There was no such thing as a "normal" Tower run anymore.
Kael tried to pretend otherwise as he stood in the queue for Tower Seventeen's Floor 3 gate, fidgeting with the strap of his shield.
Yes, he had a shield now.
It was still E-rank. But it existed. Progress.
[ITEM: CRACKED TOWERWOOD BUCKLER (E)][EFFECT: +3 VIT, +5% CHANCE TO NOT DIE INSTANTLY.]
Joon bumped his shoulder.
"Nervous?" he asked.
"I've been called a successor to a dead admin by a haunted debug Node," Kael said. "Floor 3 spiders do not crack my top ten anxieties."
"Good," Joon said. "Because the healer's late and I need you mentally stable enough to pretend we have one."
Their party stood a little apart from the crowd.
Joon, frontliner, now Level 12, with his ridiculous Warpack Captain bone glaive.
Kael, allegedly a support, realistically a walking collection of exploits.
Ria, a compact, intense spear-fighter in C-rank leathers with too many knife sheaths.
Dane, a tall bow-user who looked like he hadn't slept since the last patch.
And, supposedly, a healer.
Ria checked the time on her UI and scowled.
"If she flakes, I'm selling her slot," she said. "I am not running Floor 3 with a half-party and a guy whose HP bar is a rounding error."
"Love the confidence," Kael muttered.
A voice called, "Sorry! Sorry, I'm here!"
The healer arrived in a flurry of robes and apologetic bows.
She looked… young. Not Haneul-young, but new-Hunter young. Short, dark hair in a messy bob, a healer's staff almost as tall as she was.
[USER: LIAN – LEVEL 9][CLASS: SUPPORT / HEALER]
Ria's scowl softened slightly.
"You're new," she said. "Anyone explain Floor 3 to you yet?"
"Spiders, webs, poison, screaming," Dane said. "In that order."
Lian swallowed.
"My mentor walked me through the map," she said. "I passed the simulation. I— I can handle mid-tier cleansing and regen."
Her eyes flicked to Kael's HP bar and widened.
"Uh. Is that… a bug?" she asked.
"Yes," Kael said.
"Is it… contagious?" she asked.
"No," he said.
"Does it come with hazard pay?" she asked.
"Shockingly, no," he said.
Ria snorted.
"He's survived Floor 2 three times with that bar," she said. "Just treat him like a glass cannon that forgot the cannon part."
"Rude but accurate," Kael said.
He felt Haneul in the back of his mind, watching through the shared party feed.
Try not to die, she messaged. Hospitals are busy enough.
Noted, he replied.
Beta observed quietly.
[MORAL_AUDITOR_BETA: STATUS – PASSIVE OBSERVATION.]
"Alright," Ria said, rolling her shoulders. "We clear the first two nests, skip the optional mini-boss, and if anyone sees a chest with a weird glow and teeth, don't touch it. Dane, you're on web duty. Lian, stick midline. Kael, do whatever unholy spreadsheet magic you do, but don't trigger a rollback event."
"I only did that once," Kael protested.
"Once," Ria repeated. "Too many."
The gate pulsed.
[FLOOR 3 – "NESTING GROUND"][RECOMMENDED LEVEL: 10+][PRIMARY HOSTILES: SPIDERKIN (LV 9–12), WEB RATS (LV 8–10), BROODMOTHER VARIANTS.]
"Party Ria-Seventeen-Three," a System voice chimed. "Enter when ready."
They stepped through.
Floor 3 felt like the inside of a throat.
The air was humid and faintly sweet, walls slick with some biological resin. Webbing hung in drapes from the ceiling, glistening in the low light. Somewhere deeper in, something skittered.
Lian made a small, involuntary noise.
"Breathe," Ria said. "First nest is a warm-up. Kael?"
He activated Scan.
Spiders lit up behind walls and webs, little red icons with levels hovering.
[SPIDERKIN SCOUT – LV 9][WEB RAT – LV 8]
Standard layout. Two side passages, one central, all leading to a bowl-like chamber with a nest core.
He flicked through the environmental flags.
Slick floor. High web density. Minimal glitches.
"Standard spawn," he said. "No anomalies. Watch for webs on the floor. They slow, not immobilize, but you don't want to be stuck when a Broodling jumps."
Joon spun his glaive.
"Smash, stab, don't stand in sticky stuff," he said. "I can handle that."
They moved.
The first engagement went smoothly.
Dane's arrows picked off advancing spiders before they closed. Ria and Joon cut down stragglers. Lian's heals floated like gentle green threads over scraped armor and poison ticks.
Kael did what he was supposed to do: buffed, debuffed, watched.
He nudged a few DAMAGE_TAKEN_MULTIPLIER flags on spider carapaces, careful, small tweaks. He slowed a falling stalactite's impact on Lian by adjusting a physics flag. Little things. Nothing that screamed.
[WATCHDOG_PROCESS_Ω: STATUS – UNINTERESTED.]
The nest core—an ugly, chitinous blob pulsing in the center of the chamber—went down under focused fire.
[NEST CORE DESTROYED.][LOCAL SPAWN RATE: REDUCED.]
"See?" Joon said as the last web rat dissolved. "Totally normal run."
"Don't say that," Dane muttered. "You'll jinx it."
He did.
On the way to the second nest, they heard screaming.
Not System ambiance.
Real, human screaming.
Ria held up a hand, halting them.
"Off-route," she said.
A side tunnel branched off to the left, not on the standard Floor 3 map. It pulsed faintly in Kael's debug view.
[OBJECT: SIDE_PATH_T17-F3-NEW.][STATUS: RECENTLY ADDED.][SOURCE: DYNAMIC EVENT.]
"Oh, good," he said. "Procedurally-generated suffering."
More screaming.
"Sounds like a party," Joon said.
"Could be bait," Dane said.
"Could be people," Lian said quietly.
Ria's jaw clenched.
"We're E–C rank mix," she said. "Not rescue squad."
Kael glanced at the event log.
[EVENT: STRANDED PARTY – ACTIVE.][DETAILS: LOW-LEVEL PARTY TRAPPED IN WEB CHAMBER.][REWARD FOR ASSIST: EXP BONUS, REPUTATION, MINOR LOOT.]
Beta pinged him.
[NOTE: NON-INTERVENTION = BASELINE (PARTY FREE TO IGNORE SIDE EVENT).][OBSERVING DECISION.]
Of course it was.
He looked at Ria.
"You're lead," he said. "Call it."
Her eyes flicked between the main path and the side tunnel.
"The smart play is to hit second nest first," Dane said. "Clear our flank, then maybe double back if we're not drained."
"People might be dead by then," Lian said, knuckles white on her staff.
"Or already dead now," Dane retorted.
Ria swore under her breath.
"I hate this floor," she said. "Kael?"
He blinked.
"Why me?" he asked.
"You see more numbers than any of us," she said. "Can we afford to detour?"
He checked.
Party HP: all decent. Mana: good. Consumables: enough for a bigger fight.
But the side event's mob density was unknown. Risk of overpulling. Risk of wiping and becoming someone else's "stranded party."
He checked the event.
[STRANDED PARTY COMPOSITION: 4 USERS (LV 7–9).][SURVIVAL PROBABILITY WITHOUT INTERVENTION: 18%.][WITH INTERVENTION (PARTY_RIA-17-3): 63%.]
Haneul's shard stirred faintly at the edge of his awareness, picking up the worth evaluation.
[SYSTEM WORTH_CALC: ASSISTING_GAMEPLAY_VALUE – MODERATE, RESOURCE_RISK – MODERATE, OVERALL: OPTIONAL.][FRAGMENT_FEEDBACK (RYU_SHARD): ELEVATED PRIORITY.]
"Sixty-three if we go, eighteen if we don't," he said. "Baseline labels it 'optional.' Shard disagrees."
Ria grimaced.
"I hate it when the System gamifies morality," she said.
"Welcome to my life," he said.
He thought of the transit worker. Of small kindnesses. Of ADMIN_0's logs about the obscenity of letting variance decide alone.
"Local," he said quietly. "We can help. We're not tapped. We have an auditor watching our resource usage. I say we detour."
Dane sighed.
"That's a 'yes' with extra steps," he said.
Ria nodded once.
"Alright," she said. "Side path. But if it looks like a wipe, we bail. Understood?"
Everyone agreed.
Beta logged it.
[DECISION: ASSIST SIDE EVENT.][BASELINE: NEUTRAL. SHARD BIAS: POSITIVE.][OUTCOME: TBA.]
The side tunnel narrowed, webs thicker here, clinging to armor and boots.
The screaming cut off abruptly.
"Not ominous at all," Joon muttered.
They emerged into a low-ceilinged chamber.
Four Hunters were cocooned against the far wall, bound in thick webbing up to their necks. One—a woman with a shaved head and a broken spear nearby—was still conscious, eyes wild.
What looked like a Broodmother variant loomed over them, legs hooked into the walls.
[BROODMOTHER – "SILK-THROAT" – LV 13 (ELITE)][SPECIAL: WEB SONG (STUN), COCOON HATCH, POISON BURST.]
"Oh, that's not on the standard spawn table," Kael said.
"Yeah," Ria said tightly. "Extra event boss. Love that."
The cocooned Hunters' bars flickered into view.
[HUNTER_A: HP 30/100 – POISONED.][HUNTER_B: HP 5/90 – WEBBED.][HUNTER_C: HP 0/80 – STABLE (CATATONIC).][HUNTER_D: HP 40/110 – STRUGGLING.]
Silk-Throat turned at their entrance, mandibles clicking.
The fight started ugly.
The Broodmother let out a high, keening screech—Web Song—and the air vibrated. UI bars wobbled.
[STATUS: STUN (1.5 SEC) APPLIED – RIA, JOON, DANE.]
Kael barely clung to focus, his bugged HP bar apparently confusing the status application.
"Lian, shield!" he snapped.
To her credit, she reacted fast, slamming her staff down. A soft barrier flared around the group, dampening the worst of the sonic waves.
Spiders poured from alcoves—Broodlings, Web Rats, a couple of spindly, long-legged things that flung sticky webs.
"Dane, add control!" Ria shouted as the stun faded. "Joon, on the big one! Kael— do your thing!"
"My 'thing' needs a better user manual!" he yelled back, but he moved.
He tagged Silk-Throat's DAMAGE_TAKEN_MULTIPLIER, bumping it from 0.9 to 1.1. He eased the friction on the floor just enough to make Broodlings misjudge their leaps.
Beta hummed.
[NOTE: MINOR ENVIRONMENT MODS – WITHIN TOLERANCE.]
One of the cocooned Hunters' HP ticked down.
[HUNTER_B: HP 5 → 3 / 90.]
Poison.
"Lian, DoT cleanse on that one!" Kael pointed.
"I can't reach!" she said. "Range is too short."
Ria swore, slicing a web flinger in half.
Kael's eyes darted between enemy flags and the trapped party's bars.
Worth calculations spun in the healing node tied to this event.
[SYSTEM: PRIORITY – PROTECT CURRENT PARTY > SIDE OBJECTIVE SURVIVORS.][SHARD_FEEDBACK: DISAGREE (SIDE OBJECTIVE = LIVES, NOT POINTS).]
He felt Haneul's shard push, here but not fully connected, angry at the idea of "optional" people.
He ground his teeth.
"Ria!" he shouted. "If we don't keep them stable, we're just four idiots farming an event while people die at our elbows."
"We're already four idiots fighting above our tier," she snapped back. "We wipe, they die anyway."
The Broodmother lunged at Joon. He barely got his glaive up in time, poison dripping from its fangs.
Kael saw two futures again: Joon taking the bite and Lian scrambling, or Kael burning a bigger patch and risking Watchdog's full attention.
He chose.
He hit Local Patch on the cocoons.
[OBJECT: COCOON_WEB_CLUSTER.][FLAG: DAMAGE_REDIRECTION = 0.0][EDIT: 0.2 – SUSTAIN DAMAGE ABSORBS SOME POISON TICKS.]
The System blinked, nonplussed.
[UNUSUAL ENVIRONMENTAL FLAG MOD.][TREATING AS LEGACY EVENT VARIATION.]
The trapped Hunters' HP tick slowed.
[HUNTER_B: 3 → 3 (TICK HALTED).]
Beta noted it.
[DEVIATION: MINOR – POSITIVE TENDENCY.]
Joon roared and drove his glaive into Silk-Throat's thorax.
[DAMAGE: 120]
Ria followed up, spear flashing.
[DAMAGE: 90]
Silk-Throat screeched, webbing flaring. A cloud of poison burst from its abdomen.
Kael didn't have time to patch the poison.
He did have time to adjust one flag.
[OBJECT: POISON_CLOUD_SILK_THROAT.][FLAG: DISSIPATION_RATE = 1.0][EDIT: 1.4]
The cloud thinned faster than it should have. Lian's cleanse scraped off the rest.
"Thanks!" she gasped.
"You can thank me by not letting my HP bar see single digits," he said.
"Your HP bar IS single digits," Joon yelled.
"Lower single digits," Kael clarified.
The fight became a blur.
Healers weaving regens. Arrows pinning legs. Webbing slowing, never fully stopping. Kael patching small things—angle of a falling ceiling chunk here, trajectory of a Broodling there.
Beta kept a running tally.
[RESOURCE STRAIN: MODERATE.][RISK OF WIPE: DECLINING.][SURVIVOR HP BARS: STABILIZING.]
Finally, Silk-Throat shuddered under a combined assault and collapsed, dissolving into black dust.
[BROODMOTHER – SILK-THROAT – DEFEATED.][EXP GAINED.][SIDE EVENT: STRANDED PARTY – RESOLVED.]
Webbing around the cocooned Hunters loosened.
Lian rushed forward, casting small heals as Ria and Joon cut bindings.
The shaved-head spearwoman coughed, sucking in air.
"You—" she wheezed. "You weren't… in the roster…"
"Hi," Ria said. "We're your unscheduled patch notes."
Kael checked their bars.
All four alive. One unconscious but stable. Poison effects clearing.
His hands shook.
Not from exertion.
From the realization that they'd just walked into a dynamic event and lived. That his patches had held. That Haneul's shard had hummed approval instead of pain.
Beta's verdict appeared.
[CASE 0003 – SIDE EVENT INTERVENTION.]– BASELINE: PARTY_RIA-17-3 LIKELY TO IGNORE.– SHARD-INFLUENCED DECISION: INTERVENE.– OUTCOME: +4 SURVIVORS, RESOURCE COST MODERATE, NO WIDER DESTABILIZATION.– VERDICT: POSITIVE.– RECOMMENDATION: ENCOURAGE SIMILAR DEVIATIONS WHEN RESOURCES ALLOW.
Kael let out a slow breath.
"Still think this is a 'normal' run?" he asked Joon.
"Normal adjacent," Joon said, grinning tiredly. "Like you."
Ria slapped Kael lightly on the arm.
"Nice call," she said. "Next time we ignore screaming, I'll feel like a jerk."
"That's the plan," he said.
Lian looked at him with a mixture of awe and lingering fear.
"You… see all that?" she asked. "The probabilities. The… worth stuff?"
"Unfortunately," he said.
She bit her lip.
"Does the System ever… tell you not to help?" she asked.
He thought of earlier days. Of watching event descriptions and knowing baseline logic would happily grind people down if it meant Tower stability.
"Constantly," he said. "I've started ignoring it when I can afford to."
She nodded slowly.
"I'd like to learn that," she said. "The 'ignoring it' part. Not the… haunted math vision."
"Give it time," Joon said. "The haunted math might be a DLC."
Kael laughed, a little hysterically.
"Let's clear the actual second nest before Floor 3 decides we're getting cocky," Ria said. "Then we can argue about ethics over loot."
By the time they exited, they were bloody, sticky, exhausted—and very much alive.
Joon had leveled. Lian had gained a thousand-yard stare and a new respect for side quests. Ria and Dane had more data points for their "Kael is cursed" thesis.
Haneul watched Kael's exit through his feed, relief bleeding into the shard's quiet hum.
[FRAGMENT NOTE: 'PATTERN: PROTECT WHEN POSSIBLE' – REINFORCED.]
"You did good," she said softly, to herself more than to him.
Beta logged the day's deviations, numbers ticking quietly.
Outside Tower Seventeen, the world kept moving.
Inside, small decisions piled up like tiny, stubborn bugs in the code.
And somewhere, Admin_0's ghost—if that's what it was—watched a new generation of meddling humans argue with a god over what "worth" meant, one spider nest at a time.