Unknown_3 didn't have the luxury of slowly tweaking civilian nodes.
He was knee-deep in Tower 18's fifth floor when the Root desync hit.
Floor 5 here wasn't spiders or glass.
It was statues.
Dozens of them in a circular hall, each one a different "pose"—fear, defiance, despair. They sprang to life based on party behavior, turning missteps into full-on fights.
Tonight, with the timing glitch, they'd all woken up at once.
[ANOMALY: ALL_STATUES_ACTIVE.]
His party—two mobility fighters, one caster, one support—had clustered in the "safe" zone, or what used to be safe.
Now it was a kill box.
He tasted adrenaline.
"This is what happens when you skip floor briefings," he muttered, spear twisting as he deflected a stone fist.
In the back of his mind, his shard ripped at the worth function.
[TRIAL_FRAGMENT: "YES, THIS IS GOOD—PRESSURE."]
"No," he snarled aloud. "Not like this."
There was a difference between designing a trial and watching a bug kill people.
Kael's comment about laziness burned in the back of his head:
"That's not 'necessary pressure.' That's laziness."
He dove into the floor's event manager.
Timing was garbage. Trigger flags all flipped to TRUE. The original design had been elegant—one or two statues animating based on moral choices, symbolic crap that most Hunters ignored but that shaped tone.
Now it was just chaos.
He grabbed the levers he could.
[MANUAL OVERRIDE – UNKNOWN_3.]
He didn't turn the statues off.
He restructured.
Half of them froze mid-swing, reverting to stone.
A quarter redirected to "spectator" mode, watching but not attacking.
The remaining quarter gained boosted AI, punishing real mistakes—overextensions, neglecting the caster, tunneling on one target.
His shard complained, wanting more raw pressure.
He snapped at it internally.
"Trial, not slaughter. You agreed. Hunters, not civilians."
The shard… yielded. Not fully. Enough.
[TRIAL_FRAGMENT: PRESSURE_LEVEL – HIGH → MODERATE-HIGH.]
In the hall, the change felt like a breath.
His party's HP bars were low, but not unrecoverable.
"Focus right flank!" he shouted. "Ignore the ones that stop!"
They did, trained enough to respond to his tone even if they didn't see the invisible switches.
Within minutes, the fight went from unwinnable to brutal-but-survivable.
[PARTY STATUS: ALL ALIVE, HEAVY FATIGUE, 1 LONG-TERM INJURY.]
Beta's summary hit his overlay.
[T18_F5 – ROOT_DESYNC_EVENT.]– UNKNOWN_3: RESTRUCTURED TRIAL, REDUCED COLLATERAL RISK.– OUTCOME: NO DEATHS, HIGH STRAIN, LESSON VALUE RETAINED.– VERDICT: POSITIVE UNDER CONSTRAINTS.
He snorted.
"Lesson value," he echoed.
His shard settled around that phrase like a cat curling up on something warm.
He thought, reluctantly, of Kael's insistence on keeping clinics and trains out of it.
"Fine," he muttered. "You get your grandmas. I get my statue rooms."
He felt, faintly, another Executor's presence brushing against the wider system—Kael, busy with his own Towers.
Across the distance, he sent no message.
Just a tiny, wordless acknowledgement into the shared Node they now haunted.
[COMMENT (SYSTEM-LEVEL, UNADDRESSED): "THIS ONE, I DID RIGHT."]
Beta logged it.
[NOTE: TRAIL_EXECUTOR SHOWING CAPACITY FOR RESTRAINT UNDER ROOT STRESS.]
"Don't turn this into therapy," Unknown_3 warned.
[OUT OF SCOPE.]
"Sure," he said.
They both knew it was lying.
The Root desync smoothed out over the next hour.
System clocks re-aligned.
Event managers switched back from "cached weirdness" to normal cycles.
Nodes stopped timing out and went back to their usual awful-but-consistent worth calls.
Kael slumped sideways on the couch and nearly brained himself against Joon's abandoned cushion.
Haneul, sitting cross-legged on the floor, let her head drop into her hands.
Her shard dimmed from fully lit to a faint, steady glow.
[FRAGMENT: STATUS – DORMANT (TIRED).]
Mira's voice came over the line, softer than usual.
"We got through it," she said. "No collapses. No mass casualties outside baseline. Some near-misses. Some weirdness. But… we're still here."
Kael stared at the ceiling.
"How many decisions did we touch?" he asked.
Beta answered.
[DIRECT OVERRIDES: 7 NODES.][INDIRECT INFLUENCE VIA SHARD NETWORK: 40–60 EVENTS.]
"How many did we miss?" Haneul asked quietly.
[UNKNOWN.]
There was no number for that.
Just the knowledge that in a world this big, you never caught everything.
Joon padded out from the hallway, hair sticking up, holding three cups of instant coffee like a peace offering.
"You all sound like my brain after three Floors in a row," he said. "Did we save the world or what?"
"Not even close," Haneul said.
"We stopped it from tripping down the stairs," Kael said.
Joon handed him a cup.
"That counts," he said. "Next world-saving attempt, wake me earlier. I want more screen time."
Mira chuckled faintly.
"Sleep," she said. "You're all going to crash. Beta can run postmortems without you."
[AFFIRMATIVE.]
Kael closed his eyes, the afterimages of nodes and timers and HP bars still flickering behind his eyelids.
"One floor at a time," he murmured again.
Haneul echoed, softer:
"One fire at a time."
Mira's voice, almost inaudible:
"One bad patch at a time."
Beta logged the phrase.
[STRATEGY: INCREMENTALISM – RECONFIRMED.]
Root, somewhere deep and broken, twitched.
Shards listened.
Executors slept.
The System kept humming, slightly less cruel in a few small corners than it had been yesterday.