Panic set in Kael's heart as he realized he was faced to face with a hundred or so enemies that were all waking up. It wasn't the dramatic kind of panic that made a person scream or flail. It was the cold, fast kind that slid straight into his chest and tightened like a fist closing around his ribs.
His eyes flicked across the rubble instinctively, counting shapes, registering motion, catching the twitch of fingers around crude weapons and the scraping shift of bodies that had been limp seconds ago.
There were too many points of movement, too many separate awakenings happening at once, like a field of landmines deciding to become alive.
The building had vanished and left him standing in open streetlight with nowhere to hide, and that naked exposure made every sound feel louder. A goblin's snort was suddenly an alarm bell. A piece of stone rolling under a claw sounded like a warning.
Even the frozen smoke and ash from the vanished structure still felt like it should be there, like his mind hadn't caught up with how abruptly his cover had been ripped away. Their gray dots had already turned red on his map, but seeing the bodies in real space was worse. Dots were clean. Dots were abstract. These were hunched silhouettes with teeth and tools and ugly attention beginning to form behind their eyes.
Running across the rubble and toward the streets was his only option, and he had to hope that none of these creatures were too awake to chase him. He could feel the hesitation trying to creep in, his brain offering useless alternatives just to stall the moment of commitment. Fight? Impossible. Hide? Where. Negotiate? With goblins? He swallowed hard, throat tight with dry heat that wasn't thirst but something more primal, and shifted his weight forward.
His grip tightened on the crowbar until his knuckles ached. He needed distance. He needed corners. He needed clutter between him and the swarm, because open space was a death sentence.
He pushed off, boots grinding against rubble, and for half a heartbeat it felt like the world might let him have it, just one clean sprint before the first scream, the first chase, the first blade thrown into his back…
[Pause!]
Immediately the world turned gray as the notification showed up in front of Kael. He was stunned as he realized that everything literally paused, including the smoke going up from the flames, along with the creatures that were mid standing up.
It wasn't like time slowed. It wasn't like his senses sharpened. It was a hard stop, like reality hit a wall and stayed there. His foot was still planted where he'd been pushing off, and the grit under his sole stayed suspended mid-scrape, as if friction itself had been ordered to stand down.
The air became wrong. Silent in a way that made his ears ring. The faint heat from nearby fires stopped moving too; the warmth was still present, but it had lost its flow, like standing near a furnace sealed behind glass. Smoke froze into curling ribbons, each twist held mid-rise like someone had sculpted it out of ash. Even the goblins were caught in awkward half-motions, one with its back hunched and arms braced, another with its jaw slightly open like it had been about to grunt or snarl. Their eyes, mid-blink or half-lidded with sleep, looked dead again in this gray stillness.
Kael's breath came loud in his own head. He swallowed, then swallowed again, and the sound of it felt obscene because it was the only thing that moved without permission. His heart beat like it was trying to punch its way out of his chest, and he fought the stupid instinct to run anyway even though he could see the world wouldn't allow it.
From in front of him, space warped and shuddered, tearing in half as it revealed its inside. A portal that was familiar to Kael, the same one he took to enter the first floor of this trial tower. The tear didn't look like a clean doorway. It looked like reality being forced apart, edges quivering like stretched fabric.
The sight made his stomach dip because it carried the same sensation as the first time, an awareness that there were layers to this place, and that someone on another layer could reach down and grab his story whenever they wanted.
A rabbit wearing a twin tailed tux hovered in front of him, annoyed and clearly dissatisfied, its red eyes felt like they were radiating heat and rage. As if they were crying bloody murder, and it wall all focused-on Kael.
The tux was absurdly formal against the frozen ruin behind it, crisp and neat like it had never known dust. Its monocle caught the gray light and flashed faintly whenever it tilted its head. But the eyes were the worst part. They didn't just look red; they looked hot, like coals held too close to skin. Kael had the irrational feeling that if he stared too long, his face would blister.
"What have you done?!" it felt both like a question and a threat at the same time. Coming from such a creature it almost made Kael buckle to his knees.
"Oi, man, calm the hell down!" Kael replied as he struggled to stand up. His voice came out rougher than he intended, dragged through stress and leftover corridor adrenaline.
He pushed his back straight deliberately, forcing his posture into something that didn't look like submission, even though his instincts were screaming at him to appease whatever this was.
"Calm down? you're telling me to calm down! you're ruining this damn tower! Why don't you just do us both a solid favor and just die, please. Wait patiently for your other chance, I'll even assist you in passing over to another challenge instead of obliterating your soul!"
The rabbit's annoyance sharpened into something that looked like genuine fury, its ears twitching as if the words themselves were too loud to contain inside its small body. The threat was casual in delivery and horrifying in meaning, like it was offering to throw away a cup of tea. Kael felt a cold prickle run across his scalp when it said obliterating your soul, because he didn't doubt for a second that it meant it literally.
"The fuck you mean man!" Kael replied. The stress and frustration from earlier seemed to want to pour out of his body in this moment. "The fuck did I do to deserve to die?! I didn't break any rules!" He could hear the strain in his own voice, the edge of it. He wasn't trying to be brave. He was trying to keep control of the conversation, because he'd learned fast that if you let someone else frame the rules, you ended up dead under them.
The rabbit opened its mouth and shut it down again.
That pause was not indecision. It was restraint, the kind that implied it had a dozen answers and was choosing the one that didn't immediately commit a crime in front of witnesses that didn't exist.
"Torrac…" Kael said. "You're hiding something from me…" He narrowed his eyes, watching the rabbit carefully for any twitch, any flinch.
He felt the shape of the problem shift. This wasn't just an admin yelling because he broke a window. This felt like a system reacting to a crack.
Something big must have happened for an Administrator to show up unannounced.