Runebound Reverse Tower of The Dead

For one breath, the village saw only the impossible.

A child’s body lay at Kael’s feet.

The broken red brooch had fallen beside it, half-buried in dirt and blood, its cheap enamel catching the afternoon light in a way that made the scene look even worse. The older villager who had been watching from nearby stumbled back with both hands raised as if he had somehow been struck instead. His bundle of firewood rolled across the ground, scattering logs near the wall of the house. Someone screamed from the street. A woman at a doorway clutched her own child and dragged him behind her. The climbers in the square spun toward Kael with weapons half-drawn and faces full of the kind of horror that quickly hardened into accusation.

"Murderer!" someone shouted.

The Sun clan climber was the first to fully draw his blade. His expression twisted with outrage, but underneath it was something else too, something almost relieved to have an obvious enemy in a floor built around hidden ones. "You bastard, what did you do?"

Kael did not answer.

He stood with his fist lowered, helmet tilted slightly toward the body. From the outside, that silence made him look worse. No panic. No apology. No shock. Just an armored man who had accepted a child’s request, smiled, and then struck him down in the middle of the village street.

The villagers backed away from him.

The climbers moved closer.

Then the corpse twitched.

Not like a dying child.

Like something inside the small body had been forced to stop pretending.

The screaming changed pitch. The villagers who had been rushing forward froze so suddenly that a few collided with each other. The Sun clan climber’s blade lowered by a fraction as the body at Kael’s feet began to distort. Bones lengthened with wet cracks. Fingers curled inward, nails splitting open to reveal dark claws. Fur pushed through torn skin along the arms and neck. The small spine arched, then snapped into a different alignment, no longer built for a child’s posture. The face, what remained of it, pulled and reshaped around a jaw that had never belonged to a human boy.

Someone vomited.

Another villager fell to his knees.

The older man who had been ready to believe the best of Kael stared at the thing on the ground, mouth trembling, eyes hollowing as the truth arrived too late to be comforting.

Kael glanced at his minimap.

The red dot was gone.

That had been the only reason he struck.

Not the brooch. Not the way the child moved. Not some clever deduction from a hidden clue. The legendary minimap had never been shy about distinguishing people from monsters. Villagers showed as green. Climbers showed green. Hostiles showed red. And when the small figure had walked toward him holding that broken brooch, smiling with a child’s face and asking for help, the minimap had shown a red dot standing where every other villager should have been green.

The map did not lie.

The Tower did not give them enough time to argue.

A notification appeared in front of Kael.

[You are the fastest to have discovered the Werewolf.]

[New record achieved.]

[You can move to the next floor.]

[Floor 8.]

[Would you like to move separately? Or continue with the same party?]

The other climbers had not even fully understood what they were looking at yet. Their eyes moved from Kael, to the changing corpse, to each other, then back to Kael again. Questions were forming. Accusations too. Fear had not left the village, it had merely shifted shape. Some of the villagers looked at him now as if he had saved them. Others looked at him as if salvation had come from a monster wearing armor.

The Sun clan climber’s eyes sharpened.

He was trying to get a better look at Kael’s face through the T-shaped opening of the helmet.

Kael chose before the man could take one step closer.

[Move separately selected.]

The world pulled him away.

The village vanished before the first question reached his ears.

Darkness folded, twisted, and released him into candlelight.

Kael landed on wooden flooring this time, one hand instinctively near his gear and the other steadying himself against the side of a long pew. The smell hit him first. Wax, old wood, damp wool, frightened sweat, and the faint sourness of too many people packed into one enclosed space. A church stretched around him, not grand like a cathedral, but solid, old, and built for a village that had believed its gods would hear them better under a roof.

The pews were full.

Dozens of villagers huddled together, praying in broken whispers. Some held charms. Some gripped one another’s hands. Children slept against their mothers or pretended to. Old men stared toward the doors with the empty look of people who had survived many nights and expected no mercy from the next one. Candles burned along the walls and near the altar, their flames trembling despite the lack of wind.

Night had just begun to fall.

Kael arrived in time to see the last strip of outside light through the church doors.

A priest stood there, both hands gripping the heavy wooden panels. He looked outside one final time before closing them, and the worry in his eyes was not general fear. It was specific. He was waiting for someone. A villager who had not returned. A family member perhaps. A group of men sent to fetch water. Whoever it was, they were not coming.

Kael saw the priest’s gaze linger on the path.

Then, from within a nearby bush beyond the churchyard, two red eyes opened.

They glowed in the dimming light.

The priest did not see them.

Kael did.

The doors shut.

The sound of the bar sliding into place echoed through the church like a coffin lid being sealed.

A notification appeared.

[Hunt of the Red Moon.]

[You have been marked by the wolf.]

[A band of Werewolves has sensed your existence and noticed that one of their brethren was slain by you.]

[They will hunt you down.]

[The church offers minimal protection, but once the moon rises, there will be no warding to stop the creatures.]

[Survive one night.]

[You have been marked by:]

[The Hunter.]

[The Butcher.]

[The Mother.]

[The Elder.]

[The One Eyed Red.]

[Survive until dawn or kill the One Eyed Red.]

Kael read the notification in silence.

Then he looked at the doors.

"Stop," he muttered. "Don’t close that."

The priest turned sharply, one hand still on the wooden bar. His face was thin, lined by years of worry, and now tightened by offense. "Are you a fool? The night has begun. Let us pray here and rest. Opening that door will doom us all."

Kael looked past him toward the door, then toward the barricaded windows. Heavy planks had been nailed across most of them. Tables were pushed against one side. Benches braced the rear entrance. It looked like a desperate imitation of safety, the kind of thing people built because doing nothing was unbearable.

"You think these wooden walls will protect you from what’s outside?" Kael asked.

"No," the priest replied. His voice softened for the first time, not with doubt, but with conviction worn thin by terror. "But our gods will."

Kael stared at him for a moment.

Then shook his head.

There was no point arguing with dead men.

Not yet.

He moved away from the door and walked down the aisle between the pews. The villagers shrank back as he passed. His helmet hid most of his face, but that only made him more unsettling to them, a stranger appearing inside their sanctuary at the worst possible hour, armed, armored, and calm while everyone else whispered prayers like ropes thrown into a storm.

Kael sat on one of the long pews near the center of the church and began checking his gear.

First came the jacket.

The damage from the Dark Beast had been getting too obvious. The Epic leather had held better than anything else he owned would have, but there were torn patches, scorched grooves, stress lines where claws and pressure had nearly forced their way through. He had been putting off proper maintenance because the Tower had given him no time to breathe. Doubt had taken days. Vanitas had thrown acid-darkness and metal-toothed rats at him. Now the eighth floor had decided to welcome him with a werewolf hit list.

He pulled out Brokk’s Hammer.

The moment the hammer settled into his hand, several nearby villagers stopped praying and stared. Even those who had no understanding of artifacts could feel the difference. The hammer was not large, not impressive in the obvious way, but the weight of craft around it was unmistakable. Kael placed the damaged section of his armor across his lap and began working.

Tap.

The first strike was light.

Tap.

The second found the seam.

Tap.

The third made the leather breathe.

The villagers watched in growing confusion as torn scales tightened back into place, split stitching drew together, and the damage on the Epic armor slowly withdrew under the hammer’s touch. It was not flashy. No golden light, no divine hymn, no dramatic restoration. Just craft. Exact, steady, confident craft. A few precise strikes, a shift of pressure, a small adjustment of angle, and the armor returned closer to what it had been before the Dark Beast of Getava had tried to tear Kael apart.

He did not stop watching the minimap while he worked.

That was the important part.

Unlike the last floor, where the minimap had solved the game in one brutal second by showing a red dot wearing a child’s face, this floor was clearer in a different way. The church was packed with green dots. Villagers. Human. Afraid, helpless, but human. No hidden red among them. No monster pretending to pray in the pews. No werewolf under a bonnet waiting to slit throats after midnight.

Inside was green.

Outside was not.

Kael sighed.

More than twenty red dots moved beyond the church.

They circled slowly at first, keeping distance from the building as if the wards still mattered for now. Some paced near the treeline. Others waited near the rear entrance. A few had positioned themselves beyond the windows, testing routes, measuring barricades, learning where the humans had put their faith. Five dots were different, larger or brighter on the map, marked by the Tower’s notification even if the minimap did not give them names.

The Hunter.

The Butcher.

The Mother.

The Elder.

The One Eyed Red.

"At least they’re not invulnerable during the night," Kael muttered to himself.

An old woman in the pew ahead of him heard the words and began praying louder.

Kael gave the repaired armor one last strike, then set the hammer down beside him and flexed his shoulders. The church continued whispering around him. Prayers rose in waves, overlapping, desperate, and fragile. The villagers hoped for salvation. They hoped the gods would hold the doors shut, blind the wolves, strengthen the wards, carry them until dawn.

None of them knew what the notification had told him.

Once the moon rose, there would be no warding to stop the creatures.

The church offered minimal protection.

Minimal did not mean enough.

Kael looked toward the barred doors as something scratched lightly against the wood from the other side.

The sound was almost polite.

The praying faltered.

Kael slowly reached for his gauntlet.

Midnight had not come yet.

But the wolves were already testing the door.