Chapter 297: Plot Twist
Kael held the Frost rune in his hand when the notification from the previous floor faded.
The clearing, the werewolves, the moon, and the smell of blood vanished around him. For one short moment, he expected the usual transition. A new floor. New rules. Another challenge that would probably try to kill him in a different way than the last. He had already crossed the seventh floor in a way the Tower clearly had not intended, survived the Hunt of the Red Moon, and earned an Epic Rune for his trouble. Floor Nine should have appeared next.
Instead, the Tower gave him something worse.
[You have been invited to a Floor of Vanitas.]
Kael’s expression went cold.
Not annoyed.
Not irritated.
Cold.
The thought hit him so hard that his stomach tightened before he could stop the reaction. He had bought two Torches of Vanitas. Two. One had already been used during his first invitation to the Outer Rims, back when the floor had spat him out after the Corrupted ratman and the Exsanguinate rune. That left him with one.
One torch.
If Vanitas claimed the ninth floor, then he could survive this one. Barely. But if the tenth floor, by some monstrous piece of luck, cruelty, or design, also became Vanitas, then he was dead. There would be no clever workaround. No training under the Fist King to grit through it. No rune combination to simply ignore the condition. Vanitas did not merely wound those without a torch. It consumed flesh. The darkness itself became hunger. Without the blue flame, he would not last long enough to complain about how unfair it was.
All he needed was to reach the tenth floor.
That was it.
Once he reached it, the deal with Dragon, the administrator, would conclude. The Elixir he needed to save his mother would be his. He had been moving toward that one point through every trial, every fight, every floor, every absurd detour the Tower threw at him. And now, with the destination so close, Vanitas had opened its mouth again.
Kael shut his eyes for half a breath.
Panic was worthless.
Worry was worthless.
Fear did not make another torch appear in his inventory. It did not change the floor. It did not help his mother. The only thing left to do was move forward, survive the invitation, and pray that the Tower did not decide to be funny on Floor Ten.
He hated relying on prayer.
The world shifted.
Kael appeared in darkness.
His hand was already moving before his boots fully touched the ground. He pulled out the last Torch of Vanitas and lit it immediately. Blue flame bloomed into existence, cold and steady, and the pressure of the dark peeled back from him in a reluctant circle. It was only then that he recognized where he was.
The sewer reservoir.
The same open chamber where he had killed the Ratman.
The broken gate remained behind him. The black sludge pit still occupied the middle of the room. The stone walls still bore claw marks from things far worse than the boss he had fought. The corpse was gone, eaten by the floor or cleaned away by whatever awful mechanism Vanitas used to reset its dead, but the memory of the fight remained clear enough.
Kael looked at the Frost rune in his hand.
Since he was not being attacked yet, he finally inspected it.
[Frost - Epic Rune]
[ᚠᚱᚩᛋᛏ]
[Effects:]
[Reduces temperature of touched objects or surfaces.]
[Slows movement through localized freezing.]
[Creates brittle conditions on affected targets.]
[Negative Effects:]
[Increased energy consumption in hot environments.]
[Frozen surfaces become more difficult to manipulate.]
[Excessive use may affect the user’s own equipment.]
[Lore:]
[Heat seeks movement.]
[Frost seeks stillness.]
[The cold need not conquer.]
[It need only wait.]
Kael read the window slowly.
Epic.
The word alone made the rune valuable. The effect made it worse, in the best possible way. Localized freezing, slowed movement, brittle conditions. It was not simply cold for cold’s sake. Used properly, it could become control, disruption, and setup. It could make armor crack. It could stiffen joints. It could turn wet ground into a trap or make an enemy’s weapon brittle at the wrong moment.
His eyes moved to the last lines.
The cold need not conquer.
It need only wait.
Kael gave a small, humorless breath. "Wonderful. Even my rune has patience now."
He opened the socketing panel and placed Frost above Fire.
The fit was immediate.
The rune settled into the available socket with a pale glow, the markings sinking into the structure of his equipment as if they had always belonged near the heat they opposed. For a moment, the Fire rune and Frost rune both pulsed, one warm and one cold, two instincts pressed close together with only the system’s structure keeping them from ruining each other. Kael watched carefully until the glow steadied.
He did not test it.
His internal energy had not fully recovered from the werewolf floor. Stone, Darkness, Heft, Exploit Weakness, Execrate, all of them had taken more out of him than he liked to admit. Using Frost now just to see what it felt like would be stupid, and Vanitas was not the kind of floor where stupidity came with warnings. He tightened his grip around the torch instead.
Then he moved.
The sewer beyond the reservoir descended through a series of narrow passages where the stone grew slicker and the darkness pressed harder against the edges of the blue light. The Torch of Vanitas held, but Kael could feel the difference. The first time he had entered this floor, the creatures had craved the flame. They had come for it like starving things. This time, that craving had become madness.
The first Corrupted MegaRat came from a drainage pipe on the left.
It did not aim for his leg, nor his body, or his arms as he expected. No, there was greed in their eyes this time.
It went straight for the torch.