Runebound Reverse Tower of The Dead

"No," the young man said.

Kael glanced at him.

The climber’s face had gone pale beneath the blood and dirt. His sword was raised, but the point trembled slightly as he looked at the massive thing standing in the road with its cleaver hanging at its side and dozens of Watchdogs arranged around it like a loyal pack. The blue light of Kael’s torch did not reach far enough to fully brighten the monster, but the little it revealed was enough. The stitched belly. The dog collar. The bucket over its face. The cleaver, too large and too ugly to belong in sane hands.

"I think we should head back," the young man said. "It’s not attacking."

Kael looked unimpressed. "Why? You scared?"

"What do you mean?" the young man snapped, his whisper nearly cracking into a shout. "That’s a Butcher. They have dozens of dogs with them, and they really make dying slow. You need a full party for this."

"Is that so."

Kael looked at his gauntlet.

A second passed.

Then he smiled.

The young man saw the expression and immediately looked more frightened than before. "Wait. What are you doing?"

Kael raised his arm and aimed it down the street. His other hand came up, locking his wrist in place. The palm of the gauntlet opened with a soft mechanical shift, exposing the fire core within. Heat gathered first as a shimmer, then as a glow, then as a growing bead of contained violence.

’Exploit Weakness. Heft. Fire.’

The runes answered.

[High Synergy detected: 88%.]

Kael’s eyes narrowed slightly. ’So Exploit Weakness doesn’t lower the synergy much. Good to know.’

The fire core burned brighter.

He focused his palm forward.

"Avada Kedavra, motherfucker."

The fireball launched.

Kael had not used the Fire Ball option of the gauntlet in a long time. Not properly. Since training under the Fist King, most of his use of Fire had been close-range, heat wrapped around fists, bursts of flame to shape space, controlled ignition through strikes and movement. The actual projectile function had been something from the early floors, back when his body could barely handle what the runes demanded from him and his internal energy, for lack of a better word, was shit.

Back then, the fireballs had been fist-sized orbs.

This was not.

After the training, his body had changed. Stronger muscles, denser bones, better control, more damage endured and more damage dealt. But that was only the part a person could see. Internally, his channels had expanded. They had been stretched, beaten open, forced to carry power through pain and pressure until what once felt like a flood now felt like a current he could direct. The Demon Fist had altered the outside as a side effect. The true growth was deeper.

Now was the time to see it.

The fireball that formed in front of his palm was the size of a large soccer ball, condensed and violently bright, an orb of heat so dense the street around it warped. It did not drift forward like a spell thrown by a novice mage. It shot down the road with weight, mass, and vengeance baked into its core.

The Street Butcher howled.

It lifted its cleaver and pointed it toward Kael.

The Watchdogs rushed.

They came in a wave, metal jaws open, nailed plates flashing in the torchlight, eager to intercept the projectile before it reached their master. The fireball crashed into the first of them and did not stop. It bulldozed through the body, burning fur, melting skin, and warping metal teeth into useless shapes. The second Watchdog burst apart around it. The third was carried backward with its chest core liquefying before the orb tore through and continued on.

It was not merely flame.

Heft had given it weight.

Exploit Weakness had made the path cruel.

The fireball plowed through the pack like a small sun thrown down a narrow street. Watchdogs that tried to leap at it were smashed aside. Those that took it head-on vanished into burning ruin. The smell of scorched fur and melted metal flooded the street.

The Butcher brought its cleaver down.

It tried to hack the fireball apart as if it were some swordmaster from a movie, as if skill or ugliness or size could split a sun in half. That sort of thing only worked if one was strong enough, or delusional enough to make the world briefly confused.

The Street Butcher was neither.

The fireball struck.

A creature that large should have been thrown backward. The impact should have lifted it off its feet and sent it crashing into the dogs behind it. But the bastard was simply too fat to move properly. Its mass held. So the fireball did the second best thing.

It bored through.

Flame drilled into flesh, through stitched scars, past thick folds of corrupted meat, through whatever organs remained inside the bloated body, and out the back in a burst of heat and blackened gore. The bucket over the creature’s face rattled once. The cleaver slipped from its hand and struck the street with a heavy clang.

The Butcher dropped to its knees.

Then fell forward.

[You have slain: Corrupted Street Butcher.]

[You have obtained: Vanity Essence x1.]

The remaining Watchdogs froze.

Whatever loyalty, command, or instinct held them together snapped the moment the Butcher died. The nearest ones looked from the corpse to Kael, then to the burning trench left by the fireball through their pack. Their survival instincts finally said something intelligent.

They ran like hell was on their heels.

Kael watched them scatter into alleys and over broken walls. "Smart dogs."

The item that entered his inventory was different from the lesser fragments. Not a tiny shard. Not the pale scraps he had gathered from rats and Watchdogs. This Vanity Essence was larger, cleaner, and heavier in presence, a proper piece of the same strange material. Not lesser.

Interesting.

He turned toward the young man.

"So," Kael said. "You were saying?"

The climber stared at the dead Butcher, then at the line of burned corpses, then at Kael’s gauntlet. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again. "You sure you’re on the ninth floor?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"That..." He swallowed. "That’s runic inscription. I never thought they were this powerful."

"Ah, these."

Kael lowered his hand and flexed his fingers inside the gauntlet. The fire core dimmed, heat fading from the metal slowly enough that the air around his palm still shimmered. "They aren’t all that fancy, I can tell you that. Too many disadvantages. Requires too much energy and usable runes are hard to find. Not to mention, they deny any path to mana and magic."

"Ah, yes, I know," the young man said, still unable to take his eyes away from the gauntlet. "But for some climbers, just this amount of power is enough to protect themselves."

"If this was easily achieved, a lot of climbers would have done this before me."

"I wonder why they didn’t..."

Kael did not answer.

He was not about to explain Anchor. Without Anchor, most rune setups were just carefully designed ways to kill oneself with slightly more style than jumping off a tower. Anchor was not socketed like the others for a reason. It was fixed into his gauntlets, hidden beneath structure and craft, the thing that made the rest of this madness possible. To another climber, his gauntlets probably looked like a lucky runic inscription setup. They did not need to know it was built around a rune that made suicide machinery behave like a weapon.

"Alright," Kael said. "Let’s keep moving."

They passed through the corpses.

The street beyond the dead Butcher opened gradually toward another blue glow. The next lanternpost stood ahead at an intersection near a collapsed fountain, its light forming a safe circle under cracked stone arches. The two green dots waited there, close together, unmoving. Kael could see figures inside the blue light now, both climbers, both watching the road with weapons drawn.

Next safe zone

Just a little farther.

Kael was already considering how to handle the exchange. The young man had promised an extra torch. Once they reached the safe zone, he would ask for it. If the climber gave it willingly, good. If not, things would get unpleasant. Not ideal, but his mother’s life sat beyond Floor Ten, and Vanitas had made the math ugly.

Then something moved.

Not from the street ahead.

From the darkness beside them.

Kael turned immediately, body already shifting to intercept, but the thing was fast. Too fast. It did not attack him. It flashed past his guard as a black streak and slammed into the young man instead.

The force shoved him forward.

Right into the safe zone.

For a fraction of a second, Kael saw nothing clearly. Not a climber. Not a beast. Just a red dot on the minimap and darkness peeling away from the shape as if it had never wanted to be seen.

Then it was gone.

The young man staggered under the blue lanternlight.

His eyes were wide.

Something protruded from his chest.

A large black obsidian spear, jagged like a stalactite ripped from the roof of a cave, had punched straight through him. It jutted from his body at an ugly angle, wide enough that Kael knew immediately there was no clean way to pull it free. Blood spilled around the black stone in thick pulses.

The two climbers inside the safe zone stared in horror.

Then they looked at Kael.

They did not check for a red name tag.

They did not ask what happened.

They did not think twice.

"Change safe zone!"

"C-Change safe zone!"

Green light surrounded both of them.

They vanished.

Kael rushed forward.

The checkpoint notification flickered at the edge of his sight, but he ignored it, dropping beside the young man as he collapsed onto the stone beneath the lantern. Helping him was impossible. The jagged spear had ripped through too much. Chest, lungs, organs, maybe the spine depending on the angle. Blood filled the climber’s mouth and spilled down his chin as he tried to breathe.

The young man’s eyes found Kael.

He tried to move one hand.

Not toward the wound.

Toward his side.

Toward something strapped beneath his gear.

The extra torch.

Kael understood too late.

The climber’s fingers twitched, failed, and fell.

"Damn it," Kael said.

The young man tried to speak, but only blood came out.

Then the darkness beneath him opened.

Kael grabbed for his shoulder.

His fingers missed by a breath.

Blackness rose from under the wounded climber like a hand from water and dragged him down into the floor. The body vanished beneath the stone without leaving so much as a smear behind. The obsidian spear disappeared with him. His swords, his lantern, the promised extra torch, all of it was swallowed in the same instant.

Kael remained crouched in the safe zone, one hand extended toward empty ground.

For a moment, he did not move.

The blue lantern burned quietly above him.

Then the system appeared.

[You have reached Sector 1-4.]

[Exiting Floor of Vanitas.]

[You have completed Floor 9.]

The city began to fade.

Kael’s stomach tightened before the next notification even came.

No.

Not now.

Not again.

[Entering Floor 10.]

[You have been invited to a Floor of Vanitas.]

Kael stared at the words.

For the first time in a long while, he felt the kind of fear that did not shout.

It sank.

Slowly.

Coldly.

He had no torch left.