The staging area between floors was called the Lobby.
White walls. High ceilings. The same sterile hum that every Tower space carried, like the building itself had a heartbeat. Vendors lined the edges selling overpriced gear to climbers too excited to haggle. Information boards displayed floor rankings, party recruitment posts, and the occasional obituary disguised as a "retirement notice."
Jaehyuk ignored all of it.
He found a corner. Sat down. Pulled up his status window.
[ YUN JAEHYUK ]
Rank: F
Floor: 2
STR: 12 | AGI: 13 | END: 11 | PER: 14 | WIL: 16
Skills: Shadow Step (F-Rank)
Titles: ???
Tower Recognition: 0.03%
The stat gains from Floor 1 were standard. Two or three points across the board. Nothing special.
But that title.
He tapped it. The window expanded.
[Title: ??? ]
[This title is locked. Unlock conditions are unknown.]
[Note: This title was not awarded by a floor clear.]
That last line made his skin crawl.
Titles came from floor clears, boss kills, or achievements. Always. The Tower had rules. Rigid, predictable, exploitable rules. That was the whole reason his regression mattered. He knew the rules. He'd memorized them. Built his entire strategy around them.
A title with no source meant the rules had changed.
Or something outside the rules was watching.
"You're doing it again."
He looked up. Somin stood over him holding two cups of something that steamed.
"Doing what?"
"The thousand-yard stare. You've been sitting here for six minutes looking at your status window like it insulted your mother." She held out a cup. "Tea. The vendor lady said it restores a little stamina. I think she was lying, but it's warm."
He took it. It tasted like hot water with ambition.
"Thanks."
She sat down across from him. Cross-legged. Staff across her lap. She looked different now. Less scared. The Floor 1 clear had done something to her posture. Straightened her spine a little.
"So," she said. "Are we going to talk about what happened in there?"
"We cleared Floor 1."
"You cleared Floor 1. With your fists. In eight minutes. While knowing exactly where the wolf would be, exactly how it would attack, and exactly what skill drop you wanted." She sipped her tea. "I'm not stupid, Jaehyuk."
He said nothing.
"I'm not going to push it," she said. "But I need to know one thing. Are you dangerous? To me, specifically."
He looked at her. Really looked. In his first life, he'd never paid attention to her eyes. Now he noticed they were sharp. Sharper than the nervous laughter and the rambling suggested.
"No," he said. "Not to you."
"That's a weird way to phrase it."
"It's the honest way."
She held his gaze for three seconds. Then nodded. "Okay. Good enough for now. What's Floor 2?"
Jaehyuk closed his status window.
Floor 2. The Cave of Echoes. A maze of tunnels filled with bat-type monsters. The boss was a Shrieking Matriarch that used sonic attacks. Most parties took two to three hours. The main danger wasn't the boss. It was getting lost in the tunnels and running into other parties who'd gone hostile from stress and darkness.
In his first life, he'd spent eleven hours on Floor 2. His party had fractured after the third wrong turn. Two members attacked each other over a loot drop. One died. The other left the party and was never seen again.
"Floor 2 is a cave system," he said. "Dark. Confusing. The monsters aren't the real problem."
"What is?"
"Other climbers."
Somin's face did something complicated.
"There's a path through the maze that bypasses 80% of the tunnels," he continued. "Left at every fork for the first six intersections, then right twice, then straight until you hear water. The boss chamber is behind a waterfall that most people assume is a wall."
She stared at him.
"YouTube?" she said, flat.
"YouTube."
"You're the worst liar I've ever met."
"I know."
A commotion near the information board pulled their attention. A group of climbers had gathered, voices rising. Jaehyuk stood. His body protested. The stats were higher now, but muscle memory of what he used to be kept expecting more.
He moved closer. Somin followed.
The information board was displaying a ranking. Floor 1 clear times for today's batch of climbers. Names, times, ranks.
At the top:
1. YUN JAEHYUK — 8:14 — Rank A
2. SHIN MIRA — 9:02 — Rank A
3. PARK DOGEON — 14:33 — Rank B
"Who the hell is Yun Jaehyuk?" someone in the crowd muttered.
"Never heard of him."
"A-rank on Floor 1? That's gotta be a glitch."
"Look at number two. Shin Mira. She cleared in nine minutes too. Two A-ranks in one batch?"
Jaehyuk stepped back from the board. Being visible this early was a problem. In his first life, he'd been invisible for the first thirty floors. Nobody knew him. Nobody cared about him. That anonymity had kept him alive.
An A-rank clear time on Floor 1 was a spotlight he didn't want.
"We should move," he said to Somin.
"Why? This is great. You're number one."
"That's exactly why."
He turned toward the Floor 2 entrance gate. And stopped.
A man stood between him and the gate. Tall. Clean-cut. The kind of handsome that got put on recruitment posters. He wore a white coat with a golden emblem on the chest. A tower with wings.
Vanguard Guild.
The man smiled. Warm. Practiced. The kind of smile that had probably convinced a thousand people to trust him.
"Yun Jaehyuk?" the man said. "That's an impressive time. I'm with the Vanguard Guild. We're always looking for talented new climbers."
Kang Dohyun.
He looked younger than Jaehyuk remembered. Of course he did. This was seven years ago. The man who would build Vanguard into the most powerful guild in the Tower. The man who would be called a hero by people who didn't know what happened on the boss floors. The man who fed weaker climbers to bosses and called it strategy.
In Jaehyuk's first life, Dohyun hadn't noticed him until Floor 40. By then, the guild's reputation was cemented and the bodies were buried deep.
But Jaehyuk had just put himself on the board. Number one. And now the predator had come to the watering hole.
"Not interested," Jaehyuk said.
The smile didn't waver. "That's a quick answer. You haven't even heard what we offer."
"I don't need to."
A flicker behind the smile. Most people didn't say no to Dohyun. Not this early. Not when the guild was already forming and joining meant safety, resources, and a fast track up the Tower.
"Fair enough," Dohyun said. "The offer stands. We'll be around."
He extended a hand.
Jaehyuk looked at it.
This hand would push a B-rank healer into a boss's attack range on Floor 34 to buy two seconds of distraction. The healer's name was Yoon Jihye. She was twenty-two. She'd joined Vanguard because Dohyun told her she'd be protected.
Jaehyuk didn't take the hand.
"Good luck on Floor 2," Dohyun said, still smiling. He turned and walked back toward a cluster of white coats.
Somin let out a breath she'd been holding. "That was... intense. Why'd you say no? Vanguard is supposed to be the best guild forming right now."
"They're not."
"How do you..."
"Somin."
She stopped.
"Trust me on this one," he said. "Stay away from Vanguard."
Something in his voice must have landed, because she didn't push it.
They walked toward the Floor 2 gate. The stone archway hummed. The darkness beyond it smelled like wet rock and something copper.
Jaehyuk paused at the threshold.
In his peripheral vision, near the vendor stalls on the far side of the Lobby, a figure in a grey coat was buying something. They had their back turned. Hood up. Nothing remarkable about them.
Except they'd been on Floor 1. In the forest. In a spot they couldn't have reached without knowing the path to the wolf's den.
And now they were here. In the Lobby. At the exact same time as Jaehyuk.
Following the same pace.
"Jaehyuk?" Somin said from inside the gate. "Coming?"
He looked at the grey coat one more time. They didn't turn around.
But their hand, the one resting on the vendor's counter, was tapping.
Index finger against thumb. The same rhythm Jaehyuk used when he was thinking.
His blood went cold.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm coming."
He stepped through the gate. The darkness swallowed him whole.
And the question that had been circling since he woke up on Floor 1 finally crystallized into something sharp enough to cut:
He wasn't the only one who remembered.