The cave ate light.
That was the thing about Floor 2 that no guide mentioned. Not the bats. Not the maze. The darkness itself. It had texture. Weight. It pressed against your skin like something alive was leaning on you from every direction.
Somin's staff glowed. A faint white pulse from her healing skill, repurposed as a lantern. It carved a circle of visibility about three meters wide. Beyond that, nothing.
"I hate this," she said.
"Left," Jaehyuk said.
They'd hit the first fork. Two tunnels, identical. No markings. No indication which led deeper and which led to a dead end full of Echobats.
Somin went left without arguing. She'd stopped questioning his directions after the wolf den.
Smart girl.
The tunnel narrowed. Their footsteps echoed wrong. The cave played tricks with sound, bouncing it off walls at angles that didn't match the geometry. You'd hear your own breathing behind you. Your own footsteps above you. After an hour, most climbers started hearing voices.
Jaehyuk had spent eleven hours in here the first time. He'd heard plenty.
"Left," he said at the second fork.
"Left again?"
"Six lefts. Then two rights. Then straight."
"That's... very specific for a cave you've never been in."
He didn't answer.
Third fork. Left. The tunnel opened slightly. The ceiling rose. Water dripped from somewhere above, each drop detonating in the silence like a gunshot.
A screech ripped through the dark.
Somin flinched. Her staff light flickered.
"Echobat," Jaehyuk said. "Small. Scouts for the colony. Don't react to the sound. That's what it wants."
"Don't react to the horrifying screaming. Got it. Easy. Totally easy."
The bat swept through their light circle. Jaehyuk tracked it. Small, about the size of a house cat, with membranous wings that shimmered in the staff light. Teeth like needles. Eyes like black marbles.
It circled once and vanished back into the dark.
"It's checking if we're prey," Jaehyuk said. "We keep moving, it loses interest. We stop or show fear, it calls the colony."
"So we just... walk. Through the screaming cave. Calmly."
"Yes."
"Cool. Cool cool cool."
He almost smiled. She said that when she was terrified. Same phrase. Every time.
Fourth fork. Left. Fifth. Left. The air was getting warmer. Wetter. The walls glistened with moisture that caught Somin's light and threw it back in fragments.
Sixth fork.
"Right," Jaehyuk said.
Somin turned right without hesitation.
Something was different about this tunnel. Wider. The echoes changed. Flatter. More... occupied. The air carried a smell. Copper and sweat and something chemical. Adrenaline.
Jaehyuk stopped.
Voices. Ahead. Real ones, not cave tricks.
"... telling you, we go back. This is wrong."
"We've been going for forty minutes. We're not going back."
"Hyung, she's bleeding. We need to stop."
A party. Lost. Jaehyuk could hear at least four voices. One was strained. Hurt.
Somin grabbed his arm. "Someone's injured."
"I heard."
"I'm a healer."
"I know what you are."
"So we help them."
Jaehyuk's jaw tightened. In his first life, he'd walked past a situation exactly like this on Floor 2. Different party, same scenario. Lost, scared, someone bleeding. He'd walked past because his own party leader said it wasn't their problem.
Two hours later, that other party ran into Jaehyuk's group. Desperate. Hostile. They attacked for supplies. Someone died.
Helping now could prevent that. Or it could slow them down enough to attract the Echobat colony.
"We help," Somin said. Not a question.
He looked at her. The nervous girl from the staging area was gone. This was the healer. The person who'd chosen a support class knowing she'd always be dependent on others, and walked into the Tower anyway.
"Two minutes," he said. "You heal. I watch."
They rounded the corner.
Four climbers. Three men, one woman. The woman was sitting against the cave wall clutching her leg. Blood ran between her fingers. An Echobat had gotten a clean bite on her calf. Not fatal, but deep.
The three men stood in a loose formation around her. Tense. One held a sword. One had a shield. The third, the oldest, held nothing and looked like he was about to collapse from stress.
The sword guy spotted Jaehyuk and raised his weapon.
"Who are you?"
"Not a threat," Jaehyuk said. "She needs healing."
"We don't need your..."
"Min-su, shut up," the woman on the ground said through gritted teeth. "If they have a healer, let them heal."
Somin was already moving. She knelt beside the woman, staff glowing brighter. Warm light spilled over the wound. The bleeding slowed. The woman exhaled.
"Thank you," she breathed. "God, thank you."
"I'm Somin. This is gonna sting for a second, then it'll feel warm. Don't move."
Jaehyuk watched the three men. The sword guy, Min-su, hadn't lowered his weapon. The shield guy was watching Jaehyuk's hands. The older man was watching the darkness behind them.
Good instincts. Wrong target.
"You're lost," Jaehyuk said.
"We're not lost," Min-su said. "We're... regrouping."
"You've been walking in circles. This tunnel loops back on itself every four hundred meters. There's a scratch on that wall." He pointed. "You made it. Probably twenty minutes ago."
Min-su looked at the wall. His face went pale.
"Take the next left," Jaehyuk said. "Then right. Then straight until you hear water. The boss room is behind a waterfall."
"How do you know that?"
"Does it matter?"
The older man stepped forward. "You're Yun Jaehyuk. The A-rank from Floor 1."
Jaehyuk said nothing.
"We saw the board," the man continued. "Eight minutes. No weapon." He paused. "Why are you helping us?"
Because in another life, a version of you attacked a version of me in a tunnel that looked exactly like this one. Because the woman bleeding on the ground might be someone important on Floor 30, or she might die here, and I don't have enough information to know which. Because the healer standing next to me decided we were helping and I've learned that arguing with healers is a losing proposition.
"My healer insisted," he said.
Somin snorted without looking up. "He says that like he had a choice."
The woman's wound was closing. Pink new skin over raw muscle. E-rank healing was slow, but it was thorough.
"Done," Somin said. "Don't run on it for at least ten minutes. The tissue is fragile."
The woman stood carefully. Tested the leg. Winced, but held.
"Thank you," the older man said. "I'm Baek Junhyeon. If we can repay this..."
"Follow the directions," Jaehyuk said. "Left, right, straight to water. Don't stop moving. The Echobats key on stationary targets."
He turned to leave. Somin fell in beside him.
"That felt good," she said quietly.
"Healing?"
"Mattering."
He didn't have a response to that. Or maybe he did, but it lived somewhere in the seven years he'd spent not mattering to anyone.
They walked in silence for three minutes. The tunnel straightened. The air cooled. And then he heard it.
Water.
Not a drip. A roar. A subterranean waterfall cascading down a rock face into a pool that glowed faintly blue from whatever mineral the Tower had seeded into the stone.
Behind the waterfall, barely visible through the curtain of water, a chamber.
"That's it?" Somin whispered.
"That's it."
"It's actually behind a waterfall. Like you said. Like you somehow knew." She looked at him. "Jaehyuk."
"Yeah."
"When this floor is over, you're going to tell me the truth."
Not a question. Not a request.
He looked at the waterfall. Behind it, the Shrieking Matriarch waited. A bat the size of a minivan with a sonic attack that could rupture eardrums at close range. In his first life, his party had fought it for ninety minutes. Three people went temporarily deaf. One never recovered.
Jaehyuk knew the frequency of its shriek. He knew the three-second cooldown between attacks. He knew that its left wing was weaker than its right because of a birth defect the Tower had coded in.
He knew everything about this boss.
What he didn't know was what waited after.
Because as they approached the waterfall, his status window flickered. Unprompted. A single notification:
[??? title resonance detected.]
[Proximity alert: Another ??? holder is within 200 meters.]
The grey coat was in the cave.
And they were close.