Floors six through ten went fast.
Not easy. Fast. The difference mattered. Easy meant nothing hurt. Fast meant the hurt happened efficiently and you were through the gate before it settled into your bones.
Floor 6 was a vertical climb. A cliff face with handholds that moved. Mira led. She scaled it like gravity was a suggestion, her blade strapped to her back, fingers finding stone that shouldn't have supported her weight. Jaehyuk followed. His arms screamed. His stats weren't built for climbing, but his memory of where the handholds locked into place kept them ahead of the teams below who were guessing.
Somin climbed with her staff between her teeth and a expression that said she was composing her own obituary with every meter.
They cleared it in forty minutes. A-rank.
Somin didn't speak for five minutes afterward. She sat on the Lobby bench with her palms flat on her knees and her eyes focused on something that wasn't the wall in front of her.
"Heights," she said finally.
"Yeah."
"I don't like heights."
"I noticed when you stopped breathing at the halfway point."
"That was a strategic pause."
"That was terror."
"Same thing." She smiled, small and shaky, and the color came back into her face one shade at a time.
Floor 7 was psychological. A maze of rooms where each room presented a choice. Two doors. One safe. One lethal. No visible difference. In his first life, Jaehyuk had memorized the sequence. Left, right, left, left, right, left.
The sequence had changed.
Third door. He went left. The door opened to a room full of acid rain. Fine needles of liquid eating through stone. He pulled Somin back before the first drop hit her shoulder.
"Not left," he said.
"You said left."
"I was wrong."
"That's terrifying."
"I know."
Mira watched him recalculate. Watched his eyes flick across the door frame, reading something invisible. He found it. A faint discoloration on the hinge side. Copper residue. The safe doors had clean hinges. The lethal ones had corrosion.
The Tower had changed the sequence but left a tell.
Because it wasn't trying to kill him. Not yet. It was testing whether he could adapt.
He could. For now.
Right. Left. Right. Right. Left. Right. Clean hinges every time.
They cleared Floor 7 in twenty-two minutes. S-rank.
Floor 8 was a siege. Defend a position against waves. Simple in theory. Brutal in practice. The waves accelerated. Each one stronger. The kind of floor where healers broke first because the damage outpaced their output.
Somin didn't break.
She stood behind Mira's sword and Jaehyuk's Shadow Step and healed with a precision that made E-rank look like it was punching above its class. Her range had expanded again. Eight meters now, up from the original six. The evolution was quiet but consistent.
Mira noticed. She moved differently when Somin was behind her. Took risks she wouldn't take alone. Trusted the healing without asking for it.
They didn't talk about it. The trust lived in the spacing. In how Mira positioned herself exactly where Somin's range ended, so no gap existed between sword and light.
Floor 8 cleared. A-rank.
Floor 9 tested Somin directly. A poison floor. Everything was toxic. The air. The water. The walls sweated something that burned on contact. Every thirty seconds, another dose. Stacking.
Jaehyuk and Mira could endure it. Their Endurance was high enough to resist the buildup. Somin's wasn't. She was burning through her own healing just to stay conscious, pouring light into herself while trying to keep the other two functional.
By the halfway point, her face was grey.
"I can keep going," she said.
"You're healing yourself more than us," Jaehyuk said.
"That's fine."
"It's not."
"Then find the exit faster."
He did. Floor 9's boss room was hidden behind a wall that dissolved when exposed to the poison itself. Counterintuitive. The thing killing you was also the key. He'd learned that on his first climb by accident, after stumbling into the wall while half-delirious.
This time he walked straight to it. Pressed his palm against the stone. Watched it melt.
The boss was already dead.
Not killed by them. Killed by the poison. The floor's own mechanic had destroyed its own guardian. A design flaw the Tower had never patched because so few climbers survived long enough to reach the chamber.
Floor 9 cleared. S-rank.
Somin collapsed in the Lobby afterward. Not dramatically. She just sat down and didn't get up for eleven minutes. Jaehyuk brought her water. Mira stood nearby, arms crossed, watching the crowd.
Not watching. Guarding.
She didn't realize she was doing it. Or maybe she did and would never admit it.
Floor 10 was the one the Broker had called a choice.
It was a crossroads. Literally. Four paths. Each led to a different Floor 10 variant. One rewarded combat. One rewarded stealth. One rewarded endurance. One rewarded... something the description didn't specify.
"Unknown reward for unknown trial," Jaehyuk read from the floor prompt. "That's not suspicious at all."
"Take the combat path," Mira said.
"Take the endurance path," Somin said. "Please. I need a floor that doesn't try to dissolve me."
Jaehyuk looked at the fourth path. The unspecified one.
In his first life, he'd taken the combat path. Standard. Predictable. It had given him a small stat boost and nothing memorable.
The fourth path hadn't existed.
Another change. Another adjustment. The Tower adding doors where doors hadn't been.
"Fourth path," he said.
Mira looked at him.
"You don't know what's in there," she said.
"No."
"And you want to take it."
"Yes."
"Your reasoning?"
"The Tower put it here for me."
Five seconds of silence. Mira's jaw worked once. Then she walked toward the fourth path without another word.
Somin followed. "For the record, I hate this."
"Noted."
The fourth path was short. One room. One table. On the table, a ledger. Black cover. No title. The same light-absorbing material as the tokens from Floor 4.
Jaehyuk opened it.
Pages and pages of names. Climbers. Hundreds of them. Beside each name, a floor number and a single word. CLEARED or DEAD or RESET. Dates that stretched back years before the Tower was supposed to have existed.
Near the middle, written in handwriting that looked hurried, almost desperate:
Iteration 1 — RESET
Iteration 2 — RESET
Iteration 3 — RESET
Iteration 4 — DEAD
Iteration 5 — RESET
Iteration 6 — ACTIVE
No seventh entry.
"What is that?" Mira asked.
"A record." Jaehyuk's voice was flat. Controlled. The way it got when something inside him was screaming. "The Tower keeps track."
Somin leaned over his shoulder. Read the entries. Her face went still.
"Iteration 4 says dead," she said. "Not reset. Dead."
"I see it."
"The others reset. They came back. Iteration 4 didn't."
"I see it."
"Jaehyuk."
"I know."
Reset wasn't death. Not really. It was a return. A second chance with memories stripped. Or in Jaehyuk's case, memories intact. But Iteration 4 got neither. Just an ending.
He turned to the last written page.
A single line. Fresh ink. Written in a hand so precise it looked mechanical.
Floor 23. The healer dies.
Below it, smaller:
Unless the seventh iteration alters the sequence.
Jaehyuk closed the ledger.
His face showed nothing. His hands were steady. His breathing was even. And inside, behind the careful architecture of a man who'd survived seven years by not reacting, something cracked.
Floor 23. Somin. The floor where she'd died in his first life because her party abandoned her when the boss spawned adds.
The Tower knew.
The Tower had always known.
"Jaehyuk?" Somin touched his arm. "What's on the last page?"
He looked at her. Bright eyes. Nervous smile. The woman who'd followed him from Floor 1 without a reason better than stubborn kindness.
"Nothing yet," he said. "Let's go."
They cleared Floor 10. The reward was a stat boost across the board, larger than any floor before it. Generous. Almost kind.
The Tower's kindness was always the most dangerous thing about it.
In the Lobby after, while Somin rested and Mira cleaned her blade, Jaehyuk found the Broker.
Same dark hood. Same measured voice. Same infuriating calm.
"You knew about the ledger," Jaehyuk said.
"I sold you routes for floors four through ten. I didn't sell you comfort."
"Floor 23."
The Broker tilted their head. "You read fast."
"The healer dies on Floor 23. That's what the ledger says."
"In the original sequence, yes."
"And in this one?"
A pause. The Broker's mouth curved. Not a smile. A calculation given shape.
"That depends entirely on what you do between now and then."
"Tell me how to stop it."
"That isn't free."
"Name the price."
The Broker looked at him for a long time. Longer than any information merchant should look at a customer. Then they spoke, and the words landed like stones dropped into still water.
"Someone already knows you're trying to stop it."
Jaehyuk went cold.
"Who?"
The Broker pulled their hood lower. Stepped back into the crowd.
"That's the question, isn't it?" they said. "Floor 23 is thirteen floors away. I suggest you use them wisely."
They vanished into the Lobby noise.
And Jaehyuk stood there, surrounded by climbers and vendors and the hum of a building that ate people, with two words burning in his skull like a brand.
Someone knows.