The tunnel smelled wrong.
Not rot. Not blood. Something cleaner. Bitter oil and damp stone, with a thin metallic taste that sat on the tongue and refused to leave.
Jaehyuk pressed a palm to the wall and listened with his fingers.
"Left," he said.
One of the weak climbers stumbled. "Left? The route seller said straight."
"The route seller is trying to get you killed."
"That sounds unlikely."
"It shouldn't. Keep moving."
Behind them, the main passage was filling with noise. Boots. Voices. The wet rasp of something large dragging itself through stone dust.
Six climbers followed Jaehyuk through the left branch. He'd found them at the Floor 13 entrance, clustered around a man with a clipboard and a professional smile who was handing out route maps like charity.
The maps were poison.
Jaehyuk had seen it the second he looked at them. The "safe routes" funneled traffic through three specific corridors. Each corridor had side chambers. Each side chamber was a monster nest. The weak climbers would walk in, the monsters would chase them, and the stronger teams coming through the main passage behind them would find a cleared path.
Bait. Again. Same system. Bigger scale.
But this time it wasn't a Vanguard enforcer doing the herding. It was infrastructure. Printed maps. Designated route sellers. A supply chain of sacrifice that looked so professional you'd never question it.
Unless you'd seen it before.
Mira kept pace behind him, sword drawn. She hadn't spoken since the entrance. Her silence had a shape to it. The kind that meant she was cataloguing everything for a conversation she planned to have later.
Somin was at the rear, healing light flickering between her fingers. One of the climbers, a man with a gash on his forearm from the entrance gauntlet, kept drifting toward her like she was a campfire.
"Hold still," she told him. "If you keep moving, the tissue seals wrong and you get to do this again later."
"Sorry. Sorry. It's just... warm."
"That's the healing."
"No, I mean... it feels like someone actually cares."
Somin's hands paused for half a second. Then she kept working. "Someone does. Now hold still."
The corridor narrowed. The air changed. Warmer. Wetter. The smell of fur and something sweet, like crushed fruit left in the sun.
Jaehyuk stopped the group at a three-way split. Left. Center. Right.
Each path looked wrong in a different way.
Left had fresh scrape marks. Something dragged recently.
Center was warmer. Faint ozone underneath the stone dust. Trap corridor.
Right breathed. A slow pulse of air pushing out of the dark and pulling back. Like lungs.
"You know this one?" Mira asked.
"Parts of it."
"Which parts?"
"The parts that haven't changed yet."
She looked at him. Not impressed. Not unimpressed. Calculating.
One of the rescued climbers hugged her arms to her chest. Mid-twenties. Black hair tied back with a fraying red ribbon. Canvas satchel across her shoulder. Chalk dust on her cheek. She'd told Jaehyuk her name at the entrance. Han Yejin. She baked rice cakes for her younger brother and signed up for the Tower because clinic bills didn't pay themselves.
She was staring at the center path.
"Which one?" she asked.
Jaehyuk crouched. Ran his fingers along the floor seam. Grit in the groove. Too much. Someone had used this chamber recently and tried to hide it. Route intermediaries. Coming through the center path to set up the bait corridors ahead.
"Right," he said.
"The one that's breathing?"
"Yeah."
Somin made a noise. "I want to register a formal complaint about every floor in this Tower."
"Noted. Move."
They went right.
The breathing tunnel was worse up close. The air pulsed against their skin, warm on the exhale, cold on the inhale. The stone walls had a faint sheen that looked organic. Not wet. Alive.
The ceiling lowered. Jaehyuk had to duck. Behind him, the climbers pressed closer together, the kind of animal clustering that happened when people stopped trusting the space around them.
Then the noise came.
Clicking. Fast. From the left branch behind them. The path they'd avoided.
"That's where they wanted us to go," Mira said.
"Yes."
"What's in there?"
"Nothing you want to meet."
A shriek echoed through the corridors. High. Thin. The sound of something finding prey where prey was expected. Where the route maps had promised prey would be.
One of the rescued climbers, a young man barely out of his teens, went pale. "Someone else took that path."
Jaehyuk didn't answer. Because the answer was yes, and saying it wouldn't help.
"Keep moving," he said.
The breathing tunnel opened into a wider chamber. Not a nest. A junction. Three exits, all leading up. The air was cleaner here. The breathing sound faded behind them like a tide going out.
Jaehyuk checked the walls. No scrape marks. No intermediary tracks. This junction wasn't on the route seller's maps because it wasn't supposed to be found. In his first life, Floor 13's hidden junctions were discovered by accident around Week 3 of the climb. By then, most weak climbers were already dead.
"Rest," he said. "Two minutes."
The climbers collapsed. Not dramatically. Just the slow folding of bodies that had been running on fear instead of stamina. Han Yejin sat with her back against the wall and her knees pulled up, the satchel clutched like a shield.
Somin moved between them. Healing the arm wound properly this time. Checking the young man's breathing. Pressing her palm against an older woman's shoulder where a bruise was darkening into something deeper.
Mira cleaned her blade. The cloth came away dark.
"You fought something," Jaehyuk said.
"Side tunnel. While you were navigating." She folded the cloth. "Small. Fast. Pack hunter. It was herding them toward the center corridor."
"Herding."
"Three of them. Coordinated. They backed off when I killed the lead."
That wasn't standard behavior for Floor 13 monsters. Pack hunters on this floor were supposed to be ambush predators. Uncoordinated. They didn't herd. They swarmed.
Unless the Tower had changed them too.
Jaehyuk filed it away. Another deviation. Another sign that the floor was shifting around his presence, adapting, learning.
Six floors, the Broker had said. Before it stops being subtle.
They were past six now.
"Time's up," he said. "We move."
The upper exit led to a ridge overlooking a massive cavern. Below, the main passage of Floor 13 stretched like a highway. Climbers moved through it in groups, following the route maps, funneling into the corridors that Jaehyuk had steered his group away from.
From up here, you could see the system.
Groups entering the side chambers. The monsters surging toward them. The stronger teams moving through the cleared main passage behind, untouched.
Supply chain of sacrifice. Clean. Efficient. Almost beautiful if you didn't think about the screaming.
"That's organized," Mira said. Her voice was flat in a way that meant the opposite of calm.
"That's Vanguard," Jaehyuk said.
Han Yejin was standing at the ridge edge. Her hands had stopped shaking. Something harder had replaced the fear.
"Dohyun told us this route was safe," she said.
Jaehyuk turned.
Her face was still. Not angry. Not yet. The stage right before anger, where everything gets very clear and very cold.
"He said it was for the greater good," she continued. "Those words exactly. 'The Tower requires sacrifice. Vanguard ensures the sacrifice is distributed fairly.'"
Somin's healing light died. Her hands dropped to her sides.
"Distributed fairly," Somin repeated. "He said that?"
"To our faces. In the Lobby before we entered." Yejin's voice didn't waver. "He gave us the route map personally. Smiled the whole time."
Personally.
Not through subordinates. Not through enforcers like Nam Geonwoo. Not through the intermediary system Jaehyuk had assumed was the extent of it.
Kang Dohyun was standing in the Lobby, shaking hands with the people he was feeding to the monsters, and smiling while he did it.
Mira's knuckles went white around her sword grip. She didn't speak. She didn't need to. The look on her face said everything a sword would say later.
Jaehyuk stared down at the main passage. At the groups following the maps. At the route sellers directing traffic like it was a job, which it was, because someone was paying them.
In his first life, Dohyun had been careful. Distant. He'd let others get their hands dirty while he maintained the hero's image. The sacrifice system had been whispered about, never confirmed, never traced back to him directly.
This was different. This was brazen. Public. Like he'd stopped caring whether anyone saw the wires.
Or like he knew nobody could stop him even if they did.
"When did he give you the map?" Jaehyuk asked.
Yejin looked at him. "Two hours ago. In the Floor 13 staging area. He was there with three of his officers."
"Did he speak to anyone else?"
"Everyone. Every group that came through. He stood by the gate and handed out routes like he was doing us a favor." She paused. "My brother... he was supposed to be in the next group."
The words hung in the air. Small. Heavy.
Somin moved to Yejin's side without being asked. Didn't touch her. Just stood there, close enough to reach.
"We'll find him," Somin said.
"You can't promise that."
"No. But I can stand next to you while we try."
Yejin looked at Somin for a long time. Then she nodded once. The kind of nod that costs everything and gives nothing back.
Jaehyuk turned to Mira. "He's not hiding anymore."
"No," Mira said. Her voice was a blade being drawn from a sheath, slowly, so you heard every inch.
"He's distributing the kill maps himself. Standing at the gate. Shaking hands." Jaehyuk's thumb tapped against his index finger. Once. Twice. "He's not afraid of being seen."
"Should he be?"
Jaehyuk looked down at the main passage one more time. At the system running like clockwork. At the climbers walking into it because a man with a warm smile told them it was safe.
"Yeah," he said. "He should be."
Below them, another group entered a side chamber. The clicking started three seconds later.
And somewhere in the Lobby behind Floor 13's gate, Kang Dohyun was still smiling, still shaking hands, still saying the words that made the knife feel like kindness.
For the greater good.