Jack stood before the virtual screen for several minutes in silence, even after the fight had ended.
He had watched it all. The comments. The slow-motion breakdowns. The so-called expert analysis.
At this point those “professional analysts” might as well have been two drunks arguing about quantum mechanics in a pub.
The fuck did they know.
Like seriously… what was that? Did Alonso slash so fast the frames couldn’t even catch it? Then why the hell was the sword on the ground?
And that was just Alonso.
The visual manifestations in the air. The darkness. The cards. The beams. The explosions ripping the field apart like a full artillery strike. It was all just… surreal. And for him to call something surreal after the year they’d had? Hell, that meant something.
He’d honestly love to see how the world governments planned to handle this if any of them came back and didn’t do as told. What were they going to do? Fire a rifle at someone who could go from zero to Mach 2 in a blink? Or try to strong-arm the girl who could level a battlefield with what looked like a bloody walking stick?
Like… come on.
Just like the forums had been saying.
Whatever age they’d been in before? It was done. Finished.
This… this was the Age of Climbers.
Jack let out a slow breath.
His gaze lingered on Pablo.
He’d always known Alonso was a bit unhinged… in a good way. The kind of bloke who loses a leg and decides that’s just a sign he ought to hike further, push harder, give the universe the finger and keep moving anyway.
But Pablo had never been that type.
He was the steady one. The sharp mind behind the jokes. The guy who’d take the piss out of you one minute and quietly carry half the load the next without making a fuss about it.
Seeing him there on the screen, coughing up blood, body wrecked, still forcing himself up and throwing everything he had left into the fight, that landed in Jack’s chest in a way he hadn’t expected.
It hit different.
Jack’s breath steadied.
This fight raised the stakes again, proper this time. No filters. No cinematic angles to soften it. Just blood, broken bodies, and that cold, clinical reminder of what The Tower really was.
It was cruel. Indifferent. It didn’t give a damn about your confidence, your spreadsheets, your armchair breakdowns of “what they should’ve done differently.” It dumped a bucket of freezing reality over every wannabe Climber who reckoned they’d breeze through after watching a few slowed-down replays and talking big in the comments, theorising about “better strategies” and “obvious mistakes.”
This wasn’t a highlight reel.
This was the cost.
You want power?
Then cough the hell up in blood and pay the price.
Jack leaned back in his chair. “What’s ASCENT’s view on this, MEI? Anything new coming down?”
The AI’s voice answered, calm and smooth. “There has been no official notice as of yet. I will inform you the moment an update is posted.”
Figures.
“Alright,” he said, pushing himself up. “Run the training sessions again.”
“Understood. Which segment would you like to review?”
Jack’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the frozen frame of the battlefield one last time.
“All of them. And… drop pain reduction from 80 to 50%.”
“That would be statistically unwise—”
“Just do it.”
A brief pause.
“…Understood.”
***
Unlike most of the world, who had to sit before a screen and attempt to interpret fragments of what they had witnessed, Ishaam received the transmission directly from The Tower.
A dense, coherent sequence of pulses unfolded within his mind, carrying hundreds of thousands of frames in perfect continuity, accompanied by a complete three-dimensional reconstruction of the battlefield.
Even with a mind sharpened far beyond human limits, processing it in parallel layers, the conclusion remained stark.
He did not understand what he was seeing.
This fight had crossed into a domain that no longer made sense to him.
He could state with near certainty that the constructs manifested in the air were not products of the electromagnetic spectrum. The Tower provided timing, spatial coordinates, relational vectors, yet withheld compositional specifics.
Even so, he understood enough to recognise that whatever those phenomena were, they lay beyond what he, or anyone on Earth at present, could adequately theorise.
He recalled Arjun’s words from a private conversation a while ago.
“The Tower is a cursed road that leads to the divine.”
Now the meaning of that sentence settled into him with merciless clarity.
Each ascent, each incremental gain in Stage Progress, widened the gap between those who climbed and those who remained below. Even he, who considered himself insignificant beside the likes of Alonso, stood at over 25% Stage Progress and could walk unharmed through those at 10–15%. And those, in turn, would be untouchable before trained battalions of soldiers.
The divergence did not plateau.
It expanded.
At Earth’s current technological apex, advanced beyond what the general public outside ASCENT could ever imagine, the truth remained unavoidable. If those seven returned, if even one of them chose to impose his will upon the world, resistance would be symbolic at best.
Power on that scale did not negotiate.
It dictated.
To many, such a prospect would be intoxicating. The idea of becoming something akin to a god among mortals would inflame ambition and hunger.
For Ishaam, it inspired unease.
This world was no longer built for them.
Every visit home required restraint so severe it felt like self-erasure. He moderated his steps so the floor would not crack. He filtered his speech so it would not accelerate beyond comprehension. He throttled perception itself, dampening his cognition to a fraction of its capacity merely to approximate normalcy.
It was an act.
A performance of humanity.
And beyond family, what future awaited? Could he build one? Could he share his life with someone bound to a biological ceiling he had already far surpassed? Even with another Climber, if the disparity grew wide enough, the imbalance would remain.
He could claim he was still human.
Biologically, perhaps he was.
Existentially, he no longer belonged.
The Tower had granted strength beyond history, yet in doing so it had quietly extracted something in return. It had severed the invisible thread that binds an individual to the collective.
They had been elevated.
And in that elevation, they had been isolated.
Not rulers among men.
Outliers among their own kind.
There was something almost darkly amusing in it. Now that he had returned to Earth, the very thing he had once longed for while inside The Tower, he finally understood that his place was no longer here… but there.
That was why he understood Alonso, Lukas, and the others still climbing. People kept asking why they pushed so far when they knew they could come back upon death. What they failed to grasp was simple. If they came back, they would not be returning. They would be leaving the only world that could truly contain them, the only place where they could exist without restraint.
Returning meant losing it all. It meant becoming an alien in a realm of men. It meant solitude, emptiness, isolation.
Worse than that, it meant watching from the outside with envy. Watching those still inside, still climbing, still fighting and laughing together. Watching them become something greater while you stood still. It meant remembering what it felt like to move without fear of shattering concrete beneath your step, without calculating whether an angry strike might bring down a wall.
For those who had tasted that world, leaving it felt close to death. Perhaps even worse. A slow erosion of self.
That was why Ishaam, like every other strong returnee, had joined ASCENT. That was why they trained. Why some of them, like him, had even pushed themselves to reach the Third State.
They were waiting.
Waiting for the next Ascent. Waiting for the chance to step back into the only place that no longer felt foreign.
Yes, there would be pain. Yes, suffering would follow them like a shadow.
Yet as cruel and merciless as it was… The Tower had become their home.
As his thoughts drifted, an encoded pulse struck his mind.
“We found him. Prepare to engage.”
Ishaam sent confirmation back without delay.
He stood at the edge of a skyscraper in Los Angeles, forty stories above a city that still believed it ruled itself. His figure remained invisible to all electromagnetic perception, including visible light, concealed by both his Awakening and the adaptive nano-mesh suit sealed against his skin.
Below him, traffic streamed in ordered chaos, neon bleeding across glass towers, unaware that something far more lethal than any missile system was lurking inside it.
He rose from his crouch and rolled his shoulders. A three-dimensional grid unfolded in his mind, the city rendered in layered vectors and depth markers. Heat signatures. Movement densities. Structural schematics.
The target had slipped through containment several times already.
Civilian casualties exceeded one thousand.
The directive was absolute. He had to be terminated before the next Ascent.
Within Ishaam’s perception, a projection assembled itself:
Ian Dominik
Estimated Stage Progress: 26–27%.
Probable State: Extreme Body State, 2–3.
Threat Classification: Red - 9
Ishaam inhaled slowly, then linked to the rest of the squad dispersed across the city grid, their presences flaring like distant stars in his awareness.
No further words were required.
He stepped forward into open air.
Gravity claimed him for a fraction of a second before the suit responded, magnetising and vector-locking beneath his pulses. His descent shifted into controlled acceleration rather than a fall.
And then he vanished—
A blur without light, barely a whisper of displaced air, cutting through the vertical canyons of Los Angeles toward the target.
***
Gregor stared at the signed parchment resting upon his desk, fingers drumming lightly against the wood.
He knew it could not be forged. The seal was true, the signature unmistakable — the Marquis’ own knight, and the Guild’s liaison posted at the Hanging Oak’s fort. This was no tavern tale dressed up in ink.
And yet…
He had tested the lad scarcely a week past. A very promising sort, aye. But this? This was another matter entirely.
It took him a few long seconds before he leaned back in his chair, which creaked in quiet protest, and fixed Alonso with a measuring look.
“Well then, lad,” he said at last, folding his hands over his middle, “pray tell… how in the seven realms did you manage that?”
Alonso answered easily. “I suppose I had a good team.”
“A good team, says he,” Gregor huffed, though a grin tugged at the corner of his beard. “Aye, and I suppose dragons are but overgrown lizards while we’re at it.”
He shook his head slowly. Whether the boy meant to rub salt in the old talk he’d given him or not, the truth stood plain as day.
“Well,” Gregor went on, “it is not often I must eat my own words, but I shall do so gladly this day. I have never — not once — seen a fully Silver-ranked band clear a mid-tier Dungeon clean through. And that beast, Maerwyn… curses and all. You walked in blind to half of it, didn’t you?”
Alonso nodded.
He let out a low whistle. “By the Saints, lad… that is something.”
Alonso merely smiled.
Gregor studied him for a moment longer, curiosity flickering behind his eyes. There were questions there, plenty of them. About origins. About training. About what forge had hammered these youths into such world-class talents.
But he knew when to pry and when to let matters breathe.
“Very well,” he said at last, pushing the parchment aside. “You have surpassed my expectations, and that is no light praise. I have spent a lifetime in this trade, and I do not hand out compliments as if they were sweetmeats at a fair.”
He rose from his chair and came round the desk, clapping Alonso upon the shoulder.
“You and your companions have a bright road ahead, mark me. Brighter than this humble border post can hold for long, I’d wager. Should you and your lot have need of anything before you outgrow us entirely, my door stands open.”
He gave the lad a warm, crooked grin.
“And should you fancy a proper drink one evening, you may yet tell an old Guild Master how you truly pulled off such madness.”
“I may take you up on that,” Alonso replied. “Though before that, I have another matter to report.”
Gregor’s brows drew together. “Another matter, says he? Pray, young man, what fresh storm have you wandered into?”
“During our raid, we encountered a Dungeon anomaly.”
Gregor stilled. The air in the room seemed to thin for a heartbeat.
“An… anomaly? In the Hanging Oak?” He squinted at Alonso as though weighing jest from truth. “Now I cannot decide whether you are the luckiest soul in the region or the most cursed. Very well then — where did this little miracle show its teeth?”
“In the final boss. Maerwyn. We have reason to believe—”
“Oh, come now, lad,” Gregor interrupted with a short laugh. “You nearly had me there. An anomaly in the Oak’s final chamber? That would be—”
He stopped.
Alonso had raised his wrist.
The pendant hung there, the inverted angel catching the light as it swayed gently between them.
Gregor’s colour drained. His gaze dropped to the chain, then lifted slowly back to Alonso, then returned once more to the relic.
“... Well I’ll be damned.”