Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Animals in this Tower have skeletons of glass—a tempered, tougher sort of glass, the kind that is only transparent at certain angles. 

Hwaryun tells Khun this on the 77th Floor, when he notices her staff is too light to be metal, and asks what exactly it is made of. He has heard of glass flowers and glass moons, but nothing like glass bones. 

“Most shinheuh are common,” she explains, “so some take them as pets, or train them to fight. But if one can’t be tamed, it’s seen as worthless, killed, and its skeleton is sold in parts. The bones are valuable. They’re used in construction. Items.” She nods at her staff. “Weapons.”

Hwaryun doesn’t mention it again until they reach the 100th floor. 

Their floating ship is parked high up near the limits of the 99th floor. The rest of Khun’s team has gone down early to debrief, but he finds Hwaryun and White in one of the upper deck’s lounges. Their conversation falters when he walks in. 

White is emptying the contents of a small bag onto the table between them: a glass jar, a small handheld mirror, and a knife. He has his back turned towards the west window, so his hair is all golden where light from the sunset hits it. The red markings near his eyes are gone, and the lack of colour is strangely jarring. 

“I never knew you painted those on,” Khun says. It strikes him as odd that one of White’s defining features can be washed off with water. Khun thinks he looks a lot less threatening without them. 

“Really?” White muses as he uncaps the jar, sounding amused. It is half-filled with a thin red paint. “My followers used to paint blood next to their eyes to look like me, you know.” He holds out the knife to Khun with a grin, hilt first, like a twisted offering. “It would be perfect on you.”

Khun lets his firefish swim out. He watches absentmindedly as it twists around his arm, imagining painting the red slashes down his eyes, and how he would look when he opened them. Perhaps, if not for the blue, he could pass as one of White’s followers. 

“I’m flattered,” Khun says, nodding at Hwaryun, “though she’d be better off taking the offer.”

She’s started to gather the loose papers strewn across her side of the table, arranging them into a neat stack. There are diagrams sketched on some of them—Khun catches a glimpse of a sword on the topmost one before Hwaryun straightens the pile. 

She doesn’t say anything, but Khun studies her for a moment anyway, then supplies, “The red matches your hair.”

Hwaryun smiles wryly. It is the most emotion she’s shown all week. “I’ll meet the others on the lower deck now. Come down when you’re done,” she says, and places the pile back onto a shelf in her lighthouse while she walks out.

Red Witches aren’t allowed onto the next floor up, so she will be staying behind on their ship. No one can pinpoint the date in history or the reason why they were cast out from the 100th floor. Khun has a feeling Hwaryun knows, but she won’t share. Evan isn’t with them either, so they won’t have a guide. His Frog Fisher is still in Khun’s lighthouse. 

He watches Hwaryun move past the doorway and into the hall. Her outfit is all white today, and the colours of her hair and clothing remind Khun of the next floor—specifically, the family that lives there. 

He is a Khun, and his team has three members of FUG. The firefish loops around his wrist in an orange arc; a reminder that it is still, technically, a Yeon flame. 

The 100th floor belongs to Arie Hon, who has never been known for letting his enemies go easily. 

Despite what Bam tells him, passing through quietly doesn’t seem viable. So far, nobody has been able to gather unique information. The Princesses haven’t been to the floor. Hatz, for all his obsession with swords, has never been there either. White had spared them nothing but a glare, which was enough to shut up Shibisu, but no one else. 

For all their talk of the 100th floor, Khun wonders now if White misses it. He says the word home like he’s out for blood, if home was a living, breathing thing to fight over and reclaim. Coming from anyone else, Khun wouldn’t think much of it, but it’s unsettling when White says it, sounding almost fanatical, even though the only thing Khun has ever known him to worship is himself.

White is already a ranker, after all. He’s only allowed back because he is an Arie. Khun wonders, with a chill, what could be left there that White is going after, what he could’ve missed the first time around.

There are stories, of course, word of mouth and from the legends, but they were frowned upon where Khun grew up. Nobody wants to talk about the competition. His best description of the floor is something he’d overheard from Maschenny, speaking haughty and disapproving of territories and wives, Ran’s hand clasped in one of hers. Passersby slowed down and leaned in, because they knew Maschenny held all the secrets, even though she has never been known to tell the whole truth. 

There’s nothing you would like there, Ran, he remembers her saying, eyebrows close-knit with pride. No flower glades, no weapons, no art. Hon’s floor is graceless. It’s a skeleton of a city. They can’t match us.

“Someone once told me there was nothing beautiful on your floor,” Khun brings up, offhanded. “What do you want to go back for?”

White dips his knife into the mixture and starts painting red over the corner of his left eye with the metal’s edge, double checking his lines in the mirror. The action is mild, but the way he holds the knife is cruel. Khun can’t tell if he’s using the blunt or the sharp side. Either way, it doesn’t cut him.

“You think every city will be like yours,” White says, tone jagged. “You want decorations—glass flowers, where the wind blows and nothing moves? My family would never bother with useless things.”

Khun digs his fingers into his arms, surprised. He hadn’t expected White to know anything about the Khun family, even if he is just using it to get around giving Khun answers. 

“That’s too bad,” he replies, “but there are decorations on your floor too, things that people are too scared to touch.” 

He watches carefully. White’s mouth stiffens. He seems to know where Khun is going with this, but he doesn’t react yet, just finishes the shape over his left eye, then his right. He fills in the outlines with the flat of the blade, upward flicks of his wrist and enough precision to make Khun wonder just how many times he’s done this. 

“There’s another test that Arie Hon offers on the 100th floor, isn’t there? And I heard that no one’s attempted it for years.”

It’s an obvious bluff. Still, White stands. The mention of his father seems to snag at him, sudden and terrible. His shinsu crown fizzles to life over his head. 

“Maybe I’ll take it,” Khun presses, “since all I have to do is withstand his attacks for ten minutes. And when I win, I’ll ask him to plant some glass flowers as my reward.”

White says: “That won’t happen.”

His expression snaps Khun out of the charade. He looks like he’s set his sights completely on a goal that Khun can’t see, single-minded and unrestrained. It’s almost obsessive. Khun knows what White looks like when he goes after people he hates, people he wants dead, but this time is different, somehow. Everything about it sets him on edge.

They call the 100th floor the ‘glass ceiling’ of the Tower, and it comes with a warning that this is where teams start to break—but to Khun, it’s the same as any other level. The higher up they get, the more it will cost them to lose, and this is the first floor where the risk becomes real. He won’t pretend to understand who White is and what he wants, but he knows he can’t have him running loose. Not when they’re this close to the top. 

“You mean taking the test, or winning it?” Khun asks. “Or do you think we won’t even be able to pass the regular test?”

“You’re crazy to think you can take it,” White narrows his eyes, unfazed, “and crazier to think you can win. There’s nothing you can use to your advantage in the regular test. If you think fighting my father will help you pass, you’re sorely mistaken.”

The paint on his face has already dried, edges tapering off in crisp slashes around his eyes. The markings sort of remind Khun of fangs—or horns—and are so clean that if not for the colour, he wouldn’t be able to tell where skin ended and paint began, even up close. 

“I don’t care about advantages,” Khun argues. “But I’m sure Arie Hon won’t object if I challenge him.”

When they step towards each other, the firefish moves of its own accord, flaring defensively between them. 

“You’re not taking it,” White repeats, “because I am. And if you get in my way, I’ll kill you, just like I’m going to kill him.”

Chapter Text

Hoaqin dreams of a house between the trees. 

His father had told him of a certain philosophy which says that all knowledge is based on experience—that the mind is born a white slate, and that ideas can only be formed by new sensations: to learn of heat, you must be burned. To learn to kill, you must first see it happen before you. 

Empiricism, in essence, is the reason why all members of a family tend to turn out the same. He had compared it to growing bonsai, and said the two were just as simple: angle the plant to the sun as soon as it sprouts, prune its leaves as it grows, and eventually it will learn to keep its shape. It will age to be just like the others. 

There is a small brick house, far out from the city, back to back with a forest and looking out over a beach. When Hoaqin thinks of it, he wonders if it is affected by theories too, if it is shaped by the wind and cold water that laps up the shore.

If the concept of empiricism exists, then the goal of an Arie will always be to prove themselves as the best, to kill their father. But according to this concept, to kill a demon means they must first know how to, and to do that, they must become demons themselves. 

For now, killing a king is out of reach, but the house is not. They decide to take it.

They visit the next Sunday and pile their weapons onto the sand. Anna and Albelda paint the roof-tiles to match the sea and the windowsills to match the sun. Hoaqin and Vicente purchase garden ornaments and vegetation from the nearest store in town, then plant rose bushes full of thorns in the loam and arrange vines so that they crawl up the trellis on the wall. Opposite them, David lines up pots of saplings around the birdbath they’ve carried back. He is hoping that, by the end of autumn, their flowers will begin to bloom. 

It really is nice here, no blood or bodies or politics. Hoaqin has packed a few apples he’d bought from the market, but he finds himself staring at their pink skins and unable to pick up a knife. He washes them and lays out a plate and calls Vicente over to cut them instead, then spends twenty minutes helping Albelda choose a suitable playlist from her lighthouse. Eventually, they decide not to play music and listen to the birdsong outside instead. 

Later, Anna takes off her shoes to walk at the edge of the shore, where the waves are mostly foam. Hoaqin wonders what a person would become if they spent their whole life in the shinsu and the sea—if they would develop notions from the shinheuh or language from the seabirds, if empiricism would even matter if all they knew was water.

At sunset, they sprawl out across the patio together. 

It smells like salt and sand and drying paint. Hoaqin’s shoulders are sore from carrying furniture and shovelling earth, but the sunlight is warm against his skin. It’s a rare sort of warmth, the kind that can’t be replicated by hot showers or layers of blankets, so he doesn’t move in fear of losing it.

“What’s going to happen to this house when we climb the Tower?” Albelda asks eventually, kicking absently at the sand. 

For every story Vicente has, Albelda has one to match. The difference is that Vicente’s are softer, sometimes fantastical, and make Hoaqin feel like he can believe. Albelda’s stories are about the Tower and all its savage realities, and he always finds that he’s unwilling to listen to them all. He’s heard snippets of histories and betrayals from her, things about the other Families that most people on this floor wouldn’t care to know.

Father is the strongest, he remembers her saying, all sing-song, the least cruel of all her stories, and then Khun Eduan. I heard he has fields and fields of glass flowers that don’t even move when the wind blows. 

Right now, Hoaqin hates her just a little for bringing it up. He’d almost forgotten real life. 

“We can’t stay here forever,” Vicente says, “but we just found this place. We should make the most of it.”

Anna covers her face with her hands, even though they are still smeared with yellow paint. “I wish I was just water,” she mumbles. She’s barely grown-up at all, but she sounds longing, like she’s always yearned for a different life. The middle of her sentence is lost between her fingers, but Hoaqin catches the tail end of it: “—with you all.”

He looks between the backs of their heads. “It doesn’t matter, does it? If we climb, we climb. We’ll make it back here and find this place again.”

Vicente laughs a little, though it sounds uncertain. “I guess so.”

A few uneaten apple slices are still sitting on the plate one of his siblings has brought outside. Someone has knocked the fruit knife to the sand on the side, but Hoaqin doesn’t move to retrieve it. 

A house gains nothing from knowledge. It will stand in the middle of storms and waves and learn nothing from the experience. Perhaps, when Hoaqin first sees this one—an empty intermediate between land and sea, with no function but to stand for itself—he feels a little jealous. 

When the sunset is over, Vicente suggests that they go out to collect their swords from the shore. They trudge back to the beach and find the blades half-buried in the sand and damp from the water. For a while, nobody moves to pick theirs up.

Hoaqin deliberates over throwing his far into the ocean, but doesn’t.  

.

When Hoaqin opens his eyes, they are standing among a group of regulars on a wide, circular span of stone. He recognises it immediately—it is one of the cliffs on the 100th floor, the one that overhangs a waterfall he could always hear from the beach.

The floor looks just as he remembers: buildings stripped down to their white ivory skins, pavilions and boulevards accented with red, lined with thin streams of water and bare trees. It seems like nothing has changed. The layout is all the same, the city nestled within shores of grey water and white sand that looks more welcoming than it is from faraway. It’s more familiar than it is beautiful. 

His first instinct is to look for the house by the shore, but then he notices his body feels strange. Powerless. 

His siblings are gone. 

When they had split on the Hell Train, he’d felt liberated. But now, on the floor of his home, he needs them back. It’s like he’s just lost a fight, a feeling that he barely recognises anymore. He won’t accept that he’s made it all the way back here, done all that work on the strength of them together, only to lose it all where it matters most.  

You are trading your own siblings’ souls to kill your father, the demon had scoffed at him, all those years ago. And you think of me as a demon. If this spell works, you will become one too.

“Vicente,” Hoaqin mutters, pulse jumping. His hand moves automatically to his sword. “Albelda!” He whirls around and starts pushing through the crowd of regulars around them, looking for anything: white hair, a red dress, a fallen sword—

Fingers close suddenly around his wrist, pulling him back. 

“White?” Khun frowns, before his expression goes calm and blank. He pulls Hoaqin forward by the wrist and lowers his voice. “What happened?”

“My siblings,” he hisses. “They’re gone. We split up, but we shouldn’t have. The spell doesn’t work that way. I need to find them—they might be here somewhere.”

His teammates act quickly. The scouts have already pulled up their observers, getting a clear view of the regulars from overhead. 

Shibisu shakes his head. “I can’t see any other Aries in this crowd.”

Hoaqin exhales. “They can’t have just disappeared,” he says. “Maybe they were teleported into the city.”

“That city?” Khun points down the cliff. “There’s nobody there.”

The lower floor is the testing grounds, and it will only fill up with people once all these regulars go down. His siblings wouldn’t be there. The hilt of his sword still fits well in his hand. With his siblings gone—with everything gone—he has never been more relieved to have it with him. 

“It must be something about this floor,” Viole says, eyebrows furrowed. “My thryssas are gone too. I can’t feel them anymore.”

Khun grits his teeth. “I still have the firefish.” He summons it, as if to make sure, and it blooms into shape over his shoulder. “Endorsi still has Bong Bong, so this isn’t about items.” 

It takes Hoaqin a moment to find his voice. “If it is a rule, it must be a new one. I’ve never heard of a rule that would warrant these being taken away.”

“FUG’s slayer and slayer candidate have lost their powers?” 

He turns to the speaker, a tall woman with a haughty smile, and unsheathes his sword just an inch. 

“Don’t,” Khun cuts in sharply. “I’m not sure she’ll want to die before the test even starts.”

The woman goes red. She begins talking again, but Khun is looking at the empty box floating beside her. Hoaqin follows his gaze. It resembles a lighthouse, but its edges are much too rounded to be one. He scans the crowd and spots identical boxes near several of the regulars, all empty. 

Hoaqin doesn’t figure out what it is, but Khun lets himself laugh. “My teammates aren’t the only ones who’ve lost something,” he tells her. “Why don’t you all check your shinheuh tanks?”

The woman turns to her own tank. She finally realises her shinheuh is gone, and her face goes slack. “But—but how—” She rounds on him and her expression tightens. “You did something to us, didn’t you? You must have, just before we got here—”

“He didn’t,” Viole says sharply, defensive. 

Shinheuh, thryssas, clones—slowly, it begins to piece together. Hoaqin can assume: “This must have something to do with souls.” 

If his guess is correct, then Khun has gotten off lucky. The firefish has not been taken away from him since it does not have a soul, but is simply an incarnation of the Yeon family’s healing flame. Over the past few decades, Living Ignition Weapons, having finally been perfected by the Workshop, have also seen a great increase in popularity throughout the Tower. Hoaqin is willing to bet some of these regulars have Ignition Weapons within them, and have lost them too. 

“You’re right,” someone else says from behind him.  

Hoaqin goes still. 

Shinsu pressure isn’t new to him, but when the man approaches, the shinsu around him forms its own gravity. Lighthouses clatter to the ground like plastic. 

“Arie Hagipherione Jahad, the last one to pass the additional 100th floor test, wished that all souls arriving on this floor would be freed from the vessels they didn’t belong to,” the man continues. “Childish, I know. But rules are rules. You will not be getting them back.”

Hoaqin’s hand is still on his sword. He wants to laugh, but he hasn’t felt fear like this in a long time.

“But let’s not gloss over the formalities,” the man says, and when Hoaqin finally turns to face him, he is smiling. “My name is Arie Hon.”

At first sight, he is the same father Hoaqin remembers—the things he says don’t quite match his voice, and his voice disconnects again from his appearance, a strange double contradiction. Give yourself over to the joys of murder, he would say, with a voice too calm to lord over a place like this, and his hair and eyes pure white, as if colour and blood could never disgrace him.

Inwardly, though, Hoaqin isn’t sure if this is the same person at all. His eyes glide calmly over Hoaqin with no recognition. 

“The floor test will proceed as follows,” Arie Hon says. He draws another sword from where it hangs at his hip on a cord, and begins breaking it into parts with his hands. “Crossguard. Pommel. Grip. Grip tape. True edge. False edge.” Finally, he unhooks the sheath from the cord and drops it on top of the separate parts, where they glow a strange silver. “Sheath.” 

As far as Hoaqin remembers, the administrator has never been his father himself. He wants to kill something badly. He has the chance to kill Arie Hon right now, but without his siblings’ power, it would be impossible. He can count on one hand the number of times he has felt so frustratingly powerless. Even fewer times has he lost.

His father continues, “To pass, you have one week to find and collect all seven parts, then assemble the sword. Each regular can only hold one part at a time. You will be marked with it.”

Khun, a political rival, is leaning with one arm on Viole’s shoulder; Endorsi and Anak, two of Jahad’s Princesses, are yawning openly in front of someone they are supposed to respect. Hoaqin wonders how he is the only one now who can’t find the confidence to take his hand off his weapon. He has slain billions, dominated the Outer Tower and killed High Rankers, but here he is. He wants to move. He tells himself to move. His body doesn’t respond.

Arie Hon’s eyes gleam. “The opening ceremony will begin shortly. You may now make your way to the regulars’ hotel,” he says. “But first...” 

Just for a moment, a shadow of a demon hangs over his face, bloodsoaked and terrible, but his father is looking at Khun, not him. 

He reaches out with one hand. “A Khun boy, bringing the Yeon flame to my floor?”

Khun smiles. His arm is still on Viole’s shoulder, and the firefish loops once more around his wrist. Neither of them look scared. 

“Confident, I see.” Arie Hon smiles back, reserved. “I wish you all the best.”

He closes his hand around the firefish. There is a flash of white light as both disappear, and the regulars are teleported onto the banks of the stream at the bottom of the cliff. The shinsu pressure lifts and lighthouses soon rise into the air again as they get to their feet. 

The hotel’s receptionist is waiting for them at the stream. He bows low in greeting, then turns and begins to lead them to the regulars’ area, which he introduces as a safe zone. 

He leads them through broad, sloping roads, and winding plains with grass drained of colour. Arie Hon’s territory is huge, but there’s almost nothing of notice here. Khun thinks the entire floor has been built around two keystones: the first is a huge dome-like maze of glass taking up the centre of the floor, reflecting shades of red and gold struggling against each other, walls slowly shifting into new patterns. He wonders what could possibly be kept inside.  

The second is the Oarfish, a monster he’d thought was slaughtered, something he’d initially dismissed as a skyscraper because of its size. It overlooks the city, held back by a colourless shinsu barrier, and its metal-plated body takes up the entire northern stretch of the floor. It’s so large that Khun can only get a good view of half its head, the other half blocked by acres of forest. One of its horns is missing.

Endorsi and Bam take turns trying to teleport themselves forward short distances, but to no avail. Lighthouse teleportation, however, does appear to work, but since it requires a lighthouse at both the target and beginning destination, they resort to walking. The floor is so large that it takes them an hour to reach the regulars’ area, and by the time they arrive at the hotel and collect their keys from the front desk, the sky is fully dark.

They step into an elevator that takes them slowly up from the lobby to the fourteenth floor. They have all been given keys, but there are only four rooms here. Hoaqin, who is now considered a regular and test-taker, takes a room for himself. Khun decides to share one for three with Bam and Rak. He unlocks it and finds two beds—one single and one double. There are three sets of neatly folded suits laid out on the pillows and two pairs of dress shoes on the floor beside the desk, presumably for the opening ceremony.

They are essentially being asked to prepare for a party, but the mood is grim. They have lost crucial items, and Hoaqin most of his power. If they are caught in fights, they will have to be a lot more careful. 

After they finish changing, Endorsi discovers that they have been allotted identical keys and invites herself into Hatz’s room, then Khun’s. She skips Hoaqin’s door. 

There is too much about this floor that Khun doesn’t understand. Maschenny had spoken of the lack of beauty then, but Khun is most put off by the lack of life here, even as all the buildings are being filled up. He hadn’t been expecting to see any Arie people so soon, or ever, let alone Arie Hon, who has never been known to interfere.

He mulls it over while he slides his suit jacket on. It seems tailor-made for him. 

The ceremony, at first, seems pointless. Arie Hon is there by the building’s stained glass window, below the chandeliers, like some sacrosanct figure—fitting, Khun thinks, but can’t bring himself to be scared of him. 

The curtains to the wooden stage part and a group of Aries walks out from backstage. They prop their sheet music on stands and adjust the latter to their heights, prepare their instruments, and begin to play. The music is a slow, lilting piece. None of the regulars look like they want to dance. 

The second storey is all red-backed seats. The way the room is designed reminds Khun of a coliseum, only for ballroom dancing rather than fights to the death. The steel eel is visible through one of the window walls. 

Khun leans against the food table, a clean self-serve counter that runs the entire length of the lower floor’s wall. Regulars have started to crowd around: maybe two whole groups to his left, not including his own, and three on his right. He can make out thin imprints of weapons under the fabric of their suits and dresses, and wonders if they are able to see the knife under his sleeve too. 

Bam tugs at his sleeve, then nods to the musicians. “Second violin,” he says, just loud enough for their team to hear.

Khun looks over at them. One of the violinists doesn’t appear to have the same sheet music as the others. His stand is angled away from them, a cello blocking out half his body, but Khun can just see a ribbon that loops over the top of the stand, glowing a strange silver. It’s the grip tape. 

So this isn’t pointless after all; the test has already begun.

“Hoaqin. How many exits are there?” 

“Just two,” Hoaqin replies. “One next to the stage and one in the back corner upstairs. They lock automatically and can only be unlocked by key.”

Khun is impressed. It must have been centuries since Hoaqin was last here, and yet he can still remember.

“So is there a plan, or do we just stand here for the whole night?” Endorsi asks, picking up a strawberry. It is the same colour as her lips, and stands out starkly against her black dress.

A good number of people are staring at her from across the room: a dark-haired man, the woman from the cliff earlier. It’s not unusual—Endorsi is well-known, after all—but if he wants to use this… He thinks over the rules again and suddenly, an idea hits him. 

“Go do what you do best,” Khun says with a grin, tilting his head to the group opposite them. “Turn some heads.”

Endorsi laughs. “Easy.”

As the music swells, she makes her way across the room with perfect poise, extending a hand to the man as an invitation to dance. The regulars around him sputter nonsensically. 

Khun nudges Anak, Hoaqin and Rak after her, muttering, “In a few minutes, make some noise.”

Then Khun turns to Shibisu. “We’re going after the sheath first, aren’t we?” he says, a little too loudly. The conversation of the groups beside them falters.

“What? Why?” Shibisu asks, alarmed. 

“For the floor test,” Khun says, like it couldn’t be more obvious. “Arie Hon never specified what would happen if none of the groups managed to complete the sword, but I know: the groups with the parts that are worth the most will pass, and the rest will fail.”

He narrows his eyes pointedly at Shibisu, whose expression—thankfully—morphs from one of confusion to understanding. He activates his observer. The screen spins with different functions and Khun is certain he sees Shibisu select one that says Amplify sound. 

Behind them, there is a sudden click, like a camera shutter. In the glass cover over an assortment of cupcakes, Khun sees the reflection of someone else’s observer set to record their conversation. He bites back a grin. “I won’t say it out here though. Someone could be listening.”

Shibisu waves a hand dismissively. “Nobody is. I’ve set my observer to block out sound, so they can’t hear us.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Fine. The sheath is worth the most, obviously, so we should be trying to find it first. The parts of the hilt are worth the least, so it barely matters whether we collect them or not. We can just trade any old thing for it.”

Shibisu frowns, but before he can reply, something crashes to the ground. It’s Rak, right on time.

Khun signals to Rak: good job, then gestures to Shibisu and Hatz: follow. He takes Bam’s hand and leads him to the centre of the room, where pairs of regulars have begun to dance. The musicians start up a new song. He recognises it as one his sister used to play—the first movement of a winding symphony, commonly played to finish a concert right before the curtains fall. 

“Was all that stuff you said real?” Bam asks him. “About the floor test, I mean.”

“No,” Khun says, leading them further into the crowd. He holds Bam’s hand in his right. “None of the parts should be worth more than the others, but if people think they are, they’ll begin by going after those first. If the word spreads—”

“And it will, won’t it?” 

“—then we should start off with an advantage,” he finishes. 

“You made that up on the spot, and Shibisu picked it up?” Bam looks at him with a strange expression, then smiles and looks away. “I’m glad I have you on my team. All of you.”

Khun laughs at that. Bam is strong enough to destroy the 77th floor and kill a king, strong enough to climb the Tower without them. He’s past the point where he needs their help. Climbing with Bam is like trying to keep up with the swordsmanship of an Arie or the strength of a Ha—impossible, no matter how much sleep you lose and how much you train. This floor should be no different for him.

“I’m glad, too,” is all he says. He pushes Bam gently into a spin.

His memory is hazy, but if he remembers correctly, the piece the musicians are currently playing is around ten minutes long, which means they only have about five minutes until the curtains fall and the lights go dark.

Bam presses closer to him. “The other teams have noticed,” he mutters. “They’re all looking on my side.”

Khun scans the crowd. Bam is right—almost everyone has spotted the grip tape, watching the violinist discreetly and taking care to step in time with their partner. “Same here. We’ll have to fight.”

“Will we be okay without the firefish?” Bam asks. His tie has started to come loose. Even in this sharp, strange lighting, the colour matches his eyes. “We haven’t had to fight defensively in a while. Endorsi’s used to teleportation, too…”

“Don’t worry,” Khun says. “Our team is strong. You’re strong, Bam.”

He means it to be reassuring, but Bam’s expression closes off. “Okay,” he says, before Khun has a chance to react. He leans forward, dropping his head on Khun’s shoulder. “I trust you.”

Thirty seconds. They slowly move to the edge of the room, where the rest of his team is starting to gather. His palm hits the wall just as the musicians play the final few bars with a flourish.

A moment after the music stops and the room goes dark, it is so quiet that Khun can hear Bam’s heartbeat.

The silence explodes.  

He pulls up his lighthouse, but the room is so dark and wide that all he can see is blurred shapes and faraway lights. Everyone is scrambling for the violinist, tripping over heels and discarded suit jackets and stairs. 

“Get over here!” he yells. The heavy doors leading out of the room slam shut with a resonating bang, followed by a terrible crunching sound. A group of voices scream. 

Khun fumbles for a weapon in his inventory through the thin light. They run out, and he yells back one last thing. “Be careful! We can’t teleport and we don’t have the firefish. If you die here, you’re not coming back.”

He runs to a white light near the front of the room, pushing through bodies and stepping over the fallen. Something tears into his back, and bright pain lances across his shoulder. Instinctively, he calls for the firefish, only to realise he no longer has it. 

A single wave of shinsu crashes into the wall beside him, lighting the whole room green. With a start, Khun realises the light he could see was Hoaqin’s sword, holding off a wave of regulars, slicing through lighthouses and limbs alike with an ironic grace that only an Arie could match. 

He spots Endorsi and Anak in the corner, fighting back to back with bare fists. Bam has found his way behind Hoaqin onto the stage. 

The room goes dark again, but the split second of confusion is all Khun needs. He sends one of his lighthouses over to Bam and teleports there, sending ice sprawling across the floor. 

“Khun?!” Bam starts. He can’t fly without the thryssas, but he summons his Blue Oar to stay off the ice. Someone barrels into them, knocking Khun to the ground in a rush of fabric. Pain blooms across his shoulder.

“Don’t move!” the woman says hoarsely, slamming him to the floor. 

Khun grits his teeth. “Bam! Keep looking for it!” he yells. They roll across the ice, but his shoulder has gone numb now. He lets himself be pinned down and tries to lift his gun, but finds his hand trapped under a knee, or a shoe, or an elbow.

“Don’t try to escape,” the woman growls. “That grip tape is mine.”

Khun twists his wrist and slides out the dagger from his other sleeve instead, then stabs her clean through the neck. “Can’t be yours if you’re dead,” he mutters, annoyed. 

He pushes the body away and almost collides head first with someone else crawling on the floor, curled over something. Something digs into his palm. Splintered wood? 

A broken violin? 

The musician pulls out a sword—a shorter blade with one serrated edge. Khun can see the telltale glow of the grip tape under him, along with the outline of the book it’s slotted in. 

He doesn’t have time to act before Bam lands behind him and shoots his sword hand. The light of his Blue Oar illuminates the Arie for just a moment, enough for Khun to aim and follow up with a shot through his forehead. 

He grabs the book. Bam grabs his hand.

“Someone’s calling you,” Bam yells. “Check your pocket!”

Khun can barely hear the ringing over the sound of fighting. He slams the answer button and Hoaqin’s voice yells back at him through the receiver.

“Did you find it?”

“Yeah!”

“The first floor exit’s blocked. Grab that stupid alligator and get to the second floor! I have the rest with me.”

“On it,” Bam mutters. He reaches over and ends the call, then shrugs. “What? He was lagging.”

Khun rips the grip tape from the book, which looks familiar—a leather cover with a silver pentagram on the cover. Bam seems to think so too, because he takes it from Khun and pockets it. 

They can’t fly far with Blue Oar before crashing into something, but it isn’t too hard to find Rak. He is standing next to a row of marble pillars, roaring, indistinguishable from the huge statues beside him.

Khun sends a lighthouse up to where Hoaqin is, smacks a hand onto the alligator's face, then teleports them up to the second floor. 

“What the hell, Blue Turtle, I had them—”

“They’re here, go, go, go!” 

Someone kicks the doors wide open. It must have been Endorsi, because the force of it knocks them back and sends shattered pieces blasting outwards. Light spills into the room. They clamber out, jump down to the ground, and run.

They don’t stop until they get to the hotel, where they collapse in the lobby, too tired to say anything until they catch their breath. 

After a while, Hatz speaks. “He wasn’t lying about the tattoos,” he says grimly.

Khun turns to look at himself in one of the mirrors. A thin silver line has appeared on his face, running down from his forehead to his jaw. 

“Not bad,” he comments. “Though it doesn't look good enough to risk getting killed for.” 

Hoaqin laughs bitterly. “If I still had all my power, that fight would've been over in seconds.” 

“If we still had the firefish, you mean.”

Nobody denies it. None of them could fight to their full potential. Khun shifts against the pillar he’s leaning on, assessing the damage. They have all taken hits and scrapes, but otherwise look okay. He can’t see blood through the dark material of their suits, but he knows when he stands the ground will most likely be stained red. 

“Well,” he sighs. “We all know what that means, then.”

Bam narrows his eyes at him, confused. “What?” 

“The tests are only going to get harder after this floor,” Khun says, tying the grip tape into a loose knot around his wrist. “I doubt we’ll make it through without the thryssas and the firefish, and Hoaqin can’t form White without his siblings.” He looks up. It’s a plan they can’t refuse. “We’re going to get our souls back.”

Chapter Text

“Leave this place,” his father says. He is holding the White Oar, and Hoaqin can smell all the souls inside it, even from far away. “Return as a demon, and maybe then you’ll have a chance.”

Hoaqin stares up at him, full of awe. “Will you remember me?” 

He hopes so. All the kids here learn about chains—food chains, chains of being—how Arie Hon is at the very top, how if you were there, you’d have nothing to be afraid of. 

Vicente is a bit older than him, and sometimes he talks about new things he learns of, things that can hurt and kill. So Hoaqin has already decided: he doesn’t want to be scared of these things. He doesn’t want his siblings to be scared, either. He thinks he would be willing to kill anyone and do anything to get up to the top. 

“Of course,” his father says. “Servants, sons, wives—all your flesh, blood and bones have gathered to create the Arie blade. I couldn’t forget your names if I tried.” 

The air tastes like blood then, all warm and alive. Hoaqin thinks that, if he really is going to climb, he’s going to have to get used to that.

how did you find me?  

hoaqin is thrown back into his own body when he hears the demon. he scrambles to regain his balance, but his feet won’t touch the ground. he doesn’t know where the ground is. he reaches up blindly for a handhold and finds nothing but red, empty space, like an oversized chamber of a heart. 

someone left you behind, he says. his voice sounds substanceless compared to the demon. i called you back. they said you could make me strong.

it’s only half a lie. he found an old spell yesterday, one someone forgot to destroy, written in a language he couldn’t understand. he had spent a night reciting the words, agonising over the soft shapes of sounds that don’t exist, until he knew them by memory. he must have done something right, because now he’s here. 

whatever this is, it has to work. he reminds himself what he wants, and how strong he needs to be to get it. the surge of anger that follows spurs him on. 

it’s been centuries, hoaqin guesses. i know you were alone. aren’t you looking for something to do?

the demon makes a sound that has to be a laugh, horrible and grating, stretching on and on. a-rie, it says, dividing the word into pieces. i know your kind. i know your maker.

what do you want? hoaqin asks.

souls. 

suddenly, the space around hoaqin starts closing in. it gets too dense to breathe cleanly. he can’t fight back. this isn’t anything he knows how to kill. he can feel the demon watching and knows he’s just being toyed with, a human floating in red limbo, fighting to stay alive. 

instead of panic, though, all he feels is envy. it fills him up with excitement, imagining being as strong as this faceless, nameless thing. he thinks of vicente, albelda, anna, david, and convinces himself that they’ll understand. some of them might not. he'll make them.

like you said—i can make you strong. i can make you better.

hoaqin takes a last breath. i’ll give you four. 

the demon laughs again, like it had been expecting his answer. you are trading your own siblings’ souls to kill your father, it knows, and you think of me as a demon. if this spell works, you will become one too.

that’s all i want, hoaqin confesses. let me go, and i’ll give them to you. i’ll entertain you. we can both get our way. 

After that, he can’t remember exactly when or where things changed. His life seems to split down a broken line into two parts: there was nothing, and then there was White.

“Everything you want is at the top of the Tower,” Headon tells him.

It sounds like the beginning of a fable. The way he speaks is intrusive and all-knowing. White gets the sense that Headon knows everything about him, but won’t say more than he has to, so he doesn’t bother asking more questions. It won’t matter, anyway. Headon just confirms what he already believes—the 100th floor is the top, and that’s where he needs to be.

“I must warn you,” Headon grins, his entire face splitting open with it, “it will feel like chasing the moon. You five may lose your way. Nothing will ever seem more impossible.”

White looks at him, barely believing what he’s just heard. There’s only one of him now, and the one in control doesn’t believe in childrens’ stories. Not anymore. The climb has only just begun, he thinks angrily, and decides Headon must be crazy to doubt him, to bring up the dead to try and slow him down.

“Open the gates,” White says, feeling mindlessly greedy. “Open the gates, and I’ll show you.”

White leans over the sink and looks into one of the mirrors overhead. The room is dark, but he can see bodies behind him, bleeding out. It looks like a tsunami has just swept through here, if water was red instead of blue, a natural disaster. Except that didn’t happen. It’s just him and his sword. The longer he thinks about it, the funnier it gets. 

He is only on the 20th floor, but he already feels like the higher he climbs, the less thrill there is, far less than he'd expected. He has a feeling it’s just the lack of things that can hurt him. There is nothing in the Tower stronger than the demon he made a deal with. It means survival isn’t anything special anymore. He doesn’t remember the last time he had to fight to live. 

Arie Hon is waiting for him on the 100th floor, high up the Tower, higher on the food chain. White feels frantic just thinking about it. He wants to fight him. To kill him. To really survive.

Can you hear me? he thinks, taunting, even though no one ever replies. What would you do if you could see through my eyes? Would you kill this body and hope you’d come back to life?

He curls his fingers around the edge of the sink. He’s taken his shirt off and left the tap running, though he really can’t tell if the water is hot or cold. It always feels like this when he absorbs more souls, like his whole body is alight. 

Just one more thing he’ll have to get used to, then.

He peers up into the mirror and raises his eyebrows, two at a time, then one by one. Lowers them. Pulls the corners of his lips out with two fingers that taste like blood. Spits in the sink. Opens his mouth wide, so his reflection shows him as many teeth as possible. It’s still too blank for his liking—he looks like he’s dead, or gone insane, but he’s not either. 

There’s more blood dripping down the basin. White swipes it experimentally down his eyes with his fingers. It’s a bigger success than he expects. The red makes him look way more alive.

Somewhere along the line, he becomes addicted to the count. He amasses over a million souls, but what makes him mad is that he knows it won’t be enough. The Tower isn’t real life, where a billion is a number almost unimaginable, and so his father must have that or more.

To reach the top, he has to be stronger. There are predators with enough power to swallow him whole—Arie Hon, FUG’s elders, the Oarfish on the 100th floor—and not enough prey left to keep him alive. When he feels like even the climb isn’t enough, he rips through to the Middle Tower, then the Outer.

He finds two neighbouring countries outside the sights of Jahad’s empire, uncharted and hopelessly undefended. The people living there meet him with pickaxes and old-fashioned sickles, good for nothing but harvests, and White doesn’t miss how they stare at him, starry-eyed, like he’s an angel who’s tripped down a rabbit hole into their own little world. 

They’re helpless. They’re so hilarious. White tells them to build up their lands, and they do. He tells them to bow and kiss his hands and his feet, and they do. They think he’s come to save their lives, so White teaches them to take each other’s, just out of interest, and they do it without question. He eats their souls by the thousands. 

The markings down his eyes become somewhat notorious throughout the Outer Tower. Highwaymen and worthless thieves start to copy them, then kill in his name. White becomes what could have been the subject of one of Albelda’s stories. For a while, no one knows if he is one person or many, or simply just a legend. 

White doesn’t care about them, but he finds himself despising how easily the blood runs off, and how it always dries in dark flakes, like metal gone to waste by the sea.

He ends up replacing the blood with paint. He thinks about the Oarfish and tries to mimic the shape of its glass horns with the red on his skin.

.

“I expected more,” Arie Hon says now. “You should be as strong as the steel eel. Invulnerable.”

This is Arie Hon’s island, the place where Hoaqin had first come up to him and asked where to beat him. Nothing has changed at all, not the cycling arches of water and gates leading to nowhere, not even the weight of the air. Even his father looks the same, standing amidst these glass figures all built to worship him, staring down at Hoaqin as if he had never grown up at all.

It’s the first thing he says after Hoaqin finds him again, as if him coming up here is inconsequential. Hoaqin grits his teeth. This would be going differently if he were still White, but he’s not. He can’t fight, but he’s come to meet his father again anyway. 

“What makes you think I’m not?” he asks instead, but keeps a hand on his sword anyway. 

He looks out at the cold sky between one of the arches. The eel stares back from behind the shinsu barrier, eyes red, one glass horn missing, like it’s been cut clean off. He still remembers it: the Oarfish, the most well-known shinheuh in the Tower. 

Since nobody has been able to tame it, the Arie family keeps the Oarfish on the 100th floor as a favour for the Lo Po Bias, locked away. In exchange, the Lo Po Bias sent all manner of items here, feeding Arie Hon’s city until it had been built up into what it is today. 

Vicente was the one who told him about these things, back when they were not quite adults, not quite children. He had always been interested in the way things worked, as if he wanted to scrub this floor down to a white slate again, piece by piece. Hoaqin found it ridiculous. They sparred and sparred, and Vicente told him stories between blows, what the world was like at the top of the food chain, and outside of the 100th floor. 

Don’t you want to know? he asked once after training, while they counted their bruises. There could be anything out there.

Hoaqin didn’t. He might have thought differently when he was a kid, but he didn’t want to become a weapon just to climb. He wanted to stay at the bottom, where there was lots to fear, but the world was all okay. In the end, something changed. He ended up climbing anyway. He made it to the top—slayer, ranker, monster—but now he’s in Arie Hon’s home. Full circle. 

“I still recognise you,” Arie Hon answers. 

Hoaqin’s not sure he heard him right. “You recognise me?” he echoes. It sounds nonsensical. A sudden laugh builds up in his chest, more out of habit than anything, and he holds it back until he feels a stitch tugging at his sides. “You know my face, and that makes me weak?”

He follows Arie Hon around the corner and into another room that opens out into the broad sky, with seemingly no ceiling. Hanging baskets of bonsai are suspended in the air, held up by nothing, angled towards the sun and forming a spiralling path towards a set of double doors. 

“You don't know the law,” Arie Hon says, gesturing to a row of bonsai beside him. They’re all trimmed uniformly, and look identical. “I tell all my children to come back as a demon, but you’re not quite there, and you can’t pretend.” His gaze settles on Hoaqin, piercing. “This high up the Tower, things can see right through you.”

The one memory he has that he has never doubted is the deal he made with the demon, and Arie Hon has just put it down like it was nothing.

This has to be some sort of test. They’re not Khuns. They’re not children. They don’t have to play games. Hoaqin’s starting to get irritated at all this, but he doesn’t know how to turn the conversation away. He’s not used to this much talking. 

“Because I’m not White anymore?” he retorts, incredulous. “You can’t imagine defeat. Is your control so weak that you had to take my siblings away?”

Arie Hon doesn’t even turn to look at him, just stops in front of the doors. “What happened with your siblings was because of a rule, one I’m not in control of.” 

Then he turns, fully this time, and his smile is all red. 

Hoaqin feels all the shinsu around him shift at once, tilting the whole world a few degrees to the left, messing up the scale in his vision. He tries to speak, and finds that his voice crawls back into his throat, insubstantial. It’s the same effect the demon had on him, so long ago. 

“You can try to kill me,” his father continues, “but you’re destined to die trying. You’re not strong enough. That’s just how things are. If you fight me, you’ll also be fighting against the natural order. Control. Fate itself.” 

He pushes the doors open into a room that is all mirrors. As he steps through the doorway, Hoaqin catches a white flicker of mist around him, something thin and howling. It’s his soul. This must be how Arie Hon has locked his private quarters, his mansion and treasury, so that only Aries can enter.

The air starts to hum. It smells like life and death at the same time. A moment later, he understands why. Inside the room stands the White Oar—the strongest weapon in the Tower. 

The sword is lying on an altar, a place for something holy. It is completely white, simply made, but the mirrors around it reflect all sorts of colours and sounds that come from nowhere, like some shattered portrait of the world. TAKE MY HAND, a voice cries at him, some wretched harvested soul, and another voice screams over it, BOW.

Arie Hon takes the White Oar from its stand and turns it over. Hoaqin feels sick looking at it, unimaginably hungry. The room thrums with lights and power that ripple backwards, down the glass walkways, tangling the tidy leaves of the bonsai. 

“What about my siblings?” he asks, finding his voice. “Are they in that sword?”

The corners of Arie Hon’s mouth tug up mildly, like a reassurance. “They’re alive. I haven’t decided what to do with them yet, though.” He sounds politely amused. “I could get them to fight the Oarfish,” he considers, “or kill you.”

The mere idea of it is hilarious. Hoaqin knows his siblings, and they’re weak. They wouldn’t even put up a fight against him, much less the Oarfish. Still, he doesn’t understand what his father really wants. He pushed his children to become demons, and he was not satisfied. He killed almost all of his family for power, and he was not satisfied. Hoaqin made it back to him, back up here, and still, he is not satisfied. 

He needs his siblings back to form White. If Arie Hon feeds them to something else, Hoaqin won’t be able to win. His first instinct is to start a fight, but he can’t do that here—not now. He has to admit to himself that if he tries, Arie Hon will kill him easily. Hoaqin grinds his teeth together. He’ll have to talk his way out of here, then, or at least try to. 

“You want to start a war with FUG, then,” he says tersely. “See how the second time works out.”

Arie Hon laughs, dismissive. “You’re in my territory. Jahad’s territory. This is not the same as the lower levels. Do you really think FUG will come running to your side?”

“What about this?” Hoaqin offers, trying at a ceasefire. “If I take your test and I pass, you let my siblings go.”

He knows before the words leave his lips that he’s made a mistake. He won't stand a chance in the test without forming White first. His father looks at him, condescending, as if realising the idea is absurd. 

“The Red October is the only sword that comes close to the White Oar’s power,” he says. “You need it if you want to beat me. I’d like to hear how you plan to get it.”

Hoaqin knows how strong the White Oar is. It is one of the first things an Arie learns about, and with so many more souls in it, it is even stronger now. The sword is motionless in his father’s hands, but light bleeds constantly from its blade like a wound all the same, and the energy from that alone is enough to hurt. 

But one of the secrets Vicente told him, way back when they were kids, is where the Red October is hidden.

“Passing my test will only grant you one wish,” Arie Hon says, as if he needed reminding. “I suggest you don’t waste it.”

“You want me to play the hero?" Hoaqin laughs, gripping his sword. “Me? I’m going to get my siblings back, and then I’m going to kill you, with or without the Red October.”

He’s never given much thought to the wish, the reward for surviving the 10 minutes. He finds that really, he doesn’t care. There's not much else he wants. The team only calls on him when they want the battlefield up in blood, because they think they can always count on him to be the villain. Hoaqin doesn’t mind it. At first, he killed because he thought it was what his father wanted, what his siblings wanted. Now, it’s just a part of him—the best part.

“You didn’t come here to tell me this.” His father looks down at the rest of his floor, unconcerned by the threat. “What do you want to know?”

Hoaqin stops. He hadn’t been expecting this outright. He feels a strange thrill of dread and anticipation, dark water pouring in through the cracks. Hearing his father say that makes him feel like it’s his first time being this high up, where the sky stretches so wide that it could pass as an ocean. He feels like a child, and then he feels like a fool. 

He asks: “Do you remember my name?” 

“Hoaqin,” Arie Hon says easily, but doesn’t look at him, just keeps his eyes on the empty city below, like he isn’t worth the acknowledgment. 

I think struggling to survive is really beautiful, Maria had told him.

Khun thinks it is pointless. The Tower is mostly just a series of games, something to be won. Struggling is only for those with no other way out.

Without the firefish, his team—save for White, who has disappeared somewhere again—is spread out across their rooms, taps running, nursing half-healed bruises and cuts, something they haven’t done in years. Still, Khun tells them it’s only temporary. He’ll play this out as it is. 

“Stop moving,” Bam says. He holds up a cotton ball threateningly. “I don’t want to mess this up.” 

Khun doesn’t bother protesting. This is just one of those things about Bam that never changes. He stays still and lets Bam clean the gash on his shoulder, then cover up the wound with bandages. 

“Shibisu’s going to scout the east coast for parts,” Khun says, then nods to Rak, who is still asleep. “So we should take the west again with the gator.”

Nobody is eager to search the north, where the steel eel resides.

They’ve drawn up maps of the 100th floor, which are now strewn across his bed. There are floating islands and built-up sandbanks dotting the air and the water, but otherwise the layout of this place is deceptively clear, like the first administrator had built the test around the floor and wanted its players to follow a path. 

What seems to be a treasury is up on one of the floating islands, though Arie Hon isn’t known for collecting items. It doesn’t remind Khun of the treasure room on his floor, mostly because it’s so closed off. He only has a few guesses as to what could be in there.

The west fringe is similar to the east, beaches and forests. In their first sweep of the area, near the far edge of the waterside there, they had found a small building in a clearing with roughly painted walls. They hadn't had time to go inside, but it had appeared so far removed from the rest of the floor that Khun doubts it would have held anything important to the floor test regardless. Still, he wonders what's in it.

“What about Hoaqin?” Bam asks, snipping off a length of gauze. “I’ve barely seen him since we arrived here.” 

Khun is a bit conflicted about White. Without his siblings, he is just Hoaqin, and still technically a regular. He’s part of their team, but he doesn’t seem to care about the floor test at all. So Khun marks him off as dangerous; a natural disaster, a force of nature. 

“He’s unpredictable on this floor,” Khun says. “This is his home, and we don’t know anything about it.”

“But he definitely knows this place better than we do.” Bam’s fingers are warm on his neck. “And he won’t try anything if you and I are with him.”

And here is Bam, after Rachel, after Prince and Arkraptor, still full of trust. Another thing that never changes. 

Khun is still reluctant, but White has never been anything much to him. At most, he is just a sword, and it won’t be a huge blow if Khun loses one of those. He has plenty more in his lighthouse anyway. 

“We’ll take him,” he decides. “But keep him in a sheath, in case. He’s more of a weapon than anything else.”

Bam’s fingers stutter across his skin, then draw away. “Oh,” is all he says, clipped, suddenly. “Okay.”

Khun doesn’t have time to wonder whether he’s said anything wrong. He looks back at Bam, who turns away a bit too quickly, and it feels like the moment before a hurricane hits. A force of nature. 

Hoaqin steps into the trees behind the beach with instructions to stay hidden. It’s the western beach, he recognises, the one with low ledges above the rocks, where the water forms thin pools underneath. He didn’t want to show up for this, doesn't fight for teams, but talking to Arie Hon has got him itching for a fight he can win. He can barely stay still. 

The world is a frozen sort of quiet, like someone has dialled down the volume in the air here. The sand is all ice. In the middle of it all stands Khun, and he is surrounded. There must be at least twenty other regulars here. They can’t all be part of one team, but they’re moving together regardless, a tight-knit pack.

“You have a bounty on your head, Khun Aguero Agnis,” one of them says, the one who must be the leader. He sounds familiar. “What if we split you up? I’ll take your eyes, and the rest of you can fight for what’s left.”

“But what exactly are you after—me, or the crossguard?” Khun’s eyes glitter. “I’ll only let you have one or the other.”

His fingers drum against one of his lighthouses, but the motion doesn’t seem quite so careless. It seems almost nervous. 

They must be fighting over the crossguard, further out in the sea—Hoaqin can see it in the waves, past the foam—but he doesn’t understand why Khun called him here. He doesn’t look like he has a plan. He looks like he’s losing .

“Either you don’t want to pick a fight,” Khun presses, “or you can’t. What are you waiting for?”

Hoaqin could jump out right now and slaughter these people in an instant. In all the years he’s been climbing with this team, he has never played a bigger part in Khun’s plans than fuelling a massacre—if Khun even has a plan. 

And then his pocket lights up. 

[1824]
not yet

It’s a message from Khun. Hoaqin looks up, thrown. Khun’s fingers are still tapping against his lighthouse, but when he looks a bit closer, he sees that the rhythm is irregular.

He hadn’t been nervous. He was typing. 

But the man is still moving. He has both feet on the ice now, and Khun isn’t doing anything about it, just watches, eyebrows drawn down. Hoaqin watches it happen like he’s anchored down underwater, just below the surface. 

“Go get it,” the man says, waving to the crossguard. “But leave your lighthouses with me. I might need backup.”

Half of the group of regulars jumps into action, and the other half stays behind with the lighthouses, alert. 

Everyone here must be A-rank at the least, and one of them is right next to Khun, close enough to kill. He’s saying something, but Hoaqin can’t make out what. He tries to see the man’s face.

The first regular steps into the water, and the man next to Khun looks right at him. He is smiling, like something has gone terribly right, and his eyes are gold.

It’s Viole.

Hoaqin’s pocket lights up with a second message.

[1828]
kill them 

Of course. Khun had a plan after all, and of course, Hoaqin is the weapon. The clean-up. 

He loves it. His body moves on its own, unmoors itself, breaks the surface of the water. He draws his sword, waits for shinsu to collect around it, then attacks the nearest regular. She is dead before Hoaqin finishes his first swing. It happens so naturally that he doesn’t have to think about it, but he feels the rush, the way white fire lights up his whole body, thins out the air around him. 

The faster he gets this done, the sooner he can use these people to get what he needs. Then, he reminds himself hungrily, he’ll be able to fight his father, and that fight will feel better than this. So much better. He’ll tear out the guts of a god instead of these regulars.

“Be careful,” Hoaqin hears Khun say, somewhere in the distance. “You might slip.” 

The sea freezes over. Ice runs over the people in the water, but it doesn’t stop there. It keeps climbing skywards, growing into spires that try to claw through the air and up to the moon.

Rak drops down from the trees behind him and decompresses with a roar. He swings Mad Shocker right at the crossguard, and it seems to connect, crashing through frost and water. He calls the spear back. It flies back to him in a streak of red and white. The crossguard is hooked on its tip, dripping water, beaming silver. 

A reel wraps around Hoaqin’s ankle and pulls him back into the shadows. He’s dragged back with a sudden lurch through the border of trees, cutting through branches and brambles to the other side of the beach. 

Hoaqin snarls, surprised by the sheer speed of it. He gets to his feet, trying to cut it away, but the line comes for his face, tangling in his clothes, his hair. The girl who wields it puts up a good fight, but within seconds, her weapon is in splintered bits and pieces, parts of it strewn across the sand.

The rest of the regulars have run after him, the Khun’s team too, standing back-to-back at the shoreline. Viole has destroyed the lighthouses that the group of regulars left behind. He doesn’t have his thryssas, but one of his thorns is ignited to compensate. Rak must have given the crossguard to Viole. There is a tattoo winding across the right side of his face, like a silver map of veins. 

Hoaqin whirls around, looking for someone else to kill, but it seems like the fight is over. He turns around, skin still buzzing, just to make sure—

He sees the house. 

He’s not sure why he’s unprepared for it. They’re at the western beach, between the trees, and the house is still here, right where it should be. It’s all faded now, the roof-tiles washed-out blue, white walls peeling back to grey, rose bushes in the loam with dead petals skewered over thorns. It reminds him of a time when he was stupidly hopeful, and all he had to worry about was whether the saplings David planted that first weekend would bloom. 

Now, looking at it, he feels sour. He realises how naive he was back then. What had he been thinking? There is no world, no fate, where empiricism doesn’t carve him into a weapon, where his birthright isn’t to become something that kills. He can’t imagine ever going back to being who he was the day they’d found this place. 

Khun is looking at him strangely. There’s something different in his expression this time, a new recognition, but he seems to rethink it in an instant, and it disappears. Hoaqin can’t figure out what it is. He turns away with a snarl—away from Khun, away from the house—and starts walking back the way they came.

The grey waves crash loudly against the shore. His siblings are still alive. He imagines them all coming back here, watching the sunset again: no Arie Hon, no food chains, no White. 

But he knows that’s impossible. 

On the way back to the hotel, they take a route closer to the maze and keep searching the ground and the glass. Now, after sunset, the glass is a dusty red, paths and panes still shifting in and out, the colour of dried blood. 

Nobody speaks. Khun stares at the back of Hoaqin's head and tries not to think about how shaken he had looked after the fight. Normally he wears brutality like a second skin, and seeing him without it throws Khun off badly. A part of him is quietly curious as to what caused it, but another has already decided what to do, and what part he wants Hoaqin to play. He needs the 100th floor to go his way.

There are so many things that could go wrong and parts that could break. He’s convinced himself that he at least has Hoaqin under control, but now even that looks like it might change.

Light pulses from within the maze, distracting him. Khun looks up at it. He hasn’t thought about the maze much, but he knows it is there to hide something. He wonders what it could be, if there’s a spell cast on it, if it could be broken. 

“Stop,” Hoaqin says. He turns back, and his eyes gleam. “Listen.”

Suddenly, the world around them goes cold. Khun feels something drop in his chest. He recognises this feeling. 

Bam’s eyes widen. He slides open his arms inventory, and the 13 Month weapons they’ve collected come alive, each singing notes in a piercing harmony. The air around them shakes with a strange gravity, as if trying to pull them somewhere. 

Khun looks into the maze, hears the note coming from the darkness there, and knows what must be inside.  

Chapter Text

A long time ago, Hoaqin had offered him a coin, palms up around it like open parentheses. 

“Heads means yes,” he’d explained then, “and tails means no. Flip it. Tell me if I should go see Arie Hon.

He says Arie Hon as if the name is jewelry, letters heavy in gold over his neck. Vicente knows all at once that Hoaqin must be one of those people who still believe in second chances, stars, what lies outside the 100th floor. One of those people who know nothing.

He doesn’t really know what to make of Hoaqin. They’re siblings, but then again, he is still just a kid, still a blank slate: a painting in progress, yet to be framed and nailed into place. Vicente looks at Hoaqin’s palms and notices that they are clean, unmarked, like they’ve never held a sword at all. 

Vicente has told Hoaqin stories of the outside world. Some he knows are true: that the gap between the 100th and 99th floor is unusually thin, that the Oarfish was traded over by the Lo Po Bia family. Others he skips out, letting society tell instead: that becoming as strong as Arie Hon is the Aries’ goal, that reaching him is possible. 

Because beating their father is something of a dream for all the children, at some point, before they learn it is impossible—a storybook dream, much like moons—and they learn fast. They try, train, climb the Tower, and end up dead before they reach the 100th floor again. He doesn’t think much of it. Hoaqin will learn too, soon enough. 

Vicente flips the coin anyway. It lands on heads, and afterwards, Hoaqin pockets it.

(For Vicente, the lesson came early. One time, when he was very young, he tried to reach the moon. 

There were stories he’d heard, of course—blue moons, harvest moons, moons of storm and stone that weren’t made of suspendium but floated anyway. He’d spent a long time reading about them, how far away they were from the waltz of war. 

If empiricism is real, Vicente thought then, the moon must be the happiest thing in the world. 

All the Red Witches here knew these tales, and insisted that moons were just shinsu illusions. The older kids scorned him for believing in them. His mother told him to focus on training and not on things out of reach. 

Vicente refused to listen to them. Unlike the other kids his age, who had long since stopped believing, he wanted to prove them wrong. Moons were real. Reaching Arie Hon was possible. 

The moon was full that night, so clear it could have passed as glass. It was closer than he expected, so he climbed all the way to the tops of the highest trees near the water and grazed the moon’s surface with his fingers. 

And the moon crumbled into air and dust. 

It was just a shinsu illusion, after all.

Something heavy settled down in his chest then, and it felt like shame, or anger, something that burned more than hurt. How foolish of him, to have chased something that never existed this whole time. No wonder his mother had scolded him. No wonder everyone else had looked at him like that.

But what were the other kids training for then, if they already knew the stories they’d been told were false, that beating their father wasn’t possible? 

Their lives were being built up on something they already knew was a lie, he realised, and they didn’t care. They were being fed and trimmed and shipped off to the Tower to die.

Vicente grit his teeth. He would not let himself become a product of empiricism like them.

But oh, he became one anyway.)

Midway through training and hardly a day later, Arie Hon himself comes to find him, a book in his hand and a sword at his hip. 

Everyone kneels before him. Vicente, because duty, because bloodlines, because empiricism, because he’s just like the rest of them, isn’t he, because of all the possible worlds this is the one he has to exist in—kneels too.

“Vicente,” Arie Hon says. “Stand up.”

His father passes the book to him, and he’s determined not to let his hands shake, not with everyone watching. The cover is softer than he expects, a silver pentagram stamped onto the leather. 

When he flips it open, a shinsu sword materializes, so suddenly that he almost drops it. He thinks it must be like the weapons the Workshop would make, if the Workshop really did exist. Carved on the handle is a name, in a jagged font that reminds him of teeth marks: Silver Moray. 

“Before the Red Witches left, they took one of the Oarfish’s horns with them,” his father tells him. “One of the weapons created with it is this.” He smiles, then leans down, so close Vicente almost shivers. “But remember the sword doesn’t make you. Prove yourself. If you don’t, you’re nothing.”

Vicente just nods, can’t find the words. Unlike the Khuns, the Aries aren’t particularly focused on anything: not Princesses, not wives, not items. Their family is more like something wild, one of those animal kingdoms where the runts end up as stepping stones for the strong. Smaller family branches don’t count for much here. Individual strength is all that matters, really. 

Vicente stares at the book in his hands. He wonders if this means he has finally moved up the food chain, or if he’s really still camouflaged prey at the bottom of the river.

But the next time Arie Hon speaks to him, it is a command: “Fight Hoaqin.”

He does. And even with the Silver Moray, against Hoaqin—who has never trained as much as the rest of them, who has those scarless palms unlike the rest of them, who hasn’t killed as many as the rest of them, who still wastes his time thinking of faraway moons and kings—he can’t win. He can’t fight back. 

He can feel his father’s eyes on Hoaqin the whole time; not him, not once. 

They end the fight in a draw. For a while, Vicente clutches his sword, feeling something burning up in him, corrosive, like acid. 

This can’t be fair. He doesn’t understand how Hoaqin has managed to escape empiricism, and why the rest of them are nailed in place by it. This sort of thing only happens in fairy tales, make-believe stories, and Hoaqin shouldn’t be—can’t be—the hero. 

They find a house between the trees. The whole time, though he tries not to, Vicente notices Hoaqin: how much he wants this place, how he stares at the roof and the sun and the water as if they are something to be jealous of, how reluctant he is to pick up his sword from the sand. The acid only gets stronger, choking him. 

He fights the urge to clench his fists, but at the end of the day, there are still crescent-shaped bruises littered over his palms. 

“Father told me to leave this place,” Hoaqin recounts later, back inside, after their siblings have left. “He said I should become a demon, and then I can beat him.” 

Vicente digs his nails hard into the soft wood of the table. Hoaqin sounds uncertain, almost like he’s confessing something, and Vicente hates it. He makes killing seem like something fantastical, yet he’s climbing up the food chain like it’s nothing. He doesn’t know what it’s like to really struggle to survive. 

“Beat him?” Vicente starts, without thinking. “Do you really think you can make it there? Why do you think father wants us all to kill, to be good with a sword? You’re no exception.”

Hoaqin’s eyes narrow. “I know I’m not. I’ve fought you—don’t you remember? I’ve trained just as much as you have.”

Of course I remember, Vicente thinks bitterly. How could I not? 

“That’s not true,” he grits out. “You spend more time here than training, and you know you won’t be able to get anywhere without working like the rest of us do.” He looks right at Hoaqin, really looks at him, then adds, voice level: “How will you reach father, or become a demon, if you can’t even beat me in a fight?”

Something snaps in Hoaqin’s expression then, and only then does Vicente stop, feeling awful and hypocritical and oddly satisfied. 

He only realises later what he’s done, and what he’s created.

After that, Hoaqin asks him to spar again, over and over. 

The way he fights now is so intense that Vicente can hardly keep up. His attacks are more frenzied than before, more deliberate, and remind Vicente of a beast before it strikes. He finds that, after a while, he can barely look Hoaqin in the eyes. 

The Silver Moray can cut right through shinsu. He can cleave past Anna’s spells and Albelda’s swords, but not past Hoaqin. Against him, despite everything he’s done, all Vicente can do is defend, never win. 

The next time Vicente sees Albelda, she’s sitting alone near the bay of the west coast, where grey sand meets stone, and the water barely licks up into shallow pools. Usually no one else is ever here when he visits. He’s not happy to see her, but he doesn’t want her gone, either. 

“He keeps asking me to fight.” Albelda cranes her neck to track some unknown point above them. “And I’ve started to lose.”

Vicente sits down beside her, staying silent. He lets his feet swing down near the rocks. The waves strain feebly upwards like they always do, trying to grab onto the bottoms of his shoes, but he knows they will never reach him. 

"Vicente, ” Albelda says, a forceful emphasis in there that startles him, “I know you didn’t see this coming either. It’s not him. He wants this so much that it’s self-destructive.”

“All he’s doing is getting stronger,” Vicente mutters, hoping she won’t notice how he evades her question. “It won’t kill him.”

“That’s not the point,” she interrupts. She pauses, facing straight ahead, but looks at him sideways with doubt in her eyes. “A few days passed and now I don’t even know him. I thought you were closer to him, so why aren’t you worried? Doesn’t it bother you how quickly he changed?”

A flash of panic jolts through him. Anna is too young, and David is too self-centred to care, but Albelda is strong, and she is reasonable, and she has realised. If she can make Hoaqin see sense, she might be able to change him back. Vicente weighs it out in his head, the new guilt against the old hatred, and knows which outcome he’d rather live with. 

“Hoaqin always wanted to climb the Tower, he was never ready,” he argues, clenching his teeth. “He’s finally getting closer now, and you want him to go back to the way he was?”

The mention of the Tower seems to pacify her. Her frown doesn’t fully disappear, but eventually, the suspicion in her face buckles and falls away. 

When it comes to things bigger than her, Albelda becomes predictable. All her ambitions and all her training are geared towards something no one else can understand. Most Aries want to climb to make it back up here and fight Arie Hon, but it seems like what Albelda really wants is just the climb itself—the means, not the goal. 

The old Hoaqin wouldn’t have been any help to her, or to any of them. He would’ve entered the Tower just to search idly for things that don’t exist, and do nothing but slow them down. Albelda has to know this.

“Don’t try to stop him,” Vicente says, taking her silence for an answer. “Let him do what he wants.”

He looks up at the crown of the sky near the tallest trees. He thinks Albelda must be watching the same place, not because she knows the shinsu moon will start to take shape there, but because she is imagining climbing the levels of the Tower above. 

In one of the drawers, there is a pile of coins. There’s a jacket of dust over the tops of them, and their gold shine has tarnished into something almost silver. Vicente can tell they haven’t been touched in a long time.

Everywhere else, there are bandages and blades and grips. Beneath that, he finds odd things stashed away. Books with drawings crammed in the margins. A music player, hidden in the corner, that refuses to wind past the first few seconds of a song far too gentle for this bloodline.

Vicente can’t believe this room belongs to Hoaqin, but some part of him knows he was the one who made him this way. 

“Don't bring that,” Hoaqin says, looking at the music player. 

Vicente can't quite decipher his expression. “Why?”

Hoaqin gives him a look, like it’s obvious. “I have everything I need.”

Later, he notices that Hoaqin has nothing with him but his sword.

“I’m scared,” Albelda admits. It’s unlike her. “But should I be?”

A fight broke out today. Almost twenty other kids, and Hoaqin killed all of them. It’s the first time he’s really gone all out. The result isn’t unusual for an Arie, but it is for him. Vicente doesn’t see much of it, only smells the blood and bleach of the aftermath. 

He knows Albelda doesn’t mind the killing or the ambition, but now Hoaqin has changed beyond reason. He has never claimed his role and his script so tightly. He wonders if feeling guilty about it will make a difference after so long, but doesn’t quite make up his mind before he speaks. 

“No,” Vicente assures her. “We all end up like this, sooner or later. It’s how this family works. He isn’t an exemption.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She looks up at him, an odd expression on her face. “He still thinks beating father is possible, and challenging him here again. I’m worried he might actually go for it.”

For a moment, Vicente remembers what he said to Hoaqin back in the house, so long ago. After he has pulled Hoaqin in with them, there is no way he can still be the hero. No way he still believes in fairytales. 

“He offered me something,” Albelda tells him in a hushed whisper, eyes unnaturally bright, and when Vicente looks closer he sees doubt and excitement shivering in them at the same time. “You were right. I didn’t stop him, and I think he’s gotten further than any of us could have. He says he has something to help him climb the Tower.”

“What can we do about it?” he asks. He can feel his nails digging into his skin again, marking out the old bruises. 

Albelda exhales, like she can’t believe what she’s about to say. When she does, Vicente can’t believe it either. “We go with him.”

When Hoaqin next gives him something, Vicente realises he has made him a predator. 

He’s seen Hoaqin at training. They all have. Recently, Vicente’s noticed a different aura around him when he fights. The blood around him seems more like a spill from an inkwell tipped over, as if Hoaqin is simply dipping his sword in to write with the red; a long-winded letter about the Tower and Arie Hon and food chains and death. 

This time, Hoaqin brings the proposal to him. 

“I figured it out,” he says, looking down at a coin in his hands, as if there’s some blood left on his skin Vicente can’t see. “There’s an old spell. We can tie our souls together, merge our powers into one being.”

“The five of us,” Vicente muses, and tries to imagine it. He knows they’re strong individually. They’d be even stronger together—maybe even strong enough to take on Arie Hon. “Will it work for sure?”

“Of course.” Hoaqin raises his head, smiles. “Something told me last night.” 

Vicente is so taken aback by the look in his eyes that he almost forgets this Hoaqin—bloodthirsty, philosophy-bound—is his fault. A new sort of monster. And even if he ends up regretting it, he can’t turn back what he’s said and done. There is only one way to climb from here, and that is up. 

“Something?” 

“It might have been a demon,” Hoaqin shrugs, grin dragging wider. “It was powerful. I can’t remember its face, but it looked like something I wanted to become.”

“We need to ask the others,” Vicente murmurs, “and figure out how to climb the Tower, if this cuts any laws.”

“Unimportant,” Hoaqin says, leaning forward, so that Vicente can almost see the points of his teeth. “Let’s work out our name first.”

He slides the coin forward. Vicente hesitates. 

The first thing he thinks of is empiricism. Going through with this would mean restarting: leaving the 100th floor, going to the very bottom of the Tower, where glass moons seem real and killing a king seems more than possible. Where they are all blank slates, not yet swords. No experience, no knowledge. Shapeless, nameless. Colourless. 

Vicente takes the coin and flips it. It clatters across the tabletop, shudders to a stop with a sound like parentheses sliding shut.

If this is the only way to share the story, to be part of the narrative too, then Vicente will take it.

“White,” he says, without waiting to see which side it lands on.

.

Vicente wonders why, all of a sudden, he feels so incomparably alive. 

He doesn’t remember the last time he was so acutely aware of his breathing, the steady pulse at his chest. When he opens his eyes, the world comes into focus so sharply it makes his head spin. Colors, sounds, a dull pressure on his skin he faintly recognizes. It feels a lot like shinsu.

It is shinsu. 

He jolts up, and everything comes snapping into place. The room they’re in is spacious, a window open in the high corner that lets in disproportionally large shapes of light. Four beds. His siblings are around him: Albelda, David, Anna. No Hoaqin.

“We’re out,” Anna tells him quietly. She looks just like she did on the Hell Train, and a wave of relief spills over him. “And we’re okay. No more White.”

“We’re okay,” he repeats, not quite processing. He feels like he’s been put through an endless carnival ride. His head is spinning with vertigo. “What happened?”

“You can thank your sister,” a voice says from behind him. “Hagipherione. You may know her. She made it up here the year you left for the Tower.”

Vicente freezes. This voice, he recognizes almost immediately. 

He reaches into his pocket for the Silver Moray, but it isn’t there. He still remembers this effect, one unique to Arie Hon—the insane pressure, the urge to run and yell and draw a sword and fight, despite knowing you were destined to lose. 

“Looking for your weapon before your last sibling?” his father asks. He’s standing at the doorway, like he was just about to leave. “I thought you were more practical than this.”

There are too many things going on for Vicente to properly respect him. He has always told stories of Arie Hon, his temperament and his power, a diplomat and a legend instead of a father. Now that he’s seeing him up close again, Vicente realises that everything he’d thought about him as a child is still true. 

If it were anyone else, the four of them would be dead already. Vicente used to care so much about honour, but he can’t bring himself to show it now. Arie Hon studies them with mild interest, like he wants to see what he can get away with, as long as it helps his own reputation.

“I don’t care where he is,” Vicente growls. “He tricked us. I care about what you’re keeping us here for.”

HIs father tilts his head. “I’m still deciding.”

“There’s only one choice.”

“Three,” Arie Hon corrects. His voice feels like violence, a ripple all over Vicente’s skin. “Let you go, kill you, or add you to my collection.”

After their father is gone, Albelda tackles him in a hug. The warmth of it is foreign now, something Vicente’s almost entirely forgotten. He doesn’t ever want to be part of White again, can’t even describe it as existing—it was seeing nothing, feeling nothing, a single blank feed of memories from the 100th floor to the Hell Train, and from the Hell Train to now, for all of them except Hoaqin.

A wave of relief spills over him, but it turns sour fast when it hits him fully that Hoaqin isn’t here. They’re locked in a room, under a king’s mercy, and Hoaqin has escaped again. Whether it’s luck or destiny—there’s a pattern to it, and Vicente can never understand it.

It’s always unfair, he thinks slowly, all the pent-up hatred catching up to him. Time hasn't changed things. The fact that they're out here right now hasn't changed things. Hoaqin tricked them, and he lied to them, over and over. Vicente can't be the only one who wants to get out of here right now. They can't be wasting time in a cell.

“Where is he?” he asks.

Albelda’s smile falls. She’d told them of the Tower, of bloody betrayals and entire squadrons fighting wars, and so maybe she saw this coming. Vicente doesn’t know why she’s more upset. All she ever wanted was the climb, and now it’s been ripped away from her. This is her chance to take it back, but she doesn’t look angry at all. She looks subdued, reasonable, like she always does. 

“We still have our abilities,” he starts. Anna has sent her rabbit familiar out through the window to scout. David can still split his soul from his body, a process Vicente has never understood. “But the problem is getting out of here.”

“I doubt we can break out,” David adds. “We tried before you woke up, but we don’t have anything that can get through these walls.”

Vicente pauses. He looks up at them. “We might.”

Albelda’s face clouds, then clears up just as quickly. “You’re not going to kill him.”

Vicente doesn’t look at her. Maybe she’s still holding onto something, for whatever reason, but he isn’t. He knows what he sounds like, and he doesn’t care.

"Do you think he can change, Albelda?" he asks. 

In a way, White was Albelda's creation too. She, only her, had a chance to stop it all before it happened, but she didn't. She'd chosen the Tower over the old Hoaqin, the dreamer. Vicente thinks she must recognise now what he has done, and what she has done too. He wonders if she regrets it. He still doesn't know if he does. 

"No," she admits finally. "We can't change him. I know that. We'll find him as he is."

“We're not killing Hoaqin,” David answers for him. “Vicente could never beat him, remember? We’re going to get out of here.”

His voice is light, but there’s anger in it all the same. Vicente ignores him. David’s the same as he used to be, too—he doesn’t play for teams, and doesn’t care if he gets on Vicente’s bad side right now. He only does what benefits him. 

Vicente can hardly believe how like their old selves they all seem, but he knows that time as White has changed them. He knows who these people used to be. He’ll keep knowing them until the end, even if they turn their backs on each other, like Hoaqin did to them. 

“I mean it,” Vicente says. He can feel his pulse at his neck now, just below his skin, and he thinks his heart might burst. “The Silver Moray has to be on this floor. If we want to get out of here, we need it back.”

And if the Silver Moray is here, Hoaqin must also be, he thinks, doesn’t say, with a surge of dark anticipation. The whole family, back where we belong.

Chapter Text

“There’s a 13 Month Series in the middle of the maze,” Khun says.

“That’s why I called you here,” Hoaqin agrees. His white eyes cut across the room. “The Red October. I need it to kill a king.”

Even hours later, huddled together in Shibisu’s room, Khun can still feel the charge coming from Bam’s armor inventory, like something radioactive. From what he can remember, none of the 13 Months they’ve collected so far have ever reacted so strongly.

Arie Hon is something they call a god on the lower floors, a king by his people, and a demon above. Hoaqin’s telling the truth, then. The Red October must be the only thing here that comes close to what he needs to kill him—whatever he might be.

Khun studies Hoaqin for a moment. He has never seen him this subdued before. It’s a little unnerving to think that this is Hoaqin himself, without White. The look on his face now is a few degrees off what Khun’s used to seeing on him, and it’s enough to throw him off—less reckless and more deliberate, like he means it, like nothing in the world can stop him. 

When Khun finally figures it out, he has the sudden urge to throw his head back and laugh. Killing a king, he thinks. He knows what it’s like to want something that badly. 

“You’re really taking Arie Hon’s test, then,” Khun says, getting an odd sense of deja vu. He rests his chin on his hand. “You think you can survive.” 

He feels Bam turn to look at him, just the tiniest bit, and carefully does not look back.

“With the right weapon,” Hoaqin replies, lips curling. “But I need a guide to get through to it. Shinsu is disabled inside the maze.”

“Guides aren’t allowed on this floor,” Endorsi frowns, swinging her legs from Shibisu’s bedside table. 

“Good work, genius,” Anak says flatly. She turns to glare at Hoaqin. “We know what he wants.”

Hwaryun is still on the 99th floor. 

They all seem to realise at the same time. Shibisu’s face darkens. “Is that possible?”

“It is,” Hoaqin says, like it’s common knowledge. “The Tower’s been broken before. Among all the floors, the space between the 99th and 100th floors is unusually thin. The shinsu around the Oarfish is too dense for teleportation, but the Lo Po Bia family had to move it somehow.”

Shibisu narrows his eyes. “So what, they took the stairs?”

“Exactly,” Hoaqin says. 

Khun considers him, a little surprised. Opposite him, he sees Endorsi do the same. The 10 Great Families tend to black out parts of their history, so he’s only ever heard parts of this story. It’s one of the oldest, from what he remembers, and well hidden. He wonders who Hoaqin heard it from.

The Tower has stairways, the story goes. They say each stretches for kilometers between floors, arching up and up until it looks almost endless. No one knows exactly why or how these stairways formed, but Khun has always had a suspicion that it was his father’s Mago spear, uncompressed for the first and last time, that had split the Tower from the top down.

The space dividing every floor from the 99th downwards had cracked and crumbled, and gone thin with strain. The stairways are dangerous, but those brave enough can still use them. 

“The Guardians decided to collapse the thresholds between the floors to move the Oarfish up,” Hoaqin says. “This was centuries ago. The break has healed over, but the scar of it is still somewhere here.”

“You want us to get Hwaryun on this floor so she can find the weapon for you,” Hatz says slowly, arms crossed. “Look, I’m not against it, but last I checked, we still have the regular floor test to worry about. Why would we do this for you?”

Khun tips his head back, watching Hoaqin for a reaction. He can’t shake the feeling that there’s something about this whole thing he’s not quite understanding. 

“You know, he makes a great point,” Shibisu frowns, starting to nod. “What happens if we get caught?”

Hoaqin meets his gaze. Something skewed flickers in his white eyes that Khun doesn’t like. He doesn’t think there’s any way Hoaqin didn’t see this coming, but he stays silent for a long moment before answering, almost as if he’s been caught off guard, or in a lie.

“If I live,” Hoaqin says finally, “I’ll give you the Red October.”

None of them trust Hoaqin. He lies and he fights, and it does it for the thrill of the victory, the easy kill. He's a monster on the run. But if Khun thinks about it a little longer, he starts to realise he's done the same things in his own home, all the way up the Tower, but more quietly. He imagines what he'd do to get back to his own floor and to have the win. He'd trade away a 13th Month, if that's what it takes. 

Khun lets himself smile. “Tomorrow night, then,” he decides. “We break Hwaryun in.”

Suddenly, Bam’s fingers dig into his injured shoulder. Khun can’t see his face from the corner of his eye, but if it wasn’t before, it’s clear now what he’s trying to get through: Look at me. 

Khun grits his teeth, breathes in, and ignores him. He doesn’t exactly have a good feeling about this, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be interesting. 

“Should be fun,” Endorsi says lightly. 

Khun surveys his inventory. He sees the White Heavenly Mirror hanging down from the right wall of his lighthouse, and Evan’s Frog Fisher is lying sideways on his table, where he’s been using it as a paperweight.

He grins. “That’s the spirit.”

When they get back to their own room, Khun rounds on Bam. “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” Bam counters, sounding far more upset than Khun was expecting. “You made a bet on Hoaqin’s life. This wasn’t how the 100th floor was supposed to go.”

Khun grimaces, but Bam holds his gaze, accusing. So that’s what this is about. They’ve been having this conversation more and more lately, but still, Khun never feels properly prepared. 

“It was never going to go as planned,” he settles on saying, “not after Arie Hagipherione’s wish. We’d basically already lost.” He leans back against the door. “What did you want me to do? We need all the 13 Months. We want him to win. He wants to win. It works out.”

“We don’t need anything,” Bam says over him. “You have to remember he’s not White anymore. He’s Hoaqin. He’s part of our team. You can’t just throw away his life for some wish we have.”

“It’s not just some wish,” Khun cuts in. “It’s yours.”

Bam freezes. The corners of his mouth go tight, but it isn’t a smile. It’s not anything. Khun looks in his eyes and finds nothing at all. 

“You’ve been doing this since we reached this floor,” Bam says. “You’re acting like Hoaqin’s a monster. Is that because he’s strong? Because he’s killed people, killed millions?” His voice falls quiet. “I have all that too, you know. I’ve done it all.”

Khun looks away.

He’s sure Bam can see it now. Khun Aguero Agnis, 111th floor: acting like a god until he met someone greater. Following. Wanting to rule the world, knowing that it was impossible. Hiding floatstone in his lighthouse. Starving for something better at the top of the Tower. For something more. 

And then Bam. 

“Do you think I’m making a mistake?” Khun asks him, voice even. There’s a bitter taste in the back of his throat.

Through the open window, Khun can see the Oarfish in the distance. He looks between Bam, standing in front of him with his head bowed, and that thing with its metal plating and glass bones, and is struck by how easily both of them could destroy this city: Bam, given a reason; the monster, given an opportunity.

He expects Bam to say yes. He wants Bam to say yes. He knows he’s wrong, has known it from the start, but Bam keeps letting him get away with it—doing something terrible, toeing the line, convincing Bam of his humanity. Convincing himself. 

But Bam just shakes his head, like he doesn’t know what to think. “That’s the problem,” he says helplessly. “That’s always the problem.”

And again. 

Centuries ago, to move the Oarfish up from the 99th to the 100th floor, the Lo Po Bia family broke open the Tower for the second time, and sealed over the wound with a bar. 

Khun would’ve thought no one on the 100th floor would be insane enough to come here in the middle of a floor test, but the place is packed. He slides onto the narrow barstool next to Hoaqin and pretends not to notice the regulars eyeing him, the silver mark on his face for the grip tape. 

A little more than an hour to midnight. The others are scattered across the ground floor and second storey, getting into position.

“This is unbelievable,” Khun says under his breath. “Never thought I’d see FUG’s Slayer waiting for a drink.”

“Slayer?” Hoaqin repeats absentmindedly. He’s flipping something between his fingers, but Khun can’t make out what it is. “Hardly.” 

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Khun says. “You want him to recognise you.”

Hoaqin gives him a laugh full of teeth. “Everything I’ve done was just to get back up here.” He drops his voice like he’s letting Khun in on a secret. “Becoming a Slayer, the Tower… that wasn’t really part of the plan.” 

“That’s how it goes,” Khun agrees. “You get one thing and suddenly you think you can have everything else, win everything else—whatever you want.”

Hoaqin slams his hand down on the bar, and the object rattles to a sharp stop under his palm. He looks up at Khun, white eyes predatory, and the message behind them is obvious: we are not the same. 

The Khun and Arie families work very differently. Khuns kill each other—mostly kids the same age, sometimes older—and Princesses matter the most. The first person Khun killed was a boy he was friends with. He had mean looking eyes and a bit of an overbite, and they used to go fishing together. His earrings were still warm when Khun took them. He’d locked himself in the bathroom afterwards and thrown up in the sink, and then hid the jewelry away. Their fishing rods, too.

Aries work their way back up to kill their father. They don’t kill their friends, their siblings, but Khun’s heard the stories. Hoaqin did anyway.

Funny how things work out. 

“I don’t care whether I live or die,” Hoaqin says, “as long as Arie Hon dies with me.” 

He looks almost vengeful, something starved in his eyes, like he's wanted this for the longest time. The expression is so strong that it almost makes Khun falter. He takes a moment to remind himself that it's Hoaqin, not him, fighting his father. This is Arie Hon's floor. It's not Khun Eduan's. 

So Hoaqin’s fighting for pride, or something even less than that. Him taking Arie Hon’s test was meant to be inconsequential, but now he’s placed too many stakes on it. He’s gotten Bam into it now too, but he pushes the thought away before the guilt starts biting at him. 

“I want you to win,” Khun begins. “If you fight him like this, you’ll lose, and I don’t have a plan.”

Hoaqin lifts his hand. The thing he was flipping was a coin. It’s so outdated that Khun can’t recognise which ranker is stamped on the back, the kind that Shibisu would try to sell in the lighthouse network for a fortune. He wonders how Hoaqin got his hands on it. 

“I do,” Hoaqin says, tossing the coin up. “I’m going to get my siblings back.”

Khun raises his eyebrows. He tries to imagine Hoaqin as White again, with all his siblings’ power: how strong he was on the 99th floor, the red slashes pronounced over his eyes that Khun had almost forgotten. The Slayer White, and all he’s done, wielding the Red October—but is that enough to kill a king? 

“You know how to get them out of the treasury?” Khun asks, waving the bartender over. “And you’re sure they’d agree to form White again?”

“They’d be kept in Arie Hon’s floating island,” Hoaqin scoffs. “He’s not that much of a fool to keep them in the treasury.”

“What kind of things are in there, then?”

Khun knows the answer before he even asks. He can’t believe he didn’t realise it sooner. Hagipherione’s wish turned Arie Hon into a collector.

“Items,” Hoaqin says. “The Yeon’s flame. Viole’s little blue and red creatures.” Hoaqin catches the coin with two fingers. A slow smile spreads across his face, but he holds Khun’s eyes, and he looks delighted. “You can’t get in, and I can’t help you.”

“A lock you can’t get past,” Khun muses. He orders a drink and drops a few points on the counter. “I find that hard to believe.”

Khun thinks for a moment. Arie Hon is renowned for his grudges and his pride—pride for his family, but for himself most of all. Hoaqin being too weak to break an Arie lock is laughable, so the problem is just him—some sort of anti-Khun measure. 

“It’s a soul lock.” Hoaqin shrugs. “You have to be an Arie.”

The bartender slides Khun’s drink in front of him. It’s a pretty thing, with a sprig of mint over the ice. 

“I’ve killed plenty.”

“You think a few Arie souls would be enough? You’ve got your own, and a hundred more Khuns on top of that,” Hoaqin says distastefully. “You’d need to control the souls with something. An item, if there is one.”

An item?

Khun steps off his seat, trying not to smile. It’s hard not to love when the pieces fall into place. “I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

“I did you a favour,” Khun’s voice comes through her Pocket. “Now I need it back.”

“The Soul Stirring Ladle,” Hwaryun guesses. She almost laughs at the way Khun pauses, though he should be used to this by now. She knows him—she’s been their guide for long enough, after all. 

“Do you know where it is?”

“I don’t,” she lies. “But I can get it to you, for a price.”

“Remember what happened last time,” Khun reminds her. He sounds like he’s smiling now, but there’s an edge to his voice she recognizes. He’s talking about the 77th floor. “You really want to do this again?”

Of course she remembers, but this is nothing like their deal back then. If only he could see what she does: a dagger, a sword in all red, a maze. A body. A thousand more. At the end of it all, she can’t tell whether it goes horribly wrong or horribly right. 

It’s only because she’s seen it before that she doesn’t shiver. After back and forth trades with Madoraco, she has managed to secure the Soul Stirring Ladle. It’s in her lighthouse right now, but guides were banished from the 100th floor for a reason. The politics and consequences are far worse. If she hands it over to Khun, if what she sees carries through, this will unfold nothing like a game. 

But everyone has their own parts to play, and fate is already in motion. She’s seen enough tragedies. What’s one more?

“Alright,” Hwaryun relents. “How much time do I have?”

“Until midnight,” Khun tells her, as she’d expected, and now he’s definitely smiling. “Not long now. Here’s the plan.”

Things always get so complicated around him. His plan is stupid and unnecessary and irrational, and if she didn’t know any better, she’d say it was impossible. She pretends she hates the very idea of breaking into the 100th floor, but to tell the truth, she’s not exactly dreading it. 

It’s about time she meets her old gods again, anyway.

Chapter Text

At midnight, Bam gives Anak the Green April. They find a lonelier corner of the bar and make the exchange, quick as alley cats, and just as silent. Khun doesn’t think either of them says a word, except Anak zeroes in on him afterwards, eyebrows drawn together. 

“Stay safe,” Bam tells them, but he’s so quiet that Khun doesn’t so much hear it as read it off the movement of his lips. 

Khun watches him twist his way through the crowd, down to the ground floor, and tries to will his anxiety down. They haven’t talked again since they left the hotel together, and Bam’s avoided him the entire time they’ve been in the bar. He knows this will go right, but he’s dreading what comes after. 

“What the hell did you say to him?” Anak hisses. She has the Green April swinging from her index finger by the hook like it’s a keyring, and it doesn’t cut her.

She looks furious. Khun pretends not to notice. Bam’s called him out for it before, creating tactics and moving people around like that’s all they are—people, not friends—but Khun doesn’t see a way around it, especially as Bam only gets stronger. It’s something unspoken, but they’ve all known it from the start, from the moment they decided to climb up with Bam: the Tower is a place for survival, not for redemption, and not for proving your worth. 

With Anak it’s a matter of pride, but Khun’s sure she knows it too, since she’s climbed all the way up here with them. She only complains when Bam gets like this, and historically, it has always been Khun’s fault.

“I told him to follow the plan,” Khun tells her easily. “You should too.”

Anak hands stills around her weapon. “He keeps this team together,” she tells him after a moment, voice hard. “If he turns back now, the rest of us will never make it up without him.”

She stares at him, and there’s something forceful in her eyes, too—resignation, maybe. An understanding that she’s not quite happy with. Suddenly, Khun can’t look at her anymore. 

“I know, Anak,” he says. “I know.”

Her mouth tightens, but she ignites the Green April anyway. 

Khun is thrown backwards by its power. He swears he can see the weapon’s spirit, something he’d thought Anak had been lying about all this time, a girl with pointed ears and green hair sliced off at the shoulders. There’s the smell of a forest after spring rain, and that same forest burning all in the same moment, curling up on itself. A quiet place. A sinister place. 

In two slashes of green, Anak cuts the lights. 

Khun has the grip tape’s mark on his face, and Bam has the crossguard. The regulars here would be stupid not to notice them, and now they take their chance—Khun feels hands grabbing at him, weapons unsheathing in the dark as he jumps the balcony and falls to the ground floor. 

Endorsi is at his side, right in position. Khun can see her shinsu quality zipping through the dark, and the people pulling at him fall away almost instantly, screaming. He keeps going, pushing blindly through the crowds.

Shibisu and Hatz’s observers come drifting above him from the second floor, and Khun silently blesses whoever designed them with night vision. Their screens display Hoaqin and Rak standing back-to-back, swinging their weapons maniacally and clearing out the middle of the room. Bam is standing further, the crossguard tattoo bright and winding, and Khun realises with a shiver that no one is even trying to take it from him. 

“Bam!” Khun yells, and Hoaqin and Rak back away.

Anak drops down and cleaves a wicked arc into the ground with the Green April. Bam follows, and Khun feels all the shinsu around them get drawn momentarily into a single point. Then it bursts, like the space itself around them is tearing apart, stitches pulling open, and in that second Khun can’t see anything at all—not darkness, not light. 

There’s a huge rush, a crunch like two ships colliding. The 100th floor breaks open. 

Khun runs forward. One of his lighthouses materialises under his feet, and then he’s falling through.

Immediately, his skin crawls with the horrible feeling that he’s being watched. The Tower knows he’s here. All around him, staircases knit back together in slow parts, the same way lovers might hold hands. Light spills in from the 99th floor far below, and it spotlights the faces of beasts curled up on the landings, sleeping monsters that take him entire minutes to fall past. 

His head starts spinning with the lack of air. At some point the temperature falls too, and the rift seems to dissolve into mist. Khun begins to think something will jump out at him when the fog spills him out into the 99th floor.

The sky is ink black, but he’s never been more glad to see it. Their floating ship is still parked, and Hwaryun is standing on her own lighthouse outside it, the wind pulling through her hair. It’s oddly quiet here. From this side, the break they’d made between the floors looks just like a gap in the clouds, spilling sound and air. 

“Hwaryun,” Khun nods, breathing hard. “Lovely to see you.”

“Khun,” she says, tipping her head politely. “What a good liar you are.”

“My favour?”

She holds out the Soul Stirring Ladle. Khun takes it from her. It looks like a regular white soup ladle, ceramic, with a simple red flower imprinted over the handle. He turns it over in his hands and is almost surprised to see that it’s real. 

“Thank you,” Khun says mildly. Then he pulls the White Heavenly Mirror out from his jacket and stabs her through the heart.

He leans down and tosses both the dagger and the Ladle safely back into his lighthouse. Above him, a scream echoes down suddenly from the cut in the sky, but it isn’t human. It sounds like something’s been woken up. There’s a heavy snap and the thud of impact, like something huge jumping—or climbing. 

Khun runs a hand down his face. It was going a little too smoothly. 

He dials a number on his Pocket, heart pounding. Within seconds, Shibisu picks up.

“-you hear that on your side? ” he starts, panicked. “What is that? ”

“Monsters,” Khun says grimly, “and they’re climbing. They’re trying to get through to the 100th floor. You need to seal the break.”

“WHAT?! ”

“Seal the break,” Khun repeats, firmer this time. “I gave you the Frog Fisher. Restore the place—the break, the lights.”

“If I close it, you can’t get back up. ”

Khun pulls up another lighthouse. He has more left on the floor above with Isu and the others. He breathes in slowly, trying to envision the layout of the bar. If he can just remember where they are—

The monster keeps climbing. It’s getting further and further away from him, which means closer to his team above.

“I’ll teleport,” he says. 

“Are you insane!? ”

“There’s no other way!” Khun insists, losing his patience. “Do it now, or we all die!”

A beat. But Shibisu doesn’t argue. “Restoration! ” he shouts, and Khun sees a sphere of energy expand over the break in the sky. He knows the Frog Fisher must be doing the same over the floor on the other side, swallowing up the debris and the shinsu, turning back the time lost. 

Khun enters the coordinates. He teleports, and in the same moment, the opening between the 99th and 100th floors closes. 

It’s been long enough since they’d last met that Vicente’s forgotten how young Anna really is. Her hair has barely grown past the nape of her neck. She’s quiet, too, and it makes her seem less than she really is, smaller to the world. Taking off the centuries they’d spent as White, she’s only a kid. 

Vicente looks at her, sitting on the edge of a chair with her feet hovering above the floor, and tries not to feel guilty. Ignoring her time as White doesn’t mean it never happened. 

For him, White was just that—a white room with no walls and no edges. There was the sound of dripping water somewhere, but no matter how far he walked, he could never find it. He tried to claw through the floor, tried for days, but it wouldn’t break. His fingers never even bled. 

He imagines Anna in that empty room, going insane.

“Are you mad at him?” Vicente asks, voice drawn, but it travels in the silence anyway. All three of his siblings look up. Anna meets his gaze blankly, and he clarifies, “Hoaqin.”

“No,” Anna says. “How could I be?”

Vicente’s taken aback, but then he remembers how she’d been on the Hell Train. There was no distinction in her actions. She’d followed him and Hoaqin around as equals. He realises sourly that she might never have understood what really happened with the demon, the deal, and how Hoaqin tricked them. 

It makes him furious. He looks for something to blame, someone, and it falls back to Hoaqin. Always Hoaqin. 

“Don’t,” David says from beside him, like a first warning, loud enough for Albelda to hear too, but not Anna. “You would’ve done the same if you were in Hoaqin’s position.”

Vicente narrows his eyes.

“If you’d found the demon first,” David goes on. “If you had the choice to be the one in control.” His eyes take on an odd gleam. “I know I would have.”

Vicente wonders if David was always like this, if he’s changed after so long. He’s still selfish, but he’s afraid. He thinks back to David—David, his brother, on the 100th floor—his ambition, the strange way he used to wield his sword, one or two conversations, his longing for the openness of the Tower. Nothing more. 

He grits his teeth. He doesn’t try to remember Anna or Albelda any further. He doesn’t know their motivations now, what's keeping them together. He doesn't want to realise that they’re practically strangers. 

“We didn’t have the same chances,” he says finally. “I thought you’d realise that.”

“We could,” David says. He turns to Anna. “How far has your rabbit gone?”

Yesterday, she sent out her rabbit familiar to scout the area. They’ve been waiting for hours, too anxious to sleep, and the mood has shifted entirely. Vicente can’t feel the novelty of being released anymore, not when they’re still kept prisoner inside Arie Hon’s island.

“Far enough, maybe,” Anna answers slowly. “I think it knows where your sword is.”

The relief hits him so suddenly that his first instinct is to laugh. 

 “You can do it, can’t you?” he asks David. “This is what you meant—this is our chance.”

A soul is a precious thing. Separating the soul from the body is innately wrong, so hardly any regulars understand how to do it. Many never try. You lose things in the process: feeling, sight. David is the only person Vicente knows who holds the ability. He can possess a regular. He can take the Silver Moray back, wherever it is. 

David dips his head in a mock bow, but he doesn’t smile. “As you wish, my king.”

Albelda laughs from the other side of the room, finally speaking. “King,” she repeats, like she’s testing out the feel of the word, oddly quiet.

The king, Vicente thinks. The top of the food chain. No one has ever called him king .

“Follow my pet,” Anna says to David. “It’s got a scent. It’ll take you to the Silver Moray.”

They might be strangers, but they’re bound by this situation. If they make it out, Vicente doesn’t think they’ll stay together, but the possibility doesn’t scare him as much as it should. He meets Albelda’s eyes, and she looks hopeful, like maybe she’s thinking the same thing.

He nods. They watch David’s soul split from his body. 

People fear mind control, but the soul is weaker than the mind. 

When it was David’s turn to fight, his opponents started counting their turns as an automatic loss. Once David took over, he could do anything he wanted with the body he was in control of until it collapsed. Surrendering was better than waking up on the other side of the city, and for David, it was easy. 

But that was hundreds of years ago. He’d forgotten the wrongness of it, the stilted way his soul peels off his body in third person, like the wing of a dove. There’s a second of violent panic he’s unprepared for, as if there’s something holding cling film over his nose and his mouth, forcing him to give up his own body. 

It passes, and then he’s left with no feeling. His hearing dims. His vision webs over in white, but he can make out his siblings, still sitting around the room.

He can’t see their faces, but their souls are clear on display. David has the sudden urge to take over one of them, make them fight each other until one of them breaks, just to see how they’d react.

It’s exhilarating. He’s missed the feeling of his own power, the freedom to do whatever he wants. Years of being locked up inside that thing was enough to make him forget that he was strong once, too—still is. The unfairness of it makes him want to spit.

He passes through the wall. The building they’re being kept in is up on a floating island that drops almost immediately down. Anna’s rabbit familiar jumps right off the edge and keeps loping ahead, and David follows. When he lands, it’s with the force of smoke hitting a windowpane. 

The city is blurred, but it’s still beautiful. It’s as clean as he remembers, part forest and part white buildings and part sea, with the Oarfish taking up the north coast and the red maze in the middle. Anna wasn’t lying—all the Arie people are gone, and there seems to be a mismatch of regulars on the street instead, with hair of all colors apart from white.

David wonders, just briefly, if that house is still there. He could go and look for it now. He might as well.

His whole life, David just wanted to do whatever he liked. Though for a child of the 10 Families, the Tower is the only path, a predestined one. For a child of Arie Hon, the way is narrower still. He trained and fought with the others, but tried to learn things that would make him extraordinary.

(There was one night in particular he remembers—a Wednesday. He and Vicente had run down the roads barefoot to the western beach, and there he’d torn his soul from his body for the first time. Vicente found him sitting there on the sand afterwards and said something about reaching the moon, but his voice was awfully faraway. Later, when the nausea passed, David looked far up, but there was no moon in the sky.

After that, David went back there almost every day. Vicente never did again.)

When Hoaqin proposed the idea of White, David took it without question. He doesn’t know what his siblings’ motivations were, but to him it seemed like a fast track to the 100th floor, a quicker way to freedom. Maybe White really was free, but when they split on the Hell Train and news of White’s conquest spread, it was all Hoaqin. David hadn’t really played a part. 

He’d learned an ability almost nobody in the Tower knew, and so one that almost nobody could defend against. Something like that, trapped in the body of White, with someone like Hoaqin at the helm—what a waste.

The rabbit bounds over a high stretch of rocks, avoiding the regulars below, and David stops. He’s itching to go east. He doesn’t owe Vicente a thing.

He reminds himself of it again, annoyed, but his Silver Moray is the best shot at getting them out. After the 100th floor, he never has to see any of his siblings, or White, again. He can do what he wants until he runs dry.

The rabbit stops in the back alley of a building pulsing with sound and slaps a pink paw onto the wall. David goes in. Immediately the world reduces to a blur. His vision has faded to almost nothing—this looks more like a soup than a crowd of people.

Ah, whatever. He takes hold of the first regular he sees.

The world goes upright with color so sharp and sudden that it hurts, and for a few seconds it blurs with the sound and the dizziness so badly he almost falls. David swears and reaches up blindly, pulling himself up with the wall. He focuses on the feel of it at his fingers, and eventually the shock fades into a softer realisation that he’s no longer something half-alive.

He opens his eyes. A man in a purple tracksuit is staring at him, expression half-amused. “At least keep it together for the first drink,” he’s saying. “We’ve lived through worse, I’m sure.”

David looks around, now in full control of this regular's body. There’s a longsword hanging from his hip, but it isn’t Vicente’s. They’re in some sort of bar, where everyone else seems to be fighting or knocked down. There’s a Khun—he can tell by the blue hair—and another guy with gold eyes. A girl with the symbol of Jahad pinned in her hair presses a cocktail into his hand. Hoaqin is on her right.

Hoaqin?

David is shocked. He’s smiling before he can help it. Then he starts to laugh.

He knows these people, and they’ve teamed up with his brother.

They were on board the Hell Train with Wangnan, the last regular he’d taken control of before getting sealed back into White. If they’re the ones who have Vicente’s Silver Moray, it’ll be the most fun he’s had in millennia.

“What’s wrong?” the Jahad girl asks him, bewildered. “I haven’t seen you laugh in three years.”

“I just haven’t had a drink in a while,” David says, catching his breath. He raises his glass. “Not to sound out of character or anything, but this is the best day of my life.”

Chapter Text

When Khun opens his eyes, Bam and Rak are already awake. The first thing Bam whispers, as if there’s someone pressed up to the other side of the door, listening: “Our room’s been searched.”

He gets up with a nauseating sense of dread. Someone has been in here. He remembers when Kiseia would come in looking for something and leave everything just a margin off from how it was before, lock the door from the outside later with the same knife she’d used to pick it open. There would never be anything wrong, but it was impossible not to notice. 

Unease spikes in Khun’s stomach. He pulls open their curtains and the morning light stings his eyes, but it lets him see how weary his teammates look. He shouldn’t have been the last one up. When did it happen? And why hadn’t he noticed anyone come in?

“See if anything’s missing.” He tugs his jacket down from the rack in the corner and starts turning out the pockets one by one. His mouth feels numb. “Have you gone through all your things?”

“We have,” Bam answers. “One of mine is gone.”

Khun stops. He can’t think of anything they had that an intruder would want. If something was stolen, they’re probably only alive now because the hotel is a safe zone. “What is it?”

“That book we found the grip tape in,” Bam answers, eyebrows furrowed. “You remember? The one I pocketed, our first night on this floor.”

Khun calls everyone into his room and finds out the same thing has happened to all of them. They’ve been searched in their sleep, but only one thing has gone missing.

They’re all crowded on the floor again. There’s an uneasy air to the conversation that isn’t usually there. Khun tries not to let his tension show. It’s the worst time to suspect each other, but some part of him is cataloguing who held each room key last night, who out of everyone here has the most to gain. 

Hwaryun starts passing around an assortment of jelly fruit cups that Endorsi managed to snag earlier from the hotel’s breakfast downstairs. Khun studies her, wondering if it could’ve been her who did it, but she looks right back up at him, unfazed and unflinching, as if to say, We’ve been through too much for that. 

Outside, the Oarfish roars, and the muted sound sweeps across the room. Khun is facing the window. He can see the eel’s head thrashing, like it’s fighting something, but he can’t make out what it is. It’s never acted like this before.

He shakes his head. That’s besides the point.

“Hoaqin isn’t here. Could’ve been him,” Anak says. She tears into the packaging reluctantly. 

She looks unimpressed. The lingering exhaustion from the past few days still shows on her face. Khun is a bit surprised she hasn’t given him an earful yet, especially after how close last night was, and what she’d told him right before that. 

It’s a needless statement, anyway. Khun doesn’t pay too much attention to what she’s saying. Since they’d arrived on this floor, they’ve barely seen Hoaqin at all. It’s not so much Hoaqin’s objectives that worry him—more so the fact that they’ve done so much to accommodate what he wants, but what they want means nothing to him. If Hoaqin revokes the deal, they lose. If Hoaqin isn’t there when they clear the floor test, they lose. 

“Was there nothing else to eat?” 

“Go down and get something else yourself!” Endorsi crosses her arms. “Besides, Hoaqin doesn’t get anything from that. He’s after the Red October, not some random spellbook.” She turns to Bam. “Did you look inside it?”

Bam hesitates, but then he nods. “It’s like you said,” he admits. “It’s just a spellbook. But I couldn’t understand anything inside it. The language… it wouldn’t translate, even with my Pocket.”

“Anything important?”

“Well, there must have been,” Hwaryun says flatly.

Endorsi looks like she’s about to say something, but Shibisu prods her with his foot. “We can’t waste time on this,” he says, exasperated. “Everywhere we go, someone’s got it out for us. This book is probably just one of those things.” He looks around the room warily. “But we’ve broken the law— Tower law. We’re better off focusing on the floor test. The faster we get out of here, the better.”

Everyone looks away from Hwaryun, as if just remembering she’s here is some sort of taboo. 

Khun grimaces, leaning back against the foot of his bed. While they’re sitting here, there are people plotting to take back the grip tape and cross guard from them. Even worse, there are people who don’t care about the floor test, but are willing to kill them over a grudge. 

There’s a loud crunch from behind him. Khun tilts his head back and sees that Rak has bitten down on the fruit cup whole, plastic and all. 

“What about the White Turtle?” he asks. “Isn’t he still part of the team? He’s not even here!”

He stomps across the bed, messing up Khun’s blankets, and swipes Khun’s food too. Khun is too tired to punch him.

“We do need the Red October,” Bam adds, though it’s half-hearted. “But I don’t think Hoaqin wants the same thing we do.”

Hatz goes still at the mention of the weapon, but he stays quiet.

“But what does he want? What do we even want?” Endorsi blows out a huge, exasperated breath. “It’s all gone to shit, anyway.”

She’s brought her legs up close to her chest, wrists balanced above her knees. She sounds bored, but Khun knows better. It has to matter. The higher up the Tower they get, the more it does—for a member of the 10 Families, and for a Princess of Jahad above all.

“We know what to do,” Hwaryun offers. She looks directly at him. “Don’t you? Khun?”

The corners of her mouth twitch, like she’s just done something unbelievably hilarious. Khun swears his eye starts to twitch. No one else knows about the Soul Stirring Ladle, or his conversation with Hoaqin last night. He’d wanted to keep it to himself until he actually figured out a plan—trust Hwaryun to make things hard for him.

Everyone is starting to look at him, so Khun relents. Look,” he begins, “I figured out how to get it all back—everything that was taken from us.”

Fighting this floor without the firefish and Bam’s thryssas has ended up in too many close calls. Up until now, without the ladle, getting them back was impossible. He sees Shibisu’s mouth tighten, but he doesn’t say anything. Khun can tell from all their faces what they’re all thinking: so what—we just have to trust you? But they all know how this goes, how it’s always been. No one argues.

“And the Red October.” Endorsi raises an eyebrow. “While you’re doing that, how do we make sure we get the weapon?”

There’s the unspoken question again: what happens if Hoaqin loses?

“If Hoaqin dies in the fight, there’s a better chance of Arie Hon taking it back before we can get to it,” Bam tacks on quietly, like he doesn’t want to consider it. “Even if he wins against Arie Hon, can we even trust him to give it to us?”

“You can’t,” Hatz speaks up for the first time.

Bam pauses. “Why?”

“There’s a spell on the Red October,” he explains. “It can’t be touched, or leave this floor, in the hands of anyone apart from an Arie.”

“How do you know that?” 

Hatz looks puzzled. “What? Every Arie knows that.”

Every Arie?

Khun makes eye contact with Shibisu across the room.

“So Hoaqin was lying to us!” Endorsi cuts into the silence, fuming. “We couldn’t take it from him even if we wanted to!” She waves her hands impatiently. “That means we can’t let him get to the Red October. But we don’t even know where he is.”

“Or we could get to it first,” Bam suggests. He looks down. “Spells usually don’t work on me. I could break it out.”

They’d be robbing Hoaqin of the chance to fight his father. Without the right weapon, he doesn't stand a chance. Khun pictures it now as a lose-lose situation. Either Hoaqin falls, or the team does, and Khun knows which he’d rather. Besides, he thinks, if Hoaqin is merely fighting for pride, if his wish won’t benefit anyone else, there’s no reason for them to help him. 

He’s shocked that Bam even brought it up, but there’s a determined set to his face that makes Khun think this time, he knows it too: there’s no way for all of them to make it out of here, no way for all of them to get what they want. 

That’s how the Tower goes.

“Hwaryun,” Bam says. “Will you take me through the maze with you?”

It has to be before Hoaqin suspects anything, but he’s not even here. This floor is his home—if no one knows where he is, none of them can find him. Hwaryun doesn’t look surprised, as though she’s been expecting it. She nods. Khun can’t read a thing from her expression. 

“I guess we’re splitting up, then,” Anak mutters. She starts to stand up, apparently done with this whole conversation, then points at Hwaryun. “Hide under the bed or something. If anyone sees you, we’re dead.”

When they start filing out, Endorsi falls behind. She whispers, “Give me the dagger.”

Her voice is so quiet that Khun almost thinks he imagines it, but then she walks by him, and they look at each other from the corners of their eyes.

Here’s something about Endorsi: people always assumed she never got along with the rest of her team. It’s not really difficult to see why. But people also know that you don’t just become a Princess of Jahad for no reason; she’s sharp-witted and critical and strong, and hides it poorly behind ugly pride. 

She’d noticed something off about Hatz. Khun wouldn’t have expected her not to. So when she sweeps in front of him, hands behind her back, he presses the White Heavenly Mirror silently into them. She folds her fingers cleanly around the hilt.

When they reach the next corner, while the team is arguing about who’s going to do what, Khun yanks Shibisu around it by his sleeve. Shibisu doesn’t flail around and make a fuss like Khun expects. He looks around furtively like he wants to tell Khun something important, not the other way around. 

“I need to give you something,” Khun says. 

“I need something from you,” Shibisu says at the same time. 

Shibisu shakes his head. “You first,” he apologises hurriedly. 

“I have lighthouses to spare.” Khun pulls one up in visible mode, letting it drift to a lazy hover near Shibisu’s arm. “Take this one with you. In case anything goes wrong, we’ll be able to teleport both ways.”

The blue light coming from its core lights up all the worried creases on Shibisu’s face. He nods, but Khun has never really seen him this anxious before. Khun wants to reassure him that they’ve faced worse than passing a floor test, breaking into Arie Hon’s treasury, stealing the Red October, figuring out what the hell is wrong with Hatz, and keeping an illegal Red Witch out of sight while betraying one of FUG’s Slayers, but then he realises it’s probably not the way to go. 

“Now you,” he says instead. 

Hesitating, Shibisu leans one shoulder against the wall. The lighthouse spins out of the way. “I have a plan,” he answers. “I don’t know if it’ll work at all, but it involves copies.” He looks at Khun intently. “Do you have what I need?”

“It’s in here,” Khun says easily. He reaches forward into the lighthouse still floating near him, pulls out the Manbarondenna, and drops it into Shibisu’s hands.

Shibisu swallows. He goes pale as he stares at it, like it’s something long dead brought back to life. It’s almost unfamiliar to Khun too, its weight and its balance, and he knows that Shibisu is remembering the way he used to draw knives out of the briefcase’s mouth, the throne game, the tests they cleared up to the 20th floor until he’d finally locked it away—history.

He knows Shibisu won’t hold this against him. There has never been any expectation of sharing secrets. What you need in the Tower is simply someone who will survive with you when no others will, someone who sees the things you see, who understands the necessity of the way you think. Shibisu has always been that for him.

Suddenly, Khun feels the risk of this floor more than ever. At this point, the Tower stops being a game, like it was before. This might be where they fail, and even Shibisu has no idea how close Khun is to where he has to be—to what he started this whole climb for. 

“I didn’t expect you to still have this,” Shibisu admits heavily. “Were you ever planning to use it again?”

Khun’s mouth twists. He thinks forward, much further into the future. “If I have to.”

There’s silence for a moment. Then Shibisu claps a hand on Khun’s shoulder. “We’ll make it there.”

He stows the Manbarondenna away. They walk back around to meet the rest of the team at the end of the hallway. There’s big windows set into the wall, offering them a close-up view of the north. Elevators ping occasionally, bringing regulars up and down the hotel. Some people stop to glare at them.

Hwaryun is still hiding out in Endorsi’s room. It seems like everyone else has already decided how to split off. 

“We’re going to do our parts as fast as possible,” Bam is saying. He looks like he’s already tired of explaining, but he sounds a little protective anyway. “Don’t break too much skin.”

He turns to Shibisu. Frowns. 

Shibisu’s observer is facing the window. He’s squinting up into it, face ashen, looking like he really doesn’t want to believe what he’s seeing. 

“What is it?” Endorsi snaps.

Shibisu swallows. “Found him.”

The Oarfish screams again. This time, when Khun looks closer, he realises why it’s been so agitated the whole morning. There’s an awful sinking in his stomach. He can see someone clinging onto the steel eel’s back. 

“What is he doing?” Hatz snarls. He moves towards the glass, reaching for his sword like he wants to cut it open and kill Hoaqin himself. “Idiot!”

It’s not someone, Khun realises—not just Hoaqin. There’s four people, each with white hair, fighting each other, and there’s someone else too, standing apart from them on the beach, watching the flux. 

David manages to snap back into character before he loses his composure entirely. He’d stolen the Silver Moray last night and relayed it back to Vicente. Seeing Vicente fighting on the Oarfish’s back now, David can’t believe it. He spent so much time getting the spellbook back to his brother, just for him to get himself killed?

He chances a glance at the Oarfish‘s pit and sees that his siblings are still up there, climbing its body. David grits his teeth. He doesn’t get this whole thing—Vicente would never drag their sisters into this. He’s calmer than that. While the Silver Moray can cut through some magic, David knows it would take more than that to get inside the Oarfish’s barrier. It almost seems like someone is forcing them to fight. 

“We’re a little late,” the Jahad girl says. Endorsi. David has learned everyone’s names now, and what this floor test is about “If no one else here has found anything yet, there might not be any sword parts in this place.”

She pushes open the door to the training range. David follows. A crowd of regulars is already here, searching, and the air smells of cleaning agents. Observers and lighthouses crowd the ceiling and walls.

“There is,” Shibisu answers, tilting his chin subtly. “At least one, right there.”

Something painful twists in David’s chest. It’s not nostalgia—he doesn’t associate this place with anything good. It’s more the sharpness of a series of memories that refuses to die away: his sword clashing over and over with Albelda’s; his soul ripping from his body; his brothers training with each other, watching each other change. 

The anger and the worry refuses to subside, but despite that, David starts to feel a little excited. If his siblings all die, he could live a life alone as this swordsman—Hatz—or anyone else of his choosing. He could climb the Tower in this body, or settle down in the Outer regions, as long as he makes it out of this old training range and out of this floor. 

There’s a strange, warped tension in the air, and the rest of this team seems to be on edge. They’re a big group—him, Shibisu, Endorsi, Rak, Anak—and infamous too, from what David has gauged, but no one even looks at them as they come in. People are too busy looking sideways at each other like they’d rather avoid a fight, focused instead on finishing the floor test. 

David weighs his options as they walk through, keeping his head down. If he helps this team pass without being discovered, he can get out of the 100th floor faster. He can rejoin Vicente, but he doesn’t know what Vicente is planning anymore. If he runs out of here by himself and hides, there’s a chance his siblings will hunt him down.

The choice is easy enough. 

Shibisu motions again in front of them, where a group of regulars are talking with a girl in a black hood. She’s fidgeting with something silver in her left hand that can only be the sword’s grip. David squints at her and sees the stamp of it up on her right cheekbone. It’s all on clear display.

“They’re trying to negotiate,” Anak says with a short laugh. There are shadows under her eyes. “I guess everyone is worn thin.”

David is surprised. Either the Tower’s regulars have fallen complacent, or the 100th floor is much more vicious than he’d thought. When he was growing up, he and his family would barely manage to solve a thing without resorting to swords. 

“So nobody wants to fight,” David says slowly. Everyone turns to him when he starts to speak, and David hesitates for a split second. He hasn’t quite grasped the dynamics of this group, or the character of the regular he’s in control of. Would Hatz try to talk it out, or would he fight?

Luckily, Endorsi jumps in. “We’ll have to do it,” she goes on for him, and smiles.

David blows out a breath. He grins back at her. 

Her smile falls. 

“Look behind her,” Rak grumbles, before David can figure out what went wrong. There’s rows of training dummies behind the girl holding the grip, each holding a sword. David hasn’t sparred against one of these in years. Some of them have been knocked down on their sides, missing synthetic limbs. “It’s a front, right? We search there.”

David watches as Shibisu and Endorsi make eye contact. They look tired, but then Shibisu nods a little, and something eases in their faces. 

“Hatz, Endorsi, and Rak, get the grip from that girl,” Shibisu says. “Anak and I will search the dummies behind them.” He looks around, eyes landing on David. David does not look away. “Good luck.”

Barely a moment passes before everyone moves. Endorsi almost knocks David away with how fast she lunges forward, catching the first regular in the crowd easily and slamming her knee into his jaw, sending him sprawling back into the far wall. David’s hand slides automatically to the hilt of Hatz’s sword. For a second, he is uncertain whether he’ll be able to keep up. 

He unsheathes the sword. Immediately he feels stupid for doubting himself. He slashes it down, and it feels liberating. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, nor does it matter that it’s not his blade. He’s an Arie. The sword becomes part of him. 

The teams in the range react quickly, all bringing out their own weapons and raising shields. The girl with the grip starts to run, but Endorsi goes after her. There’s blood roaring in David’s ears. The commotion must have drawn in regulars from outside, but most of them are standing on the sidelines, seeing no reason to join in. He keeps cutting through, almost unthinking, and he has just enough self-control to leave the regulars alive. 

Playing pretend as Hatz is exhausting. David feels a surge of longing. It’s almost over, he tells himself, and then he can get out of here. At the top of the Tower, he can have anything he wants. He’s sure all his siblings will be thinking the same way. 

He sees Endorsi tearing the grip away from the girl in the hood. It’s easy to spot Rak, towering up to the second floor, and she throws it his way. Rak catches it as if it’s a spear, and a silver mark appears between his red eyes in the shape of the sword’s grip. 

Endorsi starts walking back towards David. He slashes through one more regular and turns to her. Endorsi looks like she’s going to say something, but suddenly, Rak steps between them. He looms over David, lifting him off his feet by his sword hand, and grumbles, “He smells all wrong.”

Rak tosses him down, but takes Hatz’s sword away. Before David can get up, Endorsi kicks him hard below the sternum. David falls back, gasping, tears stinging at his eyes reflexively. He looks up through blurred vision and sees that she’s not smiling anymore.

“No,” David says under his breath. It can’t all come apart so fast, so soon. Freedom was so close, he’d almost had it—he can still have it— “Why?” How did you figure it out?

He could have had a body of his own. Air and space, instead of a grey cell. A better house, maybe, a whole beach to himself, flowers that don’t take seasons to bloom. He looks around wildly to see if there's any way he could escape, but Rak is so close next to him. David can sense the thrum of his red spear right behind his back, making the hairs on the back of his neck prick up with static. He knows, then and there, that he's lost it all.

Endorsi raises her eyebrows. She unhooks a white dagger looped through her belt. “We know Hatz better,” she answers.

She stabs Hatz through the heart with the White Heavenly Mirror, locking him inside. His reflection flashes mirror-like in its surface, and it sends a chill over her. His hair is completely white. When she tries to get another look, the image disappears as she angles the dagger back to the light.

The first thing Endorsi feels is furious. She’d felt like something was wrong ever since the night they’d broken Hwaryun in, but ignored it. The rest of the team must have noticed too—if not before, then definitely this morning—that it’s almost as if it’s not Hatz at all. She can’t even be relieved yet, because she still doesn’t know who it could be. 

They’ve been on the same team for years. Hatz’s technique was looser in the fight just then, borderline instinctive compared to the structured lines she knows he was trained in. There’s a faint white light swimming around his sword that she knows would never be there before. Worst of all, when she smiled at him, he had smiled back. 

This is Endorsi’s last straw. As much as she hates to admit it, the team is tired. For the first time, they really could lose. Khun is risking his neck to find Hoaqin. She’d be surprised if Hoaqin wasn’t dead yet, given his new stunt with the Oarfish. 

“Endorsi,” Shibisu calls her over. There’s cuts all over his face and a blade of a longsword in his hand. He holds it up proudly. “Found it in the pile of training dummies behind the Ha girl. I think she was waiting there for her team to come so no one else could take it.”

He pulls it apart, undoing the metal seam where the false edge and the true edge dovetail together. He gives one part to Anak and one to Endorsi, and they watch the silver tattoo come to life on each other’s face; matching blades. 

“...And Hatz?” Shibisu asks. His voice sounds like an echo, like he already knows the answer.

Endorsi holds up the dagger. His face falls. “It’s not him, Isu,” she answers, mouth twisting. Then, before she can dwell on it, she adds: “If we bring him back to the hotel, we can figure out what happened to him.”

Rak steps closer, a huge, familiar figure. “We found three sword parts,” he says, the grip tattoo shining on his face. “Cheer up, turtles. We’re close to escaping this place.”

Shibisu nods, looking like he needed that reminder badly. “Two to go.”

Endorsi slides the White Heavenly Mirror into an empty slot in her Arms Inventory. Rak has knocked down every last regular. Out of the rest gathered up to watch them, no one else is charging forward, but they don’t move out of the way for them, either. Endorsi’s lips curl. 

They shove their way through the crowd. The moment she changes her Inventory to invisible mode, someone in white presses close to her right side. It’s so fast that when Endorsi realises, the figure is gone, and her Inventory has already shimmered out of sight.

Chapter Text

“There’s talk that the 100th floor has broken open. There’s no footage, but the rumours are out already. Regulars claim to have seen it with their own eyes.”

It’s not the first time members of the 10 Families have tried to pass the 100th floor—nor is it for Princesses of Jahad, Slayers of FUG, and even Irregulars—but it’s the first time Arie Hon has had all of these on his floor all at once, in one team. Historically, these events incite revolts throughout the Tower. They cause needless change. 

“I’ll intervene where necessary,” Arie Hon replies. “Did you call to counsel me?”

“I called to remind you what happened the last time the Tower split open. Let me ask you: what do you think they brought in from the 99th floor? What do you think is about to happen?”

From this point onwards, the cities are owned by Family heads. Floors above become intrinsically tied to Jahad’s Empire. The 100th floor, its jump in difficulty, acts as both a ceiling and a baseline to muzzle the radical and the dangerous. If it fails, the weight of the world begins to shift. 

“I’m keeping the news from the King. You have time to fix this.”

“Let him hear it,” Arie Hon says, dismissive. “There’s really no problem here, but it’s good of you to check up on a family member.”

Silence. 

“I wouldn’t want to welcome another familiar face.”

“He won’t make it to your floor.”

“It’ll count against you if he does.”

Arie Hon looks down at his home. The red maze is the colour of dust in the dead of night, but his city is still beautiful. He asks: “Is that all?” 

“Yes.”

“Thank you for your time, Khun Maschenny,” he says cordially. He hangs up. 

He’s always a touch annoyed after talking to a Khun. Even the ruse Maschenny called him under was weak; he knows that King Jahad has never once feared for the 100th floor. The Khuns would never contact him about something like that. 

The laws here have been broken. She must be paranoid that she’ll have to face the repercussions, many floors above. Even so, the Khun boy on his floor doesn’t strike him as extraordinary. He needs to deal with his own children first.

Arie Hon remembers them, back when they were small. He almost regrets that he won’t be able to let them climb any further.

It’s so early in the morning that it still resembles the dead of night. When Hoaqin reaches the Oarfish, it’s curled up around itself, body leaving heavy dents in the sand, taller than all the buildings here. The barrier shielding it from the city opens up around him and lets him through, and suddenly he feels the eel’s crushing presence, even in its sleep.

He steps around the Oarfish. It only has one horn left, tapering off towards the sky, wicked and transparent. The other has snapped off at its base, bloodless, probably done by some ruined magician millennia ago.

“What are you doing here?” 

Hoaqin turns around. Vicente is there, staring narrow-eyed at him. Anna and Albelda are standing next to him, and David’s body is on the floor, unmoving.

He grits his teeth.

He hasn’t seen his siblings since the Hell Train, but things are different now. They’re all back in the place they grew up together, despite everything that has changed. Vicente’s stance is still the same, guarded low even without a sword in his hand. Hoaqin doesn’t know where they’ve been, or what they’ve been doing, but he meets Vicente’s eyes, aware of the things unsaid. 

There are enemies all over the Tower. No one has more of a reason to kill him than his siblings do. Hoaqin looks at them in the darkness, trying to read their faces. 

There’s something else wrong here. Hoaqin doesn’t believe in coincidences. 

He tells them, “Arie Hon told me he’d give you all back to me if I brought him the Oarfish’s horn.”

Vicente tips his head back. “He told us that if we brought him the Oarfish’s horn, he’d set us all free.”

They all know what’s happened. It doesn’t take a genius to see.

“Just step down,” Hoaqin says, trying to reason. Nerves are already firing in his body, telling him to fight. “He wants us to kill each other. You know he does. We have a better chance of winning against him together.”

Vicente laughs, hard and clipped, and it sets Hoaqin on edge. “That’s the first thing you think of? Your first line of defence?”

There’s a sound of something soft, like paper rustling, and all of a sudden the air bursts open with white light that knits itself into a sword, shaped to kill. Hoaqin knows what it is immediately. Goosebumps flare up his arms. He’s sparred with that sword countless times. He remembers the exact design of the Silver Moray even though it isn’t his, the exact way it feels when it draws blood.

He glares at it as the magic dies down. It sticks out like an anachronism, something lost in time. He doesn't know how Vicente still has it, or how he got it, but it doesn't deter him. It's a fresh reminder that against the Silver Moray, as a kid, he has never been able to win, and all this does is makes him mad. 

“You never did listen to me,” Hoaqin says warningly, fingers twitching. “I’m stronger than all of you, Vicente. We can't fight the same way as when we were kids. I’m trying to save your lives, damn it, just realise that!”

“Why?” Vicente asks, every word insistent. “Because you can’t form White without us?”

Hoaqin forces back his impatience. There’s no time. He won’t take back what he’s done, or what he’s about to do. There is nothing to explain, after all. Still, some part of him wants to ignore that—the clear fissure between them that’s only grown and grown, and now it feels like a chasm. He can’t be bothered to fill it up with words. No one ever taught him how.

“And you?” he asks, turning to Anna and Albelda. 

Hoaqin half expects Anna to join him. He remembers her washing her hands in the sea, even though the salt wouldn’t scrub off the yellow paint on her fingernails entirely. On the Hell Train, she followed him and fought for him. For a moment he feels guilty that they’ve made her join the fight. Then, the longer he thinks about it, the more irrational it is that Anna isn’t changing sides. She should be confident in him. Albelda, too—she must know that Vicente can’t win. 

“I’ll fight you,” Anna says. 

Her answer registers like an insult. 

“You’ll fight me?” Hoaqin says in disbelief. “The three of you will fight me?” They don’t look scared at all; that means they don’t get it. “Everyone you meet from here on is someone who used to worship me. FUG won’t take you. The friends you make will try to slit your throats. They’ll try to kill you because you’re not me.”

Albelda steps in front of Anna. “It’s not all about you,” she says evenly. “It’s not us against you. Get it in your head. There’s no reason for us to form White again.”

Hoaqin presses his knuckles to his forehead, disbelieving. Albelda doesn’t even have the right to talk to him like this. All she wanted was to climb the Tower. She never had anything, no change, no motivation, apart from what the family gave her. No wonder she’d jumped on the idea of White so quickly, and now she’s trying to tear it down.

He can’t understand how she thinks there’s no reason. She has to get his situation. He can’t lose now. He can’t afford to.

“I brought you this far up the Tower,” Hoaqin scoffs. “You got lucky it was me. You were all asleep in White’s body while I did all the fighting. We’d be dead if anyone else was in control.” He lets his hand fall impatiently, trying not to reach for a sword. “You can’t rely on each other. Do you not get it? I can win. I’ll beat Arie Hon. Just let me—trust me like you did before!”

He feels the change in the air immediately. Albelda’s mouth twists, but it’s not with anger. She looks like she just wants to laugh at him. 

“You thought we trusted you the whole time,” she echoes, as if she’s just making sure. 

Hoaqin bites down on the inside of his cheek until it stings. He reminds himself that it doesn't matter what she says. She’s basically a stranger. They’re all strangers now. Still, they had a home together once. Hoaqin feels like they must have once trusted each other with everything. He isn’t prepared for what it feels like to hear Albelda deny it all in one breath. 

“You were always so ignorant,” Vicente says bitterly. “It was unbelievable. You never even realised that we were people too. We all wanted things that we can’t even dream of having now because of you.”

“We all wanted the same thing,” Hoaqin hisses, turning to him. “Look around you. We made it back here, just like I said we would, didn’t I? This is the only thing you could’ve possibly wanted, and I gave it to you.”

Vicente's expression is full of scorn. “Is that really what you thought?” 

In the back of his mind, Hoaqin hopes he doesn’t have to argue with Vicente. He’d always give up before, because Vicente always knew more than him, and everyone knew Vicente was right. Even after all this time, Hoaqin is filled with some stupid, naive hope that they might still get along. He used to look up to him, he knows, even if he barely remembers why.

“What are you talking about?” Hoaqin growls.

In the background, the sun has started to rise, orange and bright. Hoaqin almost wishes it hasn’t, because now he can see Vicente’s eyes properly, grey with old hatred. He is caught off guard by the degree of it. He doesn’t remember Vicente ever looking like that. 

“Do you know what it was like, finding out moons were just illusions, that none of it was real, then watching you go around repeating those stories I told you to anyone who’d listen?”

Hoaqin listens to him, suddenly doubtful. There had been a change, he remembers, seemingly overnight, when Vicente sounded like he stopped believing in his own stories. He had sounded less faraway and more tired of reality. At the time, Hoaqin had chalked it up to training taking its toll. He wonders why he never questioned it, even when the stories stopped completely. 

Why had they stopped?

“We were children.”

“You were,” Vicente corrects him, voice tight. “You weren’t a real Arie. You didn’t even have a proper reason to fight, so I gave you one.”

The understanding wraps around Hoaqin’s stomach like iron. The memories play in his head in reverse: the Middle Tower, FUG’s crown, the deal with a demon, and before everything was the first day Vicente had come up to him and said, How will you reach father if you can’t even beat me in a fight?

In the end, they did want the same thing. But Hoaqin suddenly remembers that once, he looked up to Arie Hon just as a father, and not someone to kill. He hadn’t always been interested in climbing the Tower. Someone had fed him that idea, and he’d swallowed it down like a fool. 

Empiricism, in essence, is the reason why all members of a family tend to turn out the same. It is the theory that all knowledge is based on experience, but Hoaqin never was a blank slate. Neither was White. He sees it clearly now—there was Vicente’s name right there, signed along the canvas, stamped across it in plain sight. 

“You made me,” Hoaqin realises. His voice comes out an angry hiss through his teeth. “We’re here because I believed in the moon, and you hated me for it. All of this—everything—because of you.”

The Arie family has always been a food chain, and a food chain is just a series of events that spirals forever out and back in. The start of this one was Vicente. Hoaqin can barely admit it to himself. He has never wanted to kill him more. 

“This wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out.” Vicente slams the Silver Moray’s blade down into the sand at his feet. “But I guess it never mattered to you.”

Hoaqin holds out his hand. The shinsu in the air pulls into his palm in a cold rush, and a white sword materialises. He tests the weight of it and knows what it is without looking—a sabre with a wicked edge, flat and sharp enough to cleave through glass. 

“You wrote the start of this story,” Hoaqin says slowly, “and it’s my fault for how it turned out?”

“No.” Vicente looks away, and now Hoaqin can see all the ugly jealousy in his face. He sounds like he’s almost ashamed of his answer. “Just for playing the hero.”

At this point, Vicente’s words feel weightless. Hoaqin feels laughter bubbling up in his chest. He doesn’t regret the life he lived, but he blames Vicente for the life he lost. Vicente turned him into a killer, but he probably thinks Hoaqin has never looked back either, never once wondered what could have been if they’d all just left glass moons and killing kings to the fairytales and climbed the Tower together, made it back up here as five.

Besides, history won’t change. The people of the Middle Tower called him Lord when he slaughtered their ministers. The 10th Slayer of FUG before him bowed at his feet for mercy. That was him in control—White’s perfect form, the hero—and it couldn’t have been Vicente. It couldn’t have been anyone else.

“You’re hilarious,” Hoaqin says, feeling almost giddy. He raises his sword—a toast to his brothers and sisters. “I’m going to take you back. We’ll form White again, and then I’ll kill our father.”

Vicente steps towards him through the sand. “You’re not going to win against me. You’ve never been able to.”

“Would you rather flip a coin to decide?” Hoaqin asks mockingly. “Because I thought you didn’t believe in that, either.”

Vicente is at him in a flash, back facing the dawn, and their blades collide with a boom that hisses out in a tangible arc around them. The winds turn away from sound’s origin. The waves stop in their tracks midway to the shore. The impact hits the Oarfish, rousing it from its sleep, and it screams loudly enough to drown out the sound of their swords. 

(Outside, the Oarfish roars, and the muted sound sweeps across the room. Khun is facing the window. He can see the eel’s head thrashing, like it’s fighting something, but he can’t make out what it is. It’s never acted like this before.)

The person standing on the sand is Arie Hon. 

Khun gets to the Oarfish as fast as he can, but he knows far before that. The white air around him gathers and falls, taking up its own space in the early day, and Khun realises far too late how strong Arie children really are, to have to fight something like this in their fate. If he focuses on Arie Hon for too long, he starts seeing things wrong: shadows pooling eastward when the sun sets; the hit of fluid rocks against solid waves; the birth and death of a hundred moths at a flame.  

It’s all the same as what Shibisu saw through his observer. Hoaqin, Vicente, Albelda, and Anna are behind the barrier with the Oarfish. Khun doesn’t know what it’s about. He doesn’t know what any of them are after, but there’s this—Hoaqin is part of his team. His other four siblings are not. 

If Bam and Hwaryun can't get to the Red October before Hoaqin does, they will still need Hoaqin alive to survive the fight against Arie Hon, in the chance that he might keep his promise. Otherwise, there's no way they can leave this floor with the weapon. If Hoaqin dies here, against the rest of his siblings, it'll all be over—so Khun takes a stupid gamble.

“I need you to make sure Hoaqin wins,” he says. 

He doesn’t see Arie Hon turn around, but suddenly they’re facing each other. There’s something in Arie Hon’s white eyes leering at him, grinning ear to ear, and for a long moment Khun feels physical fear, telling him he has to bow down. 

Khun steels himself and doesn’t break eye contact. 

“Need?” Arie Hon repeats. His voice isn’t loud, but it echoes like everything around him has no choice but to hear it. “Do you know what he’s staked on this fight?”

“No,” Khun says, “but whatever it is, the most he can offer is his life. I can give you something worth more than that.”

At first, Arie Hon doesn’t say anything. He’s oddly soft-spoken. Willing to barter, even. Nothing like Khun’s own father. He can feel his pulse down every inch of his skin, aware that he could die at any moment, but he’s banking on the fact that Arie Hon is everything he is meant to be, that he won’t take a life for no reason—not even a rival Family’s. Not unless it brings him some sort of victory. 

Arie Hon points at Vicente. “That’s also my son,” he says. “Does he look like he wants to die?”

Khun follows his gaze. Vicente has been thrown off the Oarfish’s tail. There are no cuts on him, but Khun shivers when he sees his expression. His face is completely empty when he swings his sword, like the desire to win has driven him insane. 

“Convince me. Why do I kill four of my children for something worth little more than the life of the fifth?”

Hoaqin slams Vicente away with the flat of his blade. He starts climbing towards the head of the Oarfish, and his siblings follow. Khun watches them and gets the strange feeling they’re not trying to kill each other. They’re trying to climb, to reach something. They can't even see Arie Hon watching them. It feels like a shallow caricature of the Tower.

Khun tears his eyes away. “You made them fight each other,” he realises, mind racing. “So you kill them no matter what. You might as well make the deal.”

Arie Hon considers him properly, like he’s just seeing Khun for the first time. 

“And what will you do, son of Khun? Bring me the moon?”

The question catches Khun off guard. It’s harmless, but it’s almost as if he knows the weight it holds, like he knows it’s something personal. He thinks of Bam and feels that it should’ve been a secret between them, as if there aren’t shinsu stars and shinsu moons on almost every floor they’ve climbed past.

He takes it back. This man is everything like Khun Eduan. 

“I can bring you something better than the moon,” Khun promises. “How badly do you want the Red October?”

Arie Hon makes a sound halfway between pitying and amused, like he’d been waiting for Khun to bring it up. His face stays calm, but the thing in his white eyes comes back, ferocious, grinning at Khun through sharp teeth and mouthing LIES, LIES, LIES. The contrast is jarring. Khun does not look away.

“Your team was never meant to pass this floor,” he tells him. “No matter what you offer up to me. They call this the glass ceiling of the Tower. You can try to break through, use everything you have, but this is your limit, and this is the proof.”

There’s another muted roar from behind the barrier that rakes down Khun’s spine. Next to the Oarfish, someone hits the ground. It’s Hoaqin. Khun can just make out his lips moving, yelling something, but the sound is blocked. There’s a crazed, terrible look on his face. 

Arie Hon won’t trade with him. Khun knows he’s lost here. But for some reason, as he follows Hoaqin fight silently behind the barrier, he knows the real fight is so much more than him. It’s between an entire family. He watches the struggle unfolding between four siblings and a father and a fate he knows nothing about, and can’t help thinking that he’s read Hoaqin all wrong, all this time. 

This floor, so much like the 20th, is where teams that have been together for years start to fall apart. Khun has been trying to ignore the distance he’d put between himself and his teammates, but now he sees the consequences of what he’s done wrong. 

The 100th floor belongs to Arie Hon. This has never been Khun’s stage. To him, this is nothing more than another step to the top of the Tower. To Hoaqin, this is the top. 

Arie Hon is famed for his strength, but before that he's always been known for his diplomacy. The 100th floor is special in that Arie Hon offers his own test, but he's never been known to intervene in the workings of the floor test itself. Khun gets the unsettling feeling that if he's doing this right now, interfering with his own children and the test takers, then something must be unsteady in the rest of the Tower, and he must think that Hoaqin has the power to unbalance it completely. 

“It’s glass,” Khun says recklessly, “so people like you can look upwards. You’ve been at the bottom of it your whole life, but everything is about to change. I know you can feel it.”

Arie Hon looks at him curiously. 

“I can,” he agrees. His face smooths back into a thin-lipped smile. “That’s why your climb ends here.”

It’s not a threat. It’s not an invitation to fight. Arie Hon is simply letting him go.

Khun stares back at him, all the white in the world, but the first thing he thinks of is blue hair, a piano, teeth marks on his hand, a place 11 floors above. 

“I have somewhere to go, and someone to meet,” he says. “I couldn’t lose here if I tried.”

The Oarfish loses its last horn. For the first time in centuries, an animal’s bones are harvested for what can only be raw entertainment. The strongest beast in the Tower is reduced to a hunter’s game. Years later, the stories say the horn was as long as a human’s entire body; others say it was used in the reconstruction of the 100th floor. Nobody knows the truth. Since that day, it has never been found. 

It’s Vicente who takes it. He jumps down from the head of the Oarfish, entire skyscrapers above, with the glass horn he cut off in one arm. It’s so transparent that Hoaqin can barely see the outline of it next to his body. Anna chants a spell and magic seeps out of the air to slow his fall a second before the Oarfish’s tail slams down.

“I won,” Vicente says. His eyes are wide and astonished. He seems stunned. 

Hoaqin wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, but there’s no blood even though he feels like there should be. He knows they should be able to hurt each other. His siblings haven’t been taking this seriously. Irritation pricks at him, and the next time the Oarfish attacks, he swings his sword at its skin without thinking.

“Why didn’t you just kill me?” he yells at them. He feels like he’s going mad. “There’s three of you, and you couldn’t even make me bleed!?”

The Oarfish lunges blindly at them, mouth wide open, revealing spirals and spirals of teeth, reaching all the way back into its throat. Hoaqin leaps out of the way, jumping on top of its writhing body. 

“Same reason you didn’t kill us!” Albelda screams furiously back at him. Grey sand spills over her feet in massive waves from where the eel’s fins hit the floor. “Because we were family!”

Hoaqin falters. 

The eel’s jaws open back up. It snaps at Hoaqin, and he barely stops its teeth from spearing him. 

Was he not fighting seriously, either? He could see them all dead. He could see, in his mind, the way to kill them, the right way to swing. He’s already given them up for dead, but it was like someone else was puppeteering him the whole time. He looks at all his siblings now and sees that they, too, are unscathed. 

Hoaqin doesn’t get it. It should’ve been easy. He doesn’t even know these people anymore, and there’s nothing to look back on. All they did was push him onto a road, and the road spit them all out here, and if all they have in common is a house that should be in ruins, he doesn’t get why they haven’t turned on each other completely. 

The anger keeps building up with nowhere to go. The Oarfish darts through them, and Hoaqin is forced forward, closing the distance between them. 

“I really had faith in you,” Albelda tells him, catching him by the arm. Her voice is full of hurt. “But now I understand. I know what he’s done. Just let him go. You can do good again.”

“Do good? ” Hoaqin sneers, moving away. He tells himself she’s not making sense. He doesn’t want to listen to sense. “I remember you, Albelda. You never wanted things to change. Don’t act like you can save this now.”

“I won,” Vicente says again, cutting them off, eerily calm. He walks towards Hoaqin, raising the Silver Moray. “Why are you acting like you haven’t realised yet?”

There was a time Hoaqin would’ve given anything to see Vicente win. He felt his siblings’ victories as if they were his own. Right now, Vicente looks like he wants nothing but to see Hoaqin dead, and suddenly Hoaqin grasps just how little he truly understood him, his dreams and his tics and the things he wanted to climb for. He has always just been in his own head. 

It finally gets through to him that this is not the Vicente who used to tell him stories. This is not the Vicente who hung up bookshelves and dartboards and pointed out the fake moon at night to him. 

Things will never go back to the way he thought they were. 

Hoaqin gives up on them. He isn’t aware of how hopeful he’d been this whole time, a tiny sand sculpture of it, until it starts crumbling in his chest. He lunges forward, swiping Vicente’s book of spells from his belt, and tosses it into the Oarfish’s mouth. It surges forward, biting clean through the leather cover. The magic codes break. The Silver Moray shatters, and disappears. 

Hoaqin doesn’t wait. He slashes down Vicente’s arm, and he lets go of the Oarfish’s horn. Hoaqin takes it and runs. The barrier opens for him, and he keeps going until he’s face to face with Arie Hon. 

Behind him, Vicente screams something, the sound worse than the Oarfish, worse than anyone else Hoaqin has ever killed.

The barrier closes. The sound shuts off. For a moment, Hoaqin can pretend it’s just him and Arie Hon and a city at sunrise. No one else is fighting at all. 

Hoaqin throws the horn at his father’s feet. He expects it to break, but it doesn’t, and it infuriates him. He can’t think properly through the blood pounding in his head, but when he speaks, it’s surprisingly clear. 

“Give them to me,” he says.

His father doesn’t speak, just waves his hand. True to his word, Hoaqin’s siblings appear on their side of the barrier, eyes glassy. 

He looks at them. He turns to his father and asks what he should’ve tried to figure out first. “Why did you make us fight?”

“I wanted to see who was the strongest,” his father answers. 

It’s praise in itself. Hoaqin barely even registers it. He realises he doesn’t even care about the answer. 

He doesn’t need the book. He’s had the spell memorised since the first time he met the demon and made the deal. It’s not written in a spoken dialect, so his pocket doesn’t translate the words into the common tongue. When he says the words aloud, the shinsu around him tries to rip the sounds apart. Momentarily, the air turns to ash, clinging to his lips. Tree roots tear out of the ground and snag around his ankles, like the Tower itself is rejecting the magic. 

He can’t hear himself anymore, but he doesn’t stop chanting the spell. A shade blocks out the entire sky. The only light that remains is Arie Hon, two demons warring for control, and then even he is snuffed out like he’s nothing. 

“You’re incomplete, Slayer,” Arie Hon says, tilting his head. His tone is almost patronising. 

Hoaqin has taken in Albelda, Anna, and Vicente. David’s body is still lying there, but still he feels strong. Unreasonably so. He takes a moment to get used to his new form. He can barely even feel the difference between himself and his father anymore, and it feels so disappointingly easy. He thinks he might not even need the Red October, like he can win off the high of power alone. 

He’s imagined how this moment would feel, over and over, but it’s nothing like what he’d thought. His father is in front of him, but he looks out onto the empty city, and the expectation of the fight gives way to the understanding that he has no one to relish in the victory with. If he wins here, there is no one left on this floor to know. If he loses, no one will look for him.

It doesn't matter. He's done it all for himself, anyway. He climbed all this way with no reason but to kill Arie Hon—the king of this floor, of the Tower as he knows it. Everything he's ever wanted is here, and it's nothing, but he's ready. He's already gone through all this trouble. There’s nothing else he can do but take it, crush it by its throat. 

“We fight now,” White says. “I’ll cut you to pieces.”

[ANNA]
she’s still holding the ear of her bunny in one hand. the floor is wet. she opens her eyes last, but it’s the same as she remembers—just a dark room, no windows, just enough light to see the shapes of her feet on the floor, and the water never drains.

nothing’s changed. she feels so tired. she doesn’t want to do this again.

for the longest time, anna pretended she didn’t understand how hoaqin changed. she never wanted to choose a side. there was never any point to the fighting. maybe it’s nothing to the rest of them, since they’ve lived longer. but for her, her siblings are everything. there is no other life for her to turn back to, no other history.

the demon looks down at her, this little girl lying in black water and filth. 

you are so young, it says. there is no violence in you at all.

isn’t there? anna replies. the sound of her voice barely travels. she can hardly hear herself. i think there should be. this is all i’ve ever known.

[ALBELDA]
right to the bitter end, the demon whispers in her head.

you couldn’t change your evil nature, albelda finishes. 

she’d said that to hoaqin when she realised he was beyond changing again for the better, beyond saving, when he had no humanity left in him. she thinks back on it now, much later, how obvious it is that hoaqin is just a projection of vicente, and how vicente is a skewed imitation of hoaqin before it all. 

back when they were still kids on the 100th floor, she hadn’t known. it took this long for her to realise. it was there all along, but she hadn’t tried to change vicente, either. staying silent was her mistake. maybe all of it was her mistake.

albelda has always been the only one who could have stopped them, but she chose not to. she chose the tower instead, so entertained by the idea of being part of something greater.

she’d convinced herself that what happened was fate, as if something preordained could be so cruel. she’d started fighting against it only after she knew it wouldn’t make a difference. 

she puts her head down on her knees and laughs and laughs until she’s furious. she stays angry until she’s tired of it. then she curls up on her side. maybe if she falls asleep, she’ll only wake up again when hoaqin reaches the top of the tower. then maybe her wish will come true.

[VICENTE]
he’s here again. it’s a white room. there’s the sound of water dripping somewhere, very faintly. it’s endless here. there are no walls and no ceilings in sight. 

vicente walks forward. then he starts to run. he can’t hear his footsteps. he can only hear the water. the whole while, he’s thinking it should’ve been him. he finally had it. it should’ve been him, and maybe it’s different to last time. maybe he can get out of here. he lost. maybe he hasn’t lost for good.

it should have been you, the demon echoes suddenly back to him, taunting. it should have been you.

something grabs the side of his face, and vicente sees a coin, a scar, a friend—a book, a moon, a sword. a monster. a house between the trees. the images crash through each other and before he knows it he’s on his hands and knees, retching onto the dry floor. 

you did all this work to make him who he is, the demon says, and you still say it should have been you?

i never understood, vicente rasps, chest heaving. i read the spellbook long before he did. it didn’t have to be him. you chose him. why did you choose him?

i serve who better serves me.

vicente pounds his fist on the floor as hard as he can. it makes no sound. he looks around him desperately, and the demon is nowhere in sight. it’s just a white room. just a white room and the sound of water dripping, and a voice in his head. 

he lost.

what does he have that I don’t? vicente asks, choking on bile and hate and jealousy. what did he give you? what can he give you now that i can’t?!

entertainment, the demon’s voice says, with cruel finality, like a last bow. 

vicente should have known. this is the tower. this is destiny. there is no pattern to it, no sense. it doesn't favour the strong, like he always thought it did. it doesn't favour anyone. 

Chapter Text

The 100th floor’s treasury is where all regulars’ items, stolen away from them by Hagipherione’s wish, are kept. Khun drags an Arie soul up from inside him and Bam with the Soul Stirring Ladle, and the treasury lets them in. 

The room angles out, much larger than it appears from the outside, and must be much too heavy to stand as it does on a floating island without the help of magic. All the space is crammed with shinheuh and souls, some floating gently, others spilling over each other in close mimicry of the pits of a landfill, but without the smell of decay.

There is no light except for the souls that provide it. Khun’s firefish is easy to find, a tiny flame that glows stubbornly bright. Bam’s thryssas are here too, red and blue eyes immediately distinguishable from a mess of souls and sharp edges that form the shape of their bodies.

Khun holds his hand up. The Yeon flame sinks, burning, into his skin. He feels the half-healed gash on his shoulder close at once, stupidly easy, and hates how much he’d been counting on it. 

“What did you find?” Bam asks.

Khun hasn’t even told him yet. He’d gone to the Oarfish and back as fast as he could, and Bam had flown them up to the treasury with black wings, no questions, fingers light at Khun’s wrist.

Before the 77th floor, Bam wouldn’t have burned the souls for that flight. He would have come into this room of once-owned spirits and left intent on setting them free. Now, he just looks resigned. Khun watches him pick his way across the room to the Blue Thryssa, something tight in his chest.

“Hoaqin and his siblings were competing for something,” he describes. “They might still be there. I don’t know why, but Arie Hon pit them against each other, and I have a bad feeling he wants to take the test now.”

For some reason, since he saw Hoaqin there, the time passing has been weighing down on his shoulders, pressing, even though nothing is technically going wrong. 

Bam frowns. “He’s still Hoaqin, isn’t he, not White? He’ll die. He won’t take the test if he knows he’ll lose.”

“He doesn’t know,” Khun says, stepping over a fishtank. “He’ll do it anyway. Hoaqin has never seen reason, Bam. He’s never followed a plan.”

He turns back towards the door. Bam doesn’t move.

“You sound like you want to help him,” Bam says. His voice is strange, and a little helpless. “Why are you changing your mind now, even though I tried to convince you before, so many times?”

Khun has skipped all the details, but Bam seems to sense his doubt. He doesn’t know where this is going. He isn’t sure what he wants himself, or what Bam wants him to say.

“No,” he decides. “There’s no time.”

Slowly, Bam walks up to the Red Thryssa. It bows low to him, curved teeth almost scraping his leg. Khun watches him with a baseless urge to pull him out of the way, just in case he gets hurt, though that hasn’t happened in years. Bam takes it back too, and power cascades momentarily around him. Two horns flicker over his head, red and blue.

When the light dies out, Bam asks: “What if it was me?”

Something in Khun splinters, and then it breaks. 

Bam tilts his head away. He tries wordlessly to meet Bam’s eyes, too stunned to do anything else, but Bam won’t let him. 

“Sometimes you look at me the same way you look at him, and you tell me I’m strong,” he keeps going. “But the way you act around us is so different, the things you tell us to do. Why is it different? Why do you say things and not realise—”

He cuts off, sounding like he’s been thinking about this for the longest time, but is struggling to get the words out all the same. Khun wonders if this is the only chance Bam has had to say this out loud, without Khun pretending the problem is nothing, and he feels awful. 

He rethinks all the things he’s said about Hoaqin since arriving on this floor. The White he thought he used to know has cracked and broken away bit by bit, and now he can’t forget how unrecognisable Hoaqin had looked as he climbed the Oarfish after Vicente.

The Hoaqin he saw with his siblings wasn’t quite the one he was so sure was going to betray them. It was a Hoaqin who made a promise he knew he couldn’t keep, hell-bent on reaching something, to isolate this fight and make it his—inane as it may be.

Now he gets why Bam has been reacting the way he has. Most people will only ever think of him as Viole, because to them, Viole is easier to understand, easier to fit into the narrative they want to tell. 

Bam swallows. “Don’t you think he ever wonders, too? I never know if I’m doing anything right, but sometimes it’s worse. I listen to the things you say and I wish I wasn’t strong. I wish I wasn’t anything. Things would be so different.”

Khun has always wanted Bam to realise just how human he is, how he is nothing like what they tried to make him. Now he thinks of Hoaqin on the 100th floor, then him on the 111th, then the golden-eyed boy he’d met on the 2nd, and he feels like he’s lost the distinction between god and weapon and Bam somewhere between all the layers of humankind. It terrifies him, how wanting something for himself has gone so wrong. 

You’re everything, he doesn’t say. He wishes that Bam could read his mind and realise just how scared he is of losing him. You’re everything I want to keep faraway.

“I didn't know Hoaqin before,” he says, hoping Bam can hear the intent and the apology in his voice, "but I’ve always known you.”

Bam steps in, close enough to kiss, but no closer. For a while, he doesn’t acknowledge what Khun says, but Khun can see it in his face, and he is suddenly afraid that one day, he won’t have this anymore. No one has ever looked at him like this before, like he is all they see, like the world is a wine glass they would shatter for him. 

He decides that, if the Tower demands it, he’ll trade anything away for this.

“And that changes things?” Bam whispers.

“It does,” Khun says. 

Using another one of Khun’s lighthouses, Hwaryun teleports to them and leads them into the maze. She is wearing an outfit of all white again, just like she was the day before they left her behind on the 99th floor. Her red hair is hidden. She’s holding her staff in one hand, as if for protection.

“You’re lucky our teams split the way they did,” she comments. Khun can barely hear her over the faraway singing of the Red October. “Evan wouldn’t be able to take you through.”

“I thought Silver Dwarves were crossroads, and Red Witches were fate,” Bam frowns. “You get lost all the time.”

The upper layer of glass must be blocking all the daylight, and the darkness snatches up their voices. The walls press into them, forcing them to walk in a single line. One glass panel moves, and another takes its place without a breath in between. Everything seems to drain their shinsu, trying to throw them off. Khun’s sense of direction isn’t bad, but he admits to himself that without Hwaryun, he would be lost already.

Hwaryun doesn’t laugh. “I see further into the future, but this is far enough.” Khun sees the barest outline of her arm as she lifts her hand, tracing invisible threads in the air. “We reach the Red October. There’s fate tying us there.”

She sounds almost uncertain. Khun tries to dismiss his nagging doubt and concentrates on following Bam through the dark.

He remembers Hwaryun in the middle of Wolhaiksong’s forest, eyepatch gone, telling him about shinheuh bones while the trees around them softly burned. Khun had decided there that it was okay to trust her. He thought she’d cut all her allegiances with FUG more than twenty floors below, and after all, she was prepared to die with him, wasn’t she?

It’s been clear since long ago that she’s not on their side. What’s less obvious is that she’s not on anyone’s side. Hwaryun makes more sense when Khun stops trying to imagine destiny as one huge, tangled ball of string, and pictures her in its place instead. 

He wonders what it must be like, following a birthright that is to lead others to theirs. Sometimes her actions don’t even seem like her own. Even when he’d asked for the Soul Stirring Ladle, she had lied even though she knew he would hear through it, like she had no choice. 

“We’re here,” Hwaryun says. 

Khun looks up. Light hits him all at once, harshly bright.

The centre of the maze is not the Red October. It’s a city.

Water flows from seemingly nowhere, falling down the edges where the floor of the maze suddenly drops off. A spiral of steps leads them down, suspended in midair, the leftovers of ancient magic holding them afloat.

It’s the last thing Khun had been expecting to see here—a city within a city, except this one is badly buried. Half the buildings have been smashed into glittering bits, grown over by dry grass and withered flowerheads. The ones still standing look like their walls were once made of glass, or something too light to be metal, a mirror of the 100th floor above. As they pass through, Khun notices that they aren’t always transparent, only from some points of view. 

Hwaryun doesn’t seem surprised at all. She walks past him, and Khun’s breath catches sharply in his throat when he realises her staff is made of the same material. 

“Hwaryun,” he says, very carefully. “Where’s the Red October?”

Without turning back, she says, “Forward.”

Khun has never once heard of this place before. Hwaryun has brought them into a ghost town—it was clearly never meant to be found. He looks around at the hollow buildings, thinking Hwaryun might have led them into an ambush, but nothing comes. 

“But why is it here?” Bam asks. His fists are clenched warily. He looks ready to fight. “Who used to live here?”

Hwaryun considers, mouth drawn in a line, but otherwise no giveaways. She gives them the flat look she always does when she doesn’t want to answer any more questions, but she tells them anyway: “Aries.” 

The unease that’s been building since they came here starts gnawing at his insides. From the tightness in Bam’s face, Khun gathers he must be thinking the same thing. They can’t go forward without her; they can’t go back, either.

Hwaryun waits for them to catch up, and they follow her through until the borders of the ruined city round off to begin another section of the maze. Where it ends, the low music turns shrill and bloody, barely comparable to singing anymore. 

The sound pounds against Khun’s temples. He steels himself against it, but they barely have to search for its source: the Red October is right there, at the end of all the carnage, lodged in a broken wall. 

There’s whispering coming from it, sounds from paper lips, and Khun knows instinctively that whatever this sword has done, it must have been nothing but evil. At certain angles, the entire weapon goes colourless, disappearing until all he can see is the three eyes of Jahad imprinted along the grip. At others, the whole sword appears solid red, a bleeding cut of a blade. 

It’s breathtaking in the most wicked way possible, and it clouds Khun’s mind with memories he isn’t sure are his. He blinks hard, shaken, trying to snap out of it before he begins to taste blood.

He tries to grab onto the sword, but the spell makes his fingers glance right off the hilt. 

“Let me try,” Bam says, but Hwaryun blocks his way before he can move.

“I’ll take it,” she offers unexpectedly. Bam pauses, surprised, and she clarifies, “The spell won’t work on guides. Here—I’ll show you.”

She reaches up, hand closing around the hilt slowly, like she’s trying to prove it to herself, and slides the Red October out of the wall.

Khun has never seen her carry a weapon so large, but for some reason, it seems balanced in her hands. He’s suddenly aware that somehow, Hwaryun knows how to handle this thing. The longer he watches her, the more he’s put off by it. He tilts his head, finding the right angle, and the blade goes red again, the exact shade of Hwaryun’s hair. 

“You didn’t mention that earlier,” Khun says steadily. “Who were you hoping to hide that from?”

Hwaryun looks up at him, seemingly startled by his question. Before he can catalogue her reaction, her face sets into something unreadable. 

Khun knows better than to expect an explanation from her, though something feels too obviously out of place, as if even Hwaryun herself hasn’t thought it through. He tries to convince himself that she wouldn’t try anything here—this dark, airtight space—not without risking a repeat of the 77th floor, where she had barely made it out herself. 

He’s wrong. She rounds the corner of the maze, out of sight. They follow her in, and she starts to run.

They chase after her, smashing through glass panes that snag at their skin. At the last moment, the maze spits them out, sending them crashing into grey sand.

The first thing Khun registers is that it’s not just them and Hwaryun anymore. He stands, reeling, trying to figure out how badly this has gone wrong, and the picture pieces into focus in fragments. They're on the northern shore. Arie Hon is here, the Oarfish towering behind him. The fight must already be over, because Vicente is gone, and Hoaqin is here too. The Red October is in his hands.

Khun watches as Hwaryun draws out the White Heavenly Mirror from her inventory and unseals Hatz from the dagger. He tips over, unconscious, and something white seeps up from his skin like smoke, a shapeless soul that crawls its way through the air and back into David’s body, motionless at Hoaqin’s feet.

Too late, Khun realises what’s happened. 

This isn’t Hoaqin—it’s White, and he's still incomplete. Hwaryun had played this floor in his favour from the start.

“Welcome to the 100th floor.” Arie Hon spreads his arms, inviting, studying Hwaryun with vague fascination. “I see you’ve already given them a tour.”

The Oarfish rears up above them, but distantly Khun notices both its horns are missing now, making its silhouette a lot less menacing, almost like White without his red markings. Hwaryun flings the empty dagger a safe distance away, breathing fast. It’s supposed to be with Endorsi. Khun has no idea how she got it.

“What was that place, Hwaryun?” Bam asks quietly. 

Hwaryun looks at him through her good eye. Her expression is completely unfamiliar. Khun has never known her to hold a grudge, but right now she looks like she has one that runs deep, and the viciousness of it leaves him stunned.

“That was home,” she answers.

Bam shakes his head. “That’s not enough,” he says. Khun can feel the anger seething from him, brimming under his skin. He is tired of being betrayed. Khun puts his hand on his shoulder, meaning for it to be grounding, even though he feels his own heart racing at his throat. 

“Introduce yourself,” Arie Hon encourages her. “Your friends are waiting. They want to get to know you.”

At the word friends, her fingers go white around her staff. For a moment, Khun thinks she is going to argue, but then the sides of her mouth turn upwards in a humourless smile. The fight seems to drain out of her. She won’t lie—not with Arie Hon right in front of her.

“Red Witches used to live on this floor,” she says, unfeeling. “When Ashul Edwaru was creating the 13 Months, he needed fate on his side. We helped him. In return, he gave us the Red October to keep.”

Off to the side, White looks down at the sword in his hands. He looks like he’s recalling an old story, but his reaction is the opposite of Hwaryun’s. “You were still here when I was little,” he remembers, eyes opening wide and delighted. “We called you witches, because you could see the future.”

“You chased us out because people were scared,” she says to Arie Hon through her teeth. “You thought your paranoia could change the future.”

Khun realises—this is Hwaryun when she takes a side. She’s on White’s side not because she has to be, or because he’s a Slayer too, but simply because he is not Arie Hon. This action is hers, even if it’s senseless, even if it snaps this seam of fate entirely. 

Suddenly, all the conversations she’d had with Hoaqin and all her subdued reactions make sense. The wheel has always been in motion. Khun remembers the firefish he’s just stolen back, his lighthouses and everything hidden inside them, but can’t think of anything he can do to stop it. Hwaryun looks calmly up at Arie Hon, Hoaqin beside them, a family face-to-face with its destiny, all of it prewritten.

“And here you are,” Arie Hon says gently, “trying to change the past.” His face twists, mocking, but he sounds almost fond. “It was beautiful, watching you all fight the Oarfish. It’s too bad what you made with the horn you took was worthless.”

He takes Hwaryun’s staff and spins it once, observing it as it turns clear, then gold. It fractures in his grip, but it doesn’t break until he hands it back to her, crumbling into pieces as she tries to hold it.

“So that was a lie too?” Bam guesses, eyes flicking between them. “That you can hold the Red October because you’re a guide?”

Hwaryun stays silent.

“The Arie family colours are white and red,” Arie Hon answers for her. “Think about it, Slayer. Why is that? Who do you think made that spell in the first place?”

Chapter Text

It’s David who ruins the moment. David, that self-centred fool, takes over Hwaryun in a last-ditch attempt to escape, but he forgets that she can’t move as fast as they can. She’s too frail to fight.

“Come back, brother,” White says. He’s at Hwaryun before she even moves a step, picking her up easily by the arch of her throat. Her white eye—David’s eye—goes wide and desperate as he cuts off her air, and her feet kick pathetically at nothing. “You coward.”

He adds the last part just for fun, but really he’s not giving David much choice. If his main body dies, his soul will have nowhere to go, and who would want to be trapped in a Red Witch’s shell with an Arie’s abilities? White nudges at David’s body with his ankle, then aims the Red October just below his ear. It’ll be a straight cut. David should know that. 

Hwaryun’s nails dig uselessly into White’s knuckles, so White presses the sword in, and that’s all it takes. David obeys. 

Finally, White thinks, ecstatic. He tosses Hwaryun aside, then crouches down to David’s body, examining the shallow cut on his neck, checking that his soul has returned fully. Everything seems perfect, so gets close to David’s ear. He repeats the last few lines of the spell loud and clear, enunciating every word so that David can know exactly what’s happening. 

The demon’s shade swallows them again, hiding the moment David’s body disappears from sight.

The darkness lifts, and White emerges, complete.

He’s missed this power. There’s too much shinsu and too many souls for his body to contain now, and he can feel it just under his skin, itching to escape, wanting to form swords. White lets it overflow, limiting it to the shape of a crown that fizzles into place overhead. The rest, he forces to subside into two wings that trail behind him, blade-like and angular.

He feels perfect. He’s starving. Once more, he feels like the rest of the world is nothing. He rolls his neck, getting used to this form. When he cracks his eyes open, he expects the Red Witch to be dead already, but his father hasn’t moved to kill her. Instead, he’s looking right at him.

“What?” White asks. “What is it? You don’t recognise me now?”

There’s reckoning in Arie Hon’s face that White has never seen, and it makes him realise he’s never had his father’s full attention before. It sends a roar of sudden excitement though him that smooths out into fury, an engine revving to life.

“No,” his father agrees. “You’re not scared of me anymore.” 

“Haven’t you seen me before?” White asks, feigning innocence, but not very well. It turns into vicious before he gets the rest of the sentence out. “You have no idea what souls I’ve taken. I’ve been all over the Tower as White while you’ve been sitting here, ruling over nothing.”

Arie Hon starts walking towards him, stepping over the shattered glass guts of the maze. It truly seems like he can see no one else—not the Slayer Candidate, not the Khun, not the Red Witch. With all his father’s focus on him, it immediately feels less easy. Even at White’s full height, his father towers over him.

“10th Slayer of FUG,” Arie Hon says intently. He looks up to White’s face, and for a foolish moment White feels vulnerable without the red. “No name. Red markings down your eyes. You let such a childish thing define you.”

That gets a rise out of him. “People followed me,” White spits. “They followed me like I was a god. They killed for me out of the goodness of their hearts. When was the last time anyone did that for you?”

Arie Hon’s gaze travels over White’s crown, his wings. “All of my children challenge me thinking they’re gods. I’ll admit, you made it there, but why are you still pretending?”

Pretending to be what? White wants to snap, but he gets his answer. His father reaches up to White’s crown. It cracks into shards under his touch like it’s nothing, and he examines his fingertips with faint curiosity as the shinsu and souls untie and fall apart. White is stunned, and then he’s furious at himself for letting his father take control.

“The rest of the Tower calls me a king,” he says, curling his hands into fists. “Nobody knows you as that anymore.”

Arie Hon considers him, eyes alight. “I don’t mind if I’m caught up in change. As long as it doesn’t get past me.”

With a jolt, White realises that he is the change that Arie Hon is talking about, not anyone else standing here.

To him and his siblings, Arie Hon has always been something unkillable, and has never had to fight to survive. He has never seen his father as anything less. The fact that he views White as a threat now leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

“Stop talking,” White says derisively, dragging a hand over his face to try to negate the disgust. “I’ll have this fight before I lose my respect for you.”

He reminds himself that even if he didn’t want it before, he wants it now. In the back of his mind, he’s desperate for this to be a good fight. His siblings don’t matter. Before doesn’t matter.

Use your rage towards me as fuel, his father had told him—wasn’t that it? That’s all he’s been doing. He’s pressed all his doubt into rage until there was nothing left but the anger, so he holds onto it tightly, violently, until it threatens to burst. 

His father tilts his head in the slightest of bows, an acknowledgement. White wants to cut the manners out of him. “As you say.”

At his words, the sky starts to darken, locking down the 100th floor in a vault of red. The air turns cold and stale, like old blood. This must be ancient magic. White feels the change in his whole body as it takes effect, flooding through the space as if to say: this floor is your boundary, and this is the law.

Arie Hon steps back. He turns his hand palm up, beckoning. The White Oar binds together from nothing, a weapon so purely made it almost looks sacred. Its presence tears bright and open through the clearing. In White’s grip, the Red October feels overwhelmingly inferior. 

“The floor will count down for us,” Arie Hon says, as if that explains anything, as if White is patient enough to care. “Withstand my attacks for ten minutes, and I’ll grant you one wish within my power.”

It’s been so underwhelming so far that right now, White is almost dizzy with the suspense. He feels every inch of his body in fierce, pinpoint clarity, like his nerves have been sharpened against a whetstone—hair caught between the thin collar of his shirt and his neck, sweat at the base of his spine—and the fight has hardly begun. 

“I’ve waited so long just to kill you,” White confesses. “If you die off easily, I’ll spoon feed you souls until you come back to life.”

He wants his father to know that he’s prepared to carry through, so he tries to sound as meaningful as possible. His voice comes out full of spite regardless. Arie Hon seems to get it, because he levels his sword, but his words are callous. “You were always a dreamer.”

Out of the corner of White’s eye, he sees the Khun boy move towards something he can’t see, and an absurd panic wells up inside him. The three people standing there are harmless. Maybe not the Slayer Candidate, but still—he won’t have them lay a finger on Arie Hon.  

“Leave,” White snarls, vision tunnelling. “This is mine.”

The strongest Family head, and the strongest weapon in the Tower. He wonders how long he can drag this fight on for. If he draws up the seconds individually in his head, all of them, surely it will be endless, so he starts. One. Two—

Without warning, his father raises the White Oar fully—doesn’t even swing it—and blades in its image fill up the sky between them, so fast that even White can barely register it. The sight of all that shinsu aimed towards him, razor-sharp, makes him ecstatic. He loses count immediately, and his shoulders start to shake with adrenaline and silent laughter. 

He calls up Cullinan with his right hand, his strongest sword, concentrating for the split second he can spare. The sword pulls together, a loop left empty at the base of the blade that he’s snapped so many wrists through. With his left, he holds the Red October, and he slices down Arie Hon’s swords that were going for his vitals. One nicks his thigh. Others smash into the ground inches from him, leaving craters behind on impact that sand rushes to fill.

The 100th floor doesn’t need spectacles. Arie swordsmanship is a dance in itself, the way their blades change trajectories like a turn of the hips, a hand at the waist that leads into a spin. The Tower needs a show, White thinks, and this is it. This is what he’s been looking for.

“Beautiful,” he murmurs. He watches his father prepare to swing again, seeing it in slow motion. “You’re beautiful.”

White is barely hurt, but to the left, fractures start creeping up on the shinsu barrier holding the Oarfish back. He finds it in himself to consider it—this must be his father’s first fight in centuries. He wonders mildly what would happen if that beast was released here, in the middle of this fight. 

The White Oar moves, and shinsu unfurls from it like a budding flower. More than anything, White wants to match that. Magnolia, he thinks gleefully, pouring souls into his sword. I haven’t seen a real one in forever.

The skill activates. White uses the momentum of the motion to jump back, widening the gap between them. The spirit of an undead lord rises from his sword, wielding his own that slashes petals of shinsu across the battlefield. For a moment, White holds his breath, thinking their attacks will meet in the middle, but then Arie Hon’s cut through.

White’s reacts too late. He feels it before it happens. He guards with the Red October a moment too late, and he’s slammed back with enough force to leave him dazed. Magnolia’s king is still there when he checks, shaking his head, but he’s been cut too, white smoke seeping up from the slashes in his clothes.

Some of his father’s attacks are hitting their marks, but none of White’s seem to be. If this keeps going on, he won’t last. He needs something better. 

He looks around wildly for the Red October’s spirit, eyes narrowed against the clouds of sand and dust. He finally spots her—a girl in a silver dress leaning against an archway, ankles crossed—and turns to head in that direction. Strangely, the harder he tries to reach her, the further away she seems to get.

Frustrated, White turns back, but then she appears out of nowhere over his shoulder, studying him with grey eyes that remind him somewhat of the smudged surface of a moon. There’s a chain of silver and precious stones draped over her black hair, like a belt of asteroids. She looks insufferably like all of Vicente’s stories of galaxies and planets come to life. 

“Ignite for me,” he commands, heart racing in anticipation. 

He thinks she might start chastising him for trying, since he’s clearly not a Princess of Jahad, but all she does is tilt her head to the side, expressionless. “Come clean,” she says in response, and that surprises him even more.

“Come clean to what?” White sneers, incredulous. There’s only one thing he wants, and it’s never been a secret. “I’m FUG’s Slayer White. The Outer Tower’s king. I want to kill Arie Hon, and I want you to help me.” The Red October doesn’t reply, so White changes tactics. “Remember yourself!” he demands. “My family made you, so bow to me. Ignite for me.”

The spirit simply stares at him, lips pressed into a judgmental line. She says, “I am not looking for pride.”

White is speechless. No one has ever told him no, never in the middle of a fight, and much less a sword—a sword that hasn’t been used for countless years, at that. He tightens his fingers around the Red October, furious at being denied, deciding whether it’s worth his time to slash at her.

The Red October stays still and unchanged. The spirit vanishes.

It’s the first time he hears Arie Hon laugh properly, full-bodied and condescending, with all his teeth. It’s like he knew White would fail. He was waiting for White to fail, and it’s hardly been a minute.

This time, when his father attacks, White isn’t ready. The White Oar moves just a little, but White blocks it poorly, so the shinsu runs rampant. It sweeps him into the structures and gates nearer to the city, and his body smashes through them until eventually, the crushed glass breaks his fall. 

From the south of the 100th floor, Shibisu sees the sky go red. 

It’s Endorsi who notices first, pointing over to the north beach. At first, he thinks it’s just in the opposite direction, but soon the red spreads all over, casting a shadow the colour of desert dust over their faces. That’s bad enough as it is, but then he hears the sounds of swords clashing, the shockwaves sweeping through the city, and automatically he knows there’s nothing else that could be. Hoaqin has to be taking Arie Hon’s test now. 

Shibisu has never felt dread like this before. His legs are burning. He can barely breathe. He hasn’t seen, or even heard from, the other half of the team since they spotted Hoaqin fighting the Oarfish earlier this morning.

“Don’t slow down!” Rak yells, yanking him forward by the bottom of his jacket. “I thought you had a sense of time?!”

“I know, I know!” Shibisu yelps, pushing Rak’s claw away. He chances a glance to the side, and horror sinks to his core, weighing him down like water. The group of regulars that Endorsi had beat down at the training range are tailing them. They’re almost a full team, too: light bearers, wave controllers, and a fisherman. 

“They’ve chased us through a whole marathon, and they’re still going?” Anak grumbles. She lashes out with the Green April, but someone’s lighthouse spirals out into a shield, blocking its route.

“We chased them first, idiot!”

Shibisu focuses on pulling up his Pocket, inhaling hard through his nose. He doesn’t even want to check the other side. They’ve just run a team halfway across the floor to get the sheath, which he’s holding on to, and the only part they need to find now is the pommel. The problem is, there's no time at all before the whole band of test-takers starts chasing them, seeing as they now have all the parts of the sword except one. 

His Pocket connects. Shibisu could cry with relief. “Khun,” he starts breathlessly. He wants to ask if everyone’s okay, if everyone's alive, but there’s no time. “How do you unseal someone from the White Heavenly Mirror?”

His observer’s screen suddenly shows him more people heading for them from the right side of a forked path that intersects theirs. He breaks off, pushing everyone hurriedly to the left.

“We locked Hatz in the dagger, but we need him to take the last part of the sword,” Endorsi explains quickly, covering for him. “We can only take one part each, right? So even though it’s not him, exactly, we need him out, or we’ll be disqualified.”

“Don’t worry,” Khun’s voice says. “We have him.”

“You have him?” Shibisu repeats, confused, and then it dawns on him: “We lost Hatz?!”

Endorsi’s eyes widen. She slides open her Inventory frantically, and sure enough, the White Heavenly Mirror isn’t there. “Someone stole it,” she bites out, looking confused. “That person in white—”

“Was Hwaryun,” Khun says grimly. “David must have possessed Hatz.”

“Who? What? How did she get there?”

There’s a huge crack of glass breaking on Khun’s side, the same time Shibisu hears the sound echo back to them. He missteps, almost tripping on an uprooted piece of tile, and it costs him. The teams behind them start closing in. “Oh, god,” he realises, “you guys are there with Hoaqin.”

Khun starts to say something, but Rak grabs the Pocket impatiently and demands, “We need to pass the floor test, Blue Turtle! Can you tell us how to get to the Samurai Turtle or not?”

Crackling. “I’ll teleport him to you. But—”

A massive blast of shinsu resounds from the north, and there’s a distorted noise of something smashing through glass. It sounds awfully like a body, or multiple, judging from how long it goes on for. Shibisu swears. There’s sweat streaming down his forehead. He doesn’t know what the hell is going on, but he’s almost at the western beach. Just a little further— 

The sounds of glass die down, until Shibisu can only hear his own side: footsteps, shouting, desperate breathing.

“I’ll call you back,” Khun promises.

The edge of Arie Hon’s hit knocks Bam off his feet. He’d been on guard already, standing on the sidelines, but he’s unprepared for just how powerful it is. It would have sent him further, but at some point he called up his wings and tried to regain his bearings mid-fall. 

When he sits up, the world around him is a mess of swirling dust and plain sand, all of it hashed with bigger pieces of broken stone and glass. Bam finds himself feeling sorry for this city. He’d been expecting destruction, but not this much; the fight has just started, yet a slice of this floor has already been razed, like the Tower wants a repeat of the forests below.

He braces himself on his palms to stand, but then his fingers meet something cold. He looks down and sees that it’s the Frog Fisher. The White Heavenly Mirror that Hwaryun had thrown lies just a few feet away, its curved handle peeking out from the layers of sand.

“Viole,” Hwaryun says, voice hushed, “You need to follow me.”

Bam bristles. He whirls around, but she’s not there. He stretches out a hand and finds that a few feet in front of him, everything gets hidden by the dust and the red sky. He can’t see her. He can’t see anyone else, either.

He’s tired of never being able to trust Hwaryun. Every few floors he thinks it’s fine, and then she winds up doing something not even Khun can predict, for all his caution. He wants to ask her what she wants, what her plan is, but he knows she won’t give him an answer. For now, he figures that Hwaryun at least isn’t on Arie Hon’s side, which automatically puts them on White’s.

“Where are we?” he calls, moving towards the sound of her voice. Surely this, she can answer. 

The wind finally dies down, and far in front of him, there’s a silver wall. Beside it, there’s a book with a puncture through it, like it had been bitten through with a massive fang. Bam gets closer and realises with a shock that it’s the one that was taken from his room in the morning—the pages are sandy and torn, but the language is the same one he doesn’t recognise, and the tips of the silver star on the cover are still there. 

He pockets it again with the other two items, hit with a strange sense of deja vu. He keeps his wings up, just in case.

Bam spots Hwaryun’s red hair first. He starts to speak when they can see each other clearly, but then she shakes her head. “Be quiet!” she hisses, an odd note of urgency in her voice that puts him on edge. “We’re in the Oarfish’s cage.”

Bam’s heart drops. That thing in front of him isn’t a wall at all, then. It’s a coil of the Oarfish’s body, barely moving now, so huge that he can’t see past the tail of it. He looks around silently, trying to figure out how they got in. Hopefully, they don’t have to fight it. He doesn’t know a thing about shinheuh, let alone this one.

“There’s meant to be a shinsu barrier blocking it off, isn’t there?” he says quietly. “When did it break—”

The Oarfish lunges at him.

Bam darts out of the way, rising up on his wings, a line of shock racing up his spine. A thing that big should not be able to move that fast. He can barely even see its mouth slow down before it curls up, ready to strike again, but he can hear the sound of sharp teeth sliding closed. 

He conjures a shinsu black hole sphere in the direction opposite from where he guesses Hwaryun is still standing. It pulls the Oarfish towards it, and then the space explodes with a bang that’s both loud and soft at the same time, light and dark, outlining it against the red sky.

The steel eel screams, snapping at him again, completely unharmed.

Bam grits his teeth. He sets up another black hole, pulling it away, and lands back down next to Hwaryun. 

“The exit’s there,” she yells over the sound of the beast, pointing over it and a little to the right, where Bam can make out a jagged break in the shinsu barrier. “We got thrown past it.” She hesitates, but then she looks at him, wearing the same face she always does when she says Slayer. “It’s the Tower’s strongest shinheuh. Hoaqin and his siblings have been fighting it all morning, and it doesn’t have a single scratch on it.”

There’s not a single hint of doubt in her tone, like she really believes that even now, after everything, Bam is still part of FUG, and it’s his job to save her life. 

Bam looks away, thinking of Khun to ground him. If he can’t get out of here with shinsu, he’ll try again.

“Where’s its heart?” he asks. 

“I’ll call you back,” Khun promises. He hangs up.

Arie Hon’s last strike has pushed him and White back close to the city. Even though he had only caught the tailwind of the attack, all the lighthouses he used to defend against it are damaged, and one has been smashed in half, the edges and screens spitting sparks. Khun surveys the damage, grimacing when he realises the worst of them is the one he keeps all his items in. 

The Frog Fisher is gone, but the Soul Stirring Ladle is still inside, hanging onto a shredded fragment of the blue wall by the hole in its handle. Khun fishes it out carefully and, at a loss of where to put it now, ends up looping a spare hair tie through it and securing that to his belt.

“Look at you,” White says, when Khun is just about to discard the rest of the ruined lighthouse completely. “Still making deals where it doesn’t matter?”

Khun pauses as he stands, brushing off shards from his clothes. The glass and the fall wouldn’t have hurt him, but on his forearms, where he blocked the brunt of Arie Hon’s attack with his skin, there are red marks that Khun knows will bruise badly later. He looks more humiliated than anything. On the lower floors, this expression usually meant that he’d kill the next person who rubbed him the wrong way.

“You’re not dead yet, so I’d say it matters,” he decides on saying, putting his hands in his pockets. “Keep your word. Give us the Red October if you survive.”

White scoffs like he can’t quite believe it. “You haven’t figured out yet that you can’t take it?”

Khun knows what he’s thinking. Since the moment they met, everything that has happened between them has been a back-and-forth of deals and empty words: do this for me, and you’ll be better for it. To White, this might not mean a thing. Khun has to make it count.

“Bam can,” he lies, then softens it with a truth he doesn’t like: “Worst-case scenario, we’ll give it to Hwaryun.”

“That Witch? She’s not with you.”

Arie Hon is just standing there, grinning wide and red, watching them from far away. He must be so confident that White won’t live the full ten minutes that he doesn’t care how much time he saves right now. White must have realised it too, because his jaw is clenched, and his lower body is tense, like he’s ready to jump.

“She’s not with you, either. She’s just angry, and when that’s all you have, nothing else matters, does it? It’s easier to make sure no one else can have what you want either,” Khun says sharply, surprised at how much he means it. “And you—at some point you stopped doing it because it’s easier. You just did it because it was fun.”

White tears his eyes suddenly away from Arie Hon. He looks down at Khun with a wicked expression, half indignance and half scorn, that crumples into a stifled laugh.

“Absolutely,” White says, eyes wide. “And you’re the same. You turn things into a game because that’s all you can do. It feels good when the others lose, but you never try to win yourself.”

For a moment, Khun feels a world of difference between them, and at the same time, almost none at all. He doesn’t have to try very hard to imagine himself in the same position—if it was him and Khun Eduan, him and Maria, him and Kiseia—and realises he’d do crazy things to get there, too. He has been. Maybe after he makes it, all this will stop, but it won't break.

Reluctantly, Khun makes a choice. White might kill him for interfering. He thinks he might have lost his mind. 

“I’m trying now,” he admits. 

He holds out his hand. White definitely thinks it’s an empty action, so he takes it, grip harsh. Khun doesn’t wait. He transfers the firefish over to him.

White tears his hand away. “Take it back,” he growls. The fury is back in his eyes, white fire, and briefly Khun wonders how the firefish will manage to compete with that. “I’ll burn through it in an instant.”

“Do what you want,” Khun says warningly, “but I’m going to make sure you win.”

Chapter Text

A crescent of the city has been smashed to bits, spines of glass structures buckled in half, fountains on their sides still oozing out water like blood from open arteries, darkening the grey sand. White turns back towards his father, and the firefish looms suddenly in front of him, blocking him from sight. 

There are so many souls in you, the firefish says to him. Its voice is empty. It sounds incapable of feeling. You are more parts dead than alive, and each one is beyond repair. 

“Oh, good,” White says, not really hearing, feeling crazed. “Don’t interfere, or I’ll cut you out of my body myself.”

The Yeon flame circles back into his skin with a sharp burn that feeds straight back into the rush of adrenaline, a positive loop. White rolls his shoulders back, savouring it. He wasn’t planning on taking help from a Yeon flame. If the Red October won’t help him either, it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. He’ll have this fight all to himself. 

“Who are your enemies?” he asks, pointing with his sword as Khun jumps over a pillar, disappearing into the glass. “That’s one, isn’t it? He’s getting away. Catch him! Put him in a trap.”

Arie Hon doesn’t answer. White feels puzzled, but then he shakes it off, and starts to grin. He never did care about politics anyway.

He can’t get close to his father, not yet. The space between them fills back to bursting with shinsu, white dahlias and lilies with blades for petals, display after display. White pours hundreds of thousands of souls forward to match Arie Hon, and it’s really rather beautiful, each of their attacks colliding in the air like rose vines, strangling each other down to dust. 

White feels more of his father’s swords appear around him, behind him, trying to get through to his back. He’s almost tempted to turn around and admire them too, but he thinks better of it. Arie Hon deserves his attention. He orders Magnolia’s king to counter them instead, and he fights his own battle behind White’s back, a puppet without its strings. 

He raises his arms, sand sliding off the blades of his swords and into his sleeves. He dares himself to close his eyes, pretending he’s orchestrating a symphony that only crescendos up and up and up. It’s exhilarating. He loses himself in it.

“Can’t you hear the music?” he calls. He peeks through an eye and sees, just by luck, the souls between them thin out, and there—there’s the path.

He pushes forward compulsively. Shinsu jabs at him, getting in his way, and he doesn’t bother deflecting. He can feel the metal-like cold where it tears into his bare skin, but the adrenaline and the vertigo are enough to soak away the pain. When he closes the distance between them, he sees that his father only looks unimpressed. His laugh from earlier is gone.

“I thought you’d be enjoying yourself,” White remarks, feeling almost offended. 

The Red October and Cullinan are unbalanced. He feeds more souls into Cullinan until both swords feel the same weight, and then he stabs forward, trading power for two-handed speed. He’s only meant to survive, but he can’t help attacking. He just wants to see Arie Hon bleed—just a little. 

Arie Hon parries with a single strike. His eyes are passive. “I expected more,” he says simply. “It looks like there’s a demon in you, but nothing else. You’re no different. This is how it always starts.”

White presses his lips together, but a surprised sound slips out of them anyway. “Always?” he repeats. “I’d be dead already if it was always.” He lets his head loll to the side, eyes half-lidded, playing dead. His hair slides over his forehead, catching slightly on the bridge of his nose. “Like this. How good is my impression?”

His father’s expression doesn’t change. White watches his lips move. It looks strange with his head still tilted sideways. “If you keep matching me, you’ll run out of souls completely.”

“You’ll burn out too,” White counters, abrasive. “You think I can’t feel it? Don’t act like you’re limitless.”

Arie Hon’s eyebrows draw together. It’s the only warning White gets before he attacks, slashing forward. The White Oar cleaves through with unbelievable strength, leaving a burnt trail of white behind it. Now that they’re in close range, White has to defend, smashing both swords upwards to press back against it. 

For a single, still moment, their three swords lock together in a bind. The empty loop at Cullinan’s base offers White a clean-cut window of Arie Hon’s neck. He shivers. He can’t see any of his veins or his vitals, but he knows where they are.

“Ten minutes,” Arie Hon reminds him, “but you can’t last it alone.” He nods at the Red October. “Not even she will help you.”

He twists the White Oar downwards at White’s wrist, forcing the Red October out of his grip. It leaves his left hand free. With a growl, White crosses that arm over and calls up souls at his empty fingertips, crafting a narrow switchblade that he thumbs open and stabs through the hollow loop at Cullinan’s hilt, aiming at Arie Hon’s jaw. 

Arie Hon sidesteps it easily and swerves back, breaking the stalemate. The switchblade dissolves with a soft, harmless sound, like butterfly wings. White digs his heels into the sand as he picks the Red October back up, breathing fast.

“You can’t use it properly.” Arie Hon looks down at him. “It’s not about the souls. It’s about strength, and you don’t have enough of it.”

The Red October is heavy, much heavier than it looks, and its gravity is centred somewhere in the middle of the blade, like it was made for defence and not manoeuvrability. It’s nothing like what White is used to. He can’t attack properly with it. He can’t even throw it away now. 

The break is enough for the rush to die down. White looks down at himself. There’s more blood than he expects, long lines down his arms and his ribs, and it stings unexpectedly where his clothes pull at the cuts. His father is still completely unharmed, no red, and that hurts White’s pride badly.

“Ignite the White Oar,” he snarls. “Use it all.”

“I don’t need to,” Arie Hon says. He lifts the White Oar with one hand. “I’ll narrate your life back to you. You’ve only ever had to attack, because no enemy can stand up to the Arie blade: not on the 1st floor, not on the 99th.”

When he brings the sword down, White rolls to the right, barely dodging, defending his open side with his swords. He chances a glance at Magnolia’s king fighting behind him and sees that he’s almost all smoke now. Annoyed, White directs more souls into him, hundreds and hundreds, healing the gashes all over his skeleton. 

It’s clear what Arie Hon is implying: you’re just like all the rest. There have been Arie Slayers before him. White wastes a second imagining how many other Aries have grown up under their father, challenged him and failed. There’s a truth in it, and White ignores it. The thought of being the first one to win spurs him forward. “Ignite it,” he presses. “Fight!”

Arie Hon strikes him again, grim, and he keeps going: “On the 100th, you take my test. It’s the first time you’ve ever had to defend. It’s the first time another’s sword has ever cut through your skin. You start to lose, and then I ask you: what will you wish for if the ten minutes pass?”

White feels his eyes widen. His father looks at him like he already knows his answer. 

He doesn’t know what comes after this. He thinks back to when he and his siblings were all individuals, before he found the spell from the demon, before he gave away their souls, but it’s too late. He might have wanted that once, but he doesn’t now. White imagines trading away this violence for an old world, and feels greedy at the thought of losing it. He can’t live without it anymore. 

All he’s ever climbed for was this fight: an obsession in the shape of a broken sundial, sharp and unchanging, counting down the years until he reached the 100th floor again. His days had pooled around it. Every level of the Tower, he’d introduced himself as wanting to kill Arie Hon. He’d only killed for souls to fight him. He hasn’t thought about Jahad in years. He hasn’t even considered the Outside. 

“I won’t wish for anything,” White decides. “I don’t care about what comes after. I told you, didn’t I? Vicente said it was impossible to reach you, so I’ll make this fight last as long as possible.”

Arie Hon’s expression clouds over, as if in surprise—wrong answer. “You’re supposed to say, ‘I want you dead.’”

White does, but he wants it less than the fight. He’ll kill him after he’s dragged this out. Arie Hon looks confused over something—White’s whole reply, or the fact that he brought Vicente up. White’s not really sure why he did either. 

The firefish stirs. “Don’t!” White snaps, before it can say a word. He doesn’t know what it was going to say, but he won’t take its help either way. He’s bled more than this before. He’s burned up more souls than this, and regained them in the end. How many times does he need to say it before everyone gets it? 

That strange surprise on Arie Hon’s face fades away. “And after you give me your answer,” he continues, as if nothing had happened, “you keep fighting, Hoaqin, and then you die.”

White bares his teeth. Hearing his name rubs him the wrong way, even though it’s the last thing that matters. Arie Hon charges up the White Oar, and the energy from it branches out and forces White back again, scraping against the Red October in a twist of white petals. 

“White,” White corrects him harshly. “I’m perfect. I’m stronger than Hoaqin. Hoaqin could never even dream of reaching you. Hoaqin couldn’t even beat Vicente.”

“He could always defend better than you,” Arie Hon says. 

He doesn’t sound amused. He doesn’t sound like anything. Still, anger licks up in White’s stomach, like gasoline before it catches alight. How would his father know? He wasn’t at training. He hasn’t seen anything of how far he’s come. 

“I couldn’t beat him,” White admits, spiteful, “but he couldn’t beat me either.”

In the background, he can hear the Oarfish waking. He looks up. The red in the sky seems to have faded just the barest bit, like it’s slipped away down an hourglass. White finally gets what it means—a countdown. 

“Do you think you can hold out, then?” Arie Hon asks him. “It’s barely been three minutes.”

Khun runs behind the wreckage, crouching down beside Hatz, shielding them with as many lighthouses as he can spare. The Soul Stirring Ladle digs into his hip. He’s too close to the fight, and he can’t hear himself over the sound of it—this entire huge, empty expanse of beach, blurred with souls and dry smoke and the sound of burning. He’s never seen anything like it. 

“Get up!” Khun hisses, then chokes off when the dry smog burns his throat. He rolls Hatz over quickly, pressing his thumb to his neck. His eyes are still closed, but his pulse is strong. It’s a miracle he’s still alive—both of them, for that matter. Khun is relieved, but it doesn’t last long.

“Ignite the White Oar,” he hears White say, his voice distorted by shinsu. 

A voice in the back of his head tells him he shouldn’t be alive right now. Arie Hon, if he is the person everyone says he is, should have killed him the moment he released the firefish. Khun straightens up a little from behind the smashed buildings, as much as he dares, expecting something to drop down at him or ambush him from the destruction. 

From his position, he can’t spot Hwaryun or Bam anywhere, but he can see a red line far away going all the way up, spearing through the clouds and the white smoke, blending into the sky: Bam’s thorns. 

Khun shivers. Wherever Bam is, whatever he is up against, Khun trusts him to make it back alive—but he can’t teleport to Shibisu until he has all of them with him. He can’t get through to him if he’s on the other side of White’s fight. 

Another attack flashes through, and when the wind clears, Khun is shocked when he sees just how close behind White he is, and how much blood there is everywhere, all over him. Like he’d expected, White hasn’t used the firefish. He won’t. The Red October still hasn’t ignited for him, either, and Khun feels a pang of urgency. White is losing. He’s going to die. 

The fighting pauses, and White has his swords up, sounding defensive, saying: “Hoaqin couldn’t even beat Vicente.”

“He could always defend better than you,” Arie Hon says back, voice far in the distance. 

Khun gets a sudden, crazy idea—maybe the only one. No matter what, one of them is losing today. Once this fight is over, Arie Hon is sure to come after him. White won’t take any help, and if Khun doesn’t try, he’s dead either way. 

“Do you think you can hold out?” Arie Hon asks. “It’s barely been three minutes.”

Bam isn’t here to see him make the last gamble, so Khun doesn’t think. He snaps the Soul Stirring Ladle off its tie, lifts it towards White, and commands: “Vicente.”

the walls of vicente’s white cell start to collapse. shreds of it peel back like wallpaper, revealing the view from hoaqin’s eyes in bright, vivid colour. vicente stares out, stunned, making out the span of a beach, hoaqin’s hands on either side holding a sword that looks impossibly like the red october, and arie hon in front of him—and then the whole wall tears itself down.

The world lurches and spins, a roar of sound, and then Vicente takes control. 

He feels like he’s just woken from a long, dizzying dream, where reality comes back to him in pieces. The spell that binds them shouldn’t allow this. 

His whole body aches, and his arms are covered in blood, but it’s his body, not Hoaqin’s. He’s holding the Red October in his left hand, the symbol of Jahad raised along the grip that he can barely feel through all his calluses. Arie Hon is really here, the White Oar neutral at his side, the sky fading red behind him. 

“Father,” Vicente says, head spinning. It sounds respectful, but he doesn’t know if he means it to be. He doesn’t know if he can say it any other way. He ignores his instinct to bow, even though maybe he should. 

Arie Hon looks at him for a moment, at the Red October, but then his gaze slides away to track something behind Vicente, like he’s not important enough to regard as an opponent. “That boy keeps interfering.”

Vicente doesn’t know who he’s talking about. He can’t even make sense of what’s in front of him. Somehow, Hoaqin has managed to find the Red October. Judging from the wreckage all around them—the floor smashed, the red sky—he must have been taking Arie Hon’s test just then. Hoaqin really reached him, like Vicente always said he couldn’t.

As the dizziness passes, it hits him for the second time that this is him in control. His body is brimming with power he’s never tasted in his life. If he dies, if Hoaqin takes White back, he won’t get another chance. Arie Hon gave him a fair opportunity to walk free this morning, and he’d lost it to Hoaqin. Whatever this is—he won’t waste this one. 

“We can continue this fight,” Vicente insists through his teeth. “It’s no problem. I’m still White. I’m a part of him.”

“We will,” Arie Hon reassures him, calm, but for some reason he sounds put off, like Vicente has said something wrong. “But do you want to? Do you think you can? I pinned you to be the reason among your siblings. You’ve always been rational.”

He holds up his hand. Shinsu swords materialise, pointed straight down above Vicente, shuddering against gravity. Arie Hon is holding them there, and Vicente can tell that once he lets go, they will fall down on him with all the force of comets crashing into land. 

“Why?” he asks. “Because I didn’t think we could reach you?” 

Arie Hon studies him. There’s no emotion in it. “I gave you the Silver Moray to keep Hoaqin in check, but you failed.”

Vicente flinches. He doesn’t have the Silver Moray anymore. Arie Hon had given it to him when he was young, asking him to prove himself, to uphold the family honour. Now Vicente is wondering if there was another meaning to it, this whole time. 

“He never beat me,” he says, dread clawing up his throat, spider-like. 

His father looks unimpressed, like he’d been expecting Vicente to have it all figured out. “You were meant to be something he couldn’t win against,” he explains, “your defence, your lack of belief—but you let him enter the Tower anyway.”

When Arie Hon had given him the Silver Moray, his first instruction to Vicente was to fight Hoaqin with it. He did, and Vicente remembers now how his father had his eyes trained on Hoaqin that entire time, even though he gave the Silver Moray to Vicente, even though he had approached Vicente first.

It was never about him. His father had never seen anything in him. He had seen the potential in Hoaqin to upend the food chain, and left it to Vicente to drag him back down.

“I thought that was what you wanted.” Vicente shakes his head. He starts to feel something indescribable, something ugly. “Even though I didn’t believe it myself, I was faithful to you. You wanted us to try to reach you, so I convinced him to do it anyway. I changed his mind.”

“Was that your loyalty, or was it jealousy?” Arie Hon asks, unconcerned. “Either way, I chose wrong.”

The Red October’s spirit is standing just out of arm’s reach. She looks like she was born from make-believe stories of galaxies and planets that Vicente had almost forgotten, like she was placed here specifically to mock him. Even her body language makes her seem miles away.

Vicente turns numbly to her. “You didn’t ignite for Hoaqin?”

“He didn’t come clean to me,” she says matter-of-factly, then fixes her grey stare on him. “Will you?”

A memory of a younger Hoaqin comes to him with distinct sharpness: on the patio, wet sand caught on the edge of his rolled-up sleeve, the deliberate motions he takes to avoid the fruit knife; at training, sprawled on his back instead of holding up his sword, asking, Will you tell me about the Tower?

Everything you want is at the top of the Tower, the stories all promise. Vicente didn’t believe in it himself, but he wanted to help his siblings climb. Hoaqin tricked them. The Tower doesn't mean anything to him anymore. 

There’s a dull ringing in Vicente’s ears. This is Hoaqin’s last dream, isn’t it, what he’s been chasing after, what he’s been climbing for—killing their father? Vicente will take it away from him, too. He’ll kill Arie Hon here. He won’t let Hoaqin have this. He won’t let Hoaqin prove him wrong again.

“I’m Hoaqin’s brother,” Vicente says bitterly, “and I’ll kill for him, if it kills him too.”

The spirit considers him for a long time. Then, slowly, the corners of her mouth quirk up. 

In Vicente’s hands, the Red October ignites.

Ten moons appear overhead in time with his pulse—a circuit of white in the red sky, disorientingly bright—and are gone when his heart beats again. It happens fast enough that he’s almost convinced he’s imagined it, but when he steps back, guard up, there’s a ring of afterimages burned in his field of vision that he can’t blink away.

“Red October,” the weapon whispers liltingly in his ear, “the tenth moon that nears the Tower and drives explorers mad. They try to reach it, but they never can. Give them something true to chase after—something to defend.”

Vicente goes cold. She reminds him of the first time he tried to touch the shinsu moon and watched it break like glass, and shame ripples through him all over again. She must be talking about all the many people before him who have done the same thing, realising they had only been hunting something out of reach.

He sweeps the Red October sideways, and in its wake, dead things start to rise: white souls of rankers and regulars alike, some of them still holding chipped weapons, arsenals of flickering lighthouses tumbling out after them. The sound of broken whispering climbs louder as they claw their way out of the blade, faceless and uncountable, and Vicente starts to pick out words from within the jumble, things like far and mine. 

The ghosts settle. They don’t attack, but when the rest of Arie Hon’s swords fall down at Vicente, they defend, clambering up shockingly fast to block the blades with childlike eagerness, as if it were as easy as catching a paper plane, or pulling a kite off-course by its line.

Through the debris, Arie Hon is looking right at him. It’s startling. There’s a faint smile on his face stretching wider and wider, his appearance and his demeanour not quite matching each other. The ghosts move to guard against him, like a line of soldiers devoted to a throne.

“The Red October wants you to join her ranks, Vicente,” he warns, gesturing at the ghosts, something ablaze in his cold eyes. “She only ignites for impossible things.”

Vicente feels feverish. It’s the second time Arie Hon has ever said his name.

“Father,” he says, as evenly as he can. “Please don’t tell me what’s impossible.”

He shifts his centre of gravity forward, heartbeat thudding in his fingertips at the Red October’s hilt, and lowers its point in a fool’s guard, as flexible as possible. It moves exactly like he wants it to. He notices now how heavy the sword is, balanced, made for defence. Almost as perfect as the Silver Moray. 

He doesn’t know anything about Arie Hon’s fighting style, so he can only play safe. He’ll let Arie Hon come to him. Barely a moment after he decides, Arie Hon is darting across the sand, calling up more shinsu swords in the sky to follow after him. 

The swords slam down with jarring force, and all Vicente can do in time is react. He parries the field of attacks—world thinning down to muscle memory, remembered lines, keep your feet parallel —and swings around, paranoid that his father might have gotten behind him. Then he sees that the Red October’s spirits have locked Arie Hon back, weapons and forgotten items spinning in the air, bearing the brunt of the impact. The dead are endless. 

This is the Red October, Vicente thinks, oddly dazed, and this is her army. No wonder it was sealed away. He’s never loosened his guard in the middle of a fight before, but he feels like he might get away with it now. With this sword, he might actually last. He might actually survive. 

“So I wasn’t really wrong,” he says wonderingly. “You’re a scrapbook king with paper crowns. Hoaqin always believed me when I told him that. He used to say he could just rip you apart.”

The smoke and wind is blowing Arie Hon’s hair across his face, but his smile is still there, unflinching. At Hoaqin, his eyes go wide, the white light from the spirits casting all the shadows out of them. It gives the effect that he’s not seeing anything at all, even though they’re staring straight at each other. Vicente feels goosebumps raise all over the back of his neck.

“I see what this is,” Arie Hon says, standing very still, sizing him up. “You and him. A sibling rivalry you’ve turned into a fairytale.” His lips curl, like Vicente has left him with no choice. “Then let’s trade stories, Vicente. I’ll tell you one of mine.”

Vicente steps back, skin prickling. This isn’t who Arie Hon is supposed to be. He’s not supposed to look this frenzied, like his entire persona is breaking, like he’s taking Vicente seriously.

“People call this floor the glass ceiling of the Tower, the boundary where teams can only look up and dream. That started off as a rumour: someone hears a whisper of an unbreakable ceiling on the 100th. It gets watered down. It becomes a travellers’ song.” He turns the White Oar over, as if to inspect it, but his eyes don’t leave Vicente. “I’ll show you the real thing.”

An invisible ceiling materialises high above, so high that Vicente wouldn’t be able to sense it if not for how the air changes. It looks like nothing, but he can feel it coming down with a slow, crushing pressure. The souls from the Red October react to it instantly, flocking upwards by the hundreds, but each of them seems to melt away at a touch as soon as their hands meet the glass. 

There’s a light pulsing from the White Oar that brightens with each soul the ceiling swallows down. The strongest weapon in the Tower, the first sword to ever harvest a soul, and Arie Hon has ignited it for him. 

“The cruelest walls are made of glass, aren’t they?” Arie Hon murmurs, starting to walk towards him. “If they meet you, the White Oar will take your soul for itself.”

Vicente tries to get to where the ceiling seems to end, but another wall slams down before him that doesn’t move, only blocks his way. He scrambles to a stop and looks up. He can see the whole red sky through the barrier. The ceiling is still far, far away, but slowly yet surely, it’s coming down to him. 

No wonder Arie Hon can level floors on his own. Anyone who tries to challenge him—anything that doesn’t fit his narrative—will fall. 

“This is it,” Arie Hon says, walking towards him, “so pick a fairytale: the Red October, the White Oar, or Hoaqin. Play the part. Can you do it, hero? Can you hold up the sky?”

Vicente’s mind is racing. The edges of his periphery are going dark with fear. He has to try to attack his father close-distance and kill him before the ceiling gets low enough. He has to—but can he do it? 

The spirits blocking their path begin to thin out. Arie Hon is cutting a path out before him with the White Oar, shockwaves echoing from it, tangible. Vicente had never learned how to burn souls to fight, but he can recognise the overwhelming magic, hundreds of souls singed in each of his father’s strikes. The Red October is only making him stronger, but Vicente can’t just throw away his only weapon.

“Don’t call it that.” He thinks of David, Anna, Albelda, the life they could have had, and he raises his voice without thinking. “I just want to live. I want my siblings to live without him stealing it all away. Is that really impossible? Why do I have to fight so hard for it—why do we have to fight each other for it?!”

Somewhere, the Red October’s spirit laughs. 

Vicente keeps deflecting. There’s no time for counterattacks, no ripostes. He can’t get close enough. He’s done this same sequence of moves a thousand times with the Silver Moray, but it feels like he’s trying desperately to stay within the lines. 

Will you tell me about the Tower? 

Vicente, reaching up to the moon, watching it shatter.

Tell me if I should go see Arie Hon.

In Vicente’s chest, a thread seems to sever. It’s small, but it feels like it was holding entire skylines together. Arie Hon, Hoaqin, they’re both the same. They fight like water, and he is just a ship in the waves—so when they attack, he defends. He draws the fight out. He doesn’t win. That’s all he’s ever done.

demon, white yells, throat tearing. show yourself. answer me. how did I get here? answer me!

he’s back in the demon’s control. the world is still pitching sideways in his vision. he was fighting arie hon a second ago. a second. now, he’s landed in a jail he just barely recognises, full of red, pulsing space that reminds him of the chamber of a heart, where his voice barely travels. 

this time, something is different. wrong. there’s a sound of dripping water in the background that was never there before, getting faster and then slower, like the water pressure is being tampered with. there are cracks widening in the red walls, black and white light spilling into his red room, and suddenly he realises what this is—the barrier between him and his siblings’ cells are breaking.

this can’t be happening. it shouldn’t be. he sees albelda and david close by, each in hollow grey rooms. away from them, anna is sitting up in a dark chamber pooling with black water. diagonal, furthest from him, there’s an empty white cell where vicente should be. 

vicente isn’t here.

vicente is in control. 

white slams his fist into the ground, off-balance, furious. vicente has taken over his fight with arie hon. that’s his fight. his time. white won’t let him stay.

hoaqin! albelda calls out when she spots him, scrambling to her feet. there’s a deep crease between her eyebrows, cautious, like she doesn’t want him to get closer, but she sounds relieved. 

it’s white, white says. blood rushes in his ears, so loud he can barely hear himself. he crushes down the rest of the wall between them and steps over the boundary, red to grey, getting up close to her with a baseless anger. tell me if you did this. tell me how to get back in control.

if you want someone to blame, it’s not albelda. david’s hand lands suddenly on white’s shoulder, and white turns around, shoving it off. david doesn’t move. if it isn’t obvious, he goes on, we don’t know what’s going on either. 

then take a guess! white exclaims. tell me. 

david’s hands clench into fists. another spell came along. the demon that plays warden is fighting something stronger. what else could it be?

white looks around at vicente’s empty cell. one of the walls looks like it’s been torn to pieces, alternating between repairing itself and tearing back to shreds, like the demon is trying and failing to heal it. the scene behind the white wall looks red, sparking with colour and light, that looks a lot like the middle of a fight, and white realises that it’s showing the 100th floor. it is the 100th floor. 

if he gets to that wall, he might be able to tear back through to reality. 

he starts walking towards the light. everyone else seems to realise at the same time, because david grabs his wrist and jerks him back. albelda steps in front of him, barring his way.

we only need to survive, she starts, an undercurrent of panic in her voice. we don’t need to kill arie hon. vicente can defend the best out of all of us. i know what you think, but just let him stay. let him fight. 

you don’t know a thing, white growls. he tries to swipe her out of the way, but she catches his arm easily and twists it back. white’s hand opens up reflexively, palm up to the ceiling. 

he stares at her. she looks determined and sad at the same time. he can’t believe this is the same albelda he fought against just this morning, who didn’t have it in her to hurt him. he can’t believe this is the same albelda from when he was young, who used to spar with him and share music with him and tell him tales of the tower. it gets more ridiculous the longer he thinks about it. 

we have to do this, then? white hums, trying to remember the last time he fought hand-to-hand. what a waste of time. 

he drops down and sweeps his leg out. his shin catches at albelda’s ankles, knocking her down, but she breaks her fall with her hand and rolls back up to standing. white is faster. he’s always been. he’s already moving towards her, hands at eye level, but then david barrels into his side, using white’s momentum to throw him forward and down. his back slams against the ground, knocking the air out of him. 

you always said i was self-centred, david says, tackling white into the floor. the grey room shakes and rattles, like a box held up by chains. we’ll all die if anyone else takes back control. that includes you. don’t you get it?

white wheezes a laugh. he reaches up and curls his fingers tightly into david’s hair, yanking him away. it’s not hard enough. his neck doesn’t snap. david’s face twists. he gropes for a fistful of white’s shirt and tries to shove him away, but white keeps his grip in his hair, pulling david with him. his other arm skids across the concrete, and then it meets water—anna’s room.

you’re nothing, white jeers. you haven’t even seen our father. you’ve never even talked to him. how would you know anything?

david tries to wrestle him into an arm lock. white flips over early and lands his other elbow hard into the soft joint at david’s shoulder, forcing him to let go with a cry. white pulls himself up to his knees, winded, and circles a kick outwards at where he guesses albelda is coming up behind him. it connects at her lower ribs, and he can hear her breath snap off when she crashes into the wall. he pushes up to his feet and keeps going, running across the water to vicente’s room. 

i would be better off going back there than you! david shouts after him. at least i’d recognise it as suicide. at least i’d have the sense to run away!

david manages to loop an arm around white’s stomach, pulling him back. he lashes out desperately with his other hand, and his fingernails rake across white’s cheekbone. white grabs david’s hand, irritated, and twists until he hears something crack, then throws him away. 

anna runs forward to break his fall, her feet splashing through the thin water. you’ll kill each other, she says warily, catching david under the arms and hauling him up. don’t go back out there, hoaqin. you’re half dead.

get back! albelda screams at anna. hoaqin, stop. stop! i know what vicente did, but it’s not worth this. i told you. i trusted you to choose your life over a grudge, damn it—

finally, white crosses over to vicente’s room, where the endless white is peeling back, revealing the view from vicente’s eyes. he reaches up and rips the rest of the wall down, and sound and light whirl in from the outside. 

don’t you talk about life, white sneers. i’ve lived. you never have.

he tears through the wall to the 100th floor. 

White takes back control. There’s sweat dripping down the side of his face, and his whole body feels annoyingly unsteady. He can’t tell how much of it is from his fight with the demon, and how much is Vicente’s residual fear. On his left, the Oarfish’s shadow looms up, awake again after Vicente cut off his horn, and it seems to be fighting something again—the Slayer Candidate, maybe. The Khun would die to it in a second. White doesn’t care enough to check twice.  

When his vision clears, he realises Arie Hon hasn’t reached him. There’s a wave of white souls in front of him that White doesn’t recognise, defending him from his father’s attacks. This isn’t one of Vicente’s abilities. 

The Red October’s spirit is standing there, facing the battlefield with her arms behind her back, one leg crossed behind the other. When White turns to her, he swears he can see the silhouette of ten moons behind her—ten months—that disappear in a heartbeat, so fast that it feels like insanity, and he knows what this has to be.

“What did Vicente say?” White asks dangerously. “Why did you ignite for him?”

She notices him, and her expression falls. “You’re back,” she says. She has the nerve to act disappointed. “He told me what I wanted to hear. He told me a dream.”

She makes no sense. Without hesitating this time, White brings the Red October up, but she skips lightly out of the sword’s path, always keeping just out of reach. She looks at him with a strange expression, close to pity, and suddenly, all the ghosts vanish. Everything defending him—defending Vicente—disappears, vanishing into smoke, leaving him and Arie Hon on the sand.

Above them, there’s some sort of invisible ceiling, glass-like, and it’s coming down. This isn’t one of Vicente’s abilities, either. White has a horrible feeling that he knows what this is too.

He calls up a dagger, binding it with souls. He aims upwards and throws hard enough that his shoulder blade sings with the motion. It hits the barrier like he expects, and the blade melts into it on contact, like the ceiling is taking all the souls for its own. 

“You ignited the White Oar for Vicente,” White says to his father, seething. His voice is flat. He’s so mad that he can barely form the words. “Not even for me. For Vicente.”

Arie is watching him from straight across the field, unblinking, something unexpectedly forceful in his eyes. He looks almost manic, with none of the calm indifference that was all there before. White notices it, but he’s too angry to react. He just wants to hear his answer. He has to hear it to laugh at it, after all. To refute it. 

“He fought for you,” Arie Hon says.

“He fought for himself,” White replies, stunned. He can’t believe he even has to clarify this. “You saw him. You saw how badly he wanted my spot, to be me. He just wants to be the centre.”

“You don’t know your own brother. You don’t even know yourself.”

White throws his arms up, frantic. “What is there to understand? What is it? Tell me! He’s so weak. What makes him a threat? What makes him so different?!”

“He hates you so much that he’d fight for you,” Arie Hon says coldly, so much angrier than White has ever seen him. “And you. You admired him so much that you’d fight to prove him wrong?”

White opens his mouth to answer, to argue, but he finds that he can’t. For a moment, he’s speechless. 

“I told you to kill until everything else became meaningless,” Arie Hon tells him, his voice ringing clear and furious, as mad as White feels. “You’re not meant to think. You’re not supposed to have things that matter, things you believe in enough to change for.”

And then, suddenly, he gets it.

His father taught them about empiricism. Anyone who isn’t a byproduct of that is dangerous. Anyone who has something to fight for is dangerous. Hagipherione wished for souls to be free. Urek Mazino wished for the 77th floor. They all won. Everyone else, every other Arie, had no desire but to reach Arie Hon, an empty drive that got them killed, and now—here’s White.

This whole place—the songs sung and sculptures raised in Arie Hon’s name—is built upon control. His father had taught them all to come back up here for proof that they could never win against him. White looks up and wonders what could be there that his father wants to protect so badly, trying to hide it behind useless politics and laws and a philosophy that means nothing.

“Who are your enemies?” White asks again, just to make sure. “A Khun and a Slayer Candidate are here. A Red Witch broke into your floor, and you’d let them run off to chase after me?”

Arie Hon doesn’t look away from him. His eyes drag even wider. “I’ve owned this floor since the dawn of the Tower. They broke rules, but they don’t have reasons to overthrow me. You do.”

So his father had never been taking this seriously until now. The laugh from earlier, the acknowledgement, the mock bow, was nothing compared to this. Now, White realises, he must think White can really, truly kill him.

The 100th floor is one of the oldest foundations of the Tower. Take away Arie Hon, one of the pins threaded through its base, and the whole layer crumbles. Oceans will come flooding in to fill up the imbalance, unstoppable, bringing change with them—the one thing the Tower has always tried its hardest to drain. 

Maybe what White really wants is to prove Vicente wrong. He’s finally put a label to it all—the Outer Tower, FUG, wanting to kill Arie Hon, wanting to stretch out this fight to prove a point he’d forgotten to someone who no longer matters—and it feels good being the hero, being right. Being able to change things for himself. It feels so good being the only one. 

“And Vicente is my reason,” White says, testing out the words. He reconciles himself to it. “Alright. If that’s what it takes to beat you.”

The red in the sky seems to have faded halfway. White feels the adrenaline coming back already, pumping through him, frenetic. He knows Vicente is watching. He wants Vicente to see, for these last five minutes, just how wrong he was. 

He told me a dream, the Red October had said. White looks down at the dead weapon in his hand, the 13th Month that’s meant to be so strong, and starts to understand.

“I’ll let you in on something, father,” he half-whispers, the realisation making him giddy. “I told the Red October that I wanted to kill you, and she didn’t ignite for me. That means she thinks it’s possible, right? That it’s no use giving me false hope, because she knows I can do it either way?”

Arie Hon lunges towards him, making the first move for the first time. To White, that’s a confirmation. 

“Keep it a secret, okay?” he says wildly, forming Cullinan again. “It won’t be one for long, anyway!”

Even his father’s fighting is different from before, more unrestrained. He flits between genres, elegant then wild, self-assured and untrackable—if each step was a cut, if each dance was a sword. This is Arie Hon in all his splendour. White marvels at it first, but this new style is overpowering. It gets to him faster. 

White has to choose where he wants to focus his souls now: in his sword, or in the air. He can’t spend them unthinkingly on keeping up with his father’s attacks anymore, even though that’s what he wants. He doesn’t have enough to spare to summon Magnolia and keep it running. If he doesn’t maintain Cullinan with enough souls, it will shatter.

“I warned you,” Arie Hon says, stepping forward, forcing White back. “You never listened.”

White’s body is moving too slowly. Vicente’s fight hasn’t done him any favours. Trust him to mess it all up. White remembers how much energy Vicente wasted on keeping up his posture and his tight positioning, even when he didn’t need to. Fighting should never be that difficult. 

One of Arie Hon’s swords scores him above the crook of his elbow, and White swings the Red October diagonally to cut it out of flight, aggravated, but his movement doesn’t carry through the way he wants it to. It pauses midway, and the sword comes to a light, vertical stop in front of him. 

White feels a shudder race through him. It’s like someone else has taken control of his body. This is not his stance. 

He slams his swords down at his feet, hoping the impact will jolt him back in command. It doesn’t work. Someone’s old habits are creeping up on him: half-finished swings, subdued footwork that isn’t his, and then he hears a voice. 

—qin. Hoaqin!

It’s Albelda. She’s in his head. 

White squeezes his eyes shut, trying to get rid of the awful echo. The demon’s spell breaking did have consequences, then. His siblings are cowards. He knows it. They’re all cowards. They don’t want to take back control and face their father themselves, so they’re interfering with him now, when it matters the most. 

You’re burning up your souls too fast, she says, panicked. Let me do it!

He won’t listen. David. We’re dead. He can’t win. Just leave him. 

“Don’t speak!” White demands. He tries to fight, but their voices are reflecting in different directions, throwing off his hearing, his sense of depth. “Do you think I’m a fool? I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make me lose. Come out and do it yourself! Or are you too scared?”

Why would I do that? Don’t you think I want to survive, too? Albelda argues over him. Let me use the souls. I can help. Just listen to me!

Aren’t you sick of trying? David snarls, hostile. He won’t reason. You can’t change him. We’re not kids anymore, for god’s sake. You know what kind of person he is now. You’ve seen it.

White jumps back. Arie Hon follows him, doesn’t pause, and White has no choice. He burns more souls to keep his father back, and flowers bloom again across the sand, petals and twining white leaves hiding the rubble from the city. The ceiling is still there.

I know that! Albelda says helplessly. I’m not forgiving him, I’m not trying to change him. It’s just—he’s still here. He’s right here. How can you just give up on him?

How? David cuts in, voice rising. You’re asking me how ?! We couldn’t grow up. We didn’t even have a chance to grow apart! You know why, Albelda? You know. Because he took it from us! He took everything! All I could do was lie in that grey room and hate him!!

“Shut up,” White snarls, pressing the heel of his hand hard against his temple, trying to block them out. His heart is pounding almost painfully. “Just shut up!”

You’re irredeemable, Hoaqin, Albelda says. Her voice is shuttered, like she’s the one fighting, as if she’s the one getting hurt. You’re beyond mercy, the things you’ve done. I don’t want to know you. I don’t want to be your sister, but I can’t let you die. I can’t believe I can’t let you die. 

“You’re ungrateful,” White tells her. She sounds so pathetic that it infuriates him. All of them do. “I’m the centre. You never had to do anything. Anything! We’re only here because of me!”

We’re going to die because of you, Albelda shouts, her voice echoing harshly in his head. I’m trying to save you!

White isn’t just you, Anna says quietly. It’s all of us. We’re the ones who make you stronger than what you are.

White is ready to yell back, but Anna’s voice surprises him. She’s never properly argued with him before, never more than a few words. Even when he’d proposed the idea of climbing the Tower to her, she had just nodded silently, like she’d wanted nothing at all apart from staying together. 

i can make you strong, the demon had said to him, i can make you better. He’d asked Hoaqin for souls, a trade, and Hoaqin had given them up. He’d promised: I’ll give you four.

White remembers, and then he starts to laugh. He laughs without really knowing why. He laughs until he feels weak, until he’s almost doubled over, like he’s been holding it in for ages. 

White, he thinks, gasping for air. White. 

It’s just a name. It’s all a mess of misunderstandings. In some twisted way, they’re all helping him fight Arie Hon, even though they hate each other and what they’ve all done, even though nobody knows what they really want. There’s no turning back time. This is the present, and all they have is this title, this shared, monstrous history: family.  

“Fine,” he says breathlessly, smiling up at the sky, “fine. I’ll give you a chance. Help me. Serve me.”

Anna speaks to the firefish. Heal him, she says. 

The firefish wakes. Little girl, it says, toneless. He is irremediable. You want so badly to heal someone who hurt you? 

I don’t know, Anna replies, sounding exhausted. She’s small. She’s so small. White doesn’t feel bad at all. I don’t know. Just do it. Please do it anyway.  

The firefish pauses. For a moment, White thinks it might not obey, but it does. Flame spills out around him, and his bleeding wounds close up. When it’s over, he moves and finds it easier, quicker, like there’s almost zero resistance against him in the air. At the same time, he lets Albelda take over his souls. She never goes all out. Half his attacks fall immediately, but she keeps cycling just the souls he needs to fuel his sword, a low burn. 

David stays sullenly quiet. Vicente still hasn’t spoken. After this, White almost wants him to. Maybe if he hears his voice, he’ll get angrier—fight better. 

You’re running down, Albelda warns him. You can’t keep up that sword for long. 

White ignores her. “Do you regret not killing the Khun?” he asks, meeting his father’s attacks with renewed strength, red fire flickering around his wrists. “I might have to thank him after this.”

Arie Hon scoffs. “You think I haven’t dealt with a Yeon flame, or this demon’s spell? You’re not the first one, child. You’re not the champion you think you are.”

White grins. “Then why are you treating me so well?”

He lets himself relish in the fight, Arie Hon’s against his two swords. He gets hurt, but the firefish listens to Anna, healing him before his blood has the chance to clot, and then Cullinan cracks. At the next hit, it breaks, splintering down to its hilt, and falls apart. 

Albelda didn’t give him any fair warning. White scowls and repositions the Red October, swapping it over to his right hand. What a useless weapon. He has to fight with just this one sword then, defensively too, but that’s never been his style. That’s Vicente’s. 

He tries to adjust, but then something makes him falter. He looks left to the Oarfish’s enclosure, where the shinsu that fences it off is broken, but the Oarfish is gone. There’s no blood on the sand—that whole, huge beast has vanished without a trace. Viole is walking out from behind the barrier, the Red Witch next to him, his Thorns painting a line up into the sky.

“What are you doing?” White shouts at them. “What do you want?”

Viole isn’t looking at him or at Arie Hon. White follows his gaze sideways to the right and sees Khun opposite him, Hatz’s arm slung over him, staring right back.

Arie Hon takes that second to get in front of him, using his leverage to twist the White Oar clockwise down at his wrist, the same move as minutes earlier, and disarms him entirely. Arie Hon catches the Red October before it hits the ground and throws it away carelessly behind him. White watches it glint, red and colourless, almost in slow motion, and then he loses it behind a wave of sand.

David sneers. You’re dead. 

Wait! Anna and Albelda say at the same time, and Albelda takes over for her: It’s not over. Get me to him. Get me to the Slayer Candidate.

White grits his teeth. He has no sword, and his father is zeroed in on him. If he can’t get the Red October back, or any weapon at all, if his sisters have no idea what they’re talking about, he’s as good as dead. He makes a run for it. The firefish takes away all his fatigue, so he jumps and slides over wreckage like it’s a playground, dodging swords, skidding around to the side of the beach. 

“I need the Silver Moray. The book in your pocket,” White calls out against his will, one of his siblings controlling his tongue. “Bam!”

He’s never called Viole by that name before. White doesn’t know which of his siblings knows him as Bam, but Viole looks up, caught off guard. He pulls out the Silver Moray’s spellbook, the Oarfish’s bite marks punctured through its pages. “This is yours?” he asks, expression darkening. “You stole this?”

“Give it to him!” Khun yells, running across to them, and Viole’s face changes immediately. He tosses the book to White, and then he’s dragging the Witch with him, racing across to Khun.

It’s hilarious to see. White gets it now. This Irregular—this boy who White has tried his hardest to corrupt, to pull out of virtue, the one who burned down the 77th floor, the one who is standing up to Arie Hon right now—has put his life in this Khun’s hands, who is everything White is, minus the spectacle. 

The Silver Moray is just a spell, Anna says, sounding like she’s trying hard to remember. The whole thing is a spell. I can fix it.  

She recites it. The words spill out from White’s mouth, tongue pressing against the backs of his teeth in unfamiliar cadences. The Silver Moray’s cover starts mending itself slowly as he watches. Arie Hon swings at him, but Viole blocks it like it’s easy, Thorns spinning, the clash resounding off his thryssas. It’s so ironic. He doesn’t block it for White. He blocks it so it won’t hit Khun.

The spellbook restores fully, the bite marks closed over with magic. White flips the book open. Khun turns around at the sound, and he seems to see everything all at once—the firefish, the sword, the glass ceiling above them. He mouths something, and White reads the shape of it: win.

Khun’s lighthouses come to life. He hauls Hatz up and takes Viole’s hand. Viole takes Hwaryun’s, and the four of them teleport away.

White pulls the Silver Moray out of the book. It’s beautiful, really, even heavier than he always thought it was. He’s tried to pick it up before and use it, but it never felt perfect. It still doesn’t. Now, though, White thinks resentfully just how similar it is to the Red October, how well-formed it is for defence. 

“You’re going to fight with that sword?” Arie Hon says, his long hair tangled from the chase, all over his arms. He looks frantic. He looks furious, but not at the interference—at White. White wants to laugh again. It makes him feel so special. “You’re not your brother.”

The ceiling reaches the tops of the very tallest trees still standing, lining the beach, bare-boned things with branches that disintegrate at a touch. 

“That’s the difference, isn’t it?” White grins. “His sword was a strong one, but it never was a winning one.”

The ceiling only gets closer, a quiet thrum that turns into a howl, and White realises in delight that his father can’t use his souls anymore, either. When Arie Hon attacks, the ceiling draws all the souls towards it and back to the White Oar before they can reach White, a wicked sequence. It puts a limit on his power. 

White feints to the right, then slashes the Silver Moray down at his father’s empty left hand, following an echo of Albelda’s swordplay. Arie Hon can’t call up more souls to block, and White’s sword connects. It makes a straight, shallow cut across Arie Hon’s palm, right below where his fingers start, and he bleeds. He bleeds red.

White watches, enthralled, as blood wells up from the gash and traces down the curve of his father’s thumb, down his pale wrist, staining the edge of his clean sleeve red from the inside out. It looks like sacrilege. White feels like he’s sinned. 

“Come,” he says hungrily, still tracking the blood. “Don’t stop. I’ll dethrone you.”

Arie Hon still won’t extinguish the White Oar’s ignition. He must be relying on it to bring White down and take back whatever souls are still left inside him. That’s how he recovers, fight after fight. A monarch’s power comes from the masses. From the people who offer him their lives. 

White catches the White Oar’s next blow with the flat of the Silver Moray. The shock races back up to his shoulders. He presses harder until they’re up close, enough that he can see the dark rings in his father’s eyes, and all he can smell is sweat and metal. It feels different now, raw and gritty and intimate, and it’s so human. It’s better than any fight White has ever been in before.

This struggle—this is what he’s been looking for. 

The glass ceiling lowers down on them like a muzzle, stifling, until it’s low enough that White knows he can’t stay standing anymore. The points of his shinsu crown would’ve been swallowed up by it if it hadn’t been destroyed already. He braces the Silver Moray over his shoulder, preparing to knock his father down, but he gets beaten to it. 

Arie Hon pins him down, knee on his sternum, crushing. He presses bloody fingers to White’s face, swiping them savagely across his eyes in imitation of his red markings. “Here!” he says, ferocious. “If this makes you feel powerful, demon, keep fighting. I want you to fall with grace!”

He smashes the White Oar down, and White just manages to stop it from killing him with the Silver Moray. He pushes back, trying to breathe, feeling his own sword’s edge dig into the palm of his hand. It hurts like nothing he’s ever felt before, even with the firefish trying to heal him around it. The pain translates to anger, and then a violent admiration. He can’t kill Arie Hon. He can’t kill this monster. 

He tries to counter with the Silver Moray, but he feels it again—that weight, the off angle, the strange, defensive balance that he can’t get used to. 

I can’t help, Albelda hisses. She could never use the Silver Moray either. None of the rest of them could. There’s a loud bang, like she’s slammed on a wall inside the demon’s jail. Vicente. Vicente!

“Lost your courage?” White spits, tilting his head back to avoid the swords. Broken glass pricks at the back of his neck. “If you won’t come back, at least help me from there. Look how desperate your sisters are. They think I’ll lose.”

Vicente, please!

“He’s done all he can!” Arie Hon says, overpowering, all predator. “He’s not here to help you.”

You don’t have to forgive him, Albelda yells. You can hate him, but he’s all we have. We’re siblings. That’s not something you can give up. That’s not something you can just let go!

“What do you want me to say? There’s real moons Outside the Tower!” White lies. He feels delirious. “I’ve seen them. I won’t apologise. I’ll show you. I’ll bring them down to you—”

“That’s just a fantasy,” Arie Hon cuts in, eyes wild, pressing down with the White Oar. “Everything you want, everything you all want—they’re all just fantasies!”

“—I’ll put my sword through them to prove to you they’re real!” White laughs, choking, dizzy, thinking back to everything Vicente had told him as a kid. He remembers it all. “I’ll cut them all down their strings for us, so just give me this—one more thrill. One more story!”

The ceiling is almost on top of them. The Silver Moray starts pressing back into White’s throat. He can feel it start to cut in—and then finally, finally, Vicente speaks.

You still believe that? he asks, sounding familiar, sounding betrayed. Then try.

White’s hand moves. Vicente guides his thumb down, and it shifts along an unfamiliar angle on the underside of the grip instead of where he’d been holding it at the side. The degree corrects itself. Suddenly, he feels the Silver Moray the same way Vicente must have remembered it: heavy, fortified, perfectly balanced.

White burns the last of his souls, everything he has left, to reinforce the Silver Moray. The firefish flares over his skin. He shoves Arie Hon off his chest with the flat of the blade, then catches him under the jaw with the hilt, driving him up. The back of his father’s head presses against the glass ceiling. 

The White Oar takes Arie Hon’s soul.

The ceiling stops moving. It stops, and then it shatters with the sound of glass breaking into a thousand pieces. The White Oar drops to the ground, glowing with power, its wielder’s soul sealed inside it. Arie Hon falls too, the light and the craze draining from his eyes in one go.

“There’s one right here,” White rasps, looking up at the shinsu moon. It’s all he can see. All the red is gone now from the sky. He’d survived the ten minutes. “And you were wrong.”

There’s the strangest sensation of something being stolen away from him, something he’d never even been aware of having. It feels like a part of him. He wonders if those are his last souls—his siblings. His own. They’re all being burned away.

The world fades—not to darkness, but to white.

vicente looks out from hoaqin’s eyes. a hilarious mercy. he can feel all the souls hoaqin has collected burning down to the quick, but his siblings aren’t gone yet. he knows they’ll be the next. hoaqin turns up to the sky, catching a glimpse of the moon high up in the half-afternoon as he falls. 

there’s one right here, hoaqin says, and you were wrong.

how poetic, vicente thinks, how unfair, that it ends where it all started: on the 100th floor, under a glass moon.

Chapter Text

There’s a crack of immense power, an inverted sound of ceramic fracturing under huge pressure. Khun looks up, and a shiver runs sharply through his entire body. Something has appeared in the sky above them—an invisible ceiling of sorts, distorting the red sky beyond as it comes down with a massive, distant roar. 

The shakiness only gets worse when he figures out what it is: the White Oar’s ignition. 

Everything else goes inexplicably quiet in comparison, slows all the way down. In that stretch of time, the only thing Khun can feel is the devastating force from that ceiling as it descends. It steals his breath away. 

Growing up, naturally, Khun has heard stories of this sword and its owner. Long ago, the 100th floor became known as the ‘glass ceiling’ of the Tower. This saying has since become a warning, taken many meanings, but its first and true origins are simple. The White Oar is, and has always been, the strongest weapon in the Tower. In all its history, it has only ever had one owner. Its existence is tied to this floor, and to its wielder, so much so that its ignition has become the 100th floor’s moniker. 

Weapons like this are never ignited for the singular reason that there is nothing strong enough to stop them. The pace of this floor has changed. The countdown isn’t just for White anymore—there’s minutes left for every regular here until the ceiling reaches them. 

Time shudders back to normal, and Khun forces himself to look down, gasping in air. When he catches sight of the red of Bam’s thorns again through the smoke, he pulls Hatz forward with him and keeps moving towards him. Right now, that's all he can do. 

“The ten moons,” Shibisu says. His voice isn’t as strong as he needs it to be. He feels like all his blood has turned into ice. This isn’t human—nothing about this floor is—and he’s starting to lose sight of how he can still make an impact. “Is that the Red October?”

“It is,” Khun tells him. He must be yelling, but Shibisu can barely hear him through his Pocket, either. “Just hold on! I see Bam and Hwaryun. They’re right in front of me.”

Shibisu squeezes his eyes closed, but the light from the ring of moons is already seared into them. When he shakes his head, the ten afterimages blur into one unearthly, concentric halo that doesn’t look like it belongs anywhere in the sky. Shibisu’s never even held a 13th Month, and will never wield the Red October, but he’s never going to forget this ignition. 

“The White Oar is ignited too,” Endorsi tells him, trying to shake him out of it. “Look at the ceiling. No, just—look at me, okay? The moons are harmless, but the White Oar will kill us if you don’t focus!”

They pass behind a stretch of white tile lined with tall, glittering glass structures. In the momentary cover it provides, Shibisu tries to enter in a new command in his observer, but the air is so full of smog that it’s pointless. 

“I see it,” he hisses back to Endorsi. “I just can’t believe these weapons are active now, and all we can do is run.” 

Khun shouts something in the background. Shibisu can’t hear a thing over the roar of the ceiling and the burn of the moons. 

He wills his voice to rise. “We’re running west,” he yells into his pocket. “What’s happening? Where are you?”

The single lighthouse Khun left with him is still floating above them in invisible mode, and well below the glass ceiling. Shibisu is certain that the lighthouse is undamaged. Khun could have teleported to their location any time, but he hasn’t. Shibisu hates this, the feeling of all his information and all his sources going dark. 

He looks frantically past the buildings and towards the north where Khun must be, searching, unsure what he’s even looking for. He can’t see White or Arie Hon at all. He can’t even see the Oarfish, though it should be easily visible from any angle of this floor, even if it’s been slain. It’s like the entire creature has vanished, but Shibisu doesn’t want to believe that. 

Finally, he distinguishes the red of Bam’s thorns racing upwards from the red of the sky, where the Oarfish should be, but he only feels a spark of relief. He doesn’t know where the Oarfish could have gone, and that almost scares him more. 

“Hurry up, Khun,” Anak snarls. She’s gripping the Green April with two hands now instead of one, a sure sign that either she’s worn down or bored of waiting for the fight. “When can you get to us?” 

Khun calls an answer back to them: “Now!”

As soon as the teleport processes, Khun throws up shields with his remaining lighthouses. He feels like he’s blind in the air, shinsu spinning towards him too fast and from too many directions for his lighthouses to totalise their trajectory. The barriers hold up long enough for his feet to hit the floor, but there’s so much adrenaline burning up in his skin that he can’t tell whether he’s been cut either way. 

This feels like a whole new world from White’s fight. They’re still somewhere within the city, the area still crowded with empty buildings and sculptures and floating islands above. He’s landed in the midst of buildings and glass gates that clear suddenly into open avenues, every solid surface semi-transparent and slightly reflective, just enough to be disorienting. 

“Thanks for the shields,” Hatz mutters, pulling away from him and Bam. 

“Glad you’re awake,” Khun says lightly, though he’s never been happier to hear Hatz’s voice. “You didn’t miss much.” He does a quick headcount to make sure everyone’s still here, something he hasn’t had to do for a floor test in years. “Where are we going?”

“Don’t know,” Shibisu answers. He sounds simultaneously more frustrated and more relieved than Khun has ever heard him. “And I can’t tell how many regulars are after us anymore—it has to be more than one team now.” 

They’re far away from White and Arie Hon’s fight, but still close enough that the air smells like fire. Khun tries to make out Shibisu’s expression, but his vision is half obscured by glass bits and white haze. White shinsu is dissipating all around them, and Khun can’t tell whether it’s from his team’s chase or the Aries in the north. 

“We’re about to hit a dead end,” Bam calls. The glow of his eyes and thorns is one of the only things Khun can see clearly. “Unless we want to fight in water again.”

“How far is it?” Anak asks, pressing closer to hear them. The brief glare of the Green April’s blade lights up her face.

Khun squints into the smoke. Bam’s right—they must be a few kilometres out from the western beach, where they fought to get the crossguard. “A few minutes at this speed,” he guesses, trying to visualise it, “but it’s too empty. We’ll be exposed.”

“We don’t have to keep running,” Endorsi suggests. “Now that you and Hatz are here, we can just fight to get the last sword part, can’t we?”

Red shinsu arches towards them. Anak deflects it back in the direction it came from. Green and red light hiss through the air, contradictory. At the same time, Rak sweeps his spear through a set of gates and glass columns, clearing them a path to the side wall of a bell tower. They duck behind the wall, still exposed from three directions, but shielded at least for a fleeting moment. 

“We need the pommel,” Khun says, looking at Hatz. He’s the only member of the team who isn’t holding a part of the sword now, no silver tattoo on his skin. “You’ll have to take it.”

Hatz glances at Hwaryun. He must realise that she can’t take it—she’s not supposed to be here in the first place. Khun swallows down a snarl. She hasn’t said a word since they teleported. Khun doesn’t want to acknowledge her. She’s returned his last favour, sure, but he wonders whether it was worth the rest of this mess. 

“Do you know where it is?” Hatz asks. 

Shibisu shakes his head. His observer must be working now—he’s pulled down the screens, eyes flicking across the display. “There’s two teams on our left and one behind, and a couple more people coming from further south. We’ll have to figure it out.”

Without warning, the tower at their backs splits across its midsection. Khun rolls towards his right, squeezing his eyes shut against the glass shards that spray up from the ground. The bell tolls once, heavy, as the top half of the tower crashes down between them. 

Khun opens his eyes. He sees Shibisu and Hwaryun beside him, the rest of his team further away on the opposite side, with the other regulars coming from the left closing in on them. He scans his surroundings—nothing he can use. Hwaryun has nothing on her, and he and Shibisu are almost as defenseless. Gritting his teeth, he motions for them to follow, trying to make the most of the tower’s connecting wall. 

They round the collapsed edge, and Khun comes face-to-face with a woman, a hood hiding half her face and her eyes. She’s not on his team.

He lunges back to avoid the first swipe of her dagger, his lighthouses spinning towards him. She doesn’t give him a second to recover, slashing up towards the underside of his jaw. Khun blocks with one arm, barely stopping her upward momentum. He catches her wrist with his other hand before she can reset and calls ice to spread from his skin and across hers, up the angled edge of her dagger, dulling the blade and binding their hands together. 

It’s a cheap trick—temporary—but it works. The woman tilts her wrist back and breaks the shell of ice, the movement taking her a step back. It gives Khun enough space to unlock the lighthouse near his thigh, and it’s only a second before his hand closes around the handle of a knife. 

He pulls the weapon out from his lighthouse and meets her blade halfway between them, pressing her back. At the same time, Shibisu steps in from behind and catches her behind the knees with his leg. It doesn’t knock her down, but it throws her balance off enough for Khun to line up his knife with her throat. 

The woman rears to the side, her teeth bared. It puts her in line with Hwaryun, and when Shibisu’s eyes widen, Khun realises what’s going to happen. The woman lets herself fall back into Hwaryun, pulling her around to her side and pressing her dagger to her neck too. 

Khun doesn’t let his knife fall, making sure the point digs into the front of the woman’s throat. She does the same to Hwaryun. Behind her, Shibisu pulls her hood back, revealing white hair and a silver tattoo high up on her cheekbone—the last part they need. 

Lucky, Khun thinks. 

“Don’t you want the Witch back?” the woman asks, the shape of her sneer visible even through the smoke. “I know she isn’t expendable.”

This woman is alone, yet Khun doesn’t know who has the upper hand here. She might be bait. Her teammates could all be dead, or they could be one of the others coming from behind—and, as much as it would make things convenient, they can’t leave Hwaryun behind. He makes eye contact with Shibisu. They can’t waste time on this—no more than a minute. 

“Depends,” he says. “Does your team want you alive?”

For some reason, the woman’s eyes narrow at his voice. “You talk loud,” she says, her grip tightening on Hwaryun’s shoulder. She looks sideways at Shibisu. “Give me the sheath, and I’ll give you the Witch.”

“So you know the sheath is worth more,” Shibisu says, stepping into Khun’s view. He’s holding a suitcase in one hand. “Then give us the pommel, too.”

The woman grits her teeth, but nods. Khun remembers the lie he and Shibisu had told that first night: that the sheath was worth the most, and the parts of the hilt were near worthless. He keeps his expression blank, but he feels a fierce satisfaction that he’s been proven right again. Regulars only want to win. They’ll believe any lie told with enough confidence. 

Slowly, Shibisu reaches into the suitcase and draws out the sheath. The item is solid, silver, and looks heavy enough in the woman’s palm when she takes it. 

No one else is close enough to see except Hwaryun. She looks down at the Manbarondenna, then spares Khun a mildly curious look through the fog that says: I’m not surprised. 

The woman shoves Hwaryun away and presses the pommel into Shibisu’s outstretched hand in one motion. The exchange is over in seconds. Khun pulls Hwaryun forward by the wrist and wills a wall of ice to rise up in her place, cutting them off from the woman’s line of sight before she can realise the silver markings on Shibisu’s face haven’t changed. 

Shibisu throws the Manbarondenna back to him, and Khun stows it back into his lighthouse as they run, heading towards the rest of their team. “How many parts did you copy?” 

“Just the one,” Shibisu replies. “We got lucky.”

It’s harder to rejoin the fight than Khun expects. There are too many teams in the fray now, and other than Rak, Anak, and Bam, who are easily distinguishable, he can’t keep sight of the others. “Hatz!” he yells, barely avoiding Rak’s spear as it swings into the line of people behind him. “Where are you?”

“Here!” Hatz’s voice calls back. Khun tries to look for the flash of his sword, anything, but he can’t see Hatz at all. “This isn’t going to work. We need to run!”

They manage to push through to the next line of glass sculptures. There are people following them on platforms and rooftops above, but it’s clear that they’ve almost reached the outskirts of the built-up city. The scenery is going to clear out soon into just empty sea and sky, and they’ll be completely out in the open.

“We need cover,” Khun yells, smoke burning his throat. “There’s nothing out there!”

Shinsu lashes towards him, but he doesn’t have enough lighthouses left to keep his shields up indefinitely. He can’t tell how far above the glass ceiling is, though it must be coming down, slowly enough for someone to forget about it if not for the pressure and the sound. 

“I might have something,” Bam offers, coming up beside him and Shibisu. “It’ll get the other regulars away from us, but it’s not ideal.”

“Neither is that,” Shibisu says, motioning at the beach. “Unless your idea is also out to kill us?”

“Maybe,” Bam admits. “But I think the White Oar will kill it first.”

He opens his Inventory and takes out the White Heavenly Mirror. The blade flashes, and Khun laughs, more impressed than shocked, when he realises what’s locked inside it. He’d been wondering where they went—both the dagger and the beast.

“Do it,” Khun tells him. “Good thing the Oarfish has a soul.”

“And a heart,” Bam adds, smiling for just a moment. 

The ground underfoot quickly transitions from solid stone to grey sand, dipping under Khun’s weight, slowing him down. It isn’t long before the glass sculptures and buildings thin all the way out, and they’re finally stepping into the western beach, dizzyingly empty, in the clear. 

Bam turns back towards the city. He lifts the White Heavenly Mirror up to his chin, takes aim, and throws it straight forward. As Khun watches, the dagger’s surface gleams with a fractured reflection, and the Oarfish is released from the blade. With an agonised, piercing cry, it hits the ground, its massive serpentine body twisting. It’s missing both its horns, and it’s furious. 

The Oarfish’s body winds up large enough to cut off his team from the other regulars behind them, dividing the beach and the city. It snaps towards the regulars still in the city, the ground shaking with the force of its movement, and there’s a horrible crunch of sharp teeth. Khun thinks for a second that they’re safe like this, covered in the shadow cast by its body, but then the end of the Oarfish’s tail sweeps out in the sand towards them, unnaturally fast, throwing them off their feet. 

Khun pushes himself up, sand and smoke gritty in his eyes and under his tongue, but the Oarfish’s tail swipes again. This time, when it hits, he’s thrown all the way into the water. He tries to breathe in instinctively, unprepared for the shock, but chokes on saltwater instead, swallowing it down. The sound of the fight deadens briefly into something dense and indistinct. Foam and silt rush around him, dark and directionless. 

His fingers dig into the bank and he pulls upwards until his head breaks the surface, gasping in air. He blinks water out of his eyes and forces himself to his feet and onto the sand. Amidst the mayhem, the only person he can make out on the shore is Shibisu.

“This is chaos,” Shibisu yells, trying to reach him, hands up to shield his face. “We can’t hold out for this long against the Oarfish!”

“It got the other teams away from us,” Khun replies, still trying to even out his breathing, struggling to move closer with his clothes weighed down by water. “That’s what we needed.”

There are only a few flashes of shinsu around the Oarfish’s head now, of what must be the last few regulars who have decided to stay and fight. Bam is there too, shinsu black hole spheres chewing up the light and smoke in the air and keeping the Oarfish’s attention away from them. Endorsi and Rak are on the ground, in combat with the few others who have made it across to the beach. 

The floating islands have all crumbled down, crushed by the glass ceiling’s slow descent. The Oarfish moves like it’s aware of it, keeping its body as low as possible, but it must know what’s about to happen. Neither the White Oar nor the Oarfish are selective about what they destroy.

As Khun watches, the ceiling meets the Oarfish’s head, just at the base of its broken horns, and takes its soul. The Oarfish cries out, baring its spirals of teeth as it falls—and it’s terrifying how wrong it seems, but Khun can’t look away. The scream keeps echoing as the eel collapses and finally hits the ground, metal-plated body smashing against glass and ivory, the remains of the city splintering under its dead weight. 

The ceiling doesn’t stop. It keeps moving down. 

They’re next, Khun thinks numbly. Them, and White, and the other regulars still alive. The White Oar will take everything from this floor, and now that it has the Oarfish’s soul, there are only humans left. 

“Don’t,” Khun says. He can’t hear his own voice over the sound of his heart pounding in his ears. “Don’t look,” he says again to Shibisu, louder, tearing his gaze away. “Just keep going.”

There’s a ring of trees near the far edge of the beach. The sand and sky stretches out so far, following the fallen body of the Oarfish, that the scale of the land seems to change—it takes too long for them to get there, to the rest of the team. 

They make it over to Hatz and Anak. Shibisu gives the pommel to Hatz with shaking hands, and the silver markings fade into brightness on his cheekbone. “We can finish this,” he yells, looking around wildly for their teammates. “We need to do this now!”

Bam lands next to Khun, bringing out the crossguard. Khun fumbles in his pocket for the grip tape, unravelling it with unfeeling fingers. Rak and Endorsi push their way towards them. Everyone takes out the sword parts they’ve been holding on to, but the sword doesn’t come together automatically. Khun’s mind races. 

“Here,” Hatz says, pulling Anak and Endorsi’s hands together. The true and false edge link together to form the sword’s blade. He looks over the parts, reaching forward and directing them until the two halves are finished. 

Khun takes the completed hilt and starts winding the grip tape over it. Panic is running sharp through his body, but his fingers are numb. He spares a glance sideways, and sees the bodies of the trees nearby start to splinter as the ceiling nears, crashing down beside them. 

“Hurry!” Rak growls, staring upwards. The howl of the ceiling is deafening now, pulling smoke and shinsu upwards towards it in a vortex. Everyone is yelling, but Khun can only see their faces move. Somehow, the only thing he can still hear is the thud of his own heartbeat. Someone’s fingers tug desperately at his wrist, and he finally understands the message: get down. 

Khun lets himself be pulled down onto the ground. Under the White Oar’s ignition, he has never felt weaker. He grits his teeth against the feeling and keeps going until the grip tape is fully sealed, and holds the hilt out to meet the blade.  

The two halves of the sword bind slowly together, silver threads of magic spinning out into the air and illuminating the space between them with sparks.

Khun wants to turn, but there isn’t enough space left to lift his head and look up. The howl of the ceiling turns out to be voices, countless souls without bodies used to fuel a king’s weapon. Millions of souls. More. 

He presses himself down into the sand. Everyone has laid down their weapons, trying to make themselves as small as possible. Bam has deactivated his thorns. They look at each other as the sword burns silver, and Khun has the sudden, overwhelming thought that he will end up as one of the souls in the White Oar, will never get what he wants from higher up the Tower, and will never see Bam again. 

In the back of his mind, he hears the sound of a piano. 

He closes his eyes. 

There’s a bright flare of silver light. Khun feels a jolt run up his arm as the blade and hilt finally snick together, magic twining one last time around the weapon and sinking in, and the test sword completes. 

He feels the ceiling stop right above them. Then it shatters with an unmistakeable, resounding break, fractured pieces of it floating upwards and dissolving into thin air. In that same moment, everything left on this floor seems to scream, like it knows just how close it was to being destroyed—wind tears through the clearing, and the sea churns, wave patterns disrupted, foam lurching onto the shore—then that, too, stops. 

In the aftermath, the world goes eerily still, and very silent. 

Khun rolls onto his back, breathing hard, too dizzy to bring himself to do anything else. The sound of the piano is gone. His ears are ringing, unaccustomed to the abrupt silence, and there is no other sound. No fights. No monsters. 

The test sword is still here. It lies just above him, fully assembled, close enough that Khun can see it glowing faintly silver in the corner of his eye. 

“We won,” Khun whispers, but it sounds wrong even as the words leave his mouth. 

“We passed,” Shibisu mutters shakily. His voice is hoarse. “We passed,” he repeats slowly. "But nothing's happening. Why is no one coming to us?”

Distantly, Khun notices that there is no more red in the sky. Suddenly, he realises how cold he is, a cold that seeps dread-like into his chest. So White had survived the ten minutes then, maybe even killed Arie Hon—but if he had, then why isn’t he making a sound? 

He pushes himself up to his elbows. The line of trees near them has completely fallen, trunks snapped and sunken deep into the sand, dry branches everywhere. There seems to have been a house beside them, but it has been crushed too. It looks vaguely familiar. After a moment, Khun recognises it as where they’d ended up when they first found the crossguard on the western beach—where Hoaqin had that strange look on his face. 

Just outside, there’s a fallen tree with its branches covered in white flowers that stand out amidst all the dead and broken things. Magnolias, Khun thinks, surprised. 

Every flower in his home is made of glass. He wouldn’t have recognised these ones if not for one of White’s attacks he’d seen earlier, where he had recreated the flowers sharp-edged with souls and shinsu. In real life, each magnolia is a simple, soft arrangement of petals, white and oddly clean. Khun can’t believe that Hoaqin could have held this dear enough to kill with it.  

“We need to find White,” he mutters. One of them has to be alive: him, or Arie Hon. “Wherever he is.”

Surprisingly, it’s Hwaryun who replies. She’s looking at the magnolias too, her face unreadable. “North,” she says. 

.

“You know she’ll never look at you,” Aguero says lightly, walking up the hallway. “You don’t have to keep doing this.” 

Today, his sister is playing a sunny piece that reminds him of orange skies. He knows she can see their reflections in the surface of the piano. Kiseia knows this too. 

He sits down beside her outside the piano room. Kiseia looks worse these days, Aguero acknowledges, thinner and unhappier, and rarely makes eye contact with him anymore. She’s sitting in a grey coat that’s too big for her with her knees tucked up, cheek resting on one of her forearms. It looks uncomfortable, but her eyes are bright instead of wary, like she’s entranced by the piano. When she gets like this, Aguero doesn’t really expect her to reply. 

“I saw Maschenny today,” he says. “She was telling Ran about her visit to the 100th floor, where the Aries live. You probably haven’t heard yet, if you’ve been here all day.”

Kiseia shifts a little. It’s not exactly a sign that she’s listening, but it’s something. Aguero gets the feeling she hasn’t moved in a while. The side zippers and extra fabric of her coat slip from between her arms and hit the panelled floor with a heavy sound. 

Aguero leans back on his palms. That doesn’t mean he’s let his guard down, and Kiseia knows. She draws her shoulders up to hide her neck, as if that would stop Aguero from killing her, as if she wouldn’t be dead already if that was what he came here to do. 

“Do you know about the Aries?” he asks. “Their family is based around an idea—empiricism, I think it’s called. It says that you’re born a white slate, and you’re made through your experiences.”

“We aren’t Aries,” Kiseia interrupts, surprising him. He didn’t think she would say anything in response at all. There’s still a lot she hasn’t learned, and it’s obvious with how everything shows so clearly on her face. Her eyes dart to him, full of growing distrust. 

“But we’re similar,” Aguero replies, “the way winning is everything.” 

“Winning is everything in every family,” Kiseia says. “I can’t think of one where someone would rather lose.” She seems to have snapped out of her music-induced trance, and now she is looking at him suspiciously, completely focused. It’s enough to make someone think Aguero was pointing a weapon at her, but by now, he is used to her hostility. 

Aguero raises his eyebrows. “It’s good that you know that,” he says evenly. He looks back at his sister, watching her hands move quickly across the keys. “She knows, too. She’s trying to live up to it.”

“She’s doing it for her family,” Kiseia says sharply, over the crescendo of the music. “She doesn’t have to bring home jewels or become a Princess, does she? Winning matters to her because she wants to win, because it makes your mom happy.”

“If she didn’t win her fights, she’d be dead,” Aguero tells her gently. “She’s just a blade, Kiseia. She doesn’t know how to be anything else. Nobody ever taught her how to love.”

“You’re only saying that because she doesn't love you,” Kiseia argues. “She likes me. She gives me things. Look.”

He watches as she reaches into her right coat pocket and draws out a half-handful of gems. She tilts her cupped hand so he can see, apparently scared to drop them. All of them are true blue, but some of them have lost their lustre, as if she’s been holding onto them for a very long time. 

Aguero tries not to, but he feels sorry for her. “She really gave those to you?” he asks. 

Kiseia gnaws on her bottom lip. She hasn’t been in one of the Khun fights yet, but Aguero suspects she knows: these blue stones, the ones that don’t float, are the least valuable draws from the prize pool. Most winners throw these away, unable to trade them for items or clothes. His sister must have pitied her. 

“It doesn’t matter.” Kiseia drops the gems back into her pocket and slides the zipper closed. “She’s the only one winning for the family branch right now. I’ll start winning too, and I’ll give all of my prizes to her. Then she can stop all this—stop working so hard on her own.”

Aguero doesn’t know whether to be surprised at how fiercely she believes in this, the story and the ending she’s spun up in her head. 

If Aguero wants to change the system, he’ll have to overturn it completely. That might mean beating Khun Eduan, and even thinking it makes it seem impossible. 

Eduan has tricks and a whole treasury of items and a spear that could crack the Tower in half. Their family isn’t like the Aries, who learn swordplay from their father in hopes of using it against him; Khun sons are given nothing at all. Aguero supposes Kiseia’s wish is much more reasonable, even though realistically, it is just as impossible as his. 

“Good,” he says, mostly to himself. 

The piano piece ends with a bright, beautiful chord. His sister plays it with no expression. She moves her hands back to the opening position and readjusts her foot to rest on the rightmost pedal. She doesn’t look behind her, or at their reflections. She starts the piece over. 

A Princess is shaped by her family, paid for with suspendium jewels. A Princess must be beautiful, powerful, must have multiple talents and skills. A Princess must not think for a second what might happen if she were to fail. She cannot have people to count on, people to bring her down, and people to live for other than herself. 

The cold starts to sting Aguero’s palms. He stubbornly stays in the same position, just because he knows his mother doesn’t care enough to snap at him to sit up straight like she would with his sister. He could get away with just about anything, really, but he hasn’t tested the limits. He thinks there’s no point in trying.

His sister makes it through an entire third of the piece before Kiseia speaks again, catching a lull in the music.

“Good?” she repeats reluctantly. “Why?”

“You have a reason,” Aguero answers. 

Truthfully, Aguero thinks the only thing Kiseia can do is follow in the footsteps of his sister. He doesn’t know how far Kiseia’s reason for fighting will get her, but the fact that she has one, one separate to the motive she’s meant to believe in, already makes her different to the rest of them. 

Better, maybe. 

Their home is cold and full of mirrors. Aguero looks around at the three of them in their fractured reflections and isn’t sure what he feels: love-hate, but it’s barely love. Not quite hate, either. They’re all just following rules. Each of them, at this moment, are exactly what the family wants them to be. 

Aguero wonders if any of them will try to break this chain—if it’s possible to in any timeline, any family, down any string of fate. 

.

White and Arie Hon aren’t moving. Their bodies are motionless, the ground under them a mess of red blood and sand and glass. The firefish floats silently, unblinking, over them, but they’re not coming back to life. 

The red in the sky has lifted entirely. The smoke has started to clear, letting Khun see the full scale of their fight. He knows, almost certainly, that the 100th floor has never seen such complete destruction. As far as he can see, all the huge glass structures and their sprawling foundations have been shattered to a wreck of brittle pieces, as if the city put up no more resistance than a field of glass flowers. 

The firefish has healed all of White’s external wounds, but he’s still covered in blood. He smells like it. He’s still breathing, Khun realises, but his eyes are startlingly empty, his pupils constricted to points. He hasn’t responded to their voices at all, like all the consciousness has been burned away from him, and the lack of anger in his face makes him entirely unrecognisable. 

Khun tears his gaze away from the bodies, gritting his teeth. He has the same sick, sinking feeling in his stomach as when he’d watched the Oarfish die—the slow, sick realisation that it can only have been slain by something even greater. 

“He’s used all his souls,” Hwaryun murmurs. She stops a few feet away and turns her body towards the red maze—destroyed now, collapsed into itself—where her old home was. Her gaze stays fixed on Arie Hon, indecipherable. She looks like she doesn’t know what to feel. 

“What can we do?” Khun asks.

The wind blows Hwaryun’s hair across her eye. She doesn’t move to push it out of her face, and she doesn’t look up from Arie Hon. She says: “Nothing.”

Khun had been expecting that answer, but he grimaces anyway. He’d been prepared for White to lose, to die, even, but seeing it in front of him is different.

You got what you wanted, Khun thinks, so why aren’t you acting like it? He wants to round on Hwaryun for the betrayal, for the secrecy, but he realises that he doesn’t know what he thinks, either. He can’t shake the seething sense that they’ve lost more on this floor than they were ready to—but in the back of his mind, he’s resigned to the fact that maybe, this is the only way it could have gone. 

White won. They’ve won, but for the first time in a while, it doesn’t feel that way. 

Khun thought this floor would be no different to any of the others. The more time they spent here, the more he felt like there was something he was meant to find, or a question he should have answered. He thinks now that he’ll have to leave with it unanswered, without even knowing what the question was. 

“He could have held onto the Tower for longer,” Bam murmurs. “It’s like he just chose to give it up here.”

Khun nods. “For his father,” he says, feeling sick. He wants to say that he can’t believe it either, but it isn’t true. “But we knew that. We knew this floor was going to be his.”

“Is that what happens in the 10 Great Families?” Bam asks. He’s looking at Khun so intensely that Khun wants to turn away. There’s the unspoken question: Is that what you’re going to do, too?

By the way Bam’s expression changes, Khun supposes he knows that Khun can’t give him an honest answer. 

“Does anyone know what he wished for?” Shibisu asks.

“No,” Endorsi admits, her voice tight. She has never really been hostile towards White, not for a while, but her attitude has changed over this floor, since David took over Hatz. Rightfully so. “Someone like him… I can’t even guess.”

Khun looks at Arie Hon again. He seems to be in the same state as White, drained of souls, but the only red on him, in comparison, is from a single cut on the inside of his left hand. The firefish hasn’t healed him, and so blood is still sliding from the gash almost gracefully, like it’s a dance, down his wrist and onto the sand. 

A shiver kicks through Khun’s body all over again. Anyone looking at this would think that this wasn’t meant to be a tie. This fight shouldn’t have been close in any way. No Arie child is meant to survive. 

“It won’t have been anything important,” Khun says. He thinks fleetingly of the magnolias Hoaqin left behind, the house that might have been his, but convinces himself that it was most likely nothing. It’s easier, now, to think of his history as nothing. “I don’t think he’s ever wanted anything else.” 

Shibisu’s mouth twists. “But the reason he ended up like that… I never thought there could be a reason, but there has to be one.” He trails off, seemingly frustrated. “I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

White has never shown himself to them as anything else. They all know what White has done, and no one needs reminding of it. There is no good in his character to acknowledge at all. Still, when Hoaqin and his siblings fought behind the barrier yesterday, it had made Khun wonder what exactly White entered the Tower for. 

He remembers how angry Hoaqin has always been, and how bitter, how tiredly disdainful Vicente was in comparison. Two people—five—who have spent their whole lives hating each other, taking from each other. The Tower makes it more than easy. Siblings break apart all the time. 

For a brief moment, Khun thinks of the magnolias again. He tries to picture the Arie siblings when they were younger, imagining their voices and their distinct personalities and what they might have looked like, huddled close together to watch the first magnolias unfurl. Or maybe they had never been so close. Maybe they had each walked past the saplings as strangers, weeks apart, different times of day, knowing that they were predestined to leave it behind for the Tower.

Either way, Khun reminds himself, jaw clenching, Shibisu is right. They won’t ever know. 

“If White has nothing left to do with this floor, then we don’t either,” Khun says reluctantly. “We should find a way out.” 

He wrenches his gaze away from the blood on Arie Hon’s hand. “The rest of the Tower won’t know that Arie Hon is gone yet. Right now, there is no administrator. We can’t say for sure what’s going to happen if we stay.”

Bam nods slowly. “We’ll take the Red October with us,” he says. “Can we get in contact with the floor above?” 

Hatz and Shibisu test their observers. Close by, the Red October gleams pure red, somehow above all the sand and clear glass. It looks deceptive in the same way the White Heavenly Mirror did a few minutes ago, almost as if it wants to be found. Khun feels something twist in his stomach, remembering the ten moons and the maze, how this sword has been nothing but trouble. 

When Bam picks it up and slots it into his Inventory, in its place along with the other 13 Months they’ve collected, Khun swears he sees a grey-eyed girl in his periphery, her arms and ankles crossed. From her body language, she seems disappointed. 

“Are we going to leave them behind?” Bam asks Khun quietly, sliding his Inventory shut. 

“We can leave Arie Hon here,” Khun replies. “He needs to be found. And White…”

The White Oar is lying next to Arie Hon, the light from it tangible, nearly overpowering everything else. It’s by sheer chance that Khun sees the Silver Moray, the sword positioned in a way by White’s wrist that makes it obvious he was the one who wielded it last. The Silver Moray was clearly the decisive weapon here, and maybe it’s this detail that makes Khun rethink. 

Vicente’s sword. Not Hoaqin’s—never Hoaqin’s. 

Khun hesitates. He crouches down next to White’s body and draws out the White Heavenly Mirror, one last time. 

“You’re saving him?” Hatz says flatly.

Khun stops, suddenly aware of what he’s doing. He meets Hatz’s gaze and is first taken aback by the open doubt in his face. Hatz looks exhausted, incredulous, hair still plastered to his jaw, like he’s too tired to argue but can’t believe that Khun doesn’t want to leave White behind.

Immediately after, Khun wonders why he’s surprised at all. He’s the irrational one here, wanting to take White with them, and he doesn’t even think he fully understands why himself. It’s selfish, what he’s doing—that much is clear, even to him, so he doesn’t give himself time to question why he’s made this choice. 

“Are you serious?” Hatz asks, stepping forward. “Someone will find out we took him with us, and it’s going to end badly. You know his reputation. You helped create it.”

“I do,” Khun assures him, lowering the dagger. “But nothing’s going to change whether we have White with us or not. He hasn’t been our enemy in a long time.”

“That never made us allies,” Hatz says dangerously. “There are still people in power who would give anything to have him killed. Knowing he’s tucked away in a dagger makes him an easier target. Makes us one, too.”

“He might come in useful on the upper floors,” Shibisu says slowly, like he’s trying to give Khun the benefit of the doubt. “Having White could give us some sort of leverage.”

Anak interjects. “We don’t want to make that trade.” Her eyes flick down, then back up, cautious. “The Tower’s seen enough of him, either way. We don’t need to bring him any higher than this.”

Hatz takes another step forward. He still has the test sword in his left hand. Khun can’t tell how sharp the blade is. He doesn’t know if it can be used as a weapon. 

Subconsciously, Khun adjusts the handle of the dagger in his palm. His pulse starts to pick up, even though he knows this won’t escalate. He’s ready for a fight, but this shouldn't turn into one. It can’t. This floor has been hell. They’ve come too far for that.

“What are you trying to do?” Hatz asks. “He was never a friend. You would never save his life.”

“I know,” Khun growls. 

“Stop,” Endorsi says warningly, stepping in between them, hands raised. She’s ready for a fight too; Khun can see it. Her eyes flash in disbelief. “Are you really arguing over this?”

“Endorsi—” Shibisu grabs at her sleeve and lays a hand on Hatz’s shoulder, trying to push them both away. “Just wait!”

“You know?” Hatz demands, talking to Khun, pressing past them. His right hand edges towards his own sword before he closes it in a fist, stopping himself. “So drop it. Arie children only want to fight their father, right? He’s had his fight. He was ready to die, and he’s still ready now!” 

“Then kill him,” Khun says, through gritted teeth. “Kill him, Hatz.”

Hatz doesn’t move. His eyes widen.

They all know Hatz won’t do it. Despite everything, he wouldn’t do White such an indignity. 

Khun exhales, heart thudding in his ears. He doesn’t feel angry at all—just cold, strangely. He hopes Hatz can’t see it in his face, or at least not as clearly as Khun can see the feeling in his. 

“There is no way to save him,” Khun says coolly. “I just don’t think he deserves finality.”

He’s not lying, not exactly, but he feels like he is. He feels like he’s putting up a front. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Bam watching him. He hadn’t even moved to interfere. Bam thinks that he and White are the same, thinks that Khun sees them as the same, and so he has most likely been watching Khun this whole time, waiting to see what decision he would make. Khun wants to tell him that this couldn’t be more different. 

“Just take him,” Shibisu says, his voice shaky. “We need to leave this floor.” 

There’s blood smeared down White’s eyes that’s starting to dry, a mockery of his old red markings. Khun looks at the staggering silhouette of the Oarfish behind Bam. It’s chilling to see it lifeless as it is, knowing that it’s now nothing like the monster it’s meant to be. Both its horns are gone, cut down centuries apart, and Khun finally realises what White’s markings used to remind him of—maybe exactly what they were meant to be. 

The Oarfish was part of all the old stories Khun had heard of. The degree of it all hits him. The 100th floor is never going to be the same. The Tower won’t be. 

He should let White die. He knows he should. White has done irreparable damage to the Tower, on a scale Khun can’t even begin to measure—but for some reason, he can’t see himself leaving White here. 

Khun slides the dagger into White’s heart and seals him away. It happens instantly, and then all that’s left of him is his red blood on the sand, and the Silver Moray. The weight of the dagger in Khun’s hand doesn’t change. It never does, no matter who is sealed inside. Still, it’s strange to think that everything White was—the violence, the havoc, the titles he’s held—now fits in a single blade. 

He stands and sheathes the dagger away without checking for White in its surface. 

Chapter Text

Animals in this Tower have skeletons of glass—a tempered, tougher sort of glass, the kind that is only transparent at certain angles. 

Hwaryun tells Khun this on the 77th floor. It takes him twenty-three floors to put the pieces together. She doesn’t have her staff anymore, but now Khun thinks of it and knows it was made of animal bones, just like the rest of the 100th floor. 

After the test, when they are allowed back into their floating ship, Hwaryun is the first one he tries to find. She’s in the same room as they were just before all this, where Khun had last seen White painting the red markings down his eyes. 

The red matches your hair, Khun remembers telling Hwaryun, remembers her half-smile in response, and it makes sense now why it was so fitting. That colour had belonged to her all along—the old Arie family’s red. 

“You knew about that floor,” he says. “You knew everything.”

Hwaryun only moves slightly to acknowledge him. She lifts her hands up a little from the armrests of the couch she’s sitting on, exposing the bare undersides of her fingers and her wrists. It’s like she wants to placate him by proving she’s unarmed. 

“There’s a rumour that what Arie Hagipherione wished for was just a pat on the head,” she replies, one eyebrow raised. “Most regulars believe that. Was I supposed to know any better?”

Khun feels the muscles in his face tighten. Not for the first time, he wishes he could get the answers he wanted out of her by force. He sinks down on the lounge opposite her, leaving his legs uncrossed, taking up space. The room is wrapped in window walls, letting in the darkness from the sky outside. It looks like Hwaryun has been sitting here by herself, waiting for night.

”You know what I’m talking about,” he says. The sudden anger sharpens his tone into something cold. “If you just wanted revenge on Arie Hon, you could’ve told us that. There was an easier way to win than betray us.”

“You were going to betray White,” Hwaryun counters easily. 

“If he matters so much to you, you should join him,” Khun offers, vicious. He’s so exhausted that he might just do it. “I’ll lock you in the dagger next time. Little white room, and your saviour next to you.” 

Hwaryun’s eyebrows draw together. “You haven’t eaten yet,” she notes. “You haven’t slept. Is this all you’ve been thinking about—how it could have gone?”

Her voice is flat—not scornful, but not kind either. Khun decides to wait a moment to give Hwaryun a chance to say something else, but she doesn’t. Her hands have fallen back down to the armrests. It’s too dark for Khun to tell whether her nails will leave marks in the leather. 

“That’s why I’m here,” Khun says, by way of an answer. “It would’ve cost us so much less if you hadn’t given White the Red October.”

Hwaryun blinks at him. She asks in the same tone: “Really?”

Another reminder: this is fate, sitting in front of him. Khun still wants to defy it. Would White have fought Arie Hon if Khun hadn’t called up that favour from Hwaryun? Would things have ended any differently if the Arie siblings had won against Hoaqin, if Bam had taken the Red October first? Could they have passed the 100th floor without losing someone, something, at all? 

She isn't wrong. The 100th floor was split into thirds: his plan, Hwaryun’s plan, and White’s plan. All three of them ended up getting their way, but it had cost the others. Khun can’t stop himself from thinking over it again, how their three goals could have intertwined. 

The sequence of the last floor had felt almost inevitable, too fast, like the rush of a landslide. Khun recognises that maybe, that there might not have been any other way this could have gone. 

“I didn’t want to help White,” Hwaryun clarifies, before Khun can decide what he thinks. Her face hardens. “But Arie Hon was a common enemy of ours. What I did worked in your favour too, you realise? If White wasn’t strong enough to be a threat to him, Arie Hon would’ve gone after us.”

“Us?” Khun repeats. 

Hwaryun shrugs. “Viole. Even you. There are people who don’t want you further up the Tower.” Her gaze flickers sideways. “You keep enough secrets as it is.”

Khun doesn’t react. It’s not an accusation by any means, but he can’t tell whether she’s talking about the Manbarondenna, or the Soul Stirring Ladle, or the floors above. The fact that there are that many options as it is just proves she knows too much. 

“And you,” Khun adds, a little cruel. “You were cut out of that bloodline. We bent a lot of rules to keep you on that floor.” He leans on his elbow, suddenly curious. “You said Arie Hon forced you out because of his paranoia, that he thought getting rid of you could change the future. Was it this future?”

He remembers that, a long time ago, White had called Red Witches a species with filthy blood. Khun hadn’t wondered then what the history behind that was. Now, it makes sense as something Arie Hon told his children after he drove the Red Witches out of the 100th floor—another one of the Tower’s false tales. 

“It was,” Hwaryun says, almost smiling. Good play. “I saw his city razed. I saw a red sword. It was hard to follow. I didn’t know how or when it was going to happen, but I knew the outcome.”

The outcome, Khun thinks, tired. There’s so much collateral. Barely a day has passed since the 100th floor’s fall, but people all over the Tower have already begun to riot. White’s followers, new and old, are painting red across their eyes as a show of honour. Jahad’s military and FUG’s Elders have both been silent, but Khun knows better than to trust that silence for long. 

Hwaryun‘s lips curl. “We told Arie Hon his fate centuries ago, and he thought he could avoid it by banishing the Red Witches, as if we would be the cause of it. It happened anyway. It was bound to happen.”

Khun stares at her. He understands her actions one by one, but he doesn’t understand her as a whole: why she never picks a side, why she calls people her gods and leaves them to die, why she’s here. 

“Why are you still climbing with us?” he asks her. “You’ve gotten your revenge against Arie Hon. You’ve been up the rest of the Tower before. What’s waiting up there that you need to see again?”

Hwaryun shifts to mirror his stance, but it seems unnatural. She doesn’t break eye contact, even as shadows fall across her face. “I got what I wanted,” she agrees. “I’m not allowed to want more?”

“I didn’t say that,” Khun smiles drily, leaning forward a little. His knee presses into the edge of the table between them. “But you’re invisible in the currents, Hwaryun. You can only see fate. You can’t change it.”

Almost before the words leave his lips, he realises the answer. She gives him a strange, curious look, and it makes Khun realise maybe that’s exactly what Hwaryun wants: to see fate happen. 

Hwaryun must have seen hundreds of timelines where the waters stay constant, but here, in this climb, the Tower is changing with them. Bam is the evidence. White. The 100th floor. In all the places they have and will touch, nothing is the same anymore. Hwaryun must want to watch it come true in real time. 

“You’re getting it,” Hwaryun starts to say quietly, like she’s read his mind. “It’s not hard to see, is it? The Tower can’t be simplified to something like family, politics, or even to fate—but these small parts are what makes it change. It’s been changing. I want to be there to see it.”

Suddenly, Khun feels weary. He wants to ask what else bends for them. How many more kings do they kill? How many more floors do they destroy? How long will the rest of the Tower matter before its ceiling is thrown wide open? 

“Then can you watch without interfering?” he asks finally. “Without taking from us?”

Hwaryun tilts her head, still looking blankly at him with that one red eye. “You know,” she says in lieu of an answer, conversational, “I’ve always wished I could be honest with you.”

Khun realises, suddenly, that he’s approaching this all wrong. It seems, over the years, that he’s forgotten who they really are: Hwaryun, who’s betrayed and lied and used them so many times since the start, and Khun, who has done the same to her. She doesn’t owe him the truth. She doesn’t owe him a thing.

“We’ll have to compromise,” Khun says.

When word of Arie Hon’s defeat reaches the other wives, Maschenny pins up her hair, slides on her finest jewellery, and picks out a smart pair of heels. She joins in with appropriate solemnity and a few well-placed remarks, and pretends she hadn’t heard the news from Repellista hours ago. 

This far up the Tower, hardly anything gets through without reaching her first. Nothing goes on in the lower floors that she doesn’t oversee, either. This is the rare exception, and she only wishes she were there to see it happen. 

Arie Hon made a mistake. Maschenny had tried her best to warn him, to negotiate, but she should have known better than to expect anything. Hon’s family is selfish, and he’s just like his children; he has always focused on himself, his own position and his floor, rather than the rest of the Tower. It cost him, but Maschenny won’t let it cost her. 

“You must have heard,” she mentions later to Eduan, after she has slipped away from the others. “The irregular and his team have passed the 100th floor. They’re coming.”

He doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t. He hasn’t had reason to care about anything in centuries, but Maschenny knows this will get his attention. The glass ceiling has been broken open, one of the Tower’s last lines of defence, and now there’s nothing stopping them. 

“V’s son?” Eduan says, sounding amused. “I thought he was gone for good.”

Maschenny examines her fingernails, checking for any imperfections. It seems like she’ll be left behind the scenes again, but this time, she’s looking forward to it. It’s almost like her own little test of sorts, behind the laws and politics, one that she can’t let pass. 

There are wars about to collide, and more about to begin, worse than the ones they started on the lower floors. Just the thought of it stirs up a dark excitement in her chest, heavy and absolute, like a brewing storm. It gets a little hard to breathe. She wonders if this floor can handle it. If the Tower can handle it. 

“V’s,” Maschenny confirms, and can’t hide her grin. “But forget about him. Once they get here, the problem won’t be his son—it will be yours.”

On the 110th floor, half past midnight, long past curfew, Khun lifts the White Heavenly Mirror up to the light. 

It’s been a long time since he’s unsheathed it, but the dagger looks the same as always. It’s glowing a faint, celestial white, handle curved as if a human heart could slot in there like a puzzle piece. Khun tries to angle it right, tilting it back with his thumb. He stops eventually when the blade refuses to show him White locked inside, only his own reflection. 

There’s a faint buzz under his skin, a feeling that he can’t pinpoint. He holds the dagger still, a final attempt, and thinks back to that conversation with Hwaryun from so long ago. The Tower isn’t meant to be understood. Jahad and FUG, leaders and followers, destiny—Khun is smart enough to recognise he’s nothing among it all. 

He’s climbing the Tower regardless, though. That should mean something. Everything you want is at the top of the Tower, Headon had promised him, and Khun still remembers exactly what he’d said in response, exactly what he’d wanted. But the closer he gets, the more afraid he is, secretly, that he won’t be able to take it for himself. 

Khun finally lets the dagger fall, sick of staring at his own eyes. The 100th floor marks the point where the 10 Great Families start to rule, and so it’s where most of their children aim to reach. It’s also where most of their children fall in combat. Any remaining ones are barred from climbing higher by any means possible. 

White was never meant to survive. He knew it, but he’d done so much to get back to the 100th floor anyway, like he needed to prove to himself that he could do it. He’d given everything for it, even though it was all the wrong things. Everyone could see what he wanted—a single fight, an Arie child's fanciful, maniacal obsession—and he’d destroyed any part of the Tower that disagreed. 

Finally, Khun realises what he’d wanted answered on the 100th floor. There are things that he can’t bear to lose, but there are also things he wants. Though he’d never asked the question outright, Khun was looking for an answer from White that whole time. He wanted to find it in the outcome of the fight between White and his father, Hoaqin and his siblings, and he gets it now. 

White would have climbed the Tower a hundred times over to have his fight—and, Khun is sure, White had never been scared that he couldn’t spill the blood he wanted to.

Khun sheathes the dagger and stores it away. He recognises that buzz now as anticipation. Excitement. 

He wonders if White felt like this too, realising that he hasn’t been home in a long, long time. 

Khun ends up in one of the bathrooms on impulse, staring back at his reflection again, his blue hair and blue eyes. He thinks of the red slashes painted down White’s face—the violent, unforgiving impression they left—and he makes a choice. 

If White can make the narrative his own, then Khun will, too. 

So the night before they reach the 111th floor, Khun dyes his hair black.