He stood in thinning dust, shoulders heaving. The shield hung low on his arm, the baton far heavier than it had been an hour ago. His thigh ached from a spear, and fresh bruises throbbed.

  Jordan hovered a pace off his right shoulder, posture loose only in the way a man pretended. He kept his salvaged bar low by his thigh, eyes sweeping the treeline, bodies, treeline again—counting exits. His breathing was loud until he forced it quieter, jaw clenching against his shoulder's pain.

  Across the clearing, the woman leaned on the boulder. The glow around her faded, contracting to a shimmer at the edges of her veins.

  Cal forced his fingers to unclench from the baton.

  “You good?”

  Jordan let out a short exhale that might’ve been a laugh if it hadn’t been edged with pain. "He means you. He’s running on spite and bad parenting instincts," he replied.

  The woman huffed, the sound sharp and brittle, bracing herself against the boulder—a laugh caught between relief and disbelief.

  “Define good,” she said. “But I am not dead. So. Yes.”

  She straightened slowly, wincing as her weight shifted to her left leg, then limped across the few steps separating them.

  Up close, Cal could see the cut on her arm was already closing. The blood had slowed to an ooze. The angry red of torn skin was fading to something pinker, cleaner.

  He stared.

  “You just healed,” he said. It came out more accusatory than he intended.

  “Yes,” she said. “That is kind of my thing.”

  Jordan’s mouth twitched. “Must be nice. I’m over here trying to willpower my tendons back into place.”

  Cal shot him a look.

  Jordan lifted his free hand in surrender, but his eyes stayed locked on Cal’s stance, on the way his weight favored the bad leg.

  The woman smiled a little as she spoke, but the humor barely touched her eyes. Those kept flicking between them and the clearing—wary, measuring, just as Cal had since stepping onto Floor One.

  “You really came running toward the screaming?” she asked. “Alone?”

  Cal’s heart was still hammering. The worst of the adrenaline spike was passing, leaving his hands shaking with small, uncontrollable aftershocks.

  He cleared his throat.

  “It sounded human,” he said.

  "So does a goblin dying if you do it right," she shot back.

  “It sounded human,” he repeated.

  Her gaze softened briefly, a cautious warmth flickering behind her guarded look.

  “Lucky for me, you can tell the difference,” she said. “I’m Anya.”

  “Cal,” he said. “Calen.”

  “Cal it is,” Anya said.

  Her gaze shifted to Jordan.

  Jordan gave her a half-bow, as if at a party instead of standing in blood and leaf litter. “Jordan. I’m the idiot who followed him in.”

  Cal didn’t correct him. It was true in the only way that mattered.

  Anya glanced around the clearing. Three goblins lay near her original spot, two sprawled by Cal. Another twitched at the brush’s edge, breath rattling.

  She turned from the bodies and, with determined steps, walked directly toward the twitching goblin.

  Cal saw where she was headed and matched her steps, moving in close beside her as they approached.

  Jordan drifted wide, bar ready, keeping the treeline in sight and guarding without announcing it.

  The goblin tried to raise its spear as they approached, but its arms failed halfway. The staff slipped from its fingers and rolled away. Its black eyes flicked between them, wide and bright with pain.

  Anya’s mouth pressed into a thin, unhappy line. She lifted her staff.

  “Hold,” Cal said.

  She flicked him a quick look.

  “If you are about to suggest mercy,” she said, “this is not the floor for it.”

  “Not that,” he said. “I just want to see.”

  He nodded toward her injured arm.

  “What you did. The… life magic.”

  Jordan made a low sound, half disbelief, half warning. “Cal.”

  "Two seconds," Cal murmured, not looking back.

  Anya’s expression shifted from wary to curious.

  “You have not seen abilities before?” she asked.

  “Not like that,” Cal said. “Not outside a screen.”

  Her brows rose.

  “First day,” he added. “First cycle.”

  "And you came running anyway," she marveled.

  Jordan’s humor slipped, just for a breath. "He wasn’t going to sit in a tree and listen to it. Neither was I," he said quietly.

  Anya held his gaze, then lowered her staff.

  “Fine,” she said. “Watch.”

  She knelt by the goblin, careful to stay out of reach of its teeth. The creature hissed weakly, trying to twist away.

  She placed two fingers lightly against its chest.

  For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

  Then thin lines of light bloomed under her skin again. They traveled from her shoulder to her fingertips, tracing an intricate branching pattern that reminded Cal of tree roots, capillaries, and lightning strikes all at once.

  The goblin convulsed.

  Its chest rose sharply, once, like something had squeezed its heart. Its eyes rolled back.

  The light in Anya’s hand flared, then snapped out.

  The goblin went limp.

  No breath. No movement.

  “You killed it,” Cal said.

  "I stopped telling it to keep going," she corrected. "Difference matters. At least to me."

  Jordan swallowed. His voice came out quieter. “That’s…clean.”

  She stood, brushing dirt from her knee.

  “Life element,” Anya explained. “It is not just growth and flowers. It is bodies. Cells. The push and pull between staying and going.”

  Cal’s throat worked.

  "You can do that to people?" he asked, voice wary.

  “I try not to,” she said. “Usually I go the other way.”

  She pressed her fingers lightly to the dried blood on her arm, focusing on the wound.

  A soft green light pulsed at her wound. The skin closed further, blood flaking away.

  “See?” she said. “More acceptable in polite company.”

  Jordan let out a breath through his nose. “Yeah. Polite. That’s the word.”

  Cal stared at the nearly closed cut, at the way her skin seemed to hum faintly with residual energy.

  "You got your first ability already," he said, wonder in his voice.

  "Floor Two," she replied with a short nod. "First active. A little healing, a little reinforcement. Enough to keep me on my feet if I am not stupid."

  "How long have you been in?" Cal asked.

  "This cycle? Since yesterday," she answered. "Cleared Floor Two. Came back down to sweep this one."

  She looked him up and down.

  "And you really do not have anything yet," she asked. "No prompts? No slot unlock?"

  “Floor One,” Cal said. “Today. Atrium gave me an orientation and a scan. Told me Earth resonance. No abilities until Floor Two.”

  “Earth,” she repeated. “Good. Keeps your feet where they belong.”

  “Sometimes,” Cal said. “Sometimes it just shows how far you can fall.”

  She huffed a laugh.

  “You talk like someone who has seen too many broken buildings,” Anya observed.

  “Hazard salvage,” Cal said. “Back home.”

  “Back home,” she echoed, then tilted her head. “The refugee belt? Upper rings?”

  “Outer district,” he said. “South side.”

  “I came in from the west,” she said. “Different slums, same problems.”

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Jordan made a soft, noncommittal noise, as if he didn’t want to step into the conversation but couldn’t help but hear the old map in their voices.

  For a moment, something like understanding flickered between them—fragile, built on nothing more than shared geography and the knowledge that they were here, alive, instead of spectating through someone else’s shaky feed.

  The moment stretched.

  Then Anya shook herself.

  “Right,” she said. “Talking later. First, we make sure nothing else is about to eat us.”

  They slowly swept the perimeter of the clearing, cautious with each step.

  Cal listened along the treeline. Anya checked each goblin, ensuring none were faking death.

  Jordan stayed close to Cal, drifting behind when Cal advanced and ahead when Cal paused. He kept himself between Cal and any dark that looked too quiet.

  Once they ensured the goblins were dead, the three returned to the boulder and sat near its base together.

  Cal sat with his back to the stone, shield against his knee, baton across his lap. Muscles throbbed with his heartbeat. His throat felt raw. His hands ached.

  Jordan sat on Cal’s other side with a grunt, rolled his shoulder, hissed, and leaned back as nothing happened.

  Anya sat with considerably less ceremony, staff across her knees.

  For a while, they just breathed.

  The forest began to reclaim the silence. Birdcalls crept back in at the edges, while something small rustled in the undergrowth and kept a wary distance from the corpses.

  "You almost did not come," Anya said eventually.

  Cal stared at the ground between his boots.

  “How do you figure?” he asked.

  “I heard it,” she said. “The hesitation.”

  Jordan’s head turned slightly, watching Cal’s profile the way you watched a friend approach the edge of something you couldn’t pull them back from.

  Cal glanced at Anya.

  “You screamed again,” he said. “Second time louder. First one I thought was…”

  He shrugged.

  “Could’ve been anything,” he finished.

  “Could have been the Tower testing you,” Anya murmured.

  “Was,” Cal said. “It does not mean it was not also you.”

  She studied him for a beat.

  “You thought about not coming.”

  “Yeah,” Cal admitted. “I barely survived the things I ran into before you.”

  He flexed his leg experimentally. Pain shot up from the old spear bruise.

  “Helping you meant risking dying even faster,” he said. “Leaving you meant…”

  He stopped.

  “Meant what?”

  He thought of his mother hitting the classroom floor. Sammy in the clinic hallway, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles had gone white.

  “Meant being the kind of person who hears someone scream and keeps walking,” he said quietly.

  The words tasted like rust in his mouth.

  “I am already doing math on my own family,” he added. “On how much they cost. How long have they had? I am not going to start doing cost-benefit on everyone else, too. Not if I can help it.”

  Jordan’s humor didn’t show up this time. He just nodded once, a small agreement that carried more weight than any joke.

  Anya let out a breath that was almost a sigh.

  “Most people on Floor One do not say that out loud,” she said. “They think it. But they dress it up as tactics. ‘I cannot save everyone.’ ‘Better to pick my battles.’”

  “Those things are true,” Cal said. “But not the only truth.”

  She nodded once.

  “You’re doing better than most,” she said. “You know your line.”

  Cal snorted softly.

  “Apparently, my line is run toward the screaming without a class and with a trash can lid for armor.”

  Jordan leaned his head back against the stone. “And drag your best friend with you. Don’t forget that part.”

  Anya’s mouth twitched.

  “You also have a baton that’s seen better centuries,” she said. “Don’t undersell your arsenal.”

  Cal glanced down at the old police baton.

  “It works,” he said. “Mostly.”

  “Worked well enough,” Anya said. “But keep smashing goblin skulls, and it’ll be sentimental scrap by tomorrow.”

  Cal shrugged.

  “If I’m alive to be sentimental, that’s a win.”

  “Fair,” she said.

  They sat in silence for a few more breaths.

  Then Cal cleared his throat.

  “So. Is this just what Floor One is? Wandering around until goblins get hungry?”

  Anya snorted.

  “Strictly, Floor One has a purpose. Tower didn’t grow this just to stress-test your cardio.”

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “There’s a cave,” she said. “Goblins nest there. Clear it, unlock the stairs. That’s your way to Floor Two.”

  “And abilities,” Jordan added, too eager, like he could talk himself into being fine.

  “And abilities,” Anya confirmed.

  Cal let his head thump gently back against the boulder.

  “How big is the forest?” he asked.

  “Big enough that if you wander without a plan, you die tired,” she said. “But there are patterns. Patrol paths. Density spikes. The Tower likes its little systems.”

  “I have noticed,” Cal said dryly.

  “Some floors are simple like this,” Anya went on. “Go here. Kill that. Take a thing to a place. The Tower does not always say it out loud, but the structure is there.”

  “And the others?” Cal asked.

  “Some floors have towns,” she said. “Places the Tower or its people have decided are safe enough to cluster in. You rest there. Trade. Get news. Sometimes you get stuck there because you cannot pay the exit costs.”

  “Rent,” Cal said.

  “Rent with monsters,” she said. “Some floors want puzzles. You stand in front of a door for three hours arguing about what the riddle means and hoping the corridor behind you does not spawn anything new while you ponder.”

  Jordan blew out a breath. “That’s cruel. That’s a landlord with extra steps.”

  “Some floors are hunts,” Anya continued. “The Tower sets a quota. Kill X number of Y. Bring back parts as proof. Fail, and it resets you back to the Atrium with a lower opinion of you.”

  Cal grimaced.

  “And some floors,” she said, voice tightening, “punish impatience. They look simple. Easy. People rush. They miss the second condition. That is usually when things get messy.”

  “You sound like you have stories,” Cal said.

  “I have seen folk limp back to Hearthpost missing pieces they would rather have kept,” she said. “Or I have not seen them at all. Which is worse?”

  “Hearthpost,” Cal repeated. “That is on this floor?”

  “Yes,” Anya said. “Half NPC, half climber. Established on Floor One. The Tower calls it a ‘local town.’ People call it Hearthpost because there is hot food and a chance you will not die in your sleep.”

  “Sold,” Jordan said immediately. “I was about to ask if it comes with pillows and emotionally supportive soup.”

  Anya gave him a look.

  “You really are fresh,” she said.

  Jordan spread his hands. “First day. Still have my original limbs. I’m trying to keep it that way.”

  Anya’s gaze slid back to Cal.

  “You are heading there now,” Cal guessed.

  “I was,” Anya said. “Until some goblins decided I looked like a snack.”

  She flexed her hand, wincing as her fingers brushed a deeper bruise along her ribcage.

  “And now?” Cal asked.

  She looked him up and down again.

  His shield hung at a tired angle. The strap had rubbed his shoulder raw. The baton was dented and scuffed. Sweat pasted his hair to his forehead. The bruise on his thigh had spread.

  Her eyes shifted once to Jordan’s shoulder, to the way he held himself too carefully.

  “Now,” she said slowly, “I am reevaluating my route.”

  “You do not have to babysit me,” Cal said quickly. “I can manage. I have been managing.”

  “You have been getting hit in the same leg repeatedly and running toward screaming without backup,” she said. “Which is admirable but not what I would call a long-term survival strategy.”

  Jordan opened his mouth.

  Cal shot him a look that said, Not now.

  Jordan shut it.

  “I cannot slow you down,” Cal insisted.

  “You will not,” Anya said. “Because we are both going the same way. And I am not leaving you to stumble around this forest alone after sunset.”

  Cal bristled.

  “I am not a kid,” he said.

  “Good,” Anya said. “Then you can make adult decisions like ‘do not sleep in a tree while bleeding if there is an actual safe place within walking distance.’”

  Cal opened his mouth, then shut it again.

  “I have been climbing for two years,” Anya said, gentler. “I have seen people tougher than you die because they would not admit they were tired. The Tower does not give you extra points for bravado. It just notes the data and moves on.”

  Cal thought of the system slab. Of the way the Tower had written him into its math without comment.

  “I need to find the cave,” he said. “I need Floor Two. I need chips.”

  “You need to still be breathing when you get there,” Anya said. “You cannot brute-force the Tower in a single day. It likes endurance tests. It stretches you out.”

  Cal scrubbed a hand over his face.

  Sammy’s face flashed behind his eyes. His mother on the couch. The number on the clinic slate.

  “If I fail,” he said, “she dies anyway.”

  Anya was quiet for a beat.

  “You think going faster means you do not fail,” she said. “Sometimes it just means you fail more dramatically.”

  Cal looked at her sharply.

  “You do not know my situation,” he said.

  “No,” she agreed. “I know mine. I know I signed my first Tower waiver the day after my father lost his job to a corporate mech. I know I rushed. I overused my first ability because it felt like cheating at reality. I spent two days shaking so hard I could barely stand because my nervous system decided it was done being wrung out like a rag.”

  She tapped her chest with two fingers.

  “Aether fatigue,” she said. “Use too much power too fast, and your body pushes back. Nausea. Tremors. Blackouts. Then the Tower throws you something else, and you cannot answer because you are busy trying not to vomit.”

  Cal winced.

  “Your element is Life,” Jordan said, and his voice was softer now, careful. “You can fix that, right?”

  “Up to a point,” Anya said. “Life can patch over damage. It cannot erase all consequences. There is always a bill.”

  She let that sit.

  “So,” she said, drawing her knees up, “here is what I am proposing. We go to Hearthpost. You eat. You rest. You listen to people who have survived more than one floor. Tomorrow, if you still want to go chasing goblin caves at dawn, I will point you at some likely patrol paths.”

  “And in return?” Cal asked.

  “In return,” Anya said dryly, “maybe you will be around to pull another idiot out of a bad spot. Call it an investment.”

  Jordan’s laugh came out thin. “An investment in this guy? Bold.”

  Cal stared out at the treeline.

  The light was already shifting again, edging toward the murkier tones that meant night was on its way. The idea of trying to fight in that, with his muscles already burning and his equipment one bad hit away from coming apart, made his stomach knot.

  “Surviving is not weakness,” Anya said quietly. “It is the whole point.”

  Cal let out a slow breath.

  “You are very convincing for someone I just met,” he said.

  “You are very stubborn for someone with no abilities and a limp,” she replied.

  Cal snorted despite himself.

  “Fine,” he said. “We go to Hearthpost. But tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow,” Anya cut in, “we’ll see how you feel. The Tower will still be here. The goblins will still be breeding. Your mother will still need you more alive than dead.”

  Cal flinched at how close she’d come without meaning to.

  “Come on,” Anya said, pushing herself to her feet with a soft grunt. “If we walk now, we can make the anchor stone before full dark.”

  She offered Cal a hand.

  He hesitated for a fraction of a second, then took it.

  Her grip was stronger than he expected.

  Jordan was up immediately, quicker than his earlier wince suggested. He shifted to Cal’s other side as they started moving, like it was the only natural place for him to be.

  The forest felt different as they left the clearing.

  Before, it had been a maze Cal was trying to decode alone, every root and trunk a potential trap. Now, Anya moved with the surety of someone who had walked this path more than once. Jordan stayed close enough to matter, quiet enough not to give them away, and whenever Cal’s limp worsened on a bad patch of ground, Jordan’s shoulder was just there—offered without comment.

  As they walked, Anya talked.

  Not constantly. Not in a stream of nervous noise. Just enough to lay down a framework in Cal’s mind.

  How to tell the difference between a fresh goblin patrol route and an old one. What the Tower’s extraction prompts felt like. The way the system sometimes whispered offers in the back of your head when you were tired and hurt and tempted to say yes to anything.

  “If it sounds too good,” she said, “it is.”

  “You say that like you tried one,” Cal said.

  “I say that like I watched someone else accept an ‘optional sub-objective’ and end up in a hole with twice as many teeth as sense,” she said. “The Tower loves to test boundary conditions. Especially on new data.”

  “New data,” Cal echoed.

  “To it, yes,” Anya said. “To each other, we are the only reason the numbers do not get worse faster.”

  Jordan hummed. “That’s…grimly romantic.”

  Anya didn’t look at him. “Don’t make it weird.”

  The trees thinned a little as they walked. The ground grew firmer, more exposed stone. The air shifted, picking up a faint tang Cal couldn’t quite place.

  “We are close,” Anya said.

  “To what?” Cal asked.

  “You will see,” she said.

  They crested a low rise.

  Beyond it, the forest thinned into a broad, shallow valley. Trees pulled back just enough to reveal open ground and, in the middle of it, a town that had no business being this deep in the woods.

  Low stone walls ringed it, built from whatever rock early settlers could drag into place. Watch platforms broke the line, rough but sturdy, silhouettes of people on patrol. Smoke from cookfires drifted up in thin blue lines. Lanterns already burned along the main street, their light pooling warm against the coming dark.

  Anya let out a slow breath.

  “Hearthpost,” she said.

  Cal swallowed.

  After hours of trees and teeth and things that wanted him dead, the sight of walls and rooftops and the low murmur of human voices made his knees feel weaker than any fight had.

  “That is…bigger than I pictured,” he said.

  “Started as a camp,” Anya said. “Climbers, support staff, locals who decided they’d rather live where the work is than commute from the city. It grew. Towns do that when people keep not dying.”

  Jordan exhaled like he’d been holding his breath since the scream. “I love a place built on the radical concept of not dying.”

  A faint, incredulous laugh escaped Cal.

  “And we just…walk in?” he asked.

  “We just walk in,” Anya said. “No tests. No tricks. You already passed the part that tries to eat you.”

  They made their way down the slope along a narrow path worn into the hillside by years of boots. As they walked, the sounds of Hearthpost grew clearer: shouted greetings, the clatter of something metal being dropped, a snatch of music from somewhere inside the walls.

  By the time they reached the gate, two figures waited there with spears in hand and mismatched bits of armor strapped over work clothes. Not soldiers. Just people who’d lived close to danger long enough to learn which end of a weapon pointed out.

  Anya lifted a hand in greeting. One guard waved them through with little more than a glance at their entry bands and the goblin blood drying on their clothes.

  Cal stepped under the stone arch and into the town proper.

  Lanterns swung from ropes overhead. Stalls lined the main street, some shuttered for the evening, others still doing brisk trade in food, tools, and the kind of small luxuries you only bought if you expected to see another payday. Children darted past, weaving around climbers in scuffed armor and locals in aprons and work boots.

  It felt, impossibly, like a place where life went on.