Insomniac Player

The third floor looked like Saint Mary’s Orphanage after midnight. A narrow entrance corridor stretched out under weak yellow light.

Children’s paintings covered one wall. A wooden crucifix hung above the office door. At the far end waited the security desk beside the main entrance, an old monitor sitting on it, and the same chair Damien had occupied through countless sleepless nights.

The details were close to perfect. The tower had even reproduced the water stain above the eastern window. What it had missed was Sister Agnes’s habit of leaving a small lamp burning near the chapel all night.

Without that lamp, the whole place just felt abandoned.

➤[Floor 3 initiated.]

➤[Guardian Replication Rate: 30%.]

The office door opened. Another Damien stepped out wearing the faded security uniform from before the world changed. This face sat close enough to be genuinely uncomfortable, black hair falling the right way, both eyes carrying the right exhaustion. Only the skin looked wrong, too smooth, untouched by years of bad sleep and repeated dying. It carried no visible weapon.

"You still haven’t gone back," it said.

Damien glanced toward the chapel. "I’ve been busy."

"You send money."

"They need it."

"Anonymously."

"Attention would put them in danger."

The guardian leaned against the office door, careless, the exact posture Damien used whenever he wanted people to stop asking if he was tired.

"That’s one reason."

"It’s the important one."

"The other reason is you don’t want to see how well they lived without you."

Damien’s fingers tightened around the dagger. That one landed because it wasn’t entirely wrong. He’d imagined going back, more than once, the younger kids grown taller, rooms reassigned, whole routines rebuilt around the strange night guard who’d vanished for two years and never come back to explain. Protecting his identity mattered.

So did not having to look at proof that his absence had turned into something ordinary.

"That one was better," he said.

The imitation pushed off the door. "Better than what?"

"The emotional damage."

It drew a blade from behind its back and attacked.

Thirty percent stopped being harmless the moment the first thrust landed. It forced him sideways, and the second strike already knew he’d turn toward open space, driving him straight into the security desk. The monitor hit the floor with a crack. This copy knew the corridor. Worse, it knew that Damien knew it too, placing every attack exactly where he’d normally retreat to, treating the familiar walls like pieces on a board it had already memorized.

Damien kicked the desk into its knees. It hopped over the same way he would have.

He threw the old monitor. It ducked. He’d expected that too.

His dagger found the light switch behind it instead.

Darkness swallowed the corridor. Nocturnal Eyes adjusted instantly, the walls resolving back into clean grey shapes. His opponent stayed visible, but its pupils widened slow, uncertain. Thirty percent of a passive night ability wasn’t the same thing as his own genuinely broken relationship with the dark.

The reflection cut at empty air. Damien stepped behind it and drove his shoulder between its ribs, all ninety of the pill’s physical points behind the hit, and the lighter body went straight through the office door.

He followed before it hit the ground. It rolled, recovered, lifted its dagger again.

His blade found its heart first. Silver spread out under the security uniform.

For one moment, the guardian’s face went completely accurate.

"They stopped waiting," it whispered.

"Good." He meant it too.

It broke apart.

➤[Floor 3 cleared.]

➤[Level increased: 24 → 25.]

➤[Available Stat Points: 15.]

The orphanage vanished, taking the darkness with it. Damien stood alone beside a blank grey wall.

The tower expected guilt to mean wishing they’d suffered without him. It didn’t work that way. Feeling unnecessary hurt, sure, but it hurt a lot less than coming home to find everyone broken.

He climbed to Floor 4.

Trumpets greeted him first. The final tutorial battlefield stretched out under a blood-red dawn, crude barricades burning across an open valley, goblins packed along the distant slopes, alpha wolves moving between them in silhouette. None of them advanced. Memory cutouts, repeating the same motions on a loop, going nowhere.

At the center of the field stood John. Or something shaped like him.

Six and a half feet tall, enormously wide, a heavy mace in one hand, face lost entirely in shadow. It swung the weapon into a knot of goblins that vanished before the impact ever landed, then reset to its starting position and did it again.

Damien watched the loop repeat twice. "He killed fifty-two goblins," his own voice said from behind him.

He turned. The Floor 4 guardian wore his old tutorial clothes, forty percent of him copied now, the face nearly complete this time, his own dry half-smile sitting easy on its mouth.

➤[Floor 4 initiated.]

➤[Guardian Replication Rate: 40%.]

"And four wolves," Damien said.

The reflection glanced toward the shadow John. "He fought. You made plans."

"The objective was survival."

"Convenient."

"Effective."

"He gave you the dagger. He stood between you and the chief. He carried the final wave while you told everyone else where to hide."

Damien looked at the imitation of the man who’d later crossed whole countries, torn through government walls, and moved into his home purely because Damien had disliked living alone.

"Yes," he said.

The guardian frowned. "That doesn’t make you feel small?"

"Mr. John makes most people feel small. He’s very large."

Casual, on the surface. The question underneath it wasn’t. He’d depended on John, completely, and pretending otherwise would disrespect everything the man had actually done for him. The mistake had never been depending on someone. The mistake would’ve been believing survival counted for less just because somebody had helped him reach it.

The other Damien raised its dagger. "You always have an explanation ready."

"You talk too much for a monster."

"So do you, when you’re nervous."

Fair. They moved together before either of them decided to, the fight simply starting on its own. This guardian had enough speed now to close the gap on an easy sidestep and enough strength behind it to punish a sloppy block. Their daggers collided. Damien turned his wrist to disarm it, and the duplicate saw that coming too, driving a knee straight into his thigh.

Pain shot through the muscle. He cut for its shoulder. It pulled back a half-second before the blade arrived.

For the first time, a guardian had read an exchange exactly as fast as he had.

They circled near the burning barricade, the shadow John still swinging his silent, endless loop off in the distance.

Damien feinted high, changed direction, went for the ribs. The guardian blocked both. It answered with the same low cut he’d used himself against the Lord of Ironfall.

He jumped back. The false blade still caught his coat, opening a thin line across his stomach on the way past. Real blood hit the ground this time.

The guardian smiled. "There you are."

Damien pressed a hand against the wound. Forty percent of himself had just drawn first blood.

The floors ahead won’t be this polite. He changed his grip and advanced. It expected another feint and got two, watching his shoulders shift toward the safer angle each time. He let it think that was working.

Its heel found the burning wreckage of the barricade on the retreat. Flame caught the trouser leg, and for less than a second its attention dropped.

Damien hit it in the face with everything the pill had given him. The punch shattered its jaw clean, and as it fell he caught the collar and put the First Blood Dagger straight through its chest.

The battlefield vanished with the sound of breaking mirrors.

➤[Floor 4 cleared.]

➤[Level increased: 25 → 26.]

➤[Available Stat Points: 18.]

The cut across his stomach stayed exactly where it was. He tore a strip off the dissolving guardian’s sleeve, but it turned to silver dust in his hand before he could use it, and he sighed and pulled an actual bandage out of the compact pack in his inventory instead.

The arguments keep getting sharper because the people in them are real.

John had supplied strength. Damien had supplied the plan. Neither fact canceled the other out. The staircase ahead was already lit.

From Floor 5, his own voice drifted down. "Context is what cowards call an excuse."

He tightened the bandage. "Ugh.. that sounded a lot better in the head."

He climbed.

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