Floor 7 opened into the interrogation chamber beneath the Region 21 Secretariat, and Damien’s jaw tightened before he’d even finished crossing the threshold.
Twelve chairs curved in a semicircle under cold white light. The president’s seat sat empty at the center. Smoked-glass figures filled the rest, faceless, every head turning to track him the moment he stepped through the door.
The seventh guardian occupied his old chair. Seventy percent had already stopped looking like a rough sketch, black hair, pale skin, the same tired slump in the shoulders, even a shallow cut across the stomach that matched the wound still bleeding through his own bandages.
➤[Floor 7 initiated.] ➤[Guardian Replication Rate: 70%.]
"Those four hours...."
It cost him more than it should have to keep it that way.
"They accused you. Threatened to lock you up. Talked about you like something they owned."
"... in a name of government meeting."
"And you just sat there and took it, heh."
"Twelve of them. One of me."
It rose from the chair, unhurried. "Then John broke the walls down. Martin stopped him before he finished. The Prime Minister apologized to your face. The judge scared the whole room into behaving."
"Powerful people decided whether you got to leave that room. You didn’t decide anything."
His grip tightened on the dagger, hard enough to hurt. "That’s what happened."
"What did you do while they decided?"
"Answered questions."
"Like a pussy cat." It drew its blade. "You couldn’t even protect yourself from people in suits."
"A president, twelve ministers, and two generals in a locked room." His voice cracked on the last word.
Not in front of this thing.
It came at him without wasting a single motion, and this one felt different in his hands than the last six had. This one sat in that room too. It knows exactly how small they made me feel.
The first cut aimed for his wounded arm. The second went straight for the bandage on his stomach, like it already had every hurt place on his body written down and was just reading off the list.
He blocked, turned, went for the wrist. It switched grip a half-second before contact and opened the back of his hand instead.
He fell back between the chairs. The glass officials shifted with him, watching. The guardian cut him off from the darkest corner of the room before he reached it.
It knows about my eyes. It knows exactly what I want.
So he threw the dagger somewhere it hadn’t guarded. Straight through the president’s shape, into the panel hiding behind it.
Every light died at once.
Bet on the ceiling. Wrong bet.
Darkness opened the room back up to him. The guardian’s edges blurred just enough that he could still tell the difference. He took it, moved through the chairs, kicked one into its legs, struck from beside a glass minister while it braced for a blade that wasn’t there anymore.
He drove a broken chair leg through its throat instead. The room came apart around them.
➤[Floor 7 cleared.]
➤[Level increased: 28 → 29.] ➤
[Available Stat Points: 27.]
His dagger found its way back into his hand the second the memory let go of it.
Doesn’t feel like winning.
Floor 8 opened onto moonlight and reeds, the Broken Road stretching out through Cloudstep Gorge, and then he saw the bodies and his stomach dropped before his mind caught up to why.
Twelve of them.
Laid out with too much care. That’s worse. Not better.
Wei Jian’s hand still gripped his measuring rod. Bao Yu’s short blades lay a few feet from her open fingers. Lin Hua rested near Qiao Sen, one arm reaching just far enough that it almost touched him.
He made himself stop looking. The eighth guardian stood among them.
Eighty percent had stopped being a copy of anything. It moved like footage of himself with a half-second delay stitched in.
➤[Floor 8 initiated.]
➤[Guardian Replication Rate: 80%.]
"They solved it. Not you."
"I know." No fight left in that answer. He didn’t have one to give.
"You said nonsense at them. They turned nonsense into something that worked."
"Yeah." Barely audible. "Exactly that."
"They died doing it. Xuan Wuye let them die and called it strategy."
That one actually hurts.
"He used them. To expose the cell."
"And you joined him anyway."
"He showed me his face."
Weak.
He knew it the moment it left his mouth.
"Another powerful man decided if you got to live. That’s twice now."
"Stop repeating it."
"I’m not the one who keeps living it."
No armor for that one.
It sank into shadow before he could answer back.
➤[Replicated Shadow Dash activated.]
His hands were shaking. He gave himself a half-second to force them still before he moved. He already knew which shadow it would pick, the narrow band under the leaning pine, the clean angle, the open escape line.
It learned that from me. Everything it knows, it learned from me.
He drove the dagger backward into that exact spot before he’d fully decided to.
It came out right onto the blade. Its own copied dagger still caught his shoulder on the way through, the failed Dash carrying it just far enough off-line that the cut landed shallow instead of deep.
They broke apart. Silver leaked from its side. Red ran down his own arm and dripped onto Lin Hua’s sleeve.
He stepped back off her fast. Sick with myself.
"You predicted yourself," it said.
"You picked the obvious route."
"It was the best route."
"Doesn’t make it the right one." His voice had gone hoarse and he hadn’t noticed when.
Its Dash dropped into cooldown. His hadn’t. They fought through the space between the bodies without touching one of them, and every hit landed heavier now, meaner, like it had stopped holding back the way the earlier floors had. Eighty percent of his own strength thrown back at him didn’t feel like eighty percent of anything.
It nearly had him. He let it herd him back toward the reeds anyway, watched it read the Dash coming and cover the pine’s shadow to shut it down.
He picked somewhere it hadn’t thought to guard.
➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Dash]
The shadow under Wei Jian’s own hand. Thin. Awkward. Nowhere near a stable landing.
Not the best route. That’s exactly why you’d never have picked it either.
He came out on one knee beside Wei Jian’s body and drove the blade up through the guardian’s chest before it finished turning.
It looked down at him, almost gentle. "You used him again."
He pulled the dagger free, hands still not steady. "I remembered him. That’s different."
Is it, though.
The road broke into moonlit pieces around them.
➤[Floor 8 cleared.]
➤[Level increased: 29 → 30.]
➤[Available Stat Points: 30.]
He stayed on his knees a long moment after the bodies disappeared before he made himself climb.
Floor 9 was his own penthouse, and something in him flinched at just the sight of it. Night sat over Viremont past the windows. Every piece of furniture waited exactly where he’d left it. One of John’s slippers lay abandoned in the middle of the lounge. A bowl big enough to feed a family sat by the sofa with three crumbs left in the bottom.
The ninth Damien waited by the glass. Ninety percent had stopped looking like a copy at all. It pressed a hand to its own shoulder the exact way he did, without thinking about it.
➤[Floor 9 initiated.] ➤[Guardian Replication Rate: 90%.]
"He had a son."
Don’t.
He didn’t ask who. He already knew.
"Died at your age. Sounded like you, apparently. That’s the whole reason this started."
"He told me himself." Smaller than he wanted.
"That’s why he protects you the way he does."
"Partly."
"You let him see someone else standing in front of him. Every single day."
His eyes went to the slipper on the floor without his permission. "I never asked him to see that."
"You kept him around anyway."
"He stayed on his own." Barely a whisper.
Nothing in its face mocked him for that.
That’s the worst part. It actually understands.
"You needed a father. He needed a son. Neither of you says it, because saying it makes it real, and real things end."
His hand found the dagger’s grip, unsteady. "You’re not fun at ninety percent."
"Neither are you, most days."
The fight opened slow. No showmanship left in either of them, just two bodies circling, reading shoulders, feet, the smallest shift in weight. Ninety percent caught every fake opening he threw. He offered one near his left side. It didn’t bite. It let its own heel drift toward the carpet’s edge, testing him back. He didn’t bite either.
Six exchanges, no blood. On the seventh, it broke a rhythm he’d have sworn belonged only to him.
He blocked high. The blade turned mid-strike and found his thigh instead. He punched its jaw, and it rolled with the hit and opened his ribs on the way back around.
He went down against the sofa, breath tearing out of him.
It knows every hesitation I’ve ever had. That’s worse than knowing my strength.
He kicked the bowl off the table. It didn’t chase the motion, reading the distraction correctly.
Watching myself outthink myself. Over a bowl John forgot to wash.
He threw the whole table instead.
It caught the guardian and drove it into the window hard enough to crack the glass behind its shoulders. It stabbed straight through the tabletop before he could close the distance, and the blade caught the outside of his arm.
He kept his weight moving forward anyway, slammed the table again with everything left in his legs, and the window gave out. It fell through the broken frame.
For half a second, Viremont waited far below, patient.
Then the tower refused to let the fall actually happen. The guardian struck some invisible wall and hung there against the night sky, arms still moving, mouth still open on a word it never finished.
He reached through the shattered frame, grabbed its collar, and hauled it back onto the blade.
Its fingers closed around his throat on the way down. Ninety percent of his own grip strength squeezed in, and black crawled into the edges of his vision before he drove the dagger in deeper.
Silver cracks spread across its face. Right before it broke apart, it whispered something so quiet he nearly missed it.
"He’ll leave too. Eventually. Everyone does."
He held its eyes until the very last second. "Yeah." His voice cracked clean in half on the word. "I know."
The penthouse came apart around them both.
➤[Floor 9 cleared.] ➤[Level increased: 30 → 31.] ➤[Available Stat Points: 33.]
Damien hit the ground on one knee and stayed there. Blood soaked his thigh, his arm, his shoulder, and the stomach wound had torn open again underneath everything else. Shadow Dash sat locked on cooldown. Every breath dragged against the cut along his ribs.
Nobody’s watching. Let it shake.
He let it.
The final staircase waited. He didn’t take it yet. He wrapped what he could reach in the last of his bandages and let the hour bleed out in silence around him. No potions left. Rest wouldn’t close a single one of these wounds, but it steadied his breathing and eventually handed both shadow skills back.
He checked his status with hands still not fully steady.
➤[Level: 31.]
➤[Available Stat Points: 33.]
Spending them might improve his odds against whatever waited above. It would just as easily improve whatever the tower built to meet him there.
He closed the panel without touching a single point, got up, and climbed the last stretch of stairs.
A black door waited at the top, polished until it worked like a mirror, his own reflection looking back at him without a single mark on it.
"Come in when you’re ready," it said, though its mouth never moved.
"I already am." His voice barely held.
He pressed a bloody hand flat against the door. "You could’ve spent all that time down here becoming someone I actually liked."
His mouth is surely nasty. Do I always sound like that?
The mirror opened.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter