Insomniac Player

Floor 10 didn’t borrow any scenery. The orphanage had been a reminder of what he’d left behind. The tutorial field, the ruined city, the penthouse, all of them had given him something to grab and swing. This floor gave him nothing at all. Just a circular platform of black glass under an empty white sky, no walls anywhere.

Past the platform’s edge, thousands of reflections hung suspended in open space. Each one showed him at a different age. A silent kid staring at his own ceiling. A teenager sitting awake through an entire night. A security guard watching Saint Mary’s monitors flicker. A blood-covered player standing in the middle of a dead town.

Every version of me that never slept.

His hands still hadn’t stopped shaking from Floor 9. He pressed them flat against his thighs for a second, forcing them still, and looked up.

At the center waited the final guardian, wearing his current clothes without a single cut or drop of blood on them. The First Blood Dagger sat in its right hand. Its face wasn’t cruel. Wasn’t proud either. It just looked tired, because he was tired, and it stood the exact way he’d stand right now if exhaustion hadn’t already dug in this deep.

The only real difference between them was health. He limped onto the platform. It walked in clean.

System windows opened between them.

➤[Floor 10 initiated.]

➤[Gate Boss generated.]

➤[Attribute Replication: 100%.]

➤[Skill Replication: 100%.]

➤[Memory Replication: 100%.]

➤[Title Replication: 0%.]

Something answered from inside his own status.

➤[Title condition satisfied.]

➤[Boss Killer activated.]

➤[All physical attributes increased by 10% against the current Boss-class target.]

Heat rolled into his muscles. His heart kicked harder. The pain in his leg and shoulder stayed exactly where it was, but everything underneath the pain went faster, harder, heavier.

The guardian studied him. "Ten percent."

"Enough to be rude about it."

"Not enough to fix the leg."

"Noticed that myself."

The windows dissolved. Neither of them moved.

It knows I watch before I act. It knows that I know it knows.

He almost laughed at the shape of that, except laughing would have cost him a rib he didn’t have spare right now.

"This is going to take a while," he said.

"Not with how much you’re bleeding."

It moved first, unhurried, one measured step folding into a sudden thrust at his injured shoulder. He turned into the strength the pill had given him and knocked the false dagger wide.

Metal rang across the glass. He cut for its throat. It had already dropped its head clear.

He changed direction toward the ribs. It rotated past his wrist before the turn finished and drove an elbow straight into his stomach wound.

Pain folded him in half. Its knee came up toward his face.

He caught the leg and threw it. The extra ten percent lifted the whole guardian clean off the floor. It twisted mid-air, landed on one hand, and used the spin to cut his forearm on the way down.

They broke apart, blood on both blades. Red on his. Silver on its.

"Stronger," it said.

"You sound surprised."

"I’m not."

"Then stop narrating like grandpa’s broken radio."

They collided again. He won every straight contest between them. Shoulder to shoulder, it gave ground. Wrist against wrist, he forced the angle down every time. His steps covered more distance. His blade carried more weight behind it.

None of it landed clean. It never met force where he wanted it to. It gave early, cut the angle, and went straight for wounds it already had memorized, the thigh, the weak grip in his left hand, the exact breath that pulled the cut along his ribs open wider.

Worse than the wounds, it knew his habits. He feinted right. It ignored the feint entirely. He let his eyes drift toward a band of shadow thrown by one hanging reflection, and it stepped clear of that route before he’d even triggered anything. He shifted his grip to set up an inside cut, and it caught the back of his hand, already knowing exactly what came after that shift.

I’m stronger than it. It’s already seen every lesson that ever taught me how to use that strength.

It edged toward a nearby reflection. Shadow touched its boot.

➤[Replicated Shadow Dash activated.]

He turned and raised his dagger, already braced. It didn’t come out behind him. It came out of the shadow under his own wounded leg instead.

The copied blade drove upward. He threw himself sideways, and the point missed the artery but opened his thigh next to the wound already sitting there.

He hit the floor, rolled, triggered his own skill.

➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Dash]

He picked a distant reflection. It was already waiting when he arrived, its dagger sinking into his side.

His own blade found its chest in the same instant, but it had already turned enough that the strike caught ribs instead of heart.

Both of them staggered apart. The suspended memories around them shifted. Every single reflection now showed him standing behind someone stronger.

John, facing down the Goblin Chief while Damien watched from cover. Doctor Smoke and the others tearing through the Knights of Ironfall. High-level players ringing the Hollow Giants. The Broken Road investigators bent over a damaged dream formation. The Dark Lord walking calmly through a room full of dying assassins.

The guardian glanced at the images. "There’s the pattern."

He pulled his dagger free of his own side. It dissolved and reappeared in the guardian’s hand instead, ready before he’d even registered losing it.

"The tower controls the slideshow," he said. "You’re just taking credit for the lighting."

"The point is, you hide behind people. Every time the enemy’s stronger than you."

"That’s usually when hiding is the only option that works."

"Not usually. Almost always." Its voice dropped, uglier now, closer to something he’d never let himself say out loud. "You should be ashamed of yourself. Everything good in your life exists because John decided to care about you. What happens the day he stops? What’s left of you then, fake genius?"

It smirked with its own mouth.

He didn’t answer. He attacked instead.

It dodged and opened his shoulder on the way past. He backhanded it across the face hard enough to knock silver fragments loose from its cheek.

It smiled through the damage. "You’re a coward."

He stepped in again. "Not new information."

"You’re not clever either. You’re a fraud who pays attention. That’s the whole trick."

Their blades locked between them, hands pressed flat against each other’s wrists. He forced it backward, and it hooked a foot behind his injured leg and turned the whole exchange against him. He hit the platform hard enough to lose the air in his chest.

The dagger caught the edge of his coat. He rolled before the next thrust landed.

It followed. "You notice the one thing everyone else missed. Then they call you a genius for it."

He blocked from the ground. "I can’t control what they decide to call it."

"On the Broken Road, you spoke nonsense. They interpreted it. Investigated it. Solved the whole thing themselves. You kept the reputation anyway."

"I tried giving them the credit."

"Beautifully. Right up until the credit stuck to you regardless."

That one’s true. That one actually lands.

He kept his face still and kicked it off him, forcing himself back to his feet.

Blood ran from his side with every breath now. The title had sharpened his strength. It had done nothing at all for how much blood he had left to lose.

The reflections shifted again. This time they showed the space behind the people who’d protected him. No John standing there. No team. No investigators from Murim.

Just Damien, alone, every single time.

"You’re nobody without them."

It came forward before he could answer, and the exchange lasted under five seconds. It turned his dagger aside, cut his wrist, struck the reopened wound in his ribs, and swept his ruined leg out from under him.

He hit the ground on his back. The First Blood Dagger slid out of his fingers across the glass.

It set a knee against his chest and the copied blade under his jaw.

"Attention isn’t intelligence."

He stared up at his own face. "No."

It paused. It had expected him to argue.

He breathed carefully around the blade sitting against his throat. "I think you’re right."

The guardian’s grip didn’t loosen. But something in its eyes did, a half-second of genuine confusion, the same look he’d probably worn a hundred times himself right before a plan fell apart. Every other floor had tried to break him by proving he leaned on other people, and every time, some part of him had still been fighting to disprove it, to win the argument even while losing the fight.

Stop arguing. See what happens.

"I’ve never been smart," he said, and meant every word of it for the first time out loud. "I notice things. That’s not the same. You’re right about that too."

The blade under his jaw didn’t move, but its arm did, just slightly, weight shifting like it had planned for resistance and gotten agreement instead, and had no answer built for that.

He didn’t fight the knee on his chest. He turned his head an inch into the blade instead, into the pressure rather than away from it, and felt the guardian’s whole stance falter for exactly as long as that took.

Long enough.

His free hand closed around a shard of silver still lying on the glass from his own backhand strike, and he drove it up into the gap where its confusion had opened its guard.

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