The Tower listens to human rules—but answers in its own code.
The soft hum of the city settled around the modest apartment in District Thirteen. Outside, twilight bled into the lingering dusk, the amber glow catching the edges of worn rooftops and flickering neon signs. Inside, the air was still — heavy with expectation.
Caidyn Ver sat at the small kitchen table, her fingers wrapped tightly around a thin stack of official papers. The Tower Integration clearance lay before her, crisp and newly issued. Her eyes traced the fine print, the seal of approval from the Tower's human overseers marking the culmination of years of training, discipline, and loss.
Her thoughts drifted back, as they often did, to the woman who had once been her world.
Mother died five years ago, she remembered — not in the Tower itself, but out there, beyond its bounds, in the chaotic rift fractures that tore through reality. That loss reshaped everything.
The knock on the door was soft but certain. Maris Lorne stepped inside, her presence sharp as ever, the quiet authority of a battlefield-hardened gunfighter in every measured step.
Maris's eyes briefly flicked to the papers in Caidyn's hands. Without a word, she settled into a chair across from her, the silence between them carrying more meaning than words could.
"Humans made the rules," Maris said quietly, voice low, almost a warning. "The Tower learned. Neither cares if you bend them."
Caidyn's gaze lifted, meeting the steady resolve in Maris's eyes.
Then I'll break through them all, she thought, voice steady though unspoken.
The apartment held its breath alongside her, the city's pulse continuing beyond the walls, unaware of the quiet determination kindling within — a determination that would soon be tested by the Tower itself.
The city lights blurred past the window as Maris Lorne maneuvered their vehicle through the waking evening traffic. The streets of District Thirteen hummed with life, but inside the car, the atmosphere was quieter, heavier — a fragile pause before a storm.
Caidyn stared out at the sprawling cityscape, her fingers drumming lightly on her lap. The sealed papers she'd carried like a talisman now rested folded inside her jacket. Today, she would hand them over and step into a world she'd only prepared for in fragments.
Memories surfaced, vivid as the neon outside.
One of my earliest, she thought, was Mom out exploring—gone for hours while I stayed home. I was little then, playing video games under the watchful eye of her friend. The flickering screen was my world, the only place I could control the chaos.
The car shifted lanes smoothly as Maris kept her eyes steady on the road. The weight of the moment hung between them, unspoken.
Years later, Caidyn remembered, I wasn't just playing anymore. I was good—people on the forums talked about ZeroVox, my gamer tag. I won a few tournaments, earned respect. It was escape, yes, but also proof. Proof I could be something.
A sharp turn brought them closer to the Tower's shadowed silhouette rising against the night sky.
The final memory pressed forward, sharp and unyielding: The day Mom left to respond to a rift break. No one could get help there fast enough. She didn't come back.
A clenched breath, held too long.
They pulled into the parking area just outside the Integration Facility. The Tower loomed ahead, a monolith of glass and steel illuminated by cold floodlights that cut through the growing dusk. Maris brought the car to a smooth stop and killed the engine.
"Stay sharp," Maris said, sliding open her door. "I'll wait out here. Come find me when you're done."
Caidyn nodded, stepping out into the cool evening air. The faint murmur of the city felt distant here—replaced by the steady pulse of the Tower itself, alive and watchful.
Inside the lobby, the clinical brightness made the space feel oddly detached from the world outside. Caidyn approached the registration desk, clutching her papers.
The official glanced up, expression neutral. "Name?"
"Caidyn Ver," she answered, voice calm.
That name, though — it rippled through the space like a stone cast into a still pool.
A few nearby voices caught and lingered.
"Ver? Like... the Ver?"
"The one who climbed past floor twenty?"
"Caidyn Ver? Wait — ZeroVox?"
Whispers floated around, eyes flicking toward her. Some recognized the surname, nodding subtly at the memory of her mother, an early awakened healer whose reputation had become legend. Others connected the full name to the professional gamer known as ZeroVox, a prodigy whose skill had earned a quiet but dedicated following in underground circuits.
The official seemed unfazed, continuing the routine.
"Adventurer school diploma verified. Age confirmed. Registration protocol complete pending System synchronization."
Caidyn felt the weight of all those unseen gazes press against her back, the mixed recognition a reminder of expectations she'd carried long before today.
She met the official's eyes with steady resolve.
"Yes. I'm ready."
The registration seal confirmed with a soft beep, and a strip of light blinked on across the far wall, illuminating the path toward the telepad terminal.
Caidyn exhaled slowly, turning toward it. Each step she took echoed in the white-tiled corridor. Not loud—but deliberate. Each one closer to the floor that would decide her fate.
Her thoughts drifted. Not to what was ahead, but to how she'd gotten here.
Before the camp, she remembered, there was training at home. Real training.
Auntie Maris had been the first. Blunt, fast, and ruthlessly precise.
"Breathe out when you pull the trigger. Trust the sight. And if it jams—don't freeze, adjust."
Caidyn could still hear the metallic clink of spent casings hitting the floor in the practice range Maris had built beneath the guild's annex. She'd taught her to treat guns not as mystical relics or brute-force weapons—but as tools. Extensions of focus and decision.
Then there was Uncle Garren. Large hands like coiled stone. A man of few words and unyielding standards.
"Plant your feet. Take the hit. Don't just block—absorb. If you're going to fight, fight with structure."
He taught her how to move her weight, how to read someone's stance before they even made a move. How to take a punch without flinching and return it with control.
After the world had reshaped itself around her mother's death, the camp had followed—the so-called Adventurer School. Less personal. More standardized. Designed to strip students down and build them back up with foundational skills: melee basics, weapon etiquette, stamina conditioning.
Even there, she stuck to her strengths. Firearms. Movement. Adaptability. While others struggled to hold a blade steady or memorize weapon trees, she was building reflexes that moved with the rhythm of recoil and retreat.
But the curriculum extended beyond combat.
They taught the tower's structure—floor segmentation, stairwell transition thresholds, resource pulse tracking. They covered glyphcraft basics, too: how runes embedded in Tower architecture linked to system permissions, how different classes could interface with embedded functions. It was part science, part faith.
And then the System Interface: how to navigate stat trees, skill acquisition routes, how to submit a floor clear, how to tag for backup or request a return. Mostly digital menus with intuitive designs—but unforgiving if misused.
The last and strangest part of the camp curriculum was the one she never quite got used to.
Xenology.
Not because it was hard to grasp—far from it. She'd grown up surrounded by people most civilians only saw through news broadcasts or tower footage. Two guildmasters had shaped her life, and through them she'd shaken hands with diplomats, mercenaries, quartermasters, even full-blooded adventurers from the Tower's deeper floors. She'd eaten meals cooked by a dwarf rune-chef, traded gun oil recipes with a beastfolk hunter, and sparred—badly—against a demonborn martial artist.
Still, the class had its place. It wasn't just about recognition. It was about context. History. Lineage.
They taught that five known races had become part of the world since the Tower's merging with Earth fifteen years ago.
Celestials came first in the syllabus, and in human myth.
Not all of them looked like the classical angels—though some did: beautiful, winged, radiant. Others resembled the chiseled, wrathful gods etched in stone across ancient temples. It wasn't coincidence. The Tower hadn't simply opened the door to them—some had been bleeding through for centuries.
The stories of Zeus, Ra, and Apollo? Celestial echoes.
The shimmering figure in the burning bush, or the voice that parted seas? Likely a Celestial.
Divine beasts that swallowed suns or guarded heaven's gates? The other kind.
Celestials were divided into two branches: the humanoid and the beast-born.
The humanoid Celestials were what you'd expect—regal, refined, often revered. Subsets within them specialized in light-magic, astral bindings, or judgment protocols that made their very presence weigh on the soul.
The beast-born, though...
They were harder to categorize. Massive, often primal, they blurred the line between divine and monstrous. Fenrir, Quetzalcoatl, Amaterasu's wolves—myths across the globe had always whispered about them. Some called them demons. Others called them gods. The truth, apparently, was yes to both.
Classification depended on who you asked and what side of their fangs you stood on.
Next were the Elves. Slender, quick-eyed, attuned to the natural leyline networks across both Earth and Tower floors.
They looked almost exactly as stories had told—pointed ears, graceful features, often too stylish for their own good. But they weren't all standoffish or uptight. If anything, Caidyn had found them... breezy. The type to sip tea on a rooftop mid-monsoon and call it "soul-centering."
Still, there were rules.
Desecrate nature? They'd cut you down with a smile.
Practice necromancy? You'd better do it right—as in respectful, clean, consensual.
Defiling the dead through parasitic bindings or forced resurrections? That crossed their sacred lines. And Elves remembered every line ever drawn.
Dwarves were easier to deal with—probably because Caidyn had grown up around them.
Her uncle's secondary class was a blacksmith, and that had meant years of working alongside Dwarves who didn't have time for nonsense. They came in three primary sects: the Forgers who shaped metal and soul-bound steel; the Runeweavers who etched enchantments that bent physics; and the Engineers who built everything from cross-floor elevators to collapsible mortars.
They were short, broad, opinionated, and absolutely unbothered by anything that didn't involve craftsmanship. Caidyn had liked them immediately.
Beastfolk, on the other hand, were so varied they almost needed their own class.
They divided primarily into five tribes:
Predators – canids, felines, raptors, wolves, lions. Quick and deadly.
Preyfolk – deer, hares, sheep, birds. Agile and cautious, but never weak.
Skykin – wings, talons, hollow bones. Aerial tacticians and scouts.
Tideborn – aquatic specialists. Swimmers, breath-holders, amphibians with wicked spatial instincts.
Burrowers – subterranean, earth-attuned. Moles, badgers, snakes, miners, and sappers.
The trick with Beastfolk was never to assume instinct made them simple. Caidyn had once watched a rabbit-type wipe the floor with five trainees during a route-clearing demo. Strategy was universal. Teeth were optional.
And then—Demons.
Split into two extremes, like oil and fire.
The first: Monstrous Demons.
That was the term used for anything with a demonic classification that didn't fit a humanoid mold—though even that rule bent sometimes. Some monstrous demons did have vaguely human forms… just with too many limbs, or twisted joint arrangements, or bone spurs jutting from flesh that never stopped burning. A few even stood upright, but bore six arms, a tail made of teeth, or legs that bent the wrong way and kept going.
They were the kind you didn't try to speak to.
Monstrous demons typically lacked language or used it so sparingly and wrong that it unnerved even the most seasoned linguists. Grunts, warbles, low-frequency screeches that vibrated through bone—they didn't negotiate. They attacked, consumed, adapted. It wasn't that they were stupid. It was that they didn't care.
There were always exceptions—rare instances where something bestial stopped, stared, even responded in riddles—but those were so few and far between that most instructors still ended their lectures with one piece of advice: if it hisses, don't talk—shoot.
Some Celestial Beasts, depending on who you asked, also fell into this category. They were divine in origin but demonic in temperament. Unreadable. Unmerciful. Sometimes the Tower seemed to summon them from the wrong side of its own imagination, twisted by something older than design.
The other half of the equation was where things got even more complicated:
Demonfolk.
These were the ones who could pass as people—if people had horns, fangs, and the occasional set of shadow-slicked wings. Succubi, incubi, vampires, highblooded warlocks, and various nightmare-blooded hybrids who had carved out cities of their own on floors beyond the thirtieth.
Demonfolk were the ones who made deals. Who talked. Who smiled like everything was a test and meant it. They weren't inherently evil—no matter how many anti-demon conspiracy blogs still screamed otherwise—but they were dangerous.
Not always because of power, though there was that.
Because of unpredictability.
The best way her instructor at the Adventurer School had phrased it was this:
"Demonfolk have layered thoughts, layered motives, and no internal brakes. They are not one idea at a time. They are spirals. Ever-changing, ever-widening spirals."
It wasn't a moral failing. It was cultural wiring. Some demons were fiercely loyal, beautifully compassionate. Others could swap allegiances in the middle of a sentence and kill with perfect emotional neutrality. Some didn't even see the change as betrayal. Just a shift in angle. A better rhythm to the dance.
Caidyn had met a few over the years. She wasn't afraid of them. Not really.
But she didn't mistake that for trust, either.
Her boots crossed the last concentric ring of the telepad. The glow at her feet intensified, syncing with the faint pulse of the Tower's attention. Not the whole thing—just the outer skin, the welcome lobby.
Even still, it was watching.
Alright, she thought, squaring her shoulders. You've seen what I am. Let's see what I become.
The platform flared. Light surged around her, not hot, not cold. Just blinding.
And then the world snapped into something else entirely.