James materialized in his Northgate apartment and the silence pressed against his ears after the combat noise had faded. He walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower without looking at himself in the mirror. The hot water burned when it hit his shoulders and he stood under the spray until the blood washed pink down the drain and his fingers went numb.

He dried off and pulled on clean clothes and walked to the kitchen counter where he’d left his laptop. The screen showed his open stat page from before he’d entered Floor 2 and he closed it before checking his storage ring.

The ring held fourteen corpses with six open slots remaining.

He pulled up the market prices on Tower Tactics and started calculating what the bodies would sell for at the TRB. Goblin corpses went for seventy to ninety Tower Credits depending on condition. Dire wolves pulled a hundred thirty to a hundred fifty. Venomous spider bodies were rarer—market average sat around two hundred each.

Nine goblins at eighty TC average came out to seven hundred twenty. Three wolves at one forty averaged four twenty. Two spiders at two hundred made four hundred. Total estimated value before he walked through the door: fifteen hundred forty Tower Credits. At twelve dollars per credit that was eighteen thousand four hundred eighty dollars from one floor.

He closed the laptop and walked to the living room. The lights were off and the curtains were drawn and the only illumination came from the kitchen behind him. He was about to head back to the bedroom when he noticed the TV was on.

The screen showed a muted news anchor sitting at a desk with the RTÉ logo in the corner. His mother must have left it on before her morning shift and forgotten to turn it off. James reached for the remote on the coffee table.

The screen changed and BREAKING NEWS flashed in red letters across the bottom while the anchor’s expression shifted from neutral to urgent. James’s hand stopped on the remote and he turned the volume up.

"—confirmed just minutes ago by the Tower Resource Bureau. Ireland has successfully cleared Floor 45 for the first time in the tower’s ninety-year history. We’re going live now to footage from the TRB press conference."

The feed cut to shaky camera footage. The quality was poor—someone had filmed it on a phone from inside the tower itself. The landscape was wrong. Grey wasteland stretched in every direction with cracked earth and gas vents spewing green mist into the air. The Abyssal Miasma.

Ten figures moved through the fog. They wore full environmental gear and the lead figure carried a shield that glowed with golden light. The Purify aura. James recognized the barrier pattern from Takeshi’s Fortress Stance but this one was stronger and wider and the light didn’t flicker.

Monsters emerged from the mist—humanoid shapes with elongated limbs and skin that looked like it had been melted and reformed. One lunged at the shield bearer and the golden light flared brighter. The creature’s skin started to smoke where the aura touched it and it staggered back.

The camera shook. Lightning arced across the field and three monsters died in the blast. Fire exploded on the right flank. Someone screamed an order but the audio was too distorted to make out words.

The fight lasted ninety seconds before the footage cut out and the screen returned to the studio where the anchor was already transitioning to the next segment. "The Tower Resource Bureau Director Ciarán O’Shea addressed the nation less than an hour ago. Here’s what he had to say."

The feed switched to O’Shea standing at a podium with the TRB seal behind him and microphones clustered at the front. He looked exactly the way he’d looked when James had sat across from him two weeks ago—silver hair, dark suit, glasses, the same calculated expression that gave away nothing.

"Today marks a historic achievement for Ireland," O’Shea said. His voice was steady and practiced and completely without emotion. "At oh-six-hundred hours this morning, an Irish-led team successfully cleared Floor 45 of the Dublin Tower. This floor has remained impassable since the tower’s activation in 2040. Every previous attempt resulted in total team loss within the first two minutes of entry."

He paused and let that sit.

"This success was made possible through the deployment of a recently acquired artifact with Purify capabilities strong enough to neutralize the Abyssal Miasma that has killed every prior team. The operation was conducted under strict TRB oversight and all ten team members have returned alive."

The camera flashed to the artifact. James’s circlet. The Apostle’s Radiant Circlet sat in a secured display case behind O’Shea with spotlights aimed at it from three angles. The white stone in the center caught the light and threw it back in clean geometric patterns.

"This breakthrough positions Ireland among the elite nations currently pushing toward Floor 60," O’Shea continued. "We expect to mount Floor 46 and Floor 47 clearing attempts within the next six weeks. Further details regarding the artifact and its acquisition will be shared following completion of our national security review."

He stepped back from the podium without taking questions and the feed cut back to the studio.

The anchor started talking about economic projections and international response but James had stopped listening. He sat on the couch and stared at the screen even though he wasn’t seeing it anymore.

Ireland had cleared Floor 45 and broken a ninety-year failure. The circlet was on national television and O’Shea had given a carefully worded statement about the artifact’s acquisition without mentioning who found it or where it came from.

Recently acquired. National security review. The anonymity clause was holding.

The anonymity clause was holding. His name wasn’t attached to it and the payment would keep coming every two weeks whether Ireland cleared Floor 46 or wiped on the attempt. A hundred thousand dollars every fourteen days.

James did the math in his head. Twenty-six payments per year. Two million six hundred thousand dollars annually for as long as the contract held. More money than his mother would make in forty years of seventy-hour weeks. More than enough to buy a house outside Ballymun. More than enough to make her stop working.

He pulled out his phone and opened his banking app. The first payment from the TRB contract had hit his account three days after he’d signed the paperwork. One hundred thousand dollars minus the fifteen percent withholding tax came out to eighty-five thousand. The second payment would arrive in eleven days.

James closed the app and looked back at the TV. The news had moved on to coverage of international reaction. The American Tower Bureau had released a statement. So had South Korea. Japan. China. Everyone watching to see what Ireland would do next.

He turned the TV off and the room went dark except for the kitchen light behind him. He sat in the silence and thought about Floor 46 and what would happen when the circlet failed or when someone on the team made a mistake or when O’Shea decided the risk was too high to keep pushing.

The contract had a termination clause. If the TRB stopped using the artifact for more than sixty consecutive days, James could reclaim it and the agreement would void. But as long as they kept running Floor 45 attempts or pushing higher, the money would keep coming.

James stood and walked to the bedroom. He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Tomorrow he’d sell the corpses at the TRB and bank another eighteen thousand. Tomorrow he’d start planning for Floor 3. Tomorrow he’d keep climbing.

The circlet was making him rich and he’d never even equipped it.

He closed his eyes and sleep came fast.

♢♢♢♢ 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Two weeks later

James lay on his back in grass and tried to remember how to breathe. His chest heaved and his arms felt like someone had filled them with wet sand. Sweat ran into his eyes and stung.

Around him the rest of the team was in similar condition. A Korean tank sat with his back against a tree and blood running down his face from a cut above his eyebrow. A German archer had collapsed onto her side with her bow still in her hand and her breathing coming in short gasps. Someone was vomiting in the brush. A Chinese mage lay flat three meters away with her arms spread wide and her eyes closed.

One hundred enemies. The notification had announced it when they’d landed and James had thought the System had made a mistake. Floor 3 had been sixty-five. Floor 4 should have been seventy or seventy-five at most. But the wave had kept coming.

Fifty goblins in the first rush. Twenty dire wolves in the second. Fifteen spiders from the canopy. Ten Corrupted Wolves—larger than the normal variants, faster, with black mist leaking from their mouths. Five Goblin Shamans that had thrown fire and poison from the back lines.

James had burned through all his mana twice and relied on his sword for the last fifteen minutes of the fight. Both of his reanimated wolves had been destroyed in the first five minutes. He’d triggered Death Chain three times and each time the mental exhaustion had hit harder than the last.

His hands were still shaking.

The sky above was grey and flat and gave nothing back. His skull throbbed where Death Chain had drained him and his mana pool sat at forty-three out of three hundred eighty.

James closed his eyes and lay still.

[FLOOR 4 — SUBJUGATION COMPLETE — 100/100]