The second floor kept trying to tear itself apart around them.

What had looked manageable from below turned vicious the moment the walls started opening everywhere at once. Without the pale flame dragging the Soul Beasts toward a single point, the room lost all order. Glassbrood Spiders dropped where they pleased. Night Walkers slipped through broken seams in the white stone and lunged at whatever was nearest.

The front ranks tried to hold, the people behind them tried not to climb over each other, and the ones with no real experience learned very quickly that numbers did not mean much when panic spread faster than commands.

Neo moved through the mess with Gravebite in hand, cutting where the line threatened to buckle. A spider caught one man in the calf and left him screaming on the floor while venom spread through the veins in his leg like black ink beneath skin.

Another awakened took a bite to the shoulder and nearly dropped his weapon before Max shoved a beast off him with the face of his shield. Marika burned two creatures trying to crawl over a fallen body, and Alice split a Night Walker down the middle so hard its blood and dark chitin skidded across the white stone in a wet arc.

No one on their side had died yet.

That was the good part, and it was a thin one.

The rest was blood, poison, broken formation, and people revealing themselves in the worst possible way. Some fought well under pressure. Others froze and only became useful when a beast was already close enough to smell their fear.

And some, Neo noticed with growing irritation, had started paying more attention to Soul Cores than to the creatures still trying to gut them.

That part became personal almost immediately.

A Glassbrood Spider dropped at Neo’s feet after he cut through it, the body twitching once while the Soul Core surfaced with a faint yellow pulse. Before he could bend, a girl from one of the groups behind him darted in, snatched it, and consumed it in front of him without even pretending otherwise.

Neo stared at her through the churn of bodies and flashing skills.

’You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re robbing me right in front of my face?’

He did not get to stay angry.

A Night Walker rushed him from behind, long limbs scraping over stone with that ugly speed they had. Neo turned hard and Gravebite bit through the creature’s leg at the knee. The thing folded sideways, and Snot came out from a bad angle with both daggers rising from under its jaw. He drove them up through the soft part of the skull and tore backward, opening half its face in the process.

Snot caught the Soul Core as it surfaced, took one glance at Neo, and threw it his way.

Neo caught it one-handed and consumed it at once.

[Soul-Window]

[+2 Souls] [984/1000]

’Sixteen more.’

He wanted the rest. Every single one. But the floor refused to let him breathe long enough to take what he killed. Every time a Soul Core surfaced, something pulled him elsewhere. A beast slipped through. Someone needed covering. A weak point opened near Marika or Alice or one of the Vein Cores trying to keep the whole chamber from turning into a slaughterhouse. And if none of that happened, some greedy bastard was already lunging for the reward before the body hit the ground properly.

The second floor had turned into a test of something uglier than combat.

It was not only about who could kill, it was also about who could keep formation while others scraped for scraps at their feet.

After a while, the flood eased. The walls did not stop producing Soul Beasts entirely, but the room no longer felt like it was vomiting them in endless waves. People were hurt, breathing hard, caked in poison, sweat, blood, or dust, but the front had held long enough for the worst of the pressure to thin.

That was when the damage became easier to read.

There were plenty of Ember Cores among the fifty-three Awakeneds gathered there, and the difference between them and the rest showed all over the floor. Some had survived because they were quick, careful, or useful in the right way.

Others had survived because stronger people had happened to be standing near them. One man could not move his wrist at all. It only hung there, wrong and useless at the end of his arm while he stared at it with the frightened confusion of someone who had only just understood that pain did not care what he wanted.

There was one healer among all of them.

That alone was rare enough to make Neo notice. Healing classes were the kind people paid fortunes for, and the kind powerful groups did not let wander around cheaply. Yet here he was, kneeling by another wounded awakened and using what remained of his Soul Essence to mend a torn leg before the man collapsed entirely.

The one with the ruined wrist saw it and snapped.

He shoved his way forward, grabbed the healer by the collar, and yanked him halfway upright.

"Me! Heal me first!"

His limp hand swung uselessly in front of the healer’s face.

The healer’s own voice shook under the pressure. "I can’t heal everyone. My Soul Essence is already running low. I have to focus on wounds that stop people from moving or fighting. You can still use one hand."

That answer only made the bastard uglier.

He could not swing properly with the broken arm, so he drove a knee into the healer’s ribs instead.

"I said heal me!"

Byron turned toward the disturbance at once, fury already building in his face, but Neo reached them first.

"Tch."

He stepped in close enough that the man had to turn toward him.

"Oi dickhead," Neo said. "I haven’t seen you do a single thing to raise your Soul Core. Every time I saw you in camp, you were in your hut or wasting time talking while the rest actually worked. And now you’re starting trouble with the one person keeping this group from falling apart. Let him go."

The man recoiled more from the words than the tone. Neo had seen him often enough over the last days to know exactly what sort of parasite he was. One of those people who waited for everyone else to build the bridge first and only complained when it shook beneath their feet.

He released the healer with a curse and threw a punch with his good hand.

Neo was ready for it.

Gravebite shifted in his grip, and he drove the hilt into the man’s liver with compact, brutal force. The bastard folded instantly, dropped to one knee, and spat onto the floor while trying to pull air back into himself.

"Behave," Neo said coldly. "There are more than fifty of us here. If you become dead weight on purpose, we can let the tower sort you out."

Byron arrived a breath later and moved past Neo to check the healer, who was coughing and trying to steady himself. The man on the floor had already started muttering under his breath, half to himself, half to whatever fear had finally swallowed him whole.

"I don’t want to die... I don’t want to die..."

That part, at least, Neo understood.

Nothing about any of this had been normal. The Breach had closed behind them. Weeks had passed. Hope had narrowed into a tower and a staircase. Every person there had already understood, one way or another, that if things truly broke, their own life would suddenly feel far more precious than anyone else’s.

The gray-haired boy chose that moment to make himself heard again from the stairs.

"WE’RE NOT WAITING FOR ANYONE! THE THIRD FLOOR IS WORSE WITH THIS MANY PEOPLE, SO FOCUS!"

Neo turned toward Snot and the others.

"I don’t like this."

Max raised his shield again. "Stay close."

Alice gave a small nod, timid as ever, though there was decision carved into her face now. Marika nodded once as well. Snot rolled one shoulder and adjusted his daggers, the easy humor from earlier replaced by something leaner.

They started climbing.

The stairs curved up from the wreck of the second floor, carrying the whole battered mass into the next level with far less confidence than they had brought in at the start. People who had never climbed this high before felt it immediately. The air changed. The tower changed. Even the silence above them had a different texture, as if it were listening.

The third floor opened wide around them in tiers.

White stone rose and broke into balconies, platforms, suspended walkways, shattered edges, and exposed levels stacked one above another. It looked less like a floor and more like the inner bones of some dead structure folded into the tower’s body. On those balconies stood the Ragged Duelists.

Humanoid Soul Beasts with worn gray skin, ragged cloth hanging off them like the remains of old beggars, dented shields, spears, axes, and serrated swords. Some waited near the black orbs embedded into the architecture of the floor. Others stood motionless against pillars or railings like corpses left upright out of spite.

And above them, around them, in the cracks and across the walls, more spiders.

The floor heard them coming.

One Ragged Duelist moved first, drawn by the noise of more than fifty people climbing into its hall. Another followed. Across the balconies, shapes began turning toward the sound, slow at first, until that dead reluctance vanished and the whole level woke at once.

What happened next made even the people in front hesitate.

The Ragged Duelists did not climb down.

They walked straight off the balconies.

Not with the stiffness of ordinary bodies either. They dropped in loose, horrible folds, as if someone had ripped the bones out of them before pushing them over the edge. Those falling from the highest levels hit the lower stone with enough force to break apart completely. Their Soul Cores surfaced among the wreckage.

Others hit, bent in impossible ways, and rose with weapons already in hand.

The third floor had answered the noise.