The third floor held together far better than the second, at least for now.

Most of the Awakeneds were still moving with the same groups they had formed before entering the tower, and that alone kept the whole ascent from turning into a disaster on the spot. The Ember Cores stayed more guarded, tucked nearer to shields, sturdier bodies, and the people whose classes could actually answer when something ugly came close.

The stronger ones occupied the outer pressure, cutting down Ragged Duelists as they came off the balconies or stepped in from the side paths broken into the tower’s inner structure. For the moment, the Soul Beasts on this level were not crashing into them in one wild tide. The danger here breathed differently. Spread wider. Sharper in its intent. Better suited to wearing people down while they advanced.

Neo had not used Beast Strength yet.

He kept Gravebite in hand and fought with the same restraint he had decided on before entering the tower. Every drop of Soul Essence inside this place had value. The thing waiting at the top had already shown him enough the first time.

A speed that did not fit the room. A presence that had turned the whole throne floor colder just by existing there. Spending too much now for easier exchanges on this level would be stupid.

He had entered the tower with the same conclusion already carved into him. Less than half of them would walk out of this Breach alive.

Maybe fewer.

That was why he wanted Vein Core before the final floor. They had no real idea what rank or strength that thing upstairs truly held, which made the answer obvious enough. Reach Vein first. Save what he could. Kill what he needed. Everything else could rot.

A small part of him regretted not pushing harder before the incursion, but there was no use chewing on that now. The chance in front of him was simple. Take what this floor offered and close the gap while the others were busy surviving.

So Neo peeled a little away from his group.

Not enough to abandon them but also not enough to draw Max’s irritation or Marika’s comments. Only enough to carve out cleaner fights while the larger clash stretched across the level. If he could kill fast and stay mobile, he could harvest what mattered before the tower took the choice away from him again.

A Ragged Duelist stepped into his path.

The thing carried a serrated sword disturbingly similar to Gravebite’s shape, gray skin clinging to a lean humanoid frame wrapped in ragged cloth and scraps of ruined leather. It moved with that same awful wrongness the others had, like a corpse that had remembered too much about fighting and too little about being dead.

The first clash rang hard through the floor.

Steel bit steel. Sparks cracked between the blades. The Ragged Duelist pressed him immediately, one cut rolling into the next with ugly efficiency. There was nothing elegant in it. No wasted style either. The thing swung like violence had been hammered straight into the joints. Neo caught the first strike and shifted with it, only for the next to rise from below with enough force to jar his wrist. He stepped back across a broken patch of white stone, turned his shoulders, and sent Gravebite across the creature’s upper body. The cut opened cloth and gray flesh, but not enough to slow it.

The Ragged Duelist drove forward again.

A short chop toward the neck. Neo deflected. A backhand return toward the ribs. Neo twisted away and answered with a thrust toward the throat, only for the thing to slap the blade aside and come down in a brutal overhead cut that forced him to give ground once more. The exchange stayed tight and violent, each impact running through his arms with enough weight to remind him that the Soul Beast in front of him was stronger.

Not by a ridiculous margin but enough to push him back if he kept this clean.

Neo had no intention of dragging it out. He wanted the corpse, the Soul Core, and the next fight after that. He still needed eight Ragged Duelists in total when this started. After this one, seven remained.

The creature swung again.

Neo answered with Beast Strength.

The change ripped through his arms in an instant. It did not arrive gently. The force of it flooded the muscles and joints with something far beyond this tower’s scale, because the skill had not come from this tower. It belonged to a Throne-rank creature. Even filtered through his current body, even restrained by his present core, it remained absurd compared to anything this Breach had thrown at them so far.

Gravebite was no longer the same either.

The Divine Relic had devoured it and returned it changed, tougher and crueler in ways the old weapon never was.

Sword met sword.

The Ragged Duelist’s blade broke.

There was no gradual crack, no warning. One instant the weapon was there, the next it had split under the impact. The creature seemed to falter, not in fear, but in that dead confusion of something whose body still remembered battle even as its ruined mind failed to understand why the exchange had gone wrong.

Neo did not give it the grace of a second thought.

Gravebite kept moving through the broken steel and carved into the creature’s head, splitting the upper half apart and leaving the lower part of the mouth hanging beneath a wreck of bone and gray flesh.

The body dropped.

[Soul-Window]

[You have slain Ragged Duelist - Vein Core.]

The Soul Core surfaced.

This time no one stole it.

Neo crouched, grabbed it, and consumed it at once.

[Soul-Window]

[You have consumed the Soul Core of Ragged Duelist - Vein Core.]

[+2 Souls] [986/1000]

’Fourteen more.’

He moved again without wasting time.

The third floor dragged on in a harsher rhythm after that. Ragged Duelists kept dropping from balconies, stepping off higher walkways, or coming out from broken side routes that cut through the tower’s inner structure. Some of them burst apart on impact if they fell from high enough, their Soul Cores surfacing among the wreckage. Others rose from the stone with weapons already in hand, bodies bent wrong and entirely unconcerned by it. The spiders only made the whole thing filthier, descending whenever the humanoid Soul Beasts pulled enough attention away from the walls and ceiling.

Neo kept killing.

He did not get every Soul Core. Sometimes another exchange pulled him away before he could take it. Sometimes the corpse fell too close to other hands. Sometimes the tower itself forced his attention elsewhere. Even so, he kept pressing, taking what he could, fighting with one count running beneath the rest of the noise. Blade. Kill. Move. Count. Blade again.

By the time the floor finally began to thin for real, he had pulled the gap down much farther than before.

Only four Souls short now.

That was when the first two Awakeneds died.

One of them was the bastard with the broken hand.

Neo saw the body on the stone and felt no surprise. The man had already shown what he was on the second floor. Weakness did not disgust Neo by itself. Plenty of weak people survived. But weakness with entitlement attached to it usually ended the same way once the pressure turned real.

What came next was uglier.

The people around the dead were not stupid, and they were not sentimental enough to leave value on the ground. The moment the Soul Cores surfaced, they took them. Consumed them. Fast enough that anyone still clinging to softer ideas had no chance to stop it. A few voices rose in protest. Others answered just as quickly that this had already been said before, that if someone died, someone from their own group would take the Soul Core rather than let a stranger have it.

Even with fresh corpses at their feet, greed climbed to the surface without shame.

Neo watched it happen and found nothing strange in it. The Breach had been grinding people down for weeks now. Fear had stripped enough away already. Once a human being stayed cornered long enough, the better parts usually lost the fight first.

At last, the third floor emptied.

No more Ragged Duelists came off the balconies. No spiders moved across the walls searching for another opening. The whole level was left as a wreck of white stone, broken weapons, blood, and bodies, with the surviving Awakeneds breathing hard among it.

Neo checked his count again.

Four Souls short.

Close enough to bite.

Byron raised his voice across the battered floor. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

"We rest for a while," he said. "After that, we continue. What’s left is the last part."

No one argued.

Not because anyone felt safe.

Because every person there knew the same thing by now. The tower had already started stripping them down, and the thing waiting above had not even moved yet.