The void swallowed us.
I fell laughing.
The Saint fell screaming.
And the Tower shuddered.
There was no ground. No ceiling. No air.
Only fragments.
A cathedral pew floating in darkness.
A staircase that spiraled nowhere.
Candles suspended mid-drip, their flames frozen.
The battlefield was a graveyard of timelines—shards of what the Saint had erased, shards of what I had corrupted.
Every step I took crunched on bones that weren't supposed to exist.
Every breath dragged in the whispers of deaths that had been undone.
I spread my arms.
The void caressed me like an old friend.
"Beautiful."
The Saint staggered to his feet across from me, robes dimmed, face pale. His sword still glowed, but the light sputtered, as if doubting itself.
"You shouldn't be here," he whispered.
"And yet," I grinned, "here I am."
[System Alert: WARNING. Regression Authorities in direct conflict.]
[Result: Dimensional Stability collapsing.]
[Result: Extraneous timelines leaking into active floor.]
The void groaned. Memories bled into existence:
A village where hunters survived the beast tide.
A dungeon where the Wyrm never woke.
A child I had killed on Floor 3… alive, clutching her mother's hand.
All of them flickered, unstable.
The Saint lifted his trembling hand toward them. "Return…!"
And I slammed my boot onto a bone, snapping it with a crack.
"Stay."
The corpses surged from behind me, clawing at the fragments, dragging them down into rot. The undone deaths wailed as my authority touched them.
"You erase them." I laughed, teeth bared. "I collect them."
The Saint roared and charged.
Our blades met—his of light, mine a jagged fang of bone. The impact split a floating staircase in two.
Each strike wasn't just steel on steel—it was time against time. When his blade cut me, the wound tried to erase itself. When mine cut him, the wound tried to persist even when undone.
It was a paradox given flesh.
And the void screamed around us.
Floor 3.
A party of hunters sat around a campfire, eating stale bread. Then—
The fire snuffed out.
The System windows above their heads glitched into static.
One hunter dropped his food. "...What the hell was that?"
No one answered.
Because above them, the sky cracked.
For a split second, they saw it: a cathedral breaking apart, two figures clashing in the void beyond. One wreathed in corpses, one in light.
Then the sky sealed.
But the silence that followed pressed down heavier than any monster.
Floor 7.
A guardian beast lifted its head. Its nine tails quivered.
The Tower's whispers—its eternal instructions that only guardians heard—were gone.
For the first time since its creation, the beast felt alone.
And it howled.
Floor 20.
Hunters racing through a labyrinth froze as their maps scrambled into nonsense.
"Impossible…!" one muttered. "The Tower's coordinates never fail!"
The walls melted into other walls. Corridors split into forests. Whole memories from "undone timelines" bled in.
They heard a laugh echoing faintly through the distortion.
A laugh none of them ever wanted to hear again.
The Saint's blade carved across my chest.
I collapsed—dead.
[You have died.]
I rose, coughing blood, grinning.
The Saint stabbed me through the eye.
[You have died.]
I rose again, one-eyed, cackling.
"You see, Saint? You erase. I endure."
"You're filth," he spat. "You're corrosion. You're nothing but the Tower's disease."
I leaned close, blood dripping down my smile.
"Then what does it make you? A doctor who can't stop bleeding his patient dry?"
His hand shook. For the first time, doubt swam in his perfect saintly eyes.
And I reveled in it.
Far beyond the Tower, in a place where hunters' eyes could never reach, voices stirred.
<< Two Calamities in conflict. >><< Unstable convergence. >><< This should not be. >>
The voices were not gods. They were older. Deeper.
The Saint of Salvation and the Necromancer of Regression had pressed too hard against the rules.
And the Tower itself… was faltering.
The Saint screamed and unleashed everything.
A thousand timelines ripped open at once—armies of hunters, villages, cities, all summoned as weapons. His Authority rewound them into existence, turned them into a tidal wave of "what ifs."
My corpses answered.
The undone dead, the forgotten slain, the erased tragedies—every memory he had tried to bury clawed back under my call.
Light clashed against rot.
Timelines devoured timelines.
The void shredded into raw static.
And then—
The Tower spoke.
[System Emergency Protocol Activated.]
[Stability below 15%.]
[Calamity Clash must be terminated.]
"Terminated?" I grinned. "Try me."
The Saint gasped. "No—you can't—!"
The void itself split.
A hand reached through.
A hand made of stone, carved in Tower-script, its fingers wrapped in chains.
It reached for us both.
Every hunter across every floor saw it.
For a heartbeat, the Tower walls turned transparent.
They saw the void.
They saw the clash.
They saw the hand descending.
And they knew:
This wasn't hunters fighting.
This wasn't a quest.
This was something the Tower itself couldn't control.
And every hunter, from the weakest on Floor 1 to the apex guild leaders of Floor 50, shivered with the same thought.
We are insects here.
The Tower's hand closed around us.
Chains lashed my body, burning through flesh and bone. The Saint screamed as chains pierced his chest.
[Containment Required.]
[Calamities Relocated.]
The void shattered.
The timelines screamed.
And the Arena of Calamities ceased to exist.
I woke chained to a spire of obsidian.
The air was ash. The sky was red. The ground stretched into nothing.
The Saint was shackled opposite me, his glowing robes shredded, his silver hair tangled.
We were bound in a prison between floors.
A place neither of us should ever have seen.
The Tower's voice rumbled all around us:
[Calamities may not clash beyond containment.]
[Violation detected.]
[You are to remain bound until correction is determined.]
The Saint panted, head bowed. For the first time, his aura of divinity was gone. He looked human. Weak.
I laughed, even in chains.
"So, brother," I hissed. "It seems we've broken the toy box."
He looked up, trembling. "You… you'll ruin everything."
"Yes," I whispered. "That's the fun part."
The Tower shuddered again.
And for the first time, I thought I heard fear in its voice.
Guild leaders convened in panicked whispers.
"Two Calamities…""The Tower itself intervened…""What does it mean?"
No one had an answer.
But they all knew one thing.
The Tower was no longer a game.
It was a powder keg.
And somewhere in its depths, one Calamity laughed.