Kael's roar shattered the silence, a physical wave of fury-laced fire-mana that scorched the damp air. Precognition flashed—half a second of clarity—showing Zeke the guildmaster's massive form tearing down corridors like a battering ram. *Too soon.* The Devourer's power snarled, demanding confrontation, but Zeke's golden eye saw deeper: Kael's aura blazed like a forge, layered with decades of battle-hardened enhancements. Even with stolen divinity, Zeke's body remained a hollow shell—ribs grating, wounds weeping black ichor, vitality barely a flicker. Engaging now wasn't valor; it was suicide. The Devourer recoiled at the retreat, its divine hunger a cold knife against his spine. "Patience," Zeke hissed, not to himself, but to the ancient will thrashing within him. "Your feast comes later."
He moved with brutal efficiency. The gutting knife flashed, carving a single word into the grimy floorboards beside the drained corpses: **VENGEANCE**. Each stroke echoed the vessel's stolen breath, Kael's mocking laughter, and the Hexa-Saint's betrayal—all fuel for the Devourer's silent approval. Precognition screamed again—Kael's bootsteps thundering closer. Zeke snatched a pouch from a fallen enforcer, spilling copper coins and a vial of cheap healing salve into his palm. Not enough. Not nearly enough. He slipped through a fractured window into the suffocating embrace of alley shadows, leaving bloodied footprints that steamed in the rain-slicked air. Behind him, Kael's enraged bellow shook the barracks' foundations, promising a hunt.
***
The copper coins clinked softly in Zeke's pouch, a pitiful anchor against the Devourer's gnawing hunger. Rain-slicked cobblestones blurred beneath his boots as he fled, Divine Trace Vision mapping escape routes in searing gold—a labyrinth of crumbling tenements and sewage canals. Kael's fire-mana signature pulsed behind him like a war drum, growing fainter but no less furious. The Devourer recoiled at the retreat, its essence coiling tighter around Zeke's soul, whispering promises of divine retribution. "Silence," Zeke rasped, thumbing the obsidian glyph beneath his ribs. The fragment's cold fury vibrated against bone. "We ascend. Now."
Half-blind exhaustion dragged at him, but Precognition flared—a half-second glimpse of a patrol rounding the next corner. Zeke veered into a butcher's alleyway, where the stench of blood and offal choked the air. He pressed against fly-blown carcasses, his stolen salve stinging as he smeared it over weeping wounds. The Devourer's power bristled at the delay, yet Zeke's golden eye locked onto faint golden threads snaking upward—toward the Tower's Second Floor transit hub. Survival demanded passage. With coins clutched like shards of hope, he melted into the squatter's market crowds, where hollow-eyed vendors hawked rat kebabs and rusted blades. Every shadow held Kael's enforcers; every whisper sounded like betrayal.
At the hub's gates, two guards barred his path, their bored eyes glazed with cheap stimulants. Divine Trace Vision ignited—their auras thin and frayed, Common-rank fodder. One spat. "Scum don't ascend." Before the words fully landed, Precognition gifted Zeke a half-second dance: the shift of weight, the lazy swipe of a baton. He moved. Not with violence, but precision—palming copper coins into the guard's calloused hand, a silent bribe slick with rain and desperation. The guard's pupils dilated, fingers curling greedily. A nod. The gate groaned open onto a platform of humming, rune-etched stone. Behind him, in the slum's depths, Kael's roar echoed—unanswered. The Devourer sighed, cold and approving.
Air thickened—heavy with ozone—as the teleportation platform vibrated beneath Zeke's boots. Gold threads of ambient Mana surged upward like inverted waterfalls. He stepped into the pulse, exhaustion warring with the fragment's jagged hunger. Light swallowed him. Sound vanished. Pressure crushed bones already brittle. Then—silence. Absolute. Cold. The scent of wet stone and decay replaced by sterile dust and something metallic, sharp. His golden eye adjusted first: walls of seamless grey alloy stretching into dimness, corridors lit by floating orbs casting sterile blue light. The Second Floor. Clean. Empty. Deadly. Precognition prickled—no immediate threat, only a vast, watchful stillness. The Devourer stirred, tasting new power here. Ancient power. Unclaimed.
Zeke didn't linger. His trace vision locked onto a distant nexus—the ascension gate shimmering like molten gold against the grey. He moved like a shadow slipping through cracks, boots silent on polished floors. Echoes of Kael's hunt faded; here, only his fragmented soul mattered. Precognition flared: two patrol drones humming around a corner—faceless spheres wreathed in silver threads. He pressed flat against cold alloy, holding breath. They passed, scanning beams grazing air inches above him. Danger whispered, familiar yet alien. This floor's guardians weren't men; they were constructs—remnants of a forgotten architect's wrath. The Devourer snarled softly, eager. But Zeke pushed on. Survival demanded ascent. The Third Floor awaited.
***
The abrupt transition hit Zeke like a physical blow—dank slum air replaced by sterile corridors humming with latent energy. His Divine Trace Vision snapped sharply into focus, painting the seamless grey alloy walls with rivers of pure golden mana. Yet among those luminous currents, a discordant thread snaked through the floor's infrastructure, pulsing with feral hunger. Following it led him away from the ascension nexus, deeper into the maintenance bowels where blue-lit orbs cast long, skeletal shadows. The scent struck first—wet fur, ozone, and crushed stone. Then the sound: rhythmic scraping, claws on metal, punctuated by guttural yips. He rounded a corroded coolant pipe and froze. Gnolls. Not the mythical beasts of old lore, but twisted, hyena-like constructs fused with mining gear—rusted drill-arms whirring as they clawed at mana-infused ore veins in the walls. Their eyes glowed a dull crimson; crude harnesses bulged with glowing mana-stone sacks. Easy prey. Rich resources. The Devourer's essence coiled eagerly against his ribs.
Precognition flickered—half a second of snarling jaws lunging from his blind spot. Zeke pivoted, gutting knife already singing free. His stolen energy reserve screamed as he channeled it, not into evasion, but into the Obsidian Glyph's cold promise. The blade met fur and fused metal with a sound like tearing silk. Divine entropy surged. The gnoll shuddered, its crimson eye-flares dimming as mana-core threads unspooled violently into raw power that flooded Zeke's starving veins. Two more charged, drill-arms whining. Exhaustion warred with the Devourer's vicious delight. He let them come, riding Precognition's edge—a sidestep past snapping jaws, the knife's edge tracing a fractal path through the second gnoll's harness-strap. A mana-stone pouch thudded to the floor, spilling raw, blue-luminescent ore.
He fought economically, each movement a tremor through his fragile frame. The third gnoll died choking on its own corrupted energy, drill-arm sparking against the wall. Silence returned, broken only by Zeke's ragged gasps and the Devourer's satisfied hum beneath his ribs. He knelt, ignoring the lingering phantom ache of shattered bones. Methodically, he harvested: claws sharp enough to pierce cheap armor, teeth fused with conductive ore, and the precious mana-stones—raw, uncut power humming in his palm. The corpses he dragged into shadow, bundling them with scavenged coolant pipes and frayed wiring. Waste denied. Resources claimed.
The descent was a calculated risk. Returning to the First Floor meant diving back into Kael's hunting grounds. Zeke moved fast, hood pulled low, Divine Trace Vision painting patrol routes in shifting gold threads. He bypassed crowded markets, slipping into the Merchant Guild's cavernous warehouse through a corroded vent shaft. Air thick with incense and desperation replaced sterile dust. A bored clerk eyed Zeke's bundled loot—the gnoll parts, the claws, the teeth—with practiced disdain. "Common-grade scrap. Fifty copper." But Zeke placed the uncut blue mana-stone on the counter. It pulsed with cold, pure light. The clerk stiffened, fingers twitching. "High-grade... Ascension vein core? thirty three silver ninety copper." Zeke didn't haggle. Speed was armor.
Coin pouch heavy, he navigated the Guild's labyrinthine stalls. First, armor: stiffened Marsh Wyrm hide greaves and a cuirass, smelling pungently of tannins and cheap enchantment residue. Next, the blade: a hulking slab of Common-grade ironwood-steel alloy, its edge dull but its weight familiar, grounding him in the Warrior's muscle-memory. Two crude health potions—thick, crimson sludge in clay vials—cost another silver. Finally, the ring. A hawker displayed it on velvet: plain silver band inset with a fleck of Void Shard. Five cubic meters of extradimensional space. Expensive. Twenty-eight silver ninety copper. The Devourer growled at the expenditure, urging violence over purchase. Zeke silenced it, paying. The ring settled coldly onto his finger; his will brushed emptiness inside. Luxury traded for anonymity. Resources secured.
He slipped back into the First Floor's choking alleyways, the greatsword a heavy, comforting burden strapped across his back beneath a scavenged cloak. The leather armor chafed against his ribs, a constant reminder of the vessel's frailty. Precognition flickered—no immediate pursuit, only the usual predatory shadows trailing potential prey. He moved northwest, towards the crumbling Aqueduct Sector, where damp stone walls offered cover and forgotten maintenance shafts provided shortcuts. His Golden Eye scanned constantly: the ambient threads here were thinner, polluted by desperation and decay, yet beneath it all pulsed the Tower's deeper, colder currents. He needed solitude. Consolidation. Time to heal fully and integrate the Devourer's snarling presence. A derelict pumping station, its rusted gears frozen mid-turn, became his temporary den. He barred the corroded metal door with a fallen beam thick as his thigh.
Time blurred in the perpetual gloom. Training became ritual. Dawn found him straining against the weight of scavenged boulders—not building muscle, but *reteaching* ligaments and tendons forgotten pathways. Sweat stung his empty socket; phantom pain flared where ribs had been shattered. He pushed through, feeding agony directly into the Devourer's entropy glyph coiled within his soul—fuel for focus. Afternoons were blade-work: the crude greatsword's balance was abysmal, its edge dulled rapidly against makeshift practice dummies stuffed with refuse. He compensated with Precognition: a flicker-ahead to shift his stance minutely, to exploit momentum the blade itself lacked. He drilled until his hands blistered, then healed overnight with stolen slivers of vitality siphoned from cockroaches and sewer rats consumed unwillingly by the Glyph's cold hunger. Every kill was practice; every evasion drilled into muscle-memory, and so, 2 months passed.
Solitude fractured only for necessity. Thin copper coins bought stale bread and foul water from desperate hawkers near collapsed aqueduct arches. Silver bought fleeting moments of safety—a guard's averted gaze near high-traffic zones. He harvested low-tier beasts in forgotten tunnels: Cave Slugs leaking acidic ichor, Blind Rats squealing in the dark. Each Core ripped out by his knife fed the Glyph, fueling minute bursts of enhanced strength or accelerated healing. His vessel remained frail, ribs aching in the damp cold, but no longer fragile. The stolen greatsword felt less alien; the Wyrmhide armor moulded slightly to his frame. Days blurred into weeks, marked only by the deepening ache in his bones and the Glyph's restless stirring. Precognition sharpened: half-seconds stretched to three-quarters. Divine Trace Vision painted the Tower's Mana currents with agonizing clarity—a constant reminder of heights lost and heights yet to claw towards.
The whispers reached him near month's end. He lingered near a grimy tavern vent, hood pulled low, pretending to mend a frayed bootlace while patrons spat venomous gossip. Kael's name cut through the ambient stench like poisoned steel. "...pulled strings, bastard," a drunk hissed. "Ascended weeks ago. Ninth Floor." Another voice, thick with envy: "Heard he pledged to the Ivory Shield Guild proper. Got a patron. Riding high." A third, fearful: "Left his Red Hand cronies scrambling. Whole Enforcer barracks is a pit of vipers now." Zeke's fists clenched beneath his cloak. Kael ascended. Escaped. The coward hadn't lingered to hunt his ghost—he'd fled upwards. The Devourer's entropy Glyph flared cold against his soul, feeding on the sudden rush of betrayed fury. Patron. Ascended. Kael thought himself untouchable. A phantom ache pulsed where the boy's eye had been ripped out. "For the old Zeke", the thought resonated, colder than the Glyph itself.