Tower 17 wasn't collapsing.
Yet.
Its event manager was just… drunk.
Timers misaligned by seconds, then tens of seconds. Mob spawns overlapping weirdly. Trap reset counters merging.
[OBJECT: T17_EVENT_MANAGER.][STATUS: ROOT_SYNC LOST – RUNNING ON CACHED PATTERNS.]
Cached patterns meant "whatever it had loaded when the glitch hit."
Normally, that was fine.
Tonight, it wasn't.
Kael saw three glowing sections on the manager's floor map.
Floors 3, 5, and 6.
Floor 3 again.
"Of course," he muttered.
[F3 PARTY: RIA / JOON / DANE / LIAN / EXTRA.]
They were halfway through a run.
And the timing bug had stacked two mini-events on top of each other:
A web tunnel collapse hazard was supposed to trigger after Brood Nest 2.
An elite Broodmother spawn was supposed to be optional if a certain chest was opened.
Both flags fired at once.
[HAZARD_TUNNEL_COLLAPSE – ACTIVE.][BOSS_SILK-THROAT_VARIANT – ACTIVE.]
Plus the normal trash.
"Overtuned," Kael said. "They're good, but not that good."
Joon's voice came through their party link, tinny with echo.
"We were not supposed to get this many spiders," he said. "Kael, your boyfriend Tower is being weird."
"Working on it," Kael muttered.
He dove into the floor's event queue.
Under normal circumstances, the System would consider "difficulty spike" vs "party level" and adjust health/aggro accordingly.
Tonight, the worth function in that module just said:
[EVAL: …][ROOT: NULL.]
He grabbed the queue.
Haneul watched the live feed: Joon spinning in a tight space, glaive carving arcs; Ria barking orders; Lian barely keeping up with heal ticks.
"You patch, I'll lean," Haneul said.
Her shard flowed outward, tugging on the same logic they'd nudged on their earlier rescue run.
[FRAGMENT_VECTOR: "CHALLENGE, NOT SLAUGHTER."]
Kael didn't delete any hazards.
He slowed.
He took the tunnel collapse timer and stretched it.
[COLLAPSE_DELAY: 8 SEC → 20 SEC.]
He took Silk-Throat's variant HP and quietly shaved ten percent off.
[HP_MULTIPLIER: 1.0 → 0.9.]
He dropped the spawn count of Broodlings by a quarter.
[BROODLING_COUNT: 12 → 9.]
Not dramatic.
Enough that a party who'd handled the earlier side event could handle this without it becoming a wipe lottery.
Watchdog_Ω flickered an eye his way.
[UNUSUAL ADJUSTMENTS DETECTED.][ROOT_SYNC LOST – TEMPORARILY ALLOWING MANUAL.]
"Even Watchdog's on break," he muttered.
In the feed, Joon cursed as the floor started shaking.
"Tunnel's going!" Ria shouted. "Move! Move!"
With the stretched timer, they made it through the chokepoint before rocks fully came down instead of getting half the party cut off.
Silk-Throat Variant shrieked and lunged.
Dane's arrows sank deeper than they should have into its carapace.
Lian's heals hit a little harder than she'd expected—residual tag from the shard's "don't kill them, challenge them" vector.
HP bars dropped.
HP bars climbed.
No one hit zero.
[F3 PARTY: ALL SURVIVED.]
Kael let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.
"Floor 5?" Haneul asked.
He checked.
Floor 5's glitch was almost… benign.
Two patrols had spawned on top of each other, but both groups were mid-tier. The party there had a heavy Defender and a DPS monster; they'd handle it, bruised but fine.
Floor 6's anomaly sorted itself out as the Root channel's timing hiccup cleared.
[T17_EVENT_MANAGER: SYNC – DEGRADED → STABILIZING.]
He sagged back in his chair, sweat on his forehead despite not having moved his physical body much at all.
Joon's post-run message hit their chat a minute later.
Okay we definitely got double-spawned in there. Felt like the floor was having a stroke. We good?
Mostly, Kael wrote back. I kicked a few timers. You owe me noodles.
You owe me less early death, Joon replied. Call it even.