They came out of the darkness like they owned it.
Seven of them, all young and all armed with makeshift weapons scavenged from the floor: rocks tied to sticks, sharpened metal from fallen equipment. One had an actual knife, probably brought from Earth like Dante did.
Their leader was a tall man with a shaved head and eyes that expected obedience. He smiled when he saw the camp.
"Well, well. Looks like our little bird found some friends."
The wounded woman, still pressed against the rock behind Dante, made a small sound that might have been fear or something else.
Dante didn't turn to look at her. He was too busy counting angles.
Seven hostiles with Dax and Lena positioning behind him, rocky terrain, and one path of retreat if needed.
'No. No retreat. That's not what this is.'
"You're the hunting pack," he said. Not a question.
The bald man's smile widened. "Smart. You must have heard of us. We're just doing what the Tower wants, friend. Survival of the fittest. You help us out, give us your supplies, maybe that knife of yours, and we let you walk away."
"Generous."
"I'm a generous guy."
Dante studied the formation: two in front with the leader, four spread in a loose semicircle, and one hanging back as the probable lookout.
Amateur tactics with no coordination. They overwhelmed weaker candidates with numbers and never faced real resistance.
This would be quick.
"Counter-offer," Dante said. "You walk away now. All of you. I let you live."
Silence.
Then laughter. All seven of them, laughing like he told the best joke they'd ever heard.
Dante waited for them to finish.
"Oh, that's good." The leader wiped his eyes. "That's really good. You're what, nineteen? Twenty? And you think you can take all of us?"
"I don't think. I know."
Something in his voice cut through the amusement. The laughter died. A few of the attackers shifted uncomfortably.
The leader's smile turned cold. "Kill him. Take everything."
They rushed.
---
The first man died before he understood what happened.
Dante moved forward instead of back, closing distance when they expected retreat. His knife opened the first attacker's throat in a single motion as blood sprayed. The body was still falling when he pivoted.
The second attacker swung a rock-club at his head. Dante ducked, stepped inside the arc, and drove his knife into the man's ribs, twisted, and withdrew.
Two down in three seconds.
The others hesitated. That hesitation killed two more.
Dante hit the third with a palm strike to the throat that crushed his windpipe. Grabbed the fourth as a shield when the fifth swung a metal bar. The bar connected with his own ally. Dante let the body drop and cut the fifth attacker across the face.
The man screamed, clutching his eye, and Dante finished him with a thrust under the jaw.
Five down in ten seconds.
Dax was fighting the sixth, grappling for control of a weapon. Dante could have helped. Instead, he turned toward the leader.
The bald man backed away, all trace of confidence gone.
"Wait. Wait. We can talk about this."
"We talked. You chose poorly."
Dante advanced. The man turned to run. He made it three steps before Dante's knife took him in the back of the leg. He fell screaming.
Dante walked over and crouched beside him.
"You hunted candidates. Killed them for supplies. How many?"
The man blubbered words that weren't words.
"How many?"
"I don't... we didn't... eleven! Eleven, okay? But they were weak! They would have died anyway!"
Dante nodded. Expected answer. The justification every predator used.
'They would have died anyway. I just sped it up.'
He heard variations of that excuse a hundred times in his original climb, from bandits, from traitors, and from Elliot at the end with that same smile.
"You're right," Dante said. "They probably would have died. Just like you're going to die."
He drove the knife down.
---
The silence after violence was always strange.
Seven bodies in less than a minute. Dax and Lena stood frozen, staring at the carnage like they didn't understand what they witnessed.
The woman who led the predators to them was sitting very still against the rock, her "injured" arm perfectly mobile now. Her eyes met Dante's.
"You were bait," he said.
She didn't deny it. "They made me. Said they would kill me if I didn't bring them prey."
"But your arm wasn't really injured."
"...No."
Dante cleaned his knife on one of the bodies. Considered.
She sold out strangers to save herself, an understandable and human response, the kind of survival instinct the Tower rewarded.
Also meant she couldn't be trusted.
"Leave," he said. "Now. If I see you again, I assume you're hostile."
She scrambled to her feet and ran into the darkness without looking back.
Dax finally found his voice. "What the hell was that?"
"Self-defense."
"You killed seven people!"
"They were going to kill us, and they killed eleven others before us." Dante met his eyes. "You would have died, your sister would have died, and I would have died. This was the only option."
"There's always another option!"
"No. There isn't." Dante's voice was flat. Final. "This is the Tower. This is what it does. It takes people and makes them choose between killing and dying. You can pretend there's a third choice. You can cling to that fantasy until someone puts a knife in your back while you're busy agonizing over morality."
He gestured at the bodies.
"Or you can accept reality and survive."
Dax looked sick. Lena, though, was staring at Dante with something other than horror.
"You've done this before," she said quietly.
"No."
"Bullshit. No first-timer moves like that, and no first-timer kills like that."
Dante said nothing.
"I don't know what you are," Lena continued, "but my brother's alive because of you. So I'm not going to ask questions. Just... tell me. Can we trust you?"
He looked at her. At Dax, still pale but listening.
'Can they trust me?'
Truth: he would sacrifice them if it meant saving Ivy, and he would burn the entire Tower to keep his sister alive.
But that wasn't happening today.
"As long as you're with me," he said, "I'll keep you alive. That's the best I can offer."
Lena nodded. "Good enough."
---
They didn't sleep more that night because there was too much blood in the air and too many eyes watching from the darkness.
By morning, Dante led them toward the exit gate at a pace that left no room for conversation.
[Floor 1 progress update]
[Time elapsed: 36 hours]
[Current survivors: 2,104]
Half were gone, and they still had thirty-six hours left.
The terrain grew worse as they approached the gate, steeper and with more creatures. Other candidates appeared occasionally, some traveling in groups, others alone and desperate.
Dante avoided them when possible, helped when the cost was low, and killed when there was no choice.
Each time, the gap between who he was and who he presented to be grew wider.
'How long can I pretend? How long before they realize I'm not normal?'
He pushed the thought aside. It didn't matter. Getting through the floor mattered. Building trust mattered. The rest could wait.
---
The exit gate appeared on hour forty-eight.
It wasn't hidden since the Tower didn't bother with subtlety. A massive archway, identical to the one they entered, sat at the peak of a rocky plateau, visible for miles.
Which meant every surviving candidate was converging on the same location.
"That's going to be a mess," Dax said.
"Probably."
They approached carefully. The base of the plateau was already crowded with hundreds of candidates, most wounded, many armed, all desperate to claim their spot in line. Fighting had broken out in places, and bodies littered the approach.
Dante scanned the crowd.
There, near the front, a group of about thirty, organized and disciplined. At their center, Elliot Crane directed traffic like a general commanding troops.
"See the big group?" Lena said. "That's the guy from registration. The one who wanted everyone to team up."
"Elliot Crane," Dante confirmed.
"He's got half the survivors. How'd he manage that?"
'By being useful, by being safe, by making everyone feel like they needed him.'
Same strategy Elliot always used: gather the sheep, protect them, become indispensable, then, when the time was right, sell them to the wolves.
"Doesn't matter," Dante said. "We move around them. Enter the gate from the east approach."
"Isn't that longer?"
"He'll try to recruit us if we go through his group. I'd rather avoid the conversation."
Dax frowned. "What's wrong with having allies?"
"Nothing. I just don't want those allies."
---
They circled wide, and the eastern approach was harder and steeper, patrolled by a pair of creatures Dante dispatched without slowing down.
The gate loomed ahead, twenty meters, then fifteen, then ten.
A voice rang out behind them.
"Hey! You three! Wait!"
Dante didn't stop.
Footsteps came from behind, running, someone catching up.
"I said wait!"
A hand grabbed his shoulder.
Dante turned, knife already in motion, and stopped the blade an inch from a very surprised young man's throat.
"Don't touch me," he said quietly.
The man, barely twenty, raised both hands. "Okay! Okay! Jesus. I just wanted to talk!"
Dante lowered the knife but didn't put it away. "Talk."
"I'm with the Jade Serpent Guild, or at least I will be once we clear this floor. My sponsor's watching the candidates, and he noticed you, the way you move, the way you fight."
"And?"
"He wants to recruit you officially, with good benefits and guaranteed support through the floor progression. The Jade Serpent takes care of its own."
Dante considered. He knew the Jade Serpent, a mid-tier guild that was competent but not exceptional. They would be absorbed by Titan Corps in three years.
"No."
"Just like that? You don't even want to hear the offer?"
"I don't want offers, I don't want sponsors, and I don't want handlers watching over my shoulder."
He turned and walked toward the gate.
"At least tell me your name!" the recruiter called after him. "So I can tell my sponsor who turned us down!"
Dante didn't answer. He stepped through the gate, felt reality twist, and emerged on the other side.
[Floor 1: Complete]
[Survivors: 1,847/4,847]
[Your rank: #127]
[Congratulations. You have cleared the threshold.]
[Floor 2 will open in: 24:00:00]
He closed the notification and looked around. A massive safe zone stretched before him. Candidates who made it through were resting, healing, processing what they survived.
Dax and Lena stepped through behind him.
"We made it," Dax said. He sounded amazed.
Dante didn't smile.
'That's one floor down. Only seventy-six more to go.'
The real climb was just beginning.