Nobody had ever completed Endless Tower solo.
Gareth Mourne had done it twenty-seven times.
Tonight he was going for the record.
zzz_sleepy: it's 2am, I have school tomorrow, I shouldn't be watching this
NightOwl_Fen: I have work tomorrow and I still can't leave
Celestia_VII: why does this guy make it look so easy
ProHunter99: because it IS easy for him, that's the problem
Four hundred viewers on the stream. Gareth wasn't looking at them. He never read chat while playing. It was a life principle.
But before stepping through the boss door, he stopped.
Opened his status screen.
'Fourteen active buffs.'
Most players didn't know half of them existed. Three were hidden behind environmental interactions on floors 12, 27 and 33 that no wiki had ever documented. Two required item combinations nobody had figured out were compatible. One only triggered if you'd taken damage from a specific enemy on floor 41 without healing afterward.
Gareth had mapped every single one across hundreds of hours. Not because someone told him to. Because he'd looked at the game and decided there had to be more than what the surface showed.
There always was.
'Alright,' he thought, closing the screen. 'Let's see if twenty-seven runs was enough.'
He stepped through the door.
The Sovereign Wraith Valdorak stared at him from across the room: four meters of oxidized armor fused with pulsing violet flesh, six arms ending in swords melded to bone, an iron mask with a horizontal crack emanating purple light in absolute silence.
It didn't roar. It didn't threaten.
It just waited.
"Long time no see," Gareth murmured.
Seventy percent health in the red. Planned. Every potion saved for this moment, every cooldown timed to the second. Not recklessness. Optimized routing. The health deficit was intentional too, three of his fourteen buffs only reached maximum potency below eighty percent.
Celestia_VII: wait why is he already at 70% health before the fight even starts
ProHunter99: he does this every time, I still don't understand it
GuildMaster_Erend: I think it's intentional??? the buffs scale with missing health???
zzz_sleepy: these people understand this game so much better than me
Valdorak launched the Cycle of Desolation.
Six arms in a spiral. Eight meters with no blind spot. The attack that had killed every player who made it this far.
Gareth hit the floor on the exact seventh frame, slipped through the four-degree rotation nobody else had found, took the secondary impact that shaved off another twenty percent health, and came out the other side without breaking stride.
'Good. Down to fifty. Crimson Edge activates at fifty.'
His damage output jumped instantly. The buff had no visual indicator, no notification, nothing. Just a hidden threshold baked into the game's code that rewarded players for fighting on the edge of death.
He'd found it by accident on run nine. He'd been exploiting it ever since.
Celestia_VII: HE DID IT AGAIN
ProHunter99: HOW DOES HE KNOW EXACTLY WHERE TO—
NightOwl_Fen: I've been playing this game for months and that angle DOESN'T EXIST
zzz_sleepy: I don't think I'm sleeping tonight
"You've been hiding the same thing for twenty-seven runs," he said. "I know it by heart now."
Valdorak entered phase two.
The upper arms fused into spinning bone lances. The lower ones drove into the floor and the fiftieth level cracked open, violet light bleeding through from below, flooding every corner of the room from underneath.
And it was then that Gareth saw it.
In the far north. Almost invisible in the shadows until that exact moment.
A statue.
Small. Ancient.
He froze for one full second, lances spinning meters from his head, staring at it.
He knew it.
Not from the game itself. From the wiki.
There was an entry almost nobody had read because it was buried under layers of secondary lore: "The Relic of the First Cycle, an object of veneration for Tower entities. Its presence on floor 50 is believed to be purely decorative."
Purely decorative.
Gareth looked at the statue. Looked at Valdorak. Looked at the runes carved into its base, identical to the ones the boss wore on his shoulders.
And he felt like the biggest idiot alive.
The developers had put it there. Right there, on floor 50, in the final boss room, with the same runes. And he, twenty-six runs later, had ignored it because a wiki written by people who died before reaching this room had decided it didn't matter.
'It's sacred. To him.'
'And it took me twenty-seven runs to read what was right in front of me.'
"Hey," he told Valdorak, dodging a lance without looking at it. "I need your help with something."
He started moving.
Not toward the exit. Not looking for space. Moving with purpose, changing direction every few seconds, staying one step ahead of the spinning lances.
Valdorak followed.
Of course he followed. The boss's aggro was absolute: wherever the player went, he went. No exceptions, no blind spots, no possible distractions. A mechanic everyone knew and nobody had ever thought to use for this.
Gareth guided him. Step by step, dodge by dodge, with that specific patience of someone who isn't improvising but executing a plan that had formed thirty seconds ago.
Until he had Valdorak exactly where he wanted him.
In front of the statue.
"Perfect," he murmured.
He pressed his back against it.
Valdorak launched his most brutal attack. The same one that had wiped entire raid groups.
Gareth stepped aside on the last possible frame.
The impact shattered the statue.
The entire room shook.
[RELIC OF THE CYCLE DESTROYED]
[BUFF TRANSFERRED TO NEAREST BEARER: MOURGARE]
[VIOLET RESONANCE — Damage +40% against Cycle entities]
[FLOOR MEMORY — Cooldown -50% for 3 minutes]
The stream exploded.
ProHunter99: WHAT JUST HAPPENED
GuildMaster_Erend: THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE GAME
Celestia_VII: I've been playing for 3 years and THAT MECHANIC IS NOT IN ANY WIKI
XxShadowKillxX: HACKER. HACKER. HACKER.
NightOwl_Fen: REPORT HIM IMMEDIATELY THIS IS CHEATING
zzz_sleepy: can someone explain what just happened because I have no idea
Gareth opened his status screen.
'Sixteen active buffs.'
He felt the shift immediately. The weight behind every movement, the way the daggers felt sharper, more responsive, like the game itself had finally acknowledged what he'd been building toward for twenty-seven runs.
"Thanks," he told Valdorak, completely seriously. "You just completed the stack."
GuildMaster_Erend: HE'S THANKING THE BOSS
ProHunter99: this guy isn't human, I'm confirming it
zzz_sleepy: losing my mind at 3am
Forty percent health. Two emerald daggers. Sixteen buffs, every single one intentional, every single one invisible to anyone who hadn't spent hundreds of hours looking for them.
"Alright," he murmured, spinning the daggers. "Full stack. Let's go."
And he charged.
What followed lasted three minutes and forty-two seconds according to the server log. Personal best. Every dodge one frame before impact, every hit landing exactly where the armor gave way, every buff working in concert like a machine Gareth had spent months assembling piece by piece. The room shook with every exchange but he moved through it like it was his bedroom.
Because in a way, it was.
Valdorak's health bar hit ten percent.
Five.
"Come on."
One.
He drove both daggers into the crack of the iron mask and twisted.
"Goodnight."
Valdorak dissolved into light.
[ENDLESS TOWER: CLEARED]
[PERSONAL RECORD: 4H 32M 17S]
[GLOBAL RANKING: #1 — MOURGARE]
The chat was unreadable. Hundreds of messages crashing the server at once.
Gareth opened his status screen one last time.
Sixteen buffs. All consumed.
He stared at the empty slots for a moment.
Twenty-seven times.
And there were still things he hadn't seen.
That, more than the record, gave him something close to satisfaction.
He closed the screen. Turned off the monitor. The room went dark.
He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
***
He didn't know how long he slept.
What he did know was that the ceiling he was staring at when he opened his eyes wasn't his.
He sat up slowly. Looked around.
An enormous room. High ceiling with dark wooden beams. A cold fireplace on the right wall. Shelves full of books nobody had touched in years. Clothes folded over a chair that cost more than his computer. And above the door, carved in stone with that solemnity only families who've spent centuries taking themselves seriously can pull off, a crest.
A silver wolf on black.
The Thornfields.
Gareth stared at it for three full seconds.
'I know that crest.'
Of course he did. It was the most influential family in the game. The Thornfields. All because of Victor Thornfield, considered the strongest Sentinel and leader of the Eternal Blades guild, possibly the most important one.
Rank A lore. The kind he'd read once and memorized without meaning to because his brain didn't know how to filter irrelevant information. Irrelevant being the key word, because as far as Gareth was concerned, Victor was overrated. Completely mid.
'What a specific dream. It even picked a family with lore. Just not one of my favorites.'
He looked at his hands. Same as always. Looked at the rest of himself. Also the same.
Well. Almost.
The clothes weren't his.
A white linen shirt with an embroidered collar that probably had its own name and a price he'd rather not calculate. Dark trousers, leather boots by the bed, and on the nightstand, a ring bearing the Thornfield seal.
'My subconscious has absolutely no taste,' he decided.
The door flew open.
A woman walked in without knocking, with that specific authority of people who have never needed to ask permission for anything. Dark chestnut hair pulled back, deep blue dress, the bearing of someone used to the world arranging itself around her. Gareth recognized her before she opened her mouth.
Lady Elizabeth Thornfield. Rank A narrative NPC. Family matriarch. Twenty-two lines of dialogue, all critical to the main lore. He'd read every single one.
"Dorian," she said, with that precise mix of love and warning that apparently transcended universes. "Get up right now. Today is the synchronization. You cannot be late."
'Dorian,' Gareth registered. 'No way… I'm that Dorian?'
'This has to be a joke.'
"On my way," he said, with the tone of someone who couldn't care less.
Lady Elizabeth studied him for one second with those eyes the game described as "capable of reading lies before they finish forming" and closed the door.
Gareth was alone.
He looked at the Thornfield crest one last time.
The Thornfields were the family of the eldest son who had no real relevance in the game. The kind of character writers create when they need someone to make you feel something they never earned. He appeared in two cutscenes being absurdly kind to everyone, impossibly modest despite being the heir to one of the most powerful families in the game, smiling with that rehearsed humility of someone who had clearly read too many books on how to be a good noble. And in the third cutscene, without anyone asking or needing it, he sacrificed himself to save a side character who appeared for the first and last time in that exact scene.
The kind of character who dies so the writer can sleep at night.
'Great,' Gareth thought, without any particular urgency. 'I got stuck with the worst character possible.'
He got up, pulled on the boots, ran a hand through his hair with zero success.
'At some point I'll wake up. Until then, might as well see how this ends.'
He walked out of the room convinced it was a dream.
It wasn't.
But that, like so many other things, he was going to learn the hard way.