For a moment, just a moment, he felt something. A warmth in his chest. A quiet satisfaction, the kind he might have felt before the tower, before the deaths, before he forgot what his own face looked like in a mirror. He had killed the goblin. The thing that had killed him on his six thousandth attempt. The thing that had torn his guts out while he lay helpless. He had killed it, and it was dead, and he was not.
'Satisfaction,' he thought. 'That is what this is called.'
Then he looked up.
The shadows were moving. Not the shadows of the shelves or the pillars, but smaller shadows, hundreds of them, thousands of them, pressing in from every direction. Green skin and yellow teeth and bright malicious eyes. Goblins. More goblins than he had ever seen. They poured from the shelves, from the cracks in the walls, from the floor itself. They came in a tide of small bodies and sharp weapons, and he understood in that instant that the first goblin had not been an ambush. It had been a scout. A signal. A call to the hive.
Five hundred of them. Maybe more. They surrounded him in the narrow space, and there was nowhere to run.
He raised his sword.
The first wave crashed into him. He cut left and right, his blade opening throats and splitting skulls, but for every goblin he killed, three more took its place. They swarmed over his legs, biting, stabbing, tearing. Their spears found the gaps in his armor. Their teeth found his hands, his arms, his neck. He felt them pull him down, felt his knees hit the stone, felt the weight of their bodies pressing him into the dust.
He did not scream.
He had never screamed. Not on the first death, when the dark chitin monster had torn him in half. Not on the five hundredth, when the knight had crushed his head beneath its boot. Not on the thousandth, or the two thousandth, or the five thousandth. Screaming required a belief that someone might hear, and there was no one. There had never been anyone.
He continued fighting.
His sword rose and fell. He killed a goblin that was eating his left hand. He killed another that was trying to gouge out his eye. He killed a third that had buried its teeth in his thigh. But his arm was growing heavy. His vision was growing dark. They were eating him alive, and he could feel it, could feel the sharp pull of teeth on his flesh, the hot rush of blood, the cold emptiness where his stomach used to be.
He did not stop.
He drove his sword through the chest of a goblin that was grinning at him, its face smeared with his blood. He pulled the blade free and drove it into another. And another. And another. His left hand was gone now, chewed off at the wrist, and he held the sword with his right, swinging it in clumsy arcs. The goblins climbed over each other to reach him, a mountain of green flesh and yellow teeth, and he was at the bottom of the mountain, being crushed, being consumed.
He thought, 'This is death six thousand and one.'
He thought, 'I will remember this.'
He thought, 'I will learn.'
The goblins were in his chest now, their small hands tearing at his ribs, their mouths closing around his heart. The pain was immense, a white light behind his eyes, but he had felt worse. He had felt worse on the four thousandth death, when the worm had swallowed him whole and he had drowned in its stomach acid for three hours before the darkness took him. This was faster. This was almost merciful.
He killed one more goblin. His sword arm was gone now, chewed off at the shoulder, but he had been holding the sword in that hand, and the sword was gone too. He had nothing left. He was nothing left. Just a torso and a head, lying in a pool of blood and viscera, surrounded by a feast of small green bodies.
He did not scream.
He simply continued. He continued breathing until he could not breathe. He continued thinking until his thoughts dissolved into static. He continued being until there was nothing left to be.
The last thing he saw was a goblin's face, inches from his own, its mouth opening to take his eye. He watched it come. He did not flinch.
[ You are dead ]
[ Go forth koalemos, conquer the inverted spire ]
[ You are currently on floor 100 000 ]
He awoke.
The stone was cold against his back. The dust motes danced in the pale light. The shelves rose around him, tall and silent, filled with books he would never read. He sat up slowly and looked at his hands. Whole again. Unbroken. The fingers flexed without pain, and he watched them for a long time, turning them over, examining the palms.
He thought about satisfaction. He had felt it for a moment, killing the goblin. A flicker of warmth. A quiet sense of accomplishment. And then the five hundred had come, and the satisfaction had vanished, replaced by something else. Something colder. Something that looked at the tower and the deaths and the endless climbing and said, 'This is all there is. This is all there will ever be.'
He stood. He picked up his sword. He walked toward the corridor that would lead him down again, toward the chitin monster and the dark knight and the worm and the goblins. He did not know how many more deaths it would take. He did not know if there was an end to the tower, or if the tower was the end itself.
But he knew one thing. He had learned it in the moment the goblins had torn him apart, in the space between his last heartbeat and the darkness. He had learned that satisfaction was a lie. That the warmth in his chest was just another trick of the flesh, another way for the tower to keep him moving, keep him climbing, keep him dying.
He would not feel it again.
He stepped into the corridor, and the shadows closed around him, and the only sound was the steady rhythm of his boots on the stone.