NERU

  No warning. No starting sound.

  The entire stone platform dropped at once, plunging downward as if the ground itself had vanished beneath them.

  No one had time to react, except Neru. In that razor-thin instant, she swung her hand.

  The inner force she had been gathering surged forth like a burst dam—flowing from her core, through her arm, into the rope, and finally into the meteorite blade that shot forward like a streak of lightning.

  The knife tore through the air and slammed into the stone doorway, burying itself nearly to the hilt.

  With cries of terror from the Wardens behind her, Neru dropped. But the rope still held in her hand, halting her fall. Her body swung sideways and crashed hard against a stone pillar. She barely felt it. Her mind was already screaming, praying.

  Don’t break. Don’t come loose.

  And the blade she cherished like her own life did not betray her.

  It held. Firmly embedded in the stone.

  A breath escaped her, pushing away the panic that had not yet fully risen. She drew in another deep breath, planted her feet against the wall, and began climbing the rope.

  One step. Two. Three…

  And just as she neared the threshold, it slipped. The blade tore free.

  Neru’s body dropped—and with it, her heart. In the tension of the moment she had forgotten a simple lesson: a string can saw through wood, water can wear down stone.

  The violent strain of her fall had not been enough to rip the knife from the rock. But the steady swaying as she climbed had slowly loosened the wound, grinding away the brittle outer sheath of stone.

  The steel had endured. The stone had not.

  She had been so close.

  As the world fell away beneath her, only regret burned through her mind.

  I can't die. Not like this.

  She wanted to cry. She wanted to curse. But in that moment, all she could do was watch the knife fall in impossibly slow motion.

  How long had it passed?

  Am I waiting for something?

  A powerful arm shot through the doorway. It seized the blade like lightning, catching her last chance at life. The rope snapped taut again.

  Neru jerked her head up.

  Elios!

  Blood dripped onto her face. The blade that could pierce stone had now sunk deep into his flesh, biting through palm and fingers. Above her, Elios grunted through clenched teeth and shouted,

  “Hold tight!”

  Bracing a shoulder and one foot against the doorway, he shifted his stance. Releasing the knife, he grasped the rope with both hands and began hauling it upward with painful effort.

  Neru did not move. She waited, perfectly still, afraid even the smallest sway might loosen the rope, which had already turned slick with blood.

  Elios's resilence was almost unbelievable. Only moments ago, he had been so battered he could barely walk, yet now he forced his body to pull another person from the abyss. Perhaps his body was as stubborn as his will.

  At the final stretch, Neru reached up and caught his wrist, hauling herself over the edge. They both collapsed onto the floor, rolling onto their backs.

  The moment she caught her breath, Neru sprang up and grabbed Elios’s hand. The wound was deep—a vicious cut running across his palm and fingers. Powdered stone still clung inside it, blood flowing freely.

  Without hesitation, she tore a sleeve into strips and wrapped the injury as best she could.

  Elios pushed himself up soon after. He paid no attention to his own wound, nor did he ask if she was fine. Instead, he crawled to the edge of the stone doorway and peered down into the vast darkness below, his eyes filled with bitter regret.

  The screams from the Wardens had long since faded, Neru had not even noticed when.

  Elios stayed silent for a long time before murmuring,

  “How many lives was that?”

  Neru was tying the final knot on his bandage when she heard him. Without looking up, she said,

  “They had devices—something that lets them cling to stone. So it’s not certain they—”

  Elios shook his head and sighed.

  “At that speed, nothing would hold. Nothing except the platform itself.” His eyes remained fixed on the darkness below. “How many?”

  Neru studied him for a moment, then spoke softly.

  “Are you… blaming me?”

  “It’s not you,” Elios replied quietly. “It’s us. We killed them.”

  Neru could not stand that tone. She grabbed his arm and turned him toward her, lifting his injured wrist in irritation.

  “I killed them. What are you mourning for? I almost died too. Look at your hand, it’s practically torn open. And you’re worrying about strangers. They deserve to live, but I don’t?”

  Elios looked at her, disappointment flickered in his eyes.

  “You feel nothing?”

  She swallowed her anger with effort, teeth clenched.

  “One of them just said he wanted to violate me. What do you think I feel?”

  “You’re beautiful,” Elios said quietly. “Men like that have probably spoken to you that way many times before. Did they all deserve to die?”

  Her voice turned cold.

  “We're on a quest. Things go wrong, people die. It’s something we accept.”

  Elios held her gaze, his voice clearer than ever.

  “I’m not blaming you, Neru. The truth we seek always demands a price. But when that price is human lives… you cannot treat it as something trivial.”

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  Neru let out a laugh.

  “Sermon. Another sermon. So what exactly do you want from me? Should I pretend to writhe in grief over something we both knew might happen?”

  Elios met her gaze, utterly serious.

  “I don’t want you to pretend.”

  He paused, his voice firm.

  “But I want you to face the truth. Those people died because of us. Only by accepting that can we truly examine what went wrong—and make sure we don’t repeat it next time.”

  Neru faltered for a moment at those words. He was right about one thing—if they had the chance to do it again, the whole incident might have been avoided.

  But the anger soon flared back, this time from her heart.

  “You think mercy makes you better than me?” Neru said. “We both knew what had to be done. You just chose not to do it. Mercy was your excuse—an excuse to let someone else draw the blood for you.”

  Her voice came out louder than she expected.

  “I may be a savage,” she continued, “but at least I’m honest with myself. And you stand there judging me—for what?”

  The force of her words surprised even herself.

  Before she could say more, Elios stepped forward and caught her shoulder.

  “Never let killing become easy,” he said, his voice steel. “The moment it does, it becomes instinct. And when it does, it will devour what remains of your humanity.”

  “Without that instinct,” Neru replied, her voice defiant, “I would have died long ago.”

  “Perhaps once,” Elios said. “But no longer. You’re strong. Strong enough that mercy is a choice.”

  His grip loosened. “Most people are never given one.”

  "What's the point anyway?" She said quietly, looking at the torn knot at the seal of her dagger. "I've killed plenty, and that's who I am."

  “No. Doesn’t matter how many you’ve killed. What you do now shapes what you’ll become.”

  Only then did Neru realize—he wasn’t preaching, nor trying to bind her with his morals. He was genuinely afraid for her. Afraid that her soul might be stained beyond redemption.

  The thought held her frozen longer than she knew. She only jolted back to herself when Elios suddenly slam his fist into his palm and said,

  “Wait. It's not right.”

  He leaned forward again, staring down into the vast black shaft.

  “There’s no sound. Did I miscalculate?” he mumbled.

  “What do you mean?” Neru asked, caught off guard by the abrupt shift.

  “By my estimate, the platform should have crashed on Level One by now,” Elios said slowly. “When it does, the impact should be enormous. The whole Tower should feel it. And yet—”

  His eyes suddenly lit up.

  “The emergency brake! Like what Talgan did.”

  Neru understood at once, though something still puzzled her.

  “Didn’t you say the command I drew would sever the platform from its arcane energy completely? No other command would affect it?”

  “Indeed,” Elios replied. “Without the arcane lifting field acting on it, that platform becomes nothing more than a massive slab of stone.”

  He paused, thinking it through.

  “But the emergency brake doesn't need the lifting field at all. It’s purely mechanical. It forces all the platform’s gear teeth to spread outward and bite deep into the surrounding stone. At a speed like that, though…” He exhaled quietly. “It may take a hundred paces of descent before it finally grinds to a stop.”

  He then lifted a hand and smacked his forehead.

  “Can’t believe I never thought of that.”

  Blood seeped through the bandage and stuck in his fringe. Neru frowned and pushed his hand down.

  “Be careful. You’ll ruin that hand for good.”

  He grinned anyway, flexing each finger.

  “It’s fine. I tested the range of motion. Hurts like hell, but the tendons are intact.”

  Flawless timing and incredible grip strength, it must be.

  Then something seemed to occur to him. Elios reached behind his back and pulled something out.

  “Almost forgot. There’s one way to be certain.”

  An echo rod.

  The same short device he had used earlier to drive away the malice creature in the caverns. That one had shattered. How was it here?

  Seeing the question on her face, Elios answered simply.

  “There were a few in the equipment testing lab. Useful, so I took one.”

  He adjusted something along the rod as he spoke, then aimed its flared, bell-like end down into the dark shaft below and turned the crank.

  This time Neru truly felt it. A massive pressure pulsed out of the rod and plunged into the hollow depths below.

  “The shaft acts like a tube,” Elios explained, gesturing vaguely. “It amplifies the echo pulses.”

  Without waiting for her reaction, he turned a ring-shaped dial along the rod twice. The sound vanished, leaving only a low vibration humming through the metal. Elios went quiet, listening, calculating under his breath.

  After a moment he straightened up, his face bright again.

  “Confirmed. The platform is only about five hundred paces below us. Nowhere near the bottom yet.”

  He gave the rod a small shake and looked at her.

  “See now?”

  Neru snorted.

  “See how pleased you are to learn the enemy might be still alive and very competent?”

  Elios blinked, then gave a dismissive chuckle.

  “Forget them. Without the arcane lifting field, they’ll be stuck there for a long time.”

  He lifted the rod slightly.

  “This. See why I brought this?”

  Neru shrugged. “Because it’s yours?”

  “No.” Elios shook his head. “Distance. With this, we can measure distance. Perfect for our plan.”

  Neru rubbed her temple, already feeling dizzy from the flood of explanations.

  “Does this have something to do with that lesson about counting time earlier?”

  “It does,” Elios said. “But using this properly is rather complicated. Perhaps I should—”

  “Enough.” Neru waved him off. “Let’s move. Our five minutes ran out a while ago.”

  Elios nodded, picking up the rod as he replied,

  “More precisely, nearly seven minutes.”

  Neru blinked in surprise.

  “You’ve been still counting this whole time? And now that you mention it—how did you even know I was here? It was around four minutes and forty seconds by then.”

  Elios pointed to the green amulet hanging at his neck.The same signal had reached him. He had sensed the strange movement at the ascension pillar marked "Fyre", and had come to investigate—just as she had.

  “What did you find?” he asked.

  “Not much,” Neru replied. “Two poles. Some brocade cloth. A hook. I left them outside.”

  Elios nodded. “Not bad. Combined with what I found, it should be just acceptable.”

  Now that the echo rod was back in his hand, he used it often—almost out of habit. At times he would refuse to move forward until he had probed the path ahead with it.

  But when he felt the pile of cloth before them, he suddenly sighed and shook his head.

  “No good. This fabric’s too old. Too dried. It’s gone brittle—it won’t survive the strain of a sudden pull.”

  He looked up, walking back.

  “We’ll need something else. Must be wide. Square. Durable. The darker the better. Something like blankets. Curtains. Woven carpets. Anything thick enough to bind and hold tension.”

  Wide. Square. Durable.

  Wait...

  Neru's hand clamped around his wrist, halting him mid-stride. Her grip was iron.

  Without a word, she pulled him toward the edge of a nearby window frame and pointed outward.

  Fabric snapped in the wind, vast and dark against the night sky. The damn things that had obscured her view back on Level Five.

  The Tower’s gigiantic banners.

  For a heartbeat, Elios simply stared. Then a grin tugged at the corner of his mouth—wild, almost boyish.

  “Perfect.”

  They set to work at once.

  Sawing. Tearing. Tying.

  An enormous banner was hauled up, cut into sections, then spread flat across the floor. Its corners were secured with layers upon layers of knots—ropes, leather straps, and coarse cloth all bound together to reinforce the frame. If the air was feeling generous, it might remember how to behave like a sail.

  Elios’s hands were too badly mangled for any task that required precision, so Neru handled most of the finer work. At one point he tried to show her a ranger’s knot, only for her to laugh it off and wave him aside.

  Child’s play.

  Back in her homeland, anyone who couldn’t tie down a horse or pitch a tent properly would never last a single season.

  Elios watched and approved, not forgetting to elaborate the process.

  “To land without breaking our spines, we’ll have to pass through four distinct phases. Each need timing. Each requires techniques—techniques we don’t even know yet.”

  “How much time do we need?” she asked.

  In open air, a single misplaced second meant the difference between survival and a shattered corpse.

  He told her to picture the fall step by step, stripping away the fear until only the sequence remained: the cloth catching wind, the frame holding, the drag building.

  All the excess rope was wound tight around their bodies, even tied down around their sleeves and trouser hems.

  “You’d better be careful,” Elios warned. “With wind pressure and speed like this, losing your clothes wouldn’t be a joke.”

  Yet his voice sounded oddly strained.

  After checking the knots one last time, Elios and Neru rolled the massive banner into a tight bundle and carried it out through the Star Gate. When they reached the chosen point, the fog was so thick they could barely see three steps ahead, and the wind roared as if trying to tear the world apart.

  For a moment they looked at each other.

  Both saw the same fear in the other’s eyes.

  “Your idea. Why so afraid?”

  “You dissected this plan down to the last detail. So why are you afraid?”

  They spoke at the same time.

  Then they both burst out laughing.

  “We balance each other,” Elios said. “So don’t try anything clever with that knife. If I fall, you’re not surviving either.”

  He must've meant it as a joke—but the words died in the air halfway when his face froze in realization that it might actually be real.

  “Don’t cling to me because you’re scared,” Neru mocked. “My hands still need to move.”

  But her legs were trembling.

  Damn it. Why tremble?

  Why now?

  Elios noticed. He wrapped an arm firmly around her waist.

  “Four shaking legs still stand better than two,” he muttered. Then he shook his head. “Shit. Enough rambling. Ready?”

  “No.” Neru’s pupils shrank.

  “Good.”

  Elios pulled her forward.

  As the world faded, Neru realized it had been a very long time since she had last heard her own scream.

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