The house was quiet when Jas got ho, and the quiet was worse than anything the ballroom had thrown at him.
His mother took Nyra to bed without a word, and Jas heard the low murmur of her voice through the wall while she settled the girl, the sa way she used to settle Jas when he was small and could not sleep. He sat in the living room with his jacket still on and his hands resting on his knees, and for the first ti since the punch landed, the anger was gone and there was nothing left underneath it but the weight of what he had agreed to.
He went back over it while staring at the dark window.
Cormac had taken the punch on purpose. Jas understood that clearly now that the heat had drained out of him. The whole thing had been built to push him into swinging first in front of the caras, and the mont his fist connected, the duel stopped being an attack and beca a legal dispute that Ganner Corp could fra however they wanted. Jas had defended his mother, and he did not regret that part, but he had let them choose the ground, the timing, and the story, and that was the part that sat badly.
He had walked into a room they controlled and given them exactly what they wanted.
His mother ca back out a while later and found him still sitting there. She did not turn on the main light. She sat down across from him and looked at him for a long mont before she spoke.
"Do you understand what you accepted tonight?"
"Yes," Jas said.
"Say it, then. Out loud."
"In three months I fight a Ganner heir to the death. No surrender. One of us doesn’t walk away from it."
She nodded slowly, and her hands were folded tight in her lap. "Understanding it doesn’t make it less dangerous, Jas."
"I know."
She did not lecture him after that. She had married into one death already and raised a son who had walked into the Tower at eighteen, and she had run out of speeches a long ti ago. She just looked at him with the tiredness of soone who had learned that fear did not change what her family chose to do.
"I need to get stronger," Jas said quietly. "Fast. The way I am now isn’t enough for soone who’s been training his whole life."
"Then do it carefully," she said. "Not the way you accepted the duel."
She went to bed after that, and Jas stayed up a while longer in the dark before he finally moved.
***
He ssaged Finn before he slept.
*Going back into the Tower. Clearing Floor 11. You in?*
The reply did not co right away. Jas set the phone down and was half asleep when it buzzed.
*I’m in.*
Then a second ssage a mont later.
*About ti we moved.*
Jas looked at the two lines for a while before he put the phone down. Neither of them said anything about the duel or Floor 10 or the month they had both spent frozen, because there was nothing to say about it that the decision did not already cover. Finn needed to start climbing again as much as Jas needed the strength, and the three months counting down behind everything had made waiting into sothing neither of them could afford.
He did not ssage Kael. That conversation could wait until he and Finn were standing in the sa room.
***
Two days later, Jas sat at his desk and opened his status window before he went anywhere.
`[JAS GANNER]`
`[CLASS: NECROMANCER (LEGENDARY)]`
`[LEVEL: 17]`
`[EXP: 11,385/12,000]`
`[HP: 820/820]`
`[MANA: 1,320/1,320]`
`[STRENGTH: 37]`
`[AGILITY: 42]`
`[INTELLIGENCE: 66]`
`[ENDURANCE: 41]`
`[LUCK: 29]`
`[REANIMATED SLOTS: 2/5 OCCUPIED]`
`[TOWER CREDITS: 91,615 TC]`
The Floor 10 rewards had been items rather than coins, so his balance still sat where it had after Floor 9, minus the small cost of the training room he had rented to test the python. Ninety-one thousand credits was a serious amount of money by any normal standard, but he was Level 17 going into a death duel against soone raised in a guild family, and money ant nothing if he walked in underprepared.
He opened the System shop and searched the A-rank gear listings.
He skipped everything death-thed without a second look. There were necromancer-styled sets in the listings, black plate with bone motifs and blades that dripped fake shadow, and all of them were stupid for the sa reason. He was already the most feared na in the country after the stream and the ball, and wearing gear that announced what he was would only make people more afraid and more willing to believe he was the monster the Ganner-friendly accounts were painting. He wanted equipnt that worked, not equipnt that perford.
He found a clean sword first and bought it.
`[A-RANK SWORD PURCHASED]`
`[EFFECT: HIGH PHYSICAL DAMAGE | MANA CHANNELING SUPPORT | DURABILITY BOOST]`
`[COST: 28,000 TC]`
Then the armor, defensive but built for movent rather than weight.
`[A-RANK ARMOR PURCHASED]`
`[EFFECT: HIGH DEFENSE | AGILITY PENALTY REDUCTION | IMPACT RESISTANCE]`
`[COST: 33,000 TC]`
`[TOWER CREDITS: 91,615 → 30,615 TC]`
Jas equipped both and felt the difference imdiately. The armor sat lighter on his shoulders than its defense rating should have allowed, and the sword balanced clean in his hand with a faint hum running through it when he pushed a thread of mana into the blade. He was not suddenly unbeatable, and he knew it, but the gear closed part of the gap between where he was and where he needed to be, and buying it was the first thing he had done since the ball that felt like moving forward instead of standing still.
***
Jas drove to Hale Estate that afternoon with his new gear ready.
Finn was waiting near the basent entrance when he arrived, and he looked steadier than he had at the last eting, more focused, though still not all the way back to the version of himself from before Floor 10. He took in the new sword and armor with a glance and nodded once.
"Kael’s not coming," Finn said. "I asked. He said he isn’t ready to enter another floor this soon, and I’m not going to push him after what happened."
"Then we don’t push him," Jas said.
He ant it. Forcing soone back into the Tower a month after watching Elliot die would be the sa mistake Finn had already paid for once, and Jas was not interested in repeating it for the sake of a full roster.
"We go in as two," Finn said. "Let the System fill the rest of the team."
"That works."
Finn led the way down into the basent, and the room was the sa as always except for the gaps in it that nobody ntioned. They stepped onto the platform together, and Finn opened the Floor 11 entry prompt.
White light folded around them.
***
The Waiting Room resolved into its usual grey void, and three Challengers were already standing there when Jas and Finn appeared.
The recognition hit them almost at once. The tallest of the three, a young man with a long spear strapped across his back, went still mid-sentence when he saw Finn’s face and then Jas’s. The girl beside him had a rifle-style gun slung over one shoulder and her mouth actually fell open. The third, lean with the faint static charge of a lightning user crackling around his fingers, took a half step back like proximity alone might be dangerous.
"You’re—" the spear user started.
"Team Zero," the gunner finished. "You’re actually Team Zero. The Floor 10 clear. The stream."
"That was you at the Ganner ball," the lightning mage added, and there was a nervous edge under the awe. "The whole country saw—"
"What are your nas," Finn cut in, not unkindly but flat enough to stop the spiral.
The spear user recovered first. "Theo."
"Mara," the gunner said.
"Cian," said the lightning mage.
For a mont the three of them visibly relaxed, and Jas could see the calculation running behind their eyes, the assumption that landing in a team with Team Zero ant an easy clear and rich rewards carried by two people who had already done the impossible. Mara started saying sothing about how lucky they were, and Theo was nodding along, and the mood tipped toward celebration before the floor had even loaded.
Finn shut it down with one question.
"Has anyone here cleared Floor 11 before?"
The three of them went quiet.
"No," Theo admitted.
"Then nobody here gets to relax," Finn said. "We’ll use the public strategy for this floor, but it only works if everyone follows instructions exactly. You freeze or you freelance, people die. Understood?"
The three of them nodded, and the easy excitent drained out of the room.
***
The transport took them, and the mission zone resolved into open sky.
They stood on a broad highland of broken stone, the ruins of old towers scattered across a plateau that dropped away on three sides into deep gorges, with wide platforms of cracked rock connected by fallen masonry and nothing but open air overhead. The wind moved hard across the exposed ground. It was terrain built for things that flew, and Jas understood the problem before the System finished announcing it.
`[FLOOR 11 — SUBJUGATION]`
`[OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES]`
`[HOSTILES DETECTED]`
`[GRIFFIN x3]`
`[HARPY x10]`
The harpies ca into view first, ten of them wheeling out from behind the broken towers in a loose screaming spiral, won’s faces on bird bodies with talons that caught the grey light. Higher up, three heavier shapes circled without hurrying, griffins the size of horses with the front halves of eagles and the back halves of lions, watching the ground the way predators watched sothing they had already decided to kill.
Jas felt the disadvantage land imdiately.
His dire wolf was useless here because it could not reach anything in the air, and the Abyssal Venom Python was worse than useless, too large and too slow to matter against enemies that never ca down. He could not summon his strongest assets and end the fight. Everything he had that mattered worked best on the ground, and the enemies had no intention of fighting on the ground.
"They’re not coming down," Mara said, and the nerves were back in her voice. "How do we even—they’re not coming down."
"They will," Finn said. "We make them."
***
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