The bell of the Tower tolled once.
It was neither divine nor mechanical — a deep sound that made the ground shudder and the clouds above twist into a perfect spiral.
The duel had begun.
Chains ignited around Hae-won like coiling serpents of color — red for sin, black for death, white for penance. The ground cracked under his feet as his aura expanded in concentric ripples, devouring the dust. The mark of the Harvester of Death pulsed behind him like an open gate.
Across from him, Ji-an raised a single hand. The sigil of the Healer of Paths flared into being — a golden mandala that pulsed with steady rhythm, matching his calm heartbeat. Where Hae-won's domain spread like wildfire, Ji-an's simply breathed — slow, deliberate, absolute.
The System's window blinked once:
[ Duel Type: Pendulum Equilibrium ]
[ Rule: Balance must be maintained. Every strike equals a restoration. Every wound demands atonement. ]
⸻
They moved at the same time.
The first impact shattered the sound barrier.
Chains met sanctified light in midair — the collision erupting into fractal bursts of sound and heat. One heartbeat, Hae-won was gone; the next, he was behind Ji-an, a chain curling around the man's throat.
Ji-an didn't flinch. His eyes flicked sideways, and the air thickened. The chain slowed, its tip freezing inches from skin — stopped by something invisible.
"Still attacking first," Ji-an said quietly. "You never change."
Hae-won grinned — a flash of teeth, more pain than humor. "And you still talk too much."
He yanked.
The chain snapped forward again, the invisible barrier cracking under sheer force. Ji-an countered by thrusting both palms outward — the ground rippled as divine energy surged up like a geyser. Light condensed into blades, slicing the air in geometric patterns.
[ Skill Activated: Reflection Zone ]
[ All incoming damage redistributed within 10 meters. ]
The world warped.
Hae-won felt his own chain slash him across the ribs — his own strike turned against him. Blood hissed as it hit the floor, evaporating instantly.
He laughed through it. "Cute trick."
Then the chains changed.
They split, midair — one glowing with black heat, the other shimmering white.
[ Chain of Hell: Manifest. ]
[ Chain of Heaven: Restrained. ]
Ji-an's eyes widened. "You've learned to control polarity?"
"No." Hae-won's voice was ice. "I learned to stop caring."
He flung both chains. The red-black one hit first, distorting the air, turning light into flame. The white one followed — silent, almost kind — before snapping back into his hand, dragging Ji-an forward through his own zone.
Ji-an hit the ground hard, sliding backward, boots scraping against the crystalline floor. His lips curled in a grimace. He raised his staff and slammed it once against the ground.
[ Skill Activated: Path of Equilibrium ]
[ All damage equalized. All imbalance returned. ]
Golden light flared from beneath him, flooding the entire level. Every chain strike now echoed twice — once in front of Hae-won, once behind him. Every move mirrored.
The System hummed. The Tower approved.
It wanted balance.
But Hae-won had never been balanced.
He ripped the two chains apart, twisting them until sparks screamed through the arena. The pendulum mechanic of the duel activated fully now — for every inch Hae-won advanced, Ji-an was pulled an inch back. For every wound dealt, the Tower's mechanism healed another.
It was no longer a fight; it was a metronome of fate.
Back and forth.
Strike and heal.
Kill and forgive.
Their battle became rhythm — divine and profane colliding in unison. Ji-an's robes tore, glowing veins of light tracing his arms. Hae-won's body bled freely, his aura bleeding crimson mist.
Between blows, Ji-an spoke — voice shaking but resolute.
"You can't keep using death as a language, Hae-won. It won't rewrite anything. It only—"
"—proves it can be rewritten."
Hae-won's eyes blazed. "If life was a mistake, then let death correct it."
Their fists met.
No chains, no skills — just flesh and rage and history.
The impact blew the arena apart. The spiral above cracked, raining shards of light like molten glass. The System's voice fractured:
[ Error: Balance fluctuating. ]
[ Warning: Pendulum Equilibrium — destabilizing. ]
Both men staggered back, breathing hard.
Ji-an's golden aura flickered.
Hae-won's chains trembled, one link cracking — a sound like a scream buried in metal.
Ji-an looked up, his voice softer now. "If you break that chain… you'll lose yourself."
Hae-won looked at him — really looked.
At the calm eyes of the man who hated him for surviving.
At the healer who saw saving as the only victory worth taking.
He smiled.
"Maybe that's the point."
He snapped the chain.
⸻
The pendulum stopped.
Time halted — light frozen, sound swallowed.
And in that silence, the Tower itself watched.
The sound of the chain breaking wasn't a metallic snap.
It was closer to a heartbeat stopping.
The white floor beneath them pulsed once—like the Tower itself flinched—and then the world went quiet.
The balance meter that had hovered above them shattered like glass, its numbers fracturing into static symbols.
[ System Error: Pendulum Equilibrium—BREACHED ]
[ Class Modifier Detected: "The Harvester of Death" ]
[ Warning: Unknown Entity Outside Record ]
Ji-an stumbled backward as his equilibrium field collapsed. The golden aura that had surrounded him flickered, dimming into thin threads that tried and failed to stitch themselves back together. His staff cracked in half under its own light.
Hae-won stood at the center of the devastation—barefoot, bleeding, and utterly still.
The air around him shimmered in distorted waves, like heat haze. His chains coiled loosely at his sides, the fractured link still hissing like something alive. A strange vibration hung in the space between them—part frequency, part memory.
The System tried again.
[ Chain Identifier: Regression → Judgement ]
[ Chain Source: Corrupted Divine Artifact ]
[ Command: Reintegration Attempt—FAILED. ]
[ Alert: Harvester status confirmed. ]
The last window blinked twice and disappeared.
Ji-an looked up, panting. "You broke the law of balance."
His voice was half fear, half disbelief. "Do you even realize what that means?"
Hae-won didn't answer. His expression was unreadable—too calm for what was happening around him.
The cracked arena reflected in his eyes like a still lake.
"Balance was a leash," he murmured. "It was meant to keep us pretending the world was fair. It never was."
He stepped forward.
Every step made the ground groan—metal bending, light distorting. The air felt heavier, thicker. His very existence bent the Tower's order like gravity. Ji-an took an instinctive step back, the edges of his robes singeing where Hae-won's aura touched.
The Tower itself began to hum.
The pendulum mechanism above the sky fractured into twin spheres of light—one descending, one rising. Up and down, the eternal motion reversed.
The System screamed.
[ ALERT: EQUILIBRIUM FAILURE CASCADING. ]
[ Pendulum Ascent / Descent — TERMINATED. ]
[ Emergency Directive: Isolation Protocol. ]
Columns of white light erupted around the arena, sealing the duel chamber. Hae-won and Ji-an were trapped inside a ring of collapsing time. Outside, hundreds of players and incarnations froze mid-motion—their screens flickering static as if someone had unplugged the world.
And far, far above—where Heaven's upper levels brushed the realm of ascension—Yun Arin jolted awake.
Her halo of pale light snapped open like a wound.
She gasped, clutching her chest. The ripple of divine threads in her body twisted violently, and she felt it—the exact second Hae-won's equilibrium broke.
The world below her shimmered in visions. The Tower's midsection bled black smoke. The name "Cha Hae-won" pulsed through the ether, glowing crimson.
"No…" she whispered, her voice trembling. "He broke the chain?"
Her mentor—one of the Thrones of Heaven—appeared beside her, expression grim.
"You feel it, don't you? He is outside our jurisdiction now."
Arin turned sharply. "What does that mean?"
"It means," the Throne said quietly, "that your Harvester has chosen to exist beyond narrative law. The Tower's pendulum no longer recognizes him as alive or dead. He is between."
Arin stared down at the Tower.
Her heart pounded so hard it hurt. She had known Hae-won would push the limits—but this?
To reject the Tower, the System, Heaven—it wasn't bravery. It was self-erasure.
Back inside the arena, Ji-an lowered his staff. His hands were shaking now. The equilibrium's collapse had stripped him of his divine resistance; his healing skill kept trying to repair things that no longer existed.
"Hae-won," he said hoarsely, "You're killing the Tower."
"Maybe it deserves to die," Hae-won replied softly.
He raised one hand, and the chains followed the gesture like trained beasts. They hovered in the air, humming with restrained chaos—one radiating searing red light, the other vibrating with pale blue frost.
Each link now glowed with etchings, script that no language could hold.
[ Subdivision Unlocked: Chain of the Void ]
[ Subdivision Unlocked: Chain of Mortality ]
Ji-an's eyes widened. "You're creating subtypes mid-duel—That's not—!"
"Possible?"
Hae-won smiled faintly. "Neither is living five hundred times to fix the same mistake."
He snapped his fingers.
Both chains launched forward—one burning, one freezing, their paths spiraling like twin comets. Ji-an threw up a shield of light, shouting an invocation—
[ Skill: Path of Restoration! ]
—but the impact wasn't physical.
When the chains struck, they remembered.
They carried with them every failure, every death, every regression where Hae-won had lost everything. Ji-an's body jerked as thousands of phantom memories tore through him—whole lifetimes compressed into seconds.
He saw through Hae-won's eyes: the school corridors, the bullying, the mockery, the cold rain of the orphanage gates, the silence of every empty room after a regression. The Tower's resets. The friends who forgot him each time.
When the chains retracted, Ji-an collapsed to one knee. Blood trickled from his nose.
Hae-won stood over him.
He didn't look triumphant. Just tired.
"You heal people, Ji-an," he said, voice low. "But you've never healed the world. You just keep patching holes in a story that keeps writing itself wrong."
"And you think killing it makes it right?" Ji-an spat.
"No." Hae-won's eyes dimmed. "But at least it makes it stop."
The chains behind him shuddered—alive, restless, waiting for command.
Then, for the first time since the duel began, Hae-won hesitated. His head tilted slightly upward—as if hearing something no one else could. Somewhere deep in the Tower, a soft voice whispered his name.
"…Hae-won."
It was Arin.
The white light above the ceiling rippled. A tear opened in the sky, faintly glowing. The faint outline of a girl's silhouette appeared—hands pressed against invisible glass, light flickering around her.
Hae-won's eyes widened. "Arin…?"
The Tower screamed again.
[ ALERT: Cross-Dimensional Interference Detected. ]
[ Entity 'Yun Arin' — Unauthorized Entry. ]
[ Countermeasure: Neutralization Protocol Engaged. ]
The floor cracked open beneath him.
The duel's chamber began to collapse inward—a singularity forming at its center, pulling everything toward oblivion.
Hae-won's chains lashed outward, anchoring to the edges of the arena. Ji-an clung to the fragments of his barrier, shouting through the roar of wind and falling light.
"Hae-won! If you let her through now, you'll destroy both of you!"
Hae-won looked at the opening sky, where Arin's hand reached out.
Her face—pale, terrified, desperate—was all he saw.
"Then let it destroy us."
He reached upward. The chains followed.
And the Tower's floor collapsed.
The world came apart like wet paper.
One instant the duel platform was there—white stone, flickering systems, the taste of ozone in the air.
The next, light folded inward on itself, and gravity forgot what direction meant. The entire chamber inverted into a spiral of black and red.
Hae-won barely had time to grab Ji-an by the collar. The healer's body was limp from shock, his equilibrium field burnt out.
Arin's light descended from above like a broken halo—her descent unfinished, her wings of divine matter tearing as she fell.
The singularity caught them all.
It was not falling, exactly.
It was being pulled apart in every possible direction at once.
Sound distorted first—every scream, every heartbeat stretched into an infinite echo. Then came memory. The moment Hae-won blinked, he saw ten versions of himself blinking in sequence—one from each regression. He could taste iron, and ash, and the cheap cafeteria rice from a school that hadn't existed for years.
Ji-an's voice reached him through static. "Wh-what is this—"
"The space between," Hae-won managed to whisper. "The Tower's mirror layer. Where everything it erases goes to die."
They tumbled through colors that weren't meant for eyes—tones that hurt to look at. Chains whipped around them like the skeleton of the universe itself.
Each one glowed faintly: red for the blood he'd spilled, white for the prayers he'd ignored, black for every life the Tower had forced him to end.
Arin's form stabilized first. Her wings of light snapped open, fighting the pull. She grabbed Hae-won's wrist, her expression raw with panic.
"Hae-won! Stop resisting it—you'll tear yourself apart!"
He turned toward her, his silver hair streaming in zero gravity, eyes dull and exhausted. "If I stop, we fall into nothing. The Tower will reset again."
"Then let it!" she cried. "You'll die if you keep—"
"Arin."
He smiled faintly. "I've died worse."
The singularity pulsed, and reality stuttered again.
For a heartbeat, they saw everything:
The Tower's roots twisting through infinite layers of ruined Seoul.
Heaven's thrones shimmering above the clouds, their golden eyes turned away.
A faint glimmer of the lower floors, where Do-hyun and Seong-wu fought monsters they could barely comprehend.
And then it was gone—swallowed by the dark.
The chains around Hae-won flared to life. The Chain of the Void anchored itself into the black expanse, forming a shimmering platform under their feet. He dragged Arin and Ji-an onto it, panting.
The air here wasn't air—it was memory condensed. Every breath brought whispers of forgotten stories.
Ji-an collapsed to his knees, clutching his chest. "We're… inside the Tower's core code. This is impossible."
"Not impossible," Hae-won said quietly, looking at his hands. "Just forbidden."
He could feel it—the weight of the Harvester of Death title pressing on him like a mountain. Every soul he'd taken was here, murmuring just beyond the edge of sound. Not accusing, not forgiving—just waiting.
Arin moved closer, her light flickering weakly. "If we stay here too long, we'll be unmade."
"Then we climb," Hae-won said.
"Up or down?" Ji-an asked, still shaken.
Hae-won looked around—the singularity was neither. It was a place without direction, a wound in the Tower's logic. "Whichever way leads out."
He stepped forward, the chains extending into the void. With every step, fragments of his past flickered in the dark:
—The orphanage gates closing.
—The laughter of his classmates.
—The first regression, the first death, the first time he realized no one else remembered.
Each vision tugged at him like hands trying to pull him back.
Arin caught his arm, forcing him to stop. Her eyes burned with quiet defiance. "You can't keep carrying them all."
"If I don't," he said, "they'll disappear."
"Maybe they're meant to," Ji-an whispered. "Maybe letting go is part of it."
Hae-won turned sharply, his tone cutting through the silence. "You don't understand. The moment I let go, they die again."
The chains pulsed once—every link glowing in sympathy with his anger. The entire void trembled.
Arin reached up, cupping his face in both hands. "Then we'll hold them together."
Something in him cracked—not visibly, but deeply. The tension in the chains eased; the pressure of the void softened. For a brief moment, he almost looked human again.
And then the whisper returned.
It came from below this time—calm, ancient, patient.
"The Harvester does not share."
The void split open beneath them, revealing a single enormous eye—black as the abyss, threaded with burning sigils. The Tower itself was watching.
Arin screamed as the gravitational pull surged again. Ji-an raised his barrier just in time to keep them from being sucked in completely.
Hae-won's chains wrapped around them, but the strain was unbearable—each link glowing white-hot.
He shouted over the chaos, "It's not done with us yet!"
[ SYSTEM OVERRIDE: CORE ENTITY ENGAGING. ]
[ Instability Source: Cha Hae-won. ]
[ Directive: Terminate anomaly. ]
The voice was mechanical, but beneath it Hae-won could hear the faintest echo of something almost human—mocking, regretful, familiar.
His own voice.
The singularity was speaking with his tone.
Ji-an looked up, horrified. "The Tower's copied your pattern—!"
The blackness surged. Hae-won barely managed to anchor them again before the Chain of the Void began to unravel.
He gritted his teeth, blood running from his nose, and forced out a breath.
"Arin. Ji-an. When this breaks—run."
"What about you?" Arin shouted.
"I'll buy you time."
He raised both hands. The chains snapped taut, burning through the void like living lightning. Every echo of his past—the orphans, the bullies, the regressions, the lovers, the dead—roared to life inside him.
"Cha Hae-won," the Tower said in his voice, "your story was never meant to end."
"Then I'll write it myself."
And with a scream that shook the entire singularity, Hae-won dragged every chain into the core.