The Tower gave them fourteen hours.
It wasn't enough to plan, not enough to rest — just enough to think.
And thinking, Hae-won had learned, was the cruelest torture of all.
The corridor had stopped shifting. Now it was a hollow dome, walls slick with faint liquid light. A single, pale sun hung above them like an eye that refused to blink. It pulsed with their heartbeats — faster when they argued, slower when they stayed silent.
For the first two hours, silence won.
Arin sat on the floor with her knees drawn up, tracing sigils into the dust that disappeared the moment they were written. Ji-won leaned against the far wall, arms crossed, eyes half-closed but never asleep. And Hae-won paced in slow circles, his chains dragging a faint metallic rhythm through the air.
Click. Clink. Click.
It was almost meditative — almost.
He caught himself glancing at Ji-won again. The healer's breathing was steady, measured — the kind of calm that irritated him purely on instinct.
"You're doing that thing again," Ji-won said without opening his eyes.
"What thing?"
"The brooding. The pacing. The 'I'm a misunderstood antihero' thing."
Hae-won blinked. "…You're seriously mocking me in the apocalypse?"
Ji-won cracked an eye open. "If I'm going to die, I'd at least like to go out entertained."
Arin snorted softly. "He's not wrong. You've been doing the death march thing since we got here."
"Yeah? Well, maybe I'm the only one taking this seriously."
His tone was sharper than he intended. It hung in the air like smoke.
Ji-won didn't rise to it. "You think I'm not serious? I've died more times than you've screamed."
"Cute. You keep score now?"
"Always have," Ji-won said simply. "Dying's the only thing I do better than you."
The words should've been cutting. Instead, they landed like an exhausted truth neither of them wanted to admit.
Arin sighed, brushing dust off her hands. "You two sound like an old married couple."
Hae-won gave a short laugh. "That's the first insult that's actually hurt."
He sat down opposite Ji-won, back to the cold wall. "So. You really reincarnate each time you die?"
Ji-won nodded. "Not regression. Not repetition. I restart. Everything new except the memories."
"That's a curse," Hae-won muttered. "You remember pain that never belonged to this version of you."
Ji-won tilted his head. "Says the man who remembers a thousand failures that technically never happened."
Touché.
The silence returned, but this time it wasn't cold. It was… tired. Human.
The kind of quiet that sits between people who've run out of ways to hate each other.
After a while, Hae-won spoke again, softer. "Why do you hate me?"
Ji-won's eyes flicked open, faint surprise breaking through the calm.
Then: "Because every time the Tower breaks, you're smiling."
Hae-won looked down. "I don't smile because it breaks. I smile because I can still feel something after it does."
"…That's worse," Ji-won said quietly.
"Yeah," Hae-won whispered. "It is."
The sun above them pulsed once — a slow, heavy beat like a warning bell.
Twelve hours remaining.
⸻
Around hour eight, they set up a small camp. There was no food, no sleep, no warmth — only the illusion of safety created by doing something routine.
Arin leaned back, head tilted toward the faint hum of the ceiling. "Do you think it hurts? When the Tower erases someone?"
Hae-won's hands stilled. "I don't know. It never had the chance to finish me."
Ji-won gave a humorless chuckle. "Figures. You probably scared the code itself."
"I'm serious," Arin said. "What if it's not death? What if it's just… rewriting? Like, you come back, but you're not you anymore."
Ji-won and Hae-won exchanged a look — the kind that didn't need words.
They'd both lived that fear.
"Then I guess," Hae-won said finally, "we fight to stay ourselves. Even if it kills us."
"And what if we lose?" Arin asked.
Hae-won shrugged. "Then maybe the next us does better."
That made Ji-won laugh, low and soft. "You sound like a reincarnator."
"And you sound like a masochist."
"Fair."
Their conversation faded into the rhythmic hum of the Tower.
For a while, they even managed to laugh — about trivial things. Ji-won's ugly handwriting in the stat screens. Arin's cooking attempts during a regression where they'd almost poisoned themselves. Hae-won's chains once getting tangled in his hair mid-fight ("Don't ask," he muttered, to which Ji-won replied, "Too late.").
For a brief moment, they weren't prisoners of a divine experiment. They were people. Broken, yes. But real.
⸻
Then, at the tenth hour, the air changed.
The light flickered. The walls rippled.
And a voice — old, sharp, mocking — slipped through the air like a knife through paper.
"You still think this world belongs to you?"
It wasn't the System's voice. It was older. Familiar.
The narrators.
Hae-won shot to his feet, chains flaring red. "You—"
The Dome trembled. The voice laughed — dozens of them, overlapping, tones both male and female, human and not.
"We wrote your fall. We wrote your rise. And now we'll write your end."
Hae-won's teeth clenched. "You think you're authors? You're parasites."
"You remember us, don't you, Chainbearer?"
"You killed your audience every time you rewrote your tragedy."
"We just gave you ink."
"Enough!" he shouted, slamming his fist into the floor. The chains roared, shattering the echoes, but the laughter lingered.
Ji-won stood beside him, eyes narrowing. "Who the hell are they?"
"The ones who think they're gods."
Hae-won's voice was low, trembling with barely restrained rage. "The ones who made this."
The narrators' laughter twisted into a shriek, and then silence.
The Tower's sun dimmed.
[ Warning: External interference detected. ]
[ Stability compromised. Adjusting scenario timeline. ]
[ Remaining Duration: 6 hours. ]
Arin swallowed hard. "They're trying to end it early."
Ji-won looked at Hae-won. "Then we end it first."
The Dome cracked first.
The white light splintered down like glass, raining letters instead of dust — jagged glyphs that hissed when they hit the ground. Each one pulsed briefly, then twisted into shape: hands, limbs, faces.
Dozens of them.
Narrators, wearing stolen bodies.
They had no eyes — only mouths that never stopped whispering.
"He writes to escape."
"He kills to restart."
"He thinks he's free."
The noise scraped against Hae-won's skull. He clenched his jaw, stepped forward, and drove a kick through the nearest figure. It shattered like smoke and re-formed behind him.
They weren't bound by physics. They were ideas wearing skin.
"Back to basics," Ji-won muttered, summoning a silver blade of light from his hand. "No magic. No scripts. Just you and me."
Hae-won's lips twitched. "You sure you can keep up?"
Ji-won smirked. "Try me."
And then they moved.
No skill lights. No System prompts. Just fists, blades, and breath.
The world around them folded into a blur of kinetic rhythm — the kind of fight that only veterans of hundreds of deaths could maintain.
Hae-won ducked under a Narrator's swing, swept its legs, and used the recoil to drive his elbow into another's throat. Ji-won mirrored him, pivoting off the blow to parry a strike with his forearm. The impact sounded like stone cracking.
The Narrators didn't bleed — they unraveled. Every hit tore phrases from their forms: "He shouldn't have lived." "Reset complete." "Error: Harvester active."
One of them lunged at Hae-won with a blade made of sentences. He blocked with his chains — red-black metal singing at near-Mach speed — and spun into a back-kick that crushed the thing's torso.
"Not bad," Ji-won grunted, ducking under a scythe swing. "You fight like someone who's finally enjoying himself."
"I fight like someone who's done apologizing!"
He slammed a Narrator into the floor, knee driving into its chest, and felt the text squirm against his skin before fading.
More appeared. The Dome rippled — a cascade of living paragraphs, trying to overwrite them. Ji-won cursed, grabbed a fallen chain, and swung it wide, sending fragments scattering.
For a heartbeat, the rhythm shifted.
Hae-won's fist met Ji-won's elbow in perfect counterpoint — a synchronous strike that drove shockwaves across the chamber. The ground fissured. Air warped. The Tower listened.
A single line of System text blinked mid-air:
[ Unrecognized Combat Pattern Detected: Synchronization Index 98% ]
The Narrators hesitated. That was their mistake.
Hae-won blurred forward — a streak of silver hair and black chains — and crushed through their ranks with raw physical precision. He didn't need magic. His body remembered every death, every dodge, every impossible fight.
Each punch broke the air. Each kick left sonic tremors in its wake.
Ji-won followed — healer turned executioner — using his reincarnation-honed instincts to read every angle. Together, they moved like a mirrored reflection, one attacking where the other exhaled.
When the last Narrator stumbled back, leaking words instead of blood, Hae-won caught it by the throat.
It smiled — the cruel, knowing grin of something that believed itself eternal.
"You can't kill the story that writes you."
Hae-won's eyes went cold. "Then I'll edit it."
He twisted.
The chain coiled around his arm flared white, cutting through the Narrator's body like punctuation through a sentence. The words scattered into the air — not erased, but rewritten.
Silence fell. The Dome flickered.
The fake sun dimmed to a dull ember.
Both men stood in the aftermath, chest heaving, sweat mixing with dust.
Ji-won wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "You always fight like the world owes you something."
Hae-won looked at him — then at his own bloodied knuckles. "Maybe it does."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then I'll take it anyway."
For a long second, neither spoke. Then Arin's voice came through the smoke — soft, shaky, real.
"Hae-won… Ji-won…"
They turned. She stood at the edge of the broken Dome, her expression a mixture of fear and relief. The purity of her aura cut through the lingering dark — a reminder that not everything in the Tower was poison.
Hae-won forced a breath. "You're late."
Arin smiled faintly. "You look terrible."
Ji-won groaned. "You should see the other guys."
The brief levity cracked the tension — just enough for the three of them to share the kind of grin only survivors ever could.
Then the Tower's text returned, jagged and pulsing.
[ Tower Directive: The Pendulum System Has Collapsed. ]
[ All Ascending and Descending Floors Are Now One. ]
[ The Singularity Has Begun. ]
The walls warped, pulling toward the center — a gravity that wasn't physical but narrative. The Dome compressed, bending space and sound, dragging light into a spiral.
Ji-won swore. "What the hell is that?!"
"The Tower's trying to merge both realities," Hae-won muttered, chains tightening around his arms. "It's rewriting itself again."
Arin reached for him. "Then what do we do—"
He smiled — tired, bitter, a spark of something almost human.
"We finish the damn story."
The ground vanished.
Hae-won met his gaze — and for once, there was no hate, no rivalry. Only grim understanding.
"Yeah," he said. "Let's rewrite the authors."
The light was wrong.
It wasn't sunlight, or magic light, or even divine radiance.
It was the color of collapsing stories — pale, frantic, alive.
The floor beneath them fell away, not into darkness, but into a spiral of mirrored worlds. Every version of the Tower shimmered below — the ascents, the descents, the failed regressions. Hae-won saw himself die a thousand different ways all at once: crushed, burned, impaled, rewritten, erased.
Each one mouthed the same words, over and over:
"Even if it breaks me…"
Ji-won barely managed to stand upright. His blade dissolved in the gravitational pull, reforming into raw data that crawled across his skin like tattoos.
"Where the hell are we?!"
"The Singularity," Hae-won said, voice steady. The chains around him flared red-black-white, alive with ghost light. "The place where the Tower and the Narrators overlap. The Tower's heart."
Arin looked around, horrified. Every reflection was a world — and in each one, a version of her died differently. Some screamed. Some smiled. One whispered, "I forgive you."
She turned away. "We have to end this."
"We can't," Ji-won snapped. "It's everything! You destroy it, you destroy every scenario, every cycle!"
"Exactly."
Hae-won's chains uncoiled with a metallic shriek. "It's the only way to stop the resets."
Arin stared at him. "You'll die again."
"I've done worse."
He lifted his hand — and the chains burst outward, embedding themselves into the spiral walls of the Singularity.
Each chain latched onto a memory, a fragment, a regret. With every connection, his body flickered — pieces of himself being torn away and multiplied through the mirrored worlds.
System text erupted midair:
[ Unauthorized Override Detected. ]
[ Chain of Regression → Chain of Singularity: INITIALIZING. ]
[ Warning: Collapse may result in full narrative destruction. ]
The Singularity fought back.
The reflections turned hostile, melting into monsters of paper and ink — distorted versions of himself, of Arin, of Ji-won. Each one carried the memories he'd lost, the rage he'd buried, the guilt he'd refused to name.
They screamed his truths at him.
"You enjoyed it!"
"You killed because you wanted to!"
"You're not the hero — you're the virus!"
Ji-won slashed one apart with a snarl. "Hae-won, whatever the plan is— make it fast!"
"It's not a plan." His voice shook under the weight of the collapsing realm. "It's a rewrite."
Chains of red light and black script lashed out, stabbing into the mirrored ground. Each impact shattered a reflection, sending waves of distortion through the void. The fragments rippled like glass, and through them Hae-won saw everything:
The orphanage.
The headmaster.
The burning pages.
The first suicide attempt.
The Tower's birth — his fault, maybe, his imagination turned real.
He fell to one knee, gasping. His chest split open — not from wound, but from memory overflow. The pain wasn't physical. It was existential.
Arin caught him, pressing her glowing hand to his back. "You don't have to carry all of it alone!"
He looked up, eyes wide and wild. "It's my story! If I don't end it, it'll just keep writing itself!"
She shook her head. "Then let me help you edit it."
Her soul's purification light — the heavenly flame that had once judged her — merged with his chains, bleeding gold into the red. The spiraling realm groaned under the clash of their powers.
Ji-won slammed his hand to the ground, activating his reincarnation circuit. "You're not doing this without me, bastard. We started this climb together."
The System reacted violently:
[ Multiple Author Signatures Detected. ]
[ Narrative Integrity Compromised. ]
[ Singularity Stability: 12% … 7% … 3% ]
The reflections screamed as they fractured — layers of story dissolving like ice under a torch. The Tower's structure shook, reality flickering between countless timelines.
Hae-won gritted his teeth. "When this ends… none of this might exist."
Arin's smile was faint, tearful, defiant. "Then make it worth remembering."
He reached out, clasped her hand, and together, they pulled.
The chains of regression screamed — the sound of an entire world being torn apart by its own author. Every loop, every timeline, every version of their deaths collapsed inward, funneled through Hae-won's chest into a single blazing line of white.
The Singularity imploded.
⸻
When the light cleared, they stood on cracked marble under a real sky — no more system windows, no more rules.
The Tower loomed in the distance, split down the middle like a broken monument.
A new message blinked, faint and trembling:
[ Singularity Neutralized. ]
[ Narrative Reboot Initiated. ]
[ Survivors: 3 ]
[ Error: Harvester of Death unclassified. ]
Hae-won looked up at the sunrise — raw, imperfect, real.
"Guess we broke it."
Ji-won coughed, grinning despite the blood on his face. "Yeah. Now what?"
Arin stared at the horizon. "Now… we find out what's left to save."