It had taken a full forty minutes to get Brenda out of his apartment. Forty minutes, three polite refusals, two cups of lukewarm tea, and one reluctantly accepted future coffee with her niece after her "Just a casual one, dear, no pressure!".
He stopped at his reflection as he walked her out.
What have I done? He asked himself in terror.
He didn't know which part had been the trap. But clearly, he'd tripped it, triggered it, and fallen straight into it. Repeatedly.
"Never again."
"Never again shall I be forced to speak with people!" he agonized. The tragedy was too severe, its cost too high to bear. And so, with his worldview already in shambles, he made a promise that would govern his objectives for months: "I swear to earn enough money to leave this cursed place for good!"
He was already imagining it. Somewhere quiet, unbothered, and preferably incapable of housing neighbors.
And now, as the door clicked shut behind, and silence returned like a long-lost friend, he let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding—slumping against the poor doorframe like a man who had just outrun a natural disaster.
He thought he was clever. He liked to think he'd gotten better at talking to people after his hours of practicing in the bath. Apparently, he'd just gotten better at lying to himself.
May no man need to experience the dread of speaking with neighbors like me, he muttered silently. He'd pray, but the last god he met tried to kill him, so the whole divine hotline was officially on block.
Still, the moment she was gone, everything else slid back into place—purpose, pressure, and the low, expectant hum of the wind, circling him like it always knew what came next. He washed his face and turned on some jazz, which was perhaps not the most fitting soundtrack for tonight, but it was at least calm enough to trick his heart into believing this wasn't a battlefield.
Focus. He said to himself.
There was no time to rest. Not when you were technically bonded to an ancient alien elemental force. Not when towers kept spawning with all the subtlety of divine landmines. Not when your last "rest day" involved dodging judgment in a mirrored death room that tried to dissect your soul like it had questions and a scalpel.
But that's fine. Really. Shin had given up on breaks a long time ago.
As for tonight? He didn't expect it to go well—not really. But he at least hoped it wouldn't go catastrophically wrong. And somehow, that faint flicker of optimism was already making him feel unreasonably proud.
Typical Shin. Ever the optimist.
He pulled on the black gear, slung Windpiercer across his back, and stepped out into the city.
—
There's a specific kind of awe that hits when you see a tower up close.
Maybe it's the scale—the sheer height that seems to challenge the sky. Or maybe it's the way reality itself curves near them, folding around the structure like it's the world's one exception to the rules. Even Shin, who had already cleared two such places, found himself staring, amazed as if it were his first time.
Indeed, it wasn't surprising that the world had become obsessed.
Demand for footage, photos, and stories about towers had hit fever pitch, with entire online channels dedicated to speculation and conspiracy. Tour agencies started advertising 'tower-viewing' packages as premium trips. Even influencers staked their reputations—and sometimes their lives—on getting as close as possible. One YouTuber had even vanished trying to film the inside of a tower in Cambodia.
The press followed the towers, and the people flocked their traces. The tower obsession spread everywhere—fashion, snack branding, influencer merch drops. Apparently, humanity had collectively decided the apocalypse made for great marketing.
In response, governments did what governments always do when they don't understand something but still want to own it: they locked everything down.
Access blocked. Airspace restricted. Local feeds wiped or throttled.
Calling it covert would be an overestimation. It wasn't even subtle. Just… fast. Very fast. However, in an era where clearing a tower could bring unimaginable benefits, speed was pretty much the name of the game.
Of course, someone should've told them that keeping the towers under wraps was about as absurd as covering up a pyramid that appeared in the middle of a city.
Thing is, you can't really hide a divine structure that can warp air pressure, bend streetlamp shadows, make birds reverse direction mid-flight—or, in some cases, swallow entire blocks without warning.
This one, for example, had appeared two days ago. And without any warning, it carved itself into the side of a long-abandoned windmill on the fringe of the old industrial ring. Just a soft sound like reality was cracking, and there it was. By the time the tower fully stabilized, half the surrounding buildings had warped to make room.
Worst, barely four hours later, the place was already in full lockdown mode, with police sealing the perimeter and moving half the residents to 'safer' places.
Now it stood behind layers of fencing and concrete, floodlights sweeping wide, sterile arcs across the lot like they were disinfecting reality. Dozens of drones traced lazy figures in the sky, and at least three mobile ops teams had set up camp nearby—doing their best impression of "not military" with civilian-pattern helmets and overly generic utility gear.
Uh... Shin couldn't help but wonder. Now, that's a bit of an overkill, isn't it? Is this the Pentagon or something?
"...oh. I guess not," he squinted.
Because after all, there is nothing worse than ignorance. The kind and noble government, ever concerned for public clarity, had thoughtfully installed a massive multilingual sign—just in case anyone failed to notice the gigantic divine anomaly warping the air like a standing black hole.
HAZARD ZONE – STRUCTURAL INSTABILITY – DO NOT APPROACH
Yep. Clear as divine crystal.
Shin crouched beside the rusted frame of a decommissioned substation about a hundred meters out. The last shadows of night crept across the streets like reluctant ghosts, dissolving under the rising weight of pre-dawn stillness.
"Man," he muttered, brushing wind through his fingers, "sure hope nobody's dumb enough to try and break in."
The air rippled.
Not invisibility—just misdirection. A fold in the wind, bending perception where it mattered. He exhaled slow and steady. And vanished.
His steps didn't crunch gravel—they skimmed above it. Drones overhead didn't twitch. Cameras tracked dust motes instead of him. Even the expensive motion sensors blinked blind. But, in their defense, they'd been calibrated for people on the ground. Not people drifting just above it.
A guard sneezed and turned—half a second too late to notice the blur weaving through scaffolding like smoke.
No alarms. No panic. Just the soft hum of divine pressure growing louder with every step.
He passed the outer cordon.
Then the inner fence.
Then the last coil of barbed wire between the world and whatever this place had become.
The tower loomed before him, tall and fractured—wrapped in twisting pressure, like heat haze bent by a god's breath. Up close, it didn't shimmer—it pulsed. Its divine geometry folding in on itself like a secret that refused to stay quiet.
Shin stepped into it without hesitation.
The inside was silent. And wrong.
Not the kind of wrong that shouted danger in bright neon letters, but the quieter, more insidious sort. Like walking into a room and realizing every picture frame was tilted just a degree too far. Like hearing the hum of a light that wasn't plugged in. The air didn't hum or echo—but it existed with a thick stillness that pressed into the bones like mud.
Shin stepped forward, boots crunching faintly on a layer of fine, glittering dust. The space opened in a circle, wide and dark, walled in ancient stone. Pillars stretched up to a ceiling that shimmered with shifting runes, casting dim golden halos that refused to sit still. At the center, the usual seal pulsed—a twisted knot of divine pressure folded like origami in mid-breath.
He paused at the threshold.
No visible traps. No movement. And yet, the silence wasn't empty—it was... listening.
He didn't like that.
Moving quietly, he stepped deeper into the chamber. The entrance sealed behind him with a soundless shimmer, as if the air had agreed to forget he ever came in.
Fifty steps in, he saw it. The wall to his left was smooth—except where a human silhouette was fused into the stone. Not fully formed. Not screaming. Just… there. Mid-step. As if caught in motion by a divine pause button and melted into reality. Another was halfway inside a support column, limbs twisted, face gone.
Civilians, probably. Unlucky enough to be nearby when the tower formed. Or maybe pulled in after, caught like insects in amber. No one ever saw it happen. Only what it left behind.
"That's disturbing," he mumbled. Shin rarely dwelled on strangers. But this... this was unsettling enough to leave wrinkles even he couldn't iron out.
It came to his mind that the dust in the tower was too finely grained, like powdered bone.
What the hell did they encounter?
A pulse rippled through the floor. The tower decided to answer his question.
The chamber around him opened wide, dome-shaped and built from ancient stone veined with pale gold. Most of the floor had sunken into a bowl of loose sand, fine and still as silk. It looked shallow at first, but something in the way it drank sound made Shin suspect otherwise. The room was unnervingly still, as if it were waiting for someone to disturb it.
Someone like him.
Something happened the moment he took a step. Nothing dramatic—no tremor, no burst of noise. Just a subtle shift in pressure that told him something had changed. He stilled, his gaze scanning the chamber for every hint.
Something moved—not the sand itself—but something hiding in it. Several figures—six of them—stood half-submerged in the sand. At first they looked like broken statues, barely rising from the dunes. But now, with that single step echoing in the charged air, they began to shift. Just slightly. Like someone had pressed play on creatures that didn't remember what being alive meant.
They were humanoid—mostly. Arms too long. Limbs too smooth. Made of something that looked like dark stone but moved like flesh. And their faces—or more accurately, lack of them made Shin froze.
And so did they. Weird. Why did they stop? Shin exhaled slowly, his eyes narrowing slightly.
Think, he told himself, what could the purpose of the room be?
Towers didn't give free fights. If this room wanted him to survive a wave of attackers, it wouldn't telegraph them this obviously. There was always a rule. A logic. A test beneath the test. It was unlikely he'd gain anything even if he destroyed them. No, he won't be able to leave the trial before he cracks its code.
There were not enough clues, but a close look showed that while the floor changed, he was still in the same place he was. The dead victims that from before—their current stony form—could probably reveal what happened here.
So the only question is, will those statues allow me to do it?
The question hung in the air like condensation on glass. Obvious, fragile, and about to break.
Shin didn't trust standing still. But he trusted walking into the unknown even less.
He exhaled slowly, trying to calculate a feasible path. He needed to look closer. But there was no way to know if the bodies were themselves a trap.
"...Fine," he shook his head. "Fortune favors the bold."
And he moved.
He didn't charge. He didn't sprint.
He darted—a flash of movement toward the nearest figure, keeping low, angled, sharp, fast enough to avoid any traps. Or bullets.
But even he could miscalculate.
The nearest statue snapped to life, shooting forward like a ballistic missile made of stone. It didn't just lunge—it rewrote where it stood, blurring into motion as if even the world forgot to keep up—one moment buried. The next, screaming toward him like a javelin of divine intent, its limbs outstretched like spears of sandy stone.
Shin's eyes widened.
What the—?
He didn't dodge. It was impossible to dodge. So he accelerated—cutting hard and diving behind one of the half-crumbled remains from before. He hit the ground just as the figure slammed forward—
—and touched the poor body.
There was a sound—like silk tearing beneath the ocean.
And the corpse was gone.
Not destroyed.
Not crushed.
Just… gone.
Reduced to a stream of fine dust in the blink of an eye.
Shin's heart skipped.
"Holy shit," he breathed.
The statue turned toward him.
Slowly.
Shin raised his hand—ready to strike—but froze halfway.
Because this time, the empty face that looked at him—
—didn't look so empty anymore.