The sky was broken.
Dante stared up at it through blood-soaked eyes, watching reality peel apart like wet paper. The Tower's apex stretched impossibly above him, a spire of twisted geometry that hurt to look at. His body refused to move because of too much blood loss and too many broken bones. He could feel his lungs filling with fluid from a punctured something-or-other. Medical terminology stopped mattering when you were dying.
Around him, the corpses of S-Rank climbers cooled in pools of their own blood. Sera Knox lay ten feet away, her transformation half-complete and frozen in death, her golden eyes staring at nothing. She went down fighting, and they all did.
It didn't matter.
The Hollow King descended from the tear in the sky, and Dante understood with perfect clarity that humanity had lost. Not just this battle, but everything: the war, the Tower, Earth itself.
All of it.
The entity didn't have a form, not really. It was a shape that suggested something worse behind it, a door left ajar to a room no one should enter. Looking at it made his remaining eye water. His brain kept trying to process what it saw and kept failing.
"You."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, like someone whispering directly into his soul. Dante tried to lift his sword. His arm flopped uselessly against the blood-slicked stone.
"You again?"
He blinked. Blood dripped into his remaining good eye.
'Again?'
The Hollow King drifted closer. The ground beneath it rotted, cracked, and fell away into nothing. The air grew cold despite the fires still burning across Floor 75.
"How many times will you die before you stay dead?"
Dante wanted to respond. He wanted to spit defiance in its face, tell it that even if he died here, someone else would finish the job. That humanity wouldn't break.
But he was too tired for lies.
Elliot's betrayal had cost them everything: the ambush at Floor 68, the sabotaged equipment, the false coordinates that led half their force into a killbox. Dante killed him for it, eventually, slowly, with great care. It didn't bring anyone back.
Nothing brought them back.
The Hollow King reached for him. Its touch felt like forgetting, like his memories were being erased one by one.
His mother's face slipped away first, then his first clear, then his friends. All of it dissolving into nothing.
Ivy.
No.
He held onto that. Even as everything else slipped away, he held onto his sister's face, fifteen years old with bright eyes. The last time he saw her alive, she punched his arm and told him to stop being so serious all the time.
She died in Year 5 during the Crimson Tide, and he wasn't there.
He was never there when it mattered.
The Hollow King's grip tightened, and Dante felt his consciousness collapsing inward. The last thing he saw was the entity's approximation of a smile.
"See you soon."
Then nothing.
---
Dante woke up choking.
He rolled off the bed and hit the floor hard, gasping for air that came too easily. His lungs didn't gurgle and his bones didn't grind. His eye, the one that was supposed to be a ruined socket, blinked open and showed him morning light streaming through faded curtains.
He froze.
The room was small with cheap furniture, a poster on the wall for some band he used to like when he was young, and a jacket hanging on the door that he threw away at eighteen because it was "too childish."
He knew this room.
This was his bedroom. His old bedroom, in the apartment he shared with his mother and sister before the Tower swallowed his life.
Slowly, like a man approaching a bomb, Dante pushed himself to his feet. His body felt wrong, too light and too soft. He looked down at his hands.
No scars. The burn that wrapped around his right forearm was gone. The calluses from eight years of combat, the crooked fingers he never bothered getting properly set, all of it had vanished.
These were a teenager's hands, smooth, unmarked, and useless.
He staggered to the mirror on the back of the door and stared at a ghost.
His face looked back at him, but it was all wrong, with too much softness in the cheeks and no grey streaking his temples. His eyes were still that pale green, but they looked almost innocent, almost hopeful.
He looked nineteen.
'No.'
He pressed his palm against the glass, half-expecting it to shatter and reveal the truth. It didn't.
'This is real. This is real. This is real.'
A noise from somewhere else in the apartment made him go still. Footsteps, light and familiar.
Then a voice.
"Dante! You're going to be late for registration!"
His legs almost gave out.
Ivy.
---
He didn't remember walking to the kitchen. One moment he was in his room, the next he was standing in the doorway watching his sister pour cereal into a bowl like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Because for her, it was.
She looked young. So goddamn young. Fifteen with too much attitude and a messy ponytail she never bothered fixing properly. She wore that oversized hoodie she stole from him years ago and never gave back. Her eyes were their mother's, brown and warm and alive.
"Hey," she said without looking up. "You look like crap. Did you sleep at all?"
Dante couldn't speak.
"Hello? Earth to Dante?" She waved her spoon at him. "The Tower Gate opens in like three hours. You need to register if you want to climb, remember? That whole 'I'm going to become a hunter and save us from poverty' thing you've been talking about for months?"
He still couldn't speak.
Ivy finally looked at him. Her expression shifted from annoyance to concern. "Okay, you're freaking me out. What's wrong?"
He crossed the distance between them in three steps and pulled her into a hug so tight she wheezed.
"Dante! What the hell?"
He didn't let go. He pressed his face into her shoulder and breathed in the smell of cheap shampoo and teenage rebellion, the scent of his sister, alive and whole and here.
In Year 5, the Crimson Circle orchestrated a gate break on Earth. The event became known as the Crimson Tide. Seventeen thousand people died in three hours. Including Ivy.
He wasn't there. He was on Floor 35, fighting someone else's war while his little sister bled out in the street waiting for help that never came.
He never forgave himself.
"Dante?" Ivy's voice was smaller now, her hands awkwardly patting his back. "You're scaring me. What happened?"
He pulled back and looked at her face, memorizing every detail.
"Nothing," he said. His voice came out rough, like he wasn't used to using it. "Bad dream."
"Must have been one hell of a dream." She watched him warily. "You look like you saw someone die."
'I saw everyone die. I watched it happen. And then I came back.'
"I'm fine."
She didn't believe him. He could see it in her eyes. But she was fifteen, and fifteen-year-olds had limits to how much emotional heavy lifting they were willing to do before breakfast.
"Okay, weirdo. Just get dressed. I'm not explaining to Mom's ghost why you missed registration because you were having a breakdown in the kitchen."
The mention of their mother hit different now. In the original timeline, he awakened three months after her death. Too late to pay for treatment. Too late to do anything but attend the funeral.
This time, she was already gone. He couldn't change that.
But Ivy was right here, alive and mocking him with cereal in her mouth.
He could change that.
---
While Ivy finished breakfast, Dante retreated to his room and sat on the edge of his bed. His hands were shaking.
The question kept circling his mind: how?
He died on Floor 75 when the Hollow King killed him. He felt his memories being erased and his consciousness collapsing. That wasn't a dream, that was real. Eight years of climbing, bleeding, and losing everything was real.
But so was this.
A translucent window flickered into existence before him.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION]
[Candidate: Dante Graves]
[Status: Pre-Awakening]
[Registration: Pending]
[WARNING: ANOMALY DETECTED]
[WARNING: TEMPORAL INCONSISTENCIES PRESENT]
[CLASSIFICATION: IRREGULAR]
[ADMINISTRATOR ATTENTION: LEVEL 7]
The System shouldn't appear before entering the Tower. He knew that. Everyone knew that. You awakened inside, not out.
But here it was.
And it knew something was wrong with him.
'Irregular.'
He remembered that word from the upper floors. Climbers who didn't fit the rules, anomalies the Tower couldn't categorize. They were rare, dangerous, and usually killed by Administrators.
Dante closed the window with a thought. It vanished, but the implications remained.
The Tower noticed him. Whatever sent him back, whatever gave him this second chance, it left traces. Red flags. Evidence that he didn't belong.
Good. Let them watch.
He stood up and walked to the small closet in the corner. His childhood possessions stared back at him. Clothes that wouldn't fit him in a year. Books he never finished. A photo of his mother smiling in a better time.
He dug through the pile until he found what he was looking for. A small box, tucked into the back corner, covered in dust.
Inside was a knife his grandfather gave him years ago. He forgot he still had this. In the original timeline, he sold it for rent money before registration.
This time, he slipped it into his pocket.
Old habits.
He looked at himself in the mirror again, at the soft face, the innocent eyes, the body that never learned to kill.
None of that mattered.
He spent eight years climbing. Eight years fighting. Eight years watching people die and learning exactly how to make others join them.
His stats might be reset and his skills might be locked, but his mind was still the mind of an S-Rank, and his instincts were still the instincts of a man who killed forty-seven humans and stopped counting the monsters.
The Tower wanted to watch him?
Fine.
He would give them something worth watching.
Dante opened his door and walked toward the kitchen, toward his sister, toward the Gate that would open in three hours.
He had eight years of knowledge, eight years of enemies to unmake, and eight years of mistakes to correct.
And somewhere, climbing through the lower floors with a smile on his face, Elliot Crane had no idea what was coming for him.
'This time,' Dante thought, 'you don't get to win.'
He kissed Ivy on the forehead despite her protests, grabbed his jacket, and walked out the door to register for the Tower.
The clock started now.