The 40th floor.
At this point, Damon had stopped asuring the process he had made using the numbers carved into the tower walls. The floors had beco nonlinear, distorted by the abyss’ spatial manipulation and incomprehensible architecture.
So ascents stretched like mountains of agony, while others took him only a few steps forward, then dropped him into nightmares that lasted hours. Ti was most definitely warped in the tower, but Damon couldn’t tell by how much, he just knew it was.
He had finally arrived on what he believed to be the 40th floor, but this floor imdiately felt very different compared to the others.
This was because this floor didn’t greet him with silence, nor did it greet him with a barrage of attacks or a nightmarish scene.
But screaming. Not taphorical or in his head.
Actual, unrelenting screaming.
It ca from everywhere. The stone scread. The very air scread. Even the light, the weak, flickering hue bleeding from impossible skylines above, twisted in soundless wails that seed to rupture the soul from within.
Damon imdiately ran forward and imdiately, a barrage of attacks flooded his way. A dozen shadow-born entities exploded from the broken ground. They weren’t like the thralls from before. No fangs. No claws. No weapons.
They were just... faces.
Human faces, dozens of them, lted together in waxen sheets of flesh, moving like cloaks carried by the wind. No limbs, no torsos, just heads, mouths wide, eyes stitched open, teeth spiraling into their cheeks.
They scread, and scread, unleashing sonic attacks towards Damon which he barely managed to dodge. He leapt upwards and brought his hand down onto one of the monsters.
He grabbed it and tossed it into a wall, crushing one of the necks and unleashing monstrous flas that burnt the creature to a crisp.
~BANG!~
Damon couldn’t stay in that spot for long however, imdiately rolling to the left and barely dodging a barrage of sound waves that clanged against the walls, shaking the very foundation of the floor.
Once he regained his bearings, he didn’t hesitate at all.
[ Saint Grade Shadow Stalker Technique ]
He vanished into shadow, appearing behind the first cluster of entities. His scythe, BloodReaper, snapped to full length in his hands, humming with chaotic glee as he unleashed a multitude of slashed.
The cut through so of the faces, cutting of their ability to scream.
As for the ones he didn’t get to cut, he hurriedly flipped and turned them towards the other attacking monsters, giving them a taste of their own dicine as the sound waves crashed into their allies, killing so.
He kept the pressure on, unleashing another barrage of attacks.
[ Judgnt Spiral ]
A burst of golden light arced around him, and the purifying chains of the Codex of Judgnt burst outward, slashing through the airborne nightmares. Seven of them disintegrated mid-flight, scattering into dust and echoes.
But the remaining five didn’t die.
They grew.
Their screams beca condensed beams of pressure, blasting through the air like sonic spears.
Damon dodged two of them mid-flip, but the third clipped his shoulder, sending a ripple of sound into his bones. Pain spiked through his nerves. He grunted and landed hard, rolling.
He gritted his teeth.
[ Retribution Lance ]
A spear of golden Aether ford above him and hurled downward, pinning one of the faces to the obsidian ground. It writhed, flailed, and exploded in a mist of oil and ash.
The others surged forward.
Damon tapped into [ Overclock ], letting celestial lightning flood his veins. The world slowed. He saw the ripples in the air from their voices, traced the threads of Abyssal influence tethering their bodies.
He struck with surgical precision. Each swing of BloodReaper carved glowing trails in the air, cutting apart two more face-shrouds with barely a breath wasted.
Then the last of them turned itself inside out.
Literally.
Its flesh folded in on itself, revealing a mirror of Damon’s own face, twisted in anguish, and scread not in madness, but in his voice.
"You left her to die!"
Damon’s scythe faltered for a half-second.
Just enough ti for the monster to launch forward, its mouth opening wider than any human skull should allow.
[ Damnation’s Chain ]
The Codex responded for him.
Chains of holy light exploded outward, binding the creature mid-air and dragging it into a sigil of judgnt. Damon clenched his fist, and the sigil ignited, incinerating the entity into nothing but purged essence.
He exhaled sharply, letting his Overclock fade.
His shoulders ached. His coat was torn again, and his gloves were slick with soul residue. He scanned the area with his and finally, for the first ti since stepping onto this floor, the screaming began to dim.
The battlefield stilled.
He stood in a canyon carved of broken geotry. The sky above shimred with writhing scars of torn reality, and below, black earth pulsed like a dying heart.
But sothing else caught his attention.
Voices.
Human voices.
Faint. Hoarse. But undeniably real.
He moved quickly, slipping through jagged ravines and warped columns until he ca upon a structure that might once have been a barracks—though now, it was half-embedded in the wall of a cliff, leaning at an impossible angle.
He stepped forward, cautious, BloodReaper still in hand.
A spear t him at the entrance.
"Halt!" ca a raspy voice, "You’re not one of them... are you?"
Damon narrowed his eyes. The speaker was a man in battered armor, armor that bore the faint markings of Elarith Valis, a symbol now drowned in blood and shadow. His skin was pale, nearly translucent, and his beard was ragged. But his eyes were sharp.
Behind him, Damon saw movent, three others, all thin, malnourished, barely holding weapons upright. One was coughing blood into a cloth. Another simply stared at the wall, whispering to herself.
"I’m not Abyssal," Damon said calmly, "If I was, you’d be dead already."
The man slowly lowered his spear.
"...Then maybe you’re hope. Or another ghost. Either way, co in. You’ve survived longer than most."
Damon stepped inside the shelter. It was dark, lit only by blue spirit fire and what looked like salvaged runes embedded in the walls.
They sat around a table made of shattered slabs.
There were four survivors remaining. Their nas were never offered formally, but Damon read them in their spirits using .
Captain Rhys Halden – forr Spirit Knight of Elarith Valis.
Corin – Alchemist and Healer. Missing an arm.
Tessa – Scout, ntally fractured. Kept clutching a doll that didn’t exist.
Marek – Frontline. One leg broken beyond healing.
Rhys poured a cup of sothing warm. Damon didn’t drink.
"I’ve never seen soone arrive this far up," the Captain said quietly, "Most of us arrived here years ago. Decades? Ti is warped. We don’t know anymore. But... we ca through the sa rift you likely did. Just... earlier."
"You’re telling ," Damon said, eyes narrowing, "you’ve been here all this ti?"
Rhys nodded, "When we arrived in this dinsion, whatever this damned Abyssal echo is, we lost our tether to the real world. No ssages. No portals. No recall spells. Dead."
Corin leaned in, "We thought it was just a cursed land. So we tried to go back. But the rift... it doesn’t lead out. Only in."
"We were trapped," Rhys continued, "So we decided to ascend. Fight our way through, floor by floor, hoping that at the top... sothing waited. A god, a source. A way out."
Tessa giggled.
"There’s nothing at the top," she whispered. "Just screams. Just eyes. So many eyes. They blink. They see you even when you’re not there."
Damon’s jaw tightened.
"What happened on this floor?"
Silence.
Then Marek, the silent one, finally spoke.
"Comprehension broke us."
Rhys nodded, "The boss of this floor... isn’t like the others. It doesn’t fight. Not at first. It watches. It speaks in truths."
"What do you an?" Damon asked.
"Just seeing it," Rhys whispered, "just laying your eyes upon it... can drive you insane. One of my lieutenants, Jaren, he looked for too long. Thought he was made of insects. Tore off his own skin before we could restrain him. Another heard the boss’s voice and stabbed out her own eyes just to silence it."
Corin shook his head, "We’ve lost too many. And now... we’re stuck. We can’t go higher. Not without more power. Not without help. We’ve burned through our alchemy, our spirit cores, our hope."
"Other people have ca after us, but they all died the sa fate once seeing the boss, or have died out due to a lack of resources. We’re barely clinging on here." Rhyse said.
Damon stood in silence.
The Codex of Judgnt hovered behind him, chains rustling softly.
"I’m going to the top," Damon said finally. "Whatever that creature is... I’ll face it."
Rhys chuckled weakly, "Of course you will. You’re still whole. You still shine."
Damon’s eyes hardened, "I’m not shining. I’m burning. And I won’t stop until the last echo of this damnation is erased."
He turned to leave.
But paused at the threshold.
"I’ll co back. When this floor is clear. When the way is open."
None of them said anything.
But for the first ti in who knows how long, their eyes held the faintest glimr.
Hope.
And then Damon vanished into the shadows once more, leaving behind the echoes of failure, and stepping into the black veil that led to the 40th floor’s true trial.
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