The Celestial Tower always knew who was climbing it. It felt their energy signatures.
Measured their hearts.
Weighed their intent.
For Danny, it shifted toward creation and pressure—tests of balance and world-shaping.
For Swift, it danced between precision and flow—tests of clarity, timing, and inner stillness.
For Jake…
It gave him weight.
Floor 56 greeted him with it.
Not fire.
Not illusions.
Not tricky puzzles.
Just a single, impossibly long stone causeway suspended over a spinning void—and when Jake stepped onto it, gravity tripled.
He almost face-planted.
"Bronze…" he grunted, catching himself. "Oh yeah. There it is."
His muscles screamed as he straightened, every motion dragging a thousand invisible chains along with it.
Above, in the announcers' booth, Julian Breadstone nearly dropped his crystal notepad.
"AND THERE HE IS, LADIES, GENTLEMEN, AND GALACTIC BEINGS OF QUESTIONABLE TAX RESIDENCY—BRRRRONZE DRAGON JAAAKE!"
Jimmy took a slow breath, eyes narrowing as he watched the readout glyphs spin.
"Tower's calibrated heavy for him."
Julian clasped his cheeks. "BECAUSE HE IS THE STRONG ONE, JIMMY. THE PUNCHY ONE. THE 'WHAT IF WE JUST HIT IT HARDER' ONE."
Jimmy nodded, but his voice was thoughtful.
"Yeah. And it's about to find out what happens when you load too much weight on a guy who's already carrying a lot."
Jake rolled his shoulders once, feeling the tower pressing down on him like a living mountain.
He was tall, well-muscled, bronze dragon tattoo curling along his side with its faint metallic gleam. Sweat already beaded on his forehead. His usual cocky grin was nowhere to be seen.
Bronze aura simmered under his skin like contained thunder.
He could still picture them—
Swift, somewhere above, moving like silver water.
Danny, somewhere higher still, glowing with that impossible golden resonance that made the whole tower tremble whenever he flared.
Jake swallowed around the lump in his throat.
"Behind again, huh?" he muttered.
The dragon mark on his ribs tingled—not in protest, not in agreement. Just… there.
Jake straightened.
"Fine. Then we climb."
He took another step.
The gravity increased again.
His knee buckled.
Only sheer stubbornness kept him from going down.
The causeway looked simple—just an endless stretch of stone with faint glowing glyphs marking distances. But every few paces, the tower ramped the pressure.
2x gravity.
3x.
4x.
His muscles burned hot. Bones rattled. Breath came heavier, his chest rising in strained rhythm.
Other fighters had already quit this floor. The recovery sigils below had flashed constantly earlier, ejecting those who misjudged their strength.
But the sigils were quiet now.
Those who couldn't handle it were gone.
Jake was one of the last.
He took another step and felt something strain in his shoulder joint.
Pain flashed.
His mind whispered, You're not Danny.
He gritted his teeth and took another step.
You're not Swift either.
He took two.
And the causeway tilted.
The entire path angled thirty degrees sideways without warning, turning every step into a slide toward the crushing, spinning void.
Jake's boots slipped.
He caught himself on his hands, stone biting his palms.
Gravity pulled him sideways now, not just down.
"Oh, COME ON!" he yelled at the tower.
No answer.
Just the heavy, unrelenting drag.
He laughed once—short, bitter.
"Yeah, that's fair."
Jake snarled and slowly pushed himself upright against the side-pull, his legs shaking, his back screaming. The bronze aura around him flickered but never fully ignited.
He could ignite it.
He knew he could.
But every time he reached for that force lately, he remembered how easily Danny's power now filled entire rooms. How Swift slipped through attacks that would have pulverized Jake a year ago.
How, at the Dragon dojo, even the elders had started glancing at Golden Danny with a kind of reverence that stung in ways punches never had.
Jake had always been strong.
Now he was… relatively strong.
Differently strong.
He hated it.
The gravity spiked again.
Jake's legs nearly gave out.
Above, Julian winced dramatically.
"Is it just me, or does this floor feel, like, RUDE?"
Jimmy answered quietly.
"It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. He's a bronze dragon. The archetype is weight, density, impact. The tower wants to know: how much can he carry?"
Julian watched as Jake's steps slowed.
"Oh… that's mean," he murmured.
Jimmy's voice softened.
"Also? He's not just fighting the floor."
Julian blinked.
"…oh."
The causeway narrowed up ahead.
The next section was a series of stone blocks with gaps between them, all still under crushing gravity and slanted toward the void.
Jake stared at the first gap.
Easy, on a normal day.
Right now?
His legs wanted to tremble.
His lungs burned.
His hands still shook from catching himself.
He thought about Swift's light, balanced footwork.
About how Danny probably didn't even notice gravity changes anymore because the tower itself bent to him.
Stop thinking about them, he told himself.
"Focus," he growled.
Bronze aura flickered around his fists.
He bent his knees.
The first jump was ugly.
He didn't fly.
He didn't glide.
He hurled himself at the next stone block with a guttural yell, barely clearing the gap, landing hard enough that fissures spiderwebbed beneath him.
"Ha… ha…"
He smiled weakly.
"One down."
There were at least twenty more.
He jumped the second gap.
The third.
His breath turned ragged. His vision tunneled slightly at the edges.
The tower didn't slow or relent.
It just kept adding weight.
By the tenth gap, his muscles were screaming in a constant ache that felt like they were being pulled apart thread by thread.
By the fifteenth, he landed on one knee and stayed there, fists braced on stone.
He fought the urge to vomit.
"Just… a floor," he panted. "Just a stupid, smug… rock hallway thing. I've fought worse."
Have you? whispered a traitorous part of his mind.
Or did your friends fight worse, and you hit what was in front of you?
Jake snarled.
"Shut up," he told his own thoughts.
He pushed himself up again, shaking, sweat dripping from his chin and pattering onto the stone like small storms.
The last five jumps were a blur of pain and refusal.
He didn't jump like a bronze dragon warrior.
He jumped like a man who refused to lie down.
When he finally stumbled off the last block onto solid floor, the gravity eased in a rush, dropping from crushing to merely heavy.
Jake collapsed onto his back, chest heaving, staring up at the ceiling of swirling constellations the tower had painted for this floor.
He laughed. It sounded more like choking.
"Swift would've danced across that in silence," he muttered. "Danny might've flown."
He covered his face with one arm.
"But I walked it."
The bronze mark on his ribs warmed faintly, like a dragon's approving exhale.
"I walked it," Jake repeated.
He rolled to his knees, braced one hand on the floor, and pushed himself up, legs shaking.
"Next floor."
Floor 57 was not kinder.
The room was circular, with a dozen massive stone pillars arranged in concentric rings. Each pillar had a heavy ring of metal around its middle.
Jake stepped in.
The door sealed behind him.
Above, Julian spoke with hushed drama.
"Ooooohhh. OHHH. This is a pressure test room."
Jimmy nodded.
"Torque chamber. If he tries to smash his way through everything, he won't last."
Julian tilted his head. "But smashing things is his whole deal."
"Exactly."
The tower spoke for the first time in a while—not in words, but through runic light.
Symbols flared on each ring of metal.
Jake read them instinctively.
Weight.
Force.
Resistance.
The rings began to spin—slowly at first, then faster, grinding the air with deep, teeth-grating sound.
Jake took a fighting stance, drawing in a shaky breath.
"Okay," he muttered. "So we're doing this."
A pillar lunged.
Not physically—its ring shot off the stone, whipping toward him with incredible speed, dragging a trail of compressed air.
Jake brought his arm up.
Bronze aura flashed—and the ring slammed into forearm and shoulder.
He slid backward five feet, boots squealing across the stone, but he did not fall.
"Too heavy," he grunted.
He shoved.
The ring broke away, whipping back to its pillar.
Another shot at him.
He ducked.
It clipped his shoulder.
Pain flared.
Two more rings gunned for his legs.
He jumped.
Too slow.
They slammed into his shins, spinning wildly, almost dragging him off his feet.
He roared and braced.
Bronze dragon energy surged along his bones, reinforcing muscle and tendon. His arms bulged with effort as he fought the rotational pull.
"NO!"
He dragged one ring backward—
then pivoted.
Using the very torque pulling him, he spun, dragging two of the rings into each other.
They collided with a thundercrack and recoiled, stunned.
Jake blinked.
"Huh."
A line of thought slotted into place.
Not just hit harder.
Redirect.
His breath steadied.
The pillars accelerated their assault, rings firing in alternating patterns—some high, some low, some aiming to trip, some to crush.
Jake started to see the rhythm.
A high shot—duck.
Two lows—jump and pivot.
A feint from the left—block and twist into it.
He grabbed one ring with both hands even as it hammered into him, his arms screaming, chest burning. Instead of trying to stop it, he let it carry him into a spin.
Bronze energy surged out through his forearms, into his grip.
The world became rotation and force.
Jake roared and leaned into it, turning an attempted body-smash into a wide, brutal sweep of the captured ring, slamming it into the others in a rattling chain collision.
Metal boomed off metal.
Stone pillars shuddered.
Julian shouted into his mic:
"DID YOU SEE THAT?! HE TURNED THE ROOM INTO A WASHING MACHINE AND HE'S THE ONLY THING THAT DIDN'T FALL APART!"
Jimmy gave a small, grudging smile.
"He's figuring it out. Bronze doesn't just mean 'hard hit'. It means command of momentum. Weight with purpose."
Jake felt it.
The bronze mark on his side pulsed, power spreading through his muscles with more cohesion than before.
He stopped thinking like a guy punching everything.
He started thinking like a pivot.
Rings barreled at him.
He met them with forearms and shoulders, redirecting their arcs instead of trying to outright defy them. He let some of them slide along his body, using their own motion to slingshot them into others.
His aura shifted—from a rough, uneven flare to something thicker, more grounded, curling along his limbs like coiled cables of metal.
When one ring came at his head from behind, his body moved almost before his mind did—spinning, catching it with one extended elbow, twisting his hips, snapping it sideways into a different ring mid-flight.
It wasn't elegant.
It wasn't pretty.
It was effective.
After several punishing minutes, the rings slowed.
Then stopped.
Panting, Jake knelt with one fist braced against the floor, aura guttering.
His forearms were purpled with bruises; his legs throbbed. Sweat soaked his shirt.
"You learning?" he asked the bronze mark.
It pulsed once in his ribs.
"No…" he muttered, half-smiling. "Yeah. You're right. We are."
The tower acknowledged him with a faint shimmering in the exit archway.
He'd earned it.
He dragged himself upright.
There was no rest.
The tower rarely gave that gift.
But something had shifted inside him.
His aura didn't just flare and vanish anymore. It lingered like a weight belt wrapped around his core. His steps felt just a little more grounded, even when his legs shook.
Floor 58 was chaos.
Noise.
Shouts.
Fighters clashing.
Hazards of all kinds.
He plowed through it like a tank because there wasn't time to think. There were traps and foes and storms of debris—but the new, subtle understanding of momentum saved him more than once.
Once, a falling slab of stone came down so suddenly that the old Jake would have simply tried to catch it outright.
This Jake stepped into it, redirected its angle with a shoulder slam, and turned a crushing blow into sliding rubble.
A spear-wielder trapped under debris stared up at him afterward with wide eyes.
"Th-thank you!"
Jake just grunted, hauling the guy to his feet.
"Go. Floors aren't getting easier."
Another time, a huge tower-spawn beast lunged at him—some kind of armored, multi-legged monstrosity. Jake met its rush not with a straight punch, but with a low, twisting under-hook that used the beast's own charge to topple its front half sideways.
He smashed it into the wall with a follow-through shoulder-check that shook the whole platform.
Julian screamed with joy.
"HE'S LEARNING TO THROW THE WORLD!"
Jimmy nodded once.
"Feels like he's at the edge of something."
That "something" waited on Floor 59.
When Jake stepped through the archway, the environment changed.
No forest.
No pillars.
No drums.
Just a circular arena floating in a void—no walls, no ceiling, only the glowing ring of the platform and the endless expanse above and below.
In the center hovered a floating orb of compressed stone wrapped in orbiting metallic bands.
Runes flared as Jake approached.
The orb cracked.
It shattered outward into thirty floating stones, each one surrounded by a faint bronze halo.
Jake frowned.
"…oh boy."
Above, Julian whispered, "Oooooh, special tailored guardian. This one's personal."
Jimmy checked the readings.
"Yeah. This is a bronze-dragon-only pattern. It reads his aura and constructs a test for how he uses it."
Julian leaned closer to the display.
"So… heavy balls?"
Jimmy gave him a look.
"Yes. Heavy balls."
One of the stones shot toward Jake.
He braced, bringing his arms up.
It slammed into them with bone-rattling force.
He held.
"Okay—ow."
Another stone shot from behind. He twisted, letting it impact his shoulder at an angle, redirecting it into the first and sending both spinning away.
He was getting the hang of this.
Or so he thought.
Then the floor vanished.
Jake's stomach dropped.
The platform dissolved into motes of light—
leaving him suspended in nothing, surrounded by thirty heavy, floating stones.
"Oh COME—"
The first stone hit him in the ribs.
He spun, clenching his teeth. No recovery sigil grabbed him. The tower wasn't treating this like a "fall."
This was all an inertial zone.
There was no up or down.
Just force.
He had nothing to brace against.
Instinct screamed. He scrambled for footing that wasn't there.
A second stone rammed his back.
He spun again, aura flaring wildly.
Panic surged.
Memories flashed.
Danny blazing in golden form, the entire training ground reshaping around him.
Swift gliding between attacks like he and the air were old friends.
Jake, in those same sessions, always hitting hard, always training, always trying…
Always watching that gap widen.
Now there was nothing beneath him but emptiness, and thirty relentless stones closing in.
Maybe I'm not supposed to keep up with them, the thought came suddenly, sharp as a cut.
Maybe—
The next stone slammed into his side.
Jake snarled.
And something inside him snapped.
Not in the brittle way.
In the unlocking way.
Fine, he thought, with a sudden ferocity.
If there's no ground… I MAKE IT.
His bronze aura surged outward, not just hugging his muscles, but thickening in a wide ring around his waist and shoulders.
The next stone came at him.
He didn't dodge.
He met it.
Not with fist. Not with forearm.
With his whole body.
Aura and mass and intention aligned as he twisted, grabbed the incoming stone with both hands, and leaned into the spin.
The void became a medium.
Force became footing.
He swung the captured stone in a wide circular arc, smashing three others away in a cascade of collisions.
Bronze energy sparked between the impacts, forming faint, rings of shimmering force around his torso—like orbiting belts, like the tower's own metal rings repurposed.
Julian's eyes bulged.
"WHAT IS THAT?! WHAT IS HE DOING?!"
Jimmy's mouth curled into the smallest of smiles.
"He's stopped thinking about where the ground is. He's using inertia as his anchor. That's… new."
Jake felt it with a clarity that startled him.
Bronze wasn't just a dragon of brute strength.
It was dominance of momentum.
The ability to seize the flow of a fight and lock it to himself like moons around a planet.
He roared, hurling the stone and using the recoil to pivot, letting his newly-formed aura belts act like rotational stabilizers. Every time a stone hit him now, he didn't get knocked away—he absorbed part of the force, spun with it, and returned it multiplied.
He smashed one stone into another.
Then another into three.
Every collision fed back into his movement until he was a churning storm of bronze orbit, every impact another beat in a brutal rhythm.
The last five stones came at him simultaneously.
Jake exhaled once.
"C'mon, then."
He clapped his hands together and released a compact, dense burst of bronze energy—not outward in all directions like a blast, but in a controlled, rotating wave.
The stones that hit him didn't send him spinning.
They were dragged into his rotation.
Dragged into his orbit.
Then he flung them outward in a synchronized barrage that shattered each one against invisible boundaries with a deafening, echoing series of cracks.
Silence followed.
Then the platform rematerialized beneath his feet.
Jake dropped onto it, legs shaking, lungs burning—but grinning for the first time in what felt like hours.
"Okay," he panted. "That… that was kind of awesome."
The bronze mark on his ribs glowed steadily, pride rolling through his bones.
Julian pointed both hands dramatically at him.
"LADIES, GENTLEMEN, GALACTIC BEINGS AND MODERATELY SENTIENT STAPLERS—JACK HAS UNLOCKED 'BRONZE ORBIT' MODE! THE TOWER IS NOW AFRAID FOR ITS OWN FURNITURE!"
"Jake," Jimmy corrected automatically, but he was smiling too.
Jake rolled his shoulders, still trembling, but now there was something new in his posture.
Not arrogance.
Not bravado.
Just a quieter, humbler confidence.
Danny was still ahead.
Swift was still ahead.
But the gap felt less like a void now, and more like a climb.
They were different dragons.
And he had just found something that belonged to him.
He stared up toward the unseen higher levels.
"Alright, tower," he muttered. "You wanted to see how much I could carry."
He flexed his hands, feeling the lingering rotational hum around his center.
"Let's see how high this orbit can go."
As the archway to the next floor opened, Jake stepped through—
not light as Swift,
not blazing as Danny,
but heavy with purpose.
Bronze.
Anchored.
Still behind them.
But no longer lost in their shadows.
He was defining his own.
And the tower, sensing the shift, adjusted its next tests accordingly.
Jake didn't know it yet—
but the climb ahead would not just challenge his strength.
It would challenge what he chose to hold onto.
And what he was finally ready to let go.