The tower did not quite know what to do with Sedge Hat.
It could read power signatures.
It could weigh intent.
It could sense killing intent, destiny pressure, dragon resonance, wolf hunger, even Bones' annihilation echo.
But Sedge Hat?
Sometimes he barely registered as more than a slightly tired, slightly hungry old man with an uneven gait and a fondness for tea.
Other times, when his mood shifted and his hat tilted just so, the tower's runes flared in raw panic as if a calamity had just walked into the room.
His climb started when most fighters were already several floors deep.
He'd overslept.
Not in the heroic "meditation trance" way.
In the very normal "fell asleep after too much late-night tea and waffles" way.
He stood at the entrance arch, leaning on his crooked staff, his long white beard tied with a small reed ring near the bottom. His conical sedge hat sat low over his eyes, casting his wrinkled face in deep shadow.
He yawned.
"Mm. Long stairs," he muttered. "Should've brought a chair."
The tower stirred.
Runes flickered along the walls, scanning him.
Old.
Unremarkable.
No strong aura output.
Initial classification: low threat. Low yield.
And then his hat shifted half an inch as he scratched his head.
The readings spiked.
Threat rating: unknown.
Potential yield: catastrophic.
The runes flickered rapidly, recalibrating.
Julian Breadstone's projection appeared in the viewing arena, eyes almost sparkling out of his face.
"OHHH, HE'S HEEEEERE! THE MYSTERY! THE LEGEND! THE MAN WHO ONCE PAID HIS TAB WITH A PARADOX—SEDGE HAT!"
Beside him, Jimmy pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Oh no.
He decided to climb."
Julian spun. "You sound stressed. Why?"
Jimmy stared flatly into the scrying glyphs.
"Because I know him."
Sedge's first step into the tower was onto Floor 52—bypassing several earlier floors because he'd taken the wrong corridor, turned around twice, then accidentally stepped into a secondary admittance gate that wasn't supposed to be open.
The tower made a noise that, if it were human, would have been a strangled "what."
He emerged into a room of floating platforms and refracting crystal prisms—light beams crisscrossing through the air, refracted into deadly threads.
A group of fighters were already there, sweating and swearing as they tried to move without getting sliced into sigil-light.
Sedge appeared behind them, unnoticed.
He peered around.
"Oho," he murmured. "Shiny spiderweb."
One of the fighters—an agile, rope-muscle athlete—glanced back, nearly choking.
"Old man?! How'd you get in here?"
Sedge tilted his head.
"Door."
The fighter stared.
Sedge looked at the lasers again.
The tower studied him.
He did not flare his aura.
He did not draw on cosmic ki.
He did not assume some ancient stance.
He just… squinted.
Then he took a step forward.
Directly through three overlapping beams.
Every watching fighter winced.
Nothing happened.
The beams bent around him.
It wasn't dramatic. There was no explosion of chi, no shimmering barrier. The light simply… flowed aside for a heartbeat, like it had lost focus, and then rejoined on the other side of his body.
Sedge looked down at his worn sandals.
"Hm. Lucky."
The tower, if it had a voice, would have yelled: That was not luck.
Julian nearly passed out in the announcer's box.
"HE JUST WALKED THROUGH A TRIPLE-DEATH-LASER LIKE HE WAS CROSSING THE STREET!"
Jimmy watched more quietly.
"His field distorted the refractors without conscious effort. He's not even warmed up."
Sedge ambled forward, weaving lazily through deadly geometry, lifting his feet as if stepping over puddles. The beams shifted when he moved, sometimes ahead of him, sometimes behind, always just barely missing him.
A young archer stared, trembling.
"H-how are you doing that?"
Sedge scratched his beard.
"Doing what?"
"The light!"
He blinked at her, as if just now noticing.
"Oh. That." He shrugged. "Headache. Bright things move. Don't worry. You'll understand when you're seventy."
He reached the other side of the chamber without a single scratch.
The fighters behind him, emboldened, tried to follow his exact steps.
The first got clipped and vanished to a recovery sigil with an outraged yell.
Sedge sighed.
"Can't borrow another man's knees," he muttered. "They bend different."
On Floor 53, a gravity maze awaited—rotating corridors, shifting slopes, patches of reversed weight.
Jake had brawled through floors like this. Swift would learn them like flowing streams. Most fighters fought the pull or bent with it.
Sedge Hat arrived sipping tea.
That was new.
He walked through the entrance carrying a small porcelain cup in one hand, steam curling up past his beard.
The tower twitched.
This is not sanitary, some ancient maintenance rune thought.
He stepped onto the first ramp.
Gravity flipped sideways.
All other fighters tumbled into a wall.
Sedge tilted slightly, letting the tea swirl, then casually stepped onto what had been the wall a moment ago.
His cup never spilled.
Julian slammed his palms against the viewing crystal.
"THE TEA DIDN'T EVEN RIPPLE! I REPEAT, THE TEA DID. NOT. EVEN. RIPPLE."
Jimmy's voice was almost a whisper.
"He's balancing his personal frame of reference against the tower's shifts. He's not following gravity. He's deciding what 'down' is."
The tower tried harder.
It reversed gravity in pulses—up, down, sideways, shifting in irregular rhythm.
Sedge Hat yawned.
"Mm. Had worse on that one planet with the tricky moons," he mumbled. "Or was it the tricky bartender?"
He took a sip.
He did not adjust his footing.
The world moved. He continued walking as if on a flat garden path, sandals making soft tap sounds on surfaces that were not supposed to be supporting him at that angle.
One fighter clinging to a handhold stared in horrified awe.
"Who… who are you?"
Sedge considered.
"Retired," he said finally, and kept going.
The tower dialed the gravity to a point that had made Jake's bones scream earlier.
Sedge's cup wobbled.
His eyes narrowed.
"Careful," he told the air. "Hot."
The tower backed it off by a fraction.
Jimmy choked.
"…did the tower just flinch?"
Julian wailed with joy.
"THE TOWER IS SCARED OF HIS TEA."
Not every floor bent easily.
Floor 54 was a mental projection trial—a hall of still images that tried to lure fighters into illusions, trap them in regrets, fears, lost opportunities.
A space built for introspection.
Reflection.
Pain.
Sedge Hat stepped in.
The air filled with flickers of his past.
Younger days.
A burning world.
A friend falling.
Buddies prototypes going horribly wrong.
Old enemies.
Older mistakes.
The tower reached into his memories, found wounds like fractures in old stone, and pressed.
The first image: a younger Sedge, no hat, flames behind him, hands bloody, collapsing to his knees.
"Couldn't save them," the illusion whispered.
Sedge frowned.
"Which them?" he asked.
The scene wavered.
Another: a world cracking under Bones' influence, sealing stones buried and forgotten.
"You failed to foresee it," the projection intoned.
Sedge scratched his head.
"Accurate," he admitted. "Mm. I'm not the tower of foresight. I'm the tower of 'oops, better fix that.'"
The projection faltered.
The images tried again, sharper, crueler, building a narrative of failure.
Sedge gently walked past each one, occasionally tilting his head to examine a detail, sometimes shaking his head with a sigh.
"Ah. That was a bad hair year. Should've kept the hat on."
"Mm. Yes. That one hurt. Learned a lot, though."
"Ah, him. I sent him a fruit basket later. We're fine now."
The tower upped the pressure.
It pulled Danny, Swift, and Jake into the illusions—three bright figures, surging ahead, leaving Sedge behind, hat blowing away.
"Your students are surpassing you," the illusion murmured. "You are irrelevant."
Sedge stopped.
For the first time, his eyes sharpened.
"Good," he said quietly.
The illusion blinked.
"…good?"
"That's the point," he said. "If they weren't, I'd be a terrible teacher."
The image of the tower itself fractured.
Cracks of light split the projections.
The mental trial, designed to torment egos and unresolved guilt, recoiled as if it had tried to strike a mountain and broken its own hand.
Sedge walked forward, the projections shattering into harmless motes as he passed.
Behind him, the floor's core rune quietly marked him as "Not worth testing this way again. Very annoying."
By the time he hit Floor 55, the tower had decided to rotate its strategy.
If it couldn't break his balance, or his mind, maybe it could exhaust him.
So it gave him stairs.
Just stairs.
Endless, spiraling stairs that rose and rose, each step with a slightly different rise and depth to ruin rhythm, hallucination wards to make you think you'd reached the top, fatigue patterns that snuck up on even the toughest athletes.
It had taken some fighters nearly an hour to clear it.
Sedge stared at the staircase.
He sighed.
"Rude."
He took two steps.
Then three.
Then he stopped.
He turned around.
Walked back down to the beginning.
The tower paused.
Sedge reached into his robe, pulled out a worn, folded paper.
A tournament map.
He squinted at it.
He turned it upside down.
"Hm."
He walked to the side wall of the staircase.
He knocked.
The wall made a faint hollow sound. A micro-delay in the echo gave away a hidden cavity.
"Ah," he murmured. "Thought so."
He peered up at the endless steps.
"Too old for that."
Then he turned sideways and walked directly into the wall.
Like it was fog.
On the other side was the exit platform.
The tower screamed internally.
Jimmy planted his face in his hands.
"He… he just skipped the stairs."
Julian was making incomprehensible delighted noises.
"He wall-glitched the tower! HE ANY%-SPEEDRAN THE FLOOR!"
Sedge looked around the exit chamber, mildly impressed.
"Huh. That worked."
He took a sip of tea.
"Good map," he nodded, as if the paper had done the work.
The map was from the cafeteria and had nothing to do with the tower.
If Sedge had wanted to, he could have gone straight up, floor after floor, bending hazards like reeds in the wind, breaking challenges that had cost other fighters blood and terror.
Sometimes he did.
Sometimes, for three floors in a row, he walked like a storm given human shape.
On Floor 57, a room full of kinetic blades froze mid-swing as he shuffled through, commenting idly on their craftsmanship.
On Floor 58, a gravity arena knelt to him—the forces simply… forgot to apply, leaving him strolling casually as if through a quiet park.
On Floor 59, a complex illusion labyrinth reorganized itself into the shortest path out, completely unsolicited, while he hummed a tune about dumplings.
But other times…
On Floor 60, he tripped on the first step and rolled a good dozen feet.
"Oof," he groaned, beard tangled, hat askew.
The tower paused, astonished.
Sedge lay there for a moment.
Then he laughed.
"Ha. Still mortal joints, hm?"
He pushed himself up, joints popping loudly, moving slower, leaning more on his staff than before.
Not all of his climb was ease.
Not all of his power was casual.
There were moments his knees genuinely hurt.
Moments his back tightened.
Moments he felt his age like weight stones.
He did not ignore those moments.
He bowed to them.
"Ah. Thank you," he told his protesting joints. "For still carrying me."
He was a calamity when he wished to be.
But he was also, truly, a tired old man climbing a stupidly tall tower because his students were in it and he wanted to see what trouble they'd cause.
And the tower, with all its cosmic sensing, couldn't quite separate those two truths.
On Floor 61, he finally stopped.
The chamber was a long balcony overlooking the greater tower interior—dozens of floors above and below visible in shimmering cross-sections.
Here and there he spotted echoing flashes of battles happening right now.
A bronze blur of motion—Jake, hurling heavy constructs.
A silver streak—Swift dancing between threats.
A golden flare in the far distance, like sunrise trying to punch through reality—Danny, stabilizing creation.
Sedge Hat set his staff down.
He lowered himself to sit at the balcony's edge, legs hanging over.
He poured tea from a battered little pot into his cup, steam curling into the cool tower air.
Julian quieted.
So did Jimmy.
Even the audience murmurs dulled, as if something unspoken, deeply old, had entered the air.
For a time, Sedge simply… watched.
Not the tower.
Not its constructions.
His students.
Jake, gritting his teeth, bruised but determined, orbiting stones with that new bronze cunning.
Swift in a higher floor, staff spinning, silver aura narrowing to a focused calm that cut chaos apart.
Danny, somewhere beyond direct sight, but the resonance of his golden flame vibrating through the stone itself.
Sedge took a sip.
"Mm," he said softly. "They're doing well."
The tower, uncertain, generated a hazard.
A stray gust of cutting wind rushed up from beneath the balcony, sharp enough to slice weaker fighters clean in half.
Sedge flicked two fingers.
The wind turned into a warm updraft, lifting the edge of his beard and hat instead.
"Shh," he told the tower absently, eyes still following Jake's latest clash. "Grandpa's watching."
The tower—ancient, proud, brutal—found itself obeying.
Jimmy exhaled slowly.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "That's about right."
Julian whispered, "Is he… actually going to fight seriously at some point?"
Jimmy's eyes narrowed.
"If he ever does," he said, "it won't be for himself."
Sedge sat a while longer.
He watched until Jake cleared his guardian.
Until Swift's trial motives shifted into something more refined.
Until Danny's signature flared brighter, steady and stable, like a sun finding its balance.
Only then did Sedge Hat finish his tea.
He stood, bones creaking audibly.
"Well," he said to nobody. "Old legs did enough climbing for today."
He tapped his staff once on the floor.
The tower expected teleportation.
Some dramatic exit.
A floor skip.
Instead, Sedge just walked through the standard door to the next staircase, as if he hadn't broken half the rules on the way here.
The tower pulsed, confused.
Was he… continuing? Resting? Testing?
The answer, as always with Sedge, depended on the angle you looked from.
He would not blaze like Danny.
He would not glide like Swift.
He would not crash through like Jake.
His climb would be irregular.
A series of missteps, miracles, and quiet choices.
Sometimes calamity.
Sometimes comedy.
Sometimes simply an old man walking up a long flight of stairs.
But wherever he stopped—
whatever floor he finally decided was "high enough"—
the tower would remember that, for a time, one person walked through its heart carrying no banner, claiming no title, demanding no recognition.
Just a worn hat, a long beard, a crooked staff, and a heart that refused to bend the wrong way. Sedge Hat continued upward, humming tunelessly.
The tower adjusted its next dozen floors automatically—
and then, as if realizing who they were for, adjusted them again.