By the time Danny reached Floor 90, the Celestial Tower had stopped thinking of him as a contestant.
He wasn't fighting his way up like the others.
He wasn't bleeding for every floor like Jake.
He wasn't dancing across blades like Swift.
He wasn't tearing everything apart like the Wolf King.
Danny was passing through.
And the tower, very slowly, was realizing something terrifying:
Trying to slow him down was like trying to hold back sunrise with your hands.
The transition into Floor 90 was smoother than any he'd had before. No jarring flash, no violent shift. One moment he was stepping out of the previous gate, and the next he was walking into a long, polished corridor lined with tall, marble statues.
They watched him silently.
The air was still.
This was the hall of measured pace.
Most fighters got tested here on patience, timing, and precise movement through randomized traps: pressure plates, dart runes, time-delayed spears hidden behind the statues.
Danny took in one breath and felt all of it.
The pressure plates glowed faintly under the marble. The dart slits hummed. The delay intervals pulsed in the air like a very slow, very nervous heartbeat.
"Trap floor," he murmured.
Golden aura flickered softly in his eyes. Not blazing. Not flaring. Just enough to let him see how the tower was knitting its own rules around him.
Then he stepped forward.
The first statue's eyes lit up, tracking his movement. The pressure plates beneath his boots primed.
Then… didn't trigger.
Danny walked calmly down the hall, hands at his sides, head slightly bowed. Every step landed in exactly the right place: not too heavy, not too light, not too fast, not too slow. Just right.
Perfection, repeated.
He wasn't avoiding the plates.
He was easing the tower's tension as he moved, golden creation energy quietly convincing the mechanisms that there was no threat here worth reacting to.
By the time he reached the end of the corridor, the statues' eyes had dimmed entirely.
"Thank you," Danny said softly to them as he passed.
The door opened.
The tower hesitated for half a second before letting him go.
Floor 110 didn't bother with subtlety.
The moment he stepped through, a huge red timer materialized above the arena, digits ticking down from thirty.
A time trial.
In front of him lay a sprawling obstacle course of crumbling pathways, swinging chains, rotating blade-arches, and collapsing platforms. A standard race floor—where fighters had to move fast, learn the pattern on the fly, and reach the far gate before the timer hit zero.
"Finally," Danny exhaled, rolling his shoulders. "Something that wants me to hurry."
He touched his chest briefly.
The creation flame hummed beneath his palm, settled and vast like a hidden ocean.
He could move mountains with it now.
Reshape landscapes.
Revive crumbling worlds.
But for this floor, he only needed one thing:
Speed.
He took one step.
The timer dropped.
Danny vanished.
He didn't explode into a sonic boom. He didn't leave a crater. The floor simply failed to track him.
One moment he was at the start. The next he was halfway across a collapsing bridge, golden afterimage trailing behind him like a long, thin streak.
Blade arches swung down to intercept.
He wasn't there by the time they descended.
His body flowed through every opening, not because he reacted quickly, but because he moved as if he'd seen all possible paths at once and simply chosen the best one.
He hit a rotator platform that spun wildly underfoot, sending most fighters flying.
He used the spin to launch himself further, crossing a thirty-foot gap in a single flicker of movement.
20 seconds.
He dropped into a tunnel lined with dart traps. Runes flared. Dozens of shimmering bolts flew.
Danny turned sideways and ran along the wall, feet barely touching the surface, body cutting between bolts with microscopic adjustments.
He reached the end of the tunnel, kicked once off the stone, and launched himself upward in a smooth, effortless arc.
10 seconds.
The course curved into a spiraling ramp with sections missing. Lava simmered below. The final gate pulsed at the far end, taunting.
Danny's eyes narrowed.
"Let's see what you can handle."
He let the golden aura around his legs expand, just a fraction—just enough to lighten him, to connect his sense of movement to the deeper rhythm of the tower's structure.
And then he ran.
The ramp might as well have been a straight line across empty air. His body flowed from gap to gap, each step landing exactly where future stone would have been if the tower had anticipated him.
The timer flickered.
Danny skidded to a stop just beyond the gate.
He stepped through.
The timer reset to a calm, unlit state as the door closed behind him.
Julian Breadstone exploded in the viewing arena.
"HE HIT THE GATE WITH A SECOND TO SPARE BUT HE COULD HAVE DONE IT IN FIFTEEN, I SAW THAT, HE WAS HOLDING BACK, JIMMY—HE WAS HOLDING BACK."
Jimmy stared at the data in front of him, tension in his jaw.
"He wasn't just outrunning the traps. He was outrunning the tower's calculation. It tried to adjust mid-run and couldn't."
Julian flung his hands up. "He's faster than intent now? Is that even allowed?"
Jimmy didn't answer.
He was watching something else in the readings:
Speed signature.
It was already higher than the Wolf King's.
And Danny was still accelerating.
The higher he climbed, the more the tower stopped trying to test his basics and started probing for his limits.
Floor 150 was a gravity labyrinth, where vector changes hit like sledgehammers.
Danny moved like he'd already mapped the shifting fields before stepping in.
Floor 190 hurled storm elementals at him in a sealed arena, lightning and wind howling.
Danny raised one hand, and the storm settled around him like a ring, spiraling into harmless rain that soaked into the floor and vanished.
Floor 210 deployed a full squad of advanced tower guardians—speed specialists built to swarm and overwhelm agile fighters.
They didn't even manage to raise their weapons.
Danny appeared among them in a blur of soft gold, tapping each one on the forehead as he passed.
Their cores shut down peacefully.
He covered one hundred floors in less time than it took some fighters to finish one.
But he wasn't satisfied.
Every time he paused at a gate, every time the light washed over him, he felt echoes of other climbers through the tower:
Swift's quiet, graceful certainty.
Jake's stubborn, bruised determination.
Jade's sharp, focused lethality.
Shadeclaw's hungry, silent menace.
The Wolf King's furious, destructive momentum.
And above all of them, like a distant storm on the edge of reality—
Bones.
Unkillable.
Unbreakable.
An embodiment of destruction that could only be sealed, never ended.
Danny pressed his palm to the wall of Floor 249, feeling the tower's ancient stone respond to his touch.
"I don't have time to treat this like a game," he said softly.
His voice didn't echo.
Creation didn't need echoes.
It just spread.
"I need to be ready."
The tower heard him.
It opened the next gate without resistance.
Floor 300 made its intentions clear the moment he stepped into it.
Massive clockwork rings spun around a central arena, each ring marked with glowing runes that translated into a single concept.
SPEED.
This was a floor built specifically to test it.
To measure it.
To break those who thought they knew what fast meant.
The arena's far end shimmered.
A guardian stepped out—a tall, angular construct with four jointed legs and multiple blade-arms, each one edged with shimmering blue light. Its internal engine pulsed, runes flashing brighter as it focused on him.
"CALIBRATING," the guardian intoned, voice a synthetic echo.
Danny lifted his chin.
Golden light flickered around his ankles, along the muscles of his back, down his arms. Not a roaring blaze.
Just a warm weight.
He settled into a loose stance.
"Ready whenever you are."
The tower took that as permission.
The clockwork rings around the arena spun faster. Light shot across their surfaces as speed parameters adjusted. The guardian's engine roared as it drew in power, internal circuits aligning for one purpose:
Match.
Outpace.
Break.
"BEGIN."
The guardian vanished.
Even Danny lost sight of it for a fraction of a heartbeat.
It reappeared behind him, blades already descending.
The tower expected to feel blood.
Instead, it felt something else:
The delay between the guardian's arrival and the blades hitting anything was… empty.
The weapons sliced the air.
Danny stood ten meters away, hands in his pockets.
"Too straight," he said quietly.
The guardian recalibrated.
"INCREASING OUTPUT."
Its engines howled. The rings turned faster. Time dilation fields flickered, trying to give it an edge beyond raw speed.
It moved again.
This time it zigzagged, split into afterimages, attacked from three directions at once, each projection carrying enough kinetic intent to be dangerous.
Danny breathed in.
The world slowed.
Not because he bent time.
Because his perception moved.
He saw not three attackers, but one: the true position, slipping between all projected paths.
He stepped into that path.
The guardian arrived, blades mid-swing.
Danny reached out, two fingers extended, and tapped its chest.
The entire construct crashed to a halt.
Not shattered. Not broken.
Stopped.
Its engines whined, trying to push past the golden imprint he'd left on its core. It couldn't.
Danny walked around it once, studying its mechanisms as if it were a puzzle.
"You're impressive," he said softly. "But you're trying to outrun the wrong thing."
The aura around him swirled, golden threads flowing like quiet fireflies.
"You can't outrun intent. You can only move before it."
He walked away.
The guardian tried one last burst, throwing a wild, desperate charge forward.
Danny didn't turn.
His foot drifted half an inch to the side.
The guardian passed where he'd been and slammed into the arena wall, its structure caving in.
The rings slowed.
A soft chime echoed.
PASS.
Julian had stopped shouting commentary out loud. He just stood, mouth half-open, watching the playback.
Jimmy, for the first time in a long time, felt something like unease.
"We've clocked the Wolf King's top combat speed," he said slowly. "And Danny is… above it now. He's still climbing, and he hasn't even broken a sweat."
Julian swallowed.
"Is that good or bad?"
"Yes," Jimmy said quietly.
The tower tried new tricks the higher Danny rose.
Distraction floors.
Floors that replayed memories.
Floors filled with illusions of his friends in danger.
He refused to slow.
His eyes softened when he saw echoes of Jake, of Swift, of the Buddies, of Sedge Hat, of the phoenixes and the old worlds. His heart ached when an illusion of his home planet appeared, crumbling under ancient destruction.
But he walked through all of it.
"I don't need you to remind me," he told the tower gently. "I remember on my own."
Floor 400 unleashed a more clever defense—a wide arena shared with a handful of other top-tier fighters who had also reached similar heights.
Jade Killington was there, leaning on a railing, one arm slightly bandaged, coat half-burned.
He raised a brow when Danny appeared.
"Well then," Jade drawled. "Took you long enough, mate."
Danny smiled.
"Jade."
The tower pulsed.
SHARED TRIAL: RACE TO SURVIVAL.
The floor itself lifted.
Platforms began to fall away, one by one, as a storm of blazing orbs descended from the ceiling. The rules were simple: stay on stable ground, or fall and be eliminated.
Jade racked his arms, mechanisms clacking.
"Not gonna lie," he said. "This sort of thing? I usually enjoy it."
Danny glanced up at the storm.
"I'll clear a path. Cover the ones I miss?"
Jade blinked.
"Wait, what—?"
Danny moved.
It was the first time Jade had ever failed to track someone completely.
One moment Danny was standing beside him.
The next, he was a streak of pure gold, crossing the arena in a heartbeat.
Every orb he passed near dimmed and shattered, their destructive energy undone by the stabilizing hum of the creation flame. Platforms that were about to drop held steady long enough for trapped fighters to leap away.
Jade whistled low.
"All I'm sayin'," he muttered, "is if he ever decides to go bad, I'm retirin' on the spot."
He saw a chunk of debris falling toward a fighter who hadn't noticed yet.
Jade fired a tight, precise chi blast that shattered the debris, then pivoted to another angle, backing Danny up without needing direct coordination.
They worked in tandem for less than a minute.
It was enough.
The floor stabilized.
The orbs faded.
The storm dissipated.
The tower gave up on that idea too.
Danny landed beside Jade again, the last echoes of speed still humming softly around his frame.
Jade shook his head.
"You're not runnin' the tower," he said. "It's runnin' after you tryin' to keep up."
Danny chuckled.
"Feels more like we're both trying not to break each other."
He looked upward.
Higher.
Always higher.
Toward Floor 999.
Toward the place where creation and destruction would finally collide.
He took a breath.
Golden light pulsed from his chest, so bright it briefly illuminated several floors above and below.
Every major climber felt that signal.
Swift paused mid-step.
Jake looked up mid-guard.
The Wolf King snarled, eyes flashing.
Bones, wherever he was, tilted his head and grinned without humor.
Danny smiled gently.
"I'm coming," he whispered—to all of them, to none of them, to the tower itself.
Then he stepped into the next gate.
Faster than the tower's fear.
Faster than the Wolf King's rage.
Faster than anything that had climbed before.
And the Celestial Tower, old and immense and proud, whispered in stone and light:
Golden one.
Hurry.
We will need you.