The weak Scout, driven by a survival protocol, tried one last phase shift. It aimed to slip back into spatial fractures.
Marcus didn't let the shadow-weave slacken, holding his left-forward southpaw guard with precision. His silver eyes tracked the flickering shapes in the sickly green light. Beneath his boots, the ground felt alive. His obsidian-black shadow tendrils pinned the creature's back legs, the violent struggle pulling them both across the plaza floor while he fought for traction.
The obsidian beneath his feet felt alive, like a frozen sea. It shimmered like black glass, its glossy troughs and crests standing still with fissures like ink soaking into paper marking their surface. Every step made a sound wrong for rock—a wet, tacky give, like walking across a canvas that had never quite dried. The cold that rose off it wasn't the chill of winter; it was the cold of something that had been liquid, and might turn back at any moment.
A specific sigil-signature flared awake on the Scout's weakening hide.
It wasn't a standard, automated rune generated by the Spire's sentinel programming. Beneath the melting violet scars lay a cruel sigil that pulsed with malice. He'd glimpsed this cold mark during the first fight, but now it was clear as the creature weakened, carrying a heavy, unmistakable frequency that Marcus's body recognized immediately from the upper thresholds.
The mark belonged to "Zorath."
Who the hell is Zorath? Marcus muttered, his gaze dropping to Taryn and Lysara. Another climber? Or something worse?
His breath caught, and a shiver ran through him as the puzzle pieces reconfigured. A random environmental glitch hadn't triggered the Void-Kin Scout. It was a planned asset, set up by a rival, tracking their coordinates to purge them before they reached Floor One.
"Marcus, it's breaking the weave!" Taryn shouted, her patchwork leather armor smoking from the heat of her own reaction.
"Stay focused," Marcus replied, fixing his gaze on the target. He drove his left dagger down, sending the bright blue light from his palm straight through. "The tracker has a master, and the file ends here."
The Scout's form collapsed with a wet thud, spreading fine gray ash on the frozen black ground. As it fell, Marcus's boot hit something unexpected—something that wasn't obsidian at all.
Bone.
The glassy floor had half-fused around a ribcage, as if the sea had swallowed something and forgotten to finish digesting it. Not a statue. Not Spire architecture. A climber stood there, the leather straps on his chest faded to flat black and merging seamlessly with the surrounding stone.
Crouching through the fatigue in his arm, Marcus brushed off the ash. A tarnished, half-melted disc rested in the climber's frozen fingers. It felt cold and heavy, bearing a spiral of characters unlike any sigil script he'd encountered on this floor.
He worked it free. One face was too worn to read. The other had four clear words, crudely scratched into the metal:
IT WAS NEVER A TOWER.
Marcus stared at the relic as the Nameless Choir's dissonant hum lingered in his ears, feeling the entire mystery shift beneath him like a case file rewritten overnight.
"What is that?" Lysara asked softly, her violet gaze catching on the disc.
"A message," Marcus said, closing his fist around it. "From somebody who figured out something about this place before it killed them. Somebody who wanted the next climber to know."
He pocketed the disc, a shiver of foreboding coursing through him. A message like that came from someone with nothing to lose—and whatever they had figured out was clearly worth dying for.