Dante stared up at the hole in the sky and watched his blood drip onto the stone beneath him, pooling around his ruined leg where the bone punched through his pants in a mess of dark red and exposed meat.
'Well, that's bad,' he thought, and almost laughed before the pain cut him off.
Floor 75, the Summit of Despair, because apparently the Tower couldn't resist giving everything a dramatic name. Bodies littered the platform around him, climbers who spent years getting strong enough to reach this place only to die in the first thirty seconds when that thing ripped through reality and started killing everything it touched.
Ren was about twenty feet to his left, or what was left of him. The big guy took a direct hit from one of the Archon's Chosen and there wasn't much recognizable anymore, just armor and red and that stupid grin frozen on what remained of his face like he heard a joke right before the end.
'Damn it, Ren. We were supposed to make it out together.'
Vex was gone too, caught in one of the Archon's attacks an hour ago while her body twisted apart like paper in a hurricane and she screamed something about trajectories and probability. No body left, just scattered particles floating in the air. No confirmation needed when you saw someone unmade like that.
Adrian was nowhere to be found, which made sense because the bastard betrayed them three floors ago and disappeared into whatever hole traitors crawled into. Probably watching right now, taking notes for his new masters while everyone who trusted him bled out on the stone.
'When I get back up, if I get back up, I'm going to find you Adrian, and I'm going to take my fucking time.'
The tear in the sky pulsed, expanding another few meters, and something emerged from it that Dante's brain refused to process correctly.
He saw a lot of shit in eight years of climbing. Monsters the size of buildings. Magic that rewrote reality. Things that existed between dimensions and made hardened climbers piss themselves and run screaming for the lower floors. None of it prepared him for the Archon.
Looking at it made his brain hurt and his nose started bleeding almost immediately while his ears followed a moment later.
"You again?"
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once, rattling inside his skull and outside of it simultaneously, and his remaining good leg gave out as the words registered. He collapsed onto his back and just stared up at the thing that spoke to him in perfect, conversational English like they were old friends meeting for coffee.
'What the fuck does that mean?'
"You again." Not a question this time but a statement, like it recognized him, like they did this before even though Dante was absolutely certain they didn't.
'What? No, that was impossible because they never met, so how would it even...'
The Archon's attention focused on him, really focused, and his brain tried to shut down. His vision fractured into pieces and suddenly he lost all sense of direction, his body going numb while his thoughts scattered into nothing...
"Interesting. You do not remember."
'Remember WHAT?'
"No matter. The cycle continues regardless." The Archon reached for him with something that wasn't a hand, and when it made contact, Dante learned what real pain actually felt like.
Not physical pain, although there was plenty of that too. This was something else, something deeper, like having your soul grabbed by invisible hands and squeezed until the memories started leaking out the cracks.
He screamed because he couldn't help it. Twenty-six years old and eight years of tower climbing beat most of the fear out of him, but this was beyond anything he ever experienced and he could feel it TAKING things from him. Memories, experiences, skills, all of it bleeding away like water through a colander while the Archon rifled through everything he was and discarded pieces like it was looking for something specific.
His mother's face started to fade while Yuki's voice went silent and the feeling of his first kill disappeared, and then everything he learned, every technique he mastered, every floor cleared and every person lost started to blur together, smearing into nothing while he tried to hold on and failed.
'I don't want to forget. I don't want to...'
Everything went black.
---
He woke up gasping, sitting bolt upright in a bed that wasn't covered in blood, and for a long moment he just sat there breathing and trying to figure out why he wasn't dead.
He was in a room, small and cramped with shit lighting, clothes on the floor and a cracked window showing a gray sky while the faint sound of traffic drifted up from the street below. His apartment, he realized. His old apartment, the one he lived in before entering the Tower.
'What the fuck?'
He looked down at his hands and saw young hands with no scars and no calluses, the lean underdeveloped muscles of someone who never swung a sword in their life. Heart pounding, he threw off the blanket and stumbled to the bathroom mirror where a teenager stared back at him, maybe eighteen years old and a week before Tower registration, his hair too long and flopping into pale green eyes that never learned to hide their emotions yet while his face looked softer, younger and almost innocent.
But behind those eyes, Dante Graves, High Ranker, Floor 75 survivor, eight years of tower experience, looked back.
'This isn't possible.' He gripped the edge of the sink, fighting the urge to vomit.
[Temporal anomaly detected]
Blue text appeared in his vision, floating there like some kind of sick joke.
[Analyzing...]
[Irregular status confirmed]
[Memories intact: 98.7%]
[Skills intact: suppressed, insufficient vessel development]
[Regression confirmed]
He went back, thrown backward in time with his body reset to zero but his mind intact. He remembered everything, the battles, the floors and the people he lost and the traitor who smiled while stabbing them all in the back.
Adrian Cross, that piece of shit who spent eight years pretending to be his friend before selling them all out for whatever the Archon offered him. Dante watched twelve people die because he trusted the wrong guy.
'I trusted you. We ALL trusted you.'
His hands were shaking. This body was weak and pathetic, everything he trained out of himself over years of brutal survival, but his mind was intact and his mind knew things. He knew where every hidden reward was tucked away through Floor 75, knew which climbers would become threats and which would become corpses, knew the secret paths, the exploits and the techniques that most people didn't discover until they were already dying on the wrong end of them.
He knew, with absolute certainty, that Adrian Cross would betray them on Floor 52 unless Dante stopped it first.
[Administrator attention: level 7]
[Warning: irregular classification]
[Further analysis required]
The System was watching him, which was bad because the tower's System recognized him as an anomaly and the Administrators would start paying attention.
Actually, fuck it. Let them watch.
He stared at his reflection, at this young face that never learned to hide behind a mask yet, and felt something cold settle in his chest. He got thrown back to day one with eight years of knowledge and the burning need to make things different. His sister was alive, his friends weren't dead yet, and the traitor didn't know he was being watched.
The Archon said "you again" as if they did this dance multiple times before, as if Dante wasn't the first version of himself to climb the tower and fail. He didn't know what that meant and he didn't care. All that mattered was that this time, he was going to win.
'Tower registration is tomorrow, alright, let's fucking go.'
He wouldn't trust the wrong people or hold back either, and he would climb all the way to Floor 100 and rip the Archon out of the sky with his bare fucking hands.
Dante smiled, and if anyone saw that smile, they would know, it wasn't a nice smile.
'Let's do this again.'