The line for registration stretched around the block, hundreds of candidates waiting in the early morning cold for their chance to climb the Tower and probably die on Floor 1.
He stood somewhere in the middle of it, hands shoved in his pockets and hood pulled up against the wind, watching the people around him with the detached interest of someone who already knew which of them would survive. The answer was about forty percent because Floor 1 had a sixty percent fatality rate for first-timers, and most of the confident faces around him would be corpses within the first week.
'The tall guy three spots ahead, the one bragging about his workout routine, is going to panic the first time something bleeds on him and get eaten by wolves.'
He recognized a few faces from his original climb, including Liu Shen the martial artist who made it to Floor 12 before a trap dungeon took his legs, Mira Voss the healer who gave up trying to save too many people and quit on Floor 8, and Derek the loud one who died on day three doing something stupid that he couldn't even remember anymore.
None of them recognized him back, and why would they? In the original timeline he was nobody special, just another scared kid trying not to die. He didn't stand out until Floor 15 when desperation and talent finally started working together instead of against each other.
This time was different because this time he was a High Ranker in a teenager's body, eight years of combat experience compressed into a form that couldn't handle it yet, watching these people shuffle forward like cattle heading for slaughter.
The line moved and he moved with it, shuffling forward one step at a time.
Registration happened in a converted government building that used to be a tax office or something similar. Now it was the entry point for humanity's war against the Tower, staffed by tired-looking workers in cheap suits who processed candidate after candidate with the enthusiasm of people who saw too many young faces walk through these doors and never come back.
"Name."
The woman behind the counter didn't look up from her screen when he reached the front of the line, her fingers hovering over the keyboard with practiced efficiency.
"Dante Graves."
"Age."
"Eighteen."
"Prior combat experience."
'Eight years of killing everything the Tower could throw at me, but sure, let's pretend.'
"No."
She typed it in without questioning the answer because lying on the intake form happened constantly and it didn't really matter. The Tower would sort out the weak from the strong soon enough and no amount of false confidence would save the people who couldn't back it up.
"Place your hand on the scanner."
He pressed his palm against the crystal plate on the counter and felt the familiar buzz of the Tower's system reaching into him, cataloging, analyzing, trying to figure out what he was. In his original timeline the scan was uneventful, but this time the crystal flashed red, then blue, then a color he didn't recognize, and the woman behind the counter finally looked up with something other than boredom on her face.
"That's... unusual."
[scanning...]
[irregular status detected]
[classification: undefined]
[administrator notification: pending]
He kept his expression neutral even as his stomach dropped because the system was flagging him already, before he even entered the Tower, which meant the Administrators would be watching from day one. He needed to play it cool and not give them anything else to notice.
"Is there a problem?" he asked, voice carefully blank.
The woman frowned at her screen, tapped a few keys, then shrugged in the universal gesture of someone who didn't get paid enough to care about anomalies.
"System glitch. Happens sometimes with the new equipment. You're cleared."
She handed him a small metal token stamped with the number 847 and waved him toward the door at the back of the room without another word.
He took the token and walked, forcing himself not to look back even as he felt eyes on him. Someone, somewhere, was already asking questions about the candidate with the undefined classification, and he needed to be through the Gate before they could ask too many more.
The staging area behind the building was chaos organized into something resembling a queue, hundreds of candidates gathered in groups of fifty for transport to the Gate of Dawn. He found his group and settled into a corner where he could watch everyone without being watched himself, cataloging faces and body language while they waited for the transport to arrive.
Most of them were scared, hiding it behind bravado or silence or nervous chatter, but the fear was there in the way they held themselves and the way their eyes kept darting toward the Tower on the horizon like they couldn't quite believe they were actually doing this. The smart ones were scared while the stupid ones were excited, and he was neither.
He felt nothing but focus and the steady need to move forward that drove him since he woke up in his old apartment. Fear was a luxury for people who didn't already live through the worst, and excitement was for people who didn't know what was waiting for them on the other side of that Gate.
The transport arrived, a converted bus that looked like it saw better decades, and they piled in while the driver muttered something about traffic before spending forty minutes crawling through streets until they reached the Gate.
---
The Gate of Dawn was beautiful, if you ignored what it represented.
A massive arch of white stone rose from the ground at the base of the Tower, carved with symbols that he recognized as proto-Sylvani script from his time on the upper floors. Most people thought the Gates were human construction, built by the first awakened after the Emergence, but they were wrong. The Gates were ancient, older than humanity, and the Tower simply chose to make them visible when it decided to start letting people in.
Candidates lined up in front of the arch while administrators in white uniforms checked tokens and recited the mandatory safety speech that nobody listened to, the usual warnings about staying on the path and working together and reaching the exit gate within thirty days or being eliminated.
He already knew all of this. He knew Floor 1 was called the Threshold, a sprawling forest filled with monsters that would seem terrifying to newcomers but were laughably weak compared to what came later. He knew the exit gate was exactly 47 kilometers northeast of the entry point and he knew at least three shortcuts that weren't on any map. He knew where the water sources were, where the safe camps were, where the hidden rewards waited for people who knew how to look.
He had eight years of Tower knowledge and thirty days of pretending to be a rookie, which was going to be annoying.
The line moved forward and he stepped through the Gate.
---
The transition felt like falling up and sideways at the same time, gravity and space folding around him as the Tower grabbed him and pulled him through to the other side. His stomach lurched, his vision blurred, and then he was standing in a forest that shouldn't exist, breathing air that tasted wrong in a way only experienced climbers learned to recognize.
[welcome to the tower]
[floor 1: the threshold]
[objective: reach the exit gate]
[time limit: 30 days]
[survival begins now]
Candidates appeared around him in flashes of light, stumbling and disoriented as the Gate dumped them into the same clearing. Some fell to their knees while others looked around with wide eyes, taking in the massive trees and the unfamiliar sky and the distant sounds of things moving in the underbrush.
He stood perfectly still while cataloging his surroundings with the efficiency of someone who did this a thousand times: entry clearing with a slight elevation and good sightlines, tree line forty meters in every direction, at least two wolf packs within half a kilometer probably drawn by the commotion of the Gate activation, all matching the standard Floor 1 spawn pattern.
'Wolves will hit in about three minutes, and most of these idiots won't be ready.'
He was right, because the first howl echoed through the trees exactly two minutes and forty seconds after the last candidate appeared. Close enough to make people flinch while far enough to give the wolves time to circle. Pack tactics, same as always, driving prey toward the alpha while the beta pairs cut off escape routes.
"What was that?" someone shouted, voice cracking with panic.
"Wolves!" Derek yelled back, already reaching for the basic sword the Gate spawned him with. "Form up! Everyone form up!"
'He's going to get half these people killed trying to be a hero.'
He could have stepped in, could have organized the defense and directed people to optimal positions, but that would draw attention he didn't need yet. Instead he drifted toward the edge of the clearing, moving with the flow of bodies until he had clear ground behind him and a tree at his back.
The wolves hit the clearing like a grey tide and screaming started immediately as steel clashed and blood sprayed across the grass. He watched a wolf take down a woman who couldn't have been older than twenty, her guard too high and her reaction too slow as jaws closed around her throat.
'Three down already and now four, though the loud one is actually doing okay which is unexpected while Liu Shen looks good with clean footwork, he'll survive this.'
Something moved on his left and his body reacted before his mind finished processing the threat, his hand snapping out to catch the wolf mid-lunge. Fingers closed around fur and skin and he twisted, redirecting momentum while his other hand drew the spawned knife from his belt and drove it up through the animal's skull in one smooth motion.
The wolf went limp in his grip and he dropped it, already turning toward the second one that followed the first.
This one was smarter, circling instead of charging, yellow eyes tracking him with predator intelligence. He matched its pace, keeping the tree at his back, and when it finally committed to the attack he was already moving, sidestepping the lunge and bringing the knife down in an arc that opened its throat from ear to ear.
Hot blood splashed across his forearm and the wolf crumpled, twitching once before going still.
[enemy slain: timber wolf x2]
[system points: +20]
He killed both of them in under four seconds without changing his heart rate because the technique was second nature, drilled into him through years of combat against things that made these wolves look like puppies. His body remembered even if his stats didn't support it yet.
For a moment, as he moved, he felt the ghost of other abilities trying to activate, muscle memory reaching for skills that his underdeveloped body couldn't yet channel. Shadow Step, the teleportation technique he mastered on Floor 30. Severance, the blade art that could cut through anything. Both locked behind walls of insufficient power, suppressed until his physical vessel caught up with what his mind already knew.
'Soon. As I grow stronger, they'll unlock one by one.'
That was too fast, and he knew it the moment he looked up and found eyes on him. A cluster of survivors witnessed the kills and were staring at him with expressions ranging from shock to suspicion. The fight was winding down around them, wolves retreating now that the pack lost too many members to make the attack worth continuing, but these people weren't looking at the fleeing wolves. They were looking at him.
He should have been slower, should have faked a struggle, taken a hit, made it look like luck instead of skill. But the instincts were too deep and the situation moved too fast and now at least a dozen people knew that the quiet kid in the hood could kill better than anyone else in this clearing.
Liu Shen was one of them, the martial artist's eyes narrow and calculating as he cleaned blood off his sword without looking away. The man was smart, smart enough to reach Floor 12 in the original timeline, and smart enough to recognize competence that didn't match the registration form.
"Nice work." Derek stumbled over, sword still in hand and a grin on his face that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Where'd you learn to fight like that?"
'Nowhere you'd believe.'
"Lucky," he said flatly. "They were just wolves."
"Just wolves." Derek laughed, but there was something underneath it now, something wary. "Sure. Lucky. You want to stick with us? Safety in numbers and all that."
He looked at the group forming around Derek, at the scared faces and the trembling hands and the eager willingness to follow anyone who seemed like they knew what they were doing. In the original timeline he was one of them. In this timeline he had other plans.
"No."
He turned and walked toward the tree line, leaving the clearing and the stares behind without looking back. He could feel their eyes on him, confused and suspicious and maybe a little afraid, and he didn't care.
Let them wonder who he was. Let them whisper about the quiet kid who killed wolves like he did it his whole life. It didn't matter as long as they stayed out of his way.
He had a Tower to climb and a traitor to find and an Archon to destroy, and he wasn't going to waste time on people who would probably be dead within the week anyway.
The forest swallowed him up and he disappeared into the Threshold, moving toward the exit gate with the confidence of someone who walked this path before.
The climb began.