The moment the trial ended, the weight vanished.
Not gradually. Not gently. It was gone all at once, ripped away as if some unseen hand had decided Kael had suffered enough. His knees buckled instantly, not from pain, but from the sudden absence of it. The pressure that had been crushing his spine, grinding his joints, dragging every step down into something resembling slow-motion agony, gone. He hit the floor hard, palms slapping against cold stone, lungs heaving as his body struggled to recalibrate.
The system notifications hovered before him, glowing with a detached calm that felt almost insulting after what he had just survived.
[You have cleared the first Trial of Ulsal. Measure of Burden][All Forbidden Tags have been cleansed by Ulsal.][All injuries suffered and afflictions have been removed][You have obtained {Brokk's Hammer}][You have obtained {[ᚱ- ᚪᚾᚳᚩᚱ] ᚱ-Anchor-]
Kael sat down immediately as he felt all the weight that was forced on his body was fully lifted replaced with what felt like agonized release. It was so sudden that it didn't feel like relief at first, it felt like a trick, like the Tower had yanked away a support beam and was waiting to watch him collapse for entertainment.
The floor was cold and gritty under his palms, and the chill seeped fast through his skin, but he barely registered it because his whole body was still braced for crushing pressure that wasn't there anymore. His shoulders twitched as if expecting to be dragged back down, and the air itself felt too thin in his lungs, like breathing without resistance made him unbalanced.
He heaved and breathed heavily, a feeling of wanting to throw up crept up his stomach from what just happened earlier. It was the kind of nausea that came late, after the danger had already passed, when your body remembered it was allowed to react. His throat tightened, saliva gathering in a sour rush, and his stomach rolled as if it was trying to wring itself out.
The adrenaline had kept him from lurching and kept his focus up, but now he realized it, truly realized it, in the quiet that followed. The corridor wasn't behind him anymore, the slamming metal wasn't carving up the air, and John's voice wasn't in his ear like a hook. It was just silence, stone, and the aftertaste of panic still stuck to the back of his tongue like cheap metal.
He caused the death of another person. He didn't kill him with his own hands, but he was the main cause. Regardless if he deserved it or not. The thought didn't come with drama, it came with weight, a steady brutal weight that settled in his chest and refused to move. His mind replayed it anyway, because that's what minds did when they were trying to punish you into becoming someone else.
He saw John's face twisted with greed, the spit and blood, the way his rage had made him look less like a man and more like a starving animal that had found a bag of gold. He saw his own feet moving away, his own refusal to turn back, and the steel wall dropping like a judgement that didn't care about right or wrong. The Tower hadn't asked if John deserved it.
The Tower had just closed the distance.
Kael wasn't some mass murdering maniac, he was a normal guy, a good student who was forced into the blue collar way of life due to circumstances he couldn't manage or control. He was the kind of person who used to worry about being late, about rent, about how his girlfriend would react if he didn't bring enough money today. About his dying mother back in the hospital. About whether his hands would still ache tomorrow after another day of work.
He used to measure his weeks in small victories and small humiliations, not in life-or-death decisions made in ten-meter corridors. And now, sitting on this stone floor, he could feel the old identity trying to cling to him, trying to insist that he was still that person, that he could return to being that person if he just kept surviving long enough. But the Tower didn't care who you were before. The Tower didn't preserve your innocence like a souvenir. It scraped you down to whatever could keep moving.
A man who lived every day trying to make it to the next. And now the reality of this tower hit him hard. There was no friends here. Only enemies, and the worst enemy was himself. Only now, it wasn't some poetic realization. It was practical and ugly. The Tower turned every kind gesture into a weakness that could be grabbed, twisted, and used against you. It turned hesitation into a knife placed in your own hand, and it turned hope into a rope someone else could pull when they needed your body to be in the way.
Kael could feel how easily he could have been different in that corridor, how easily he could have believed John's promises, how easily he could have tried to be noble and ended up dead beside him. Trust wasn't kindness here. Trust was a gamble made with your own throat.
To trust anyone for whatever reason is nothing short of handing the leach of your own life to them. The phrase sat in him like a hard lesson, the kind you only learned once. He hated that it was true, and he hated that a part of him felt calmer once he accepted it. That calmness felt like betrayal too, like something in him had been quietly waiting for an excuse to stop caring.
He knew that John wasn't someone to be trusted, but to see the transformation happen in front of his own eyes was the wakeup call he needed. That switch, that instant shift from frenzy to normal speech, from foam and blood to casual tone, had made his skin crawl. It wasn't just greed. It was adaptability without conscience.
John had been willing to be anything, say anything, in whatever moment gave him the best chance to leave with more than he entered with. And Kael understood then that if John had made it out with him, it wouldn't have ended at the door. It would have followed him, every day, every floor, every room, until one of them couldn't watch their back anymore.
He couldn't vomit anything fortunately since there was nothing to vomit. The moment he got here, he never had the urge of either thirst or hunger. Perhaps this was also a part of the Tower. The thought should have been comforting, but it wasn't. It felt unnatural, like the Tower wasn't keeping him alive out of mercy, but out of convenience. Hunger and thirst were problems that could distract, slow, weaken. The Tower had simply removed them the way a craftsman removed flaws from a tool. It didn't mean you were safe. It meant you were optimized for suffering.