[Time Remaining: 04:21:07]

[Blocks Placed: 41 / 88]

[Foundation Integrity: 76%]

[Active Climbers: 143]

[Babel’s Curse — ACTIVE]

────────────

The relay was working.

It wasn’t perfectly but it was working.

We had divided the plain into four sectors with the foundation platform at the center. The grey-geared team — whose leader I had started thinking of as Commander because that was the only word that fit — ran the northeast. Staff led a mid-weight block team through the north-central sector. Plate anchored the western section with four climbers who had attached to him mostly out of proximity to his reputation, which had spread across the plain in gesture and expression after the harpy catch. The central mass had resolved itself into two functional sub-groups: one working the south section under Rapier’s loose direction, and one attempting the tertiary alcove under the two suspicious climbers I still didn’t trust.

Grey was running between all of them, patching wounds, burning through her mana reserves at a rate that made me watch her timing carefully. Healers on high-attrition floors always hit empty at the worst possible moment. I kept her moving through the lower-risk sections when I could.

I ran the relay itself. That meant I was never in one place for more than four minutes.

Two-three-two to trigger a hold. Four quick, one to signal incoming harpy. Three slow to signal a block placement window. One long tap to abort. The signals had spread outward from our original group to almost everyone on the plain — not through active teaching but through observation. People watched what worked and copied it. That was the Tower’s cruel gift to social learning: when survival is the stakes, people pay attention.

Forty-one blocks placed. Forty-seven remaining.

We had four hours.

It was tight. Technically possible. But the foundation integrity was at seventy-six percent and dropping every time a poorly-placed block had to be reset or a harpy dive disrupted a placement in progress. We had reset four blocks in the last hour alone.

The harpies had adapted.

That was the thing about monster intelligence on the higher floors. They weren’t static. They watched. And after three hours of watching us move blocks, they had figured out that a block mid-transit was more disruptive to lose than a block still on the ground. So they stopped diving at the people and started diving at the blocks.

The first time it happened, a harpy slammed into a pillar block that six climbers were mid-push on the relay path. The block veered off-course and wedged between two ground formations. Three hours of work to free it safely or one mana-heavy extraction that drained our buffer for the next placement cycle.

Commander had signaled a solution — they had started assigning two dedicated air-watch positions per sector, cycling them out every thirty minutes before fatigue set in. It was good thinking. I had been doing it ad-hoc and losing track.

I gave Commander a short nod when I saw the rotation system start.

They gave me one back. No expression. They didn’t need one.

The problem was the western section.

Two of the three suspicious climbers from the central mass had migrated west. I had noticed it forty minutes ago and watched without intervening because I was managing a harpy double-dive on the north-central team and couldn’t split my attention.

By the time I got west, they had positioned themselves adjacent to Plate’s group. Not integrated. Adjacent. They were placing blocks — that much was true. But their placements were wrong.

Not accidentally wrong.

The symbol matching on this floor was not intuitive to someone without prior Tower knowledge, but it also wasn’t invisible. The carved symbols were distinctive and the pattern logic, once you looked at three or four correct placements in sequence, became readable. A climber with reasonable intelligence and good observation who had been on this floor for three hours should have been placing blocks correctly by now.

These two were placing them inverted.

Every inverted block in the foundation structure created a stress fracture at the connection point. Not immediately catastrophic — each one dropped integrity by maybe half a percent — but it accumulated. And if they kept doing it through the remaining forty-seven blocks, the cumulative integrity drop would trigger a collapse event before we finished.

I looked at the blocks they had placed.

Six. They had placed six inverted blocks in the last ninety minutes while appearing to contribute.

[Foundation Integrity: 76%]

Without those six, we would be at seventy-nine percent. The difference felt small but at our current trajectory with harpies driving resets, every percent of integrity was a margin between a cleared floor and a failed one.

They weren’t incompetent. They were sabotaging.

The rage I felt about that was clean and cold. Not hot. Hot anger makes you sloppy. This anger was a straight edge.

I moved toward them.

Plate was on his knees near a large block, inspecting the symbol face. He hadn’t noticed the inversions yet — he was a physical specialist, not a puzzle reader. He trusted the people around him to know what they were doing.

I walked directly past Plate and stopped in front of the two climbers.

Both looked at me. One of them — shorter, with quick restless eyes — had his hand on the corner of an unplaced block. He was about to push it into position. The block was inverted.

I reached out and stopped his hand.

He went very still.

The other one — taller, broader, standing slightly behind — shifted his weight. Readying.

I pointed at the unplaced block. Then I traced the symbol on its face with one finger. Then I held up the symbol orientation it currently had and shook my head. Slowly, clearly. Wrong.

The shorter one looked at the block. Then at me. His expression didn’t change.

That told me everything.

If he had genuinely made a mistake, there would have been some flash of comprehension — the moment of oh, I see it. There was nothing. He knew the block was wrong. He had known all along.

I looked at the tall one behind him.

Same expression. Measured. Waiting.

They were waiting to see what I would do. Maybe they expected me to signal the group against them. Maybe they expected me to fight. Maybe they were testing whether I could even communicate the accusation without words.

I looked at Plate.

Plate had looked up from his inspection. He was watching us. Reading the stillness.

I pointed at the six already-placed inverted blocks along the western foundation run. Then I traced the symbol errors on the nearest one. Then I pointed at the two climbers.

Plate’s face changed. Not rage — something slower and colder, which on his scale of expression meant something significant had shifted.

He stood up. Slowly. All of his size assembled itself at once.

The shorter climber finally showed something on his face. A recalculation.

The tall one put his hand on a weapon.

I stepped directly into the line between the tall one and Plate. Not because I wanted to protect the saboteurs. Because I needed Plate angry and controlled, not Plate angry and acting, and those were two very different things on a floor where every combat event attracted harpy attention.

I held up one hand at Plate — flat palm, hold.

Then I turned to the two saboteurs and did something I hadn’t done yet on this floor.

I pointed at the exit marker — the faint golden outline that would appear at the floor’s far edge when the scenario cleared — and then pointed at the inverted blocks, and then drew my finger across my throat.

Simple. Final.

If the floor fails because of you, none of us leave.

Including you.

The shorter one looked at the taller one. Something passed between them that I couldn’t read but recognized as a recalculation of risk. They had probably expected to lose a few climbers to harpy dive-induced confusion, obscure the sabotage in the general chaos, and either survive to some back-exit they had arranged or simply delay Korea’s floor record advancement for whatever reason they had come up here with.

They hadn’t expected to be identified. They definitely hadn’t expected to be identified by someone who then blocked their own teammate’s righteous anger to present the problem as a math equation.

The shorter one looked at the inverted block for a long moment.

Then he rotated it to the correct orientation.

He picked it up — alone, straining, because he wasn’t built for block-moving and apparently didn’t care — and walked it into position, correctly aligned.

The taller one watched him. Then picked up another block from the nearby cluster and began checking the symbols before placing.

I stayed. Watched them place two blocks. Both correct.

Then I looked at Plate.

He was still watching. Jaw tight. Eyes tracking both of them every few seconds.

Good. Let him watch. They would behave under observation.

I tapped his arm once — acknowledgment — and moved on.

The relay needed me.

The chat had caught most of it, but the stream angle meant they hadn’t seen the exact symbol details clearly.

💬 KangMinFanatic77: did those two just... get it together?

💬 GhostClimber_: something happened there that I don’t fully understand

💬 Watchdog_KR: they were placing blocks wrong. deliberately I think

💬 SeoulTowerFan: WHAT

💬 TowerWatchKR: saboteurs on a tower floor?? who would even

💬 RealMvpStream: Tower politics go higher than floor 26. this isn’t surprising

💬 user_83421: but why would they be here if they’re saboteurs

💬 RealMvpStream: think about it. Korea’s highest floor is 26. if 26 fails here, it stays 25 for another cycle

💬 GhostClimber_: that’s... that’s actually significant strategically

💬 Watchdog_KR: Kang Min handled it without a fight. that was smart

💬 KangMinFanatic77: he’s always smart it’s terrifying

I didn’t think about the politics. I couldn’t afford to.

[Time Remaining: 03:44:59]

[Blocks Placed: 47 / 88]

[Foundation Integrity: 74%]

Forty-one blocks remaining. Less than four hours. The integrity was borderline.

Then the harpy swarm began.

I had been watching the upper scaffolding through the placement cycles. The harpies had never attacked in a group larger than four or five simultaneously. The biggest single wave had been six in the second hour and that had been manageable because six harpies had six separate dive vectors that our spread positioning could cover.

Nineteen came down at once.

No warning behavior. No pre-dive circling. They dropped from the upper scaffolding in a vertical formation — like a wall of wings — and hit the central section of the plain where the highest concentration of climbers was mid-relay.

The noise — not their shrieks but the impact of their landing, the scramble of people who had no way to shout warnings, the crack of mana discharge going off in six different directions at once — was enormous.

I counted three climbers dead in the first fifteen seconds. Then two more.

Staff was in the middle of it. I saw his blue column going up in three-second bursts — bright, reliable, buying space but not enough space. The harpies on this wave were working together in a way I hadn’t seen from them before. Two would engage, pull the defender’s attention, while a third came from the opposite vector.

They had watched us long enough to learn our patterns.

That thought arrived with specific clarity: they had learned our patterns.

The two-three-two tap. The four-one harpy signal. The way our air watchers always prioritized the highest-diving harpy and left the lower approach angle covered by the nearest melee fighter.

They were attacking our system, not our bodies.

I dropped into the center of the swarm.

The first harpy that came at me was using the high-then-low vector — wings open wide, then folding to dive at my right shoulder from above, while another came at my left leg from a low glide. I didn’t try to stop both. I stepped into the high one, let it overshoot my shoulder by inches, grabbed the trailing wing edge with my left hand and used the momentum to twist it into the path of the low one. They collided. Not hard enough to kill either, but enough to tangle them for three seconds.

Three seconds is a long time when you’re holding a sword.

I took the low one out at the neck joint. The high one untangled and I drove my elbow into its face — wrong move against armored feathers, my arm hurt immediately — then rotated and put the blade through its chest at the correct angle. Wing root to sternum. The anatomy was wrong for a bird but right for this monster.

Two down. Seventeen active.

Around me, the floor was holding. Barely.

Commander had their team in a circle formation, each one covering a sixty-degree arc, rotating inward when a harpy dove so that the nearest climber always had back coverage. Efficient. Military. They had drilled this.

Plate had picked up a harpy with both hands again. I heard it this time — a grinding crunch as something in the harpy’s shoulder assembly gave way — and then the sound of it being thrown. It impacted a second harpy mid-dive and both tumbled into a block cluster, dazed but not dead.

Grey was running. Not healing. Running. She had enough sense to know that in a swarm of nineteen, a healer standing still was a target. She was circling the fight, staying mobile, reaching wounded climbers in the brief windows between engagements rather than holding still.

Smart. I hadn’t told her to do that. She had figured it out herself.

Rapier was fighting three at once in the southern section. She had developed her own signal system by this point — a sharp double-stamp of her left foot to call nearby climbers to reinforce her position. Two central-mass climbers responded to the stamp and came in on her flanks. It wasn’t elegant but it worked.

The swarm broke eleven minutes after it started.

Seven harpies fled back to the upper scaffolding. Twelve were dead on the plain.

Twelve harpies. We had never killed more than five in a single engagement before.

And we had lost twelve climbers in those eleven minutes.

[Time Remaining: 03:01:34]

[Blocks Placed: 47 / 88]

[Foundation Integrity: 71%]

[Active Climbers: 131]

Eighty-three people had entered this floor and not come out. In three hours and twenty minutes.

I stood in the aftermath of the swarm and looked at the remaining 131 climbers. Some were sitting down. Some were staring at the dead. Some were looking at me.

I didn’t have anything to give them. I had no words that weren’t demonic screeching, no system message, no party ping. I had no gesture for "we can still do this" that wouldn’t feel hollow.

So I walked to the nearest unplaced block. Checked the symbols. Set my shoulder against it.

And pushed.

After a moment, I felt other hands alongside mine. Then more.

No one needed a signal for that.

[LiveStream Viewers: 3,102,887]

💬 KangMinFanatic77: 131 left. 131 left

💬 SeoulTowerFan: please

💬 GhostClimber_: 41 blocks in 3 hours. they need the same in 3 hours

💬 Watchdog_KR: integrity at 71. if it drops below 50 there’s a collapse

💬 TowerWatchKR: can they do it

💬 RealMvpStream: Kang Min is still standing

💬 user_29441: is that enough

💬 RealMvpStream: it has to be