Chapter 150: « Fable Of The Glutton’s Oven [1] »

[Floor 27 – Entry Confirmed]

[Main Scenario: Rescue the Starving Siblings]

[The wicked Witch of the Sugar Forest prepares her feast. Slay the Witch and safely escort Hansel and Gretel out of the woods.]

[Current Climbers on Floor 27: 89]

[Escort Targets: Located]

The floor loaded and I stepped into something that crunched under my boot.

I looked down. Graham cracker. The entire ground was flat, pale brown, and faintly scored in a grid pattern like someone had tiled the world with a dessert base. I pressed my heel into it. It held weight. I pressed harder. It cracked and a small divot appeared, releasing a smell like warm butter and cinnamon that was pleasant for approximately one second before becoming aggressively overwhelming.

I looked up.

The trees were sugar. Not metaphorically — the trunks were pale amber hardcandy, translucent in the light, with deep internal bubbles like they had been poured and cooled too fast. The branches were spun into something between caramel and pulled toffee, stretching outward in brittle filaments that caught the floor’s pale light and scattered it in every direction. The leaves were thin sheets of green-tinted hard candy, and when a faint wind moved through them they clicked against each other with a sound like wind chimes made by someone who had never heard music.

It was visually spectacular. It was also deeply, profoundly wrong in a way I couldn’t immediately name.

Then I named it: everything smelled like it was about to be eaten, including me.

The 89 climbers who had cleared floor 26 spread out behind me into the sugar forest. I heard the crunching of 88 other boots on graham cracker and the immediate onset of 88 different reactions to the environment.

"Is this—"

"It smells like a bakery."

"Don’t eat anything," someone said firmly, which meant someone else had already been about to eat something.

"I’m just saying it’s real sugar—"

"DON’T."

I started walking.

The stream was live. The viewer count was already climbing fast — the floor 26 clear had pushed my numbers to a new baseline. I checked it once and then focused on the path ahead.

[LiveStream Viewers: 2,104,337]

💬 KangMinFanatic77: HES ON FLOOR 27 ALREADY

💬 SeoulTowerFan: why does it look like a candy land

💬 GhostClimber_: HANSEL AND GRETEL FLOOR

💬 Watchdog_KR: someone is absolutely going to eat the floor

💬 RealMvpStream: watch Kang Min’s face right now. that expression.

💬 user_48821: what expression

💬 RealMvpStream: the one that says "I am surrounded by people"

The path through the sugar forest was obvious — a clearing between the candy-trees that led in a single direction, wide enough for four people abreast. The Tower was being less subtle than usual. I had learned early that obvious paths on themed floors either meant the designers were lazy or they were confident enough in whatever waited at the end to not need the pretense of mystery.

This path felt like the second kind.

Commander fell into step beside me. We had developed a comfortable working rhythm on floor 26 and apparently both defaulted to it without discussing it. Their team had taken losses in the swarm but twelve of the original fifteen had cleared, and twelve disciplined climbers was a significant asset.

Staff was on my left. He had told me his name after the floor 26 clear — Lee Junho. I kept thinking of him as Staff anyway, which was a habit I would have to break eventually. For now it stayed.

"The briefing says witch first, then escort the children out," Junho said, reading the System UI. "Standard rescue format."

"Yeah," I said.

He glanced at me. "You sound skeptical."

"I’m always skeptical of standard formats."

He had nothing to add to that because he had watched me on floor 26 and understood what I meant.

The caramel-slimes found us about four minutes into the path.

They came up through the graham cracker ground — the surface bulged, cracked, and these things pushed up through it like bubbles breaking the surface of boiling liquid. Golden-amber, translucent, roughly the size and shape of a large dog, with no discernible features except a slight indentation at the front that might have been a face or might have been a manufacturing defect in whatever the Tower had used to design them.

They moved like quicksand. Slow approach, then sudden adhesion — the nearest one flowed over a climber’s boot before the climber could react and began pulling downward. The climber — a young woman with a polearm, one of the central-mass survivors from 26 — tried to yank her foot back. The slime stretched and held.

"Pry, don’t pull!" someone called.

She switched tactics and used the butt of her polearm as a lever, forcing the slime sideways. It released her with a sound like a suction cup being pulled off glass and reformed two meters away, apparently unconcerned.

The slimes were less aggressive than they were hazardous. They gravitated toward warmth and movement, which meant they gravitated toward climbers, and their adhesion effect was the problem rather than any offensive capability. Getting stuck in one while something else was attacking you was the real danger.

Junho’s light column worked well on them — the heat dispersal from a sustained light spell caused the caramel to seize up and crack. Commander’s team developed a quick sorting rhythm: polearm users keeping the slimes at range while mages spot-burned them.

I handled two that came at me directly and moved through the rest of the engagement. The slimes were a warm-up. The floor wasn’t putting real pressure on yet.

What it was doing was putting its audience on full display.

Three climbers in the south side of the path had become completely distracted. One had broken off a piece of a candy-tree branch and was examining it with the focused attention of a man who had decided the risk was acceptable.

"Don’t," said the climber next to him.

The man bit into the branch. Crunched loudly. Chewed. Swallowed.

Everyone nearby watched him.

He was silent for three seconds. Then: "It tastes like apple."

The climber next to him immediately broke off a piece of the same branch.

💬 GhostClimber_: THEY ARE EATING THE FLOOR

💬 SeoulTowerFan: I TOLD YOU

💬 Watchdog_KR: this is a horror floor and they are snacking

💬 KangMinFanatic77: someone stop them

💬 user_29441: Kang Min’s face is incredible right now

💬 TowerWatchKR: is that a smile

💬 RealMvpStream: that is not a smile that is a man containing something at significant personal cost

It was fine. The branches weren’t harmful — if they had been, the System would have flagged it. The Tower on this type of floor used the aesthetic to disorient rather than poison. The candy was real, the sugar was real, and apparently the apple flavoring was also real, and now six people were eating the scenery while caramel-slimes circulated at the edge of the group.

I left them to it.

The gingerbread house appeared at the end of the path.

It was massive in the way that fairy-tale things are massive — not to scale with anything sensible, larger than the surrounding trees, larger than should have been possible given the path we had walked to reach it. The walls were actual gingerbread, dark brown and dense, reinforced at the corners with hardened royal icing in thick white lines. The roof was tiled in alternating red and white candy that I recognized as peppermint. The windows glowed orange from inside. Gumdrop decorations studded the walls at regular intervals in geometric patterns that had probably been charming once and now just gave the whole structure the appearance of something that had been designed by a culinary professional who was under significant psychological stress.

The door was open.

Inside, faintly audible from where we stood: crying. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

Two voices. Young. The crying was theatrical in the specific way of children who have been crying long enough to know how to modulate it for effect, but it was still crying, and every person who heard it registered the same involuntary response. Move toward it. Help.

I stood at the edge of the clearing and looked at the house.

[Escort Targets: INSIDE — 34m]

[Hostile Entity: INSIDE — 31m]

[WARNING: Do not allow harm to Escort Targets]

The System UI was doing its job. The scenario briefing was clear, the objective markers were clear, the warning was clear.

Something about the crying was wrong.

I had heard a lot of crying. In my previous life, in this one, on floors that used auditory triggers to manipulate climbers. I knew the sound of fear and I knew the sound of distress and I knew the sound of a child who was genuinely desperate.

These two sounded hungry.

The crying had a specific quality — lower in register than fear-crying, more insistent, the rhythm of want rather than pain. The way a child cries when dinner is late, scaled up to something enormous and theatrical.

I filed it.

Commander appeared at my shoulder. "We move in, locate the witch, engage before she reaches the children. Standard priority sequence."

"Hold the engagement," I said.

They looked at me.

"Observe first."

The Peppermint Golems came out of the side of the house before I could explain further.

They were built from the same material as the roof tiles — massive, jointed constructs of pale red and white candy, moving with the grinding rigidity of something that had been assembled rather than grown. Two meters tall. Arms that were solid peppermint batons. They moved through the clearing at a pace that was slow enough to seem manageable and fast enough to close distance before you finished processing that assessment.

Six of them. Three from each side of the house.

The fight that broke out lasted eleven minutes and covered most of the clearing in peppermint shards. The Golems were tough — the candy construction absorbed impact damage the way stone absorbed it, and they didn’t bleed or flinch or react to pain because they had no nervous system to report it. What worked was targeting the joint structures: the connection points between limbs and torso were the same sugar-composite as the rest but thinner, and repeated impact on the same joint eventually caused fracture propagation.

Rapier figured that out in the first two minutes. I had already known it but I watched her work it out from first principles and felt a specific satisfaction about that.

The six Golems went down in eleven minutes with no serious casualties — two broken fingers from someone who had punched a Golem in the chest on instinct, and a climber who had slipped on a peppermint shard and badly twisted an ankle. Grey handled both quickly.

The clearing settled.

The crying from inside the house had gotten louder while we fought.

I stood in the quiet that followed and looked at the open door.

"Still holding observation?" Commander asked.

"Going in," I said. "But everyone stays at the door until I signal."

Junho was already watching me with the expression he had developed on floor 26 — the one that meant he had learned to trust when I moved slowly toward something that everyone else wanted to rush.

I walked toward the open door of the gingerbread house.

The crying got louder with each step. And underneath it, barely audible, a sound I couldn’t immediately categorize — something between a slow drip and a quiet, rhythmic chewing.

I stepped inside.

[LiveStream Viewers: 2,891,004]

💬 KangMinFanatic77: he’s going in alone

💬 GhostClimber_: someone is definitely eating in there

💬 SeoulTowerFan: THE DROOLING SOUND

💬 Watchdog_KR: wait. wait wait wait

💬 RealMvpStream: everyone look at the escort target markers

💬 TowerWatchKR: why are they pulsing like that

💬 user_83421: that’s not normal tower behavior

💬 KangMinFanatic77: Kang Min’s hand just went to his sword

💬 GhostClimber_: oh no