[Floor 28 – Entry Confirmed]

[Main Scenario: Survive the Everlasting Winter]

[The cold is absolute. You are granted three divine matches. Keep the flame alive.]

[Current Climbers: 89]

[Environmental Hazard: ABSOLUTE COLD — HP drain active]

[Items Granted: Divine Match x3]

─────────────────────────────────────────

The floor came in white and stayed white.

Eighty-nine climbers stood on a plain of packed snow under a sky that had no color, no sun, no horizon line. The blizzard hit immediately — wind from every direction at once, the kind that finds gaps in armor and clothing that shouldn’t exist and puts cold fingers through them. The snow wasn’t falling so much as moving laterally, cutting across eye level in dense sheets that reduced visibility to roughly fifteen meters before the world went to white static.

I checked my HP bar. It was draining. Slowly but steadily, the same tick rate as a persistent poison effect, except poisons could be countered and the cold just was.

In my inventory, three items pulsed with faint orange light. Each one was rendered as a single wooden match, slender, with a dark red head. The System label read:

[Divine Match — Strike to ignite a sanctuary flame. Restores HP. Reveals concealed entities within 30m radius. Duration: variable.]

I held the matches and looked at the blizzard and thought about the word variable.

The scenario briefing said keep the flame alive. The match description said it revealed concealed entities. The floor briefing said the monsters — ice-wraiths and the Blizzard King — were invisible in the snow.

Put those three things together and the intended solution was obvious: strike a match when monsters attacked, use the warmth to heal, use the light to fight. Three matches, three stages of the floor, survive until the objective completed.

The intended solution was obvious, and on every floor above twenty the obvious solution was the wrong one.

I put the matches away.

Junho appeared at my left shoulder, his breath making a plume in the cold. His staff was already drawn. "HP is draining. Everyone’s going to need to move or we start losing people in—" he checked something in his UI "—about forty minutes at current drain rate."

"Longer if we stay active," Commander said from behind us. "Combat generates heat. Keep moving and the drain slows."

That was correct. Body heat was a real factor on cold-type floors. The Tower modeled it accurately enough that passive resistance and sustained physical output made a measurable difference. Standing still was the worst thing you could do.

"We move," I said. "Find the boss."

Junho looked at me. "In a whiteout blizzard. Actively hunting something invisible."

"Yes."

"Without lighting the matches."

I looked at him.

He closed his mouth and nodded.

The chat had been live since the floor loaded. I checked it once.

[LiveStream Viewers: 3,218,440]

💬 KangMinFanatic77: floor 28 looks MISERABLE

💬 SeoulTowerFan: the hp drain is already showing on stream

💬 GhostClimber_: three matches seems generous. use them early?

💬 Watchdog_KR: he put the matches away. he PUT THE MATCHES AWAY

💬 TowerWatchKR: the sanctuary would restore everyone’s HP though??

💬 RealMvpStream: he’s not going to use them

💬 KangMinFanatic77: how do you know

💬 RealMvpStream: floor 26 he held the signal for three minutes while his hp dropped and everyone else was panicking. he doesn’t use the easy tool

💬 user_48821: he’s going to find the boss blind in a blizzard

💬 GhostClimber_: that’s insane

💬 Watchdog_KR: that’s INSANE

I oriented by the wind. The blizzard had a primary direction buried under the apparent randomness — all blizzard floors did, because the Tower generated weather from a source point and the chaos was cosmetic over a real directional push. The strongest cold had a bearing. You learned to feel it not in your skin, which numbed immediately, but in the deeper muscles, the ones that reacted to temperature more slowly and more honestly.

It was coming from the northwest.

Boss floors put the primary hostile at the environmental source. The Blizzard King was generating this cold. That meant it was northwest of our entry point.

I started walking.

Commander fell into step beside me. They had pulled their team into a tight formation behind us — twelve climbers, all disciplined, all keeping pace. The central mass survivors from the earlier floors had distributed themselves through the group. Rapier was somewhere in the middle of the formation. Plate was at the rear, which was where he worked best on moving-formation floors — the kind of climber who made trailing attacks functionally impossible.

The wraiths found us eight minutes into the march.

The first sign was sound, which was the one thing the blizzard couldn’t completely erase. A high, thin frequency just above the range where it registered as music and just below the range where it registered as noise — the specific pitch that the Tower used for entities made of compressed cold. I had heard it before. The frequency sat in your back teeth.

"Stop," I said.

The formation stopped.

The frequency moved around us, circling. Two sources, maybe three. The wraiths were mapping the group’s edges, finding the outer climbers, testing the response time.

In the white-out, I could see nothing.

Every instinct said: strike a match. Light the circle. See what we were dealing with.

I let the instinct pass.

"Form up tight," Commander said quietly. "Three-sixty. Weapons out."

The formation compressed. Climbers rotated outward, weapons raised, watching the white nothing in every direction. The frequency circled once more, then dove.

It hit a climber on the right flank — I heard the impact before I saw it, a sharp exhalation of breath and then the sound of boots sliding on packed snow. The climber, a young man from the central mass, went down hard. The wraith was visible for exactly the moment of contact — a shape like compressed smoke, given edges by the impact, limbs that were more suggestion than substance. Then it pulled back and went white again.

Grey was already moving toward the downed climber.

"Eyes on the frequency," I called. "Track the sound."

The second wraith came from the opposite direction, targeting a different flank. It was a coordinated approach — both wraiths working the confusion of a group that couldn’t see their attackers. They hit and withdrew in under a second each time.

The problem with invisible enemies in the dark wasn’t just the fighting. It was the accumulated drain. Every hit the wraiths landed dropped HP directly on top of the cold-drain that was already running. The combination was compounding. The downed climber’s HP had dropped significantly in one impact. At this rate, with multiple wraiths cycling hits, we would start losing people before we found the boss.

I listened to the frequency. Two sources. They were moving in a figure-eight pattern around us, which meant they were coordinating with each other, which meant they had enough cognition to track both sides of the formation simultaneously.

I timed the next pass.

The right-flank wraith had a cycle of approximately twelve seconds. Hit, withdraw to fifteen meters, circle back, hit. The left-flank wraith was ten seconds.

I moved to the right flank on second nine.

When it came in, I was already at the edge of the formation with my blade extended at the exact height where the impact sound had been occurring. The wraith hit the blade instead of the climber behind me. The contact was strange — like cutting cold water, resistance without mass, but enough friction to feel the edge connect with something that had physical coherence at its center even if it looked like smoke from the outside.

It made a sound. Not the high frequency — something lower, surprised.

I drove the blade through the center of the form and pushed my mana through the edge. Heat-type combat mana on a cold-type entity was straightforward physics on this floor. The wraith came apart. Not dramatically — it dissolved, the smoke dispersing into the blizzard until it was just wind.

One down.

The second wraith pulled back immediately. The ten-second cycle stopped. It was reassessing.

Smart.

The chat was moving fast.

💬 KangMinFanatic77: HE TIMED THE WRAITH

💬 SeoulTowerFan: he killed it by SOUND

💬 GhostClimber_: without the match. in the dark. by listening

💬 Watchdog_KR: the hp drain is still going though. everyone in the group is dropping

💬 TowerWatchKR: how long can they last without the matches

💬 RealMvpStream: as long as he needs them to

💬 user_83421: that is extremely confident of you

💬 RealMvpStream: I’ve earned it

The second wraith didn’t come back in. It circled at the edge of perception for two minutes while we walked, trailing us. Harassing behavior — it would wait until someone broke formation or lagged behind, then target the isolation.

I kept the formation tight and kept moving northwest.

The cold got worse.

Not gradually — there was a threshold about twenty minutes into the march where the floor’s baseline temperature dropped perceptibly, the HP drain rate increasing to something more urgent. The climbers were feeling it physically too, the kind of cold that slows thinking, makes decisions feel heavier and less certain.

Grey appeared at my side. Her face was red from the wind. "Three people are under fifty percent HP from the drain alone," she said. "I can sustain basic mana-heat patches but I’m burning through reserves."

"How long?"

"Maybe thirty minutes before I’m pulling from emergency reserve."

Thirty minutes to find something invisible in a whiteout.

I looked at the matches in my inventory. The orange pulse of them sat in the corner of my vision. The System had given them to everyone on the floor — each climber had three. Three hundred and twelve matches between the eighty-nine of us, each one capable of creating a sanctuary of warmth, healing, light.

All of them were the wrong answer.

I put the thought away and listened to the wind.

The Blizzard King was ahead. I could feel the cold intensifying with each step in a way that had directionality to it — not just the blizzard’s ambient temperature but a concentrated source, the cold getting denser the further northwest we moved. Like walking toward an open freezer in a cold room. The freezer was close.

"It’s near," I said.

The second wraith, still trailing us, suddenly changed behavior. It stopped circling and went still at our six o’clock. Waiting.

Because its boss was at our twelve.

The blizzard in front of us shifted. The lateral snow movement changed angle, being pushed outward from a point source rather than sweeping uniformly. In the white static, something darker moved.

Enormous. Slow. Generating its own cold the way fire generates heat — actively, from the inside out.

The Blizzard King.

The HP drain doubled in a single tick. Behind me, two climbers made involuntary sounds.

I looked at the three matches.

Then I looked at the dark shape in the white.

Somewhere in its chest — or what passed for its chest on something that size — a faint blue pulse. Buried deep. Faint enough that I could only see it because I was looking for it and because the blizzard’s own light was flat enough to catch the difference.

The mana-core.

That was where the matches needed to go.

[LiveStream Viewers: 3,891,004]

💬 KangMinFanatic77: IT’S THE BOSS

💬 SeoulTowerFan: IT’S HUGE

💬 GhostClimber_: and the matches still aren’t lit

💬 Watchdog_KR: everyone’s hp is collapsing

💬 TowerWatchKR: Kang Min please

💬 RealMvpStream: he sees the core. look at where his eyes are going

💬 KangMinFanatic77: what core

💬 RealMvpStream: the blue light in its chest. he found it

💬 user_48821: HOW

💬 RealMvpStream: because he was looking