Regression of the Tower's Final Survivor-Chapter 107: Separate Paths

The gate to Floor 17 deposited them in a forest that stretched in every direction.

Ancient trees rose toward a sky choked with perpetual twilight, their branches intertwining so completely that little light reached the ground. The air smelled of wood and moss and something faintly metallic, and the path ahead split into a dozen different routes within the first hundred feet.

Nobody moved.

They stood in a loose cluster, seven instead of eight, and the absence felt like a wound none of them wanted to acknowledge.

Astrid broke the silence first. "So. We just... do this without him?"

"That appears to be the plan." Vex’s voice was dry, but his magitech eye kept scanning the treeline as if expecting Dante to emerge from the shadows and say it was all a test. "Unless someone has a better suggestion."

"We could go back." Ren’s voice was quiet. "Find him before he gets too far into whatever hidden dungeon he’s chasing. Drag him along whether he likes it or not."

"And then what?" Ravenna hadn’t moved from her position at the edge of the group. "Force him to stay? Watch him resent us for every floor we climb together? He made his choice. We have to make ours."

"Our choice being?"

"We climb. We survive. We meet him at Floor 25 like he asked." She finally turned to face the others. "Or we stand here arguing until something in this forest decides we look like easy prey."

The discussion continued as they walked, but the heat went out of it quickly. They were professional climbers, veterans of a dozen floors who understood that sometimes the team composition changed. People left. People died. People went off on their own for reasons that made sense only to them. The Tower didn’t wait for anyone to process their feelings.

"I still don’t understand why." Leon picked his way over a root system that seemed to have erupted from the ground like frozen waves. "He built this team specifically. Hand-picked each of us. Why do all that just to leave?"

"He told us why." Sera’s voice was thoughtful. "The hidden dungeons, the knowledge that can only be accessed alone... he wasn’t lying about any of that. I could feel it."

"You’re getting better at reading him."

"We all are. After what we shared on Floor 16..." She shook her head. "Whatever he’s hiding, whatever secret he couldn’t tell us even during the confession trial, it’s connected to this. The things he needs to find. The path he has to walk alone."

Vex’s laugh was humorless. "The man literally told us he knows things he shouldn’t know about the Tower’s future, and we’re still trying to puzzle out his motivations. Perhaps we should simply accept that his perspective is broader than ours."

"Accept he knows better? Just like that?"

"Accept that he has information we lack. Whether he knows ’better’ remains to be seen."

---

They made camp as the eternal twilight deepened into something closer to true darkness.

The forest provided shelter in the form of a massive hollow tree, its interior carved out by something long gone and now lined with the remnants of previous climbers’ camps: fire pits, storage alcoves, carved symbols warning about local dangers. They weren’t the first team to rest here, and they wouldn’t be the last.

Ren took first watch, positioning himself at the entrance with his shield ready. "Get some sleep. We can argue more in the morning."

Nobody argued with that, but sleep came slowly, and whispered conversations filled the darkness.

"He’s coming back." Astrid lay in her bedroll, eyes fixed on the curved ceiling above. "Right? That’s what he said. Floor 25. He’s coming back."

"That’s what he said." Ravenna’s voice came from somewhere nearby, impossible to locate in the darkness.

"And you believe him?"

A pause. "I believe he intends to come back. What actually happens between now and Floor 25..." Another pause. "The Tower has a way of changing plans."

"That’s not reassuring."

"It wasn’t meant to be."

Astrid rolled onto her side. "You’re different with him. When it’s just the two of you. Less controlled."

"You noticed."

"Everyone noticed. The way you look at him. The private conversation before he left." She hesitated. "Are you two...?"

"We’re something." Ravenna’s voice carried an edge of vulnerability that didn’t match her usual composure. "I’m not sure what. He’s not sure either. But there’s something."

"And you let him leave anyway."

"I let him make his own choices. That’s different from approving of them."

---

Morning arrived without sunrise, the twilight simply growing slightly less oppressive.

The team gathered around a small fire, eating preserved rations and pretending they weren’t all thinking about the same thing. Finally, Leon spoke the question nobody wanted to ask.

"Who leads? With Dante gone, we need someone making decisions."

"Ravenna." Astrid’s answer was immediate. "She’s his second. She knows his plans better than any of us."

"I don’t know his plans." Ravenna shook her head. "I know his methods. I know his priorities. But the details of what he expected us to do on these floors? He never shared those."

"Then we figure it out ourselves." Ren stood, his massive frame blocking most of the tree’s entrance. "We’re not helpless. We survived Floor 16 without him making every decision. We can survive Floor 17 too."

"Floor 16 was different. Those trials were designed for teams. Floor 17..." Vex consulted something on his magitech interface. "Floor 17 is a transitional floor. Free climbing, no structured trials. Monster density is high, resources are scattered, and rival teams are competing for the same paths forward."

"So we treat it like any other climbing floor."

"Except we’re one member short and our leader is running around somewhere behind us chasing mysteries."

Sera cleared her throat. "We don’t need to make this complicated. Ravenna handles tactics and demon-related threats. Vex handles scouting and intelligence. I handle medical decisions, Leon handles emergency triage. Ren anchors defense, Astrid leads offense. Everyone does what they’re good at, and we make group decisions on anything major."

The proposal settled over them, simple and practical and obviously correct.

"Fine." Ravenna stood. "Then let’s move. The longer we sit here, the farther the other teams get ahead of us."

They traveled through the forest for three days.

The rhythm of climbing without Dante was strange at first: moments where someone would start to ask his opinion only to remember he wasn’t there, formations that felt incomplete without his presence at the center, decisions that took longer because nobody was certain whose judgment should be trusted most.

But they adapted.

Ravenna discovered she was better at reading terrain than she’d realized, her demon senses picking up on threats the others missed. Vex proved invaluable for planning, his mercenary experience filling gaps in their tactical knowledge. Astrid and Ren developed a partnership in combat that didn’t require words, just the understanding of two fighters who had learned to trust each other’s instincts.

Leon and Sera worked side by side during healing sessions, and something about Dante’s absence forced them to actually talk instead of dancing around their history. The conversations weren’t comfortable, but they were honest, and by the third day the tension between them had shifted into something that might eventually become resolution.

They were still seven instead of eight.

But they were learning to be seven who functioned.

---

On the fourth day, they reached the edge of the forest.

The transition zone ahead showed glimpses of Floor 18’s terrain: crystalline wastes that caught the light and scattered it into rainbows, rock formations that pierced the sky like frozen lightning. It was beautiful and dangerous and completely unlike anything they’d faced before.

"This is where he is." Ravenna stared at the distant crystal spires. "Somewhere in there. Chasing whatever he needs to find."

"Should we look for him?" Ren asked.

"No." She turned away from the view. "He asked us to trust him. So we trust him. We climb. We get stronger. And when we meet him at Floor 25, we show him he was right to leave us."

"Right to leave us?"

"Right to believe we could handle this without him." She walked toward the forest’s edge. "Let’s prove it."

The team followed, and behind them Floor 17’s twilight forest faded into memory. Somewhere in the crystalline wastes ahead, Dante was walking his own path.

They’d find him again.

Until then, they had climbing to do.

---

Miles behind them, on the Floor 16 side of the gate, Dante stood in shadow and watched.

He couldn’t see their faces from this distance, couldn’t hear the arguments or the quiet conversations that followed. But he could see the formation they walked in, the way they covered each other’s blind spots, the unconscious coordination of a team that had learned to function as a unit.

They were heading into Floor 17’s twilight forest without him, and they were doing it right.

’Good.’ The thought carried more relief than he expected. ’They don’t need me as much as they think they do.’

The Floor 17 gate pulsed once and then sealed, the connection between floors closing as the team moved beyond its threshold. Dante stared at the inactive archway for a long moment, memorizing the image of seven people walking into the unknown.

Then he turned away.

The hidden path waited behind him: a crack in the crystal formations that most climbers would miss, an opening that led downward instead of forward, a route that only existed for those who knew where to look. His regression memories painted the path in perfect clarity, even after all these years.

Three days to the dungeon entrance. Another week inside, if the trials hadn’t changed. At the end of it, waiting in darkness for someone worthy enough to claim it...

Eclipse.

He stepped forward, and the crystalline wastes swallowed him whole.