Three days after extraction, Cal was back at the Tower gates.

  Jordan stood a half step behind Cal’s right shoulder. His helmet hung from his pack, unworn. His hands dangled at his sides, as if straining not to betray tension. He failed as Jordan always failed: by talking.

  “Okay,” Jordan said, craning his neck to look up at the Tower. “Still huge. Still ominous. Still definitely compensating for something.”

  They’d already burned chips before coming here.

  Not on charms. Not on flash. On mundane, unglamorous things that kept you alive.

  Jordan had insisted.

  Two days earlier, he’d dragged Cal through the vendor lanes. He moved like a man with a shopping list and a deadline. He ignored the holo-barkers pitching ‘Tower-blessed’ scrap and the grinning kids selling superstition on a chain. He didn’t haggle much. He didn’t joke much. He walked with that narrowed, purpose-built focus Cal had only ever seen when something threatened people Jordan loved.

  The first stop was a cloth-and-plate shop wedged between a stim kiosk and a booth hawking counterfeit sponsor pins. The vendor urged them toward bulkier armor, status, and threat. Jordan’s gaze kept drifting to knees, thighs, hips—the spots a cheap spear sought when you weren’t alert.

  Reinforced pants. Not full greaves, not bulky plating. Layered fabric, with woven impact threads and thin, flexible plates sewn into thighs and hips. Enough to blunt a glancing spear, keep a fall from splitting a kneecap, and give you a second chance when the floor wanted you down.

  Jordan had thumped a knuckle against the material and nodded, as if the answer were obvious.

  “Legs go out, you’re dead,” he’d said. “I don’t care how good your shield is. I don’t care how brave you feel. If you can’t stand, you can’t block. If you can’t block, you don’t come home.”

  Cal had started to protest on reflex—clinic first, rent first, chips were math—but Jordan had cut him off with one look.

  “Clinic first,” Jordan had said, and then, before Cal could latch onto it as an argument, he’d added, “and then this. Because I’m climbing with you. Which means I’m not letting a cheap spear decide the outcome.”

  He slid chips across the counter without ceremony.

  Next, shirts. Same philosophy as before. Reinforced ribs and abdomen. Extra padding along the shoulders and collarbone where pack straps bit and blades liked to glance. The vendor called them ‘delver undershirts,’ as if naming made them glamorous. They weren’t. They were plain, stiff in the hands, and built to save you from the kind of small wound that became a big one after infection and exhaustion took over.

  Jordan made Cal try his on under his jacket right there, tugged at the seams, and checked how it sat beneath the shield strap.

  “Does it pinch when you lift?” Jordan asked.

  Cal rotated his shoulder once. “No.”

  “Good,” Jordan said. “Then you wear it. Every time. No exceptions.”

  Cal had opened his mouth to argue again.

  Jordan’s tone shifted—still quiet, but stripped down to the truth beneath the humor.

  “I’m not losing you because we got cute about saving chips,” he’d said.

  That had ended the discussion.

  The staff came last.

  Jordan hadn’t gone looking for anything exotic. No glowing edges. No aether core. No shopkeeper promises that it was “blessed by the Tower” or “sponsor-approved.” He’d wanted something that worked. Something that didn’t break the first time it met bone.

  They stood at the back of a small weapons stall. Jordan tested three staves. He spun each one, movements economical. He didn’t show off. He found the balance point, felt the weight return to his hands, and checked its recovery after a strike.

  The first staff was too light. It moved fast, sure, but it carried no authority.

  The second was all authority and no control—too top-heavy, too slow to redirect.

  The third was dense composite wood, reinforced with metal bands at the grip and weighted caps at both ends. Long enough for reach. Sturdy enough to crack something important without splintering. When Jordan turned it in his hands, his shoulders settled. His stance changed. Less improvisation, more intent.

  “This one,” he’d said.

  The vendor had started a speech.

  Jordan cut him off with a flat look and a slide chip.

  On the way out, Cal had caught Jordan staring at the staff, as if it were a promise and a problem at the same time.

  “This keeps things off you,” Jordan had said, not quite meeting Cal’s eyes.

  Cal had understood what he meant.

  Now, in the plaza, Jordan’s new gear sat beneath his jacket and pack like silent insurance. The staff rested along his back, angled for his hands to find instinctively when he moved.

  The plaza had not changed. Vendors shouted over one another, hawking armor patches, stim packs, and ‘Tower-blessed’ charms—polished scrap and borrowed faith. Lines coiled from the Aether Exchange and registration kiosks. The Tower rose behind it all, a pale, impossible spike punching into cloud and distant corona glow.

  What had changed was Cal.

  And Jordan knew it.

  Three days ago, Cal had walked out of here shaking. Today, the fear sat lower in his chest—compressed, controlled. Resolve instead of panic.

  Jordan watched him adjust the strap of his shield, eyes flicking to the stone bracer still hugging Cal’s left wrist.

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  “That thing still hurt?” Jordan asked, softer.

  “Less,” Cal said. “It holds.”

  Jordan nodded once—approval and relief flickering in his eyes before the practiced composure returned.

  “Good,” he said. “Because I’m not dragging you out by the ankle if it snaps mid-floor.”

  Cal snorted.

  The bracer hadn’t dissolved when Cal stepped back onto Earth. The Tower had let it persist—ugly, uneven stone hugging bone and ligament. Cal had shaved down the worst edges with scavenged tools. It still ached when he flexed.

  It worked.

  His mother breathed easier. The landlord’s marker beside their unit was gray instead of red. Sammy had stopped counting pills aloud.

  Those things existed because of this place.

  Jordan hiked his pack higher. Spare kit, no surplus. He’d pared it down after the swamp.

  “You sure about the route?” Jordan asked. “Forest first, caves second. No hero detours.”

  Cal glanced at him. “You’re the one who wanted to keep it repeatable.”

  Jordan grinned. “I want you alive. Repeatable is how that happens.”

  They stepped into the registration line together.

  Inside the check-in hall, pale screens scrolled disclaimers in a dozen languages—each line a different way of saying the Tower was not responsible if you died, broke, or came back wrong. A bored attendant in a gray vest recited the highlights anyway, voice flat with repetition.

  “…acknowledge that injury, death, and aether-related complications up to and including permanent neurological damage are possible outcomes of voluntary Tower entry.”

  Jordan leaned in, stage-whispering, “They really bury the lede with that one.”

  Cal didn’t react.

  “I acknowledge,” Cal said when prompted.

  “I acknowledge,” Jordan echoed half a beat later.

  The attendant glanced up, eyes flicking over shield, baton, bracer, then to Jordan’s lighter kit.

  They moved with the flow toward the gates. Extraction portals flared on one side as people stumbled back into the world. Entry gates pulsed on the other, waiting.

  Jordan slowed just a fraction before the threshold.

  “Same deal,” he said, voice low now. “I stay where I can see you. You don’t overbuild. We pull if it gets stupid.”

  Cal nodded. “Same deal.”

  They chose a gate together.

  White swallowed them.

  Light. Pressure. Silence.

  Then, Floor One’s forest resolved around them.

  Tall trunks rose in a dense ring. Bark, dark and damp. Branches knitted overhead and filtered sourceless light into a dim canopy. Moss clung thick to exposed roots. The air smelled of wet earth, sap, and faint metallic aether.

  Jordan exhaled slowly.

  “Okay,” he said. “Still hate trees.”

  Cal’s earth sense unfolded instinctively, mapping the floor in quiet contours. He found the shallow ravine that funneled goblin patrols, the ridge that hid the first trap cluster, and the packed stone beneath moss that wouldn’t give way.

  Dangerous. Familiar.

  He raised a fist.

  Jordan stopped instantly.

  First goblin—left. Spear held low. Not looking at them.

  Cal advanced, shield raised to cover his front. He jabbed with his baton, swift and direct.

  The goblin dropped without a sound.

  Jordan scanned the treeline, staff half-drawn across his back, ready to respond if needed.

  “Clean,” he murmured. “No noise.”

  They moved together.

  Jordan didn’t range far. He stayed close enough that Cal could feel his presence even when he didn’t look back—close enough to intervene, far enough not to crowd.

  When Cal’s earth sense brushed a pressure plate under moss, he shifted right without comment. Jordan mirrored him without asking why.

  They reached a thicker cluster of undergrowth where goblin chatter bled through.

  Cal paused behind a trunk and pressed his palm to the ground.

  “Stone Shape,” he whispered.

  Pressure settled behind his breastbone and flowed down his arm. He coaxed a knee-high ridge along the far side of the clearing—angled to break a charge, not stop it.

  Jordan watched the stone rise with narrowed eyes.

  “Cost?” he asked.

  “Low,” Cal said. “Manageable.”

  “Good,” Jordan said. “Then let’s make them regret it.”

  Cal made noise.

  Goblins poured out of the brush.

  They hit the ridge at speed.

  The first tripped. The second collided with it. The third leapt and landed wrong.

  Cal stepped quickly toward the downed goblins, baton up.

  Jordan moved in just behind Cal, waiting for an opening. He swung the staff, cracking a goblin's knee, then swung again at another's temple. When a goblin broke past Cal's shield, Jordan slid sideways to block the spear and snapped his staff upward, deflecting the attack.

  “Hey,” Jordan snapped. “Eyes on me.”

  The goblin obliged.

  It died for the mistake.

  The fight stayed tight and ugly, but short.

  When it ended, Cal was breathing hard. Jordan was breathing harder.

  “Still alive,” Jordan said, forcing brightness into his voice. “Excellent teamwork.”

  Two bodies dissolved. Chips clinked onto damp earth.

  Jordan scooped one up and tossed it to Cal.

  “For the clinic,” he said, and didn’t joke.

  They pushed deeper.

  The forest maze unfolded into remembered paths. Call patterns. Trap placements. Jordan began to anticipate Cal’s pauses—slowing when Cal slowed, shifting when Cal shifted.

  When avoidance failed, they hit fast. Cal shaped small—never more than necessary. A low wall under a root. A spike at shin height. Geometry, not mass.

  Jordan covered angles, never straying so far he couldn’t reach Cal in two strides. He used the staff like a gate and a threat—keeping reach between Cal and anything that wanted to slip around the shield, hooking ankles, cracking wrists, turning a would-be flank into a bad choice.

  After a dense cluster, Cal’s hands trembled faintly.

  Jordan saw it immediately.

  “Stop,” he said.

  Cal leaned against a tree, breathing through the buzz of aether strain.

  “I’m fine,” Cal said.

  Jordan didn’t argue. He just waited, body between Cal and the forest, until the tremor faded.

  “Okay,” he said then. “Move.”

  The goblin caves greeted them with painted brambles and crude totems.

  The rockfall trap that had nearly crushed Cal on his first run met a deliberate trigger and practiced stance. Shield up. Jordan braced behind him, hands ready to grab if the stone shifted wrong.

  The stones slammed down. Dust filled the corridor.

  When it cleared, the path was open.

  “Better,” Jordan said quietly.

  They cleared chambers efficiently. The pit became a disposal. The stalactite ambush failed when Cal refused the expected position, and Jordan baited a spear throw that went wide.

  By the time they reached the long corridor with the knee-high trench and rebuilt barricade, both were breathing hard—but steady.

  “All right,” Cal said softly. “Round two.”

  He crouched in the trench.

  “Stone Shape.”

  A ramp formed on their side. Thin wedges under the barricade’s supports.

  Jordan nodded. “I see it.”

  They advanced together.

  The barricade shifted. Goblins shouted. One lost footing and vanished backward.

  Cal shoved. The structure toppled.

  Jordan went in on Cal’s left, staff swinging low and fast, cutting off a spear aimed for Cal’s ribs and punishing the goblin that tried it with a hard, efficient crack.

  The fight was vicious and short.

  When it ended, Jordan rested his hands on his knees, then looked up at Cal.

  “You good?”

  Cal flexed his wrist. Pain flared, then settled.

  “Good enough.”

  They didn’t linger.

  Floor Two’s swamp greeted them with rot and mist.

  Jordan made a face. “Still hate this more.”

  Cal’s earth sense mapped shelves beneath silt, deep channels to avoid, pockets of waiting weight. He shaped sparingly—thin discs, narrow lips—never more than needed.

  Jordan tested each step before committing, eyes never leaving Cal for long. The reinforced pants helped when mud tried to steal his footing; he recovered cleaner, less sliding panic, and more controlled weight.

  When amphibious humanoids emerged from the reeds, Jordan moved automatically to Cal’s blind side, staff ready.

  Cal shaped a knee-high wall from an outcrop, turning the approach into a funnel.

  Controlled. Contained.

  Jordan’s staff snapped out in short jabs when one tried to slip past the wall. He didn’t chase. He didn’t overextend. He made space. He kept their rhythm intact.

  When vibrations of heavier bodies rolled too close, Jordan was the one who tugged Cal’s sleeve.

  “Not today,” he said.

  They rerouted.

  They reached the ridge where they’d rested days earlier.

  Jordan sat, exhaling hard. “Okay. This? This I can live with.”

  Cal studied the water’s patterns, then nodded.

  They pulled back toward extraction without pushing deeper.

  Efficiency settled in Cal’s chest—warm and dangerous.

  “We could do this,” Cal murmured. “Just us. Early floors.”

  Jordan looked at him sharply.

  “We can,” Jordan said. “Because we’re together.”

  Cal met his gaze.

  The white slice waited.

  They stepped through.