Chương 443: Interlude - Third Ascent (I)

Jack found himself in an empty white room. He stood at the centre of it, completely still, in total silence. He blinked. Looked down at his hands. Flexed his fingers. This was it. This was the real deal. No VR rig. No neural mesh. No safety net. This… was The Tower. His pulse spiked hard before it slowly, grudgingly settled. He looked around. Four white walls, white floor, white ceiling. Same as the isolation tests he had run hundreds of times in the rig.

The test that had once broken hundreds of thousands from Gen-1 had become, through sheer repetition and preparation, about as threatening as a waiting room at the dentist. He was about to find a corner and sit down, maybe close his eyes, let the time pass, when something flickered inside his head. A message. Clear and cold, the kind that left zero room for misreading. [As a Chosen of the Wielder of the Stellar Expanse you are entitled to an advantage. Prove you are worthy of the trust placed upon you.] Jack stared at nothing for a full second.

"... What?" His eyes dropped to the centre of the room. An orb rested there. Dark, almost black, with faint lights shifting inside it like distant stars caught behind glass. It sat there quietly, like it had always been there. Jack stepped closer and came to a stop over the orb, staring down at it. For all the months he had spent behind a screen watching Alonso do impossible things, he had never quite been able to wrap his head around the gap between him and everyone else.

But this, a personal bonus handed down by The Tower itself based solely on whose name had been spoken, made it land on a whole different level. It felt almost like a blessing passed down from a god to his chosen warrior. And the scariest part was how little of that statement was actually an exaggeration. He crouched down, hand hovering over the orb.

"Alright then," he muttered.

"Let's see what you've got." His fingers closed around it. The orb dissolved the moment he made contact, spreading through his skin like a cold current running up his arms and into his chest, a brief, clean sensation like stepping into a cool breeze on a hot day. His mind went quiet for a second… and then it passed. He blinked. Looked around. Nothing seemed different at first. Then he raised his hands— He flinched, completely caught off guard. What the hell…

Dark gauntlets covered his fists from knuckle to mid-forearm, their surface a deep matte black with a faint rough texture like compressed stone. Across the front, four blunt, reinforced protrusions sat embedded in the material, like brass knuckles. The fit was perfect, as if the gauntlets had been shaped around his hands, tailored made. Jack turned his fists over slowly, flexing his fingers. The material moved with him without resistance, every joint tracking his grip like a second skin.

He pulled back and drove a slow punch into the open air. The gauntlet caught the light as his arm extended, the reinforced knuckle protrusions cutting a clean arc through the space in front of him. He felt the weight of it differently to a bare fist, denser, more deliberate, like the difference between throwing a stone and throwing a fist-sized chunk of iron. His forearm tracked through the motion with a satisfying solidity he had never quite felt before.

He threw another, faster this time, then a short combination—jab, cross, hook—the kind of sequence he had drilled ten thousand times in the VR. The gauntlets responded to every movement without drag or restriction, the material flexing naturally through each transition. After a few satisfying moves, he stopped, staring at his fists for a moment, his chest rising slightly from the effort.

"This," he said quietly, "this is amazing." He looked up at the white ceiling, then back down at the gauntlets. Then he laughed, genuine and grateful, the kind that bubbles up before you can stop it. Yet it faded quickly into something warmer, and then that too settled into something heavier, the kind of weight that came from being trusted. Right now he was nothing. Whatever he stood here with—the gauntlets, the head start—all of it existed under the immense shadow of the world's greatest Climber. His best friend.

Alonso. But that wasn't his story. He had earned none of it… not yet. His story… started now. He closed his fists slowly, feeling the gauntlets settle around his knuckles, and looked up at the white walls ahead. He wondered about the other chosen and what weapons they might have gotten. Six days ago he'd gotten a call from some old bloke named Viktor, who had introduced himself within the first ten seconds as "the guy who used to run ASCENT, past tense, very much retired now, long story."

He'd laughed at his own joke before Jack had even processed it, which had immediately made Jack like him. Viktor had asked straight up whether Jack had been chosen by Alonso too, easy and casual, like two mates comparing notes over a beer. He'd been a little hesitant at first… but the old man had been so disarmingly straightforward about the whole thing that Jack had just gone with it.

Seven of them total, Viktor had said, running through the names and faces with the enthusiasm of someone genuinely excited about the lineup. Jack wouldn't lie—learning he was just one of seven had stung a little at first. It made him feel marginally less special in Alonso's eyes. But it made sense after he thought about it. Alonso had built a life inside, met good people, people he trusted, missed, or both, and of course he'd want them back.

They'd talked through the possibility of crossing paths if the situation allowed it, and Viktor had ended the call with "don't die on me, son" in a tone that somehow managed to be both a joke and completely sincere at the same time. Jack was open to meeting them. Had nothing to do with any instructions from ASCENT—he gave exactly zero fucks to that on principle—but these were people Alonso had chosen personally, and that meant something. Truth be told, he was curious about all of them.

He looked ahead at the empty white room stretching out in front of him. Where were they right now, he wondered.

Viktor stared at the two-handed sword resting in his hands, its dark blade carrying the weight and proportion of a Zweihänder, with a mix of quiet amusement and something heavier sitting well behind his eyes. More than the weapon itself, it was the meaning behind it that struck him. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. He had underestimated how much The Tower valued a Contender.

The last message from Gen-1 and Gen-2 had covered the Observer rank Alonso had attained, and Viktor had already formed a strong working hypothesis that Contender was the rank that followed. The specific conditions for attaining either remained unclear to him, but the direction was not. Ranks of that kind were surely not handed out casually. They were carved out, through achievements The Tower itself chose to acknowledge. And The Tower acknowledged very little.

He turned the blade slowly in his hands, watching the light move across the dark metal. In a future shaped by Climbers, those at the top would decide the fate of everyone below them. Viktor had understood that principle from the beginning, had built ASCENT around it, had spent decades preparing humanity for exactly that reality. And now The Tower was formalizing it, granting benefits, authority, influence over the trajectory of their entire civilization, to those who reached the highest rungs.

For all practical purposes, Alonso could already be considered the de facto leader of mankind. Through nothing humanity had ever built, no politics, no armies, no institutions, simply through the weight of what he had become, and what The Tower had chosen to place in his hands. Viktor exhaled slowly through his nose. He took in his surroundings. The beach stretched out wide in both directions, white sand, warm air, the kind of quiet that only existed before things got complicated.

The Island, as they had taken to calling it. He had suspected this might be a possibility. Seventy seven years ago he had passed a similar test to the white rooms, and his current SP sat at 1%, which apparently carried enough merit to skip the tutorial. He rolled his shoulders once, loosened his neck, and looked out toward the water.

"Might as well clear some leeches before the place gets crowded," he said to no one, then walked calmly to the shoreline, the Zweihänder planted in the sand behind him. Using nothing but his nails, he made two clean cuts across his wrist and stood still at the water's edge, arm extended, letting the blood thread into the current. He waited. The first leech came fast, launching from beneath the surface in a tight arc aimed at the bleeding wrist. Viktor's hand turned. A small, precise rotation, timed to the fraction.

The leech's arc carried it past his skin by a hair, and his fingers closed around it mid-flight, crushing through its body in a single clean grip before releasing. The creature dissolved. The orb absorbed. Viktor reset, arm back over the water, expression unchanged. More shapes stirred beneath the surface. He watched them come.

Arjun felt a sudden dizziness wash through him, like a lagging feeling, his body dropping in weight all at once as if gravity had tightened its grip without warning. He planted his feet in the grass and steadied himself, one hand briefly touching the trunk of a nearby palm before he straightened. His mind, which had grown accustomed to operating dozens of times faster than baseline human thought, felt muted. Still sharp by any ordinary standard, but noticeably slower than what he had come to treat as normal.

Thoughts assembled a fraction later than expected, his processing carrying a subtle drag he had to consciously account for. His EM perception had pulled back significantly. The wide, detailed awareness he was familiar with had compressed inward, still functional but with far less range and resolution than he was used to. And then The Tower sent him two signals. Both completely unexpected. Stage 1 – 3. 095% And— [As a Chosen of the Wielder of the Stellar Expanse you are entitled to an advantage. Prove you are worthy of the trust placed upon you.] Arjun frowned. His SP had been reset. He looked around slowly, taking in the familiar warmth of the air, the shimmer of the lake nearby, the palms swaying at the edge of the clearing. He knew this place well. The Oasis. So The Tower had brought him back to this point, huh. The SP value matched the ceiling of this place too, which meant perhaps that this was considered, in a way, a spawn point for those that had failed after it. He let that settle.

Made peace with it, the way he had learned to make peace with most things. He had climbed from here once. He would climb again… and higher than before. He turned his attention to the second message. An advantage? He looked around and noticed a black orb resting in the grass nearby, catching the light in a way that seemed almost deliberate. He knelt and pressed his fingers against it. It dissolved into his skin with a calm, clean sensation that spread up through his arm and across his chest.

Then something materialised in his hands. Arjun stared at it, eyes widening in surprise. A sniper rifle? It bore a clear resemblance to the one Imani and Lukas had built for him during the Ajnal stage, the same general proportions and EM-based architecture. The frame was darker, a deep matte finish that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. Like its predecessor, it carried no trigger mechanism.

Acceleration was purely EM-based, a series of concentric magnetic rings running the length of the barrel, each one precisely spaced to build velocity in controlled stages as a round passed through. He noticed a pouch at his waist a moment later. He sent a careful wave through it and counted 21 rounds inside, each one a small, dense, highly conductive sphere. His gaze returned to the rifle with interest.

He also noticed he was wearing the plain white clothes from the white rooms, and the standard sword that should have been on him at this point was missing, which suggested the sniper was, in a way, a personalized upgrade to the starting weapon." Arjun?" He turned sharply as a pulse hit his mind. His perception locked onto a figure moving through the trees at the far edge of the Oasis. Mei. He sent her a pulse back.

He was already moving toward her when he noticed other presences scattered across the Oasis, unfamiliar signatures, new faces. Reselected members of Gen-2, most likely. Then two more pulses reached him, familiar ones. Ishaam. Camila. Within a few minutes they were standing together at the edge of the lake, the water catching the warm light behind them, the familiar smell of the Oasis settling around them like something half remembered.

Camila got there first, already grinning before she had fully closed the distance.

"Oh my god, we're back," she said, looking around with a wide smile on her face.

"I actually missed this place. Is that weird? I think that might be weird, actually."

"It's a little weird," Mei said, though she was smiling too, her eyes already moving to the weapons in Camila's hands.

"Are those… boomerangs?"

"Yep," Camila confirmed, holding them up with obvious pride, the curved bladed frames tilting in the light.

"Don't know if it was The Tower, Alonso, or just the universe having a sense of humor, but whoever decided… good call."

"They are very you," Mei admitted. Ishaam arrived shortly after, quieter than the others, taking in the group with a measured look before a genuine smile crossed his face.

"Good to see you all," he said simply.

"Cool daggers," Camila said, already eyeing the single edged dark bladed pair at his sides. Ishaam nodded, turning one over once in his hand.

"They feel right." Camila then shifted her attention to Mei, head tilting slightly as she tried to make sense of what her friend was gifted.

"You got a… an extended gauntlet?" Mei shook her head and lifted her left arm. The metal coating dissolved in an instant, breaking apart into countless shards that spread into a loose orbit around her forearm, each one catching the light as they shifted under her focus.

"I believe it functions similarly to the Dark Stars from the Xok'al stage," she said, studying them with that particular expression she got when something had genuinely engaged her.

"A collection of highly conductive shards. The individual components seem less refined than the Dark Stars were, but the configuration is interesting. I will need more time to assess the full specs."

"Nice," Camila said with an approving nod. Ishaam glanced at Arjun, then at the rifle.

"You got your sniper back, Captain?"

"Ishaam," Arjun said, a smile slipping through despite himself.

"Are you really going to keep that up?"

"Yes," Ishaam said, face perfectly even.

"Feels odd otherwise." Camila looked between them.

"I love that for you both." Arjun exhaled quietly through his nose, which for him was roughly the equivalent of laughing. They stood there for a moment, the four of them, the lake behind them, the warm air of the Oasis moving through the palms above. The same place where each of them had met for the first time, and yet all of them very different from who they had been then. The quiet held for a breath longer before Arjun's head turned toward the horizon.

A figure at the far edge of the clearing moved through the grass at an unhurried pace. His expression carried something difficult to place. Serene, maybe. Or the particular quiet of someone returning to a place they had carried with them for a long time. He held a talwar in each hand, the curved blades turning slowly with each step, catching the light without trying to. The group turned one by one.

Their expressions differed, some more guarded, others warmer, but beneath it all, the same thing: a quiet, complicated respect that needed no explanation. The man who had brought order to the Oasis at its worst. Who had put Hughes in the ground when few others dared try. Who had been, before everything that followed, the strongest fighter any of them had ever seen. Whatever he had been to each of them back then, there was no denying what he had represented, and the mark he had left on all of them. Siddharth Kubar.