Chương 1: Deal with the Devil

Staring at the mostly empty sky above the desolate landscape of the 99th floor, Nihil could only say one thing.

"What a fucking drag." The rule causing his frustration was featured prominently on the sky. Rule 1: Sort yourselves into groups of three. No matter how many days passed, the rule stayed the same. For a level with no food and no water, this was somewhat problematic, for all that he'd risen beyond most human limits. It was as he heard a shuffling of feet and bodies that he got up from his starfish position laying on the dusty ground and sat up. His trusty army of undead surrounded him, as always.

Dozens upon dozens of highly specialised units ranging from small to big, from old to young and from weak to devastatingly powerful. That was the thing when you relied on human corpses to build your army. You ended up getting a very broad range of sizes and abilities. It had seemed like such a good deal right up until now too. He watched with chapped lips as his undead parted for the only other person present on floor 99. Or rather, the only other human alive in the tower.

A woman dressed in an overly large and tattered brown cloak was approaching him. Hope. Her hood was pulled down for once, as if she wanted to show him how much the action of walking towards him displeased her from her frown. Nihil's attention slowly drifted down the woman's body to the silver revolver held loosely in her right hand. Pointed at the ground, for now. He licked his lips and smiled as Hope came to a stop, a dozen or so meters away. In any other circumstance his army would have ripped her apart.

Now the situation was slightly different.

"Finally come to shoot me?" He teased the brunette.

"Took you long enough." Hope for her part did not yet raise her gun towards him. It wasn't time then.

"How did you know?" she asked in a raspy voice, clearly suffering from the same dehydration that he was. Her eyes flitted distastefully from corpse to corpse, sometimes alighting with a small glee and sometimes with grim recognition.

"I was curious about you and your brother for a very long time," Nihil explained.

"You always seemed to know too much, too soon. What the levels would be, who to trust, who to kill, who to save." He observed the woman as he spoke, but as expected, she remained cold-faced until the end.

"At first I suspected some sort of skill that could predict the future, but there was one inconsistency that bothered me. If you could see the future, then why did you join your brother on the front-lines of the more combat-focused levels?" he asked rhetorically with a smile on his face.

"You're enjoying this? Really, now of all times?" Hope asked with a distasteful curl to her lips.

"I like logic puzzles," Nihil defended himself, palms in the air.

"Can you blame me? This whole situation is like a human body, just waiting to be dissected so it can reveal its secrets."

"Get on with it then," Hope said with a sigh. Nihil did exactly that.

"Your brother was a tank of a man. He could shrug off attacks that would have blown up even my most durable servant, but there was one thing I couldn't help but notice. Once would have been a coincidence, but the second time I started becoming suspicious," he muttered, remembering his train of thought at the time. His eyes remained focused on the silver revolver that wouldn't have been out of place in a western flick.

"Your main skill is obviously based on that revolver, but I never saw you actually do anything with it. You only ever uncocked the safety two times to my knowledge. Both when it looked like your brother would lose a fight, first against that huge centipede on level 57 and then against Michael on level 81. However, one odd thing jumps out. You pointed the revolver not at his enemy, not at yourself, but at him, straight at his head." He held up two fingers and pointed them at his temple.

"Bang!"

"You killed him," Hope said accusingly.

"Can you blame me?" Nihil asked.

"You tried killing me first. That was the other clue by the way. My skill wasn't that powerful at the time and yet I got a hit on my head like I was some sort of monster."

"You are a monster." Nihil wagged his finger in the air.

"But I wasn't back then, so why the interest in killing me?" He shrugged.

"Regardless. I put things together. Someone who knew the future but didn't stay in the backlines, a revolver only ever used to point at her brother in situations in which it looked like he might die… When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains…"

"However improbable, must be the truth," Hope finished.

"So many attempts… so many experience points. All wasted on designing skills that paused time for a tenth of a second or reversed it for a millionth." He paused.

"Do you want to hear my hypothesis?" he asked, gloatingly.

"I'd prefer not hearing your voice any longer than I strictly have to," Hope said instead with her eyes closed, then, she started reciting something.

"First condition: the owner of this skill will never invest any experience points into any other skill. All experience points must be strictly used to increase the amount of time that the victim's memories can be sent back.

"Second condition: the bullet must enter the victim's head to activate the transfer of memories. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Third condition: The time traveller cannot share knowledge of the future if this knowledge cannot be explained by deductive reasoning from information available in the present.

"Fourth condition: the gun is not a summoned item and can be stolen alongside the bullet, at which point the investment is annulled.

"Fifth condition: the victim must be someone whom the user of this skill loves for the user to be able to take the skill again in the past.

"Sixth condition: the user cannot use the bullet on themselves." She shook her head.

"I could go on." Nihil stared at the woman with narrowed eyes, quickly identifying the restrictions that made the skill possible. Skills became more powerful the more restrictive their use and the more of a sacrifice they represented. Never being able to spend experience points to create other skills and funneling all experience into the time travelled was the core of this skill, as was the fact that a simple theft of the revolver could destroy all the investment one had made.

"So many years of experience funneled into a single highly restrictive skill. You had a knowledge discount I assume?" he asked.

"I was a theoretical physicist," Hope said briefly, before raising the silver revolver and looking at it.

"And this is the gun my father used to commit suicide."

"Ah yes," Nihil said with a satisfied nod.

"The family gun, I am familiar with the concept." He closed his eyes.

"A closed loop narrative," he determined eventually.

"You shot your brother just after unlocking the skill all those timelines ago. He goes back in time and tells you to develop the same skill. You survive longer, invest more experience, increase the amount of time even as the years pass." He opened his eyes.

"How far back?" he asked. Hope stared at him, brown eyes on green.

"By now, to the beginning," she eventually admitted.

"Further proof that the tower is a closed system, separate from the rest of the multiverse until it completes its purpose," Nihil muttered as he shook his head.

"It would never have worked otherwise." Hope slowly raised the revolver in her hand until the barrel was pointed straight at Nihil's head. Nihil for his part stood up happily, trying to not break into dance. This was so exciting!

"You said you won't be able to take the skill again if you don't shoot someone you love," he commented with a smirk.

"How about getting to know each other a bit first before you pull the trigger?" Hope glared at him with the dead eyes of someone with nothing to lose.

"There are five normal bullets in this thing," she warned him.

"Don't make me use one of those instead."

"Has anyone told you that you lack a sense of humour?" Nihil complained, before shrugging. He threw one last look at his small army of undead, lovingly saying goodbye to each of them in his head before extending the pointer finger of his right hand and slowly raising it to his forehead. A smile spread across his face. He'd won. Again. Like always.

"I need a promise," Hope said suddenly.

"I think we both agree that the way humans were set against each other by the administrators is unsustainable. This time around you have to save people, not just act selfishly as you climb, killing high potential humans to grow your own power."

"I'm certain I can save enough others on the way up to make the difference," Nihil said confidently.

"It's not in my nature, but I'll need as much fodder as possible to increase the likelihood of having at least two other living humans by the time level 99 comes around again."

"You're just an ant stuck on the road of path dependency," Hope said with a disappointed sigh.

"You created a skill that benefits from human corpses so you followed the incentives laid out and went out of your way to create as many as you could."

"I did what everyone else was doing," Nihil responded, starting to grow impatient, finger still on his forehead.

"I survived the best I could. For all we know reaching the top of the tower grants a wish powerful enough to revive everyone that died along the way. Someone has to get to the top first though. The others squabbled too much to inspire any confidence. They were better off serving a unified purpose. My purpose. I admit I miscalculated, but enough with the talking!" he finished by shouting. Hope's face was pulled in a pained grimace and it was very obvious she didn't want to do what she was about to do.

"The only reason I'm sending you back is because you'll need living, strong allies and my brother fits the bill. Recruit him, he's useful and naive." Nihil nodded seriously. Living allies had become an unfortunate necessity, as for picking the woman's brother… He sized up the person holding him at gunpoint. In all actuality, he was more interested in the sister. She'd come farther than her idiot sibling with no skills other than her brain. They'd even been part of the same group at Level 0. How convenient.

The click of an uncocked safety resounded through the otherwise completely quiet landscape.

"Make sure not to miss, will you?" Nihil said with a smirk as he stared down his nemesis. To think they'd have to rely on each other in the end… Life truly was full of surprises. Bang! -/- What greeted Nihil when he came to was a splitting headache the likes of which he'd never felt before. The only thing keeping him from screaming out in pain was the sheer satisfaction coursing through his entire -incredibly weak- body. He opened his eyes and looked at the rules in the sky. Different ones.

Rules he hadn't seen in a very long time.

"Are you alright? Can you tell me your name and birthdate?" the dark-skinned man crouching above him asked, one of his hands extended to feel Nihil's pulse right at the neck.

"Fuck off," Nihil said happily, slapping the man's arm away before getting up in a seated position and looking around with wonder. The desert. The golden pyramid. That insufferable sheepheaded administrator standing there in a suit, arms crossed behind his back. He'd gone all the way. Level 0.

"You lucky bastard Nihil." He stood up and dusted himself off.

"You did it again," he remarked, shaking his head, before pausing and furrowing his brows.

"Where is everyone?" he suddenly asked, turning back to the now standing man who seemed to be somewhere in his late thirties and had the demeanor of a doctor along with the white coat to prove it. Nihil didn't remember him, but to be fair, most people were irrelevant. The man pointed towards the large pyramid seemingly built entirely out of pure golden bricks that glittered in the sun like the world's most expensive death trap.

The only thing to provide a break from the monotonous sandy landscape and thus the thing that naturally drew the eye.

"They all ran to the pyramid, five minutes I'd say. I stayed behind to look after you since you fell unconscious upon arriving here."

"Fuck," Nihil cursed. He'd been planning on warning a certain someone to not fall for the trap. After all, as level 99 had revealed, he'd need some living allies this time around. Hope, for all that she claimed she wouldn't be able to unlock the same skill again, would be a useful minion considering how far she'd made it.

"Stay here," Nihil told the doctor, before starting to run towards the pyramid.

"And read the rules more carefully next time, will you! You don't find meaning, you make it, and that can be done anywhere!" he shouted over his shoulder. Level 0: Endless Sands Rule 1: You must find Meaning within the hour Rule 2: The area of the level stretches as far as the eye can see Rule 3: Those who fail to find meaning within the hour will be eliminated. The golden pyramid rapidly increased in size as Nihil approached it, sand starting to seep into the sneakers he'd worn that fateful day.

"Haven't killed a goblin in a while," he mused as he finally reached the large entrance to the structure and disappeared inside the longer corridor opened at the front.