Chapter 144: « Tower Of Babel [1] »
[Floor 26 – Entry Confirmed]
[Main Scenario: Build the Bridge to Heaven]
[Work together to assemble the celestial bridge. Do not let the foundation crumble.]
[Current Climbers on Floor 26: 214]
[South Korea National Record – Highest Active Floor: 26]
The floor loaded in white.
Not the usual grey fog or the sick orange glow of combat floors. Pure, blinding white, like someone had replaced the sky with a sheet of paper and forgotten to draw the world underneath it.
Then the light pulled back, and I saw it.
A structure the size of a collapsed city. Stone blocks the size of apartment buildings were scattered across a flat plain that stretched in every direction without end. Some blocks were already stacked, half-forming columns that reached toward a ceiling too high to see. Scaffolding made of bone-white material threaded between them. At the center of the plain stood a raised platform — the foundation — and above it, in the air, floated the outline of a bridge drawn in faint gold light.
That was the target. That was what we had to build.
I had thirty seconds to take it all in before the System spoke.
[Babel’s Curse — ACTIVE]
[All verbal communication scrambled.]
[Party UI — DISABLED]
[System chat — DISABLED]
[Coordination status: INDIVIDUAL]
Then the sound hit.
Someone to my left opened their mouth — a woman in a red combat jacket, tall, dark hair pulled back tight. She was clearly trying to say something, probably a greeting or a quick assessment. What came out instead was a low, grinding screech, like metal being dragged across stone at half-speed. It stopped the moment she closed her mouth. She looked at her own throat with an expression I recognized.
Pure, cold fear.
I kept my mouth shut. I already knew what this was.
The old world had a version of this. Not the same — nothing in the Tower was ever exactly the same — but I had read the records. Floor 26 used to be called The Voiceless, back when the Tower’s earliest iteration ran through the northern routes before the re-calibration. Climbers had died on that floor not from the monsters. They had died from each other. From panic. From infighting that started the moment people realized they couldn’t speak.
Right now, 214 climbers were standing on this plain.
Most of them were going to die.
I felt nothing about that. I wanted to. I tried to feel something. But I had come back from the end of this road already, and somewhere on that return trip the part of me that felt grief for strangers had been sanded down to a hard flat surface. I noted the number.
The interface in the corner of my vision showed the viewer count. It had spiked the moment the floor loaded.
[LiveStream Viewers: 1,247,883]
The chat was moving faster than I could read. Fragments scrolled past.
-KangMinFanatic77: FLOOR 26?? KOREA NEVER CLEARED THIS
-TowerWatchKR: 214 climbers??? that’s huge
-WatcherNorth: wait why can’t anyone talk
-GhostClimber_: babel’s curse lol they’re cooked
I didn’t acknowledge the chat. Not yet. I needed to move first.
The plain was already fracturing into noise — silent noise, which is the worst kind. People were grabbing each other’s arms, pointing, gesturing. Some were already pulling out weapons. A group of maybe fifteen in coordinated grey gear had formed a tight circle near the northeast section of the plain — they had pre-planned signals, hand gestures, clearly some kind of arranged team. They were already functioning. Good.
Everyone else was chaos.
I scanned for the immediate threats and found them within twenty seconds.
The harpies were nesting in the upper scaffolding.
They were huge. Wingspan of six, maybe seven meters each. Feathers the color of burned wood, heads that were almost human in shape but wrong in every proportion — too long, too flat, eyes set at the sides instead of the front. They were watching the climbers below with something that wasn’t hunger. It was patience. They were waiting for the coordination to break down before diving.
Smart monsters. The Tower loved making smart monsters.
I counted nine visible in the upper scaffolding. Probably more hidden in the columns.
Then I looked at the blocks.
The puzzle itself was intricate. Each massive stone block had symbols carved into its sides.
The symbols had to match when blocks were placed adjacent. Wrong placement didn’t just fail, it caused a collapse event. I had seen the failure condition described in old Tower logs I no longer had access to in this life, but I remembered the shape of it. Wrong block, wrong orientation, the foundation cracks. Crack too many times, the whole thing resets. Enough resets and the floor timer runs out.
There was a timer. I just hadn’t found it yet.
I looked up. In the corner of the impossible sky, numbers burned in gold.
[Time Remaining: 09:58:44]
Ten hours. It sounded generous but it wasn’t.
I tapped the flat of my blade against my left vambrace twice, then three times. A pause. Then twice again.
A climber nearby, young guy, maybe early twenties, short spiky hair, carrying a staff that was almost too big for him turned toward the sound. His eyes were sharp. He had been watching me since I started moving. He wasn’t afraid. That was useful.
I did the tap again. Two. Three. Two.
He tilted his head. Then he repeated it back on the shaft of his staff. Two. Three. Two.
Good. He understood the concept even if he didn’t know the code yet.
I held up my hand, palm flat. Then I pointed at him, then at myself, then swept my hand toward the nearest block cluster to our south.
He nodded.
That was one.
I needed more, but I couldn’t spend time recruiting. The harpies would dive the moment the first stone moveh, that was how this floor worked. The puzzle and the defense had to happen simultaneously, and right now there were 214 people with no way to talk, no party UI, no shared objective marker, and no one taking charge.
Except me.
