Chapter 147: « Tower Of Babel [4] »
The three solos stared at him.
He picked himself up, pointed at each of them, then at the cornerstone block.
They came.
The chat was losing its mind.
💬 TowerWatchKR: HE CAUGHT IT WITH HIS HAND
💬 KangMinFanatic77: PLATE DADDY
💬 GhostClimber_: okay so that’s why he’s on floor 26
💬 user_29441: the three solos are joining what is happening
💬 SeoulTowerFan: Kang Min built a whole squad in like an hour and a half
💬 Watchdog_KR: still need like 3x more people to clear this in time
💬 RealMvpStream: he knows. watch
I watched the northeast. Rapier had reached the grey-geared team.
I could see it from here — she was doing the two-three-two tap on her rapier’s guard. One of the grey-geared climbers turned toward her. She repeated it. The grey-geared climber turned to the group’s leader — I identified them by how the others oriented toward them when uncertain — and the leader watched Rapier for a moment.
Then the leader did the tap back.
My chest loosened by one degree.
Rapier pointed south. Then she traced a path — the relay route I had been building in my head for the past ninety minutes. Block cluster to stone cluster to stone cluster to foundation. A chain. If the grey-geared team held the northeast section and we coordinated the relay through the southern and western sections, we could clear the block quota in five hours. Maybe four if the heavier pieces cooperated.
The grey-geared leader watched her trace the path. Then they turned and said something to their team — whatever came out of their mouth was the demonic screech of Babel’s Curse, but the body language was clear. The team began moving.
South. Toward our position.
That was when the infighting started again.
Not with us. With the group between us and the grey-geared team.
There were about twenty climbers clustered in the central section of the plain — a loose, unorganized mass that had formed out of proximity rather than intention. No clear leader. No signal system. They had been muddling through on their own, making noise occasionally and triggering harpy dives, losing people slowly. They had probably started at thirty and were down to twenty by the time I noticed them properly.
The grey-geared team’s movement through their section triggered a reaction. When a disciplined team of fifteen moved with purpose and coordination through chaotic space, the chaotic people around them either attached or threatened. It was floor psychology — either you wanted to be part of the organized group or you feared what the organized group represented.
Two climbers from the loose central mass moved to block the grey-geared team’s path.
Not to attack. To interrogate. They were gesturing hard, pointing at the cornerstone we were planning to move, pointing back at the foundation, clearly making some kind of claim-based argument that — without words — came out as a series of aggressive pointing gestures that could mean almost anything.
The grey-geared leader tried to step around them.
One of the central-mass climbers pushed the leader.
The grey-geared team went still. Unified. Like a single organism that had just registered a threat.
This was going to become a second west-section incident.
I left Staff in charge of our group with a flat-hand hold signal and started running.
The distance between our position and the confrontation was about sixty meters. I covered it in nine seconds. The push hadn’t escalated to weapons yet — both central-mass climbers were still at the shoving stage, which in silence was already aggressive enough to be dangerous, but there was a window.
I stepped between them.
Both sides looked at me.
I pointed at the grey-geared leader. Then at myself. Then at both central-mass climbers. Then I traced a path with my finger that went from where we stood, around the cornerstone, to the foundation platform, and back to the outer block clusters — a loop. A supply chain.
Everyone gets a role. Everyone gets a section.
The grey-geared leader saw what I was doing and moved up beside me. Tall — taller than I had realized at a distance — with a face that was calm the way experienced climbers were calm. Not relaxed. Just settled. They had seen bad floors before.
The leader repeated my path trace, adding their own detail — pointing at specific block types in the outer clusters and drawing lines to their positions on the foundation blueprint overhead.
The central-mass climbers watched. Their aggression dropped slightly. Not because they trusted us. Because the argument had been replaced by information, and information was harder to push back against than a person.
One of them tapped the grey-geared leader on the arm. Not a push. A tap.
The leader looked at them.
The central-mass climber pointed at a section of the foundation blueprint that had no blocks assigned. An alcove section — I had identified it as a tertiary pillar support, not load-bearing, which meant it could be done last. But it needed to be done.
They were asking: can we do that?
The grey-geared leader looked at me.
I nodded.
The leader pointed at the alcove section, then at the central-mass climbers, and gave a firm nod.
The tension drained out of the confrontation like water from a cracked bowl.
Not completely. Two climbers from the central mass drifted away and watched us with narrow eyes from twenty meters. They weren’t convinced. But they weren’t fighting either.
I could work with that.
I turned back toward our group and started moving. The grey-geared team fell into step behind me. The remaining eighteen central-mass climbers — some hesitant, some committed — followed at varying distances.
Thirty-one people moving with rough coordination.
It wasn’t enough, but it was the floor’s beginning.
[Time Remaining: 06:44:33]
[Blocks Placed: 14 / 88]
[Foundation Integrity: 89%]
[Active Climbers: 179]
The timer hadn’t cared about the diplomacy. It had kept cutting while I negotiated in silence. Eight climbers had died during the western section confusion — I hadn’t been there to prevent that.
I noted it. I stored it.
The harpies circled overhead, patient.
The cornerstone waited.
I went back to work.
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[LiveStream Viewers: 2,340,112]
💬 KangMinFanatic77: 179 active... 35 already gone
💬 GhostClimber_: this floor is eating people
💬 Watchdog_KR: 14/88 with under 7 hours left... it’s possible but tight
💬 SeoulTowerFan: what are those two in the back of the central group doing
💬 TowerWatchKR: just watching. not helping
💬 RealMvpStream: they’ll be a problem later
💬 user_48821: Kang Min has to know that right
💬 RealMvpStream: he knows everything
