Chapter 246: To The Next Floor
Within the HQ of the Red Sun clan, noise echoed through the hall.
Stone walls, polished banners, and a ceiling high enough that any raised voice came back twice, once as the original, and once as a reminder that everyone nearby could hear you losing your composure.
"What do you mean broke Leonard’s Record!" the sound of footsteps echoed loudly in there.
Lucas didn’t walk so much as stomp. Each step struck like he was trying to crack the floorboards out of spite. He’d already been tense before the message reached him, already annoyed at the quiet kind of problems that stacked one after another, then this hit, and the restraint snapped.
"Lucas, I told you what I saw, I don’t know who it was. We’re still receiving notice from our guys at the Fortress."
The man trailing him spoke fast, like speed would make the news less painful. He had a thin stack of notes in his hands, a couple message slips tucked into his belt, and the look of someone who’d rather be fighting monsters than delivering updates to someone who could break a table with his palm.
Lucas stopped hard enough that the man almost collided into him.
"Get me information on whoever he, or she is. I’m not standing for this shit a second time."
His voice didn’t carry anger alone. It carried possession. The tone of a man who believed certain things were owned by the people who worked for them, records included.
A record was more than a number in this tower. It was reputation. It was recruitment power. It was bragging rights that turned into resources.
And someone had just ripped that out of their hands.
"It’s still anonymous," the man next to Lucas said.
Lucas’ jaw tightened. The anonymous tag wasn’t just annoying, it was insulting. Like the person who did it didn’t even consider the guilds worth acknowledging.
"Get Iori on it, he’s got a good nose he’ll know who it was."
He didn’t even hesitate before saying Iori’s name, like it was a tool he could pull off the shelf. The irony would’ve been funny if Lucas was in a mood to laugh.
"Iori is on the eleventh floor, he won’t be able to come back right now..." the man next to Lucas replied.
Lucas sat down inside his own office and the follower closed the door, that won’t do much for all the howls he was about to listen to.
There was a split second where Lucas didn’t move. Just stood there with his hands hovering near the edge of the table, fingers flexing as if he was deciding whether to break something now or break it later.
"Shit," Lucas struck the table hard.
The wood didn’t crack, this table had been reinforced for people like him, but it still jumped.
This was the second time this happened.
A person broke Leonard’s record on the first floor one year ago, but that man was probably dead by now. They were reported to have been bleeding out, and after interrogating the man who sold potions they realized that he was dying from internal energy issues.
Lucas’ eyes narrowed as the memory resurfaced. That first one had been a headache. A brief flare of panic in the guild, a scramble of rumors, then... silence. No follow-up. No confirmed identity. Just a ghost story that ended in a corpse they never saw.
That man must have been dead, his injuries weren’t something you could cure with simple means, and he needed powerful and high-level potions to cure. So he was out of the picture.
Not even the Fist King had something like that on him, even if the Fist King took the kid, after all, everyone in this tower knows, the fist king is broke as fuck.
Lucas let the bitterness sit in his chest. Broke as fuck, yet still untouchable. Still beyond guild control. Still a walking contradiction that made every structure feel flimsy.
The Fist King couldn’t have saved him. He cannot afford something that expensive, the man never even bought or used gear. All he used was his body.
The worst kind of power. The kind that didn’t need shops, didn’t need gear, didn’t need permission. And couldn’t be controlled or goaded.
"I’ll have to go myself then," Lucas stood up.
He pushed the chair back with his thigh and it scraped harshly against the floor, a sound that made the man beside him flinch. Lucas didn’t look at him. He was already thinking about routes, checkpoints, which names could be trusted, which couldn’t, how fast information moved when the Leonards were hungry.
"We don’t know where he’ll end up, the third floor is very... vast."
A warning, and an excuse. Lucas didn’t accept either.
"You think I don’t know that? If you’re not helping piss off. I’m already annoyed with the fact we lost one Record Breaker, now the second, Mathew won’t stay still this time."
Because if Red Sun didn’t move fast, someone else would, and then they’d spend the next year regretting it.
"We’ll send in the guys, please, just give us some time, we have a few climbers ready and trained for the second floor boss, they’ll hunt the man down once they get there."
The man spoke like training mattered more than reality. Like a plan mattered more than the fact the tower did not care how prepared you thought you were.
Lucas’ head snapped toward him.
"Hunt? Are you fucking stupid?" Lucas howled, "The bastard broke Leonard’s record! BY FORTY TWO FUCKING SECONDS! You know what that means? Either the boss killed itself, or the fucker is strong enough to one-shot him right off the bat."
His voice echoed down the hall, even through the closed door.
Lucas wasn’t exaggerating. Forty-two seconds wasn’t shaving a record. It was erasing the concept of a record.
"I doubt anyone can grow that strong in the second floor, it doesn’t have any monsters. And stats you gain doing menial work aren’t that... worthwhile. We also know that the man was solo... so he wasn’t guild assisted."
The logic was clean. That made it more terrifying.
If that was true, then the tower had just produced something they couldn’t predict. Something that didn’t fit the normal climb. Something that didn’t grow through steady progression.
Something that arrived.
"Solo? How did he even get into the fortress then? Who the hell let him in?"
Lucas leaned forward, palms pressed into the table now. His fingers dug into the wood like he was trying to leave his frustration there permanently.
"Blue rose, the guards said he got a blue rose slip."
Lucas’ face tightened. He didn’t look surprised, he looked irritated in a more exhausted way now, like this was the kind of annoyance that came from a pattern.
"Shit. Must be that bastard’s doing..." Lucas sighed as he sat back on his chair.
It wasn’t surrender. It was recalibration.
"You mean the Blue Rose Guildmaster?"
"Yeah, who else, the bastard likes playing bartender. And screwing us over."
Lucas rubbed his face with both hands, then folded them under his chin, elbows on the table. The posture of someone thinking through a problem he didn’t want to exist.
The tower wasn’t just floors and monsters. It was people with influence. People who could decide whether you lived easily or lived hard.
A bartender handing out a slip could change the entire balance of the second floor, and that was exactly the kind of petty chaos the Blue Rose liked.
"We can’t allow this, go, send the guys, but don’t fight him, find out who he is, what’s his name, affiliation even the color of his underwear. I don’t fucking care, just give me information. If the Leonards recruit that guy, we’re in a world of headaches."
Every word was a command. Not because Lucas loved power, but because he knew what happened when you hesitated here. You lost people. You lost opportunities. You lost the future.
"Alright, on it boss." The man said and rushed down.
The footsteps faded quickly. The hall swallowed them like it swallowed everything else, voices, plans, lives.
Lucas was left thinking alone, this happened at the worst possible moment too.
His forces were already spread too thin. Looking for Yenna who last appeared on the twenty second floor got a good portion of their low tier climbers dead. Now, hunting for a newbie will make him delegate even more people. And he can’t just stay put.
If the Leonards get their hands on him, and recruit him, he’ll be another Leo. Another monster of this tower.
Lucas stared at the table without seeing it, his mind chewing through possibilities like a dog gnawing bone. A second record breaker was either a coincidence, rare, or a trend, worse. And Lucas didn’t like trends he couldn’t control.
"I need a drink..."
Kael stared at the fallen slumped corpse for a bit longer than he should.
Not because he felt guilty. Not because he was shocked by violence, he’d long since burned through that innocence. It was simply because his brain needed a second to connect reality to expectation.
He expected it to be hard. He expected to have to move, dodge, time the five minutes, maybe even burn stamina and take a few hits while he tested what kind of monster this "hobgoblin" really was.
He expected a fight.
Instead, the room was quiet again, except for the faint settling crackle of scorched flesh and the slow drip of something that used to be inside the creature’s body. The club lay on the floor like a fallen tree, its weight shaking dust loose whenever it shifted from the corpse’s collapse.
Kael expected that he got strong, especially after how slow that swing was from the Hobgoblin. And how he reacted to it.
He could still feel the timing in his bones, the clean sidestep, the planted foot, the twist of core. His master’s training didn’t give him bravery. It gave him automatic motion. The kind that happened even when your head screamed death.
He knew he could avoid, play it safe, and then slowly grind the beast down until it’s dead.
But... this was something else completely.
This was complete obliteration.
The creature lost its guts, stomach, spine and back all in one blow, it never even got the chance to retaliate or react, it died from one punch.
Kael flexed his fist slowly, staring at his knuckles like they belonged to someone else. The rings were still on his wrists. The weight was still there. Yet his hand felt light, too light. Like the punch had taken nothing from him. Like it had been a casual thing.
That thought was the part that bothered him.
The slew of notifications appeared in front of him.
[You have broken a record in the second floor. Your choice of wanting to keep your name anonymous has been preserved until you choose otherwise.]
[You have defeated an opponent twenty levels above yours with one blow]
[You have received the Title: One Punch Man]
+5 Strength + 5 Dex
[You have unlocked a hidden achievement]
Slaying a floor boss while still being at level 1.
[Only I don’t Level Up]
+5 to all stats.
[You have unlocked the hidden achievement for slaying a floor boss under five seconds]
[Any% SpeedRun]
You have received a randomized -A class Chest Reward.
Would you like to open it now?
Kael’s eyes skimmed fast, the way you read danger signs when you already know the important part is somewhere in the text. "Anonymous preserved" landed like a small blessing.
He didn’t want guilds knowing he existed, at least not yet. Not until he had footing on whatever came next.
Then the "twenty levels above" part hit him, and he paused.
He stared at it like the system had made a typo.
Twenty levels above. Only then did Kael realize, it took him a year and change to remember one simple fact. He never harvested the deferred experience he got from the first floor.
He simply forgot about it...
His gaze dropped to the title.
One Punch Man.
Kael’s mouth opened slightly, then closed.
Kael stared at the corpse again, then at the gate, as if expecting the creature to stand back up out of spite. Nothing moved. The room remained still.
He exhaled slowly.
Right now, the only thing between him and the rest of the tower was a door that had just accepted him.
Kael rolled his shoulders once, the way he did before a climb, before a spar, before anything that mattered.
He just started walking, because standing still in this tower was how you became a story someone else told.
