Chapter 280: Risky Endeavor
The runic words beneath the Beast’s fur were not arranged like sentences.
That was the first thing Kael noticed once he stopped looking at the claws and began looking past them. The writing did not flow from shoulder to spine in structured commands, nor did it form a layered logic of runic interactions. It was simpler than that, and somehow worse because of it. The same word repeated over and over again beneath the Beast’s skin, pulsing in red-black light each time its body swelled larger, each time its muscles thickened, each time its sanity seemed to peel farther away from whatever it had once been. Kael could not fully read the script at first glance, but he understood enough to recognize intent.
More.
Again and again, written through flesh like a commandment.
More strength. More size. More rage. More violence.
The situation began turning worse with every passing breath. The Beast was already larger than it had been when its enraged state began, and there was no visible ceiling to that growth. Kael had no desire to find out what happened if he allowed the process to continue for too long. Something that grew without limit might as well become a world-eating giant given enough time, and although that sounded absurd inside a floor challenge, the tower had already made it clear that absurdity was not a barrier it respected.
But power like that could not come without a price.
Kael knew that better than most. Every rune he used had a cost, whether direct internal energy consumption or some unpleasant condition hidden in the function itself. Heft gave power but demanded control and burdened the body. Fire burned through resources if he forced too much out of it. Darkness was worse, devouring energy like a hungry hole whenever he tried to shape it into anything useful. Even Anchor, his so-called legendary rune, was not some omnipotent miracle. In practice, Anchor was almost a massive nerf until properly understood, limiting application and forcing stability onto chains that would otherwise rip themselves apart through volatility. It was powerful because it subdued chaos, not because it gave him freedom.
So whatever rune had been buried inside the Dark Beast had to function under the same principle.
It gave strength. It gave growth. It stripped away predatory intelligence and pushed the creature toward ferality. But that could not be the whole downside. Losing sanity was terrible for the Beast’s technique, yes, but not nearly enough to balance the raw increase in power it was gaining. The more the rune gave, the more it had to take. Kael just needed to survive long enough to see where the payment was being collected.
The Beast’s paw crashed down where he had been standing.
Kael moved aside with barely enough room to spare, and the impact sent chunks of stone bursting from the arena floor. Its paw was almost the size of his entire body now, each claw long enough to gut him from chest to hip without slowing. The increased mass had made the creature’s movements slightly rougher, less smooth than before, but the speed remained obscene. Even when its larger body dragged against its own acceleration, the sheer power behind every lunge made the air buckle around it.
Kael ducked beneath another swipe and slipped toward the inside angle, thinking of striking again, then abandoned the opening when the Beast’s broken mouth twisted toward him too quickly. He kicked off the ground and slid under its jaw instead, fire trailing from his gauntlets as the remaining fang scraped close enough to carve sparks from the stone beside his shoulder. For a moment, the thought of removing the Black Iron rings flashed through his mind. If he took the weights off and threw everything he had into one fully unleashed punch, maybe he could break through the creature’s growing body before it became too much to handle.
Then his master’s warning returned with perfect clarity.
A body that could move freely was not the same thing as a body that could survive its own freedom.
Without the weights limiting him, his speed and strength would surge past what his muscles and bones had properly adapted to contain. The blow might land. It might even do real damage. But if it shattered every part of his arm in the process and left him unable to keep fighting afterward, then it was not a solution. It was a gamble with a corpse waiting at the end. Unless the fight became a clean do-or-die situation, he could not afford it.
Unfortunately, the gap between this and do-or-die was shrinking.
The Beast grew more eager as Kael kept retreating through narrow margins. Its confidence rose with each exchange. The red vapor pouring from its body thickened, turning the air around it into a steaming haze that made the firelight warp strangely. It no longer tried to disappear into shadow or circle for a perfect opening. It simply chased him, certain that one clean hit would end the fight. And with Razor Sharp still waiting behind every claw and fang, the Beast was probably right.
Kael avoided two consecutive paw swipes by the width of a hand, his body folding and twisting through the space between them while the Wanderlusting Demon footwork kept him from wasting motion. The third attack was not a swipe but a tail strike, coming from the side with such speed that dodging cleanly would have put him under the next paw. He crossed both gauntleted arms and took it.
The impact nearly lifted him off the ground.
Pain shot through both forearms, traveling up to his elbows and shoulders so violently that for an instant he thought something had cracked. The Heft rune and the density from Stone helped keep his guard from collapsing, but the tail still drove him sideways, boots tearing grooves through the stone as he skidded away. His arms rang with numbness afterward, the bones aching as if they had been struck by the
The Beast turned toward him immediately, red fur bristling, the rune-script under its skin flaring again.
Kael flexed his fingers and felt the delay in his response. Not much, but enough to matter. His internal energy bar had fallen further while he was busy trying not to be turned into shredded meat. It hovered close to halfway now, too low for comfort and dropping faster whenever he reinforced a strike or fed fire into the arena to deny the Beast its shadows. He had not found a decisive path yet. All he had done was confirm that the enemy could grow, ignore pain, and pressure him into exhausting himself.
His thoughts darkened.
"Should I really just give up an arm..." he muttered.
The Beast took a step forward.
Then its hind leg jerked strangely.
It was not a stumble caused by injury in the normal sense. The leg simply moved wrong, as if for half a heartbeat the creature had forgotten what command it was supposed to obey. The paw struck the ground at an awkward angle, and the Beast’s massive body dipped. It corrected almost immediately, dragging the limb back under itself with a violent snarl, but Kael had already seen it.
He stopped breathing for a moment.
His eyes narrowed, focusing beneath the red fur.
The runes were cracking.
The repeated word still pulsed under the Beast’s skin, still forcing more strength through the body, but some of the symbols now had fractures running through their lines. Tiny breaks, almost invisible under the glow, but spreading. Each flare made the cracks widen. Each surge of growth stressed the script further. The Beast was not simply becoming stronger. It was being overloaded by the very command empowering it.
Kael understood.
"I see," he said under his breath. "It was never meant to be defeated. It was meant to be survived."
The realization was obvious once he saw it. The hidden objective was not necessarily a test of killing the Dark Beast at its peak. It was a test of whether climbers could endure its territory, avoid its strongest exchanges, and last long enough for the rune inside it to destroy its own stability. The creature’s power had a timer built into it. Run, evade, stay alive, let the monster grow too far, and eventually the thing would collapse under the weight of its own artificial strength.
That was probably how the others had done it.
The thought annoyed him more than he expected.
It was not that survival was worthless. Kael knew better than to dismiss caution. Sometimes the safer route was the correct route. Sometimes one needed to run, hide, keep distance, wait for the enemy’s strength to turn into weakness. His master had taught him many things, and one of them was that dead men did not get to brag about how brave their mistakes had been.
But this felt different.
If the hidden objective could be cleared by simply surviving until the Beast fell apart, then the fight was less about defeating the Dark Beast and more about letting the tower defeat it for him. Maybe that was the intended solution. Maybe Leonard had done exactly that, exploiting the arena, reading the timer, evading long enough for the runes to crack. Kael could respect the efficiency of it. He just did not like what it meant.
The tower did not give impossible trials. That was the premise. If something stood in front of a climber, there was a way through it, even if that way was miserable, cruel, or hidden beneath layers of bullshit. Surviving the Dark Beast was in the book. Running around until the rune destroyed the monster was a valid answer.
But Kael felt, deep in his gut, that he would lose something if he accepted that answer as his own.
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