Chapter 283: Doubt
Lucas’s office had been quiet for exactly thirteen minutes before the next report arrived.
That was not enough time for him to calm down. It was barely enough time for the anger from the previous report to settle into something less explosive, and the moment one of his underlings stepped through the door with another folder tucked under his arm, Lucas already knew the day had found a way to become worse. The man did not look confident. None of them looked confident lately. They entered his office with the expression of people carrying a bucket of piss toward a burning house, fully aware that it was not going to help and that someone was still going to blame them for the smoke.
Lucas sat behind his desk, fingers tapping against the wood with slow, heavy impatience. "Say it."
The underling swallowed. "Sir, there has still been no confirmed contact with the Anonymous record holder."
For a moment, Lucas simply stared at him.
Then his chair scraped back.
"What the fuck do you mean, not a single one of our members made contact with him?" Lucas howled, the sound sharp enough that the man at the door flinched. "We literally sent hundreds to the fourth floor. Hundreds. Do you people understand numbers? Do I need to draw little circles on paper and explain that hundreds means more than three?"
The underling lowered his head. "I’m sorry, sir, but if any of them did make contact, then they died before making it to the fifth stage. We have no surviving report confirming interaction."
Lucas looked at the folder on the desk as if it had personally insulted his bloodline. He snatched it up, opened it, and read the first page again despite already knowing what it said. Another record had been broken. Another anonymous clear. Another impossible performance somewhere in the lower floors, right where the Sun clan should have been able to surround the person responsible with enough eyes to count his eyelashes.
The name was still hidden.
The record was not.
Lucas slammed the report onto the desk hard enough to scatter the papers beside it. "Then what am I supposed to do with this crap?"
The underling said nothing, which was probably the smartest answer available.
Lucas leaned over the desk, breathing through his nose while his mind dragged itself through the same conclusions he had been forced to revisit again and again. Anonymous could only be the same person. There were not two maniacs running around the lower floors breaking records by absurd margins while slipping through every guild net cast toward them. At first, Kael had been a suspect, a living anomaly who had appeared, broken things he should not have broken, then vanished for a year with enough internal injuries that he was probably dead before he ever found proper healing. That explanation had become comfortable.
Now, comfort had turned into a joke.
Someone was still moving. Someone was still climbing. Someone was still breaking records and making the Sun clan look like blind idiots groping around in a brightly lit room.
Lucas rubbed his forehead. "What’s the situation on Leonard’s side?"
"No progress," the underling said quickly, thankful to be speaking about someone else’s failure for once. "They’re still stuck. Their people have not found Anonymous either."
"That is the first pleasant thing I’ve heard today."
"But we have other issues on our side."
Lucas slowly lowered his hand from his face. "Speak. Make my already shit day even worse."
The underling opened the second part of the folder. "Iori sent word. He was split from his companions on the twelfth floor. Two of them ended up forced into a Vanitas floor."
Lucas frowned. "That is something they should have been aware of."
"Yes, sir. The problem is that Iori was left stranded on the thirteenth floor, and he has all their torches."
The office went silent.
Lucas closed his eyes.
Then he let out one long breath that sounded less like patience and more like a man trying not to commit murder because the paperwork would be annoying. "Fuck. They’re very dead then. Forget about them and send word to Iori to keep climbing. Motherfuckers, why would they not keep their own torches on them?"
The underling wisely offered no answer.
Lucas dropped back into his chair and waved one hand. "Never mind that. What’s with the search for that woman? Got anything?"
"No, sir. She escaped the hunt party. They’re tracking her, but it is not looking too good."
"Still on the twenty-second?"
"Twenty-fourth," the man said.
Lucas’s expression shifted, though not into the explosion the underling clearly expected. Instead, he leaned back, the anger draining into something colder and more practical. "Fine. That’s fine."
The underling blinked. "I thought you would get angry."
"Why would I?" Lucas asked, looking at him as if the question were stupid enough to deserve study. "I had no hope of you catching her anyway. Once she hits the thirtieth floors, that is when I will personally move. The restrictions on me will loosen enough that I won’t have to sit around waiting for reports from people whose greatest achievement is confirming that someone escaped them. Better to do it myself then."
The man nodded quickly. "Understood."
Lucas tapped the report again, returning to the problem that irritated him most because it was still happening under his nose. "Keep me posted on Anonymous. He is still breaking records, which means he is still climbing, which means eventually he has to pass through places where hiding becomes harder. Put people on the seventh floor. It is large, several towns, plenty of routes, too many civilians and climbers moving around for one person to disappear completely if we build a proper net. Get him there if you can. You’ll probably have competition once Leonard’s people realize the same thing."
"We already set up a perimeter," the underling said. "We’re looking for anyone who stands out too much or too little."
"Good," Lucas said. "That second one matters more. Anyone too ordinary in the Tower is usually hiding something. Get going."
The underling bowed and left as quickly as dignity allowed.
Lucas remained seated, staring at the report on his desk. Anonymous. No name. No face. Just records, broken margins, and a growing list of failures surrounding him like a bad smell.
He picked up the report again.
Then he crumpled it in one hand.
"Where the hell are you?" he muttered.
***
Far away from Lucas’s office, Kael was still in the dark.
Time had continued moving, though the trial refused to offer proof of it. There was no day or night in the space around him, no light to shift, no temperature to mark passage, no sound beyond what little his own body produced through the dulling field pressing against his senses. He had slept, woken, eaten, drunk, trained, slept again, and each cycle had been measured not by clocks or sky, but by numbers carved into his head through repetition.
One hundred thousand punches had become his day.
It was a ridiculous way to count time, but ridiculous did not mean useless. His master had given him worse methods for worse reasons, and compared to punching rock under a river until his arms felt like they belonged to someone who had personally offended the gods, throwing fists into darkness was almost peaceful. Kael could not see the punches land. There was nothing to land on. But he could feel the path of his shoulders, the turning of his hips, the connection between heel and fist, the way his breath matched the movement even when the trial made that breath feel distant and muffled.
On the second cycle, the hundred thousand came with slightly less exhaustion than the first.
That pleased him more than it probably should have.
It was not a massive improvement. He was not delusional enough to think one day of blind practice had transformed him into some transcendent martial monster. But there was refinement there, a reduction in waste. The Demon Fist did not become better because he hit harder every time. It became better when less of the body argued with the strike. Less shoulder tension. Less unnecessary elbow drift. Less foot correction after impact. Less thought wasted on remembering what the body should already know.
So Kael kept going.
He mixed the punches with Wanderlusting Demon footwork, weaving around enemies that did not exist, ducking under attacks the darkness never threw, slipping aside by a hair’s breadth and answering with a fist that cut through empty air. The trial dulled his senses until the world felt like wet cloth pressed over his soul, but that only forced him to rely more on memory and structure. If he could move correctly here, without sight and without reliable sensation, then moving correctly when his eyes worked again would become easier. That was the theory, at least.
If it turned out to be wrong, then at least he had spent three days doing something besides sitting in the dark and slowly becoming an idiot.
He paused only to eat and drink. His inventory answered every time, which still felt like luxury after the Trial of Endurance. The desert had made water into a weapon and rations into suspicion. Here, he could pull out a flask, drink, eat something dry and edible, then return to work.
The second hundred thousand ended with him lying on the unseen floor, arms heavy but not ruined, breathing slow in the absolute dark. He slept after that, not because the trial forced him to, but because the body still appreciated not being treated like a tool every waking second. When he woke again, he drank, ate, rolled his shoulders, and began the third cycle.
By then, any ordinary climber might have started fraying.
Kael understood how it could happen. The darkness was not dramatic. That was what made it dangerous. It did not roar, did not bite, did not chase. It simply removed proof. After enough time, a person would begin asking whether the trial duration had truly been three days, whether the system had lied, whether the space had no exit, whether something else was waiting in the dark, whether their own sense of time had collapsed. Doubt did not need to be loud. It only needed to keep asking questions until the mind became tired of answering them.
Kael answered with numbers.
Fifty thousand.
Sixty.
Seventy.
His fists moved through the same paths, then through variations, then through corrections of those variations. The darkness received all of it in silence. No Fracture window appeared. No warning told him he was close to failure. No whisper crawled into his ear. If the trial had expected him to panic, it had badly misjudged how much of his recent life had been spent being miserable under conditions he could not change.
By the time he crossed one hundred thousand again, he was sweating heavily beneath the damaged jacket and breathing through a deep ache in his chest. His fists lowered, his shoulders pulsed with fatigue, and his legs trembled faintly from the repeated footwork. He stood there in the dark and waited.
Nothing happened.
Kael frowned.
He waited longer.
Still nothing.
The trial did not end.
No completion window appeared. No door opened. No light returned. No soft chime informed him that he had successfully resisted Doubt for three days. The darkness remained, absolute and indifferent, pressing against him with the same dull, senseless weight it had carried since the beginning.
Kael slowly exhaled.
He did not know if it was truly the third day. That was the entire problem. He had counted punches, used sleep as a rough divider, measured food and water, and kept his pace steady enough that he trusted the estimate more than he trusted most things in the Tower. But trust was not proof. Maybe he had slept less than he thought. Maybe his pace had changed. Maybe the trial measured time differently. Maybe the Tower had decided that his method was not good enough. Maybe this was the actual test, the first moment where Doubt tried to put its fingers around his throat and squeeze.
Kael rolled his neck once.
"Cute," he muttered.
Then he raised his fists again.
If the trial had not ended, then the answer was simple. He would keep going until it did. Thinking too hard about whether the count was wrong would only feed the thing the floor wanted from him. Complaining would not make a door appear. Panic would not brighten the room. Doubt could sit there and wait politely for him to care.
Kael started over from one.
His fist cut through the darkness.
Two.
His feet shifted.
Three.
The grind continued.
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