(Strive 15:1)
The fifteenth floor was a mess of gaudy clockwork gadgets that clanked and rotated in every direction. A stuck gear made a juddering racket somewhere in the distance, and I could clearly see that this floor had suffered from the towerquakes most of all.
Coils, springs, and sprockets lay strewn on the floor, along with shattered bits of metal that had fallen from the mechanisms. Even as we stood in the entryway, there was a high tinkling sound as a screw popped loose from somewhere high above, bounced once on the metal floor in front of us, then dropped through a gap to disappear below.
Selene led the way to a massive rotating gear the size of a building, and we rode up inside one of its teeth before hopping off onto a platform that spun horizontally like a giant turntable. At the other end of the platform was a mess of gears and rubble that my udjat identified:
Clockwork Golem, a living construct of gears.
The gears shuddered weakly as we approached, but remained on the floor, crushed under fallen rubble. Another message appeared in my vision:
Defeat the Clockwork Golem before the timer elapses—
Before I could blink, the text was replaced in quick succession.
Clockwork Golem defeated. Please collect your reward.
A treasure chest fell from the sky to crash down on top of the golem. Without a word, El looted it and we moved on.
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Reach the end of the obstacle course before the timer elapses.
Not long after the clockwork golem, the message appeared before a timer began to count down from 100 seconds in the upper right corner of my vision. Unfortunately, the obstacle course in front of us was so damaged that it was almost unrecognizable as a path, and fully impassable.
“What happens if we don’t make it?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Artem. “We just need to make it to the bridge in time.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then we won’t be around anymore to worry about it.”
The tower rumbled again, and I looked up. “Really making it easy on us, huh?”
“We’ll make it,” said Selene. “It’s in that direction.”
I used Purgator to swing up to a higher walkway. At first, I saw nothing, but then it seemed like there was a familiar orange and black fog in the distance, a mirage like a heat haze on summer asphalt. Our destination.
“I’ll scout ahead,” I called down at the others, and flared my aura shield. It would save precious seconds if I could go forward and clear the path, and besides, my combat abilities were most effective with ample distance between me and the rest of the party. I leaped down and began clearing debris off the path with Power Strikes.
The timer had reached 65 when I was accosted by another Clockwork Golem, this one intact and uncrushed by rubble. It sensed my approach with whatever senses it had and rose up, forming the rough shape of a man twice my size before shambling toward me.
A fist made of spinning gears smashed the ground where I’d been standing. I rolled and sent a rope at it, but a gear shot out of the golem’s chest and knocked my shot astray.
I yanked the plunger head back to myself and ran at the golem. Gears flew at me in a hail of metal, and soon I was surrounded by a pinging mass of steel and chrome. But by enclosing me, the golem had made a grave mistake.
I detonated.
Gears flew outward away from me like an exploding suit of armor. Without looking backwards or taking the time to inspect its drops, I advanced further toward the portal, chugging a refreshing soda with a picture of a jelly bean on it.
No, that was a pinto bean. It was a pinto bean-flavored soda.
It was kind of annoying, since I’d been saving some of the ones that I thought would taste less unpleasant, as a treat. All my other sodas had unfortunate flavors like blood sausage, or they were undecipherable. One had a picture of an ear, which was very confusing to me. I also still had a loose juice from the fifth floor that I had almost forgotten about.
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The timer was at 30 when I reached the tunnel’s entrance. Tunnel seemed like the right word to describe it, but I wasn’t sure what it was. It was different from anything else in the Tower Strive, and looking at it hurt my eyes.
Everything about it seemed to change whenever I blinked or looked away for a second. It might’ve been small or large, red or green or blue, night or day. If I unfocused my eyes, I could just barely see cracks like hidden writing spiraling out of the corners. It made me deeply uneasy, and I felt my heart synchronizing to a strange pulse that came from somewhere deep within it, the same frequency of the tower’s rumblings.
The only constant was the miasma that leaked from the tunnel like off-gassing from a mine shaft. It had a feeling of twilight about it, and made me recollect vividly the sensation of looking outside Death’s classroom at that in-between world where chaos reigned.
I looked back and saw Selene and El scrambling onto the platform, with Artem climbing up close behind.
“What are you waiting for?” Artem demanded. “Go!”
The timer was at 15 when we left Strive and entered the bridge to another world.
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(???)
She stood at the far end of the bridge, waiting for us. Two bracelets—one blue, one green—shone on her wrists, and the same two colors sparkled in her eyes. The rest of her attire was light and sheer, carefree as a summer holiday. Her posture was relaxed, almost insolent, as she gazed outward over the lands in between the towers like a tourist at an observation deck. Well, apparently, she was no local.
“Finally,” she said, drawing out the word petulantly as she turned to us. “I was starting to wonder if y’all would show.”
“Could’ve been sooner if you hadn’t run like a coward,” El said.
“I missed you too, El!” Mia smiled. “But prison doesn’t really agree with me. I’m more of a free spirit.”
“Prison,” rumbled Artem, “is a best case scenario for you at the moment. You should be begging for it.”
“Oh, Artem,” she said. “Always so serious. Learn to let loose a bit, and maybe people would like you more. You too, Selene.”
The priestess said nothing.
“I should be thanking you, though,” said Mia. “If it hadn’t been for your opening of this bridge, I wouldn’t have known how vast and wonderful the world truly is. Eramai’s great and all, but you know what’s better than one tower? An infinity of different towers!” She beamed. “So many people to meet. I truly love meeting new people. The best thing in the world is winning people over.”
Selene remained silent.
“Yao was pretty torn up about you,” Mia continued. “You must’ve known that he blamed you in part for his death. Even then, he still loved you. The straw that broke the camel’s back was really the little couples’ therapy trip you guys made out here. Before he saw what was in your heart, I think he expected to find more love there than he did.” She turned her hand over to examine her nails. “But then, I’ve always thought that we each love in our own ways, in our own amounts. It was unfair for him to look for his own love’s mirror in you. But he did, and he was badly hurt when he didn’t find it.” Mia smiled sympathetically. “Hey, do you want to know what his last words were?”
Selene said nothing, but her silence became deafening, like the moment before a storm. El began to hiss loudly, and looking down, I saw the reason why.
Selene’s shadow looked grotesque, twice as large as mine and growing. It writhed and coiled like a living thing, then boiled outward in all directions until it rose up around us, enclosing the five of us in a sphere of utter darkness.
Flames leaped up, illuminating a scene from hell. I saw an image of a water pavilion engulfed in flames, a baleful red moon glaring down at me with its bloodshot eye. Everything burned, and as I cried out, I felt my throat being scalded. I tried to Harden myself, but the shield wobbled unsteadily and sputtered out.
The source of the flames was Selene. She sat stoically in a meditative position at the heart of the pavilion even as fire consumed her.
“Guilt,” said Mia’s voice next to me. “Anger.” I swung at her, but she was on the other side of me. “Normally just feelings, invisible and imperceptible. But in this place, where the walls between us and the outside are thin, free energy is abundant, just waiting for someone to wrestle it to a purpose.”
El triggered multiple explosions that went wide, and they seemed weaker than usual. “This bitch ever stop yapping?”
“It gets lonely sometimes,” said Mia, tapping my shoulder mischievously before vanishing again. “I really am a lover of people, believe it or not. And if you listen, you might just learn something. So, as I was saying, the ins and outs of the world. In the beginning, there was chaos.” Mia patted El on the head affectionately, and the raccoon twisted around to snap at her, but she was no longer there. “But us humans love turning chaos into order.” Mia whispered this in Artem’s ear, and he lashed out with a powered fist, striking empty air. “Whenever we feel or suffer or desire, we bend the primordial energies of this world to our whim, and they gladly follow. Solidify that feeling enough, and you could even be the proud parent of a new baby Tower. Selene here is learning that firsthand.”
“She’s making a Tower?” I said.
“I don’t think she’s ready to be a mom just yet, no. But she’s on the right track. This is true magic, independent of gadgets or gizmos. It does not come from Strive or Eramai. When we are in a tower, the walls serve to filter a turbulent ocean into neat, principled streams. But for those who want to go beyond, chaos is the original power, and by definition, that power comes from Outside.”
A translucent sphere surrounded Mia, grew to surround all of us, including Selene, and the burning night split open, dumping us back onto the bridge between the two towers. Mia smiled as she raised a graceful hand.
“Now it’s my turn.”