Chapter 108: Blue Dot

“ARE YOU OKAY, MAN?!” The shout came from outside the building.

The voice ripped through the hollow structure like it owned the place, bouncing off concrete and bare metal, multiplying into an echo that made the whole floor feel louder than it should’ve been.

The building had that dead, empty acoustics; every sound traveled too far, stayed too long. The kind of place where noise didn’t just happen, it announced you.

Kael got closer to one of the broken edges of the building and peered down, “I’d much prefer it if you didn’t shout that loud, you’ll attract attention.”

He leaned over a jagged break in the wall where the exterior had simply given up and collapsed at some point, exposing the drop.

Wind threaded through the opening, cool against his face, carrying dust and the faint stink of char from deeper inside. He spotted Peter below, small in the rubble maze, craning his head up with both hands cupped around his mouth like that would help.

Peter was about to argue that the explosion was definitely louder than him, but he remembered how irritable Kael was and simply nodded his head down in defeat.

Kael could almost see the argument die in Peter’s throat. The man’s shoulders sagged, and his hands dropped from his face. He looked like someone who’d learned, in the fastest and ugliest way, that “talking back” was a luxury you paid for with teeth.

Kael looked back inside, smiling from ear to ear.

The grin didn’t fade the way it should’ve if he was being cautious. It stayed, stretched wide, because for once the tower had given him something that felt like leverage,

something that wasn’t just surviving by inches, but actually pushing back.

The mana pull was a bit too much, he can probably use this about four to five times before he’s tapped out.

He rolled his shoulder once, subtly, as if trying to shake off the lingering recoil that still sat in the joint like a bruised memory. The gauntlet’s sockets had warmed in sequence when he fired, and even now his forearm felt like it had been through a short, violent workout. Not pain exactly, more like a strain that warned him where the limit lived.

Quite an exhausting expenditure, but a very welcome one since it released that much bite and power in one blow.

He kept replaying the impact in his head: the wall cracking instead of just scorching, the satisfying thump that had traveled back into his bones. That was the difference between “magic” as a gimmick and magic as a weapon.

The [Heft] Rune was beautiful.

This was enough to deter enemies and kill off monsters in one blow. If lucky, more than one enemy at a time.

The thought came with its own sharp comfort. A fireball that actually hit didn’t just kill; it made people hesitate. Monsters, too, if they had enough instincts left to recognize danger.

However, when he looked at the minimap, Kael realized something.

His smile twitched, not disappearing but tightening. The map didn’t care about his excitement. The map was blunt. It didn’t congratulate. It just showed him how screwed he could be if he got cocky.

Four or five casts of this explosion aren’t nearly enough to clear the path ahead.

The red dots were stacked above him like a swarm of angry punctuation marks. Too many. Spread out. Layered. A building full of nests and pockets and things that didn’t need to be in the same room to ruin his day.

The higher floors had more than a hundred or so monsters, all of them spread and nesting in the building. He’ll need more than just his gauntlet to clear it.

Even if he could blast a corridor open, he couldn’t blast every corridor. Not with that mana draw. Not without turning himself into a drained, panting target who couldn’t even run.

Looking around the ruined office, there was a lot of material he could use here.

It was the kind of place that used to be clean and bright in another life. Now it was just skeletal desks, broken cubicles, and scattered junk, all coated in a fine layer of dust that lifted with every step and hung in the air like fog. Some of the ceiling tiles had fallen and smashed; wires dangled like dead vines.

He thought about going about and breaking some of the tables, using their metal feet and changing their form to regain his beloved crowbar.

The idea came with a faint nostalgia he didn’t like admitting to. The crowbar had been ugly, human, and familiar. Simple. Reliable. He’d turned it into something bigger, sure, but that didn’t mean he didn’t miss having a proper lever in a world full of locked doors and bad timing.

Just then, while he was thinking a small blue dot popped up on his map.

Kael froze so hard it felt like the building had paused with him. His eyes snapped to the mini-map, his brain instantly shifting from “crafting” to “threat assessment.”

This was the first time Kael ever saw the color blue.

Green. Red. Gold. Those had become normal, normal as anything could be in a tower that wanted him dead. But blue?

All he knows is green for ca limber. Red for monster. And Gold for loot.

Blue was new. And new didn’t mean good.

It meant unknown rules. Unknown consequences. The tower’s favorite kind of surprise.

Kael held his breath because the dot wasn’t too far away from where he was.

His lungs locked up on instinct, like breathing too loud might trigger something. The dot sat there on the map with a calm certainty that didn’t match the chaos of the red spread around it.

Actually, it was merely a floor above him.

While a decent portion of the other red dots in the building seemed to move, the rest were grayed out, dormant.

He watched a few red dots shift on the map, little movements that made his skin tighten. Patrols? Wandering? Things reacting to the earlier blast? He couldn’t tell yet.

But the Blue dot was shining and fixed.

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