Chapter 133: D-Day

The night continued uneventfully, Kael had for the first time in days a good night sleep. He didn’t notice it at first, not paid attention to it when sleep began assaulting his senses that after so many days this was the only time he was going to sleep.

He only realized how exhausted he truly was when his body stopped arguing. No flinching at every creak in the hallway, no instinctive jerk at a distant shout, no counting the seconds between footsteps outside his door. The base still sounded like what it was, a broken building full of restless dead men pretending they were safe, but Kael’s mind finally hit a wall. The kind of wall you only meet when you have spent too many days living on adrenaline and cheap decisions.

The room smelled like dust, old cloth, and the faint metallic tang that still clung to him from spider gore and heated alloy. He should have been more alert, he knew that. A good climber didn’t sleep deeply in a place filled with opportunists. A good climber didn’t let their guard drop. Yet his eyelids felt heavy in a way that had nothing to do with comfort. It was more like his mind had been ordered to shut down.

Though risky, he still made sure that the only door to his room was both locked and barricaded by the table that he had with him.

He checked it twice, not because he enjoyed being paranoid, but because he had learned that paranoia was usually just experience wearing a different mask. The lock clicked clean after the hammer’s “repair,” and Kael ran his fingers along the latch to feel for any looseness. Then he dragged the table in front of it, the legs scraping softly on the floor. It was not an unmovable barrier, but it would buy him a second or two. A second or two was the difference between waking with a weapon in hand and waking with someone else’s hand on your throat.

And once he finally relaxed in his bed, night took him and it was a long one.

He didn’t dream. Or if he did, he didn’t remember. The only thing he recalled later was the sensation of sinking, the way the world faded out without a fight. For the first time since the Tower swallowed him, he didn’t lie there listening for danger until his eyes burned. He simply disappeared into sleep like a stone dropped into deep water.

Waking up at what felt like a bit after dawn, Kael stood to check his gear.

The light was a dull red bleeding through cracks and broken window frames. It wasn’t bright morning sunlight, not in this place. Still, it was enough to tell him he hadn’t slept through the entire day. That alone felt like a win. His body didn’t feel tired, because the Tower refused fatigue in the normal sense, but he felt clearer. Like his thoughts weren’t stumbling over each other.

His leather armor, his gauntlets and the chain attaching them.

He flexed both hands, feeling the gauntlets respond. The chain hung between them with that awkward weight again, not heavy enough to slow him, but present enough that he couldn’t forget it. He tested the loops around his wrists and the contact points, making sure nothing loosened overnight. Then he checked the leather beneath, tugged at a seam, pressed his fingers along the lining where heat would travel. No gaps. No tears. No weak points.

He then took a look at his backpack, noticing how scary empty it was. He had nothing in it that was a Tower item. Since he couldn’t put everything in his inventory.

The bag was more habit than necessity now, a familiar weight, a thing to keep his hands busy. It looked wrong on his shoulders when most of his real wealth sat in a system window nobody could steal by cutting straps. Still, he kept it because it made him look normal.

Normal, was advantage when one needed it.

There were a couple old gauzes. A bottle of alcohol. And a couple metal scraps he could use later if need be. And the last piece, was the lever.

He checked that lever twice, like it might have crawled away in the night. Metal, heavy, awkwardly shaped, the kind of thing a normal person would throw away as useless junk.

Kael didn’t. He remembered how the underground grid felt, the hum of powerlines, the way electricity turned from a background threat into an actual weapon the moment you controlled it.

This one was very imperative and important to Kael.

Not because it was pretty, or because it was a Tower item with a fancy tooltip. Because it was leverage. A mistake could kill him just as easily, but that was true of everything in this place. The difference was, this was a trap he understood.

It was the lever for the electricity system that ran in the underground and powered the metro grid.

Kael pictured the rails, the metal shine in the dim, the places where the Basilisk had moved like a living disaster. He pictured bodies too, climbers who didn’t know the system existed. If he needed to block a chase, if he needed to burn a path behind him, that lever mattered.

People could easily walk on the railing with this thing turned off or removed like what Kael did, but once it was attached back, it could turn on the electricity again, a good weapon if used right, and a terrible trap if misused.

He ran his thumb along its edge, then put it back into the bag carefully, like he was storing a blade. He wasn’t going to use it today. Not unless everything went wrong. But Kael always planned for “everything went wrong,” because the Tower made sure it happened sooner or later.

Kael checked his system inventory next.

The familiar spatial window made the room feel less claustrophobic. The system didn’t care about broken chairs or rotten beds. It cared about numbers, about resources, about what he could turn into the next advantage. Kael’s eyes traced the items quickly, calculating without thinking too hard.

The spatial window showed the materials he had, leather, a couple obsidian scales, Atrax and Basilisk materials and some silk and a sorry looking Excise rune there.

The Excise rune sat there like an insult. Useful, powerful in its niche, but constantly inconvenient the moment Heft entered the conversation. Kael didn’t hate it. He hated how picky the Tower was about letting him combine things freely. Still, he had learned to respect the limits rather than rage at them.

“Nothing much to use here” Kael muttered.

He didn’t mean he had nothing at all. He meant nothing he could safely burn right now without drawing attention. He meant nothing that would suddenly solve the basilisk problem by itself. Tools were tools. They didn’t replace strategy. Not completely.

“Everyone wakey wakey!” the boss’s howl echoed through the center of the place where the Sun Clan began converging.

The voice rolled through the building like a hammer on a bell. People stirred immediately, boots on stone, bodies moving out of corners and rooms, murmurs swelling into a low crowd noise.

“I guess it’s time…”

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