The mission board in the North's administrative hub looked nothing like the rusted scrap heap back in the Dump Arena. For starters, nobody was actively trying to stab anyone else to get to the front of the line. Secondly, the parchment was clean—actual parchment, not the back of a dead Orc's grocery list. And thirdly, there was a system. A boring, efficient, soul-crushingly organized system that made White's eye twitch every time he looked at it.
"Fascinating," White said, poking a mission slip with his finger. "They alphabetized the ways we could die. 'Goblin extermination, Grade F.' 'Bandit interception, Grade E.' 'Escort duty for a merchant who definitely has something to hide, Grade D.' It's like a menu where every dish tastes like regret."
Rust grabbed his arm and pulled him away from a passing clerk who was giving them the kind of look usually reserved for dog feces on a new carpet. "Stop touching things. We're guests here. Guests who haven't been kicked out yet. That's the bar, White. Don't limbo under it."
"I'll limbo wherever I want. I'm the Savior. Limboing is in the job description. It's literally in the name of the world."
Nort appeared between them like a ghost who had mastered the art of dramatic timing. His red beret was freshly pressed. His eyes were not. "You're both taking Mission 7C. Abandoned watchtower on the eastern ridge. Reports of RE activity—low-grade, probably just scavengers who ate the wrong corpse and grew extra teeth. Nothing a cracked mirror and a broken clock can't handle."
White squinted at the mission slip Nort shoved into his chest. "Seventh floor of a haunted tower? Clear out all hostile entities? That's it? No 'save the princess,' no 'defeat the dark lord with the power of friendship'?"
"The princess already left," Nort said flatly. "She got bored and married a baker. The dark lord is in tax fraud litigation. You get teeth and claws and maybe a plague if you're unlucky. This is hero work, Turner. Not theater."
Rust was already reading the fine print—the part that mentioned "unstable structural integrity" and "previous expedition lost contact" in the same cheerful tone as a weather report. "How many floors did you say?"
"Seven. Start at the bottom. Work up. Don't die before floor three. That's embarrassing for everyone involved."
The watchtower looked like someone had taken a medieval fortress, fed it nothing but spite and bad architecture, then left it in a dark corner to develop abandonment issues. Cracks ran up the stone walls like veins. The door hung off its hinges, swaying in the wind with a rhythmic creak-thump-creak-thump that sounded less like weather damage and more like the tower was trying to communicate through Morse code. Get out. Get out. Get out.
White pushed the door open with his foot. The interior smelled of mildew, old blood, and the particular brand of despair that only comes from a place where people had died badly and then been left to think about it.
"Cozy," he announced to the darkness. "Rust, remind me to leave a five-star review. 'Great atmosphere. Loved the ambiance of imminent death. Would get traumatized again.'"
Rust didn't answer. He was already scanning the room, his hand resting on the hilt of the ice sword Nort had allowed him to keep—a concession that felt less like trust and more like a test. His eyes moved the way they always did in new territory: mapping exits, counting shadows, cataloguing every sound that didn't belong.
The first floor was empty. Not abandoned-empty. Cleared-empty. Someone had been here before them. Someone had left scorch marks on the walls and claw marks on the floor and nothing else.
"That's not ominous at all," White muttered, stepping over a dried puddle of something that might have been blood or might have been rust-colored paint. With this world, the odds were fifty-fifty.
They found the stairs in the back. Spiral. Narrow. The kind of stairs that made you feel like the architect had personally hated everyone who would ever use them. Rust went first, his boots silent on the worn stone. White followed, his breath fogging in the cold air.
The second floor had bodies.
Not fresh ones. Old ones. Desiccated things in tarnished armor, their faces frozen in expressions that ranged from surprise to profound disappointment. Someone had arranged them in a circle, sitting cross-legged like they were having a tea party that had gone terribly wrong.
"Well," White said, stepping over a severed hand that looked like it had been reaching for something important, "at least they died with friends. That's nice. I hope my corpse gets propped up somewhere scenic. Maybe with a nice view of the sunset."
Rust knelt beside the nearest body. The armor was Northern issue—same green, same silver trim. "These were soldiers. Nort's people."
"Were. Past tense. Important distinction. We're not here to solve cold cases. We're here to kill things and leave before the tower collapses on our heads."
A sound echoed from above. Not a creak. Not a groan. A scrape. The sound of something heavy being dragged across stone. Then another. And another. Rhythmically. Deliberately.
Scrape. Pause. Scrape. Pause.
"Something's moving on floor three," Rust said, standing slowly. His hand tightened on the sword. "Something big."
White cracked his neck. "Big things die just as easily as small things. You just have to hit them in the right spot and run away very fast afterward. It's a science."
Floor three was where the REs lived.
The Remnants of Extinction—REs for short, because even world-ending abominations deserved nicknames—were what happened when the Spacewalker's influence bled into the world's wounds. They weren't born. They were left behind. Fragments of a god's bad dream, crawling through the cracks in reality, eating whatever they found and growing teeth in places teeth had no business being.
The thing that greeted them on the third floor landing had too many limbs and not enough face. It looked like someone had tried to sculpt a wolf out of tar and then gotten bored halfway through and added spider legs for flavor. Its eyes—all six of them—glowed with that sickly purple-black light that made White's skin crawl and his karma reservoir churn like a sea during a storm.
"Oh," White said, "that's new. I haven't seen one of those before. Rust, have you seen one of those before?"
"Shut up and get behind me."
"Gladly. I'm very behind you. I'm practically in a different time zone behind you."
The RE lunged.
Rust moved.
Three days of training with the Clock of Life had taught him one thing above all else: time wasn't a wall. It was a suggestion. And suggestions could be ignored if you were rude enough.
He stepped between the seconds, borrowing Nort's Authority just long enough to slip past the creature's claws. The ice sword carved a line across its torso—not deep, but deep enough to make it scream. The sound was wrong. Too many frequencies layered on top of each other, like a choir of broken radios all tuned to different stations of agony.
White watched from the stairs, his fists clenched, his jaw tight. The karma inside him was screaming too. He could feel it pressing against the inside of his skull, begging to be used, to be released. But the door was still locked. The tap was still rusted shut. All he could do was watch as Rust fought something that shouldn't exist and pretended he wasn't terrified.
"Left side," White called out. "It's favoring its left side. The third leg is dragging."
Rust didn't have time to thank him. He was already inside the creature's guard, the ice sword carving arcs of frost through the stale air. The RE countered with a claw swipe that would have taken his head off if he hadn't ducked. The stone behind him wasn't so lucky. It exploded in a shower of rubble and dust.
"Rent's going up," White shouted, dodging a chunk of debris. "Definitely leaving a one-star review now."
The fight lasted another three minutes. Which, in RE time, was an eternity. Most encounters lasted thirty seconds—either you killed it fast or it killed you slower. Rust managed to take off two of its legs and half of its face before the thing finally collapsed, twitching, its purple-black light fading to a dull gray.
Rust stood over the corpse, breathing hard. Blood dripped from a gash on his forearm. His face was pale—too pale—the color of someone who had pushed his cracked-cup body past its limits and was waiting for the bill to arrive.
"That was floor three," he said. "Four more to go."
White patted him on the shoulder. "You look great. Very heroic. The blood really brings out your eyes. Want me to carry you? I can carry you. I'm useless in a fight, but I'm an excellent pack mule."
"No."
"Are you sure? Because you're swaying. Swaying is bad. Swaying means 'I'm about to collapse and die, and White will have to explain to Nort why his favorite murder pet got eaten by a spider-wolf.'"
Rust shoved him. Weakly. "Shut up and watch the stairs."
Floors four and five were easier. Not because the REs were weaker—they weren't—but because Rust was getting faster. Each fight taught him something new. Each borrowed second of the Clock's Authority left him more broken, but also more precise. He learned to conserve his karma, to spend it in bursts instead of floods. The cracked cup was still cracked, but he was learning to drink from it without shattering it entirely.
White, meanwhile, discovered something interesting.
The REs didn't attack him.
Not directly. They would lunge, they would swipe, they would get within inches of his throat—and then they would hesitate. Their purple-black eyes would widen. Their limbs would tremble. And then they would turn and flee toward Rust instead, as if White was something too dangerous to touch.
"Did you notice that?" White asked after the fifth RE chose to eat a sword instead of the defenseless human standing three feet away. "They're scared of me. Me. The guy who can't even open a jar of pickles without asking for help."
Rust wiped blood off his chin. "Maybe they recognize you."
"Recognize me how?"
"As the guy who sealed their god away a hundred years ago. The Savior. The one who cut the Spacewalker into pieces and scattered him across the world like trash." Rust's voice was flat. Tired. "They're not scared of White Turner, the Dump Arena clown. They're scared of what's sleeping inside you."
White opened his mouth to make a joke. Something about naptime or bad dreams or the fact that he'd always been told he had a scary face. But the words didn't come. Because deep down, in the part of his mind that had been screaming since the moment he put on that mask in Zecker's bunker, he knew Rust was right.
Something was sleeping inside him.
And it was starting to wake up.
Floor six had no REs.
It had something worse.
A room. A circular room with a ceiling made of glass—or something that looked like glass—and walls covered in photographs. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Pinned to the stone in overlapping layers, connected by red string that stretched from image to image like a web made of veins.
White stepped inside first. His boots crunched on something that wasn't stone. Photographs. Loose photographs scattered across the floor like leaves in autumn.
He picked one up.
It was him. White Turner. Standing in the Dump Arena, covered in garbage, laughing at something off-camera. The angle was wrong—too high, too far—like someone had been watching from a rooftop.
He picked up another.
Rust. Sleeping in their lair, his face slack and young in a way it never was when he was awake.
Another.
Both of them. Walking through the crowd at the food distribution station. Unaware. Normal.
"They were watching us," Rust said, his voice hollow. He was standing in the center of the room, staring up at the ceiling. "For years. Someone was watching us the whole time."
White followed his gaze.
The glass ceiling wasn't glass.
It was a mirror.
And reflected in it, standing at the center of the web of photographs, were both of them—White and Rust, side by side, looking up at their own faces with expressions that had slowly shifted from confusion to horror to something else entirely.
Realization.
"Nort," White whispered.
And then the world stopped.
Not the kind of stop that Rust had learned to borrow. Not the Clock of Life's gentle pause, where time became taffy and seconds stretched like warm honey.
This was a slam. A dead halt. The kind of stop that happened when someone grabbed the universe by the throat and squeezed until it couldn't breathe.
White couldn't move. Couldn't blink. Couldn't breathe.
But he could hear.
Footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Ascending the stairs behind them.
Step. Pause. Step. Pause.
The same rhythm they had heard on floor three. But it wasn't an RE climbing toward them.
It was Nort.
The hero stepped into the room, his red beret perfectly tilted, his green uniform immaculate. His platinum hair caught the light from the mirror-ceiling, glowing like a halo around a face that was no longer tired.
It was hungry.
"You finally found it," Nort said, his voice soft, almost kind. "The room where I kept track of everything. Every meal. Every fight. Every time you almost died in that garbage heap and crawled back to life because you were too stubborn to stay dead."
He walked past White's frozen body, trailing a finger along the photographs. The red string vibrated under his touch, humming like a plucked harp string.
"I've been watching you for three years, White Turner. Ever since you fell out of the sky and landed in the worst place in the world. And I've been waiting. Waiting for you to remember who you are. Waiting for the glitch to boot up. Waiting for the Savior to finally wake up."
Nort stopped in front of the mirror-ceiling, staring up at his own reflection—and at the two boys standing frozen behind him.
"But you're taking too long. And the world doesn't have time for slow saviors. So I'm going to help you remember. The hard way."
He raised his hand.
The silver clock face bloomed above them, larger than it had ever been, its hands spinning backward so fast they blurred into a silver disc.
"I'm going to kill Rust. And then I'm going to wait. And watch. And see if losing the only thing you love is enough to finally crack that shell open."
Nort smiled.
It was the smile of a man who had already lost everything and had decided that the only way forward was to make sure everyone else lost everything too.
"Tick tock, Savior. Tick tock."
The world lurched back into motion.
And Rust screamed.