They did not go up right away.
The singing kept drifting down the stairwell in thin, almost beautiful notes, but for the first time since entering Hargrove Tower, rest actually worked.
Not hours and hours of shaking in the dark. Not half-healed wounds and empty reserves. Real recovery.
Jack sat on the landing outside the ruined fifth floor with his back against the wall and felt the difference settle through him. The ache in his arm from the gravity slashes eased faster than it should have. The deep emptiness after overusing his power was still there, but it no longer felt like a dry well. It felt like something broader, deeper, filling from below.
Across from him, Lily opened and closed her hands, gold moving under her skin in slow tides. "It's coming back quicker," she said quietly. "A lot quicker."
Marcus nodded once from where he sat cleaning black plant ash off his hatchet. "Same here."
Dex rolled his shoulder, tested his bad leg, then looked annoyed that it worked. "I hate that the murder-building is making us better at surviving the murder-building."
"You hate everything," Lily said.
"Not true. I like canned peaches. And not drowning."
That got the smallest breath of a laugh out of her.
Jack listened to it and held on. The tower wanted them worn thin, isolated, desperate. Every floor had tried to split them apart. Every floor had failed.
By the time the singing had looped through the same crooked melody three times, they were on their feet again.
Fully recovered.
Jack flexed his fingers. Dust trembled on the step below him and drew into a neat line. The strange edge he had found in himself on the fifth floor was still there, sharper now. Beside him, Lily's glow came easier. Marcus moved like he'd slept a full night. Even Dex's explosions flickered warm behind his eyes, waiting.
"Ready?" Jack asked.
No one said no.
He opened the sixth-floor door.
Heat hit them first.
Not the stale heat of a sealed office, but a dry, endless blast that tasted of sun-baked stone and old bones. Beyond the doorway, the tower was gone again. In its place stretched a desert under a white sky so bright it made Jack squint. Dunes rolled away in every direction, pale gold and empty except for black rock outcrops and the long shadows of things circling overhead.
The singing came from somewhere out there, rising and falling on the wind.
Marcus stared past the threshold. "He's doing it again."
Jack stepped onto the sand. It gave under his sneaker with a soft hiss. No walls. No ceiling. No sign of the tower except the door standing alone behind them like it had been nailed into the world.
He crouched and pressed his palm toward the ground.
Gravity rolled out from him in a low, careful pulse, the same way he might send sound through water and wait for an echo.
Nothing came back.
No hidden mass. No movement. No shape waiting under the dunes. Just depthless sand swallowing the scan whole.
"That normal?" Dex asked.
Jack straightened. "No."
Something flicked through the sand thirty yards ahead.
A tail.
Long, scaled, and the color of tarnished bronze. It cut a line through the dune crest and vanished deeper before Jack could react.
Lily immediately moved closer to him. "Was that a snake?"
"Maybe," Jack said.
"I don't like snakes."
Dex squinted at the place where it had disappeared. "At least it's not water."
Marcus grunted, stepped forward, and drove his boot into the sand where the tail had been.
The dune exploded.
Sand blasted outward in a ring, pelting all of them hard enough to sting. Lily threw an arm over her face. "You should let us know if you're going to do that!"
At the center of the crater, something unfolded.
It rose out of the sand on a thick serpent body banded in gray-green scales. Its upper half was almost human, if human meant dead flesh stretched tight over long bones. Metal claws curved from its hands like hooked knives. Four hawk-like wings snapped open from its back, feathers blackened and ragged at the edges. Small snakes writhed from its scalp in place of hair, mouths opening and closing with the same terrible song they had heard from the stairwell.
Then it looked at them.
Jack felt it at once. Not pain. Worse.
The power in his body lurched as though something invisible had latched onto it and started drinking. At the same time, a cold stiffness crept over his chest and throat, moving inward from his skin. His muscles wanted to lock. His breath wanted to stop.
"Don't stare at it!" Lily gasped.
Too late.
Dex fired on instinct.
Orange-white light burst from his hand and struck the thing full in the face. The explosion ripped away one eye, scorched the other, and blasted half the snake-hair into ash. The creature shrieked, a sound of metal scraping stone, and launched itself at him in a blur of wings and sand.
Marcus met it halfway.
He caught it around the upper body as it hit, boots trenching through the dune beneath him. Claws screeched across his forearms. The serpent tail coiled his waist and squeezed.
Above them, the shadows circling in the white sky folded their wings and dropped.
"Two more!" Jack shouted.
One dove straight for Dex. The other came for him.
He cut upward with his hand rigid, carving a black seam through the air. The gorgon twisted aside mid-fall with sickening grace. Its claws raked his shoulder as it passed, shallow but hot. By the time he turned, it had landed behind him in a spray of sand, eyes fixed on his face.
His knees almost locked.
In the same heartbeat, another life moved inside him.
Far away and impossibly near, the swordsman stood in a stone training court under a colder sun. Weeks had passed there since the landing outside the sea floor. He faced the Duke with a practice blade in both hands, breathing hard, silver-white aura shaking around him.
"I felt him," the swordsman said. "On the eighteenth floor. Your presence. Rotten. Twisted."
The Duke's face did not change, but the air around him tightened. "Then we waste nothing."
He drew his own blade.
Its aura was not only silver. Threads of other colors moved in it: ember-red, storm-blue, a dark edge like the night between stars. Other worlds. Other victories carried inside one man's power.
"Again," the Duke said. "And this time, you will carry more than your own strength."
Jack blinked back into the desert with the taste of steel in his mouth.
Dex cried out.
The second gorgon had clipped him across the chest and landed in front of him, gaze locked. Gray stone was already creeping over Dex's fingers where he'd raised his hand to shield himself.
Lily broke toward Marcus's fight instead of Dex's, trusting Jack to see what he was seeing. Golden light flared around her arm and lengthened into a spear. She drove it into the first gorgon's side while Marcus held the creature pinned against him, and divine fire spread under its scales.
It shrieked and thrashed.
Jack forced himself not to handle everything at once.
Dex first.
He slashed twice, not at flesh but at space. Two thin black cuts hung in the desert air like broken mirrors, one before the gorgon attacking him, one before the creature stalking Jack. The slits opened just enough to connect.
Both monsters saw through.
For one frozen second, each looked straight into the other's face.
The effect was immediate.
Their snake-hair stiffened mid-writhe. Bronze scales dulled to gray. One snake head turned solid, then another, then a whole crown of them petrified into a stone tangle.
The gorgons jerked back with panicked screeches and slammed their eyes shut before the change could spread over their faces.
Sand burst beneath them as they dove.
The desert went still.
Then it moved everywhere at once.
They came through the dunes like hunting fish, bodies swimming just under the surface fast enough to leave wakes behind them. One erupted near Marcus and Lily, claws flashing, then vanished again before Jack could target it. Another burst beside Dex and clipped his half-stoned arm. The third rocketed up almost vertically, wings snapping open just long enough to redirect before plunging back down.
"They're under us!" Lily shouted.
Jack dropped both hands and pushed outward.
Gravity rose around each of them in separate shells, curved walls of crushing force. They weren't elegant. They weren't anything close to what the Zombie King could do. But they were solid.
The first gorgon slammed into Marcus's barrier hard enough to bounce off it jaw-first. The second smashed into Dex's and folded awkwardly across the invisible surface, hissing. The third hit Jack's wall at full speed and slid down it in a spray of sand and black feathers.
"Now!" Jack yelled.
Marcus moved first.
He ripped the burning gorgon Lily had wounded off the ground by one wing, turned with all his weight, and hurled it bodily into the creature battering Dex's barrier. The impact broke the second monster's angle and, more important, broke its line of sight.
The gray creep on Dex's hand stopped spreading.
Dex staggered back, cursing through clenched teeth.
Lily drove her spear forward with both hands. Golden light punched through the chest of the gorgon Marcus had been fighting and burst out its back in a spray of fire and black blood. It convulsed, wings flaring, then collapsed in on itself as the divine blaze consumed whatever passed for its heart.
Jack dropped his own barrier long enough to strike. His gravity slash took the third gorgon across the neck and shoulder. Space split. So did bone. The creature's upper body slid from its serpent half and hit the sand separately.
The last living one hit Dex's wall again, dazed but raging, claws scraping sparks from nothing.
Marcus didn't give it time to recover.
He was on it in three strides, grabbed a fistful of stone-stiff snake hair with one hand and its jaw with the other, and drove its head into a black rock outcrop. Once. Twice. Three times.
The skull held longer than Jack expected.
Marcus hit it again anyway.
On the fifth strike, the head finally broke with a wet crunch and a burst of dark matter that spattered the sand.
Silence rushed in.
The song was gone.
Only wind crossed the dunes now.
Dex sank to one knee and looked at his right hand. Two fingers and half his forearm were veined with stone, the skin gray and hard as carved concrete. "That," he said unsteadily, "seems bad."
Lily dropped beside him at once.
"Don't move it."
"Wasn't planning to."
Jack kept watch while she worked. The desert was already dimming at the edges, the floor losing cohesion now that its guardians were dead. Beyond the dunes, the white sky showed faint cracks of office-dark.
Lily laid both glowing hands over Dex's arm. The first pulse of divine energy did nothing. The stone remained, cold and stubborn. Sweat beaded at her temple. She gritted her teeth and tried again, not burning this time but coaxing, sinking light into the gray veins inch by inch.
Dex sucked in a breath sharp enough to whistle. "Ow."
"Good," Lily said. "That means it's working."
It took longer than any healing she'd done in the tower.
The stone fought her every step back. It receded like frost under sunlight, slowly surrendering finger joints, knuckles, wrist. When color finally returned to Dex's fingertips, Lily sagged with relief but kept going until the last gray trace left his skin.
He flexed his hand, then his arm, staring at it like it belonged to someone else. "I owe you one."
"You owe me several," she said, but she smiled when she said it.
The sixth floor peeled away around them. Sand thinned into dust. Dunes became broken cubicles buried under drifts of paper and plaster. The stand-alone door to the stairwell stood where it always should have been, as if the desert had never existed.
Back on the landing, they rested only long enough for Lily to drink water and for Marcus to check that the gorgon claws hadn't left anything worse than cuts.
Jack took out his father's journal.
The pages he found this time had been marked with a corner fold and a faint dark stain, maybe old rain, maybe blood.
He read by the last of Lily's glow.
'In the world of swords, I did not arrive as a stranger. I woke into the life of a man who was already my reflection: younger brother to a king, sworn duke of the western marches, husband, father. Dreaming there felt less like travel and more like inheritance.'
Jack read that line twice.
Below it, his father's handwriting tightened.
'My son in that realm was without the drive for strength. That was until the day I found him standing before the training yard, disheveled, dressed in only his night-wear. He was pale with fright. It was then that I suspected that he was possessed by a Dream Traverser. Before I began his training he came clean about his situation back home.'
'If you ever cross over to his world, know this: he was not born cold. He was sharpened by fear, duty, and the knowledge that some doors, once opened, do not close before they take something from you.'
A few entries later, ink was pressed hard enough to bite the paper.
'My son had come back with urgent news. He had felt the corrupted aura of a version of myself. A Rank Ten Aura Swordsmen that had become a Zombie General. I can no longer expect his training progress to be enough to keep him safe. I have begun to infuse him with my Sword Aura in hopes of enhancing the rate of his growth.'
Jack looked up from the journal and stared into the dark above the next flight.
Somewhere beyond twelve more floors, a corrupted duke waited inside the shell of a general.
Inside Jack, the swordsman trained under a father's merciless care. Inside the journal, Jack's own father had left proof that family could stretch across worlds and still remain family.
He shut the book carefully.
"What'd it say?" Dex asked.
Jack slid the journal back into his pack. "That none of us got strong alone."
Marcus stood and shouldered his hatchet.
Lily rose beside him, tired but steady.