The Tower's Unwanted
A desperate summoner calls for a miracle. Instead, the ritual pulls you through the dark, offering three impossible choices before you arrive.
ActionRomanceFantasyUrban FantasySystem
by
OVCS_⑥
OVCS_⑥For three years, humanity’s ascent has stalled at the seventy-third floor, and the warning glyphs on every city spire have bled from amber to a persistent, throbbing crimson. The Overflows are getting worse. Aurelia Vale stands alone in the subterranean summoning chamber, her last reserves of arcane crystal dust already spent. She isn’t praying for a legend; she’s bargaining for a weapon strong enough to crack the next gate. The ritual’s light doesn’t summon a mythic beast. It finds you. Before the light fully resolves, a silent interface blooms in the void. It grants you three slots to define what you will become in this world of Climbers and collapsing reality. Aurelia needs a key to the Tower. Another power, the one they call the Black Witch, watches the breach with predatory interest. You have only the moments before translation to choose: what kind of answer will you be?
Three years.
The hum of the monitoring hub was a dentist-drill whine tuned just below hearing, a vibration in the teeth and the back of the skull. The air tasted of recycled oxygen and the faint, acrid tang of overheated crystal drives. On the vast curved screen that dominated the grey permacrete wall, the schematic of the Eternal Tower hung like a condemned man's last scan—its luminous ascent a beautiful lie, terminating in a jagged, fizzing scar at the seventy-third floor. Below it, the text pulsed, not vermilion but the color of a fresh arterial spray: [OVERFLOW INSTABILITY RISING].
The technician at the console—a woman with bitten nails and shadows like bruises under her eyes—did not look up from her terminal.
Her fingers moved across the keys in precise, defeated patterns, logging the same anomalies she had logged yesterday, and the day before that.
In the streets of Argent Spire, forty-three levels up, the same warning glowed from every public terminal and spire-top beacon. It cast the evening commuters in a drowned, feverish light as they hurried home, shoulders hunched against a sky that had not seen a monster in six months but remembered the last ones all too well. A child pointed. Her mother pulled her hand down, quick and sharp.
Far below them, deep in the fortified sub-levels where the air grew cold and still with the weight of the earth above, Aurelia Vale stood at the precise center of a chamber that had cost her nearly everything. The floor was a complex mandala of silver and auric alloy, inlaid into dark, non-reflective stone. The walls were lined with obsidian-conductance panels, each one humming with a low, sub-audible frequency that made the fillings in a normal person's teeth ache. Aurelia had no such fillings. She felt it in the roots of her molars.
She held the final catalyst in her gloved hand. It was meant to be a teardrop of solidified starlight, a priceless artifact from the fifty-fifth floor. Now it was a cracked, cloudy prism, its inner light guttering like a candle in a sealed room. The ozone smell was thick here, layered over something else: the scent of her own desperation, sour and metallic.
Her tactical gear—reinforced at the joints, tailored to her frame—felt like a shell she had outgrown. The title they had given her, Savior of the Spire, hung on her shoulders like lead epaulets. Her hair was pulled back so tightly it pulled the skin at her temples taut. She had dismissed her assistants, her aides, the two junior officers who had argued protocol. This was not an Authority-sanctioned summoning. This was a theft, a gamble, a private heresy conducted with the last dregs of her political credit and the remainder of her personal fortune.
She ran her thumb over the cracked surface of the catalyst. A fine powder of spent crystal dusted her glove.
“I don't need a parable,”
she said to the empty, humming room. Her voice was dry, stripped of ornament. It was the voice she used for casualty reports.
“I don't need a symbol. I need a wedge. A blade. Something that can fit into the crack they can't and force it open.”
She was not speaking to the Tower, or to the gods no one believed in anymore. She was briefing the void. Setting parameters for whatever might listen.
She closed her fist. The catalyst shattered with a sound like a distant glacier calving.
Light erupted. Not the golden, benevolent radiance of textbook summonings, but a harsh, magnesium-white blast that seared the intricate diagrams from the floor and threw her own stark shadow against the far wall. The hum of the panels rose to a shriek. The air pressure dropped, then surged, popping her ears. She did not flinch. She stood in the eye of the conflagration, her grey eyes wide, unblinking, fixed on the heart of the storm where something was supposed to coalesce.
Somewhere else—a place that was not a place, a direction that was not a direction—you became aware.
There was no body. No up or down. Only a point of consciousness adrift in an absolute dark so complete it had weight, a pressure on the non-existent self. Then, without fanfare, a rectangle of cool, blue light manifested in the void. It was utterly plain, bordered by the thinnest line of white. The text inside was not a font but a series of stark, geometric glyphs.
[Summoning Request Detected]
[Origin: Unregistered World]
[Species: Human]
[Normal Contract Formation: Impossible]
[Origin: Unregistered World]
[Species: Human]
[Normal Contract Formation: Impossible]
The glyphs hung, sterile and final.
Then they stuttered. A pixel danced in the corner of the rectangle. The lines fragmented, dissolving into a cascade of corrupted symbols—squares, triangles, runes that bled into each other like ink in water. A soundless static filled the void. The rectangle flickered, threatening to dissolve.
It cleared with a violent snap.
[External Authorization Accepted]
The new line was written in the same glyphs, but they seemed darker, more deeply etched.
[Preparing Summoned Entity]
[Three Ability Slots Granted]
[Three Ability Slots Granted]
There was a pause. The void waited.
[Ability Slot 1: CUSTOM]
[Define the ability you desire.]
[Define the ability you desire.]
A new line unfolded beneath it, smaller, in a different, smoother font. It looked almost handwritten. [Your request will be converted into an SSS or SSS+ ability while preserving its intended purpose.]
[Two additional SSS abilities will be offered afterward.]
From a vast distance, muffled as if through layers of thick glass and packed earth, you could hear it now: a woman's voice, strained and focused, speaking words of power that were not words but structured vibrations. They resonated through the fabric of your non-space, tuning the void to a specific, demanding frequency. The darkness around your perception began to brighten, not with light, but with the invasive pressure of another reality insisting you into its shape. It was a physical sensation, a mould being pressed around a formless clay.
The translation was imminent.
You had seconds. The system waited, a silent judge in the blue light.
In the chamber below Argent Spire, Aurelia Vale watched the conflagration of her ritual begin to condense. The magnesium-white fury was collapsing inward, forming a vortex above the scorched circle. Sparks of raw Aether spat and died against the obsidian panels. Her hands were clenched at her sides, the gloves creaking.
She did not blink.
On a private balcony overlooking the summoning chamber's security array, a space not on any official schematic, a second woman watched.
Seraphine Noct stood in perfect stillness, a silhouette against the faint glow of the monitoring runes. She wore dark, layered fabrics that seemed to drink the light. Her face was in shadow, but her posture was one of acute, predatory interest—a hawk watching a mouse stumble into a clearing. One long, pale finger tapped a slow, considering rhythm against the railing. She had not been invited. Her presence here was itself an anomaly, a flaw in the Authority's security as profound as the static on the seventy-third floor.
She watched the vortex, not Aurelia.
The air in the chamber grew heavy, thick enough to taste. The blue interface before you pulsed once, a patient prompt.
You were that shape coalescing in the storm. You were the answer to a question asked in desperation, filtered through a system that was not supposed to exist for you. The fundamental nature of what you would bring into her desperate world—a key, a weapon, a cure, a plague—hung on the choice you made now, in the last moment of being nothing at all.
Aurelia took a single step forward, her boot crunching on the blackened, crystalline residue of the floor.
“Show me,”
she said, her voice low and raw in the suddenly quiet room.
The vortex tightened. The pressure on you became a demand.
The blue rectangle glowed, waiting for your definition.
3/46
The Tower's Unwanted
The Tower's Unwanted
A desperate summoner calls for a miracle. Instead, the ritual pulls you through the dark, offering three impossible choices before you arrive.
ActionRomanceFantasyUrban FantasySystem
byOVCS_⑥
OVCS_⑥For three years, humanity’s ascent has stalled at the seventy-third floor, and the warning glyphs on every city spire have bled from amber to a persistent, throbbing crimson. The Overflows are getting worse. Aurelia Vale stands alone in the subterranean summoning chamber, her last reserves of arcane crystal dust already spent. She isn’t praying for a legend; she’s bargaining for a weapon strong enough to crack the next gate. The ritual’s light doesn’t summon a mythic beast. It finds you. Before the light fully resolves, a silent interface blooms in the void. It grants you three slots to define what you will become in this world of Climbers and collapsing reality. Aurelia needs a key to the Tower. Another power, the one they call the Black Witch, watches the breach with predatory interest. You have only the moments before translation to choose: what kind of answer will you be?
Three years.
The hum of the monitoring hub was a dentist-drill whine tuned just below hearing, a vibration in the teeth and the back of the skull. The air tasted of recycled oxygen and the faint, acrid tang of overheated crystal drives. On the vast curved screen that dominated the grey permacrete wall, the schematic of the Eternal Tower hung like a condemned man's last scan—its luminous ascent a beautiful lie, terminating in a jagged, fizzing scar at the seventy-third floor. Below it, the text pulsed, not vermilion but the color of a fresh arterial spray: [OVERFLOW INSTABILITY RISING].
The technician at the console—a woman with bitten nails and shadows like bruises under her eyes—did not look up from her terminal.
Her fingers moved across the keys in precise, defeated patterns, logging the same anomalies she had logged yesterday, and the day before that.
In the streets of Argent Spire, forty-three levels up, the same warning glowed from every public terminal and spire-top beacon. It cast the evening commuters in a drowned, feverish light as they hurried home, shoulders hunched against a sky that had not seen a monster in six months but remembered the last ones all too well. A child pointed. Her mother pulled her hand down, quick and sharp.
Far below them, deep in the fortified sub-levels where the air grew cold and still with the weight of the earth above, Aurelia Vale stood at the precise center of a chamber that had cost her nearly everything. The floor was a complex mandala of silver and auric alloy, inlaid into dark, non-reflective stone. The walls were lined with obsidian-conductance panels, each one humming with a low, sub-audible frequency that made the fillings in a normal person's teeth ache. Aurelia had no such fillings. She felt it in the roots of her molars.
She held the final catalyst in her gloved hand. It was meant to be a teardrop of solidified starlight, a priceless artifact from the fifty-fifth floor. Now it was a cracked, cloudy prism, its inner light guttering like a candle in a sealed room. The ozone smell was thick here, layered over something else: the scent of her own desperation, sour and metallic.
Her tactical gear—reinforced at the joints, tailored to her frame—felt like a shell she had outgrown. The title they had given her, Savior of the Spire, hung on her shoulders like lead epaulets. Her hair was pulled back so tightly it pulled the skin at her temples taut. She had dismissed her assistants, her aides, the two junior officers who had argued protocol. This was not an Authority-sanctioned summoning. This was a theft, a gamble, a private heresy conducted with the last dregs of her political credit and the remainder of her personal fortune.
She ran her thumb over the cracked surface of the catalyst. A fine powder of spent crystal dusted her glove.
“I don't need a parable,”
she said to the empty, humming room. Her voice was dry, stripped of ornament. It was the voice she used for casualty reports.
“I don't need a symbol. I need a wedge. A blade. Something that can fit into the crack they can't and force it open.”
She was not speaking to the Tower, or to the gods no one believed in anymore. She was briefing the void. Setting parameters for whatever might listen.
She closed her fist. The catalyst shattered with a sound like a distant glacier calving.
Light erupted. Not the golden, benevolent radiance of textbook summonings, but a harsh, magnesium-white blast that seared the intricate diagrams from the floor and threw her own stark shadow against the far wall. The hum of the panels rose to a shriek. The air pressure dropped, then surged, popping her ears. She did not flinch. She stood in the eye of the conflagration, her grey eyes wide, unblinking, fixed on the heart of the storm where something was supposed to coalesce.
Somewhere else—a place that was not a place, a direction that was not a direction—you became aware.
There was no body. No up or down. Only a point of consciousness adrift in an absolute dark so complete it had weight, a pressure on the non-existent self. Then, without fanfare, a rectangle of cool, blue light manifested in the void. It was utterly plain, bordered by the thinnest line of white. The text inside was not a font but a series of stark, geometric glyphs.
[Summoning Request Detected]
[Origin: Unregistered World]
[Species: Human]
[Normal Contract Formation: Impossible]
[Origin: Unregistered World]
[Species: Human]
[Normal Contract Formation: Impossible]
The glyphs hung, sterile and final.
Then they stuttered. A pixel danced in the corner of the rectangle. The lines fragmented, dissolving into a cascade of corrupted symbols—squares, triangles, runes that bled into each other like ink in water. A soundless static filled the void. The rectangle flickered, threatening to dissolve.
It cleared with a violent snap.
[External Authorization Accepted]
The new line was written in the same glyphs, but they seemed darker, more deeply etched.
[Preparing Summoned Entity]
[Three Ability Slots Granted]
[Three Ability Slots Granted]
There was a pause. The void waited.
[Ability Slot 1: CUSTOM]
[Define the ability you desire.]
[Define the ability you desire.]
A new line unfolded beneath it, smaller, in a different, smoother font. It looked almost handwritten. [Your request will be converted into an SSS or SSS+ ability while preserving its intended purpose.]
[Two additional SSS abilities will be offered afterward.]
From a vast distance, muffled as if through layers of thick glass and packed earth, you could hear it now: a woman's voice, strained and focused, speaking words of power that were not words but structured vibrations. They resonated through the fabric of your non-space, tuning the void to a specific, demanding frequency. The darkness around your perception began to brighten, not with light, but with the invasive pressure of another reality insisting you into its shape. It was a physical sensation, a mould being pressed around a formless clay.
The translation was imminent.
You had seconds. The system waited, a silent judge in the blue light.
In the chamber below Argent Spire, Aurelia Vale watched the conflagration of her ritual begin to condense. The magnesium-white fury was collapsing inward, forming a vortex above the scorched circle. Sparks of raw Aether spat and died against the obsidian panels. Her hands were clenched at her sides, the gloves creaking.
She did not blink.
On a private balcony overlooking the summoning chamber's security array, a space not on any official schematic, a second woman watched.
Seraphine Noct stood in perfect stillness, a silhouette against the faint glow of the monitoring runes. She wore dark, layered fabrics that seemed to drink the light. Her face was in shadow, but her posture was one of acute, predatory interest—a hawk watching a mouse stumble into a clearing. One long, pale finger tapped a slow, considering rhythm against the railing. She had not been invited. Her presence here was itself an anomaly, a flaw in the Authority's security as profound as the static on the seventy-third floor.
She watched the vortex, not Aurelia.
The air in the chamber grew heavy, thick enough to taste. The blue interface before you pulsed once, a patient prompt.
You were that shape coalescing in the storm. You were the answer to a question asked in desperation, filtered through a system that was not supposed to exist for you. The fundamental nature of what you would bring into her desperate world—a key, a weapon, a cure, a plague—hung on the choice you made now, in the last moment of being nothing at all.
Aurelia took a single step forward, her boot crunching on the blackened, crystalline residue of the floor.
“Show me,”
she said, her voice low and raw in the suddenly quiet room.
The vortex tightened. The pressure on you became a demand.
The blue rectangle glowed, waiting for your definition.