On the screens before him, a deluge of data flowed in a chaotic stream of Cyrillic text, grainy combat footage, and translated news reports that he had been meticulously scouring for the past three hours.

His eyes, sharp and unblinking, traced the timeline of a woman who shouldn’t have existed in this era, yet was making waves that threatened to drown the established order of the Russian player community.

He murmured to himself, his voice a low rasp that barely disturbed the air, questioning how a woman who had seen the absolute depths of the Abyssal Monarch’s cruelty could simply reappear and start over in a frozen wasteland half a world away.

The deeper he dug, the more the patterns began to emerge from the noise, revealing a trail of destruction and efficiency that was far beyond the capabilities of any modern S-ranker.

Sasha Kim had not simply appeared; she had descended upon the Russian Tower like a localized calamity, clearing Calamity-Class gates in the Siberian wastes before the local guilds could even mobilize their vanguard teams.

The Russian media had dubbed her the Orange Storm, a name earned after she single-handedly neutralized the Omsk Void, a sinkhole that had been bleeding mana into the atmosphere and killing thousands of civilians through mana poisoning.

Kang Min watched a leaked video of that event, his eyes narrowing as he saw the familiar fluidity in her movements, that same cold, calculated grace they had both honed during the hundred-year crawl through the old world’s floors.

He leaned forward, tapping a key to freeze the frame on her face, noting the absolute indifference in her green eyes as she stood amidst a field of crystallized demon corpses, a look that spoke of someone who wasn’t fighting for glory, but out of a grim, mechanical necessity.

"You didn’t go to Russia for the prestige, Sasha, so what was it that drew you to those frozen hells instead of coming straight back to where we started?"

He asked the empty room, his mind racing through the geographic mana-density maps of the Eurasian plate.

He opened a secondary window, overlaying the locations of Sasha’s most famous victories with the known coordinates of Abyss Sinkholes across the Russian Federation.

The realization hit him like a physical blow as the red dots synchronized perfectly with her activity log; she wasn’t just clearing gates, she was specifically hunting the Abyss Sinks, those jagged tears in reality that connected the Earth directly to the most volatile layers of the Tower.

This was a specialization that required an intimate knowledge of Abyssal geography, something that shouldn’t be possible for a player in this "New World" unless they had already spent a lifetime drowning in that very darkness.

He realized then that while he was building a corporate empire to control the resources of the rifts, Sasha was out in the field, closing the wounds of the world one by one with a desperation that bordered on the fanatical.

He began to pull up financial records and guild contracts from the Russian coalition, searching for any link between Sasha and the major power players of the North.

To his surprise, there was almost nothing; no long-term contracts, no sponsorship deals with the Siberian chaebols, and no recorded address other than a series of temporary safehouses near the Ural Mountains.

She was a ghost who accepted payment in raw mana stones and ancient relics, bypassing the traditional banking systems entirely, which made her almost impossible to track through conventional means.

"You’re staying off the grid just like we used to when the coalition was falling apart," he whispered.

He wondered if she was hiding from the same things he was, or if her presence in Russia was a calculated move to find something that the Korean Tower didn’t possess, perhaps a specific ley line or an anchor point that only existed in the high latitudes where the veil between worlds was thinnest.

The tension in his chest tightened as he found a classified report from a Russian whistleblower, describing a "non-standard entity" that had been spotted near the 30th floor’s spiritual echo in the Verkhoyansk Range.

The description was vague, but it mentioned a woman who could "speak to the rifts," someone who didn’t fight the sinkholes so much as she navigated them as if she were walking through her own backyard.

Kang Min felt a surge of cold irritation; the idea that she was moving through the Abyss with such ease suggested she had recovered far more of her old-world power than she had let on during their brief meeting at the airport.

He recalled her calling him an abandoner, the word echoing in his mind with a weight that felt like lead, and he began to wonder if her hunt for the sinkholes was her way of cleaning up the mess she felt he had left behind when the coalition shattered.

If she believed that the civil war on the 120th floor was his fault, then every sinkhole she closed was likely a silent accusation aimed directly at his soul.

He spent the next hour cross-referencing her moniker with ancient Russian folklore that had been updated for the Tower era, looking for any signs that she had made contact with a local Constellation.

He found a strange thread on an underground Russian forum, a group of "Rift Cultists" who claimed that a woman with orange hair had warned them of a "Great Collapse" coming from the upper floors.

This was the detail that made him freeze, his heart skipping a beat as he realized that Sasha wasn’t just clearing sinkholes for safety; she was searching for the source of the corruption that had ended their previous lives.

She was looking for the same exit he had found, or perhaps an entrance that he had missed during his final, desperate ascent past the 200th floor.

He questioned if she knew about the star-seed, or if she suspected the true nature of the child sleeping in the other room, a thought that made him instinctively glance toward the bedroom door with a protective, predatory glare.

"If you’re looking for the same thing I am, Sasha, then Russia was just a training ground for you to sharpen your blade before coming for me."

He muttered, his eyes darting across the glowing screens as he compiled a map of her known travel routes back to Seoul.

He noticed that she had visited three specific museums in St. Petersburg that housed artifacts from the "Pre-System" era, items that most people thought were just historical curiosities but that he knew were anchors for spiritual mana.

She was gathering intelligence, building a database of the world’s hidden weaknesses, and her expertise in Abyss sinkholes made her the most dangerous person on the planet.

The mystery of why she chose Russia was slowly dissolving into a terrifying clarity; she had gone there because the Russian government was the most desperate, giving her total freedom to experiment with the rifts without the oversight of a structured Association.

As the clock ticked toward 4:00 AM, Kang Min closed the final browser window, the darkness of the apartment feeling heavier than before, as if the information he had gathered had a physical weight.

He knew now that Sasha Kim was not just a ghost from his past, but a hunter who had spent her time in the cold north perfecting the art of killing the very things that ended them in the old world.

Her knowledge of the 65th Demon King, her specialization in the Abyss, and her accusations of his betrayal all pointed toward a confrontation that would inevitably tear the city apart.

He stood up, his joints popping in the silence, and looked out the window toward the silhouette of the Tower, feeling the invisible threads of fate tightening around him.

He had thought he was the only one who remembered the true face of the Tower, but Sasha was a living reminder that the past never truly dies.

Even he didn’t know how to feel about it. Was he really running from the past? No it couldn’t be, after all just like her he was trying to free earth from the towers.

So why?

Why were their ideals so different?

He walked toward the kitchen to get a glass of water, his mind still cycling through the images of the orange-haired woman standing over a sinkhole.

He realized that her return to Korea wasn’t a homecoming, but a declaration of war against the man she believed had abandoned humanity when they needed him most.

The "abandoner" title wasn’t just a slur; it was a mission statement, a reminder that she would never forgive him for leaving that coalition to rot while he chased the 200th floor alone.

He gripped the edge of the counter, the stone cold beneath his palms, and accepted that the "peace" he had built with his company and his secret daughter was a fragile illusion that Sasha Kim was more than happy to shatter.

The tension in the air was thick enough to taste, a mixture of ozone and old-world mana that told him the storm was no longer far and had in fact finally arrived on his doorstep.

He thought back to the airport, to the way the Tower had looked through the glass window behind her, a silent witness to their reunion.

She had looked at him not with love or even simple hatred, but with a profound, weary disappointment that hurt more than any blade she could have drawn.

He questioned if he had really been as evil as she claimed, if his pragmatism was just a mask for a cowardice that had cost thousands of lives in the old world.

He shook his head, clearing the doubt from his mind, reminding himself that in the Tower, there was only survival or extinction, and he had chosen the former for a reason that she could never understand.

These things that were Sasha’s "heroic" ideology would only destroy, and he would be selfish a thousand times over if it meant getting what he wanted.

He returned to the sofa, not to sleep, but to watch the screens again, his eyes lingering on a low-quality photo of Sasha walking through a Moscow airport months ago.

She looked tired in that photo, her shoulders slightly slumped under the weight of her white coat, a rare moment of vulnerability caught by a lucky paparazzo.

For a second, he felt a pang of something resembling sympathy, a ghost of the relationship they had shared on the 86th floor before the world went to hell.

But he pushed it down.