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[Time Remaining: 07:54:12]

[Blocks Placed: 11 / 88]

[Foundation Integrity: 91%]

[Active Climbers: 187]

[Babel’s Curse — ACTIVE]

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We had lost twenty-seven people in under two hours.

Not all to harpies.

That was the part the chat couldn’t stop talking about. They had watched it unfold in real time — a fight breaking out in the western section of the plain between two groups that had both targeted the same large cornerstone block. The block was blue-edged, which meant it was a load-bearing piece. Both groups had identified it correctly. Both groups had tried to claim it at the same time, and when one team tried to physically push the other away, the silence made everything worse.

Without voices, aggression escalated faster. You couldn’t negotiate. You couldn’t explain. The only language left was force, and force answered force.

By the time the fight stopped, nine were dead and the cornerstone was cracked from a misfire — a mage on one side had panicked and discharged a full-power spatial fracture spell directly into the stone to stop the other team from moving it. The crack ran three-quarters of the way through.

[Foundation Integrity: 91%]

That notification had appeared the moment the stone cracked.

One wrong placement and it would drop further. Enough drops and we failed.

I had watched it from two hundred meters away, held back by the three harpies that had dive-bombed our section the moment the western fight started — the monsters could sense disorder, I was almost certain of it. The more the coordination broke down, the bolder they got.

Staff had taken a talon graze across his left forearm during the second dive. He hadn’t stopped moving. I had given him a nod when I saw the wound and he had shrugged back at me, which I took to mean he had healing capability of some kind, or he was tougher than he looked.

Rapier had been the one to actually drive the third harpy back. She had stopped being frozen. The first thirty minutes of the floor had burned whatever hesitation was in her, and what was left underneath was clean and fast. Her rapier work was elegant — precise entry angles, targeting the wing membrane rather than trying to punch through the feather-dense body. She had figured out the weak points faster than most people twice her level.

I filed that away too.

We now had a group of seven.

Staff. Rapier. A heavyset axe-user I was calling Axe — he had gravitated to us after the first wave because he had seen Staff’s blue light column and wanted to be near something that worked. A pair of climbers who moved together and clearly knew each other — a man and a woman, both in brown leather, both using short curved blades. I was calling them the Twins even though they didn’t look related. And a solo healer who had found us during the third harpy wave, a slight woman with grey-streaked hair who was probably forty-five and carried herself like someone who had been climbing for years. I called her Grey.

Grey had saved Axe’s life in the fourth wave. She hadn’t asked to join the group after. She had just stayed.

Seven wasn’t enough.

I needed at minimum twenty-five to coordinate a block relay that could supply the foundation at the rate we needed. We had eleven blocks placed in two hours. We needed eighty-eight total before the timer ran out. At this rate we would place maybe forty before time expired.

The floor would not reset. It would lock.

Locked floor meant no exit until the timer ran out, and then the floor collapsed with everyone still inside.

I had seen that end state once. I wasn’t going to see it again.

The grey-geared team was the key. They had placed four of the eleven blocks on their own — they were efficient, disciplined, and most importantly they were still alive at full strength. But every time I moved toward them to attempt contact, the harpies engaged, and by the time the engagement cleared, the grey-geared team had moved to a different section.

I needed a bridge to them. Not a stone one. A human one.

I turned to Rapier and held up a finger, then pointed at the grey-geared team in the northeast. Then I pointed at her, then traced a path around the south edge of the plain, away from the main harpy nesting zones.

She studied my gesture for a long moment. Then she pointed at herself, at the grey-geared team, and mimed the two-three-two tap pattern we had been using.

Yes. Exactly that.

She turned and started moving immediately. No hesitation. She trusted me enough now to go alone.

I watched her go for three seconds, then turned back to the section in front of us.

The chat had been watching the exchange.

💬 SeoulTowerFan: is he sending her as a messenger??

💬 Watchdog_KR: smart. the grey team needs to know about the relay

💬 GhostClimber_: if she gets intercepted by harpies she’s dead

💬 KangMinFanatic77: she’ll make it she’s gotten so good already

💬 RealMvpStream: Kang Min trusting her means she’s going to be fine. he doesn’t trust easily

💬 user_83421: how does RealMvp know that lol

💬 RealMvpStream: I’ve been watching since floor 4. trust me

I turned away from the chat. Something about that last exchange bothered me but I didn’t have space to examine it.

There was a new problem developing to our west.

The cracked cornerstone. Someone was trying to move it.

A solo climber — big, heavy build, wearing plated armor that probably weighed more than some of the smaller climbers on this floor — had set himself against the cornerstone and was pushing. Alone. The stone moved maybe a centimeter with each push. The crack widened visibly each time.

I could see what was going to happen. The stone would shatter. Foundation integrity would drop. Maybe by enough to trigger a secondary collapse event in the already-placed blocks.

I started running.

Staff saw me running and followed without me signaling him. He had learned my patterns fast enough that he could read my urgency from body language alone. That was either very impressive or a sign that I was becoming predictable. I filed the concern away for later.

The big solo climber — I was calling him Plate — didn’t notice me coming until I was ten meters out. Then he turned, and his face shifted into something that wasn’t quite hostile but was definitely territorial. He had clearly claimed this block. In his head, he was solving the puzzle alone.

I stopped two meters from him. Held up my hands. Not surrender — just: stop and look at me.

He didn’t stop. He turned back to the block and pushed again.

The crack groaned. Foundation integrity notification pulsed in the corner of my vision.

I moved around him and put my back against the stone, facing him. Directly between him and his next push.

He stared at me.

I held up the crack on the stone’s face and traced it with one finger, slowly, so he could follow the line. Then I mimed the stone splitting apart — hands together, then spreading wide, then pointing at the ground.

He watched.

Then I held up two hands flat and pressed them together — two people, same direction — and pointed at the foundation platform.

He understood. His expression didn’t soften, exactly. But the territorial edge dropped.

He stepped back.

Then he held up one finger, and pointed at himself. Then at me.

He was asking: just us two?

I shook my head. Pointed at Staff, at Axe, at him, at myself. Four.

He thought about it. Then he nodded.

Then he pointed west and held up three fingers, eyes questioning. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

I looked west. There were three climbers — all solo, all clearly lost — standing near a mid-sized pillar block with no idea what to do. He had noticed them before I did. He had been watching the floor layout while pushing the stone alone.

I reconsidered Plate. He wasn’t just a brute-force solo climber. He was observant. He had been trying to do everything himself not out of ego but because no one had managed to organize anything in his vicinity.

I pointed at him, then at the three solos, then traced a recruitment gesture — the same one I had used on Staff originally.

He understood immediately. He pushed off from the cornerstone — gently this time, carefully — and headed toward the three solos at an unhurried walk.

Good.

Staff appeared at my shoulder. He had watched the whole exchange. He tapped his staff against the ground twice, three times, twice — our base signal, which by now meant something like: understood, ready to move.

I looked at the cornerstone. The crack was bad but the block was still structurally sound if handled with distributed force and the right orientation. I ran my hand along the sides, checking the carved symbols. Corner-connection symbol on two faces. Foundational anchor on the third. Load-bearing joint on the fourth.

This went on the east side of the foundation base, not the center. The grey-geared team had placed a block there already but left a gap at the southeast corner. This piece fit that gap.

Forty meters. Flat terrain. Four people minimum to push safely.

I looked up. The harpies in the upper scaffolding were circling. One had begun its pre-dive behavior — wings partially folded, banking tight circles, head angled down.

They always dove when a large block moved.

I tapped a new pattern on my vambrace: four quick taps, pause, one. I had established this one in the first hour. It meant: incoming air, hold positions, wait for dive.

Staff repeated it on his staff shaft. Axe had learned it watc... he looked up immediately.

We waited.

The harpy dove.

It came in fast, aiming for the group of three solos that Plate was currently walking toward. Smart targeting — isolate and scatter the outer elements before the main group could integrate them.

Plate reacted.

His right arm extended and he caught the harpy by the ankle with one hand ... bare hand, no glove as it came in at talon-first.

His whole body torqued under the force of impact.

He didn’t fall and swung the harpy in a short arc and drove it sideways into the ground with a sound like a dropped building.