The interior of the tower was wrong on sight.

No stairs, rooms or hallways connecting anything to anything else. Instead, rotating platforms of stone floated at different heights, each one carrying a fragment of architecture that did not belong with the fragments around it.

A doorway from what looked like a residence opened onto empty air forty feet above a cobblestone section that had been lifted from street level. A market stall sat upside down on a platform above them, its goods frozen mid-fall beneath it. The whole interior looked like the city outside had been cut apart and put back together wrong.

Everyone felt the pressure immediately. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

Then Raze’s hair grew.

Not dramatically. But visibly, the dark hair at the back of his neck lengthened by a centimeter in the span of ten seconds, and his hand went to it before he understood why. The joints in his sword hand ached in a way that had not been there a moment before.

"I hate this dungeon," he said.

No one disagreed.

The ache passed after thirty seconds, reversing back toward normal, and Raze rolled his hand open and closed and checked the grip on Tyrant Edge. Lily was already noting the duration and the rate of reversal on one of the spectral arrows she had released from Skypiercer, using it as a floating reference point in the air rather than a weapon, the pale light of it drifting at a measured height.

She had released three arrows before they took twenty steps inside the tower. Not to fire. To mark heights. The arrows hung in the air at three different levels, where she could see them from anywhere in the tower.

The Chrono Constructs came off the platforms above them in a wave.

[Chrono Construct.]

[Level 48.]

They descended fast, faster than the ones outside, and Raze was already moving before the third one cleared the platform edge. Tyrant Edge came up in a diagonal sweep and caught the first construct across its clock-face as it landed, the blade driving through the bronze line and splitting the face plate in two. The construct staggered and Raze stepped into it, driving his elbow into what remained of the face and sending it off the platform edge.

The second construct went for Mira. She planted her feet and brought the War Maul up in a short arc that hit it under the chin and knocked its head back, then rotated the maul and came down on the shoulder joint hard enough that the stone arm dropped.

Victor stepped in beside her and drove his energy-coated blade through the construct’s chest. The energy wave discharged through the point of impact and the construct burst apart at the seams.

The third construct was already glowing.

Elden saw it first. "It’s going to blow," he said, and the team scattered.

The construct accelerated toward the nearest hunter, picking up speed as it came. And then Lily’s Skypiercer came up and a single arrow crossed the distance in a line of pale blue light that punched through the construct’s chest before it closed the gap.

The Sevenfold effect triggered at the entry point and split into seven simultaneous lines. The construct detonated. The explosion chain from the piercing blew backward through two more constructs on the platform above and took all three apart in a single expanding burst.

Stone dust settled.

Raze stared at the space where three constructs had been. He looked at Lily. "Remind me never to stand in front of that thing," he said.

Lily had already released another spectral arrow to replace the reference point the explosion had displaced. She adjusted her three-point positioning and moved to the next platform without responding to Raze.

The second age shift came without warning.

One moment Mira was crossing a rotating platform with her War Maul in both hands and the next her shoulder felt like it had twenty years of accumulated injury in it, the old compression damage from a dungeon run three years before the system had never fully healed pressing in on her from every direction at once.

Her grip weakened. The maul dropped half an inch before she caught it. Her knees ached and her breathing changed. She looked at her hands and they looked the same but felt forty years older.

She heard Victor grunt to her left and Raze swear under his breath and Elden quietly said something she could not make out.

And then after ten seconds, the changes reverted. Mira blinked to see she was back to her original age but she shook her head and kept moving across the rotating platform.

A construct dropped onto the platform from above and she swung at it with the aching arm and the swing was slower than it should have been and the construct’s arm came across her guard and knocked her back two steps.

She planted her back foot and took the second strike on the maul’s head, redirecting it sideways, and Raze came in from the other angle with Tyrant Edge taking the construct’s head clean off.

"I had it," she said.

"I know," he said.

One of the support hunters slipped on a rotating section and went down on one knee and she was moving toward him before she finished the thought. But a construct had already appeared above him and was descending. She was not going to reach him in time. She knew it before she finished moving.

Elden’s staff came up. "Arc Lance," he said, and the beam took the construct through the side and the Sevenfold split punched seven holes through its torso and it came apart before it reached the support hunter.

Mira reached the hunter anyway. Pulled him up by the arm. Checked his face and saw he was fine, making her sigh in relief.

...

The top of the tower opened into a chamber that was larger than the tower’s exterior dimensions should have allowed. The ceiling was so high the top of it was not visible.

In the center of the chamber, standing on a platform that floated at eye level, was something human-sized.

It wore bronze armor, the joints moving with unnatural smoothness. It had multiple clock hands orbited behind it in overlapping arcs, each one moving at a different speed, the largest taking nearly a minute per rotation and the smallest completing its circuit in under two seconds. Its face was featureless bronze.

[Chronarch Sovereign.]

[Level 50.]

It raised one hand and Raze’s hair grew six inches in two seconds.

Pain hit before the change.

Raze felt his body become heavier, older, and weaker as he groaned. Then he dropped to one knee with his hand on the stone.

"Move," Lily said.

The team split and the Sovereign’s next gesture aged the platform they had been standing on, the stone cracking and crumbling with decades of weathering in the span of three seconds.

Raze got up.

He was slower than he had been. The Blood Tyrant stacks began building as he moved toward the Sovereign, the crimson coating spreading from his gauntlets up his forearms, and he drove Tyrant Edge into the Sovereign’s shoulder plate with everything the stacks had built.

The blade bit in and the Sovereign grabbed the blade with its free hand and pulled, and Raze went with the pull instead of against it and drove his free elbow into the Sovereign’s face plate. The Sovereign staggered one step.

It pointed at Raze.

He aged. Visibly. The lines on his face deepened and his speed dropped and he took the next clock-hand strike across his chest and it sent him sliding back twelve feet across the platform.

Victor came in from the left with his energy greatsword overhead, the blade coating crackling with stored power, and brought it down in a two-handed arc on the Sovereign’s back. The energy wave discharged through the armor on contact and the shockwave knocked the nearest clock hands off their orbit.

The Sovereign turned and Victor raised the energy guard, the construct of force forming in front of him just in time to take the returning strike. The guard cracked and held.

Lily’s spectral arrows were moving. She had six in the air now, repositioning each one as the Sovereign moved, building a three-dimensional map of its clock hands’ orbital patterns around it. When the fastest hand swept across the chamber she called "Down" and everyone went low and the hand passed above them and Elden was already firing on the upswing.

"Arc Lance." The beam hit the Sovereign’s chest and the Sevenfold split seven ways through the same point. The armor held but the layering cracked and Victor drove his blade into the crack immediately.

The Sovereign aged Victor.

He tried to strike it before the age effect forced him back but he felt his body growing weaker. He stumbled back before looking at the wrinkles forming on his hand and then he instantly rushed away with a panic flashing on his face.

Mira stepped in front of him while he recovered, the War Maul taking the clock-hand strike that had been aimed at his retreating form. The impact drove her back two steps but she didn’t back down.

A giant clock hand sweeps through the chamber.

Everyone ducks but one of the support hunters wasn’t fast enough. His hair instantly turned gray on one side and he screamed.

But he was pulled back by a rope that appeared in Lily’s hand. She glanced down and sighed in relief when she saw the effects slowly reverting.

The Sovereign clapped its hand once, making the entire shake and then it raised both hands.

The tower began breaking apart.

From the inside, the platform under their feet developed cracks that spread outward from the center in every direction simultaneously, the floating sections of architecture that filled the interior beginning to fall. The clock hands accelerated, all of them, the fastest becoming a blur and the slowest reaching a speed that was no longer slow.

Lily looked at the Sovereign. She looked at her hands. They looked the same. They didn’t feel the same.

She put Skypiercer up.

Lily looked at the route models she’d built.

Then ignored them.

"Everyone attacks," she said.

No more planning, just one full one attack. The arrow was pulled back fully back and the pale blue light building along the shaft and the spectral bow’s light reached its full draw.

She released.

The beam hit the Sovereign’s chest at the center of the crack Elden’s Arc Lance had opened and the Sevenfold split ran seven lines through the Sovereign’s core.

Raze drove in behind the beam before it had finished, Tyrant Edge going into the gap the seven lines had opened, the Blood Tyrant stacks discharging through the blade in a burst that spread through the Sovereign’s interior.

Mira came around the other side with the War Maul and hit the Sovereign’s leg hard enough to drop it to one knee. Victor’s energy wave discharged through the knee joint on its way down.

The clock hands stopped.

The Sovereign came apart from the inside.

[Dungeon Cleared: Multi-Team.]

[Chronarch Sovereign Defeated.]

Nobody cheered.

Nobody celebrated.

They just stood there breathing.

Then Elden said, "The corpse is glowing."

Everyone looked.

The Sovereign’s remains were producing light from every crack in the broken bronze, white and building, the clock hands that had fallen to the platform surface beginning to vibrate.

"Run," Elden said.

The explosion was not loud. It was everything. A wave of force that picked Mira up and threw her across the chamber and through a section of wall that had already been cracking, and she came down on a platform below the main chamber and hit it hard and lay there while the tower came apart above and around her.

She could not breathe for four seconds and then she could. What she breathed was dust and the smell of broken stone. She pushed herself up onto her hands and looked around.

The team was down.

All of them, scattered across the platforms below the main chamber where the explosion had thrown them. She could see Raze’s chest moving and Victor’s hand twitching on the stone and Lily face-down with her hair spread around her.

But none of them were getting up.

The tower was collapsing inward. She had maybe four minutes.

She found the largest destroyed Chrono Construct on the platform to her right. It was one they’d destroyed near the beginning, a level forty-eight. The interior was hollow, the stone shell intact, and it was large enough. Barely.

She dragged Victor to it first because he was closest. Her bad shoulder tore something important on the second step and she kept moving. Victor went in and then she went back for Lily.

Lily was lighter but further away and the platform between them was tilting. She crossed it at a run and grabbed Lily’s arm and dragged her back across the tilting stone and into the construct.

Then one of the support hunters who was buried under metal and rock. She had pushed away the rubbles even as her arms screamed for her to stop. Then the second after she leapt over the path blocked by multiple massive giant cloaks.

Then Elden, who was the heaviest person on the team and was completely limp, and getting him across the platform took everything she had in her legs and she fell twice doing it and got up both times.

Raze was last. He was the furthest and the platform he was on had separated from the one Mira was standing on by a six-foot gap that was getting wider. She looked at the gap and looked at Raze and jumped over it.

She landed badly on the other side and her knee hit the stone and she rolled on the ground. Her body trembled as shock and pain swept through her body. For a couple seconds she was frozen and couldn’t move as the environment around continue collapsing and breaking.

And then as she recovered, Mira pushed herself towards Raze. She grabbed his arm, and she did not have anything elegant left so she pulled him by the arm across the platform toward the gap and stopped thinking about her knee and dragged him across.

She did not make the jump back cleanly.

She hit the edge and her hands caught and she pulled herself up with Raze’s arm still in one hand and she was crying but she could not tell when that had started.

She got him into the construct.

She lifted the construct.

Every muscle she owned argued with this decision and she made the decision anyway. Her legs shook. Her shoulder hurt in a way it had not hurt before. She carried the construct anyway and started moving

The tower came down around her in sections. She went under a falling piece of architecture and it hit the construct’s shell instead of her and the impact knocked her sideways and she caught herself against the wall and kept going. Another section fell ahead of her and she went around it. The construct was not light and her arms were not working correctly and she went forward because forward was where the exit was.

She came out through the gate into daylight and sound and the smell of the city and her legs gave out completely.

The construct hit the ground. The shell cracked open and the team spilled out onto the plaza stone. Unconscious, every one of them, but breathing, all of them breathing, and the emergency teams that had been staging outside the gate were already moving and someone was shouting her name and someone else was shouting for medics and a third voice was saying they’re alive, they’re alive, they’re alive.

Mira lay on the stone and looked at the sky and listened to all of it.

Everyone had made it out. Not perfectly. Not without cost. But out.

She thought that was enough.

Then everything went black.