Runebound Reverse Tower of The Dead-Chapter 65: Murder

"Shit!" Kael cursed as he realized what happened. He was used as bait. Not by the snakes. Not by Baltak. By the Sun Clan too.

They’d left him standing in the open with strangers and nightfall, and they’d run back to safety to fetch backup that might arrive too late, if it arrived at all.

The first to charge him was a short man with a stone axe in hand. He jumped at Kael, weapon ready to burst his head open in one swing.

The man’s face was twisted in excitement, teeth bared, eyes gleaming like he already imagined the loot. The axe came down in a brutal arc, not refined, just heavy and eager.

Kael’s heart ramped up, far faster than normal, then, as if it had reached a throttling point, it calmed down again.

The shift was so sudden it felt unnatural, like his body had slammed into a limit and then slipped into another gear entirely. His breathing steadied. His mind sharpened. The world narrowed.

And then, something strange happened, the man who was coming at him felt... absurdly slow. Far slower than any normal human should be, even gravity should pull someone faster than that.

The leap hung in the air as if the Tower had thickened time around the attacker. Kael watched the axe’s descent with eerie clarity, saw the angle, the trajectory, the way the man’s wrist twisted to add force.

He felt like he was hanging in the air, coming down with the pace of a snail.

That feeling felt like it could span all eternity, but Kael felt that it wasn’t happening; this was a chance, a chance he got by some form of miracle or some form of divine intervention.

Or maybe something else, maybe the stats, maybe the Tower, maybe sheer adrenaline unlocking a slice of perception he didn’t know existed. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. A chance was a chance.

He simply took a sidestep, a simple, quick move. Even his own motion felt slightly delayed, like he was moving through water, but his thinking stayed razor clean.

His feet shifted, his torso turned, and the axe swung down into empty air with a whoosh that came too late to scare him. Just as the man who swung the axe down seemed to have missed, Kael’s right arm was raised high, and then jabbed powerfully, with a crowbar’s edge right toward the side of the assailant’s neck.

The stab was clean, clean enough that it tore through his jugular. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t heroic. It was efficient. The crowbar met flesh, then resistance, then a sickening give.

The man’s eyes widened in confusion before pain even registered. His mouth opened as if to speak, but only a wet gasp came out. Blood sprayed hot against Kael’s hand and wrist, and the attacker’s momentum collapsed into Kael’s space like a broken puppet.

[You have killed a climber.]

[You are the first to deal damage. You have been marked as a Red Player!]

[You have obtained the title: Murderer]

+3 stats in AGI and Strength.

[You have obtained 1 soul core.]

[You have obtained 3 soul cores from the body drops]

[You have obtained one Crude Stone Axe.]

[You have obtained One Suspicious Belt]

The pain was immediate. The bone-arranging pain of having stats suddenly added to your being. It wasn’t as violent as the rabbit’s cursed gift had been, but it still hit like a hammer to the spine, muscles tightening, nerves lighting up, a sharp pressure under the skin like his body was being forced into a slightly new shape.

But it wasn’t as crippling as before; it was as if his body was used to this sort of change. That thought was its own kind of horror. Used to it. Like the Tower was training him to accept transformation through suffering as normal.

The added stats inflated his muscles more, but also gave him a good edge. He could feel it instantly, not as raw strength alone, but as quickness, a sharper connection between thought and movement.

His grip didn’t slip even with blood on his hand. His legs felt springier despite exhaustion. It was intoxicating in the same way danger was intoxicating: it made you feel alive even while the Tower insisted you were dead.

He wrenched the crowbar from the neck of the corpse and turned to the other two. The body collapsed at his feet with a heavy thud, and Kael’s breath came out in a harsh exhale. He expected fear. He expected hesitation. He expected the sight of a man dying in one clean motion to make them reconsider.

"Who’s next?" Kael mocked.

Expecting them to be fearful and afraid they had a wide smile on his face. Instead, the two remaining Snakes looked delighted. Not shocked. Not horrified. Happy.

"He’s a red Climber now! He’ll drop everything on death!" one of the two said. His voice carried greedy excitement, like the Tower had just handed him a lottery ticket.

"Yeah, that crowbar looks like a good item drop, I call dibs," the second said and pulled out what looked like a bow and arrows. The bow was crude but functional, the string taut, the stone-tipped arrows already fletched and ready. The way he handled it wasn’t clumsy. It was practiced.

Kael knew very well that he could take on one of them with ease, but with one charging him with a melee weapon and the other supporting with a bow, he’ll be dead in a blink of time.

The math was brutal and immediate. He could sidestep a swing. He could jam a crowbar into a throat. But he couldn’t outfight steel in the back and arrows in the dark at the same time. Night was already turning the street into shadows, and shadows helped archers more than crowbars.

There was no point in being heroic now, no point in fighting against someone who could have climbed many floors using a bow and arrow, they could be very proficient.

If he couldn’t beat them here... Then he had to outsmart them. And he was already thinking up the plan.