Regression of the Tower's Final Survivor-Chapter 63: Sound and Fury

Floor 13 was an assault on the senses from the moment they stepped through the gate.

The wind hit first, a howling gale that tore at clothes and hair and threatened to knock anyone under a hundred pounds clean off their feet. Helena, Seira’s rogue teammate, actually stumbled backward into Ren, who caught her with one massive arm while his other hand kept his shield planted like an anchor.

"What the hell is this?" Astrid shouted over the roar, her words barely audible despite being only three feet away.

"The Canyons of Echoes!" Dante shouted back, squinting against the wind as he surveyed the terrain ahead.

It was a maze of towering stone formations, red and orange cliffs that rose hundreds of feet into a sky filled with constantly moving clouds. The wind screamed through gaps between the formations, creating a chaos of sounds that layered over each other until individual notes became impossible to distinguish.

And beneath the wind, barely audible but definitely there, were the whispers.

[Debuff Applied: Maddening Whisper]

[Effect: Willpower drain - 2% per hour]

[Effect: Auditory hallucinations - severity increases with duration]

[Warning: Extended exposure may result in permanent psychological damage]

"Everyone saw that?" Dante called out.

A chorus of grim nods. The newcomers, Seira and her surviving teammates, looked particularly pale.

"The debuff is floor-wide," Dante explained, leading them toward a sheltered overhang nearby. "It can’t be resisted, only endured. The longer we’re here, the worse it gets."

"How do we counter it?" Leon asked.

"You don’t. You push through as fast as possible and hope your mind doesn’t break before you find the exit." Dante ducked into the overhang, and the sudden reduction in wind was almost disorienting. "The good news is Floor 13 is relatively short, just one dungeon to clear and a linear path to the next gate."

"The bad news?" Ren asked.

"The bad news is that everything on this floor, including the terrain itself, is designed to slow you down." Dante looked at the group, counting heads and assessing conditions. "We move in tight formation. No one goes anywhere alone. If you start hearing things that don’t match what you’re seeing, tell someone immediately."

"Hearing things?" Torian, Seira’s tank, frowned. "Like what?"

"Voices. Music. People calling your name. The whispers are semi-sentient, they learn what bothers you and use it against you." Dante’s eyes were hard. "I once saw a climber walk off a cliff because the wind told him his daughter was waiting at the bottom."

Nobody had anything to say to that.

They moved out an hour later, after a brief rest to eat and check equipment. The formation was tighter than usual, bodies almost touching as they navigated the narrow paths between the canyon walls. The wind tried to separate them at every opportunity, gusting from unexpected angles and creating pockets of deafening noise that made communication impossible.

The whispers were constant.

At first, Dante could ignore them easily. They were just sounds, random syllables that didn’t form words, background noise that blended with the howling gale. But as the hours passed and the debuff stacked, they started to sharpen.

"...dante..."

He kept walking.

"...remember..."

Just the wind. Just his mind playing tricks.

"...you failed them all..."

His jaw tightened, but he didn’t stop. He did this floor before, knew what to expect and how to handle it. The whispers were lies, reflections of his own fears given voice by whatever malevolent intelligence permeated this cursed canyon.

"...they’ll die like the others..."

’Shut up,’ he thought at the wind.

"...like Ren did..."

He stopped dead.

The canyon around him flickered, reality bending like a heat mirage, and suddenly he wasn’t on Floor 13 anymore. He was on Floor 75, standing on the platform surrounded by bodies while the sky tore open above him.

Ren was there.

Not the Ren following behind him, healthy and alive and carrying that ridiculous shield, but the Ren from his memories. The dead Ren, torn apart by something that shouldn’t exist, his body a bloody ruin spread across the stone.

"You let me die," Ren said, and his voice was wrong, wet and gurgling from a throat ripped out. "You were too busy fighting to notice."

Dante’s hand went to his sword. "You’re not real."

"Does that matter?" Ren stood up, his broken body moving in ways that defied anatomy. "You remember. You’ll always remember."

The platform shifted, bodies rising around him, people he’d failed to save over eight years of climbing. Climbers who trusted him and died because of it. Friends who believed in him and paid the price. And there, walking through the carnage with a smile that never reached his eyes, was Adrian.

Adrian, whose hands were wrapped around Ravenna’s throat.

"Did you think you could save them?" Adrian asked, his voice perfectly clear despite the distance. "Did you think this timeline would be different?"

Ravenna’s demon eyes found his, wide with terror as Adrian’s grip tightened. She reached for him, mouth moving in words he couldn’t hear, and Dante felt something in his chest snap.

He drew his sword and charged.

"Dante!"

The voice cut through the hallucination like a blade, sharp and real in a way the whispers couldn’t replicate. Hands grabbed his shoulders, stopping his momentum, and suddenly the Floor 75 platform was gone and he was back in the canyon with his sword raised and Ravenna directly in front of him.

Real Ravenna. Alive Ravenna. Her demon eyes burning with concern as she held his face between her palms.

"Look at me," she commanded. "I’m here. I’m real."

Dante’s breath came in ragged gasps, and he realized with distant horror that he almost attacked her. The sword in his hand was inches from her throat, stopped only because her grip on his face had broken the hallucination before he completed the strike.

"I’m here," she repeated, softer now. "Whatever you saw wasn’t real."

He dropped the sword, his fingers numb.

It clattered against the stone, and Dante’s legs decided they weren’t interested in holding him up anymore. He slid down the canyon wall until he was sitting in the dirt, and Ravenna followed him down, never releasing her grip on his face.

"The whispers," he said. His voice sounded wrong, cracked and dry. "They showed me..."

"I know." She ran her thumbs across his cheekbones, the touch grounding him in physical reality. "The floor learns your fears and uses them. Everyone is experiencing something similar."

"I almost killed you."

"But you didn’t." There was no accusation in her voice, no fear, just that steady certainty that made him want to believe her. "You stopped."

"Because you stopped me."

"Because you heard me." She smiled, and it was genuine despite the circumstances. "That means some part of you knows the difference between the whispers and reality, Dante. You’re stronger than this floor."

He wanted to believe her. He wanted to trust that whatever weakness the canyon had exploited wouldn’t be there next time, that he could keep his people safe from threats external and internal.

But he saw Ren die. Not just in the hallucination, but in the real memory that powered it. He’d seen Adrian’s betrayal, the bodies piling up as everything fell apart. And despite all his planning and preparation and regression knowledge, some part of him still expected it to happen again.

"Thanks," he said finally, the word inadequate for what she’d done.

"You can thank me by not dying." Ravenna stood and offered him a hand. "We need to keep moving. The longer we stay in one place, the worse the debuff gets."

Dante took her hand and let her pull him up. The rest of the team watched from a respectful distance, their expressions carefully neutral in a way that told him they’d seen everything and were choosing not to comment.

Astrid had her axe out, positioned between him and the newer members of the group. Protecting them from him if necessary, he realized. Smart.

"I’m fine," he said, retrieving his sword.

"Sure you are." Astrid didn’t lower her weapon. "That’s why you almost stabbed the demon girl."

"It won’t happen again."

"It might. This floor is designed to break people, and you just proved you’re not immune." She looked at him with those sharp grey eyes. "Maybe we should have someone walk with you. Someone who can tell when you’re slipping."

It was reasonable. It was tactically sound. And it made something in Dante’s chest tighten with a mixture of shame and gratitude.

"Ravenna," he said. "She can sense emotional states. If I start slipping again, she’ll know before I do."

Ravenna nodded without hesitation. "I can do that."

"Good." Astrid finally lowered her axe. "Then let’s keep moving. I want off this floor before the wind starts showing me things too." 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

They reformed the formation with Ravenna at Dante’s side, close enough to touch, and pushed deeper into the canyon. The whispers continued their assault, but now Dante had an anchor, a touchstone of reality that burned warm against the cold lies of the floor.

He didn’t look at Ravenna.

But he felt her presence beside him, steady and real, and for the first time since stepping onto Floor 13, he thought maybe they would make it through without anyone dying.

The wind howled its disagreement, but Dante had stopped listening.