The Extra's Rise - Chapter 975

975: Baseline 975: Baseline The tower doesn’t smell like stone.

It smells like paper that has learned how to breathe, a dry, ancient scent of stored knowledge and forgotten trees.

The moment I cross the seam, the light thins and the sound of the world outside loses its edges, replaced by a deep, oppressive quiet.

My first step lands, and the floor solidifies under my boot, deciding to be a floor.

The second step waits for me to commit my weight before it makes up its mind.

I hold still and count a breath, the way Luna taught me.

Four in.

Six out.

Valeria settles in my bones, her presence calm and cool, a familiar weight in a room that feels fundamentally wrong.

‘Inventory,’ I tell myself.

‘No bravado.

Just the truth.’ I lift my right hand and reach for The Grey.

It answers, but it feels like trying to grip smoke.

It’s a fundamental rejection.

The Grey is born from the perfect, paradoxical harmony of Purelight and Deepdark, a truth I hold in my core.

But this place introduces a dissonance, a wrong note into the chord.

I try to create two simple, flat pages in the air, but the two halves of the power refuse to meet, skittering away from each other like oil on water.

The pages of reality I try to form wrinkle and tear at the corners before collapsing into a shower of silver dust that forgets how to fall.

“Noted,” I say to the quiet room.

“Grey is on strike.” Next, Mythweaver.

I keep it small and plain, writing a simple, three-word margin on the air above my head: “All speech plain.” The sentence appears in faint, careful strokes, holds for a single heartbeat, and then sputters as if starved for air.

It isn’t just that the spell fails.

I feel the tower drain a disproportionate amount of my energy for the attempt, a toll for daring to speak a new truth in its halls.

The message is clear: my words have no authority here.

Not yet.

The letters fray, invert, and fade.

Lucent Harmony, then.

I let it unspool from my center, but instead of blooming into a wide, calming field, it shrinks back, clinging to my frame as if for protection.

It holds, barely, a thin layer of order the size of a ribcage, a personal habit in a room that rejects auras.

“Fine,” I whisper.

“Me first.” I test my Nine-Circle circuits, planting a foot and humming the first knot of the Bahamut Method.

The power tries to gather, but the floor refuses to be a partner.

It feels like trying to draw water from a dry well.

The magical knot forms with grit in its gears, sluggish and unwilling.

Erebus clicks a dry greeting along our pact-line, a small, polite sound in my inner ear.

‘Ledger is open.

No singing unless you are already bleeding.’ ‘Prefer not to bleed,’ I answer.

I take a steadying breath.

“Okay,” I say, taking stock of the wreck.

“Baseline: almost no Grey.

Mythweaver is a luxury I can’t afford.

Harmony is personal.

Nine-circle magic is fighting the room.

Soul and sword are intact.” ‘An excellent philosophy,’ Valeria comments from the quiet of my mind.

‘Particularly when the verbs are on strike and management is hostile.’ ‘Austerity is a virtue in a hostile economy,’ Erebus adds.

‘Proceed.’ I take another step into the vast entry hall.

The walls aren’t walls; they are letters pretending to be plaster, each curve an honest shape until you stare long enough to feel it staring back.

I don’t try to read them.

Not yet.

The floor is level in the way a polite lie is level.

I glance up.

The ceiling is higher than it ought to be without quite being tall.

The whole place feels like the answer to a question no one has asked yet.

I drop my hand to Valeria’s hilt.

She warms once in acknowledgment.

No words.

No theatrics.

Just the weight of old metal that remembers what cutting is for.

If my magic won’t work, then I will.

I move to the side of the hall and set my feet the way Tiamat made me, back when my ankles were still arrogant.

I run the first kata.

The blade clears the sheath without a sound.

The cut is just a cut-a straight line that does not argue with itself.

No edge tricks.

No verb carried on the swing.

First bite, then exit, then breath.

The tower does nothing.

That tells me everything.

It’s not my power it hates.

It’s my assumptions.

I run the second kata.

The turning cut, the change of hand that should feel like water, feels instead like a hinge with grit in it.

My left shoulder is carrying too much habit and not enough honesty.

I know what the perfect form looks like, but I can’t land it without thinking too hard.

I can almost feel the phantom sting of Tiamat’s training staff against my shoulder blades, the ghost of her voice cutting through my pride: ‘Your shoulder wants to be the hero of a story your feet haven’t written yet.

Stop it.’ ‘Rust,’ I admit to myself.

‘A year back on Earth, and too much of it has been meetings and miracles.

Not enough floors and sweat.’ I slow down.

I begin her drill: nine slow cuts, each one faster than the last only because the line gets cleaner, not because the arm gets greedy.

One: I cut a line of air that doesn’t push my wrist.

Two: I cut a line of air that doesn’t lean on my elbow.

Three: I cut a line of air that doesn’t require my shoulder to apologize.

Four: I cut a line whose exit is as honest as its entrance.

Five: I cut a line that doesn’t promise a second cut before it finishes the first.

Six: I cut a line that knows how to stop without looking like regret.

Seven: I cut a line that could live in a hallway with a low ceiling.

Eight: I cut a line that keeps its tip a rumor.

Nine: I cut a line that does not need a witness.

By the ninth cut, my breathing has decided to be helpful again.

Four in.

Six out.

The final cut wasn’t a feeling of power.

It was a feeling of absence.

The absence of friction, of doubt, of the tower’s subtle, judgmental pressure.

For that one perfect line, the room had nothing to say, nothing to tax.

That silence was the only victory I could afford.

I test a small law, not on the air, but on the cut itself.

“Stop,” I command the muscle in my arm.

The blade stops exactly where I told it to.

The tower tries to make the stop a hesitation, a flicker of doubt.

My personal-sized Harmony keeps it from looking like fear.

Valeria settles and approves.

I run stance work.

Triangles, lines, circles.

The floor tries to charge a tax on any pattern that looks like it means to repeat.

So I keep the patterns ugly, deliberately imperfect.

Perfection is a pattern.

Patterns can be predicted, taxed, and punished.

Ugliness, true unpredictability, has no rhythm for the tower to grab onto.

It was the swordsmanship of a cornered animal, and right now, that’s what I was.

My footfalls find their truth in the untidy.

After forty minutes by my own internal clock-which could be ten minutes or two hours in here-sweat is running down my back.

Not a single part of me feels like it wasted the water.

I try a nine-circle anchor again, the smallest version from the Bahamut Method, barely a thought.

Instead of a complex knot, I leave a single, stable dot of power on the floor.

The dot agrees to keep being a dot.

When I step past it, the dot says: you were here.

Not you must come back.

That’s all I need.

‘If boredom were a saint, you’d have a shrine,’ Erebus hums along the line, a tiny, dry winter voice in my head.

‘Boredom wins,’ I answer.

‘Write it down.’ ‘Already engraving.’ My thighs start to ache.

Good.

The ache is honest.

I try The Grey one last time, more out of spite than hope.

A thumb-sized page, a two-touch fold.

I don’t push it.

I lay it down like a playing card on a bar.

The tiny page sits for a full second this time before the tower taxes it into ash that doesn’t fall.

It’s not a total refusal.

It’s just a very long bill.

“Fine,” I tell the room.

“We’ll pay with steps instead of coins.” I open my eyes and name what I have, without making it braver than it is.

‘Sword: intact.

Breath: intact.

Balance: rusty, but fixable.

Nine-circle: usable in dots.

Mythweaver: flickers.

Grey: a high-cost luxury.

Harmony: me-sized.’ I take the sheath in my left hand and the hilt in my right and run a hundred draws without a cut.

Then a hundred cuts without a draw.

I do it all with my eyes on a seam in the floor that refuses to be straight.

When the ache moves from my legs to the space under my shoulder blades, I stop.

I take one more breath.

“One floor at a time,” I say.

“One verb at a time.” I look at the letters pretending to be plaster and pick a spot that seems least interested in me.

I keep my voice small.

“Enter.” The wall doesn’t open.

The floor does, a square opening half a step in front of my foot, as if the tower wants me to remember where I carry authority and where I don’t.

I don’t move forward yet.

I run the first kata again, slower than the first time, and land a cleaner ninth cut than I’ve thrown in months.

I stepped through, leaving my old habits behind in the dust.

I had entered this tower as a master technician of magic.

I would have to learn to be a simple craftsman again, building a new strength one honest cut at a time.