The first time Percy fought Margit, he died.
It happened at 3:14 in the morning on a Saturday in late September. One second he was kneeling in the rain in a narrow stone arena under a black sky, with a golden hammer coming down at his head. The next he was lying on his back on the floor of his bedroom in Manhattan, gasping, with every muscle in his body screaming and blood in his mouth.
[THE HOST HAS DIED.]
[Ejected from the Loom at 1 HP.]
[All loot from this run has been lost.]
[Floor 11 has been relocked to its starting point.]
[Re-entry is barred for 24 real hours.]
[10% of sustained injuries have carried over.]
He lay there on the carpet and stared at the ceiling and shook.
There was a long, dark bruise spreading across his ribs where the hammer had caught him. His left wrist was swollen and hot. When he touched his cheek, his fingers came away red from a cut he didn't remember getting.
Lupe was standing on his chest, whining, licking his face.
"I'm okay," he whispered. "I'm okay, girl. I'm okay."
He wasn't. Not really.
He'd thought he was ready. That was the worst part. He'd climbed ten floors. He'd beaten a dragon and his own reflection and the twelve Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur himself. He'd put the god of war in the sand. He was Level 76 now, with three classes and seven blessings and a shadow army of nine.
And a gray old man with a cane had killed him in four minutes.
[Great Sage notes: The Host entered the boss arena 11 levels below recommended. The Host also panicked.]
I didn't panic.
[The Host's heart rate exceeded 190 beats per minute. The Host attacked during seven of the boss's eight delayed strikes. The Host panicked.]
Percy closed his eyes.
Yeah, he thought. Okay. I panicked.
[Great Sage is not criticizing. Great Sage is observing.]
That's the same thing.
[...It is adjacent.]
He almost laughed. It hurt his ribs.
Floor 11 was different from every floor before it.
He'd known it would be. The tower had told him, the moment he'd stepped through the Gate on Friday night.
[STRATUM II: THE SHATTERED LANDS]
[The threads of this Stratum are spun from a world whose gods broke their own covenant. Its warriors have fought and died and risen again ten thousand times. They do not fear death. They have forgotten how.]
[Rank: D. The tower is no longer a training ground.]
And it wasn't.
The world he'd stepped into was gray and broken and beautiful. Rolling hills under a stormy sky, scattered with ruins. Great golden trees glowed on the horizon, enormous, their leaves shedding sparks of light into the wind. And in the distance, on a cliff above a churning sea, rose a castle. Black stone, jagged towers, broken walls. Stormveil.
The road to it was the hardest ground he'd ever crossed.
The Storm Hawks came first. They dove out of the black clouds in screaming flocks, with talons like knives and wings that cut the air with a sound like tearing silk. He'd had to fight them on a cliffside road with nothing between him and a thousand-foot drop to the rocks. His lightning was worse than useless in the storm. Every bolt he called down split and scattered in the wind.
Then the Castle Soldiers. Gray, gaunt men in rusted armor who fought with spears and torches and crossbows, and who didn't run, and didn't scream, and didn't stop. When he cut them down, they just lay still in the rain. He had the uncomfortable feeling that if he came back tomorrow, they'd be standing in exactly the same places.
Then the Banished Knights. Two of them, at the broken bridge before the castle gate. Tall and grim in heavy plate armor, with great shields and greatswords, and the eyes behind their visors burning like coals. They fought together, like a single creature with two bodies. It had taken him a whole day of tower time, and three retreats, and his entire shadow army, to break them.
[Banished Knight (Lv 72) x2 defeated.]
[PROTEUS: Weapon copied. BANISHED KNIGHT'S GREATSHIELD. Stored in Realm of the Ward.]
[PROTEUS: Weapon copied. STORMVEIL CROSSBOW. Stored in Realm of the Bow.]
And then he'd walked through the gate into the arena.
And Margit had been waiting.
He spent the twenty-four hours of his lockout thinking.
Not training. Not climbing. Thinking. He went to school on Monday with a bruise on his cheek that he told his teachers was from soccer. He sat in algebra class and in English and in biology, and he didn't hear a word anybody said, because he was replaying the fight. Over and over. Every second of it.
Margit, the Fell Omen.
He was a tall, stooped old man, bent nearly double, with a ragged gray cloak and a long, cruel face hidden under a tangle of gray hair. He had horns, short and broken, sprouting from his forehead. He walked with a heavy wooden cane. He didn't look like much.
And he fought like nothing Percy had ever seen.
It wasn't his strength. It wasn't his speed, though he had plenty of both. It was his timing. Margit didn't attack when you expected him to. He'd raise his cane over his head, and hold it there. And hold it. And hold it. And your whole body would scream now, he's going to swing NOW, dodge NOW. So you'd dodge.
And then he'd swing. Half a second late. Right into the place you'd dodged to.
Every attack was like that. A breath too slow, a heartbeat too late. Every swing was a trap built for a nervous mind. And between the swings, golden daggers would flicker into his hand out of thin air, and he'd hurl them, quick as thought. Then a golden hammer would appear, shimmering and spectral, the size of a car, and come down with a sound like a cathedral bell.
[Delayed attacks punish panic.]
That had been the floor's warning. Right there, in the description. And he'd read it, and nodded, and walked in anyway, and panicked.
Because I always do, he thought, staring out the window of his biology classroom at the gray September sky. I always move first. That's what I'm good at. Seeing the hit coming and getting out of the way before it lands. That's what kept me alive for two whole lives.
And he knows it. The floor knows it. It's built to beat exactly what I'm good at.
"Mr. Jackson?"
He blinked. The biology teacher was standing over his desk, frowning. The whole class was looking at him.
"Sorry," he said. "What was the question?"
"I asked," said Mr. Pierce, very patiently, "what the function of the mitochondria is."
Two rows over, Matt Sloan coughed into his fist. It sounded a lot like powerhouse of the cell.
"Powerhouse of the cell," said Percy.
Mr. Pierce sighed, and moved on.
Across the room, Rachel was looking at him. She'd been looking at him all morning. At the bruise on his cheek, and his swollen wrist, and the way he was holding his ribs when he thought nobody was watching. She didn't say anything. She just looked.
At lunch, she sat down across from him in the cafeteria with her tray and said, "You died. Didn't you."
Nancy, sitting next to her, nearly choked on her chocolate milk.
Percy stared at Rachel.
"How did you—"
"I dreamed it." Her green eyes were steady, but her hands were shaking a little around her fork. "Last night. An old man with a cane. In the rain. He hit you with a big gold hammer, and you... broke." She swallowed. "And then you were on your bedroom floor. Bleeding."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"I'm okay," Percy said. "It's the tower. You don't really die in there. You just get kicked out."
"With that on your face," said Nancy, pointing at the bruise with her milk carton.
"Ten percent of it comes back with me," Percy admitted. "That's the rule."
"Ten percent," Matt said slowly, sitting down next to him. "Ten percent of what? How bad was it in there, if this is ten percent?"
Percy didn't answer.
The three of them looked at each other.
"Okay," Nancy said finally, very firmly. She put down her milk. "Okay. So what's the plan?"
Percy blinked. "The plan?"
"For the old man. With the cane." Nancy crossed her arms. "You've got a plan. You always have a plan. You've had your plan face on all morning. So what is it?"
And despite everything, Percy smiled.
"Patience," he said.
He went back on Tuesday night.
This time he did it right.
He didn't rush. He walked the cliffside road again, slowly, and fought the Storm Hawks again, and the Castle Soldiers, and the Banished Knights at the bridge. The floor had reset, so it was all exactly where it had been, exactly the same. But this time he didn't go through the gate into the arena.
He went around it.
[Note: Every Hidden Quest is found by exploring, or by sparing or speaking with something.]
He'd read that rule a hundred times. And on Floor 11 he'd been so focused on the boss he'd never bothered to look.
So he looked.
It took him two tower days. He searched every ruin on the hills below the castle. He climbed down a rope ladder into a flooded catacomb full of skeletons that put themselves back together if you didn't hit them with lightning. He found a ruined chapel on a lonely hill, half-swallowed by golden roots. And in the back of the chapel, crouched behind a broken altar, he found a man.
He was short and bald and grinning, with a sly, weaselly face and a crossbow in his lap. He jumped about a foot in the air when Percy's shadow fell over him.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" he squawked, holding up his hands. "Easy, friend! Easy! No need for violence! I'm just a humble merchant! A trader of goods! Nothing to see here!"
Percy looked at him.
He looked at the crossbow. At the open chest behind the altar, full of stolen-looking junk. At the trapdoor in the floor that was very obviously a trap.
He'd met this guy before. Not this guy exactly. But guys like him. Every dungeon in every world had one.
"You're going to try to drop me through that trapdoor," Percy said. "And steal my stuff."
The bald man's grin froze.
"...Maybe," he admitted.
"Don't," said Percy. "I've got nine shadows, a lightning bolt, and a really bad week." He crouched down. "I'm looking for something. Something that can stop the old man in the arena. Even for a few seconds. You wouldn't happen to have anything like that, would you?"
The merchant looked at him for a long moment. His beady eyes moved from Percy's face to his hands, to the bronze ring on his finger, to the darkness pooling under his feet.
Then he sighed, and reached into the chest, and pulled out a set of heavy iron shackles. They were old and rusted and covered in strange runes, and they glowed very faintly gold.
"Margit's Shackle," the merchant said sourly. "Pins the old bastard in place. A few seconds, no more. Twice, if you're lucky." He held it out, then pulled it back. "Not free, mind. A man's got to eat."
Percy thought about it. Then he reached into his inventory and pulled out a handful of Frost Crystals from Floor 8. They glittered blue-white in the dim light of the chapel.
The merchant's eyes went very wide.
"Pleasure doing business," he said, and the shackle was in Percy's hand and the crystals were gone so fast that Percy barely saw them move.
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE: THE FELL OMEN'S CHAIN.]
[Item acquired: MARGIT'S SHACKLE. Pin the Fell Omen in place for 3 seconds. Uses: 2.]
[+18,000 EXP.]
Then he walked into the arena.
It was the same as before. A narrow stone yard in front of the castle gate, under a churning black sky. The rain coming down cold and hard. Broken carts and old corpses and rusted weapons scattered across the stones. The wind howling.
And in the middle of it, rising slowly up out of nothing in a swirl of golden light, the Fell Omen.
Margit straightened. He wasn't stooped anymore. He was tall, taller than any man, eight feet at least, with his ragged cloak whipping in the wind and his cane planted in the stones beside him. His long, cruel face looked down at Percy with something that might have been amusement.
[BOSS: MARGIT, THE FELL OMEN]
[Level: 80]
[Host Level: 79]
[SIDE QUEST: PATIENCE. Defeat the Fell Omen without being struck by a delayed attack.]
"Back again, little stray," Margit rasped. His voice was low and dry and full of contempt. "Did you not learn the first time? There is nothing beyond these gates for one such as you. Go home. Kneel. Be content with the dirt."
Percy drew Proteus.
"I've been told that before," he said. "By people a lot scarier than you."
And this time, he waited.
It was the hardest thing he'd ever done in a fight.
Harder than holding the sky. Harder than drawing on the Master Bolt with a broken rib. Harder than standing in front of Ares. Because every single instinct in his body, every reflex built up over two lifetimes of fighting monsters, was screaming at him to move.
Margit raised his cane over his head.
Move, screamed his body. He's going to swing. MOVE.
Percy didn't move.
[STRATEGIST'S EYE active.]
He watched. Not the cane. Not the face. The feet. That was what Athena's blessing gave him. Not the moment of the strike. The shape of it. The way Margit's weight shifted, the way his back heel lifted off the stone a fraction of a second before the cane came down. The real tell, hidden under the false one.
The cane hung in the air. One second. Two.
Margit's back heel lifted.
Now.
Percy stepped left. One step. No roll, no dash, no panic. Just one calm step.
The cane came down where he'd been standing, and shattered the stones.
And Percy was already inside Margit's guard, with Proteus in his hand.
[PROTEUS: Realm of the Blade. Form: Arondight.]
Lancelot's sword bit deep into the Fell Omen's side.
Margit snarled. Golden daggers flickered into his free hand and he hurled them at point-blank range. Percy raised his left arm.
[PROTEUS: Realm of the Ward. Form: Banished Knight's Greatshield.]
The sword folded into a shield in the blink of an eye, a great heavy slab of dark steel. The daggers clanged off it like hail on a roof.
"Insolent—" Margit hissed.
Percy didn't answer. He just backed up, one slow step, and waited again.
The fight went on for over an hour.
It was a dance. A slow, terrible, patient dance in the rain. Margit attacked. Percy waited. Margit feinted. Percy waited. Margit held his hammer over his head for three full seconds, four, five, trying to break him. Percy stood in the rain with his heart pounding so hard he could hear it over the storm, and waited, until the heel lifted. Then he stepped, and struck, and stepped back.
He took hits. Plenty of them. The golden daggers. A backhand from the cane that sent him rolling across the stones. A kick that knocked the wind out of him. But never once, not once in the whole long hour, did he take a hit from a delayed attack.
[HP: 2,380 → 1,640]
[HP: 1,640 → 1,120]
[Margit, the Fell Omen: 58% HP.]
At half health, Margit changed.
He roared, and the golden light around him blazed up like a bonfire. A spectral sword appeared in his hand, long and shining and wicked. Then a spectral hammer. Then both, at once. And he came at Percy faster than before, so fast the rain seemed to stop in the air around him. The attacks were a storm of gold, delayed and quick and delayed again, mixed together so tightly that there was no rhythm left to read.
Percy took a cut across the shoulder. Another across the thigh.
[HP: 1,120 → 610]
And he felt it. The panic. Rising in his chest like water, cold and fast. Move. Run. Dodge. Get out of the way. He's too fast, you can't read him, MOVE.
And he heard Rachel's voice, from the cafeteria. You died. Didn't you.
And Nancy's. So what's the plan?
And his own. Patience.
He reached into his inventory.
Margit raised the golden hammer high over his head, both hands, for the killing blow. And held it there. Held it. Waiting for Percy to break.
Percy threw the shackle.
[MARGIT'S SHACKLE: Activated.]
The iron chains wrapped around the Fell Omen like they were alive. They flared gold, and pulled, and Margit slammed down onto his knees in the middle of the arena with the hammer still raised over his head, frozen, roaring with rage.
Three seconds.
Percy didn't waste them.
[METAMAGIC: TWINNED SPELL. LIGHTNING CALL x2.]
[PROTEUS: Realm of the Heavens. Form: The Unclaimed Bolt.]
Two bolts from the sky, and one from his hand. They hit the Fell Omen all at once, and the arena turned white.
When the light cleared, Margit was still on his knees. Smoking. His cloak was burned to rags. His gold light was flickering like a candle in the wind.
He looked up at Percy.
And slowly, horribly, he began to laugh.
"Ahh," he rasped. "So the stray has learned to be still." He coughed, and gold mist came out of his mouth. "Few ever do. They all rush to their deaths. Every one. Ten thousand of them, through this gate. They could never... wait."
He toppled forward onto the wet stones.
And faded away into gold.
[BOSS DEFEATED: MARGIT, THE FELL OMEN (Lv 80).]
[SIDE QUEST COMPLETE: PATIENCE.]
[The Host did not strike in haste, and was not struck by a single delayed attack.]
[FLOOR 11 CLEARED.]
[+82,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 79 → Level 81]
[WIS +3. (Patience.)]
[Loot acquired:]
[SHATTERED RUNE OF DETHRONEMENT — Fell Omen's Dagger. Instantly manifest spectral golden daggers to throw mid-combo or parry with. Almost no MP cost. Low damage. A perfect combo-extender.]
[MARGIT'S CLOAK — Dampens the wearer's presence. Once per day, absorbs one lethal blow, leaving an illusion decoy while the wearer blinks a few feet away.]
[PROTEUS: Weapon copied. FELL OMEN'S SPECTRAL BLADE. Stored in Realm of the Blade.]
[Realm of the Blade is full.]
Percy sat down on the wet stones of the arena, in the rain, and put his head back, and let the water run down his face.
He was shaking. All over. Not from the cold. From the hour of holding still. From the fight against his own body, which had been so much harder than the fight against Margit.
[Great Sage notes: The Host's heart rate peaked at 141 beats per minute. The Host did not panic.]
I wanted to, Percy thought. The whole time. Every second.
[Great Sage knows. That is what makes it count.]
Percy laughed, wet and shaky, alone in the rain.
He came out of the tower at five in the morning on Wednesday with a cut on his shoulder and a new cloak in his inventory, and slept for exactly two hours before his alarm went off for school.
At lunch, he sat down across from Rachel and Nancy and Matt, and set his tray down, and didn't say anything.
Rachel looked at him. She looked at the fresh bandage peeking out from under his collar. Then she looked at his face, and slowly, she smiled.
"You won," she said.
"How did you—"
"I dreamed it again." Her green eyes were bright. "You stood in the rain for a whole hour and didn't move. And then there was lightning."
Nancy whooped so loud the whole cafeteria turned to look. Matt clapped him on the back so hard his ribs creaked.
And Percy sat there with the three of them, in a noisy high school cafeteria in Manhattan, eating a terrible rectangular pizza. And he thought about something Hecate had said, two weeks ago, in the rain in the Bronx.
You will need others. People you trust.
Rachel had dreamed of the tower. Twice. Without anyone showing her.
And he had three thousand Faith he hadn't spent.
Soon, he thought, looking at the three of them. Very soon.