Floor seventy loaded and he understood immediately that it was different.
The scenario was present — the Tower always presented a scenario, the design requiring some engagement context for the floor's actual test to run in. But the scenario's surface was thin in a way the previous floors' surfaces hadn't been. A navigation challenge, simple by this floor range's standards, the kind of obstacle that a floor fifty climber would have needed to problem-solve their way through and that a floor seventy climber with standard progression would handle in under twenty minutes.
He handled it in nine.
Then the floor's actual architecture activated.
Not a second scenario. Not a hidden fable layer in the manner of the mid-range floors. The Tower's design at this level didn't hide its real content — it front-loaded the simple scenario as a calibration check and then opened the real structure when the calibration confirmed the climber was operating in the convergence-proximate range.
