2026-07-02 16:24:46The fart did not disperse. It hung in the buried cavern and gassed all of them half to nausea while the mole tittered, ambled to the corner, and went back to digging, done with the five players it had left.
Lena went to the little heap of bone, let out a long breath, took off her coat, and laid it over the blood. Ben carried Zane's body to the corner and covered the cook's face with his own jacket.
From Penny's outburst, to Zane's death, to the mole finishing what was left of her — the whole of it had taken five minutes.
The Spire had marked Side Quest 2 complete and offered no new one. They had a single main quest: survive. A person lasts seven days without water, thirty without food. If the mole kept out of it, Cole figured his upgraded body could go a month dry — what he feared was that the Spire's survival game had no end at all.
"Uncle Mole," he tried. "How do we leave?"
The mole made an odd little laugh. "Leave? You're in Moron Mode. Your only job is to stay alive. Leave. The nerve."
No one dared argue. In the black, the mole's claws went scrape, scrape, mechanical and grating.
Ben still held the flashlight Penny had conjured. He turned it over, uneasy. "Gives me the creeps, holding this…"
Cole looked at him. "You don't want it? Can I see?" He was genuinely curious about a thing made of nothing but another person's power.
Ben didn't hesitate; he shoved it into Cole's hands. "Take it. I don't want the thing."
The flashlight passed into Cole's grip — and his face stilled, and something strange flickered behind his eyes.
"Let me see it too," Lucan said, reaching.
Cole paused a beat too long, and somehow did not hand it over. Lucan was just beginning to find that odd when a bright, lilting carol burst out, the high child's voice freezing all five humans and the mole mid-motion. The mole's small eyes went round with disbelief.
"That's impossible."
The song finished, and a familiar voice spoke in every ear.
> [ Ding-dong! Stowaway Adrian Vance has successfully cleared the First Floor of the Spire! ]
The mole's head shot up. "Impossible!"
Cole's grip tightened on the flashlight, his eyes pulling to points. As the message faded, the cavern blurred in front of him. The mole, clutching its head in horror, was thinning to vapor; so were Ben, Wes, Lucan, and Lena, the four of them dissolving where they stood.
When the dark took his sight completely, the next instant Cole opened his eyes to a blaze of sunlight that whited out the world. He gulped air like a drowning man hauled up, fighting to adjust — and then he saw where he was, wrenched the wheel, scraped the curb, and nearly went out the window.
The car skidded twenty-some meters before he braked it to the shoulder.
His heart was still slamming. Every moment in that buried cavern sat right behind his eyes. But he steadied fast, looked around, and understood: he was back in the car. He and Wes had been driving when the assault pulled them under. Now he was returned —
"Where's Wes?"
He drove back and looked. No Wes. He searched, and there was nothing to find, and at last he pulled to the shoulder and looked down at the flashlight in his palm.
Ben had given it to him. Ben, who'd wanted it gone the moment the girl who made it died, had pushed it into Cole's hands without a thought — and never dreamed that, in taking it, Cole had taken something else.
Cole lifted his hand and drew the book out of the air, and turned to the third page.
> 【 Ability: Hex Marks the Spot 】
> 【 Owner: Ben (Registered Player) 】 > 【 Type: Special 】 > 【 Function: a causality strike on a chosen target, turning their luck bad 】 > 【 Level: 1 】 > 【 Restriction: one target per day; the misfortune cannot be controlled 】 > 【 Note: Cole wouldn't even pay for a flashlight. Absolutely shameless. 】Cole's fingers creaked against the page. He breathed twice, slowly, and read on.
> 【 Cole's User Manual: once per day, 30% to land. Choking on your food, water down the wrong pipe — that counts as bad luck too. This garbage ability rather suits Cole. 】
If it hadn't been his own power, Cole would have ground the book to dust and scattered the ashes.
But he'd understood the important thing. There were two ways to take an ability. The first was to kill, the way he had with Quill — that always worked. The second was to dine and dash: to take something from someone and not pay for it. Ben had handed him the flashlight; Cole had given nothing back. That counted.
But if pocketing a flashlight was enough — was it really that simple to take a person's power?
He turned it over and felt, dimly, that it couldn't be; there'd be other limits. He was about to close the book when a line in pale ink crept in below the note.
> 【 Note: Hex Marks the Spot (caster: Ben) — has taken effect. 】
Taken effect? When? On whom?
The text was faint, and none of it carried the book's usual smug venom. He studied it and got nowhere, and frowned, and slid his hand into his pocket — and his fingers met something round and hard.
He drew it out. "…The turkey egg?"
Fist-sized, the mole's parting gift, knocked twice and pocketed and apparently carried clean out of the game. An ordinary white egg, only larger. The mole had said humans could never hatch a turkey, that it was just something to eat. Cole rapped it, experimentally, against the steering wheel.
A dull thunk. He looked.
The egg hadn't cracked. The steering wheel had.
People are supposed to eat this? You'd need iron teeth.
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Chapter 19 — Draw a Circle, Curse You / Give Me Back My Grandpa
The first gunshot tore the silence apart.Cole twisted and threw out an arm, shoving Mr. Reyes off his feet. In his sharpened sight a silver bullet drifted, almost slow, through the space the teacher had filled, and buried itself in the wall — and Cole's eyes snapped to the line it had flown, fixing the shooter's position."Toby," he said, low and fast. "Kill the gym lights."A nail shot through the air and smashed every bulb. The world dropped into black."Cole — what are you doing?" Wes hissed.Cole crouched and, with a speed no one could follow in the dark, drew a clean circle on the floor. The others saw only that he'd dropped down; none saw what he did. He stood."Drawing a little circle," he said, even, "to curse him."The students slipped out of the gym by its four separate doors.Another round split the dark and punched through the concrete floor."A police pistol's effective range is fifty meters, a hundred at the outside," Toby whispered.They moved in three groups. Wes and
Chapter 19 — Draw a Circle, Curse You / Give Me Back My Grandpa
The first gunshot tore the silence apart.Cole twisted and threw out an arm, shoving Mr. Reyes off his feet. In his sharpened sight a silver bullet drifted, almost slow, through the space the teacher had filled, and buried itself in the wall — and Cole's eyes snapped to the line it had flown, fixing the shooter's position."Toby," he said, low and fast. "Kill the gym lights."A nail shot through the air and smashed every bulb. The world dropped into black."Cole — what are you doing?" Wes hissed.Cole crouched and, with a speed no one could follow in the dark, drew a clean circle on the floor. The others saw only that he'd dropped down; none saw what he did. He stood."Drawing a little circle," he said, even, "to curse him."The students slipped out of the gym by its four separate doors.Another round split the dark and punched through the concrete floor."A police pistol's effective range is fifty meters, a hundred at the outside," Toby whispered.They moved in three groups. Wes and
Chapter 18 — What Makes a Reserve
Dawn came pale through the gym's far window, and the nerves that had held everyone taut all night finally began to ease.Cole walked the corridor where the six bodies lay, looking at each in turn, his face blank, his pace slow."How did you become a Registered Player?"He looked up. Cassie had come out of the gym and stood against the wall, watching him.He was quiet a moment. "On the third day after Earth went online, I played a game of the Spire's and won. It was a one-on-one. The other player was your father."Her body went tight, then loosened. "You don't have to feel guilty.""I don't."She looked at him."Your father pulled me into that game," Cole said. "Without it I'd likely have been erased already. I've finished what he asked — I've seen that you're safe. The game was him or me. I felt guilty, for a while. But you're alive, so I won't anymore. And I don't think your father would blame me."She studied him a long moment, and then she smiled. "You're a strange person."A girl
Chapter 17 — Kill Them, Then Survive
Under the tall pines, Mr. Reyes spoke low. "I'm sorry. We were genuinely afraid you were a bad man — a Stowaway. We couldn't take the smallest risk. This is the most dangerous hour of the day, and you came in the middle of it; we had no way to be sure of you. Better to be wrong and turn someone away than to let one of them through."Cole nodded. "Eleven at night to two in the morning. Deep sleep. It's the most dangerous stretch of the day — if someone means to strike, that's when they'll do it."A student piped up. "That's exactly what Cassie said."Cole glanced at the short-haired girl in the center of the group.Mr. Reyes sighed. "You're right. We were afraid someone would creep in under the dark and kill us in our sleep. Eldridge had over a thousand people, students and staff. When the Spire said the game had begun, most of the school vanished — and we were left with two teachers and sixteen students.""Where are the rest?" Cole asked.The teacher's voice went dry. "They're here."
Chapter 16 — What Exactly Is a Reserve?
> [ Ding-dong! On November 19th, two players worldwide have cleared the First Floor of the Spire. 416,230,000 players remain. Please strive to climb the Spire! ]Cole's foot stopped mid-step. He looked up, disbelieving, at the black shape hanging in the dark over the city.He remembered it precisely: yesterday morning, just over four hundred and ninety-eight million players had loaded into the game. Now — eighty million fewer. Was that the cost of the assaults on two servers? Or were there other ways for players to die?Eighty million people, gone again, in a single day.His face went hard, and he put his head down and walked on. The streetlamps up ahead guttered; he took the flashlight from his pack and lit the map. Three corners, four streets, no wasted words to himself, and soon a traffic sign loomed at the roadside — SCHOOL ZONE, REDUCE SPEED. He was close.Crunch.Glass shattered under his shoe. He looked down at a spray of fine fragments, then up: the streetlamp over his head ha
Chapter 15 — Sugar / Sugar~
Cole did not know it, but elsewhere — on the First Floor of the Spire, in the nest of a turkey the size of a tiger — the egg's twin had just changed hands.The giant turkey lay dying in a spreading pool of its own blood, claws still red with a man's, gabbling weakly, unable to rise; one more blow would finish it. It was lucky only in that the man who'd gutted it had no strength left to stand either.The turkey ground out, "Gobble… Stowaway… eat you…"A man in black, one leg torn away by the bird, drenched in his own blood, his left arm punched through with holes, his right arm ending in no hand at all — instead, from the wrist, a vast black spike had grown, a brutal awl of black-violet metal. He coughed red, flicked the arm, and the terrible spike vanished, the wrist becoming a battered ordinary hand again. On both arms he crawled into the nest, reached into the heart of the straw, and lifted out the white egg the turkey had hidden there."Put my egg down!" the turkey howled."You kep
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