Chapter 178: Untouched City (1)

Four months had passed since Shimura Hiiro walked out of a village on Floor Thirteen and vanished.

That was the clean version of the story, anyway. It was the version Misha repeated because vanished sounded better than he was killed by a random monster.

The last villager to see Hiiro remembered him leaving the village alone sometime in the evening. At that time, there had been nothing been alarming about it. According to Astrid and Caius, Hiiro had a habit of wandering whenever sitting still became unbearable, and nobody had considered following a sixteen-year-old who could punch monsters through walls simply because he wanted some air.

By the time his absence began to feel wrong, dawn had already broken over the village.

The searchers found his tracks beyond the western road. His bootprints led through grassland and crossed several kilometers of uneven terrain before reaching a barren field. The trail continued over the dry soil in a nearly perfect line, then it ended.

There was no turn or disturbance in the earth. No second set of tracks approached him, and no marks suggested he had been dragged away. Hiiro had not doubled back or launched himself beyond the field.

Caius had crouched beside the final footprint for nearly twenty minutes while Astrid searched the surrounding ground. There had been no sign that Hiiro had doubled back, jumped away, or been dragged. He had simply stopped leaving evidence that he existed.

Misha woke later that day and received the news. She hated mysteries like that. A corpse was terrible, but at least it answered one important question. An empty field only gave the imagination permission to become an asshole.

Astrid refused to leave the Floor Thirteen. Dorian had objected at first, though even he had enough sense not to phrase it as: "Your friend is probably dead, so can we move on?"

Floors did not become safer because people were grieving, and every additional day spent waiting created new problems for the survivors still under his responsibility.

Astrid did not care. She joined every search party, then went out again after the others returned. Caius divided his time between her, the village, and Misha’s bedside. He rarely spoke about Hiiro, but each evening he asked whether anyone had found new tracks.

The answer never changed.

Eventually, the climb forced them onward.

Misha had left Floor Thirteen without a body to bury, an enemy to blame, or a promise she knew how to keep. Four months later, that unfinished absence still followed them into Ashmoor.

The first time Yara mentioned the Settlement, Misha pictured soot-darkened brick walls. Perhaps a medieval city carved from volcanic stone, all narrow streets, coal smoke, and miserable people wrapped in black wool.

She had been wrong, very wrong.

Ashmoor stood in the middle of an ash desert like somebody had dropped a futuristic metropolis into the wrong genre.

Tall towers of dark glass rose from pale-gray dunes, their upper floors disappearing behind enormous translucent barriers that shimmered whenever ash-heavy winds struck from outside the city. Bridges connected several buildings high above street level, some enclosed within transparent tunnels while others carried silent transit platforms that glided between districts on glowing rails.

Holographic signs floated over shops. Advertisement shifted across building surfaces spilling red, violet, and electric blue over polished black stone. Directional markers appeared directly beneath pedestrian’s feet before fading once they passed, while small mechanical constructs drifted over intersections directing traffic with beams of colored light.

Misha had seen futuristic cities in games. She had also watched enough cheap sci-fi movies to recognize when someone had committed aggressively to neons.

Ashmoor somehow made both look underfunded.

Even the streets were wrong for the name. They were clean, not where people swept monster blood aside and considered the job done. It was actually clean.

Ash rarely crossed the outer barriers, and whatever dust managed to slip through was collected by small automated constructs that moved along the roads like irritated metal beetles.

Carl had spent their first hour in the city staring at everything, while Misha had pretended not to do the same.

Ashmoor was loud without being chaotic. Music spilled from upper balconies. Merchants shouted over one another beneath illuminated awnings, food stalls crowded the lower plazas, and people from dozens of different Floors moved through the streets wearing everything from armor to tailored coats that would have looked perfectly normal in a high-end distinct back on Earth.

The contrast had been almost offensive after seeing Genesis and Exodus.

They had arrived covered in grime, blood, and the accumulated emotional damage of several quests designed by someone who clearly hated human happiness.

Ashmoor greeted them with colored lights. The reason the city remained so intact was apparently because of one woman.

The Crimson Witch.

According to several residents, the Crimson Witch happened to be staying in Ashmoor when the Floor Reset reached Twenty-One. She protected the Settlement, that was how casually people told the story.

She protected the city.

As though the reset had been a bad storm and somebody had remembered to close the windows.

Whatever the Crimson Witch actually did, Ashmoor survived nearly untouched while other Settlements suffered everything from structural damage to complete destruction.

Misha stopped beneath a floating projection suspended above one of Ashmoor’s main avenues.

The image was large enough to span the front of an entire building, though there was no screen holding it. Lights assembled themselves directly in the air, sharpening until a battlefield appeared several meters above the crowd.

Floor Twelve. Misha recognized the road immediately.

Her feet stopped before her brain caught up.

A funeral cart rolled beneath a gray sky while a group of unfamiliar Raiders fought desperately around it. Hushers crowded the street, their mouths stretched open in silent cries whenever the funeral rhythm broke.

The Tower had already reset the tragedy for somebody else.

’Well, that’s depressing.’

Information scrolled beneath the projection.

[ FLOOR 12 - ACTIVE ATTEMPT

Participants Remaining:17

Quest Progression: 61%

Current Settlement Surveillance Feed. ]

Misha’s eyes narrowed beneath her mask. That answered one question she had never gotten around to asking.

"So this is how they monitor Awakeners."