Chapter 246: Count down

Nathan fought his way toward the center of the factory floor.

His [Hunter’s Insight] was screaming. Not with enemy markers—those were everywhere, a sea of red. But with something else. A pattern. A rhythm. The machinery wasn’t random. It was structured. Organized. Everything fed into a single point, deep below the floor, where the orange glow was brightest and the grinding was loudest.

He reached the edge of the central platform and looked down.

The floor was grated iron, and through the gaps, he could see a massive shaft descending hundreds of feet into the earth. But there was no monster at the bottom. No half-built god of flesh and metal.

Instead, there was a vortex.

A colossal, blinding whirlpool of pure, liquid light. It was beautiful, in a sickening, wrong way. And flowing into that vortex from thousands of green tubes were not just mana or life force.

Then he saw Through Hunter’s insight.

Threads.

Millions of glowing, gossamer threads. And attached to every thread were fragmented images. A child’s laughter. A mother’s face. The smell of rain on asphalt. The memory of a first kiss. The terror of the stadium collapsing.

"They aren’t just draining their mana," Nathan whispered, his voice trembling with a rage so cold it burned. "They’re draining *them*."

Elise appeared beside him, her face pale as she watched the glowing threads spiral into the abyss. "Their memories. Their identities. Their very souls. It’s stripping away everything that makes them human and condensing it into... whatever that is." She pointed at the blinding vortex below. "It’s a crucible. It’s melting down thousands of human lives to forge a single, conceptual core."

Amara’s spirits shrieked. The Spirit Hunter staggered, clutching her head, falling to her knees. "The ancestors are screaming," she gasped, tears cutting through the soot on her face. "They can feel it. The souls being unmade. Stripped of their names. Stitched together into a chorus of agony. It’s erasing them from the cycle!"

Nathan’s jaw clenched. His grip on Moonlight tightened until the wood creaked.

This wasn’t a Tower. This wasn’t a trial or a challenge or a test. This was a soul-forge. A factory that turned people into the raw conceptual material required to birth a Lord. And the thousands of civilians trapped inside—the families, the children, the old men and women who had just come to watch a tournament—were being erased from existence to fuel it.

The realization hit him like a physical blow.

They weren’t climbing a Tower. They were racing against a countdown. Every minute they spent fighting drones and freezing conveyors was a minute the machine kept consuming. Every second, more people ceased to exist.

And then a system message buzzed through. But it didn’t appear only for Nathan. It appeared for everyone. Every Climber. Every civilian. Every trapped soul inside Lord Creation. Every single person in the Tower saw the same glowing red text burn itself into their vision:

[Ding!]

[Lord Creation Progress: 55%]

[Estimated Completion: 4 Hours, 12 Minutes]

The factory screamed.

The gears shifted into a higher register. The pistons pumped faster. The orange glow beneath the floor intensified, and the conveyor belts lurched back to life with a violent jolt. The bodies on them—the ones Amara hadn’t freed yet—convulsed as the green tubes pulsed brighter, draining faster, pulling harder. The glowing threads of their memories began to rip away in visible, agonizing streams.

The constructs stopped attacking the raid party. Every single one of them. They turned in unison, their featureless heads tilting toward the conveyor belts. Toward the civilians. Toward the fuel.

They weren’t defending the factory anymore.

They were accelerating the process.

"They’re speeding up the consumption!" Smithy yelled, his Void Eel hissing as it phased through a drone’s attack. "The Tower knows we’re disrupting the flow! It’s trying to finish the core before we can shut it down!"

Nathan looked at the notification burning in his vision. Four hours and twelve minutes. Fifty-five percent. The Lord’s core was more than halfway forged. And now it was feeding faster.

He looked at the hundreds of unconscious civilians still on the belts. At the children. At the families. At the people who had come to watch a tournament and were currently being unmade.

He looked at his party. At Garrett, bleeding from a dozen cuts but still standing. At Dillon, breathing hard but grinning through the exhaustion. At Elise, her eyes burning with cold fury. At Smithy, already calculating, already planning. At Kaito, Arthur, Long Wei, Han Seo-jun, Amara—all of them, staring at the same notification, feeling the same horror, the same rage.

Nathan nocked an arrow. His hands were steady. His voice was steady.

"Four hours and twelve minutes," he said. "That’s what we have. That’s what we’re working with." He looked around the room. "Every person we pull off those belts is a soul the Lord doesn’t get. Every construct we destroy is a machine that can’t feed. Every second we fight is a second it doesn’t finish."

He drew the string back. The arrowhead glowed with the blinding light of his S-Rank mana.

"We don’t just climb anymore. We rescue. We save. We pull every single person out of this machine before it finishes building its god."

He released the arrow. It punched through a Crusher Frame’s core, and the construct collapsed.

"And then we climb to the top, and we tear that thing apart."

The raid party surged forward. The factory roared. The gears ground. The countdown burned in every pair of eyes.

Four hours and eleven minutes.

The clock was ticking. And Nathan was not going to let it reach zero without saving every life.

---

Meanwhile, Goliath wiped black oil from his blade and stared at the same glowing red notification.

[Lord Creation Progress: 55%]

He smiled.

"Good," he muttered. "Faster. Build it faster."

Beside him, Shinny stared at the notification. Her hands were shaking. Her eyes were wet. She looked at the grey desert around them—the scorpion corpses dissolving into ash, the pale eyes still watching from the sand.

She looked at the notification.

Fifty-five percent. Almost halfway. Almost done.

And she couldn’t stop thinking about the people on the conveyor belts above. The ones being fed into the machine. She had felt the tremor in the Tower’s mana when the acceleration protocol initiated. She knew what it meant.

"Goliath," she whispered. "The people. The ones being consumed. The acceleration... it’s tearing their souls apart. They won’t just die. They’ll be erased."

"Fuel," Goliath said. He didn’t look at her. He was already walking toward the next passage, toward the deeper layers, toward the apex. "They are fuel, Shinny. That is what they have always been. That is what we were, in our world. Fuel for the Babel System. Fuel for the Towers. Fuel for the Lords who sit at the top and fed on our despair"

He paused. Looked back at her. His pupil-less eyes were hard. Empty. Desperate.

"We are simply returning the favor. When our lord is born, it will consume the Babel System itself."

Shinny said nothing. She followed. She always followed.

But her hands didn’t stop shaking.

[Lord Creation Progress: 55%]

[Time Remaining: 4 Hours, 10 Minutes]