The climb began in silence, the only sounds the rasp of gloves on cable and the occasional metallic groan from the Black Monolith’s tortured frame. L’Uomo Prime went first, his cerametal and plasteel frame gripping the hanging lines with practiced precision. Halfway up, a frayed section of conduit kissed his shoulder plating. Blue-white current surged through him in a single vicious arc. He convulsed once, twice, then locked rigid, dangling like a broken marionette until the charge bled away. Below, Butterball misjudged his own ascent. The massive form slipped, wings snapping open by reflex, and he glided in a controlled spiral down the shaft before recovering and starting again. By sheer stubbornness the party reached the tenth floor.

They stood upon a steel grate that felt more suggestion than structure. Entire sections had simply vanished, leaving ragged voids that plunged into darkness. The ruined elevator lobby lay ahead, a single car hanging in its shaft like a tooth in a rotting jaw. As they advanced, a familiar shape drifted into view: the flying repair drone from the second-floor plaza, its spindly arms and repair rod still intact, optics glowing with cold purpose.

Butterball’s precognition flared. In the vision, D’Can’Tr’s light generation washed harmlessly over the machine, and Steve Austin ended it with a single thrust of his vibro-dagger. The vision felt certain.

Reality proved otherwise.

The drone attacked without preamble. A jet of pressurized herbicide struck D’Can’Tr square in the torso. The plant-mutant’s silicone flesh blistered and blackened where the chemical touched, steaming as chlorophyll and synthetic tissue cooked together. He staggered, quills rattling in agony. Steve’s rifle barked and missed, the rounds sparking uselessly against the grate. The drone darted, repaired itself mid-air with a spray of nanites, and came again. Only after a brutal exchange—Steve finally closing the distance and driving the vibro-dagger through its primary optic—did the machine spiral down through a hole in the floor, trailing sparks and the stench of burnt circuitry.

They searched the level and found nothing but debris, abandoned construction equipment, and a front-loader whose massive treads pinned the cables they had just climbed. No one could decipher its controls. While the others recovered, D’Can’Tr forced himself through the pain and mastered the jetpack recovered days earlier, mapping every thruster and fail-safe until the device felt like an extension of his own limbs.

Butterball discovered the way forward: a stack of crates leading to high windows. Outside, the Warden’s artificial dawn painted the Silver Wastes in cold light. Hundreds of steel rebar spikes studded the outer wall like the quills of some vast, wounded animal, offering a treacherous path to a large window on the fifteenth floor.

Steve Austin and D’Can’Tr led the ascent. Steve reconnoitered first and returned with grim news: a score of Turkeyoids held the level, clustered around a central HVAC shaft that offered the only upward path. Rear-guard. Alert.

The plan shifted. D’Can’Tr taught Sheik the jetpack’s controls in hurried whispers. Then the climb began in earnest.

Sheik launched. The jetpack carried him clear of the wall—too clear. His turn came late. A zero-g drift pocket seized him mid-correction and hurled him thirteen stories down into the dunes below. The party had no choice. They continued without him, climbing the rebar spikes hand over hand until they tumbled through the shattered southern bay window onto the fifteenth floor.

The Turkeyoids were waiting.

Six regulars and two Butterball lieutenants opened fire the moment the Reclaimers appeared. Glitchy laser rifles spat scarlet beams that scorched plating and flesh alike. D’Can’Tr took a flanking position and returned fire, his laser pistol cutting a clean hole through one Turkeyoid’s chest. Feathers and dark blood sprayed across the grate. A second Turkeyoid’s weapon detonated in a bloom of corroded-cell failure, the explosion tearing the wielder nearly in half and showering the others with shrapnel and burning plumage. One Butterball lieutenant went down under concentrated fire, its massive body collapsing in a wet heap of feathers and ruptured organs. The remaining regulars fell one by one—throats opened, torsos punched through, bodies tumbling into the dark voids surrounding the central grate.

Far below, Sheik finally mastered the jetpack. He rose like a vengeful comet and crashed through the same bay window, vibro-beak already extended. He joined the slaughter without hesitation. The last regular took a massive laser strike from D’Can’Tr that sent the corpse spinning into the abyss. The surviving Butterball lieutenant, feathers singed and eyes wide with terror, scrambled up the HVAC shaft and vanished toward the twentieth floor.

They tended wounds in the brief quiet that followed, then abandoned the uncooperative VTOL taxi and pursued.

The climb up the ventilation shaft was narrow and foul, the metal slick with decades of accumulated grit. L’Uomo emerged first onto the twentieth-floor grate, followed by Sheik and Steve Austin. Six more Turkeyoid regulars waited in a shooting gallery arrangement, rifles already raised.

The second fight erupted at once.

Scarlet beams stitched the air. The grate beneath the Reclaimers’ feet was a fragile island surrounded by a fifteen-meter chasm of pure emptiness. Twisted, melted support beams framed the void like the jaws of some metallic predator. Blue-white rad-sparks leapt constantly between the ruptured conduits, throwing harsh light across the swirling sand vortices that spun toward a dark central drain far below. L’Uomo crossed first. A massive rad-spark arced past his shoulder close enough to ionize the air; he cleared the gap in a single controlled leap and landed clean. The grace did not last. In the chaos that followed, his favored Vibroaxe slipped from his grasp and vanished into the hungry darkness below—an irreplaceable loss that left him fighting with bare hands and residual systems.

The Turkeyoids scored clean hits. One of their own rifles exploded in another spectacular failure of shoddy engineering, the blast flinging the user backward into the chasm. Sheik’s stun pistol locked a regular in mid-stride; the Turkeyoid toppled stiffly over the edge and disappeared into the sand vortices. Henry Darksky’s rifle misfired, forcing a frantic reload. Steve’s aim, however, had sharpened; each shot found flesh or vital systems. D’Can’Tr’s laser pistol jammed, the dead hydrogen cell ejecting with a sad metallic ping. For a moment the Reclaimers were hard-pressed, pressed against the edge of oblivion with fire coming from every direction.

Then the tide turned. Concentrated return fire tore through the remaining Turkeyoids. Feathers and blood painted the grate. Bodies dropped or were driven over the edge into the glowing vortices below. Sheik delivered the final stun; the last regular went rigid and tumbled into the storm of sand and rad-light.

Silence returned, broken only by the crackle of residual sparks and the distant moan of the Warden’s failing systems. The Butterball lieutenant was already gone, fled higher into the darkness.

One by one the Reclaimers crossed the chasm. Butterball glided across with casual grace. The others followed by jetpack, careful leaps, or sheer determination, each of them avoiding the random rad-sparks that still danced across the gap. They stood at last before the elevator shaft embedded in the southern wall. A car waited with its doors slightly ajar. Cool, dank air drifted down from the open roof hatch—air that carried the faint, panicked scent of the fleeing lieutenant racing upward to warn Gobble Lord Skravo.

The Black Monolith continued to rise above them, patient and immense, its upper levels still waiting.

The victory over the Phase Spiders felt hollow. The Reclaimers stood amid the torn remnants of half-phased corpses, their bodies still twitching with residual horror, the air thick with the acrid stench of otherworldly ichor. They had survived another floor of the Black Monolith, yet the tower seemed only to have grown more malevolent — as though their defiance had finally drawn its full, ancient attention.

Then they found Turkey Plissken.

The Turkeyoid lay slumped against a wall, his one good eye glassy, a single puncture wound on his neck still leaking ichor. One of the Phase Spiders had struck true before it died. No one moved to scavenge his weapons or gear. They left him there in silence — a feathered sentinel standing eternal guard over the tower’s growing collection of the lost.

D’Can’Tr was still missing. They searched the mist-choked conference rooms with mounting dread. L’Uomo Prime’s detector legs flickered constantly, picking up phantom heat signatures and movement that vanished the instant they focused on them. Ghost readings. Things that should not be. The signals led them to a large conference room on the western side, its glass walls fogged with condensation.

Through the haze they saw something struggling behind the long table — a shape writhing inside a thick, translucent cocoon.

The Phase Spiders struck the moment they entered.

Three of the monstrous arachnids phased into reality with sickening wet sounds, legs unfolding from nowhere, mandibles already reaching. The horror of them was absolute: half-seen nightmares that existed between dimensions, flickering in and out of existence, dragging their victims screaming into the dark space where time and physics had no meaning. One spider latched onto Sheik, trying to pull him through a closing rift. Another nearly took Butterball whole. The creatures did not simply kill — they *erased*.

The fight was pure pandemonium. Sheik’s stun pistol sparked uselessly. Lasers sliced through empty air where spiders had been a heartbeat earlier. Steve Austin, L’Uomo, and Butterball vaulted over the conference table in a desperate counter-charge, fighting in a violent blur of blades and gunfire. Henry Darksky’s shots found their mark with cold precision.

In the heart of the frenzy, Steve Austin unleashed his Phase Disruption ability again. A shimmering wave of force rippled outward from him, slamming two of the Phase Spiders back into solid reality with a sickening snap of violated physics. Their bodies solidified mid-leap, glistening and vulnerable. But the third spider flickered at the edge of the effect and slipped away, vanishing into the space between dimensions with a hateful chitter.

Moments later, the final Phase Spider reappeared behind them, phasing in with murderous intent. Butterball and Henry Darksky moved with desperate coordination, cutting off its escape routes and forcing the creature into a corner of the conference room. The massive Butterball used his bulk to block one side while Henry’s radiated eyes burned with lethal intensity. Trapped and unable to phase away, the spider lashed out in panic — only for Butterball to bring his weapon down in a crushing overhead blow as Henry fired point-blank, finally putting an end to the nightmare.

In the end, after what felt like an eternity of flickering horror, the last spider lay dead, half-phased and twitching between realities.

They cut D’Can’Tr free of the cocoon just as the digestive enzymes began to liquefy his outer layers. The plant-mutant gasped for breath, eyes wide with terror he had never shown before. He had been moments away from becoming nothing more than nutrient slurry.

They retreated to the fourth floor to recover, using the maintenance hatch in the men’s bathroom. While the others tended wounds with what little remained of their medkit, L’Uomo Prime spent hours methodically cannibalizing the fallen Arc bots — and finally his last loyal mechanical servant — stripping them down to bare components to repair his own battered frame.

When they returned to the fifth floor hours later, the white mist struck them again like a curse. Eyes burned. Throats closed. Only D’Can’Tr remained unaffected, the plant-mutant moving through the toxic haze like a ghost.

Further south, in the women’s restroom just past the elevator lobby, they found a gaping hole in the ceiling with thick bundles of cables spilling downward like mechanical vines. Steve flew up first, followed by L’Uomo and Butterball. The floors immediately above had collapsed entirely, leaving only a hollow shaft. The cables continued upward into darkness.

As the rest of the party prepared to climb, three more Phase Spiders attacked from below.

The final battle was vicious. Lightning-fast strikes from nowhere. Mandibles phasing through armor. Sheik and D’Can’Tr fought desperately on the hallway floor while L’Uomo, Butterball, and Henry fired down from above. Steve dove back into the fray like an avenging angel. The spiders fought with hideous intelligence, trying to drag another victim into the void between dimensions.

In the chaos of the final exchange, Sheik M. Baek finally found his moment. The stun pistol, which had betrayed him again and again, suddenly discharged with a clean, crackling whine. The bolt struck a Phase Spider square in its flickering thorax as it tried to phase away. The creature convulsed violently, its dimensional shifting collapsing in a cascade of distorted light, leaving it momentarily solid and helpless. With a savage cry, Sheik lunged forward and drove his vibro-beak deep into the paralyzed abomination’s head, ending its existence in a wet, crunching spray of alien matter.

In the end, the Reclaimers prevailed — bloodied, exhausted, and shaken to their core.

Before ascending the cables, the Reclaimers paused one last time beside Turkey Plissken’s body. The Turkeyoid lay slumped against the wall where he had fallen, eyes glassy, a faint residue of otherworldly ichor still glistening at his neck. For a moment no one spoke. He had been an unwilling companion, a spy, and in the end, an unlikely ally. Steve Austin gave a small, weary nod. Sheik muttered something low in his own tongue. Even L’Uomo Prime lingered a second longer than necessary. Then, without ceremony, they turned away, leaving Plissken behind.

They regrouped on the precarious ceiling of the collapsed floor, surrounded by dangling cables that disappeared into the black shaft above. The Black Monolith had grown narrower, colder, and far more personal.

There was only one way left to go.

Up.

The tower waited above them in silence, patient and immense, as though it had all the time — and all the floors — in the universe.