CIATB Chapter 110: Old Instincts
Chapter 110: Old Instincts
The fever broke on the third day, waking Dante in a hollow he barely remembered finding, his wounded arm wrapped in bandages he didn’t recall changing. The toxins worked through his system overnight, leaving him weak and shaking but alive, though he was already behind schedule.
’Move.’ He forced himself upright while every muscle protested. ’You’ve lost time so you need to make it up.’
His body responded without enthusiasm, but the Ancient Core pulsed in his chest and flooded his system with energy that pushed back the lingering weakness. It wasn’t healing, exactly, but more like borrowed strength against a debt that would eventually come due. He broke camp in silence and started walking, the terrain shifting as he traveled.
Crystal formations gave way to something more desolate where the wastes were shaped by some ancient catastrophe. The ground was scarred with trenches and craters that spoke of violence on a scale he couldn’t comprehend—trenches where monsters now nested. He spotted them from a ridge overlooking a narrow canyon: a pack of Waste Crawlers, insectoid creatures the size of large dogs moving through the canyon in a loose formation. There were eight of them, their chitinous bodies reflecting sunlight like polished metal.
In the old days, with his team, this would have been a simple fight where Astrid charged the center while Ren anchored one flank. Ravenna and he would take the other, and Vex’s ranged support would catch any that tried to escape. It would be clean, efficient, and carry minimal risk, but alone, the calculation was different.
’Eight targets against one weakened climber is bad odds even without the lingering toxin damage,’ he thought.
There was another option. His eyes traced the canyon walls, noting stress fractures in the crystalline stone. The formations here were unstable, weakened by whatever force scarred the landscape, and with the right application of pressure in the correct places, he could bring it all down.
’I know how to do this.’ The thought came with a flash of memory so vivid it felt like being transported, taking him back to the ambush on Floor 60 where they used the exact same technique. The memory swallowed him whole.
It was Floor 60, three years after the massacre on Floor 52. Three years of solo climbing sharpened him into something less than human but more than dangerous. He fell in with a temporary party, not a team but a collection of survivors who needed strength in numbers. They found themselves pinned in a canyon not unlike this one, surrounded by creatures that outnumbered them five to one.
"We’re dead," Kira, the party’s leader, assessed the situation with flat pragmatism. "No way through, no way back. Just a choice about how we go out."
"There’s another option." His voice was cold then, colder than it was now. "The canyon walls are unstable. Crystalline stress fractures along the upper third. If we trigger a collapse..."
"We bury ourselves along with them."
"No. We trigger the collapse after drawing them into the kill zone, then escape through the gap the collapse creates in the rear formations."
"That’s insane."
"It’ll work."
It worked. Four of them made it out. Kira and two others weren’t so lucky, caught in the collapse zone when the timing shifted by a fraction of a second, and the creatures died by the dozens under tons of falling stone. Dante walked away without looking back at the bodies crushed in the rubble—creatures and allies alike, buried together in the grave his tactics dug. That was who he was—cold, efficient, and ruthless—because that was who he needed to be.
The memory faded, leaving him standing on the ridge with the Waste Crawlers below.
’I could do the same thing here,’ he thought, tracing the fault lines again. ’Collapse the canyon walls on them for a clean kill with zero risk.’
Something held him back. The version of himself who used that tactic on Floor 60 didn’t care about collateral damage, or about anything except survival and power. That Dante would have brought down the canyon without hesitation and moved on without a second thought.
’Is that who I want to be again?’
The question surprised him. Two months ago he would have had an easy answer because survival required sacrifice and power demanded ruthlessness. The calculus was simple back then, but now it was muddier. He thought about Ravenna, about the way she looked at him like he was something more than a weapon, and about Ren’s steady faith and Astrid’s reluctant respect. He thought about the version of himself they believed in, the leader who protected instead of just destroyed.
’I can’t be both,’ the realization settled into him like ice in his veins. ’I can’t be the cold killer from Floor 60 and the person they believe I am—at some point, I have to choose.’
Today wasn’t that day. Today he was alone, and survival mattered more than philosophy; the Waste Crawlers were in his path, and he needed them not to be. He started preparing the trap, spending an hour weakening key points in the canyon walls and carving stress lines with careful precision. When everything was ready, he descended into the canyon and let the Crawlers catch his scent.
They came for him in a chittering wave, mandibles snapping and claws scraping against stone. He ran, drawing them deeper into the kill zone, and when the last of them committed to the pursuit, he triggered the collapse. The sound was like the world ending: crystal and stone grinding together as gravity claimed what should have been stable. The canyon walls folded inward, burying the Crawlers under tons of debris. He made it out through the gap he planned, just barely avoiding the stone fragments raining around him as the collapse stabilized.
Silence returned as the dust began to slowly settle. He stood at the edge of the destruction he created and felt nothing—no satisfaction and no guilt. Just the hollow acknowledgment that nine creatures that were alive were now dead, and he was still standing.
’This is who I was before I met them, before Ravenna and Astrid and Ren changed what I thought was possible,’ he thought, the realization carrying weight. ’This is who I can still become if I let myself.’
The old instincts were there, waiting beneath the surface—the cold efficiency that treated everything as a problem to be solved, the ruthlessness that calculated acceptable losses without flinching. Part of him missed it, but another part was terrified of how easy it would be to fall back.
He made camp that night in a sheltered alcove far from the collapsed canyon. His arm was better and the toxin was finally purged from his system, so his body recovered its strength. By tomorrow, he would be back to fighting shape, ready for whatever the dungeon threw at him. His mind, however, was still tangled in questions he couldn’t answer.
’Eclipse is supposed to be a weapon that chose its wielders.’ He stared into the fire he finally risked building. ’An Ego that judges character as much as capability. What will it see when it looks at me? The cold killer from Floor 60, the leader his team believed in, or something in between that’s not yet settled into its final shape?’
He didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. The fire burned low as the wastes pressed in around him with their eternal indifference. Tomorrow brought the Hunter’s Trail and the dungeon, but tonight he sat alone with his thoughts and tried not to think about the rubble-buried dead behind him. He didn’t entirely succeed.