Depsy dug into another patch of the ground and scooped up any grass or other burnable matter. Once it was in his hands, he threw them into the blazes, smoke coming out much stronger and thicker thanks to the added fuel. As he’s doing that, Kauss, Helona, and Killian are sitting in a triangle, discussing something while looking at a journal. Linux’s screams echoed in the air, even after an hour of screaming. His vocal cords get destroyed, then repaired immediately so there was no escaping those nightmarish wails. After nearly twenty minutes of them, he got used to the noise.

He dug out patches of grass that still had yet to burn in order to create a circle of dirt and rock around them. He had noticed that the fire was getting hotter and larger, and no one was stopping it. Worry seeped into his soul as no one appeared to put out the fires. They were so out of control that they’d need the entirety of the guards to have a chance to put it all out. There was no doubt in his mind that it wouldn’t happen. If Rugel ordered them to do this, then there was a reason he wanted the floor to be on fire. There was no room for hope left. All he could do was surround themselves in unburnable materials and hope to survive for the next hour or two.

Meanwhile, Kauss stared at the journal, working through each entry. He was trying to come up with a timeline of events that the man in the journal took. There was one thing that came up in a consistently annoying manner, however. God was so prevalent in the entries that it made him want to give up reading it entirely. One entry stood out to him in particular.

These people are hopeless. I can’t count the amount of times I listened to horror stories about the monsters on the floor. Mothers losing their children at night, children becoming orphans, everyone losing all hope in life. It’s all very sad. Gaxtex said that he’d help the people by teaching them his ways. Even Vivus is helping them by training them to fight. I want to add in my own little bit.

I’ll teach them the word of God. They’ve lost all hope, and only God can fill that void. God, the creator of the tower and protector of humanity, will save them from themselves.

“What is this dude on about now?” Helona asked.

“I don’t have a clue.” Kauss shook his head.

“Didn’t you read it?” Killian placed his finger on the page. “He’s teaching them God.”

Kauss sighed, knowing that there was no way his version of God was anything but malevolent. That image drawn on the wall still stuck with him, even after all this. grandmamma’s idea of God wouldn’t fit that preposterous creature strangling people. She wanted God to be someone that welcomed people in death to take them away from all the killings and disease. He may not believe in it, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be insulted by something tainting grandmamma’s vision.

Day 37 of climbing the tower and we’re still on the second floor. Almost everyone has a Gaxtex now - the devices, not the person - and they’ve already begun fighting back against their captors, filled with the God’s wisdom and protection. It’s almost too beautiful to witness. There’s no way that I would’ve seen or experienced a moment such as this on the first floor. That place can go suck a dick for all I care.

It tried to break my and my friend’s spirits, but it failed. I was filled with the light of God and now I can pass it onto others. Gaxtex didn’t very much care for God, leaving the conversation once God came into it, and even though Vivus would listen, it was obvious he wasn’t a believer. They still both see this tower as a prison rather than their protection.

This journey was brought onto us by God’s will. God needs people to climb the tower to aid in the fight against their opponent, whatever it may be. My visions have been growing more vivid lately. I could see a dark beast fighting against our all mighty savior, and for the first time in infinity, the savior was beginning to lose ground.

“Now this is just plain ridiculous.” Helona grumbled. “This guy has a few screws loose. Last time I heard someone saying they saw visions, they ended up dead in an alley.”

Kauss read the words and saw it all as some sort of weird story the writer was writing imagining on the spot. It was based on something so far off from reality that it became plain ridiculous. God this, God that. Didn’t he have anything else to say? A man that let his life revolve solely around a being that they couldn’t hope to understand or even see was a man doomed to die with nothing but regret. For that reason, Kauss refused to believe in any God. God, to him, was just something grandmamma and a few special people believed. He’ll keep up the tradition, but he stopped at actually believing in any higher power.

Killian flipped a few pages ahead, nearly to the end where the entries mysteriously stopped. It was fifty days into their stay by this point, and they continued the read.

The people have begun building a church for God with my help. Gaxtex helped with the construction, though he said he’ll never come here himself. He also reported that we’ll be leaving within a week or two. Our job is done. Gaxtex has a better understanding of the nature of the tower, and the people of the floor are safe for years to come. They’ve already begun planning a large scale attack against the monsters, and even though I may not support it myself, I’ll back them up. What is a friend for other than to provide moral support to his crew.

I talked with Vivus later, and he was watching a training session between a group of friends. One of them accidentally maimed the other’s finger clean off, and he had to drop down before things got more ugly.

As I stare up at the starry sky in these treetops, I can only think about my time on the first floor, or the city of silence, as some edgy kids may call it. I hated the culture that place spewed up. People were born into violence, grew up around violence, then began taking part in violence. Then they ask why are people so violent while they're stabbing their father’s liver. It’s a disgrace, not even close to God’s plan for the tower.

They took his gift of protection and turned it into a cage of fire. As soon as I had my first vision years ago, I knew we were dooming ourselves to eternal pain and suffering. Good guys fall, so they say, yet they failed to realize that they fell because they were never a hero to begin with. Instead, they fought against a system for their own selfish needs instead of the good for all.

Helona read those few words again and again. Instead, they fought against a system for their own selfish needs instead of the good for all. Her mind drifted to that one man she killed before the moment she decided to climb the tower. He may have been in a revolution led by someone that had their own selfish needs, but he never knew that. He genuinely wanted life on the floor to be better, not just for him, but for everyone. As they read more and more, the writer was insulting every one of them.

The world can never be black and white since there are people that will do good things for selfish purposes. People like Gaxtex, who rebelled against the Owerneckers, in isolation, would be a heroic act. However, he did it so he could gain power for himself and satisfy his complex about him being better than everyone. Then again, the world can also never be grey. To say that a world is grey is to say that no one wants to do a good deed just because they want to be good. It’s also to say that there are no people that exist that will do horrendous things because they get a high off of their own ego. The world is filled with all sorts of color. Black, White, Grey, maybe even a dash of red and blue, whatever those colors represented.

Helona wondered where they lay on that spectrum of morality. She didn’t have a problem with killing people, but she didn’t want it to come to that unless absolutely necessary. Did that make her a bad guy? Does her killing a man in order to protect the people she likes make her someone to be despised? After all, an outsider could say that she could have definitely come up with other options. She’d like those people to say that to her face. No one saying that knows the real pressure that a situation like that could bring up. The only thing that would soar in their mind is saving their loved one, no matter the cost.

Helona wasn’t a good person either, however. Killing may have been normal down on the first floor, but that didn’t mean that it was considered good, just acceptable. Killing someone would rip them away from anyone that cared about them. That was inherently an evil act, but everyone just turned their cheek in fear of being killed themselves. So what would that make her. She wasn’t a hero cause she killed somebody, but she wasn’t a villain either. Maybe grey could identify her, or maybe red or orange or another color that exists out there.

They continued reading, now on to the final day before he lost his journal.

A few trees had burnt down sadly. They were fighting a Tetson and the lightning caught a tree on fire. At first, I got angry as all hell. Burn a plant on the first floor and someone was going to die. There’d be a mob at their door in less than an hour. Thankfully, they put it out, but it still pissed me off to the core. They don’t know how lucky they are to have such pristine vegetation growing around with little work to keep them alive. Nature took care of it all by itself.

The council chief came up to me and said they were going to name the new settlement and they wanted my opinion on a name. I wasn’t too good at naming things, so I just took a page out of Gaxtex’s brain. Now it has such a wonderful name from a wonderful person.

Back to the tree situation, I checked the debris and found a hole under the stump of a tree. It led down a series of tunnels and I’m going to explore them for a while. It shouldn’t take too long.

That was the final entry before he reached the strange tunnel that was now buried under a sizeable amount of dirt. Kauss looked over at Linux’s squirming body. He was kicking a huge ruckus and Depsy sat next to him, finished with making the circle of dirt and rocks. His arm was completely healed by now and his skin was finally losing the black spots, but he was still excessively bleeding. He could only imagine what he was thinking.

Linux only saw darkness. He was floating through an endless space of black, surrounded by twinkling stars and massive suns. He couldn’t feel the heat from them strangely enough, but they were still there. His entire body was numb and void of all emotions. There was still a link between him and his real body. He could feel it in his chest. Two different heart beats thumped in unison, and that was the only thing he could hear. His astral body drifted off in this unknown space, void and unfeeling, except for the coldness of the void. Only one thing impacted each sense. Light for sight, thumps for sound, heart for feel, and cold for touch. The only sense that wasn’t affected was his smell.

As soon as he thought that, a smell wafted to his nose. It was the smell of smoke and fire. He tilted his non-existent head back and saw that he was floating toward a star. The light enveloped him, but it didn’t let the coldness vanish. He drifted mindlessly into the light, unable to change his course. It wasn’t blinding light thankfully, since his body refused to let him blink. The star engulfed him, and the smell of smoke became even more prevalent.

At first, he assumed he was finally waking up from the endless, voidful dream. Fire was burning outside, and he knew that as soon as he woke up, he’d need to move as soon as possible. He was preparing to get into action as soon as his eyes open and make his way toward Felxin. When he opened his eyes, however, he didn’t wake up on the ground surrounded by a fiery landscape. He woke up on a soft, cushiony white bed that was so soft and comfy that he was about to fall back to sleep.

The smell of smoke refused to disappear, however. It was so strong that he had to get out of his bed to go check what it was. He climbed out of bed and dropped to the ground, landing on his feet. He rubbed his eyes, confused about why everything was so tall compared to normal. It had to be an optical illusion caused by waking up so late at night. He walked down the hallway and entered the living room of his home. The smoke was stronger than normal and was coming from outside.

Taking a deep breath and working up the courage, he opened the door to see what was happening. That was when he saw a sight that shocked him to his very core. Sitting around a self-made campfire were two people, a man and a woman. The woman had curly black hair that reached to her shoulders. Her stark black eyes reflected zero light from the fire, giving her a look that made it seem she was dead inside. For the man, he was laughing, eating a piece of meat that was blackened from sitting in the fire for too long. His blond hair ended at his ears, but the beard he had kept up the work for the lack of hair on his head. That was his father, Olot Fausting.

He was dreaming of the past.