Episode 2. Maintenance on Floor Seventeen

Se-rin's echo did not lower her sword. She stood like someone genuinely waiting for an answer, while the battlefield around her pulsed in a slow mechanical breath. Every time the crystal pylons embedded in the walls flashed blue, the frozen echoes around them replayed a few seconds of combat. A shield rose. A spear flew into empty air. Then all of it stopped again.

Seo-eon lifted a hand carefully. “Se-rin. It's me.”

“Support unit Seo Eon,” the echo said in a voice that sounded mechanical only until it didn't. “Mana amplification delayed. Vanguard collapse risk increasing. Requesting resupply.”

The end of the sentence fractured slightly, as if human memory and system language were trying to occupy the same line.

He stepped through the debris with deliberate care. He was trying not to touch anything, but the tip of his boot nudged a broken spear shaft and a thin vibration ran through the air. Another patch line opened overhead at once.

[Interim maintenance procedure unlocked]
1. Fix caretaker echo line of sight
2. Reconnect support channels
3. Verify uncorrected combat record

“The tower is giving me a maintenance manual now.”

He muttered it like a joke, but there was no laughter left in him. Near the wall he found his old supply case, half crushed yet somehow still locked. When he brought the patch note close to it, the latch released on its own. Inside were three glass ampoules and a sachet of silver powder he had mixed before the raid: revision salt, a disposable support-alchemy agent used to read residual mana inside damaged combat logs.

He tipped some of the powder across the back of his hand. Cold spread instantly into his wrist. Se-rin kept watching him with the expression of someone who had not yet decided whether he was an ally, a threat, or a memory wearing the wrong face.

“Trust me one more time.”

She said nothing, but he could feel that her gaze was no longer entirely empty.

When he cast the revision salt over the broken magic circle on the floor, the interrupted battle unfolded like a thin sheet of light. The last seconds of the twenty-third raid rewound without sound. The frontline collapsing. The rear mana grid flickering once. The fatal blank in the sequence, the exact gap everyone had pointed to when they decided Seo-eon must have failed his party.

He watched with his jaw clenched.

The record was not what he remembered.

His amplification chain had not failed. It was clean. Stable. The break came from somewhere else. A third channel that should have connected to the healing formation was severed mid-combat by an outside authority. In one corner of the replay, a line he had never seen before appeared in cold gold text.

[Override approved by sponsor authority]

He bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste iron. The sponsor guild. The people who had cared about recovering the tower's core more than they cared about the raid surviving. A delayed memory surfaced of Se-rin screaming curses toward the rear command line just before everything went white. At the time he had been too far inside the panic to understand what she meant.

“Our buffs didn't fail,” he said quietly.

For the first time, the echo followed his meaning instead of its loop. “The healing line went dark first.”

Her voice sounded more human now.

Seo-eon held his breath. The echo was stabilizing.

He uncapped one ampoule and poured it slowly into a crack beside the guard of her sword, then scattered the last of the revision salt over the suspended log. Light ran cleanly from her shoulder to her feet. The lagging shadow beneath her finally snapped into place.

Se-rin stood in silence for several seconds. Then she planted the tip of her sword on the stone like someone discovering exhaustion after a year of not being allowed to feel it.

“I thought you ran.”

He could not even laugh. “I got convinced that I had.”

Her echo looked around the floor, around the halted battle, the repeating ghosts, the cracked ceiling. She seemed to be calculating whether she was alive, dead, or something more humiliating than both. What rose first in her face was not fear but anger.

“Those bastards altered the record too.”

“Will the tower care?”

“The tower trusts procedure before truth,” she said. “So we get the procedure back.”

She pointed toward a sealed wall panel where a maintenance glyph for Floor 28 was barely visible.

“The last audit log should be up there. Why we died. Who cut the line. All of it. It's just sitting under sponsor authority and waiting to be approved.”

The patch note opened again.

[Floor 17 interim fix applied]
- caretaker echo stabilized
- next unresolved issue moved to Floor 28

[Reward]
- temporary maintenance authority granted

A faint mark burned itself across the back of Seo-eon's hand. It resembled the raid sigil he used to carry, but only at first glance. This one looked less like a hero's seal and more like the approval stamp of a repair technician.

Se-rin saw it and gave the smallest lift of one corner of her mouth. “See? Even the tower admits it has to listen to you now.”

He stared at the mark. For a year, the living had treated survival itself as a confession. Now the ruined system inside the dead tower was handing him restoration rights. The irony landed hard enough to feel clean.

At the deepest end of the floor, a narrow maintenance door finally unlocked. Beyond it was another lift, this one running not to Floor 18 but directly to Floor 28.

Se-rin lowered her voice. “Don't carry it alone this time. Get the record back. Then make it public in the way the people outside will hate most.”

Seo-eon nodded. For that moment he could almost forget she was an echo.

When the lift doors opened, a short line had already been written on the inner wall.

[Rollback unavailable]
[Restore recommended]