Every Loop Costs a Friend

Checkpoint Jester · Ongoing

Soren Ashfall is a nineteen-year-old Initiate scout, useful enough to send first and expendable enough that no veteran volunteers to take his place. Then a black tower appears above the imperial capital with seven days until it consumes the city. Soren dies on the first floor and wakes seven days earlier. He remembers the tower. No one else remembers the expedition—and one person he had begun to care about has vanished from ledgers, memories, and history itself. Each death resets the countdown and erases another deeply bonded person. Soren cannot carry equipment, levels, or ordinary memories between loops. Only conclusions proven true under pressure can crystallize into permanent knowledge, forcing him to purchase every reliable rule with danger and loss. The tower has seven floors of shifting, lethal logic. Saving the capital may require Soren to try again and again, but victory means nothing if everyone who made it worth winning is gone.