Free Web NovelChapter 155: « Permanent Flame »
[Time Remaining: 03:58:17]
[Divine Match x1 — REMAINING]
[Kang Min HP: 19%]
[Blizzard King: ENGAGED — Core fractured x2]
[Active Climbers: 89 — Multiple critical HP]
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Both hands around the match.
The cold pressed against my palms from two directions — the external blizzard from behind and the core’s defensive push from in front. The chest cavity sheltered the flame from the wind but the core itself was the problem. The pulse came out in waves, each one trying to flatten the flame against my fingers instead of letting it reach the convergence point.
I held it two centimeters from the surface and pushed back.
Not physically — the flame didn’t respond to physical force. But mana-fed resistance, channeling a thin current of heat-type mana through my palms and into the flame’s base, reinforcing the burn at the source. It was the same mechanic as feeding a fire in a cold environment: you didn’t push back against the wind, you deepened the flame’s hold on its own fuel.
The match flame steadied.
The Blizzard King felt it. The whole body responded — a shudder that ran from the feet up through the torso and into the chest cavity, the ice-armor contracting slightly as the thing tried to close the gap in its own construction. The contraction put pressure on the fractured section. The two existing cracks widened by a millimeter.
I held position. Two centimeters. Steady.
The core’s defensive pulse came out one more time, hard — the hardest push since I had started the first match. The flame bent sharply. I brought it back.
Contact.
The match head touched the convergence point of the two fractures, that two-centimeter offset from center where both cracks met and the core’s structure was thinnest. The flame hit the exact point.
The sound from the core changed. The deep, rhythmic heartbeat pulse shifted frequency — rising from the subaudible register into something closer to a whine, the sound a pressurized system makes when a seal breaks. A new fracture started at the convergence point and ran both directions simultaneously, following the paths of least structural resistance outward to the core’s surface.
The match burned down to my fingers.
I held it there.
The fracture reached the surface on both sides. A thin line of blue-white light bled through the cracks, brighter than the core’s previous pulse — not reflected light but generated light, the core’s own stored energy leaking out through the fault lines.
The match went out.
I waited.
For three seconds, nothing happened. The fractures were there, the light was bleeding through them, but the core sat intact, slightly cracked, pulse still running. Three seconds in a freezing chest cavity at nineteen percent HP with both hands occupied felt considerably longer than three seconds.
Then the fractures propagated.
All at once — not one extending from another but all of them moving simultaneously, the existing three cracks branching outward in a fractal pattern that covered the entire core surface in under a second. The blue-white light stopped being contained. It didn’t explode outward. It expanded, which is different: a slow, controlled release of the stored energy, the pressure equalizing through the network of fractures the way water finds every crack in a dam. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
The core ignited.
The blue-white became orange at the center — not the cold orange of the previous match flame but a deep, sustained orange that had warmth behind it. Real warmth. The kind generated by combustion rather than magical effect. The Blizzard King’s stored mana-cold was burning.
The cold field dropped.
Instantly. The HP drain that had been running continuously since the floor loaded stopped mid-tick. The blizzard outside the chest cavity continued but the ambient temperature of the floor began rising from the inside of the boss outward, heat spreading through the ice-armor layers and into the surrounding environment.
The King began to fall.
Slowly, in stages, the way a building comes down in controlled demolition rather than collapse. The legs went first — the ice structure softening and compressing under the weight above as the internal temperature rose. Then the torso, settling downward as the legs shortened. The arm that had been raised in the most recent attempt to dislodge me descended with the rest, and I rode the whole thing down, anchored to the chest cavity, until the boss was low enough that I could step off onto the snow.
I stepped off.
The Blizzard King was still falling. Still burning internally. The surface ice softened and clarified as it melted, going from opaque grey-white to translucent and then to something that glowed from the inside, the orange core-fire visible through all the remaining layers. What had been a twelve-meter entity made of frozen storm was becoming a structure of glowing melt-ice with a burning core at its center.
It settled into the snow.
The heat radiating from it was immediate and significant — not bonfire heat, something larger and more sustained, a permanent warmth that pushed the blizzard back from a radius of roughly thirty meters and continued pushing as the ambient floor temperature climbed.
The blizzard thinned. The lateral snow still moved but its density dropped and its cut dropped with it, the wind losing its edge as the temperature differential that drove it began equalizing.
Visibility extended to fifty meters. Then a hundred.
The floor was wide and flat and pale blue-white under a sky that was beginning to shift from weather-grey toward something lighter.
The wraiths dissolved. Not killed — they simply ceased to cohere as the cold that sustained them bled out of the floor. They went the way smoke goes when the fire dies: outward, diffusing, becoming nothing.
[Main Scenario: Survive the Everlasting Winter — COMPLETE]
[True Clear: Core Ignition — Permanent Warmth Source Established]
[All Penalty Warnings — N/A]
[Bonus Applied: Full Match Conservation — x2.0 reward multiplier]
[Floor 28 — CLEARED]
The notification appeared and I stood in the warmth of the Blizzard King’s burning corpse and let it sit.
Around me, the group registered the end in pieces. The HP drain stopping first — everyone felt that, the absence of the constant bleed that had been running for the better part of four hours. Then the warmth arriving, and the way warmth after sustained cold hits the body as something close to pain before it resolves into relief. People who had been gripping weapons to keep their hands from shaking loosened their grip. People who had been moving constantly to generate heat stopped moving and stood still and breathed.
Junho sat down in the snow. Not from injury — from the specific tiredness of someone who had been holding sustained concentration for four hours and had been given permission to stop. He put his staff across his knees and looked at the burning remnant of the Blizzard King.
"I thought you were going to fall," he said.
"I thought about it."
"That’s comforting."
Grey was moving through the group, running her remaining mana reserves through the critical-HP climbers. Her hands were shaking slightly — not cold, exhaustion. She patched four people before I stepped close and put my hand on her shoulder.
"You’re at twelve percent mana," I said. "Rest."
She looked at me. "You’re at nineteen HP."
"I’m fine."
"You keep using that word for situations where it doesn’t apply."
Fair.
She patched me anyway. The cold burns on my hands from holding the match past its limit healed slowly under her work — healing mana on contact burns was precise work, more detailed than bulk HP restoration. She did it with the focused quiet of someone who was too tired to talk and too stubborn to stop. freёwebnoѵel.com
The young man who had struck his match earlier pushed through the group to where I was standing. He looked at the burning King. Then at me. His expression had the quality of someone who had done something they regretted and understood exactly why they regretted it and was carrying it forward.
He didn’t say anything. He just stood there.
I looked at him. "You saw your HP going critical and made a decision," I said. "That’s not wrong. You didn’t know the condition."
He shook his head slowly. "I should have held."
"You should have held," I agreed. "Now you know."
He absorbed that. Then nodded.
The chat had been running continuously since the clear notification and I checked it for the first time in several minutes.
[LiveStream Viewers: 4,891,003]
💬 KangMinFanatic77: FLOOR 28 CLEARED
💬 SeoulTowerFan: TRUE CLEAR AGAIN
💬 GhostClimber_: TWO TIMES MULTIPLIER FOR FULL MATCH CONSERVATION
💬 Watchdog_KR: he didn’t use a single match for warmth
💬 TowerWatchKR: and the boss is a permanent campfire now??
💬 SeoulTowerFan: THE BOSS IS A PERMANENT CAMPFIRE
💬 user_48821: future climbers are going to find a warm beacon on floor 28 and never know why
💬 RealMvpStream: they’ll know. it’ll be in the records
💬 KangMinFanatic77: KANG MIN SET A BEACON FOR FUTURE CLIMBERS
💬 GhostClimber_: okay I’m emotional about this now
💬 user_29441: same actually
💬 Watchdog_KR: 89/89 again. full survival two floors in a row
Commander appeared at my side. They looked at the burning King for a moment. Then: "The exit is forming to the east."
I could see it — the gold gate developing at the far edge of the now-visible plain, solidifying from the clearing weather into something definite and real.
"South Korea’s record is floor 28," Commander said. "After today."
"After today," I agreed.
They were quiet for a moment. Then: "You knew the matches were wrong from the start."
"Suspected."
"The item description said variable duration," they said. "You noticed that."
"And every time the Tower uses variable, it means shorter than you want."
Commander almost smiled. On their face, almost was significant. "What’s on floor 29?"
I thought about it. In my previous life I had records of floor 29 that I was no longer allowed to access. What I had was the shape of it — the general category, the type of challenge.
"Something worse," I said.
"Naturally."
The group moved toward the exit gate across snow that was no longer actively trying to kill them, the warmth of the burning King following us out to thirty meters, then twenty, then the residual heat becoming the memory of heat. Behind us, the floor’s permanent campfire burned orange against the pale blue-white of the blizzard plain, a fixed point in a landscape that had been trying to erase fixed points since the moment we arrived.
I went through the gate last.
Old habit. You watch until everyone’s through. That part never changed between lives.
The gate closed behind me.
[Floor 28 — CLEARED]
[True Clear: Permanent Core Ignition — Full Match Conservation]
[Climbers Cleared: 89 / 89]
[Consecutive Full Survival: Floor 27, Floor 28]
[South Korea Tower Record: Floor 28]
[LiveStream Viewers at Clear: 4,891,003]
───────────
💬 RealMvpStream: two floors. 89/89 both times
💬 KangMinFanatic77: he’s not going to stop is he
💬 RealMvpStream: no
💬 SeoulTowerFan: how far does he go
💬 RealMvpStream: as far as it takes
💬 GhostClimber_: takes for what
💬 RealMvpStream: ...
💬 RealMvpStream: I don’t know yet
💬 user_48821: but you think there’s a reason
💬 RealMvpStream: there’s always a reason with him
💬 KangMinFanatic77: floor 29 when
💬 Watchdog_KR: probably ten minutes knowing him
💬 TowerWatchKR: lol
💬 SeoulTowerFan: lol
💬 KangMinFanatic77: lol
[Chat continues]
