As Tybalt peered through the doorway, he saw a vast gray open space with what looked like a single lonely stone edifice in the distance. The sky inside was black, as if night had fallen suddenly and completely.

  Wait, there’s an open sky inside this building? The weather is different? And when did the sun set?

  He poked his head back out of the tower, but all he confirmed was that the fog was thick around him. He could not be certain of whether the sun had set where he was.

  He turned to face back into the tower. It was unchanged, impossible as ever.

  He knew that the interior could not correspond to the structure he had seen outside. And the door clearly was not leading him to an outdoor space anywhere near where he was.

  So, how…? Tybalt shook his head—Fuck it, this is magic, just throw common sense away—and focused on what he actually saw. There was a great gray expanse of desolate land with powdery, pale gray soil ahead of him and a completely black sky above. And is that a distant, smaller tower inside of this tower? Does the Tower of Death operate on some sort of legendary tier of spatial magic?

  He thought he might have vaguely heard of such powers in legends or myths he had read, but he could not recall distinctly.

  In any case, whatever had created this place must have been incredibly powerful. Perhaps it could grant him the great power he had been imagining when he saw the Tower. The power that would justify Tybalt’s murder of Baldwin—or make justification entirely unnecessary. Enough power to set his own rules. That was the forbidden, the unspoken wish.

  Tybalt bent down and retrieved his spear from Baldwin’s body, in case he needed to be armed for the challenge of this tower. And he stepped back to grab his shield as well.

  Just in case…

  Then he entered the building, letting go of the door knob as he stepped over the threshold.

  The soil is really like powder here, he thought, looking down at the thick prints his boots were leaving in the grainy gray soil. Suddenly, the door pulled shut with great force behind him. He spun to check if he could open it again, in case he needed to leave in a hurry, but there was only the black sky.

  The door had vanished into thin air.

  Shit.

  “Welcome to the Tower of Death,” said a pleasant female voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. The sound emanated with some authority despite sounding gentle and welcoming.

  A bit like the madam of a brothel, he thought.

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice wavering slightly. Then he cursed his uncertainty.

  “Thank you for this great opportunity,” he added, investing his voice with more confidence.

  “Make the most of it,” the voice replied firmly. “This is a place outside of space and time. The perfect space to prepare for the next phase of your life—assuming that you complete the challenge successfully.”

  Almost like she knows what I was thinking about before I came here.

  “What exactly is the challenge?” Tybalt asked.

  “Defeat all enemies,” the voice said simply. “Look—there goes one now!”

  The tone was almost playful, but it made the hairs on the back of Tybalt’s neck stand on end. If she was playing right now, then he was her toy.

  Sure enough, though, he turned slightly and saw a figure shuffling across the ground toward him.

  Fine, he thought. Defeat all enemies.

  As the figure stepped closer, Tybalt wrinkled his nose. It was a skeleton. A skeleton, somehow walking on its own power despite the lack of any ligaments, other connective tissue, or the outside materials skeletons were usually wrapped in.

  Undead enemies, then? He had never fought anything like this creature, or any form of undead. His only experience of them was through stories he had read and old wives’ tales he had heard. But what he remembered was intimidating enough.

  These creatures would probably never meaningfully tire or weaken, never give up. Assuming the stories hadn’t been exaggerated.

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  At least it doesn’t have weapons… Is there someone here who’s controlling this thing, or is it generated by the tower and working on some sort of internal logic?

  If there was a human or a sort of master skeleton that he could kill, this would be easier, assuming there were more skeletons to come. So far, he only saw the one, advancing slowly, a green glow burning faintly in its eyes. They were almost the same hue as Tybalt’s eyes.

  Might as well kill this one and see what happens.

  He stepped forward, and for the first time, he noticed his footsteps were unusually light. In fact, when he made a quick appraisal of how his body felt overall, it was remarkably close to weightless. He smiled.

  At least the setting gives me a sort of advantage, then.

  He strode toward the skeleton, closing the distance to ten feet. The monster continued to mindlessly advance with no apparent strategy, arms outstretched to grip him.

  Tybalt took up a fighting stance, aimed his spear, and swung it hard at the skeleton’s head. The spear moved with even greater momentum than he had intended—he had not fully accounted for how much lighter it was now—and it tore through the skull in a single strike. Fragments of bone flew in all directions, and the skeleton collapsed to the ground.

  Well, that was simple enough. His face took on a smug expression. This challenge might end up being easy.

  Another divine message appeared.

  Oh… I see.

  He tried to contemplate doing that nine hundred ninety-nine more times, and his body protested at the idea. He was dimly reminded of his preexisting head injury and how much of his energy the fight with Baldwin had burned.

  Then Tybalt heard a distant shuffling sound. He turned around.

  Behind him, three more skeletons approached. They started out as shapes on the horizon, as the first one had.

  Well… This is going to keep escalating, isn’t it?

  “Shit.”

  Tybalt allowed the enemy to do the work of closing the distance with him this time. He actually took a seat on the ground beside the remains of the first skeleton. They moved so slowly that he felt comfortable sitting and waiting, catching his breath a bit. Anything to recover a little energy. He knew now that this was going to be a long night.

  As the skeletons reached within ten feet of Tybalt, he rose to his feet, lunged with his spear, and struck the rightmost skeleton a blow to the head. The creature staggered, the spearpoint buried in the side of its skull—but it did not fall. Tybalt almost allowed the spear to be tugged from his hands in his momentary surprise.

  I held back a little too much strength that time.

  He used the spear to pull the skeleton to the ground, lunged in, and stomped on the skull with his boot. The skeleton had raised its arms to try and grab him as he moved in closer, but its bony hands fell back to its sides as Tybalt brought his foot down, turning its skull into ivory powder.

  Then the other two were upon him, and Tybalt smashed at one with his shield, crushing its head with a single heavy blow—probably more force than he needed, but he wasn’t about to err on the side of restraint just then—while the remaining skeleton latched onto his other arm and tried to bite into his flesh. Fortunately, Tybalt’s gambeson provided him some protection from the skeleton’s blunt teeth, but he still could not help letting out a yowl of pain.

  “Graaah!”

  He gritted his teeth, used the arm in the skeleton’s mouth as a lever, and pulled it to the ground, where he brought his shield down on the neckbone. There was a crack, and spine separated from skull.

  As soon as the head was separated from the body, the jaws lost all their strength. They did not suddenly release their deathgrip on his arm, but he was able to pry them off much more easily than he could have a moment before.

  Another message appeared.

  So that is another way to kill them, then, he thought, satisfied. I can smash through spinal columns a lot more easily than I can smash through skulls. Maybe I truly can do this.

  He massaged his arm for a moment where the skeleton had bitten him—there was no blood that he could see, but it was certainly going to bruise—and then stopped. He heard something.

  More skeletons, he thought.

  But he turned his head and saw a different kind of enemy for the first time since arriving here. Three of them.

  They look just like people. As Tybalt stared at the human looking antagonists that had just appeared, though, he knew they couldn’t be. It was the way their bodies moved. They dragged themselves along like they were broken in places he couldn’t see. As if the joints are moving through sheer force of will rather than by muscle power.

  The bodies were quite thin for humans, too.

  I think I have heard of these monsters before. Sometimes they crop up in places where there has been a lot of death without the bodies being laid to rest properly. Monsters born of desecration. Right? What do they call them?

  As Tybalt’s mind groped for the word, his soldier’s instincts took over maneuvering his body. He automatically shifted back into a combat stance, readying to take the creatures head on. He raised his spear to aim at chest height and pulled his shield tight to his body.

  Where the fight with Baldwin had found him unprepared, disadvantaged by a surprise attack, the slow motion of these enemies allowed him to fight in his best possible form and to build up his confidence.

  Fundamentally, the threat they pose is not so different from humans. Weak humans, at that, by the looks of them—zombies, that was it! These things are called zombies.

  There was a flash of satisfaction as he knew he got the answer right, but then the creatures got within ten feet of him, and Tybalt sprang into action.

  In a single swift stroke, his spearhead slashed through one of the creature’s necks. The head slumped forward, almost separated from the neck—but the body kept moving, following after him.

  Tybalt found himself giving ground, pulling his body backward cautiously. These things were much quicker up close than they had been further away, and one wrong move could spell disaster.