My Charity System made me too OP

The Drummer launched forward in a lurching, swinging motion—its arms dragging the tempo behind it, sending pulses that shattered stone.

Aris rolled aside, coughing from the pressure.

The floor beneath her rippled with every beat of its distorted heart.

She tried to fire a pulse blast from her gauntlet—nothing. The coil overloaded.

"Of course," she muttered.

She ducked under a pendulum-arm, kicked off the wall, and leapt onto its back—punching directly at its rhythm core.

It shrieked again—and then shifted tempo.

Suddenly, she was moving too slow.

The creature's pulse had altered her time.

She floated mid-air, helpless, as it turned its head 180 degrees to look at her—

And raised an arm.

The Spark

[Sovereign Mark Reaction Detected]

[Shell Pulse – Level 0: Instinctual Trigger Activated]

Time snapped back.

The world inhaled.

And Aris punched.

Her strike landed not on the core, but beside it—on the fragment of rhythm stuck in its ribs. The tempo faltered. The creature screamed.

Then she drove her knee into its chest—and her gauntlet, suddenly alight with sovereign resonance, pulsed once—

KRKHHZZZT—!!

The core shattered.

The aberration exploded into glassy shards of broken rhythm, dissolving into radiant mist.

Silence returned.

Aris dropped to her knees, panting.

The gauntlet steamed. Her hands shook. She was bleeding from one shoulder.

But she was alive.

The Tower's system chimed softly.

[Victory: Tempo Aberration Defeated]

[Shell Pulse Affinity Detected: 5.3% – Type: Instinctive Reactive Flow]

[Classification Candidate: Combat Echo Initiate]

Aris looked at her hand.

The Sovereign mark still glowed faintly.

Then faded.

"Guess I don't need a babysitter after all," she said.

Then, more quietly:

"...Thanks anyway."

Far above, on Floor 307, Leon stirred from meditation.

He looked out over the edge of the cliff and smiled faintly.

Roselia raised an eyebrow. "What now?"

"Nothing yet," Leon said. "But someone just landed their first punch."

Somewhere beneath Floor 3 – Undocumented Rift Zone

Aris woke to cold stone beneath her cheek and blood crusted down one side of her temple.

The last thing she remembered was stumbling through the upward Gate after killing the Broken Drummer. Then—nothing.

Now, she was lying in what looked like the collapsed shaft of a deactivated lift tunnel. Damp. Silent. Something dripping faintly in the distance.

Her gauntlet flickered uselessly.

"Alive," she muttered to herself.

Her voice didn't echo.

This place ate sound.

She sat up slowly, cradling her left arm. The prototype was fused shut from the inside, the arc-battery warped.

"Perfect."

She looked around.

No lights. No system glyphs. No exit.

But something was there.

In the dark. Watching.

SECTION I – Echoes Below Floor 3

Aris didn't panic.

She did what her father taught her—listen first.

Even if he was long gone.

The air shifted unnaturally. Not with movement. With pulse.

Like something was tapping rhythm against the walls… waiting to see if she'd match the beat.

She didn't.

Instead, she pulled her scarf tighter and moved, one hand brushing the stone for balance. Her body still ached from the Drummer fight. Her knuckles bled freely now.

She felt the tremor before she heard it.

A boom-boom... boom in three-beat rhythm.

The Tower usually operated in four-count pulses. This wasn't the system.

This was something older.

She turned a corner—and froze.

Someone was sitting cross-legged at the end of the corridor.

Cloaked in an ash-grey robe, face hidden under a deep hood, hands resting on a blackened drum, fingers tracing its edge.

He wasn't an illusion.

He was humming.

And the corridor was vibrating with his hum.

"You fought it," the man said without looking up.

"The Broken Drummer. You punched on the off-beat. Clever."

Aris stepped back, wary. "Who are you?"

"You first."

She hesitated. Then squared her jaw.

"Aris Vale."

The man lifted his head slightly.

A pale scar ran from the edge of his eye to his jaw.

His eyes were... ancient.

But not tired.

"You're not trained. Not even inducted. And you already forced a Shell Pulse activation?"

He studied her gauntlet. Then sniffed the air.

"Iron coil. Homemade. You don't even have Forge access, do you?"

"No."

He smiled.

"Then why aren't you dead?"

Aris shrugged. "Because I decided not to be."

That made him laugh.

Not mockingly. Proudly.

He stood, the drum vanishing into mist behind him. The corridor straightened as if responding to his rhythm.

"Name's Sereth. Used to teach in Echoia's choir before she vanished."

Aris blinked. "Choir?"

"Not music. Movement. We trained Ascenders in how to manipulate pulse-based combat. Shell Pulse, Reverb Forms, Tempo Breaks. You triggered something raw. Untrained."

He gestured to her gauntlet.

"But that won't last long. Not against what's coming."

She didn't argue.

Sereth turned and began to walk.

"Come. You're in a fracture-zone. If you stay here, the Tower will eat your identity."

"Literally?"

"In layers."

Aris followed.

"You gonna train me or feed me to something cooler?"

"Neither," Sereth said. "I'm going to see if you're worth it."

They arrived in what looked like a broken Temple.

The floor was etched in fading tempo lines, shattered shell resonance nodes and cracked memory-glass.

It wasn't abandoned.

It had been silenced.

"This was the last training hall of the Reverb Circle," Sereth explained. "Echoia shut it before she tried her Fifth Movement. When she failed, the Tower buried it."

Aris ran her fingers over the broken glyphs.

One of them pulsed faintly beneath her touch.

Sereth narrowed his eyes.

"You feel it, don't you?"

"The beat. It's… not even. But it's there."

"Welcome to your first real lesson."

He reached behind a broken altar and drew out a long rod of obsidian laced with filigree.

A Reverb Baton.

He tossed it to her.

She caught it. Nearly dropped it.

"Start swinging it," Sereth said.

"Why?"

"Because if you don't find your rhythm within the hour…"

He pointed toward the ceiling.

Where something large and slow was beginning to descend from the cracks in the stone.

Its breath matched no known rhythm.

"...that will take your heartbeat. Permanently."

The Low Chamber – Floor 3 Fracture Zone

The baton felt wrong in her hand.

Too light. Too cold. Too… silent.

Aris stood in the center of the ruined Reverb Hall, broken echo-crystals scattered around her like a battlefield of forgotten practice swings. The glyphs under her feet flared dimly as if remembering what this place once was.

And from above—

The thing came.

It didn't fall.

It lowered itself, as if gravity had been turned sideways, then discarded entirely. A mass of oily limbs, no eyes, no form—just appendages coiling in on themselves. Its movement made no sound.

That was the worst part.

Not its shape.

Not its weight.

But its absence of sound.

As if it didn't exist in the world of rhythm.