Tower Climber

by Jakob Tanner

  Sakura’s heart started racing again and she rushed out of the arena and towards the other room.

  She entered the other smaller fighting room and saw Max standing in the center of the ring, covered in dirt and scrapes.

  She rushed over to him and grabbed him by the wrist.

  “What the heck do you think you’re doing?” she shouted.

  The boy blinked at her, confused.

  “Are you a fool?”

  “Sakura,” he said. “But I won...”

  “Yeah, two out of four students climbers who came here today didn’t. Guess what happened to them? They’re dead.”

  Max gulped. “I didn’t know. That’s horrible. I figured if they were coming here they were pretty confident with their abilities.”

  “You think all these rules in place are to make your life difficult,” said Sakura. “But they aren’t. There in place to protect you. To protect everyone. I thought you were smarter than that to come to a place like this, Max. Seriously. I’m relieved—no, I’m bloody happy—to see you’re alive, but I also can’t look at you. I’ll see you back at the apartment.”

  With that the woman walked away from the boy and continued her duties in cleaning up the now-defunct arena following the police raid.

  Max felt horrible.

  He bought the ingredients for bacon and egg ramen on the way home with some of his winnings from the arena.

  But Sakura wasn’t home when he got back.

  He waited around for a couple of hours, but she seemed to be working late.

  He paced the apartment, his head filled with guilt.

  He stopped in front of the windows of the city. He looked at the glittering lights along with the looming silhouette of the thick never-ending tower at the center of the city.

  Two out of the three kids he followed died today.

  They had been just like him: eager to grow in power and willing to do anything to accomplish it.

  He thought back to how when he was following them, he had thought the tower-zone wasn’t that different from the outer-rim. That it was like any other city.

  He was realizing now, however, that that wasn’t the case.

  This city with its tower that granted humanity incredible powers. It didn’t enrich the lives of the people here.

  No.

  It made them more violent, meaner, and, most of all, crueler.

  He opened his pouch and looked down at the three monster cores he’d earned that evening. Two copper cores and one silver core.

  He didn’t feel like draining their mana today.

  He would the following morning.

  More than that, he needed to figure out a way to get stronger within the parameters that he was allowed to work within.

  He was now determined to figure out how to do so.

  44

  Max woke up the next day to an empty apartment. Sakura had left early for work and had pointedly not said goodbye.

  She was clearly still mad at him.

  Max wasn’t sure how to fix the situation, but he figured if he kept training within the rules of the tower-zone, she would eventually get over it.

  He rose from his bed and got ready for the day. When he was finished, he sat on the living room floor and drained the mana from the monster cores he’d won from yesterday.

  He drained the copper monster cores with ease, though the silver monster core required a bit more energy than he expected to drain it of all of its mana.

  He fell back on the floor both exhausted and euphoric. The new mana rushed through him and he felt the mana channels and vessels throughout his body tensing as they grew a little bit stronger.

  After a few moments to catch his breath, Max eagerly checked his profile to see how much he had gained.

  Name: Max Rainhart

  Rank: Unranked

  Trait (Unique): Mimic. Unleash the last move you were hit with at double the power.

  Strength: 8

  Agility: 7

  Endurance: 7

  Mana Affinity: 7

  Passive Skills:

  Kokoro (Warrior Spirit)

  Max grinned at the information in his profile. His mana affinity had jumped by three points from four to seven. The silver monster core must have helped him achieve such a significant boost as it had proven difficult to even to get minimal gains in his mana affinity stat before then.

  Seven in mana affinity, huh?

  Max was pleased with himself. He didn’t even need the number to tell him that his mana affinity had increased, he could feel it in his body. He could sense the life force and energy running through him.

  The other thing that pleased him was his strength stat had gone up by one point. It must have been a reflection of all the battles and trials he’d been going through.

  And just like the greater sense of mana flowing through him, he could feel the tightness of his biceps and other muscles.

  If he looked at himself in the mirror, it was hard to believe only a month and a half ago, he had been such a scrawny twig of a teenager.

  He got up off the floor with a new enthusiasm for life and tried to think what he should do next for his training.

  The most obvious place to go was up to floor-2 and work on improving his stats by hunting down monsters in the endless forest.

  And he would. Eventually.

  But more than working harder, he had to work smarter.

  So he was going to do what any nerdy kid who had grown up without a lot of friends was best at: hit up the library and read some books.

  “Nice to see you again,” whispered the cute librarian he had spoken with last time he visited. “Can I help you with anything?”

  “I had a question for you,” said Max. “I’m looking for books on floor-2 of the tower, the endless forest. Do you got any?”

  The girl made an odd expression and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

  Max worried he had maybe done something wrong, like in the way he had upset Casey the day before.

  “Did I say something wrong?” asked Max.

  The girl shook her head quickly. “No, it’s not that,” she said. “I’ve gotten a lot of weird requests from library patrons before, but no one has ever asked for what you just did.”

  “Really?” Max asked, shocked.

  He guessed that many climbers were probably more eager to train on higher floors that floor-2 was easily forgotten, but it seemed like a pretty big miscalculation on their part.

  The librarian girl got up from her desk and walked out from behind her counter.

  “If you’d follow me, please,” she said in her soft voice.

  Max followed the girl as they walked deeper and deeper into the library.

  Max stared in awe at all the books they passed.

  “Were these all written by writers from the tower-zone?” he asked.

  “About forty percent of the collection is,” said the librarian. “The library contains a substantial amount of writing from the pre-tower era. It was only after the formation of Zestiris in 2055 that the knowledge protection act was put in place and the flow of information between the tower-zone and the rest of the world began to halt.”

  Max nodded along to the fascinating information. Over the years that he’d lived in the outer-rim, he’d spent a lot of time trying to learn as much of the history of Zestiris as he could find.

  The initial emergence of the tower had brought huge complications to the world.

  The magical abilities of the climbers turned the tower into a source of great geopolitical strife.

  Some of the earliest explorers of the tower became super soldiers for the U.S. military.

  Other countries demanded the United States share the tower with others, claiming the tower was a global humanitarian issue.

  The U.S. ignored these claims for many years, but after one too many tower explorers came back with incredible powers and wreaked destruction on the public, something had to be done.

  In 2055, the city of
Zestiris was formed. It was a cooperative project, designed and created by the U.S. Congress and the United Nations.

  The city was a way of controlling and tracking those who went in and out of the tower. The rule applied to information as well.

  “Interesting,” said Max.

  “Glad to hear you think so,” said the girl. “Most people aren’t interested in the history of information management, or as it is more colloquially called, information studies.”

  They kept walking further through the stacks of books.

  “Are some of these books from other floors?”

  The girl stopped and turned back to smile at Max.

  “Some are and they are the most fascinating!” she said. “A lot of them are in the restricted section though, but not all of them. A lot of them aren’t written in English or any Earth language, but there have been a few translations. Pretty cool, isn’t it!?”

  Max wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as the librarian, but he did think it was pretty cool. Not only did this place contain vast amounts of human knowledge, but it even contained knowledge from other floors in the tower, from entirely other worlds.

  They kept moving, until eventually the girl turned down between the stacks of shelves.

  Max followed behind, coughing from the dust swirling in the air.

  “Here you go,” said the librarian girl. She pointed to a half empty shelf with a few dusty books. “Here’s our small collection of books on the endless forest. Happy researching!”

  The girl then left Max alone in the hall of books as she returned to her spot at the front counter.

  There were six books on the shelf about the endless forest. Max grabbed them all and then walked over to a large wooden desk in a designated study area and got to work on his research.

  Max picked up the first book. It was called, Mapping the Endless Forest: The Road Between Two Teleporters.

  Max opened the book and scanned the pages. He’d learned long ago that you didn’t have to read for research in the same way you might read a novel. Unlike a novel where you might treasure every sentence and word, research was like an archaeological dig. You skimmed through the words looking for signs of treasure and only then did you zero in and focus on the area to dig into.

  The first book was an incredibly boring on the scholarship of map-making, cartography, and the design of the signs that would help climbers from getting lost in the endless forest.

  The most interesting thing were the statistics about how many people died on that floor in humanity’s earliest days of climbing the tower. The monsters overwhelmed climbers who were just getting used to their new powers. Some people went up and immediately suffered from tower sickness, dying due to a lack of mana affinity. From what it sounded like, the earliest days of the tower were a horrible bloodbath of trial and error.

  As Max read, Sakura’s words echoed in his mind: all these rules are in place to protect you.

  She was right.

  Even worse, people had died for such lessons to be learned, for such rules to be put in place.

  He eventually put the first book down and started skimming through the second.

  The second was a bestiary of the forest floor monsters. Most of it was variations on the types of monsters he’d already seen. Even more discouragingly, none of the monsters listed were above copper rank.

  He kept researching for another couple of hours until he decided to break for lunch.

  He spent some of his newly earned coppers on a coffee and panini at the café across the street from the library.

  He sat outside and enjoyed his coffee and sandwich while watching the city go by.

  He thought over what he had found out about floor-2 over the course of his morning’s research. Basically, it came down to one thing: climber society pretty much did not care about the floor at all. It was merely seen as a stop gap between floors. That was why so little was written about it.

  Then a light bulb went off in his head and Max quickly finished his sandwich and coffee and started heading back to the library.

  He went back to the shelves that the librarian girl had taken him to and studied the other books. The section was organized by books written about each floor. But if you went the other way, you’d find more general knowledge books about the tower overall.

  Max scanned the titles of these more general books. He started pulling out books that had memoir in the title.

  He returned to his desk with a new stack of thirteen books. He pushed the six he’d brought out before to the side and got back down to work.

  He started skimming through them, looking for that one piece of information, that one nugget, that one clue that was going to help him further his goals.

  He put the first three books down fairly quickly. He was reading through the memoirs of famous or semi-famous tower climbers. It was pretty obvious within the first few pages how much time they spent discussing the endless forest, which usually either amounted to one sentence or nothing at all.

  He continued reading.

  Halfway through his stack, he picked up a book that was most likely the oldest one in his pile. The pages were brown and crumbling. It was full of dust and it smelt old.

  He cracked it open.

  The Travels of Rem the Merchant translated by Esther Hupple, T.C.

  Max checked the publication date and it was 2063. The book was over two decades old.

  He looked at the author. Esther Hupple. Never heard of her before. He guessed the T.C. at the end of her name stood for tower climber.

  Max started the book and it was much more fascinating than the others. Rem was a merchant from a much higher floor, who’d made his business collecting abundant goods and commodities on one floor and then trading those commodities to other floors where such commodities were rare. That was his main business, but he also was fascinated by hunting for treasure throughout the tower.

  “After many years of travelling and exploring the different floors of the tower, I’ve come to the conclusion that the rarest most unique treasures and finds are not only hidden extremely well. They’re hidden in clever places. In places you’d pass by, not even considering it might be a place to look...”

  Max kept reading eagerly. His eyes bulged with excitement as he read more details from Rem.

  He reopened the map book from earlier and started cross-referencing the two books.

  He smiled.

  He found exactly what he was hoping to find.

  He’d found his nugget of gold.

  45

  Max had a plan now. A way to get more powerful and quickly too. But even still, he wasn’t ready just yet.

  He needed to prepare. He also needed supplies. And for supplies, he needed money.

  The day after his trip to the library, he headed up the tower to floor-2 to train and collect as much money as possible.

  Once in the throngs of the endless forest, he decided to get to work. Sakura had explained to him that he needed to be as efficient as possible. As an unranked climber, he could use his trait consecutively three times at an overall total of six times per day. So he had to slay as many monsters and in as few moves as possible.

  He explored the woodlands until he eventually found a group of four forest mules.

  Perfect target, he thought.

  He snuck up behind them and then placed his hands on the ground.

  It was time to trigger his trait.

  The ground rumbled beneath him.

  Max was now able to create awesome earthquakes courtesy of the rock golem he’d fought in the underground arena.

  The D-rank ability rippled across the ground, tearing it apart and sending shards of stone into the flesh of the forest mules.

  They screamed.

  One mule escaped into the shadows of the forest. The rest were too close to dying or crippled to move further on.

  A few moments later, Max was staring at three copper monster cores and a bunch of coins. He bent over and scooped them all up and
dropped them into his pouch at his side.

  Three out of four mules in one attack wasn’t bad, he thought to himself. If only there was a way to get more within the radius of my earthquake attack.

  He thought about strategies employed in a lot of online video games. There was one game called Arcane Guild Land that the other orphans had loved and fought over to play on the one computer they had available in the group home. The game had all sorts of rules, hybrid classes, and a species of cat people who liked to get drunk a lot.

  A lot of the game was all about leveling up your character and there were a lot of strategies on how to do this. Farming for experience points was what it was called.

  Max’s memory of the kids playing the game, gave him an idea.

  He started picking up random stones and filling his pockets with them.

  Next, he went and found a group of forest boars.

  He whipped a stone at them.

  CLUNK!

  The stone hit the forest boar right between its eyes.

  The boars already had naturally angry-looking faces to begin with, but now they looked super pissed off.

  They charged at Max.

  Exactly as I hoped, he thought.

  He started running with the monsters chasing behind him.

  He sprinted away until he bumped into another crowd of forest boars.

  Max threw a scattershot of stones at them and soon enough he had a stampede chasing after him.

  He led the small horde of monsters right into a group of peaceful forest mules.

  Max swerved around and planted his hands on the ground.

  If this doesn’t work I’ve got twelve angry monsters about to devour me.

  He triggered his trait.

  The ground rumbled and shards rippled through the monster mob. Blood splashed onto the nearby trees.

  Two mules ran off and one boar chased after the easy prey, but other than that all of them had been hit.

  Copper-level monsters didn’t stand much of a chance against his move. While Max didn’t know the exact stats of the earthquake attack, the fact that it was a D-rank ability meant that the ability’s strength was anywhere between 31 to 50 and that was strong enough to rip through the flesh of weak E-ranked monsters, even some D-ranked monsters as well.