Tower Story -- Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Another shot of relief passed through Bax as the doors to the Keepers’ Tower allowed him access, and he pushed them open to find a relatively large room made of the same stone as the rest of the Co-op, which he thought was large enough to hold a thousand or so people comfortably – even the larger Orcs or Saroon.  Other than its size, however, there wasn’t much to see, as the walls were almost entirely blank with no obvious way forward. 

Thankfully, all of his reading paid off, so instead of being confused, Bax immediately walked toward the far wall as the doors automatically closed behind him.  At about waist-height was a flat, black rectangle that reminded him of what the command tablet was made of.  He immediately pressed his hand against it and a notification popped up.

The Keeper’s Tower

Based on your magical signature, you have cleared 0 Floors.

Please select which Floor you would like to visit:

Floor 1

Floor 2

}}}}}}}}}}

Floor 50

Bax looked at the notification and knew that there was only one option.  Once he cleared a Floor, he would be able to visit it again or pick a higher Floor; for now, though, only Floor 1 was available.  From what he’d read, the process was different for towers out in the wild, as the ones that could eventually be found on the System worlds went through a different process to get to different floors, but for the training of the Keepers, this apparently worked much better for multiple Parties as each of them would enter the floor from a different position and would have a specific “clearing” instance.

Of course, that didn’t really matter all that much to him at the moment, because he didn’t need to worry about different instances.  It was just him, after all.

He selected Floor 1 and his breath momentarily caught in his throat at the next notification.

Floor 1 selected.

Confirming access… searching… approved.

Please gather your Party….

Even as he feared for a moment that it wouldn’t let him inside without a Party, his worries were put to rest a moment later.

Party gathered.  Approach the portal and enter when you are ready.

A few seconds later, a section of the wall to his left distorted for a moment before a large, circular disc of glowing and swirling, multi-colored magical power appeared, and he knew from the books he’d read that this was the way he would get into the Keepers’ Tower.  With only a slight hesitation in his step, as this was the first time he’d ever done anything like this, he stepped through the flat plane of magical energy.

Everything seemed to freeze for a moment as his vision went dark, before he found his foot coming down on a soft surface.  When he could see again, he could feel the heat from the two small suns in the clear blue sky above him, and all around him was a hilly plain of short, yellow grass that came up to the middle of his calf.  In the distance to his right was the faint hint of a mountain range at the limits of his vision, while to his left was a thick forest that was probably a mile and a half away from his position.

Turning around, he watched as the portal that had brought him there disappeared, only to be replaced by a waist-high pedestal made of the same stone as the rest of the Co-op, which had a familiar black surface on top of it.  If he wanted to return to the room he had just left, he could press his hand against the black surface and the portal would pop back up – but he had no plans on doing that quite yet.  He had ended up using his internal storage space over the last few days as a repository for food, so there was no reason for him to return until he ran out.  He estimated that he had around a full month of food, and he wanted to make the most of it.

Normally, clearing a Floor took the average Party of Keeper recruits a year or so, with the first 5 being faster because they were more like “training” floors than anything too dangerous or complicated.  The reason it took that long was two-fold; first, each Floor was huge, as each of them were like a world all of their own, though they were much smaller than a whole planet.  From what he understood, they were more around the size of a small continent back on Earth, such as Europe, though it could vary between each Floor.  The higher Floors tended to be smaller and had more difficult monsters to contend with, so it still took quite a long time to clear them completely.

To be fair, “clearing” a Floor wasn’t quite accurate, if he was being nitpicky about word choice.  It wasn’t as if every Party that entered had to help kill every single monster throughout each continent-sized Floor, because that was both a waste of time and potentially an impossibly monumental task.  With enough Parties on the Floor, as they all shared the same “world”, it could theoretically be done – but it wasn’t necessary.  Instead, each Party had a distinct and tailored “clearing” instance, which was essentially a set of Tasks that mimicked what would be necessary in the real world.

Such Tasks typically required searching the Floor for a number of stronger monsters that were called Floor Guardians – but Bax simply thought of them as “Boss Monsters,” as that was essentially what they were.  Each Party would have different multiple Floor Guardians to kill, though in the real world there would only be a single set that everyone entering the Floor could tackle together if they chose to.  It was this process of searching that caused clearing a Floor to take so long, as first each Party would have to travel to find the area where they thought their Floor Guardian could be found, and then working their way through the monsters there to kill the Guardian.  There could be up to 5 Floor Guardians to kill, so it was the equivalent of taking a road trip on foot across Europe multiple times before each one could be located and eliminated.

Bax opened his APPS and went to his Current Tasks to see what his Floor 1 Task would be.  For some reason, when his APPS started to come up, it seemed to flicker for a moment, and he was interrupted by an urgent-sounding notification.

Warning!  Keeper has exceeded maximum Level for current Floor.  Evaluating presence of other Parties… none detected.  New Challenge Task assigned.

Huh?

His confusion was only enhanced when he actually saw his Task list.  What?  In all the books I read, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a “Challenge” Task.

Current Tasks:

Keepers’ Tower Completion – [0/50 Floors Cleared]

[Challenge] Keepers’ Tower Floor 1 – Locate and eliminate 200 Floor Guardians

“Wait, what?!  Does that really say what I think it does?” he asked out loud, but of course, there was no one to answer him.

Instead of only 5 or so Floor Guardians that he needed to kill, this so-called “Challenge” Task wanted him to kill 200 of them.  Based on all the information he had about the Tower, Bax thought that there were tens of thousands of Floor Guardians spread out all over the Floor, and the difficulty was in finding the specific ones that were on a Task list.  His list, however, didn’t have specific ones to kill; he only needed to kill 200 of any of them.

Ideally, he knew that the Keepers’ Tower was set up the way it was in order to encourage Parties to work together and become used to each other on long journeys that could take a year to complete, as they fought through an environment and its monsters all to clear a specific Task. It encouraged them to utilize problem-solving skills to find their destination in the first place, social skills to get along with their fellow Party members, and to give them enough time to improve their Level enough so that they could kill the Floor Guardians they were assigned without risking death – because these particular monsters were usually strong enough that they would absolutely wipe out any low-Level Party that approached them.

But with Bax, he didn’t need to do any of those things.  All he had to do was prove that he was strong enough to advance to the next Floor – which meant that all the searching for specific Floor Guardians that he thought he would have to do when he arrived had gone out the window. 

In short, he could simply let loose and kill everything in his path.

That might be easier said than done, though, he thought.  Right now, he didn’t have any armor or weapons past his own body, as he still hadn’t broken into the Armory, and the only weapons inside the training rooms were wooden – and he’d already broken more than a few of them during training practice, simply by swinging them a little too hard with his prodigious Strength stat.

Now that he was in the Tower, a little bit of trepidation crept in, overshadowing his excitement over finally achieving what he’d been working toward.  In essence, while he had high stats, he wasn’t sure how they actually stacked up against monsters, especially monsters that he’d never personally seen before; he didn’t exactly have any experience with them, after all.  Still he thought that he would be fast enough to run away if they turned out to be too strong or dangerous, giving him some time to figure out how to kill them safely. 

Shaking his head to knock some of the nervousness that was creeping in now that he was actually there, he made a quick decision on where to go.  With his enhanced vision, he didn’t see a single thing within the short grass all around him, so he headed toward the forest, as it was the closest landmark-type area around his starting location.  He wasn’t sure if he’d find a Floor Guardian there, but he figured he had to start somewhere.

His speed allowed him to arrive at the edge of the forest within seconds of real time, as he was literally that quick.  His recent physical training had allowed him to become adept at judging his speed and adjusting his body to account for varying terrain, and it served him well as he stopped right at the start of the first trees ahead of him.  He looked inside the densely packed forest, trying to tell if he could determine if it was an area with monsters or not, when he noticed movement a little over 50 feet past the edge.

His vision focused on it and he saw what appeared to be a brown lizard that was hanging off the side of one of the trees, the creature’s coloring allowing it to blend fairly well into its bark.  From head to tail, it appeared to be approximately 5 feet long, but was relatively thin, as if it was designed to flatten itself as much as it could against a tree in order to camouflage its presence. 

It couldn’t hide from his focused gaze, however, and he took some time studying every little bit of it with intense scrutiny, from its lethal-looking claws that dug into the tree’s bark, to the oversized incisors that stuck out of its jaws like a stub-nosed crocodile.  The appearance of its outer skin didn’t seem to be too durable, but it was also varied in its design, mimicking the texture of the bark it was pressed up against—

New Ability Discovered: Identification

The sudden notification pushed him out of his intense focus on the first monster he’d ever seen before.  When he saw what it was, however, he smiled and looked back toward the brown lizard and activated the new Identification ability he’d just discovered.  He felt a single point of Mana flow out of his chest and to his eyes, where it was consumed before providing him with something that he wished he’d had when he first arrived at the Co-op.

Information.

Bark Lizard

Level: 1

Highest Stat: Unknown

Weaknesses: Unknown

Danger Assessment: Very Low

After discovering that the brownish monster was called a Bark Lizard and that it was only Level 1, Bax felt much more confident when the Danger Assessment labeled it as “Very Low”.  There had been no mention at all of the Identification Ability in any of the books he’d read, which he thought was strange; thinking about what was covered, it seemed as though anything that was either common knowledge for the residents of the System’s worlds was rarely or ever mentioned.  He could only assume that either everyone was born with the Identification Ability or it was learned so early that it was simply a “normal” part of their lives and not worth mentioning in the Archives.

To Bax, however, it was an amazing discovery.

What he didn’t understand was what information was and wasn’t displayed.  The monster’s Level and how dangerous it might be seemed easy enough, but would the Lizard’s “Highest Stat” or “Weaknesses” ever be filled in?  He consulted the Identification ability in his APPS to see if it had any answers to that question.

Identification – You may spend a small amount of Mana to assess a magical object or living being.  The more familiar you are with the target, the more information will be provided.  This trait can be upgraded.

There wasn’t a clear answer within the ability’s description, but it hinted that if he was more familiar with a target, the more information would be revealed; he could only assume that if he fought it, those types of things might become clear and would be revealed if he looked at another Bark Lizard.  What was even better was that he discovered that he could use it to assess magical objects, which meant he might be able to use it on some things back in the Co-op.

Now that he knew that he wasn’t exactly in danger of being hurt by the monster ahead of him, at least he didn’t think so, Bax walked confidently and slowly toward it.  He could see when it first noticed him, as it seemed to try camouflaging itself even more as its outer skin color adapted to the bark underneath it even further, and it flattened itself even more than it already was.  If he hadn’t seen it, or had a lot poorer vision, he thought he might have difficulty noticing it, but as it was, it stood out so clearly that it was almost like it was waving its arms around and yelling at the top of its lungs for attention.

As soon as he got close enough to it, he saw the monster tense up momentarily before it launched itself off the tree toward him – in very slow motion.  Or at least it seemed that way, because his superior mental processing speed skewed the speed of other things quite a bit; for all he knew, it was blindingly fast to a normal person. 

Instead of dodging out of the way, which would be laughably easy if he chose to do so, he instead decided to test if his Endurance stat actually reflected a higher durability against a monster as it did when he was training in the Co-op.  When he had been going through the obstacle course for the first time since he had increased his Level, he had destroyed it when he accidentally jumped through many of the supports accidentally, which didn’t hurt him in the least.

It was time to see if that translated against sharp claws and toothy bites by a monster.

Sticking out his bare arm as the Bark Lizard rotated in mid-air, he let it impact his appendage instead of his face – which appeared to be its original intention based on its trajectory – and he barely felt it went it immediately latched on.  The monster’s front claws tried to dig into his flesh as it held on, but his skin didn’t even dimple in the slightest; it would apparently take more than that to do more than tickle him. 

Bax then watched in amusement as the Lizard’s jaws opened wide and bit down on his upraised fist, its sharp teeth slamming closed on his fingers.  Instead of drawing blood or being uncomfortable, he instead witnessed the monster’s teeth shatter when they impacted his skin, as if it had suddenly bitten down on a hunk of steel with all its might. 

Well, I guess that proves my experience during training wasn’t a fluke.  These things can’t hurt me.  He didn’t want to become overconfident and assume that nothing in the Tower could hurt him, as this was just a Level 1 monster, but he couldn’t help but feel extraordinarily powerful at this point. 

Over the next few seconds, the Bark Lizard attempted to scratch or bite him, but it could do absolutely nothing to even draw the tiniest bit of blood from his body.  He probably would’ve kept its ineffectual attack going if it hadn’t swung its lower body toward his stomach, attempting to disembowel him with its back claws; when it did that, he wasn’t hurt, but his only shirt was ripped to shreds in the front.  Angered at the monster destroying his clothing, he stepped up next to the tree the Lizard had launched itself from and slammed the monster against the trunk…

…which was a bit of a mistake.  In his anger, his arm hit the tree so hard that the monster was practically obliterated, splashing brownish blood and body parts everywhere, including all over his relatively clean – if damaged – shirt.  He also cracked the trunk just above its roots dug into the ground and launched the entire tree away from him, where it crashed with such force against three other trees and ripped them out of the ground from the impact.  Those three trees that were ripped out fell against another half-dozen nearby, causing them to crack and snap in half, though their momentum was only enough for them to slam up against a series of trees, which managed to bend under the force instead of breaking. 

And that hadn’t even been his full strength. 

You have killed a Bark Lizard – Level 1!

For this feat, you have received 1 Experience!

The notification that he’d received a single Experience point was surprising, as he figured that he wouldn’t get anything – given that he was over 1,300 Levels higher than it.  What it ultimately meant, though, was that anyone could theoretically kill a bunch of low-Level monsters in order to Level-up; in his case, however, it would require killing nearly 15 million of them in order to reach Level 1,303 – which he didn’t think was worth it for simply a few more stat points.  For other people, especially those that were lower-Level, it could be beneficial…

…if it wasn’t for one reason.  He hadn’t missed it that the notification hadn’t mentioned earning any threshold toward improving his Class, which meant that if someone were to simply farm weak monsters, they might eventually Level-up, but their Class wouldn’t improve.  From all he’d read, it was almost imperative that one’s personal Level and Class Level were kept fairly similar, otherwise they could fall behind in their effectiveness in a fight; additional Class Levels not only made existing spells and abilities stronger, but they also unlocked new ones that could spell the difference between death and survival.

Looking down at his blood-covered and shredded shirt, he decided to simply take it off for now, as it did nothing to protect him and the stench of the Lizard blood would start to become distracting.  He pulled it off and used it to wipe off his face and arms before placing it in his internal inventory, stashing it until a time when he could clean and somehow mend it.

As he began to walk away, he watched as all of the blood and viscera that had exploded from the Bark Lizard begin to dissolve away, as the System broke it down for energy.  Oh, that’s right!  Pulling out his soiled shirt again, he smiled in satisfaction as the bloodstains disappeared, before stashing the cleaner-yet-still-damaged shirt back in his inventory. 

This was the first time he’d actually seen it in person, as he’d only seen the aftermath of the process in the Co-op.  His research in the Archives revealed that the System would break down bodies and absorb them for energy to keep itself running, while leaving behind anything important – and potentially even more.  In the case of the Keeper recruits and Guides that had died, their equipment and internal inventories had been left behind while their bodies were consumed by the System.

As for the Bark Lizard, he looked down on the ground near the shattered stump of the tree that he’d smacked and found a flat piece of what looked like brown leather.  A quick pulse of Mana to his eyes revealed what it was.

Barkskin Patch

Uses: Material used for armor specializing in camouflaging effects

Value: Unknown

There wasn’t any more information that that given out by his Identification ability, but he had a feeling that the “Value” listing for the item would fill in once he learned about the current market.  As for its “Uses,” he had a feeling that it was only populated because he’d read about it in his research regarding weapon and armor creation from the Archive.  Unfortunately, he either needed a Class that was able to craft such things, or if he was able to brute-force it with a prodigious amount of Mana.  Unfortunately, despite his high Mana Regeneration rate, the process of imbuing materials with Mana to change them for weapon and armor creation wasn’t something that could be gradually added, but needed to be done all at once – so he couldn’t feed Mana into a material over time.  At least, that was the understanding he’d had about the process from the books he’d read, so unless he was able to raise his Unity stat significantly, it wasn’t something he could do.

Picking up and storing the Barkskin Patch in his inventory, Bax moved on through the forest.  It didn’t take long to spot another Bark Lizard attempting to hide along the side of another tree, and he looked with satisfaction as Identification gave him some additional information.

Bark Lizard

Level: 1

Highest Stat: Dexterity

Weaknesses: Blunt Weapons

Danger Assessment: Very Low

He chuckled when he saw “Blunt Weapons” as a weakness; while he didn’t actually use a weapon, he supposed that smashing it against a tree was close enough.

Rather than let it attack him and potentially tear up his pants in the process, which he’d rather not take off at that time, he ran by it with a significant amount of speed, grabbed it by its tail, and then slammed it against a nearby tree.  He made sure to decrease the strength he was using until it was only a small fraction of what he was capable of; while it still cracked the tree and obliterated the upper half of the Lizard, it was a much less destructive – and cleaner – result than the previous one.  He debated on whether to wait the 30 seconds or so it would take the System to absorb the corpse and leave something behind, but figured he would simply return later and pick it up once he was done in the forest.  Supposedly, such items left behind by monsters would persist for up to 24 hours before the System reclaimed them for energy, so unless he took entirely too long to search through the trees for a potential Floor Guardian, he’d be able to grab them all later.

With that decision in his mind, Bax didn’t stop for much after that.  As he ran through the forest, he killed whatever monsters were in his path, but he didn’t go out of his way to hunt them all down.  As he moved deeper through the trees, not only did the Bark Lizards rise in Level, with some of them even reaching Level 5, but he also saw some other different monsters. 

Leafy Bat

Level: 6

Highest Stat: Intellect

Weaknesses: Blunt Weapons

Danger Assessment: Very Low

Stumproot

Level: 8

Highest Stat: Strength

Weaknesses: Blunt Weapons

Danger Assessment: Very Low

The Leaf Bats he encountered were essentially large bats that had the body coloration of tree branches, while its wings were colored and patterned to look like large leaves.  He only saw them when one tried to ambush him from above, as he hadn’t been looking up for monsters, and it had a strange sonic attack that might’ve stunned most people if they weren’t prepared for it or had such a high Endurance stat; for him, it was annoying but not debilitating, and he punched it out of the air as it dove down in its attempt to scratch his eyes out.

The Stumproot was a 5-foot-tall walking stump that was 3 feet around in width, and it could use the chunky roots underneath it for both locomotion and to attack.  It seemed pretty durable, but Bax simply kicked it and sent it flying, where it splintered and broke apart – along with the two trees behind it that suffered from its impact. 

The Levels of the monsters he encountered steadily rose as he could sense that he was getting closer to the center of the forest.  The most recent Stumproot he’d killed was Level 12, and it proved to be just as weak as its lower-Leveled brethren; nothing seemed to be able to stand up to him – or even see him as more than a blur before they were annihilated, because he didn’t really slow down for much.

No more than 15 minutes after he first entered the forest, he eventually slid to a stop as he entered a large clearing, the suns above shining down on the giant brown and green-furred bear that had been sleeping until he arrived. 

Yobira the Grove Protector (Floor Guardian)

Level: 15

Highest Stat: Unknown

Weaknesses: Unknown

Danger Assessment: Very Low

Even sleeping on the ground, the named Grove Protector was approximately 8 feet tall and at least twice that long curled up, but once it started to stand up as his arrival, he could see that it was actually going to be even larger than that.  As it stretched and began to roar at the interruption of its sleep, Bax shot forward before it could even fully get to its feet, punching it in its head right between its eyes. He felt the skull shatter upon his fist’s impact, but then the massive bear flew across the clearing and slammed up against the encircling trees, hitting them so hard that it not only cracked the trunks, but the force of the impact ripped the beast in half as it hit back-first. 

Bax stared at his fist once the two halves of the now very dead Floor Guardian fell to the forest floor, even as three additional trees slowly toppled over with a crash.  “I guess that was a bit of overkill, wasn’t it?” he said to himself with a soft chuckle.  He had simply reacted to seeing that this was one of the Floor Guardians that he had to kill for his Task, and didn’t want to give the bear a chance to fight back. 

After getting confirmation of the Grove Defender’s death via a notification, as well as progress being made on his Floor 1 Task, he waited until its corpse disappeared before picking up what it left behind.

Bearclaws of the Defender

Paired Weapon

Class Compatibility: Monk, Martial Warrior (see more)

Magical Level: 10

Special Properties: Unknown

Value: Unknown

He hadn’t even seen the claws of the large bear before he killed it, but he supposed that it didn’t matter; because, for the first time, he finally had a weapon that he could use.

The pair of furred gauntlets fit over his hands and long, sharp claws extended out from the back like a certain mutant superhero he remembered back on Earth, and he eagerly put them on.  They felt a little uncomfortable on his hands, which he knew was due to the Class Compatibility not matching his own lack of Class.  From what he’d learned, anyone could use any weapon or wear any armor that was dropped from monsters, but their effectiveness in using them was poor unless it was compatible with their Class.  That didn’t really matter to Bax, however, because he was happy to have anything to use, as he didn’t have any weapons or armor before this.

As he practiced throwing punches with his new Bearclaws of the Defender, he became a little too overzealous as he pretended to roar and stabbed a tree with both hands, thinking to impale and slice right through it.  What happened instead was the sharp claws shattered upon impact and the fur shredded apart, as the shock of the impact with the tree trunk was too great for it.

“Whoops.”  As he stared at the remains of his first usable weapon, he remembered one more thing about items like this: Magical Level.  When using weapons or armor, the items tended to connect with the energy of their user to provide the best attack or defense that could be produced; it was why Class Compatibility was so important, as that connection would then be at its strongest.

But if someone not compatible with an item that had a much lower Magical Level than their own personal Level, then this connection was more detrimental than useful.  In short, what happened with the Bearclaws of the Defender was that his energy was too dense and powerful for the weapon, and it shattered upon its first impact with anything.  He was fairly sure that even if he had reduced his strength significantly, it wouldn’t have even mattered; the disparity between he Magical Level of the Bearclaws and his own energy was so great that it was doomed to be destroyed no matter what he did.

With a disappointed thought, he realized that the same would probably happen to any armor that he managed to find in the Tower.  It was possible that if he was eventually able to create something using his own Mana, he might be able to get away with using it, but until that day, he was doomed to be without either a magical weapon or armor.  Thankfully, mundane materials like his clothing seemed to be immune to his own magical energy, as they didn’t have a Magical Level where a connection could be established.

Shrugging, as there wasn’t really anything he could do about it, Bax backtracked his way out of the forest, quickly picking up all of the items he’d left behind on his way to the Forest Guardian, stashing them all into his inventory without even looking at them.  He couldn’t exactly do anything with them at this time, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be useful in the future – and he wasn’t one to leave something behind that he’d technically earned. 

Once he was out of the forest, only 30 minutes after he stepped a foot inside of it, he looked around, focusing on determining his next target.  Those mountains look like they would be a good place to find another Floor Guardian.  With a new destination in his sights, the only surviving Keeper recruit and future Guide for the Retrogression System launched himself forward, tearing up the miles as he headed for the poor Floor Guardians that stood in between him and escape from the Keepers’ Tower.