“Hold it right there!”
The one who shouted was one of the guards at the entrance. He had a noble’s face and silver armor, the kind someone had polished all morning. On his chest, a golden atom, with the electrons spinning around the nucleus like in a schoolbook.
“Identify yourselves!”
“Good evening.” I approached without looking straight at his face. People like that like to be looked at from below. “We’re just a group of independent adventurers. We pose no threat at all.”
“Independent?” He sized me up. “You look like basuras, with that patched-up equipment. Where did you get it?”
“Ah, yes.”
I took the intermediate apprentice pin out of my pocket and showed it, with the humblest air I could manufacture.
“Unfortunately, even though I’m an apprentice blacksmith, we haven’t saved enough money to equip ourselves properly. Still, we’d like to explore the second floor.”
He took the pin and turned it in the light.
“Hm. It’s true that no basura becomes an intermediate apprentice that fast.” He handed it back. “But are you sure you want to go in? This isn’t a walk in the park.”
“I’m sure. Dangerous as it is, we’ll take the risk.”
“Very well. You may pass.”
Behind me, Sun let his shoulders drop; they had been stiff since the restaurant.
A tin pin is worth more than four people. Erebus, my old acquaintance.
When we had climbed halfway up the steps, Rafael came closer.
“Kid. What’s a basura?”
“It was to be expected that not every Erebian would welcome the new residents with open arms. Basura is what the hostile ones call us. It means more or less trash. Or pig, depending on their mood.”
“That’s what Marla was talking about. People are all the same.”
“Yeah. That’s why, in this world, you can never be too careful.”
He didn’t answer. He just pulled Lili a little closer to his leg.
*
At the foot of the tower, a screen opened in front of my eyes.
[Group detected]
[Kai Sehun]
[Rafael Jeon Oliveira]
[Sun Hwei]
[Lili Ferrer]
Beside me, I heard a very quiet sound. It was Lili, moving her lips without a voice in front of the last line. She couldn’t read. But her own name, apparently, she knew by sight. Fer-rer.
I pretended I didn’t see. It was hers.
[Choose a floor]
[1st Floor]
[2nd Floor]
[3rd Floor (Locked)]
[4th Floor (Locked)]
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
[…]
I selected the second.
[2nd Floor]
[The Plague]
[Choose the difficulty]
[Normal]
[Hard]
[Nightmare]
The Plague.
I felt an itch at the back of my neck. The affinity my class had gained from the Guardian, the one that absorbed the forest’s blight, stirred deep in my chest like an animal that hears its own name.
Coincidence. Probably. Maybe.
I thought for a few seconds and chose Nightmare again.
Whoever gets out ahead stays ahead. The first floors were the easiest, a kind of test the tower used to build the floors after the tenth. If I didn’t take advantage now to open up a lead, there wouldn’t be another chance later. It was the logic of any race: the advantage is made at the start.
Four red circles lit up on the ground, one under each of us. Sun sighed.
“Nightmare again. Of course. Why not?”
“Everything will be fine.” I said it with more confidence than I had. “I’m here.”
“With you talking like that, it’s almost embarrassing to be nervous, leader.”
“Mm-hm,” Lili agreed.
“Either way, stay alert. The tower doesn’t have despair in its name for nothing. The floors change moods.”
The three of them nodded and materialized their equipment. Rafael’s shield. Sun’s pointed hat, which he adjusted twice. Lili’s staff, held with both hands.
Light covered everything.
*
When our sight came back, Sun was the first to speak.
“Wow! What is this?!”
“Beautiful,” said Rafael, in a single word, the way he said everything that mattered.
“Too many colors,” Lili complained.
Before us stretched a field of flowers as far as the eye could see. Roses, violets, sunflowers, lilies. Every color at once. The perfume was so strong you could taste it on your tongue, sweet and a little cloying, like cake syrup.
At the end of the field, a small village, perfectly preserved. Old stone houses with thatched roofs. A stream ran through the middle of the place, and the village had grown up around it, the way houses always grow up around water.
It was the most beautiful landscape I had seen since the Turn.
That was exactly what made my hair stand on end.
“Stay alert.”
“Huh?” Sun looked at me. “It seems pretty calm so far.”
“Don’t let your guard down. We’re inside the tower.”
We followed the dirt trail to the village. I went in front, more worried about how the floor was built than about the field. Everyone knew the first floors of the Tower of Despair were simple, almost linear. The screen in the corner of my vision said otherwise.
[The Plague]
[Objective: ?]
[Story: ?]
[Reward: ?]
[Difficulty: Nightmare]
A practically empty introduction. When a floor’s description reveals nothing, it’s because the challenger has to discover the objective himself. Floors like that are always complex, full of layers, with a story of their own.
Great. I came to climb a tower and they handed me a detective case.
My suspicions were confirmed when a child ran past along the edge of the stream, with a basin in her arms.
“A child?” said Sun.
The girl stopped for a second when she saw us. Her eyes went wide. Then she took off again, after some urgency we couldn’t see.
“Do we follow her?” asked Rafael.
“We do. For now, the focus is finding out what this plague is.”
We followed the bank of the stream, and the village started to get strange.
“Kai, shouldn’t there be more people here?” Sun asked. “I mean, I don’t really know how it works, but it’s a village, right?”
“You’re not wrong. Something tells me we’ll find out soon.”
The girl’s short little steps weren’t fast enough to get away from me. After a few minutes, we stopped in front of the door she had gone through.
“Sun, you knock.”
“Me?”
“My voice sounds like someone who smoked forty cigarettes a day his whole life. If I owned the house, I’d rather have someone with a harmless voice at the door.”
“Harmless? What do you mean, harmless?”
“Lili’ll knock!”
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
Lili was already knocking before any of us had decided.
“Hello?”
“Who are you?” a girl’s voice answered from the other side.
“Just adventurers,” said Sun, getting close to the door. “Do you need help with anything?”
“Is any of you a doctor?”
“Uh… no?”
“Then go away!”
After the shout, we heard whispering behind the door. Two voices. One of them weaker, an adult’s.
“Ah… you should go talk to the village chief. Maybe he knows something.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
We exchanged looks. The girl’s voice bothered me: it had a tiredness that didn’t fit in a throat that size.
A kid who sends strangers off to the village chief always knows more than the chief. Movie rule.
The joke came, but it came weak. I thought about Lili looking for the price before the dish. I thought maybe I was going soft.
“Let’s go see this chief,” I said. “We don’t have much else to do anyway.”