The Tower of Despair. The greatest challenge a summoned can attempt. Every time Erebus changes planes, the floors go back to square one and the treasures reappear. The truth is that the Tower absorbs the belongings of whoever dies inside it, so it’s impossible to get an item that already belongs to someone, unless the item isn’t unique. That’s the biggest problem between the summoned from other planes and the inhabitants of Erebus: whoever gets out ahead stays ahead, and catching up to someone who started centuries ago is nearly impossible.
Even so, the Tower offers opportunities worth the risk. There are hundreds of thousands of dungeons outside it, and almost none compares in rewards. To make that work, the Tower also limits who gets in. Anyone who has already climbed it once, or whose level or class is too high, can’t enter the lower floors. The factions of Erebus got around that in the ugliest way possible: recruiting newcomers in a hurry and sending them in first.
That was why I needed to be first. While Earth was discovering its own powers, I had to turn knowledge into an advantage. And to get through the first floor that same night, I needed help.
I knew exactly who to look for and where. He told me he always went there when he felt lost. I didn’t remember his face as he said it. Only the sentence, which had come from the index like a subtitle with no video.
STEP STEP STEP
The place was on the way to downtown: a cemetery in the middle of Seoul. The rain and the cloudy night made everything even more morbid. My shoes sank into the mud and my socks were already soaked.
First task: recruit a man with a shield in a cemetery, in the middle of the night, in the rain. Whoever wrote this script has problems.
It didn’t take me long to find him. Even in the thick fog, a man over 1.9 meters tall stood out among the low graves.
“Who are you?” he asked, looking at my spear. “I’m guessing you’re one of the summoned too. Why’d you come here? There’s nothing here for you.”
Rafael.
His expression didn’t match the one the index described. “Rafael. One of the ten guardians. A smiling giant who was hard to shake,” the line said. A dry sentence, no face and no story, and even so, standing in front of him, my chest tightened: a part of me knew how hard he had fought to become that. Now his eyes were hollow, the eyes of a man who no longer expected anything, and they were nothing like those of one of the ten strongest guardians of Erebus.
His voice too. Hoarse, worn out. How many times did you have to scream to end up with a voice like that?
“If you’re one of those who got a quest to kill someone, I’m warning you now: you’re not the first to try it with me,” said Rafael. “I’ll ask again. What do you want?”
“I always liked the small hours of the night.” I planted the spear in the ground and took a few steps away from it. “There was nobody around to remind me who I was supposed to be. So I had more time to be myself.”
His eyes went wide.
“How do you know that?” He didn’t blink. “What do you want?”
“To talk.”
“We’re already talking. What do you want?”
Okay. No small talk. Noted.
“Straight to it, then. I need your help.”
“My help? For what?” He tilted his head. “And why would I help you?”
He had no reason at all. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
“You’re right. You’ve got no reason to help me. But what have you got to lose?”
He stared at me for a few seconds, and things I couldn’t have named passed through his eyes. Then he looked up, closed his eyes and let the rain run down his face. From the stories I knew, nothing had changed for him in those twenty years. Rafael had already lost everything before the Summoning. Empty boxing trophies were what was left of his life.
“I’ve got nothing to lose helping you. Or standing here.” His deep voice rasped. “What’s your name?”
“Kai. Kai Sehun.”
“Kai. I don’t know anyone by that name. Why’d you come looking for me? You must’ve found other summoned out there.”
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“A skill led me here,” I lied. “That’s why I picked you.”
The truth was that the line about the small hours had come from the index with a note: he’ll trust you if he hears this. I didn’t know where I’d heard it. I only knew it was his.
“A skill? What kind?” He frowned. “You sure it’s okay to go around telling people your information? Aren’t you afraid I’ll use it against you?”
“It’s exactly because of that skill that I trust telling you,” I lied again. And, like every bad liar, I added details. “It tells me whether a person can be trusted. Although, going by the description, it might fail against skills that disguise a person’s nature. And at night the range goes down. In the rain too.”
Stop, Kai. Stop making up rules.
“So that kind of skill exists?” He didn’t seem to notice, or he faked it very well. “Mine are just defense and attack.”
“And you? You’re fine telling me that?”
“Like you said. I’ve got nothing to lose.”
“Does that mean you’ll help me?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m warning you now: I won’t attack anyone who doesn’t want to hurt me.”
“I won’t ask you to,” I said. “That said, we need to hurry. We’re out of time.”
“Out of time?”
“Don’t you think it’s strange? The buildings are disappearing, the ground is changing, castles showed up. That has to come from somewhere. It’s not crazy to imagine people are coming with it.”
Rafael lowered his gaze to the headstone at his feet and looked at it for a full minute.
“You think this cemetery’s going to disappear too?”
I took a while to answer. I had an answer for almost everything coming in the next few months and none for that.
“Unfortunately.”
“Got it.” He didn’t take his eyes off the stone. “Give me a minute?”
Even in a hurry, Rafael seemed to have understood my reasons. If he was still asking for time, there was no way to say no.
“I’ll wait for you at the entrance. Don’t take long.”
I pulled the Hsu Quandao out of the ground and headed for the gate. I looked back once, sideways: Rafael on his knees by the grave, hands joined in prayer.
Don’t look again. It’s not yours.
A few minutes later, he came out too. Up close, I was reminded again of his size. Before Erebus, Rafael had been a heavyweight boxing champion, and all that body wasn’t there for decoration.
“My name’s Rafael. Nice to meet you, Kai Sehun.”
“Rafael?” I faked surprise.
“No need to pretend you didn’t notice. I’m not Korean. Well, my mom’s Korean, my dad’s Brazilian.” In fact, his face was narrow, but his features were much more Latin than Asian: tan skin, brown eyes, a flat nose, thick eyebrows. “I take after my dad. Anyway. Where are we going?”
“There.” I pointed at the tower, which seemed to be slowing down as it came out of the ground.
“You know what that is?”
“I have an idea.”
“Another one of your skills?”
“It’s more of a feeling.”
“A feeling?”
“I’ve always played a lot of video games.”
Rafael looked at me like someone reconsidering a life decision.
“I hope that feeling of yours is right.”
“You can trust me.”
“I don’t have your skill.” He materialized a Roman shield and iron pauldrons. “But I’ll trust you. For now.”
For now is already more than most people gave me in my first life.
“You already know how to use the inventory?”
“I do.”
The inventory is an invisible, limited space every summoned has, and over time it can be expanded. No outsider can touch another person’s inventory without explicit permission.
“Carrying this shield around gets tiring,” said Rafael. “But running down the street unarmed is worse.”
“Let’s go. If we want any kind of advantage, we have to be the first ones in.”
While we ran toward downtown, he bombarded me with questions.
“You know more than I do about that tower. How, I’m not asking. But I want to know a few things.”
“Go ahead.”
“What is that, exactly?”
“I can’t really explain it. You know the concept of a dungeon?”
“I think so.”
“Imagine a gigantic building where every floor is a dungeon.”
He looked at the tower, whose top had already disappeared into the clouds.
“That’s a lot of dungeon.”
“A hundred floors, if what I know is right.” I adjusted the spear on my shoulder. “But don’t kid yourself. Your idea of a dungeon works for some floors. Others go beyond anything you can imagine.”
“Meaning what?”
“You’re thinking of an underground maze with monsters, right?”
He nodded.
“This tower isn’t that simple. But I can’t explain it in detail.”
Mostly because I didn’t know either. The index of the Book of Ezekiel didn’t have that much available. It was a map with the names of the cities and no roads.
“Are there a bunch of these around the world?”
“Yes and no. The entrances are scattered, but it’s all the same thing, connected like a network. There’s only one tower, no matter where you go in.”
“I’ve never heard of technology like that.”
“Because it doesn’t exist. That’s magic.”
“Magic.” Rafael let out a breath through his nose. “Never believed in those fantasies.”
“Better start. You’re living in one.”
Running at full speed, we reached the base of the tower quickly. A dozen people were already scattered around the entrance.
“Looks like more people thought like you,” said Rafael. “Now what, kid?”
Kid. It had been twenty years since anyone called me that, and the index hadn’t warned me it would squeeze this hard.
“Now we go in.”