Tower Story -- Chapter 13

Chapter 13

The first thing that Bax noticed was that he was on top of a large hill that held the large tree that he’d fallen through, while the rest of the area was filled with a short grass that reminded him of the first Floor of the Keepers’ Tower, except that this was a healthy green color.  In the distance to his right, he could see a small copse of trees similar in shape to the one he was unfortunately very familiar with, though much smaller, and they were clustered together instead of being a singular one like on the hill he was on.  Far in the distance to his left was a river that he estimated to be around a half-mile or so in width, and a little further up the waterway was what appeared to be a walled village, town, or city; it was distant enough that while he could make out that it was there, he didn’t have enough of a perspective to tell just how large it was.  Either way, it was a relief to know that there was civilization nearby; with how he’d been treated so far in this world, he wouldn’t put it past the System to literally drop him in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles away from the nearest people. 

The second thing he noticed was the monster bearing down on him from behind him.  He turned toward it and saw that it was some sort of six-legged beast that had its sights set on him, and it was approximately the size of a wolf – if a wolf had lost all of its fur and had glowing red eyes that gave it a sinister appearance.  His Identification ability quickly confirmed for him what it was, as he was fairly sure he’d seen something like it in the Keepers’ Tower.

Demonic Wargin

Level: 20

Highest Stat: Dexterity

Weaknesses: Blunt Weapons

Danger Assessment: Very High

Yep, that’s what I thought.

What was strange about Identification, however, was that it classified the Demonic Wargin as “Very High” as far as Danger Assessment went. 

How is that possible?  It’s only Level 20 and I’m—

Oh.  Does the System only think that I’m Level 2?  Doesn’t it take my stats into account? Apparently not.

Before he could intercept the charging Wargin and smash it into paste with a good punch using his 2,682 Strength, a female voice suddenly reached him from behind the monster. 

“Run!  We’ll kill it!”

A slightly glowing arrow suddenly sprouted from the rear end of the Wargin, eliciting a whine of pain that sounded entirely too much like a dog to Bax, followed by a stone the size of his fist cracking into its hind leg so hard that he heard bone break in the process.  While the Wargin stumbled with the loss of one of its hind legs, he could see that the monster still had its complete attention on the near-naked Human in front of it, slobber flinging from its teeth-filled jaws as it stared at him like a delicious morsel. 

Bax wasn’t exactly scared that the Wargin would hurt him, as he was 100% confident that his durability had stayed intact throughout his transportation to this world, but he did dodge out of the way as the monster jumped toward him, likely intending to latch onto his neck and snap it as it rode him down to the ground.  He could’ve easily killed it while it was in the air, because it moved so slowly compared to his own quickness and speed of thought, but he held off; this was the first time that he’d actually seen other people fighting against monsters – and in a Party, it seemed.  Granted, he had killed literally hundreds of thousands of them in the Keepers’ Tower, but that had been when he’d been solo and using his fists without a lick of magic at his disposal because of his lack of a Class.  This was an opportunity to see other people in action.

The Wargin flew past him and stumbled when it landed because of its broken leg and punctured backside, and it rolled a few times before coming back to its feet.  As it rounded on him, another person interrupted his view of the monster as they ran at it, a large man he automatically recognized as an Orc.  They were wearing a heavy-looking iron and leather jerkin that was covering their torso, along with a round helmet that seemed to conform to their head almost perfectly; with some leather pants that covered up their bottom half, along with some sturdy-looking boots, the only reason he knew it was an Orc was by the greenish skin on their arms – and their size, of course.  It could’ve been a Vaneshta or even a large lion-type Dwinaii, but the green skin gave it away.  What he couldn’t tell was whether they were male or female, as they tended to appear very similar in size, but he supposed it didn’t really matter.

The Orc was wielding a large iron warhammer and a wooden shield with sharpened iron straps along the outside edge reinforcing it, and they immediately smashed the weapon into the Wargin’s face as it started to spring toward its half-naked target once again. Bax thought that would’ve been the only blow that was needed to kill the monster, but while the attack dented the Wargin’s skull a little, it simply shrugged it off.  As the Orc moved back from the first attack, intending to hit it again, he could see the warrior’s hands begin to glow red, and he recognized a Class ability from his research in the Archives.

Smashing Blow.

However, as the Orc swung forward again, the faster Wargin sidestepped to the left, and while it stumbled because of its injuries, it avoided the warhammer attack that left a huge divot in the dirt when they missed.  Fortunately, the next moment an arrow sprouted from the monster’s nose, staggering it from the abrupt attack, and then a stone spike emerged from the ground, approximately the size of Bax’s leg, and impaled itself into the Wargin’s chest. 

Even that didn’t kill it – but it certainly immobilized the monster long enough that the Orc was able to recover and send a couple of blows that broke both of its forelegs, while two more arrows and a fist-sized stone pounded into its head.  An arrow through one of the glowing red orbs it called eyes slowed it down even further, and the Orc jumped into the air and brought their sharpened-edge shield down on its neck, cutting through most of it in one blow. 

With that final attack, the Party finally took down the Wargin.

Turning away from the dead monster, she finally got a look at the rest of the Party as they arrived at a run and turned toward him.  There was the Orc, of course, who turned out to be male and had an angry look on his face as he stared at Bax.  The same sort of expression was on the face of the others as they came to a stop, which included a male Natruri wielding a bow, a female Vaneshta wearing a robe and holding a wooden staff in her hands, and a female Dwarf wearing no armor bringing up the rear with a mace on her hip.  Front-line Fighter, Support, Damage Dealer, and Healer?  Sounds like a good Party to me.

Instinctually, as every time he’d encountered something new in the Co-op and the Tower, he used Identification on all of them.

Unknown Orc

Level: 23

Highest Stat: Strength

Weaknesses: Unknown

Danger Assessment: Very High

Unknown Natruri

Level: 23

Highest Stat: Dexterity

Weaknesses: Unknown

Danger Assessment: Very High

Unknown Vaneshta

Level: 23

Highest Stat: Intellect

Weaknesses: Unknown

Danger Assessment: Very High

Unknown Dwarf

Level: 23

Highest Stat: Unity

Weaknesses: Unknown

Danger Assessment: Very High

Two things popped out to him immediately when he saw their Levels. First, he was astonished at how weak they seemed to be compared to a monster who was 3 Levels below their own; while he’d read that it became harder and harder at much higher Levels to kill monsters the same Level as you, even in a party, the effort they had gone through to kill a single monster that was theoretically weaker seemed strange to him.  Perhaps their Classes are low Level?  If that was the case, it would certainly explain why they seemed to have some trouble killing the monster.

Secondly, and more importantly, the significance of their Levels suddenly hit him. He wasn’t sure why it didn’t occur to him immediately upon seeing the Level 20 monster, but it hadn’t even registered as something strange until now.  Why was it strange?  Because, unless they were a Remnant, a monster leftover from the previous cycle that managed to maintain a modicum of their energy, then a Level 20 monster shouldn’t have been possible…

…if it had only been a little over a year since the cycle started.

According to the Archives, the average Level of monster within the first 50 years of a new cycle was approximately only Level 3, which was why this was considered to be the safest time of all, even if the people had to focus on reconstruction after the retrogression of everything imbued with magical energy.  There were some outliers, of course, but they typically didn’t show up past Level 10 – and that was a rarity.  Remnants, on the other hand, were usually a much higher Level than the average, but the earliest of them didn’t start become active for at least 50 years after the cycle began anew, which was when Keepers were typically assigned to come back and protect the worlds from those types of threats.

More than that, though, was the Levels of the people around him.  The monster might just be an outlier, an Aberration that was as far from normal as could be, but it was highly unlikely that any person within the first few years of a cycle beginning would be anything past Level 5, possibly Level 6.  The reason for this was the aforementioned average Level of the monsters during this period of time, as most of them wouldn’t be more than Level 3; and as he’d personally seen, killing monsters that were lower Level than oneself only gave a fraction of the Experience that killing one of the same or higher Level would give them.  Therefore, the people within the first 50 years would have to kill thousands of monsters to get anywhere near Level 10 – but it was unlikely that anyone would do that.  Why?  It all came back to Classes.  At Level 3, they could continue killing monsters to improve their Class, but at Level 4, they would only be able to Level up their Class by finding less-common Level 4 monsters, and so on from there with every subsequent Level-up.  Eventually, they would have difficulty even finding monsters that could provide what the needed to improve their Class, so other than a stat increase from the personal Level-up, it wasn’t really worth it to devote much time toward Leveling-up a few times.

All of that went through his mind as he looked again at their Levels and considered the now-dead Wargin on the ground.  For the first time, he wondered if the “Stasis” the System had forced upon him had actually kept him that way for more than the few seconds he thought it was.  With only a slight hesitation, he opened his APPS and looked at the date, which was handily next to time.

Cycle 980.418.583.833

Fortunately, he was able to translate the numbers fairly easily after all of his studying.  What the date was saying was that they were in the 980th cycle since the Retrogression System was initialized, and was 418 years, 7 months, and 25 days into it.

418 years?  How is that possible?

It would certainly explain the higher Levels of the monsters and the people, as it would take a few hundred years for both to start reaching the point he was seeing here.  But for some reason, Bax’s attention kept returning to the first number: 980.  He specifically remembered the speech given to the new arrivals to the Co-op as if it was yesterday, and he was sure that the Elf that had been speaking had said that this was the 979th cycle. 

Could he have been wrong?  Did he make a mistake?

Or… is this an entirely new cycle?  It couldn’t be, could it?

With dawning horror, he realized that the System had kept him in Stasis far longer than 417 years; it had kept him frozen in time for more than an entire cycle of 4,444 years, plus another 400+ years in the new cycle.  His mind worked on overdrive to put things together, as he suddenly had an idea what might have happened to the cause the System to need to shut down the Co-op. 

Thinking about how all but one of the worlds in the Retrogression System seemed to be compromised, why there was a shortage of sapient energy, and all of it was caused by the deaths of all the Keepers, Bax hadn’t even heard the Party around him speaking to him as the weight of all those deaths crashed upon his shoulders.  It was only when an actual hand slapped down on his shoulder and attempted to shake him that his spiraling depression was abruptly interrupted. 

“He’s traumatized by the attack.  We’ve got to bring him back to Lodgepoint before something worse happens to him,” Bax finally heard the devil woman say, snapping him out of his dark thoughts.

The sound of another person’s voice near him after so long was like taking a refreshing shower after a strenuous workout.  The relief he felt as the import of being on this world and back to civilization was nearly overwhelming, though he did have a slight worry that he might infect everyone again with a virus; he didn’t think it would be an issue, though, as he doubted any of the flu virus had survived from back when it had affected him. 

Shaking his head to clear it and deal with the current situation, knowing that he’d be beating himself up about it all later, he said, “No, I’m alright.”  A brief moment later, he thought he should add, “Uh, thank you for—,” but was interrupted.

“You’re alright?!  What is that supposed to mean?!” the Orc shouted in Bax’s face, making him take a step back in surprise.  “Don’t you know that wandering around out here can get you—and those trying to save your ass—killed?  What the hell is a Level 2 Human doing around here, anyway?  Most of your kind should be behind the walls, where you belong!”

The vehement anger in the Orcs words shocked him.  “What?  You know what a Human is?” he asked, now thoroughly confused – but also hopeful.  If he knows what a Human is, then that means that some of my people are still alive!  And if they are here, then it’s unlikely that viruses would have come with them, otherwise the other people here would’ve died off already!

“This fool—we should just leave his useless ass and tell those back in town that he got himself killed by a monster!” the Orc shouted, but fortunately the Dwarf came to his rescue.

“Now, Granok, we’ve talked about this before,” she said exasperatingly.  “The Humans here have their own usefulness outside of fighting monsters; we wouldn’t be as far ahead as we are right now if it wasn’t for them, remember?”

“You know I don’t trust anyone who won’t pick up a weapon and fight—”

“Granok, enough!” the Vaneshta said with a sigh.  “You know plenty well that there are some exceptional Human Adventurers out there—”

“And I could crush any of them even if they were 10 Levels above me!  Like I said, they’re useless.”

The angry expressions on all but the Orc had faded by this time, and Bax was starting to get an impression of the state of the world – as well as of his own people.  He certainly remembered his own experience at the Keeper Co-op and his conversation with Lead Guides; at the time, he was made more than aware of the fact that Humans didn’t have any special affinity with Mana and magical energy, nor did they have high starting stats at Level 1.  Unless something had dramatically changed over the last cycle, like some sort of racial evolution that made Humans stronger or more adaptable to magical energy, then it was quite possible that most of them might seem “useless” to the stronger races in the System.  He began to wonder if this meant that they were prejudiced against or oppressed because of that, but it was hard to tell without more information. 

Not that he knew what to do about it if that was indeed the case, of course.  As long as they’re not slaves or something, then I’m just happy that they’re at least still alive.

“What happened to your clothes, Human?”

His musings were again interrupted, but this time by the Natruri.  The tree-like archer was staring at him as if he was an enigma, rather than useless trash like the Orc, which he thought was at least a good sign that not everyone was as prejudicial as the front-line warrior.

“They, uh, got ripped to shreds by a monster,” he answered, which made him realized that even the clothes in his internal inventory had been emptied and destroyed by the System prior to leaving the Co-op.  For some reason, losing the last link he had to his old life on Earth hit him harder than he thought it would, and he had to stop himself from turning introspective and depressed simultaneously.  “I don’t have any spare clothes, either.”

“You survived getting your clothes ripped to shreds?  Are you still hurt?” the Dwarf asked, walking closer to examine him.  Knowing that his injuries had already been healed by his Health Regeneration, he shook his head.

The Vaneshta spellcaster sighed.  “Very well, then.  Let’s get you back to town, and then we have to continue our route.”

“Let’s just send him back on his own; I don’t want to waste any more time going back and forth than we have to.  There weren’t any monsters in between here and Lodgepoint, anyway, so he’ll be perfectly fine.  And if he isn’t, then I don’t think anyone is going to miss him—”

“Granok, I swear that if you don’t stop that nonsense, I’ll report you to the Guildmaster when we get back from our route,” the Vaneshta interrupted the Orc before he could say any more – for which Bax was glad.  His anger had started to simmer at the warrior’s words, and he felt like he was seconds away from punching Granok in the face.  He was glad he was stopped, however, because he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to reduce his strength enough to ensure his fist didn’t completely obliterate the Orc’s head. “You know that we have to escort any stray wanderers found outside the town – unless they specifically ask to be left alone, of course.”  The devil woman turned to him.  “You do want us to escort you back, correct?”

Bax wasn’t sure how to respond.  On the one hand, he could tell that while the others had defended him against the Orc, they had largely been doing it out of a sense of duty; aggravating them further by having them escort him to the town in the distance seemed like a poor decision – especially since he didn’t really have anything to fear from the monsters around the area.

But I can’t let them know that, can I?  I appear to be a Level 2 Human, right?  I could always tell them that I’m a Keeper—  The sheer thought of doing that sent alarm bells ringing through his mind.  No, that wouldn’t be the smartest idea – at least not yet.  Without any Keepers appearing last cycle, I don’t know how they would react to my presence here.  Would they be thankful or angry that no one showed up until now?  Would they blame me for what happened last cycle?  After learning how strong I am, would they conclude that I had killed everyone in the Co-op?  If so, would they then blame the other Humans that seem to be here, as all of this happened because I went to the Co-op?

Those scenarios and more flashed through his head in less than a second as he quickly decided on how to respond to the Vaneshta’s question.  With the uncertainty of how these people would respond to his real Level and strength, he figured it was probably better to act as if he needed the help for now, otherwise too many questions might arise.

“Yes, I would appreciate the escort back to town,” he said, the silence between the question and his answer longer than usual for a normal conversation, but just barely – thanks to his quick mind.  “I’m actually new around these parts, and would also appreciate anything you can tell me about the current situation—”

“You can ask around in Lodgepoint, Human; we’re not here to answer questions, but to keep ignorant fools like you alive – as much as I despise having to do so,” the Orc snapped out, cutting Bax off.  It didn’t seem as though the others were any more forthcoming in helping him out by answering any questions, so he resolved to keep his mouth shut on the way to town.

With a nod, he acknowledged what Granok said, and after the Orc grunted in dissatisfaction, they were on their way.

Bax’s arrival on a world hadn’t exactly gone as planned, but it was still a whole lot better than being stuck by himself inside the Co-op.  At least, I certainly hope it is.  I don’t feel too welcomed here, but it could also be that these Adventurers aren’t the nicest people to be around.  I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.