On a scale of one to ten, Tristan didn't know how high he was supposed to place the freaking apocalypse that had come out of nowhere, shattering his life into a dozen pieces.
He'd just finished applying what he'd learned in a couple of personal development courses, simply because he hadn't liked the way he'd been in high school and middle school. Shy and reserved is how his friends would often put it, but he really just preferred to be on his own.
Still, Tristan knew that no person could really be an island, and so he strived to bridge the gap, getting out of his comfort zone as he began to improve his social life. Meeting more people and interacting with as many people as he could in a day.
Young, old, stranger or not—Tristan didn't care much. For him, it was just a way to train his brain to be more comfortable around people until he didn't need to sit at the back of the class during lectures.
It'd all been going great for him. He was currently in his first year of college and he'd already had more friends than back in high school and middle school combined. Proof of growth for Tristan—that was until the system had come to destroy everything about seven days ago, talking about a tutorial and whatnot.
He'd scoffed at the time, and so had the other five people he'd been with. It seemed as though a mass prank was being orchestrated by someone somewhere, and most of them in the room had been prepared to dismiss the offer of the tutorial when a couple of "what ifs" echoed across the room, and they all eventually ended up accepting the tutorial.
It had been a big mistake.
A way bigger mistake than him forgetting to take his PB sandwich to school, a way bigger mistake than eating a lot the morning before gym class. They'd immediately gotten directions to what the system called a Tower rift. At the time, he hadn't known what it was, but right about this moment, he wished he hadn't had the chance to find out.
The weird system had told him—and probably the rest of those in the room, by the looks on their faces—that they'd be booted from the tutorial if they didn't head up to the nearest tower. For a moment, they'd tried to contemplate the matter before ultimately deciding to check out the tower rift. If the elaborate invite to the party wasn't on the level of the actual path, he and his friends would bounce.
I wish I had known. I would've called my mom and brother.
Tristan wanted to say he was smart, but looking back at that moment, there were a couple of regrets he had. Maybe he should've refused to go with the crowd and actually declined the tutorial. He'd probably be at his home sleeping or something. The option of being booted out of the tutorial was seeming more and more like the best option with every passing second in this freaking tower.
I can't imagine anything worse than this.
They were on the fourth floor of the tower, but they weren't alone. Lots of other people were on the floor with them. Their little group of six had lost two people. He'd lost two friends, Mara and Zion. The pair had died on the first day, and Tristan couldn't even believe it at that point.
He'd hoped that it was a joke, but at the end of the day, it wasn't. Their corpses turned to husks before the next day, decomposing so fast you'd have thought they'd been dead for weeks. They grieved and mourned their dead friends, but at the end of the day, they had to move. More than half the people they'd met on the first floor had moved up higher, battling the goblins that seemed to dominate every floor—their levels higher the more they climbed.
It took the deaths of Mara and Zion for the rest of his friends to sit up. Everyone was alert and pissed off at the same time, and there was no better place for them to seek revenge than in that tower. The goblins on the first floor were level one to two monsters according to the system, but in the numbers that they came in, they were hard to kill—especially since most of the humans in the place didn't even know how to coordinate themselves.
Most of the attacks meant for goblins hit other humans. The large group of different people caused more mayhem amongst themselves than the goblins could've ever done. By the time they'd headed up to the third floor on the fifth day, more than half the initial people who had been on the first floor with them didn't make it that far up.
They'd died fighting goblins that seemed to never run out of energy or manpower—the two things that the makeshift human company couldn't compete with. The system had thrown them a lifeline, though, giving them the chance of getting Archetypes and weapons after hitting level two.
It'd helped for a while before it started to cause problems within the camp. Around a hundred people cramped up on a tower floor with swords, axes, bows, daggers, and whatever weapon you could think about was bound to cause problems.
It'd been minuscule at first, nothing more than a few clashes that they'd termed "play fighting." But Tristan knew better, and he told his friends—Darius, Rose, Sebastian, and Lisa—not to even consider joining the measurement contest going on.
The breaks between waves of monsters allowed the adrenaline junkies in the crowds ample time to do stupid things like that. A little part of Tristan was begrudgingly grateful to the system for preventing them from feeling hunger or thirst in the tower. Something like that would've totally destroyed the fragile unity of the humans. A single source of food or water would cause competition between all in the tower and that would, in turn, lead to something that Tristan would've loved to avoid.
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But I had to be stuck with power-hungry fools.
Tristan had a hunch that the system had done all it could to prevent infighting between the humans when they were in the tower, but one thing it hadn't accounted for was a power tussle—one that had been brewing since the first floor but didn't materialize till when they cleared the second floor two days ago.
Classes. That was the ignition for the power tussle. People started getting their classes on the second floor. At least two-thirds of the people who made it to the second floor got their class there, and so had Tristan and his friends. He'd gone for the Ranger archetype as he preferred to watch things from afar and he'd picked the sniper class—an uncommon class that made him deadly with his bow.
The weakness with the class was that he needed intense focus before he could let the arrow fly, and in something as scrappy as the tower floor, he was limited to taking out a few goblins at once. The good part was that he only needed one shot to take them down.
He'd wisely opted to stay out of the power tussle when it materialized once the second floor was cleared, and so had his friends. Their trust in his judgment was a boost to his self-confidence. Their decision had led to them getting front-row seats to watch humans be humans, even when an extinction-level event was taking place.
More than five different groups were jockeying for the right to lead the other people in the tower, and he couldn't just understand why. Everyone else was trying to survive, and here were a couple of bozos trying to become dictators in the middle of an apocalypse. Tristan shook his head that day as he watched them bicker amongst themselves. The clearing out of the second floor had made it a safe zone.
I'm stuck in a tower with morons.
More like muscle-brains. It'd barely been a minute since the thought before the bickering escalated to physical blows, as expected. Arrows whistling, skills going back and forth—it was all Tristan could do to stop himself from outright trying to get them to stop.
I'll let them work it out.
His thoughts probably resonated with whatever other person not part of the scrap was thinking. Personally, Tristan wouldn't mind all of them killing themselves at this point. If there were people already like this in a tower that had monsters that could take them down easily, then what would these people do once they finally got out of this hellhole and got a stronghold for themselves, like the system had teased in its brief tutorial lecture before tossing them into the actual tutorial?
They'd become dictators.
Tristan made his heart as cold as he could, watching impassively as the groups killed each other. A couple of other spectators puked, and he was actually more interested in that than the fight. They hadn't eaten in days, so what were they throwing up? Shaking his head, he focused back on the free-for-all.
A single person was eliminating the competition with ease: Jaros, the "Silver Bull" as they'd nicknamed him amongst themselves. The man looked like he was in his mid-twenties and had the trait of recklessly charging headfirst into fights. His Berserker Archetype was a good fit for his personality.
The Silver Bull took on and killed more people than Tristan could count since he'd turned his gaze to the fatty who'd apparently decided to use his size to his advantage. Those who’d mocked him on the first floor no longer could because the Silver Bull was way higher than them in level and was petty enough to actually take a life if he so much as smelled an insult intended for him.
He wasn't the only big shot on the floor, though. Sarah Lee seemed to be holding her own against three opponents at once. Tristan had pretty much written her off as dead the moment he saw she was against three opponents simultaneously. A mage class was low-key a support class—maybe it could be more at higher levels, but right now she was just waiting to be picked apart by any one of the three that could land the killing blow.
Tristan relaxed from watching the fight. It wasn't like he really cared about who won the fight. He had no plans to play second fiddle to anyone right about now. When he got out of this hellhole of a tower, he'd get a stronghold of his own and make it a sanctuary for the weak. Apocalypse politics didn't seem like anything nice; heck, it might be a lot more bloody than regular politics.
Heck, it definitely is.
Within a couple of moments, the battle was over. Tristan wasn't quite sure what had happened because while he'd been expecting only one survivor from the collection of morons that had decided to battle with other humans and reduce their collective might in the middle of an apocalypse—and a tower, for Christ's sake—he hadn't been expecting two survivors: Sarah Lee and Jaros, the Silver Bull.
The pair seemed to have come to a truce of sorts as they were the only ones still breathing from the initial group. Tristan couldn't care less, though, as he made his way past both competitors, heading into the next floor with his friends and the remaining humans in tow.
The fight on the third floor had been going on for an hour nonstop, but they were finally close to clearing out the chief goblin. Throughout the battle, he'd caught the gaze of both Sarah and Jaros a couple of times, and the pair seemed to be harboring a grudge against him, but he hardly gave a flying shit right about now.
With a calm breath, Tristan drew on his bow as he readied himself to release the arrow, his target the only goblin left on the third floor—the chief goblin. It was currently battling against Jaros and Sarah Lee at once, with the other humans backing away from the trio.
Steadying himself, he loosed the arrow, layering it with one out of the two skills he got for choosing his class—Piercing Strike (I). The skill added 5% power to all arrows he applied it to, and a satisfied grin appeared on his face as his arrow found its mark with unerring accuracy.
Thwack!
Thud!
Headshot. The body of the chief goblin dropped to the floor with an audible thud. The pair that had been battling him turned to him with venom in their eyes. Tristan didn't hesitate to get another arrow ready and pointed in the general direction of the pair—Sarah and Jaros.
"We had it covered, you slob!" Jaros roared at him.
Before Tristan could respond in words or action, a notification popped up in his face—one that made him drop the attack as he re-read the notification.
[ Tutorial Period has Ended ]
[ Distributing tutorialists to incursion zones in
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