Olivia explained to me about the towers. Which are nothing special really, if you put aside all the rules of physics and just plain logic that they break. A tower in this case was a large structure with some number of floors each connected by a single stairwell.

How many floors? That varied, and Olivia didn’t know how many were in this particular tower, as she’d never been on any floor but this one during her time here. Which, it turned out, hadn’t been very long.

They’d recently been taken from Crownfall Tower, which was another tower in some other corporate civilization, and brought here to run this one due to their experience and exemplary performance. Except for Jevoa, the keymaster. They didn’t know him, or where he came from, and had spent barely any time at all with him before he went missing.

Which explained why they were less than broken up about it.

They were all employees, of course, as I’m sure you know.

Or do you? Maybe not. No worries, I won’t leave anything out. They worked in the town for the benefit of the hopefuls who came to attempt to clear the floors and gain the riches and rewards within. The towns provided a safe place to rest, to come back to during your adventures.

You could stock up on supplies, rent a room to sleep if you still needed it, or simply take a breather between keys.

Which were what one needed to gather to clear the floor, and which you had to search for.

The entire floor. They could be literally anywhere. And you weren’t even told how many there were beforehand.

Each floor had a certain number that needed to be gathered and once this was done, you would take them to the keymaster at the stairwell, and he would combine them into the key required to unlock it.

There was also a special hidden key, which if brought to the keymaster along with all the other keys would, among other benefits, make it so that a portal back to town would open up in addition to the stairs to the next floor. Otherwise you’d have to make the trek manually.

This was important because it was only once the floor was cleared that the tower would open up again and people could come and go as they pleased.

At least until the first key on the next floor was found, at which point the tower would lock down again.

“Are there other people here then who’ve gathered a key?” I asked.

By this point breakfast was long finished and most of the others had cleared out to do their jobs, which mostly seemed to be preparing the town for visitors, only Olivia and Meredith staying behind.

Olivia shrugged. “I haven’t seen anyone.”

“Then why did the portal close? It would be a really big coincidence if I just happened to stumble in here just as someone else got the first key to the floor.”

“It would only be closed to you. You can’t leave a tower once you enter until you clear a floor. Usually.”

“Usually?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “Sometimes things are different.”

“Oh great, so there are rules until there aren’t.”

“There are rules we don’t understand or aren’t privy to,” Meredith corrected.

I grunted.

Worst of all, it wasn’t just the icy weather that would be trying to kill me while I searched the floor for the keys, as my new friends weren’t the only occupants of the floor: there were monsters out in the wilds. And the wilds were precisely what stood between me and the exit, which was what the other mountain held: the stairwell.

My only other hope was a tunnel that the keymaster used to get between town and the stairwell, but which only he could access.

Or so they claimed. I was skeptical. There was always a way.

“I want to see this tunnel then,” I said.

Olivia nodded, a bit eagerly. “Of course. Come, I’ll show you.”

Meredith sighed and shook her head, getting up. “You clean up, girl. I’ll show him.” Then she muttered something about involvement with the locals that I didn’t quite catch.

She stopped at the door, turning back to look at me, still sitting at the table. “Well boy, you coming?”

I glanced at Olivia, who was already beginning to clean up.

“She’s not the one who asked you,” Meredith chided.

“Right, yeah.” I got up.

Olivia gave a wan smile. “See you around, I guess.”

Meredith made a tut of disapproval and headed out, me rushing after her.

‌

∎ ∎ ∎

The shortcut tunnel the keymaster used to get to the end of the floor was a large, blue stone ring set up in a building seemingly exclusively devoted to it. I could walk through it just fine, but it didn’t take me anywhere.

“It’s a portal then…” I said cautiously. “Not a tunnel.”

“It’s a portal tunnel,” Meredith corrected.

I glanced at her. “What’s the difference?”

“It’s a tunnel that portals you across the floor to the stairwell.”

“Or a portal that tunnels you across the floor to the stairwell.”

She frowned.

“So only the keymaster can activate it?”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Aye, only him. As I said.” She had told me repeatedly on the way over that I wouldn’t be able to use it, but I didn’t buy it. I needed to see for myself.

“But, once it’s activated—”

“No, I know what you’re going to ask, and no, you can’t go through. Trust me, it’s the first thing every fledgling prospector thinks to try. Not that getting to the stairwell would do them any good without the floor keys. But try they do.”

“How many times have you been through this?”

“Oh, a few hundred now.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That’s a lot.”

“Aye, the pay’s good. And quite a few of those didn’t last long.”

“So you must have been doing this since you were a girl?”

“Aye. Started at fifty or so.”

I frowned. “Fifty? As in fifty years old?”

She gave me an odd look, then nodded. “Ah right, you age fast before the system. I’m two-hundred and ten years old. Give or take.”

I stared at her, mouth open. “Wow,” I finally said. “You look great.”

She snorted. “Don’t flirt with the tower staff.” But she was smiling.

“So what is it exactly you do here?”

“I manage people.”

“You’re not a slave or anything?”

“Why would you think that?”

I shrugged. “Corporation with absolute power. That’s how these things usually go.”

“I’d like to see anyone try to enslave me.” She looked past me out the door with a wistful look. “Especially Harold.”

“Right,” I said, uncomfortably.

Harold—the one who had showed me to the ‘bathroom’—was a bear of a man who, during Olivia’s explanation at breakfast, Meredith had been unashamedly flirty with.

I couldn’t honestly tell if he minded or not, as all he seemed to do was grunt. If that.

“So,” Meredith asked, “you believe me now? The only way to get out is to find Jevoa.”

“Yeah,” I said, staring at the portal ring. “Why does he have a portal tunnel, anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why leave his post at the stairwell?”

“He’s not going to stand around waiting for prospectors, now is he?”

“Isn’t that his job?”

“Not at all hours of the day.”

“What if someone gets there and he’s not there?”

“Waiting never hurt anyone.”

“Pretty sure that’s not true at all.”

Ignoring this, she asked, “Your world only recently got added to the CorCivs, yes?”

“Coercives?”

“Cor-Civs,” she enunciated. “Corporate civilizations.”

“Oh. Yeah. Yesterday.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “That quickly?”

“You didn’t hear me tell Olivia?”

“I’m not your keeper, now am I?” she huffed, then studied me, causing my skin to tingle in a way I’d later come to associate with being inspected. “Oh dear, you’re unranked. You need to do something about that.” She tsked and shook her head. “Added yesterday and you’re already in a tower.” She frowned. “One that we got pulled from Crownfall to tend to…”

The way she trailed off made me nervous. I didn’t get the impression it implied good things.

“That unusual?”

“You might say that.”

“Good unusual?” I asked hopefully.

“It’s not great, let’s put it that way. You recall what system was assigned to your world?”

“Uh, thirty-one-twenty-something, I think.”

“You received a numbered system?”

“Yeah. I guess. Is that bad? Why do I get the feeling I’m in the worst possible situation?”

“Um, it’s not important,” she said, in a manner that made it seem like it was very important. “Well, you know about monsters, yes?”

“Yeah, out on the floor. Or wilds. The corrupted, right?”

“No. Well, not exactly. It’s complicated. Corrupted can become monsters, but not all monsters were corrupted. The important thing to keep in mind is that monsters aren’t like you or I. For us, our level is determined by our cards, and our rank by our mana. Monsters are different. Their level has nothing to do with cards, not really, and they have no ranks, but are instead categorized by classes, of which there are five: Giant, Goliath, Colossus, Behemoth, and Titan.”

“GGCBT. Bob would love that. Probably wouldn’t get the GG part.” I frowned. “I might have that last letter wrong, now I think of it.”

She glared at me.

“Sorry. So, they grow larger and larger as they get stronger?”

“No. At least, not in most civs. The names are an artifact from Prime, which is the first civ, maybe even the first system. Hard to say since it was cut off long ago from the rest of us by the Overlords. These days you might come across a Titan-class monster that’s barely bigger than you. It’s unlikely though. While they aren’t strictly tied to size, there is a tendency for higher class monsters to be larger.”

“You said for us rank is mana and level is cards, what about for them?”

“To use an example from a pre-system world, a monster’s class is a bit like being strong from muscles, while level is like using a machine. Unassisted and assisted strength. Inherent versus external.” She sighed. “Torath could explain this better.”

“You’re doing fine, please continue.”

She snorted. “In general, unless the monster is unusually high level, you can expect to be evenly matched with those a class above your rank. Unranked to Giant, Copper to Goliath, and so on. Though you’d do well to never underestimate them. Their strength isn’t as predictable as ours. I once saw a Silver get devoured by a pack of Giant-class monsters.” She shook her head. “Barely got out of that alive myself. After they finished off the Silver, they came for the rest of us.” She sighed, the pain of the memory written on her face.

“What about corrupted?” I asked to distract her. “Is their strength like monsters?”

“They vary even more. A good rule of thumb is the more they look like themselves, the more dangerous they are, and the more you should treat them like people—so far as their strength goes at least. A good prospector could take on a monster two, perhaps even three classes above them if the circumstances are right. You wouldn’t want to do the same with a corrupted. Even a single rank gap is usually enough that the one with the higher rank will always win, no matter how bad they are and how good the lower ranker. Each rank you gain makes you resilient to the ones that come before, even after the point where you stop overtly strengthening your body, so while your attacks won’t be much diminished against higher class monsters, they’ll be rendered significantly less effective, if not totally ineffective, against higher rankers, be they people or corrupted.”

“Avoid fighting people more powerful than me, got it. Not something I was planning on doing anyway. I prefer being massively overleveled for any zone. I’ll take grinding over death any day.”

She frowned.

“Actually,” I said, my levity evaporating, “I killed a Copper-rank corrupted. With a flashlight.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Was it a ghoul-type?”

“Uh, no idea. It was electricity that killed it. Do you know what electricity is?”

She gave me a scathing look. “Yes I know what electricity is. Don’t know how you managed to kill a Copper with it though. Was the item powerful?”

“Uh, it was just a regular flashlight. Was quite heavy, so must have had a lot of battery.”

“What level was the corrupted?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It must have been weak,” she said thoughtfully, looking past me. “It’s still rather unusual. You got lucky.”

“That’s one way to put it. I kinda knew him.”

Her expression softened. “Sorry. I know how hard it can be at first. But you need to focus. You can’t afford to hesitate. You did what you needed to to survive.”

“Yeah,” I said, unconvincingly.

“As for towers,” she said, now the one distracting me, “they are classified in the same way as monsters, based on the monsters inside. There are exceptions, Crownfall being a notable one.” She sighed wistfully. “Such an easy job, that was. Anyway, the first class, Giant, makes up something like eighty percent of all towers. They usually don’t have monsters higher than the next class, Goliath, which itself makes up about ten or fifteen percent of towers. It goes down from there. The next two classes, Colossus and Behemoth, make up nearly all of the remaining towers. And then, finally, there’s Titan.” She shook her head. “I can’t tell you anything about those.”

“And what class is this tower?” I asked, an uneasy feeling in my gut.

“No idea,” she said with unwarranted cheer.

She saw my look and added, “But since you said your civilization was integrated yesterday, it’s likely Giant or Goliath.” She tilted her head. “Perhaps as high as Colossus.”

I let out a sigh of relief.

“Don’t go letting your guard down or getting your hopes up. Unranked as you are, Colossus might as well be Titan.”

“Oh that sounds wonderful.”

“Don’t take that sass with me. I’m not the one who makes the rules. The good news for you is that the first floor won’t be that difficult.” She scrunched up her face briefly. “It won’t be impossible,” she corrected. “You have no cards either?”

“I have one.”

“It’s not active. You haven’t used it?”

“No. It’s… strange.”

She tutted. “Strange or not, you’ll need it. And to be safe, you really should be at least Iron-rank to clear this floor.”

“How far away is Iron-rank? And how do I get there?”

She tutted again. “I have real work to do. Come on, I’ll take you to see Torath. I don’t doubt he’ll be more than happy to explain everything to you.”