9 months 16 days 23 hours 4 minutes after launch of The Tower. 

Seagulls cawing and the smell of sea water greeted Ethan as he opened his eyes. Death in The Tower meant restarting. He stood at the precipice of Gallanrose Cliffs, the edge of the Plains of Aranor. In front of him was a drop off of over 100 feet, when he first came to the game it made him think of being abruptly dropped into a new world. This cliff was the separation between The Tower and real life. Now it just reminded him of depression. He was standing at a cliff and wanted nothing more than to throw himself off and be free. But even if he did that, he’d just come back to this same spot. 

Ethan, David, Miguel, all his friends, and roughly fifteen thousand other players were trapped in this world.  Now he saw the cliffs for what they really were: not a starting point, they were a barrier. A reminder that they couldn’t get back. 

The Tower was developed by Tilest Games as a new type of Virtual Reality. Completely immersive, all senses replicated in game without leaving your chair. The concept was simple: “there’s a 100 story tower, beat all the levels and you win”. But there was a catch. Once all 15,000 players logged in for the first time, they had  found there was no escaping the game until the last floor was cleared. No player wanted to believe it at first, someone would come and make Tilest let everyone out. 

Ethan remembered the first time he’d stood in this place after death. His original character had been a Druid. He’d watched the Alpha and Beta of The Tower zealously, and Druid had just stuck out at him as the class he wanted to play. He’d been so excited to turn into different animals and use the powers of nature!

But when he got into the game for the first time and started playing as a Druid, it wasn’t a match. He remembered his spells feeling slow and clunky, it seemed to take forever to kill anything, and when he finally got his first animal form, it had just been too odd. He hadn’t died on purpose, but he also didn’t heal himself. 

He died in a dungeon full of bullywugs in the swamp not far from the town of Grassemere after a few hours. 

He’d planned on logging out and starting a new character, but was incredibly confused to awaken back on cliffs as a Sorcerer. When he tried to find a logout button, he had started to panic. Frantically, he’d sent messages to friends, posted in global channels, even tried to get a Game Master’s intervention. 

The players he’d talked to all reported the same thing, they were stuck. After a day of waiting Ethan reviewed a message in his inbox.

Welcome to The Tower!

Tilest Games is happy you have joined our new game and are looking forward to watching you all progress. Please note, everyone signed Terms of Service acknowledging they would be unable to exit the game until the 100th floor has been cleared. 

At that time the ability to log out will become available to all players.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Good luck!

Tilest Games Customer Support

A form letter was all the information anyone had received. 

Players had convened and decided it must be a joke, surely there was no way that contract was binding if it held people against their will. Tilest would have to let them all go soon. 

But after a week, no one had left. People tried killing themselves to see if death would get them logged out. No luck, they just respawned in the Planes of Aranor as a different class. Death in this game was a reset. You die, you start over from Level 1.

Ethan had lost track of how many times he’d reappeared at these cliffs. When the game first trapped him, he’d leapt into the ocean dozens of times hoping it was just a glitch. Then when he finally accepted it, he decided to try every Archetype to level 5 and start over. He’d only managed to get through a handful before he couldn’t take the repetition of the Planes of Aranor and stayed with Paladin, taking the Leap repeatedly to make sure he got the Archetype he wanted. 

“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!” Ethan’s scream ripped from his throat. A fucking month wasted. All because some fucking asshole couldn’t hold a bowstring. 

Unbridled rage surged through him. When he was a teenager, Ethan had had serious anger issues. It had mainly manifested in self destructive ways: holes in walls, fighting with family, throwing things in his room. It culminated when he was 16 and he hit his brother in the face, over something stupid. That had been the final straw for his parents. They’d threatened to kick him out, to have him arrested if he ever did that again. But it wasn’t their threats that scared him. Ethan was ashamed. He realized who he had become and was afraid of himself. The look of fear on his younger brother’s face as Ethan stood over him, blood dripping off his hand, was not something Ethan would ever forget. 

He made the decision to change in that instant. He took control over his emotions. What few friends he hadn’t driven away became closer, they had noticed the change and appreciated it. Outside his group of friends, Ethan started to appear aloof, his fear of losing control forced him to take total control of himself. He consciously tried to be professional and polite at all times. Some people thought he was an asshole, but Ethan needed to keep that distance. He was afraid of hurting someone again. 

Today, at this moment, in one of the most peaceful places in the entire game, Ethan felt that horrible rage come back. And he didn’t want to control it. 

Behind him a wolf howled. Acting almost on instinct, Ethan pulled a throwing axe from his belt and launched it at the animal. He wasn’t sure what equipment he had, or even what Archetype he’d been given, but that action gave him relief. 

The wolf yelped in pain and then charged at him. Ethan responded with a yell of his own and unsheathed a large double bladed axe from his back as he charged back at. 

His first attack caught the wolf in the side, knocking it over. The wolf scrambled to its feet and launched at him, its jaws clamping onto his left forearm. Ethan screamed in pain and smashed the butt of his axe into the wolf’s skull. When the beast let go, he backed up for space enough to swing his large weapon. He gripped the axe in both hands, pain from his wound searing his entire arm, and swung it as hard as he could from above his right shoulder. 

His attack caught the wolf in the neck, it didn't cut the mobs head off but got stuck in bone. As Ethan wrenched his axe free the wolf fell dead to the ground. Ethan sank to his knees sobbing next to it, tears pouring down his face. It wasn’t the pain from being bitten, both him and the wolf were level 1, it hadn’t done that much damage to him. It was the feelings of anger and rage that he had suppressed for years returning. But more than that, he didn’t feel ashamed for letting them loose, he felt good about it. His axe felt like it weighed nothing in his hands when he swung it. His rage was all encompassing and freeing. And that scared him. 

“Well that looked fun.” A familiar voice greeted Ethan from his left.