The moment Ethan touched the inky black horizon of the portal, he was pulled into it by a sudden suction. As the darkness enveloped him completely, the sound of an unmanly squeak echoed toward the black. Stumbling, Ethan caught himself a moment later. Huh. He couldn’t see anything, not even his own hands, although he could feel them. Was he standing in absolute darkness? Had the portal just eaten him? Ethan tried a mental command to turn on the light on his helmet. Nothing happened.
Ethan groaned despairingly. “This was a really dumb idea.”
Just as he was about to reach up and touch his face—in case it had gone somewhere—some glowing text appeared in front of him.
Welcome to the Tower of Ascension. We hope you enjoy your experience here!
The words faded a moment later, leaving Ethan in the exact same situation as before.
“How helpful,” Ethan remarked sarcastically. “I already hate the designers of this tower.”
Wait, had the darkness grown slightly lighter? Ethan waved his hands in front of his face. He thought he could sort of see his fingers now. As he was about to try to turn his helmet light on again, he noticed something bright out of the corner of his eye. He turned to see a glow off in the distance behind him. It looked like a door, but the path to it was dark. Ethan still couldn’t see anything else about the room he was in, including the floors or the walls.
Cautiously, Ethan turned on his light and looked toward his left. Nothing happened. The beam faded away about a foot from the device, and it utterly failed to penetrate the gloom. Next, he tried the thermal vision built into his helmet, but that didn’t work either. The room wasn’t just dark. It was filled by some sort of light-dampening haze.
“Not great,” Ethan muttered as he switched back to normal vision and headed toward the door.
The dark made him nervous, and it meant he had to take special care about where he stepped. At first, he couldn’t see what was beneath his feet, but as he got closer to the door, the light from it began to reveal the floor. It looked black and featureless, which was why it was all but impossible to make out in the dark.
Suddenly, the darkness moved on Ethan’s right. He jumped back and gripped his sword hilt, but his eyes still couldn’t pierce the haze. Ethan froze. Had he imagined the movement? No, there was a quiet hum in the room now. Out of the corner of his eye, Ethan saw the darkness swirl again. There was definitely something in here with him.
Ethan quickly backed toward the door as the hum grew more incessant. It began to sound frantic and expectant, like it was growing excited or hungry. At the same time, the darkness around him started to churn. Ethan tried to study the movement, but it never happened in the exact spot he was looking.
“Ya, screw this!” Ethan yelled as he turned and dashed toward the light. Behind him, the darkness roared like a black ocean.
Bursting forward, Ethan reached the doorway and stopped. It wasn’t open. There was a translucent pane of something blocking the way. When he reached out to touch it, he felt a smooth glass-like barrier. Ethan looked back over his shoulder and felt a jolt of fear. The light from the doorway seemed to be keeping whatever was in the dark at bay, but as he watched, the black inched closer, as if it were slowly devouring the light. That wasn’t how physics worked!
“Come on, open!” Ethan cursed as he reached for the corner of the door and tried to pull it open. His fingers closed on the transparent barrier, but it didn’t move.
Giving up, Ethan jumped back, and then front-kicked the door as hard as he could. There was a loud thud as his foot collided with it, and he felt the impact vibrate up his leg. There was also a brief flash of pain, which surprised him. Right, players didn’t usually feel pain in Worldshift, but the tower was different. Now, he really didn’t want to get eaten alive by the darkness.
When Ethan’s foot dropped, he noticed he’d made a small crack in the barrier before him. Hope lifted his spirit as he drew his pistol and shot the cracked part of the door. The thunder of the shot made the darkness roil, but the bullet smashed through the barrier. Transparent glass shattered and rained to the ground as the darkness behind Ethan rushed forward to devour him.
Heart beating like mad, Ethan launched himself forward toward the open door. He didn’t make it. Tendrils made of pure darkness shot out from behind him and wrapped around his body. Everything went black as the shadow creature enveloped Ethan.
Blinded, Ethan flailed. Moving his limbs was almost impossible, as if he were drowning in tar. At the same time, loud whispering flooded into his ears. The incomprehensible noise seemed to seep into his ears and reach into his brain. It hurt, like alien thoughts that tore his mind apart because they didn’t fit.
Held in place, Ethan realized he couldn’t breathe. His lungs began to burn, but the alien whispering had grown so loud it was drowning out all other sensations. It was more than just a sound. Somehow the darkness itself was squeezing into his skull. His thoughts grew dull under the onslaught. For a moment, Ethan considered letting his consciousness drift away, but then his rage returned. No, this couldn’t be the end. He’d just started, and he hadn’t found what he was looking for!
Ethan gathered all his will and screamed. His fury pushed back against the whispering, driving it away for a second. That was all he needed. Feeling the pressure around his body weaken, Ethan leapt forward.
After pulling himself free of the shadows, Ethan dashed through the doorway, until something grabbed one of his legs and he stumbled. Desperately, Ethan pulled his leg free and then rolled across the floor on the other side of the door.
His armor cushioned him, but he felt a flare of pain in his left elbow as he landed in a heap.
“What the cracked hacks was that?” Ethan remarked angrily as he got up and looked around.
He was standing in a long tunnel made of stone blocks. Quickly, Ethan glanced back the way he’d come, but there was only a blank stone wall and no sign of the door he’d come through. Normally, Ethan would have found it sort of creepy, but now he was just glad there was no sign of the darkness. Since there didn’t seem to be anything dangerous around right at the moment, he took a minute to rest and collect himself. He needed it.
“Seriously, what is wrong with the asswipe who designed that last room?” Ethan grumbled. “Does he just get off by terrifying people?”
Putting players through that kind of stuff without any warning should be illegal. In fact, it probably was! The weird mental effect he’d felt seemed like the sort of game feedback that developers swore didn’t happen. Was this what he’d been warned about? The implant wasn’t supposed to mess with your mind. Ha, the jerkoffs who ran Tekko probably thought they were above the law, and they were abusing their power just so they could screw around with people. Well, with so much money on the line, they were probably right. Stupid corporate jerks.
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Ethan drew a deep breath and tried to calm down. The hungry darkness had affected him more than he liked to admit. It had seemed more real than anything he could remember, in or out of VR. Well, at least he’d passed. Since he was now out of danger, his fear was subsiding, leaving only excitement. Despite how creepy the dark room had been, Ethan was actually starting to feel proud about getting through it. It hadn’t been easy. More than a few players had probably failed that test.
The tunnel he was in was lit by round crystals on the ceiling. They were red and gave off a fair bit of light. The walls around him were decorated by lines of intricate hieroglyphics. Below them, the floor was made of stone tiles that looked rather suspicious. They would be a great place to hide traps. Looking down, Ethan noticed the tiles he was standing on were blank, but up ahead they were covered in symbols, and where the symbols on the floor started was where the writing on the walls suddenly ended.
Curious, Ethan began to study the hieroglyphics. There were a lot of them. Most of them featured scenes of stick-like figures with spears, doing battle with beasts. Occasionally winged figures would show up to help the warriors, and some of the figures had simple symbols over their heads that seemed to signify who they were. Ethan ran his hand against the stone as he studied the walls. All the hieroglyphs seemed to combine to create a story about a war.
When he was done reading, Ethan made his way to where the symbols began on the floor. There, every tile in front of him was marked for about a hundred feet, and the only way to advance through the hallway was to go over them. Luckily, Ethan recognized the symbols. They were the same ones that appeared in the hieroglyphs. Each one represented a person or being.
“I’m guessing the ones that represent humans and good guys aren’t trapped,” the amateur linguist mused as he began to think.
To test his theory, Ethan cautiously put his foot on a tile with a mark he recognized as a hero. Nothing happened. He was safe.
“Okay, that seems right,” Ethan said as he let out a nervous breath and stepped back.
The problem was that there were dozens of symbols, and once he began crossing the hallway, it would be difficult to go back and read the hieroglyphs. That meant he had to memorize all the symbols from the story. Ethan sighed. It wasn’t really his specialty. Rote memorization was sort of boring. Maybe there was a trick to it?
“I’m going to have to learn the story,” Ethan told himself.
Memorizing each rune to determine which ones represented heroes and villains would be iffy. However, what if he learned the story? Ethan wandered to the corner where he was pretty sure the story started. It featured a woman with a crown holding up a baby. Above the baby’s head was a rune that sort of looked like an S.
“You seem like Sam.” Ethan chuckled as he began to read.
He narrated the entire story aloud, giving each character a name to match their rune, and then he went through it again.
“And then Prince Aster killed the horned beast, Giggles, saving his people from the oddly triangular monsters that were threatening them, and the war at last came to an end. Everyone then rejoiced and his bride, Princess BB, was released from her prison. Thus, they all lived happily ever after, except for the dozens of people who died horribly, such as his father King Sam, who was my favorite character and deserved better,” Ethan narrated as he finished his third reading.
Thus, armed with a story that was probably almost completely made-up nonsense, Ethan walked to the tiles and began to cross them. Carefully, he stepped from tile to tile, while being careful to only put his weight on symbols that represented heroes from the story. There were a few times where he was forced to step on tiles he had to think about—stupid forgettable side characters—but he eventually made it across without a problem.
“Seriously, Ralph, you show up in one scene and immediately get eaten by a giant goat. Why did you get your own rune?” Ethan chuckled as hopped off the last marked tile and onto the smooth floor at the end.
There was a wooden door on the wall in front of him that obviously led out of the room, but something was bothering Ethan, so he turned back around. The runes he’d stepped on to cross the floor had roughly followed the order they had appeared in the story, but one important rune from the story had been completely missing, the symbol for the angel that had shown up to guide the young prince, which was odd since it showed up over a dozen times in the hieroglyphs. Curious, Ethan scanned the tiles again for any sign of it. There it was! It seemed the rune was only on a single tile. It was a short jump from where Ethan was standing, right up against the wall and well away from the path he’d used to cross the floor. That was odd and very interesting. Ethan hesitated. He had already made it safely across the tiles, so going back would be foolish, but he was rather curious now.
“Here goes nothing!” Ethan jumped onto the tile marked by the angel’s rune.
As his feet hit the stone, Ethan felt the tile sink slightly, and there was a faint click. He cursed and froze in fear, but no traps activated. Instead, one of the stones in the wall next to him slid away to reveal a hidden compartment. Inside was a small object, which Ethan reached for and took out. It looked like some sort of electronic key.
“You seem important, but what do you do?” Ethan mused aloud as he activated the game function that scanned items. After a brief second, an explanatory pop-up appeared above the key.
Data Key Shard acquired!
Collecting three of these hidden items is necessary to open a certain door in the Tower of Ascension, and they will drop from slain players. Each shard also contains a message. Would you like to watch it now? Yes/No
Ethan quickly jumped back to safety before clicking yes. A video played within the pop-up. It featured a close-up of an older-looking man with greying hair and a distinguished appearance. Ethan recognized him. It was Victor Crown, the CEO of Tekko. In all the clips Ethan had seen of him, he had looked confident and smooth, as befitting his status as one of the most powerful people in the world. However, in this video, there was a sadness cast to his eyes that made him look somewhat haggard. Ethan remembered hearing somewhere that the man’s daughter had died a while back, so maybe that was the cause?
In the video, Victor spoke. “Congratulations on finding this data shard, player. You have taken the first real step on your journey up the Tower of Ascension, so I thought I should dispel some of your illusions, in case you aren’t from any of the factions with access to the truth. The true prize that lies atop this tower isn’t mere money, although there is that as well, should you still desire it in the end. Throughout history, the wise and the powerful have vainly sought that which is now being offered to you. Do not waste this chance, and beware of false allies. As you are tested, others will seek to tear you down. If you survive long enough to find more shards, then I will reveal more of the truth about this tower to you. Good luck.”
Victor gave the watcher a grim smile and then the video closed. Ethan stared at the empty space it had vacated. He didn’t know what he had been expecting to hear from the message, but it hadn’t been anything like what he’d gotten. This was just an event in a video game, wasn’t it? Ya, this rich jerk was just messing with him and trying to make the game more exciting. It seemed the big CEO was into role playing. Well, whatever. Ethan’s way forward was still the same.
Since he was done with the room, Ethan walked to the simple wooden door and pulled it open. There was another set of sliding steel doors behind them, and they immediately opened to reveal an elevator. It had steel walls and electric lighting. The sight was a little jarring, but experience with the Worldshift game suggested to Ethan that this wasn’t a trap. Usually you could tell the safe zones from the dangerous ones, and the game developers weren’t so sadistic they would trap elevators. Still, this wasn’t the normal game. Tentatively, Ethan stepped inside. There was a single button next to the door. He pressed it, and the doors closed. Then, the elevator shifted and shuddered as it began to rise, but nothing exploded. A few moments later, it came to a stop and the doors opened.
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