Original "Tower" Fantasy - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

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Reed stood among a sea of people. Thousands. Tens of thousands. No, perhaps more. Even his greatest estimations felt wrong. Countless bodies, packed in some kind of stone hall. The crowd stretched so far in every direction that sheer distance swallowed detail. Faces blurred into a shifting mass and any movement rippled outward slowly in waves. The air was thick with heat and breath and the smell of bodies packed too close together. Surely there were windows in here?

He craned his neck. The strange stone hall had no ceiling. Or rather, if there was, it was so far above that it vanished into darkness. Points of faint light flickered overhead, too steady to be stars, and too dim to illuminate anything but themselves. The strange multi-coloured orbs above hung suspended above in the dark, like the eyes of unfeeling, all-seeing gods.

Someone shoved into his shoulder.

“Hey—watch it!”

“Sorry,” Reed muttered despite the instant white-hot flash of indignation.

They forged on ahead into another person. “Move back! I said move—”

“¡No me empujes, idiota!”

“W-What?” He stopped and blinked owlishly. “...English?” 

A balding, sun-tanned, wiry old man jabbed a finger into the man’s chest. “¡Dije que no me empujes!”

“I don’t—what the heck are you saying?! N-No mi hablas español, señor.”

The moment passed and the American man moved on, far more gently, through the sea of dark shapes and forms. But Reed couldn’t exactly say things were quiet now. Voices clashed in languages he couldn’t follow. He kept an ear out regardless. Some sounded familiar. Others he couldn’t quite place.

A woman nearby clutched a child tightly, speaking rapidly.

“Ça va, ça va, calme-toi, calme-toi…”

The child sobbed harder.

“Shh—hey, it’s okay,” someone else tried to calm the little girl in English to no avail.

He swallowed and looked at his feet. The ground beneath him was smooth stone, composed of identical material to the walls. It seemed just… endless. His chest tightened. This couldn’t be real, right? Maybe he’d been hit by a car and was hallucinating moments before death? What even was he doing before this? Reed dragged in a breath. He’d been walking, that much he knew. Headphones in, music playing, with the usually grey London sky overhead.

And then…  nothing.

Evidently, it was the same for the people here. All of them going about their day, suddenly transported to some liminal, endless room. The panic seemed to be spreading slowly like an infection. He just hoped they reached an exit before then. The people around him clustered by language. A group to his left formed quickly, voices overlapping in Spanish.

“¿Qué está pasando?”“No sé, pero tenemos que quedarnos juntos.”“Sí, sí—no te separes.”

Reed listened in, ears cocked for anything he could recognise. The French formed the next huddle close by.

“On doit comprendre où on est…”“C’est pas possible, ça… c’est pas réel…”“Regarde autour de toi!”

English emerged in pockets, far smaller, but a lot more common, within earshot. It helped that one or two people among the other huddles seemed to know enough English to communicate.

“…anyone know where we are?”“…this has to be some kind of experiment…”“…no, no way, this is—this is insane…”

A man in a jacket raised his hands, voice carrying.

“Hey—HEY! Everyone just—listen—”

He got maybe five seconds of attention before someone cut across him in another language.

“Was redest du? Niemand versteht dich, du Mistkerl!”

A few people laughed nervously, Reed included. The response didn’t sound particularly welcoming, but the moment broke too quickly to matter. The crowd continued carrying him to who-knows-where. Reed let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. Things seemed to have… stabilised, which was good. This could’ve turned into a concert crowd-crush kind of situation with horrifying ease.

It still could, but that was beside the point. People were talking to each other, at least. He reached into his pocket, touching cool metal. Phone. How could he have forgotten it?! Before he could switch the screen on, someone tapped his shoulder. It was a woman, shorter than him, with mousy brown hair and big expressive brown eyes.

“Ah—” she said quickly, leaning closer. “Karta… nema… signal…” She gestured sharply with a shake of her head. “Ne radi. Nula.”

Reed frowned. “H-Huh?”

The woman pointed at his phone again, up—toward the empty space above them—then made a slicing motion with her hand.

“No,” she said, slower, as if that helped. “No.”

“I—don’t—” Reed started to say. She exhaled sharply, frustrated, then turned away, already speaking to someone else.

“Rekao sam ti—nema ništa! Sve mrtvo!”

He stared after her for a second before his focus returned to the phone in his hand. His wallpaper lit the screen. It was a picture of him and his father. Both were bronzed in skin, with that same curly black mess atop their heads and identical stiff smiles. Where his father’s eyes were warm and brown, his were an almost bottle-green—just like your mother, his father would say.

Not that Reed ever knew her.  His heart crept up his throat. Could his father be here? He crushed the thought with a vengeance. Allowing it to reach its conclusion would paralyse him and he couldn’t afford to stand still here, of all places.

“It works,” he said, almost breathing the words out. Battery full. Interface normal. Apps loaded. The time read 6:17 PM, which checked out, at least in London. Who knew where he was now… but there was no signal in here. Reed looked up from his phone to see screens like scattered stars around him.

“No signal?”

“I don’t have anything either—”

“C’est mort… complètement mort…”

“¡No funciona!”

A ripple of unease passed through his multi-lingual huddle. Reed felt oddly vulnerable as he turned his phone off. Best to conserve as much battery as possible.

“What is that?”

Heads turned and the question echoed a dozen times over.

“¿Qué es eso?”

“C’est quoi, ça…?”

“Was ist das?”

There were so many bodies blocking the way that Reed couldn’t see the source of the disturbance. Not at first… but far in the distance he could swear he saw… light? Some kind of vertical ivory tear in the darkness? It widened, as if the darkness beyond were a curtain being parted by a pair of unseen hands. For a moment Reed thought he saw something behind it. Depth where there shouldn’t be depth, but then it was just blinding brightness again.

“Is that—?”

“¿Una salida?”

“C’est une porte…?”

“这是什么东西？”

“이게 뭐야…?” 

Hope crept in, more infectious than the fear and trepidation that kept the swathes docile.

“It’s a way out!” someone shouted in English.

“¡Salida! ¡Es una salida!”

“出口！那边是出口！” 

The old Spanish-speaking man in front of Reed turned sharply, grabbing another by the arm just as they began to move. Not quite rushing yet, but marching at a faster pace than before. Reed slinked along. He didn’t like this. That light was no simple exit. A pressure gathered behind his eyes, mounting and worse than any migraine. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that was no reprieve from vision.

A corridor of light stretching infinitely, yet folding in on itself. Shapes moving within it.  A tower. No, not a tower in shape. More the idea of one. Oceans pouring upward into forests. Cities suspended sideways. Skies beneath feet.

Reed gasped. He staggered slightly, catching himself against someone’s shoulder.

“S-Sorry,” Reed muttered. His pulse hammered deep inside his skull, thudding with increasing intensity that once again forced his eyes closed. People walked through the light behind his closed eyes.

He saw five figures stood at the edge of something green. Trees towering above them. Then it was gone and he opened his eyes. Around him, the crowd had begun to move in earnest.

“Stay together!”

“¡No se separen!”

“Restez groupés!”

But over that…

“MOVE TO THE LIGHT!” someone shouted in English, voice cutting through the noise with unnatural clarity. “GO THROUGH! IT’S THE ONLY WAY!”

Reed turned back. The man shouting was standing on someone’s shoulders, maybe. Hard to tell in the crush, but his voice carried far. Others shouted his words for translation purposes.

“¡A la luz! ¡Todos—vayan a la luz!”

“Zur Licht! Geht zum Licht!”

“快点！往光那边走！”

“إلى النور! تحركوا!”

“빛으로 가! 빨리!”

“Vers la lumière! Dépêchez-vous!” 

But how could they know what he was saying? Another flicker pulsed through his skull. It was a thread of understanding that didn’t belong to him and Reed knew, without knowing how, that the ones shouting had seen those visions, too.

“MOVE!”

A shove from behind broke the thought.

The tide surged for the light. Reed stumbled into joining it. Above, the archway loomed vast. From here, he could see it lacked any structure beyond itself. It was simply a tear in reality, with the edges shimmering as if it was struggling to exist. Reed didn’t want to go through it, but he had no choice. If he turned back, he might start a stampede and very likely die a painful death. There were people of all ages here. Children, who’d stand no chance at surviving something like that.

And so they went towards the light.

“It works!”

“¡Es seguro!”

“没问题！可以过去！”

Reed forced himself sideways, slipping out of the densest part of the flow. It cost him ground—people surged past him toward the light, disappearing within it. He angled forward carefully. Screams flared ahead, cut off just as quickly as they formed by that great white maw. Reed slowed before it, just for a moment, feeling its pull. As if stepping through would—

A hand slammed into his back.

“Go!” someone shouted behind him. “!يلا تحرك”

Reed stumbled into oblivion

【—〄—】

There was no tunnel or passageway funnelling them forwards, nor any tangible sensation. The world fractured and sound collapsed into silence. Light splintered into colours that didn’t exist and, for less than even a heartbeat, a gargantuan many-formed shape passed over him. It pinned him still with the weight of its gaze. Reed’s incorporeal form gazed back, slowly unravelling and—

Air.

Cold.

Alive.

It hit all at once.

Reed stumbled onto uneven ground, catching himself as his knees buckled. It was grass that caressed his palms. Real grass. He tore fistfuls and dragged them to his face, inhaling sharply. It smelled of earthy dampness and something faintly sweet. Sound returned to his ears in the rustle of wind through branches and birdsong and… a rustle closeby. He froze. Slowly, Reed looked up. Towering trees stretched endlessly upward, their canopies weaving into a shifting green ceiling. Sunlight filtered through it in fractured beams.

“Okay,” a voice said behind him. Calm. Grounded. English. “Let’s take stock. Everyone here?”

Reed turned.

Four other people stood nearby, spaced out instinctively, like animals unsure of each other. There was a woman with dark skin and sharp eyes, scanning the surroundings with controlled tension. A broad-shouldered, olive-skinned man, still breathing hard with his hands clenched. Not far from him was a short-haired Asian girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, dressed in a school uniform. There was himself, obviously, and one final man at the centre. The one who had spoken first.

“H-How… can we understand each other?” the girl said uncertainly.

“That… gate, probably,” Reed said, wincing at the crack in his voice. Here he was, nineteen years old, still suffering from random voice cracks. “The better question is why are we here?”

It was cowardly of him… but he didn’t want to reveal that he already knew. Why was he picked? Why him? And yet, shame prickled his nape just as quickly. These people knew nothing. Was he really going to condemn them to ignorance because he was afraid?

The man at the centre glanced at the trees, then back at them. He ran a hand over his balding head. “Short version? We’ve been dropped here by something that wants us to climb.”

Reed froze. The man was like the others—like him.

“Climb?” the dark-skinned woman said. “Climb what? We’re in a forest.”

“This is one of the floors,” he continued. “Or part of it. Each floor’s its own world.”

The broad man frowned. “Like a game or something?”

“If only. Games explain themselves properly with tutorials at least.” He gestured at the forest. “This is a little more confusing. It seems me and a bunch of other people were touched by… whatever brought us together. I was shown visions of stuff that I’ll explain in a minute.”

Reed looked around again at the trees. The air. The sheer… reality of it and found himself bemused, even with the blessing of knowledge.

“What are we supposed to do?” the woman asked.

“Act. That’s the only instruction that came through clearly.” He paused. “There’s no strict code of conduct. But our actions need to be meaningful. There’s always some kind of time limit, though. We’ve got three months.”

“Three months?” the Asian girl babbled. “What about our lives outside? School? My parents? How are we going to live for three months?!”

The balding man seemed taken aback by the barrage. Sympathy pulled at his lips. Reed could see that empty platitude forming within that mouth and sighed.

“What about the people here?”

Everyone looked at him before he realised his mistake.

“Are there people here?” he corrected lamely with a brittle chuckle. “The… world can’t be all forest, right?”

“There are people,” the man said slowly. “Some will think we’re chosen. Sent by something divine. Others will think we’re invaders.”

“What happens if we don’t?” the girl asked quietly. “We could just do… nothing. Camp out here for three months.”

He knew in the very bottom of his gut that doing so would be… bad, and that was putting it mildly. This… Tower was completely unknowable, its power unthinkable. Honestly, he wasn’t really sure if he was an atheist any more because this might’ve been the clearest evidence of God ever recorded.

Reed wasn’t sure he liked this god.

“I don’t think that’s an option,” the man answered with a tight smile. “Now, what’re your names? Age, too, would be a nice thing to know.”

They all looked at each other, in part startled at the man’s question.

“I can’t just go on calling you two, ‘the children’ in my head now can I?”

The girl smiled back at him. “I’m Nam Sooyun from South Korea. Or Sooyun Nam, I suppose,” she said, blushing at their undivided attention. She dipped into a shallow bow. “I’m eighteen years old and in my final year of high school. N-Nice to meet you!”

“Federico Orantes. Thirty-six. From Argentina,” the burly, black-haired man said.

The dark-skinned woman smiled tightly. “Ines Kallahan from America. Twenty-seven.”

“...Reed Ravi from the UK. Nineteen.”

“Wonderful!” the balding man clapped his shoulder. “It’s good to have a fellow Brit here, even if I’m only British by the passport, we’re still neighbours! I’m Ian Harding from Swansea. Forty-four years of age. Where’re you from, lad? England by the sound of it, eh?”

“...London, yeah,” Reed said.

Sooyun raced at him before he could reply with stars in her eyes. “W-What’s it like? I’ve always wanted to visit! I’m from Busan!”

“U-Uh…” He instinctively leaned away from her intensity. “...’s alright,” he mumbled. “Grey. Rainy, but that’s basically the entire damn island. Central’s nice, though.”

Ian chuckled. “An American, two Brits, an Argentinian, and a Korean… sounds like the start of a bad joke.”

“Abandoned in a forest, no less,” Federico added flatly, glancing around.

Ines let out a breath through her nose. “Cool. Cool cool cool. So, we’ve either been abducted by aliens or dropped into a random forest somewhere. Probably both.”

“…Wait.”

Everyone looked at Sooyun. Her eyes grew wider by the second as she looked around the forest.

“This feels like a manhwa.”

Ian blinked. “A man-what now?”

“A Korean comic,” Reed supplied automatically before he could stop himself.

Sooyun whipped toward him so quickly she nearly stumbled over a root. “You read manhwa?!”

“I-I mean—a little bit?”

She pointed at him. “Then you get it!”

“In what sense?” Federico asked slowly.

“Tower manhwa!” Sooyun said, practically vibrating now. “People getting forced to climb through floors and complete challenges for the ultimate reward!”

Reed rubbed the back of his neck. “Usually with game systems to help them.”

“I already tried summoning a status window. Didn’t work,” she cut in instantly. “So, no levelling up.”

Reed stared at her. “…That’s why I was hesitant to say anything.”

It was the truth, in part. So long as Ian was here, he’d keep his intermediary connection to whatever being had brought them here to himself. Ian would do all the talking anyway, so he didn’t feel nearly as bad any more.

“Like, is this even another world?” Sooyun continued, none the wiser. “We could just be somewhere on Earth. Which means no magic.”

“And the morality gets way messier,” Reed said, warming to it despite himself. “Because if the worlds are real, then climbers can’t just treat everyone like NPCs or mobs.”

“Climbers?” Ian cut in with a frown. “Did that thing show you strange visions like me, lad?”

Reed’s body seized with tension, like a deer caught in headlights, stuck between Sooyun’s animated expression and Ian’s gimlet-eyed stare.

“Oh, no!” Sooyun laughed. “It’s a manhwa term for people who climb towers… now us, I guess.”

Reed grimaced, eager to cast off Ian’s suspicion. “Imagine reaching another floor and finding out the people there think climbers are demons because of what previous groups did—”

“I already mentioned that,” the older Welsh man said.

Sooyun grinned. “Or people back on Earth splitting ideologically over the Tower.”

“Is this even a physical tower that’s appeared out of nowhere?” Reed asked. “We could be in another dimension, or—”

“Children, please,” Federico interrupted dryly. “You’ve bemused the rest of us.”

The two of them stopped suddenly.

Ian cleared his throat. “I’m glad we’re not completely fumbling around here. The Tower… yes, I think I’ll start calling it that. The Tower doesn’t reveal much in the way of actual help.”

Ines just looked amused. Heat flooded Reed’s face all at once.

“…Right,” he muttered, suddenly fascinated by the ground. Beside him, Sooyun made a tiny noise and covered her face with a hand.

“S-Sorry, guys. You must think I’m a massive nerd now. I-I’m captain of my school’s basketball team, I swear!”

“As if that’d make anyone any less of a nerd,” Ines said, laughing. “And what’s wrong with being a nerd, anyway? Don’t apologise. The more we know about the cosmic horror that kidnapped us, the better. The Tower has a nice ring to it.”

Federico grunted. “This Tower… it does not sound benevolent, no?”

“I don’t think it is. Pragmatic, maybe. I was given the bare minimum information to stave off panic, it seems.” Ian scratched the side of his head. “So… you two are saying we’re inside one of your comics?”

Reed grimaced. “Not literally, no…”

“I hope so,” Sooyun added.

Ian laughed. “Where did the shy little girl vanish off to, I wonder?”

“That was before I found out we might have been isekai-ed, Mr Ian!”

“What’s an isekai?”

Reed heaved out a sigh as Sooyun launched into yet another explanation as the group walked. Ines was in front with Ian, while Federico brought up the rear. Reed was sandwiched between them. Sooyun fell in step beside him and, after a few seconds, leaned in slightly:

“…You’ve definitely read more than ‘some’ manhwa before.”

“Okay, I’ve read a few.”

“A few hundred, you mean.”

“…Damn. You’ve got me. I’m actually a super nerd with hundreds of manhwa on my phone.”

She laughed, then abruptly straightened.

Reed saw Ines’ grin and laughed.

“Shut up!” Sooyun’s whisper was akin to a shout given how close everyone was. “It’s not that funny.”

Ian and Federico joined Reed’s laughter. Sooyun folded her arms, jutting her chin out. The ground shifted into a steeper incline and a cold, slithering sensation seized Reed’s stomach while they walked. They were climbing as the Tower desired, literally now. Even with the flashes of knowledge imparted to both himself and Ian… there was so much they didn’t know. But did he really need answers so badly if it meant more visions? More… communication with the Tower?

Either way, Reed continued huffing his way up the hill, already on his last legs as the incline levelled out.

“Thank God,” Reed wheezed. Sooyun looked irritatingly unaffected beside him.

“Basketball,” she said smugly.

A few more steps carried them through the thinning trees. Sunlight spilled between the trunks ahead, brighter and warmer than the fractured beams beneath the canopy. Ian pushed through a curtain of hanging branches first, then stopped.

Ines nearly walked into him.

“What—oh, shit.” She stopped, too.

Reed frowned and squeezed past them. The forest ended at the crest of the hill. Beyond it stretched a vast green valley, rolling away beneath a brilliant blue sky. A dirt road snaked down the hillside toward fields divided by low stone walls. Wheat swayed golden in the wind. Tiny figures moved between the crops, and nestled beside a winding river was a village. Timber-framed houses crowded around narrow dirt streets, their roofs thatched in straw. Smoke curled lazily from stone chimneys.

A wooden palisade encircled most of the settlement, broken only by a gatehouse overlooking the road. There were men standing atop it. Reed squinted. They wore rough-spun clothes beneath mismatched pieces of metal and leather, and one had what looked unmistakably like a round wooden shield strapped across his back. The other had a sword hanging from his hip. He slowly turned his head to find Sooyun already staring at him. Her mouth fell open, so did his, then, simultaneously:

“I fucking knew it!”

Like my Martial Fantasy chapters, this was also written for a university exam in a stroke of what I think is sleep-deprived brilliance? The basic idea here was me taking the usual Tower manhwa/progression fantasy premise and going, "Okay, but what if I made this shit a little more horrifying?" I love the concept of Tower stories but I wanted to ditch the LitRPG numbers, status screens, and the mobby vibe to everyone who's not a human. Partly because I cannot be arsed keeping track of all those numbers, but mostly because I thought the Tower itself would be much more interesting as this unknowable, vaguely eldritch thing that gives you just enough information to keep moving.I also wanted the whole thing to actually feel global. Thousands upon thousands of random people getting yoinked from Earth shouldn't result in a room where everyone conveniently speaks English at first, hence the mess of languages at the beginning. Thank God for Google Translate lmao.The other big thing is that the floors aren't meant to be disposable RPG levels full of NPCs. They're actual worlds with actual people living in them. Essentially, these kidnapped people are being made to work as agents for the Tower. Perhaps these worlds have been visited by climbers (my tentative term for 'em) beforehand. But perhaps they haven't been. Anyway, as far as objectives go, these intermediaries, of which our boy is one, are essentially the Tower's way of telling everyone what to do.Yes, this is a world-hopping story, essentially. Reed and Sooyun clocking the moral nightmare was funny to write, too. Most people being generally average, you can't exactly roll into Fantasy World #7, slaughter everyone labelled Bandit and nick their legendary sword if these are just… real fucking people. Anyway, I'm thinking of having a not-insignificant portion of people lose their minds and start worshipping the Tower as a god. Ngl, given the circumstances, I can't blame the poor bastards.

Anyway, time to update Willful Thinking now lmao.

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