The knife flew from the man’s hand with a loud metallic clang. The wooden handle exploded, sending sharp splinters at the lower half of his face. Detonate had worked better than he expected.

  He closed his eyes just in time to dodge a long one that would’ve gone straight into his eyeball. He felt it stab into his eyelid.

  The man jumped off him, clutching his hand. Arcen managed to move his tongue, and he started yelling.

  “H-help! h-help me! help me!”

  He repeated it like a chant. He didn’t want to fight with anyone in his current condition. He targeted the knife instead of the man just to make it clear.

  “Please!” he yelled, his voice giving out towards the end.

  If he uses Detonate on me, I’m fucking dead!

  The man relaxed his posture, and he pulled down his bandana mask. Arcen caught a glimpse of his beard and the glint in his eyes. The man was at least middle-aged by the wrinkles on his face.

  ”Jesus Christ, man!“ he exclaimed. “You’re a guy?! I thought you were some sort of—” The man knelt next to him, and a white light burst into existence. He’d used a more powerful Radiate than Arcen could.

  Thank fuck he didn’t hit me with anything else!

  “Oh god. All these tentacles, you’re a Ceph. You looked like a creature. I’m so sorry.”

  “H-help me!” Arcen said, trying to get his throat to make any sound. It only came out as a sad little grunt of a whistle.

  The man quickly checked his eyes, face and mouth. He rubbed the slime off Arcen’s face with his gloved hands.

  “Help... ” Arcen mouthed, trying to grab onto him.

  “Yeah, I’ll get you out!, Give me just a second,” the man said, disappearing out of view.

  Arcen drifted in and out of sleep, waiting for the man to come back. He couldn’t yell anymore. At one point he woke up mid-air, being lifted off the pit with ropes rigged around his torso.

  He had no idea how long it took. Eventually, the man laid him out on a flat rock and fell next to him, panting like a dog.

  “Thank… ” Arcen tried to say, but his body had reached its limit. His eyelids slowly closed before he could finish saying the words.

  He was finally out of the pit.

  That was enough.

  Arcen woke up under a blanket, warm and dry. It was far more pleasant than every other time that he woke up in this tower. He was in what looked like a cave with a campfire burning next to him. He blinked slowly, trying to move his lips. His mouth wasn’t dry anymore. He could make sounds without his voice fizzling out.

  He tried to move the blanket off and stand up. Pain shot up his arms, like fire through his veins. He yelped and fell back. All his limbs were bandaged tightly.

  The man who saved him came into view. This time, wearing an outfit that didn’t hide most of his face. He was indeed a middle-aged man, maybe older. He had blue eyes, a messy beard and curly white hair with a receding hairline. He had scaly green skin on his forearms and hands—a partial reptilian mutation.

  “Don’t try to get up,” Gareth said, pushing Arcen back down. “I got you some food, some soup. You should eat, drink and go back to sleep. You need rest.”

  “Thank you,” Arcen whispered.

  ”We can talk when you’re better. Don’t worry about anything until that poison flushes out of your body.”

  “Poison…?”

  “The pit flower you were in. That sludge is poison. Don’t tell me you didn’t know?!”

  He’s talking to me like I was supposed to know!

  “I didn’t...no….”

  “You got it skin deep, and some went in your mouth. This is why you fall asleep every few minutes. I don’t know how you’re still alive. Your heart should’ve stopped by now. I guess it’s a Ceph thing. Thank God for that,” the man said, sitting next to him with a plate. “Anyway, you eat this, let it do its thing for a few hours, You’ll be good as new.”

  On his plate was a mound of something that looked like a raw beef patty. The man dug into it with a large wooden spoon and started feeding Arcen.

  It tasted like grass, and meat blended together. The grass was citrusy, and the meat was oily. Arcen swallowed all of it with accompanying sips of hot soup from a two liter plastic bottle.

  It tasted like lemon peels and sardines boiled in salty water. The man continued feeding him until he couldn’t eat anymore. He had food up to his throat.

  “Full already?” He asked, putting the plate away.

  Arcen nodded as the man rubbed his mouth with a stained handkerchief.

  “Good. You go back to sleep. You’ll be better when you wake up like I said.”

  “Name…?” Arcen asked, fighting the drowsiness that was returning.

  “My name? Gareth. Tell me yours when you wake up.”

  Gareth walked away out of view. Arcen fell asleep almost instantly.

  “I don’t know how to thank you!” He told the man as soon as he woke up.

  Gareth was sitting nearby, sharpening a piece of metal on a grinding stone by the dying embers of the campfire.

  “Whoa? You’re awake already? That was fast. Got to be another Ceph thing, huh?” Gareth asked, turning to face him. “Tell me your name?”

  “Arcen. Thanks again—”

  “So, were you the one that killed that pit flower?”

  “I don’t know if it counts as killing it. I remember trying. I don’t remember exactly how it happened.”

  “I’m asking how you pulled that off? You had nothing but a pair of pants on you.”

  “I used Detonate? You know it, right? The thing that explodes stuff.”

  Gareth turned towards him with a bewildered expression. Arcen realized he just spoke about the tower system like a clueless middle schooler.

  The thing that explodes stuff. I’m a fucking idiot.

  “That’s...ridiculous?! How much did it even cost?”

  Fuck. Did he see my Aura?!

  Arcen remembered what the oily girl told him. He had Five million dollars in a suitcase. This man had saved him, but he was still a stranger. Luckily, it didn’t sound like he’d figured everything out. Gareth looked genuinely shocked by Arcen using Detonate that many times.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Arcen quietly activated the contract.

  ╭────────────────────╮

  ︶╯ SUBCONTRACTS ╰︶

  ????

  FABRICATE WEAKNESS

  ╰─────────╮╭────────╯

  ╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯

  “Cost everything that I had,” Arcen said, passing off the long pause in conversation as a gulp.

  “Now that’s a first. You can kill the flower if you poison it. You need strong stuff, but it works.”

  “I didn’t have any poison on me.”

  Gareth stood and sat next to him. Arcen saw him clearly for the first time. The man was prepared for towers. He had armor plates, several side bags with pockets rigged across him. This was a climber.

  “Can I check your Aura?” he asked with a reassuring smile.

  “Sure, I thought you did already?”

  “No, I always ask first.”

  Thank god he’s a good guy.

  Gareth looked at him intently for a second and nodded.

  “Yeah, that’s not enough Aura to be here on this floor,” he said with a sigh. “You need to climb down as soon as possible. Where did you come from?”

  Arcen frowned. He didn’t know which floor that he was on. The deer carried him until he lost track of where.

  “I was in the ground floor.”

  Gareth rubbed the side of his mouth, his eyes widening in surprise. “Well, you’re fucked,” he said.

  “W-why what’s wrong?”

  “You’re in the twenty-first floor now. You’re going to get tower sick if you stay here with barely ten thousand Aura.”

  Arcen zipped his lips. He didn’t know what this tower sickness was supposed to be, and he was too afraid to ask. Gareth was talking to him like he knew tower climbing. Arcen needed to get his story straight as fast as possible.

  “So, uh, I came here with a corpo team, and I got attacked. I don’t know how I ended up here.”

  “Oh no. You’re new to all this?”

  “Y-yes. I haven’t climbed any towers before.”

  “Well, you’re even more fucked than I thought.” Gareth looked bewildered. ”Here’s what happened. The pit deer caught you and brought you all the way up here.“

  “They do that?”

  “They collect anything living or dead to feed their flower, usually gathering from ten to twenty floors up or down. They like going down, because it’s easier.”

  That makes sense.

  “That’s not the problem. You killed the pit flower with all the Aura you had. Now you only have around ten thousand left. You need ten times that to survive here on this floor,” Gareth pointed upwards. “You need more if you want to climb higher. If you don’t have enough Aura, you get tower sick.”

  “What would happen?”

  “You’ll just drop dead. It starts slowly on these floors, you only have few days left.”

  “I just want to get out of the tower.“ Arcen said, looking at Gareth. ”I want to go home.”

  “Good, then climb down as soon as you can.”

  And end up eaten by something else again?!

  “Can you help me? I’ll pay you—”

  “I can’t man. I’m sorry,“ Gareth rejected immediately. “I have to be here for eight more days.”

  “Why?”

  “I climbed this far to find some stuff. I can’t go back until I have enough.”

  “What is it?”

  “You won’t know it by name. There’s this blue stuff. I need it for my boy. He’s very sick.” Gareth leaned back. “I’ll show you the way down tomorrow. Go get some more sleep, you need it.”

  Arcen woke up after what felt like a full day of sleeping. He felt much better as he moved his bandaged limbs. They weren’t healed or even close to healing. Everything hurt, but he had enough energy to keep moving them.

  Gareth had just returned from doing something outside. He came with four dead creatures on his back. They looked like piglets with rabbit ears and large teeth. He laid them all out next to the campfire and sat down, grabbing a drink for himself out of a large keg buried in the ground.

  “So, feeling any better?” Gareth asked, wiping his mouth after chugging his drink in one gulp.

  “Everything hurts, but I can move them,” Arcen said, lifting his arm with a wince.

  “You’re not going to walk on those legs for a while. And you don’t have a while anyway,” Gareth said, rubbing his forehead. “Here’s the plan. I’ll use Restore on your legs. So you can at least walk. I don’t have much Aura to throw around. We’ll see what we got today,” he patted one of the dead critters next to him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ah, I forgot you don’t know anything. Every living thing in a tower has Aura,” he said, pulling out his knife.

  “You can get Aura from dead things?”

  “No, that’s not how it works. You can’t transfer it like money.” Gareth pulled a bucket next to him and lowered the dead animal’s head over it. “This is where Gold comes in. Have you seen it already, or do I need to show you?”

  “The liquid gold that sticks to your skin? I’ve seen it.”

  “Yes. That gold is concentrated Aura.”

  Ah, that’s how eating it gives Aura back.

  Gareth leaned over the creature and cut a deep gash across its throat. A thick stream of blood flowed into the bucket.

  “When something dies, the Aura mixed in the blood slowly turns to gold,” he said, pulling the creature’s head back to widen the cut.

  “This is one way to make that faster,” he added, pressing his knee on the dead animal, squeezing more blood out of it. “ …by collecting all the blood.”

  “Do you have to drink that or something?” Arcen asked, clearly disgusted by the proposition. He didn’t want to drink blood like a vampire.

  “Oh no, not at all. You just leave it out for a while, gold floats to the top.”

  Gareth did the same thing to the other three animals, filling half the bucket with their blood. He set it aside for the gold to separate and got to butchering the carcasses.

  He was way faster than Arcen thought. He skinned all four animals in less than five minutes. It was easy to unwrap them like flesh bananas because the creatures were built like thick hotdogs. Next, he proceeded to open their stomachs and pulled out all the guts and organs into a separate pile.

  He was very careful when he opened the animal.

  He reached in with a small metal syringe and a small glass bottle from his waist bag. Arcen couldn’t see what he was doing in there. He pulled his hands out of the carcass after he was done with whatever it was.

  “This is the blue stuff,” he said, shaking the blue blood in the bottle.

  “This blue stuff is for your son, right?”

  “Yes, he’s tree sick.” Gareth tucked the bottle safely into a plastic container.

  Oh, that’s bad.

  Tree sickness was one of the Mayday gifts to the world. On Mayday, half of the people touched by the light turned into trees. That wasn’t the end of it.

  Light bounces off surfaces and fills spaces.

  Those exposed to this ambient light still had the same fifty percent chance of becoming a tree. It happened in the form of a disease that was worse than cancer and Alzheimer’s fused together. Those with tree sickness withered away for months, slowly turning into trees from the inside out. There was no known cure.

  “This blue stuff can help him?” Arcen asked, trying not to sound too skeptical. It wasn’t fair to a father slowly losing his son.

  “It slows the spread. He needs a liter of it every week. I’m falling behind.”

  Gareth wiped his hands on a rag and peeked into the bucket that had been sitting on the side for about ten minutes. He leaned in and put his hand into the blood. There was a small glob of gold coating his fingers.

  “That’s two hundred and seventy-three gold,” he said, showing Arcen the small patch clinging to his forefinger.

  Doesn’t sound like a lot of Aura.

  Arcen had been firing off thousands per each skill with no regard for his Aura. Two hundred may as well have been free at the rate he was depleting his reserve. “Doesn’t sound like a lot, to be honest,” he said, looking up at Gareth.

  “That’s true. So, one gold is five Aura,” Gareth said, rubbing his fingers together. “And one Gold is three dollars and twenty-five cents outside of towers.”

  Woah! You can sell that outside?!

  “How big is one gold?”

  “About one cubic millimeter,” He demonstrated by separating a tiny droplet that was clearly much larger than what he said. “Exact measurements doesn’t matter. If you have gold on your skin, the tower will tell you exactly how much you have. You really have to remember the numbers I said though, one gold, five Aura, three dollars and twenty-five cents.“

  Gareth shoved his finger into his mouth. His lips quivered as his body absorbed the meager glob of gold.

  “1,365 Aura. I’ll try to fix your leg with a Restore.” He said, crouching next to Arcen’s bandaged legs.

  A burst of light flashed across Arcen’s ankle like a rust removing laser. The pain vanished almost immediately. Gareth checked his foot by rotating it every which way. It was as if his ankle went back in time before the flower deer battered it against rocks and trees. Arcen didn’t think such a low amount of Aura could do something so medically significant.

  I’ve got to use Restore sometime later then.

  Gareth fixed his other leg as well. Likely using more Aura of his own. Arcen felt bad about hiding his Aura from the man when he was being so generous.

  “Now you can try to stand,” Gareth said, standing up. ”It won’t help you to rush down twenty floors. You’ll just die. Be careful and gather more Aura as you go along.“

  “Kill things like these?“ Arcen asked, pointing at the butchered carcasses. It didn’t seem too hard to do. A Detonate to the head could kill these things fast. He had to find a good spot to get the angle.

  “Bigger. You’ll have to kill like three hundred of these to get the Aura that you need.”

  Arcen suddenly remembered something that he already killed. The flower was doing something almost exactly like what Gareth did with the bucket. It was grinding living things to a pulp. If there was any place that had gold, it had to be there. Not that he needed any of it. Arcen wasn’t going to get tower sick with his millions of Aura. He just needed a good excuse to get along with Gareth for a bit longer. He was too afraid of the floors below him and navigating them all alone.

  “Wait, didn’t I kill that flower?” He asked.

  “Sure did. That would’ve gotten you some gold. About a hundred thousand Aura worth.”

  “Did you get the gold from the flower when you found me?”

  “No, didn’t get the time. That’s a good place to start.”

  Arcen pulled himself up with his legs. His left hand was stiff, but he could still use it if he bit through the pain. He stood up.

  “Can you point me there?“

  “Sure,” Gareth said, with a slight frown. Arcen followed him to the entrance of the cave. Gareth pointed towards the right, a small footpath worn down through the weeds. “It’s about a kilometer that way.”

  further than I thought.

  “I’ll go take a look then,” Arcen said, stepping out of the cave. It felt good to be walking again. Gareth stood with his arms crossed as he walked into the weeds. Arcen turned and waved. “I’ll probably come back this way.”

  “Hey! Mr. Arcen, stop!” Gareth yelled. “You’re gonna die if you go there.”

  Arcen turned around, surprised.

  “So you’re really not fucking telling me how you got all those millions of Aura?” Gareth asked, rubbing his chin with a grin on his face.