Chapter Thirty-Five - Travels

We managed to rotate the Paan cube into the proper configuration of “Tunnel.” We saw earlier that the other locations would take us to a barn, swamp, school, and pharmacy. As much curiosity as I had in exploring these dark renditions of someone’s imagination, I had probably no time to properly explore them. We are on a time crunch and mission to save Seiko’s brother.

After entering the tunnel, we travelled into what I can only describe a stretched road of space and color. As if everything that is the known universe was thinning out. Seiko and Olive did not seem to be amazed, so I’m guessing they experienced fancy rifts before. If anything, the Library did not function like that. It was a rift that connected two spaces together like a wormhole. This tunnel here is an extended wormhole. But it is what I would describe as trippy.

After exiting the Paan tunnel, we arrived to what I would describe as a war-torn building. It was a massive building made up of a hundred stories. It took us an hour to find the set of stairs, but that only took us to the second floor. The next set of stairs was an hour away too, and by the time we hit the third floor we ran into slimes. As we battled effortlessly against the easy enemy, we realized we have a few problems. One, we were low on food. The two girls managed to salvage some non-perishables in their Bank accounts, so we've been surviving on that. We had a corrupted bird man on our tail too. We didn't know how far away he was, but the fact that he still had some grasp of flying capabilities made him a great adversary that could easily catch up with us. Not to mention that the building was almost Japanese style with some of the alleys facing the inner square of the building. 

Overall the building was a giant square and had numerous alleys on the outside perimeter. So you could see the outside world of the building which was composed fog and smoke. A combination of fire and water in gas form. But since there were multiple alleys, there were some that were in the middle and made it more difficult to know where we were. 

There was also the option of breaking roofs and climbing instead of finding stairs. After all we would still be climbing. We found out that they are made of some indestructible material. There is an off-chance that not all roofs are made like that and that there are exceptions like rules. 

We climbed a few more floors running into more low-level monsters such as automata and were-sheep. The automata had slim designs, but were slow instead of swift. I was worried with how menacing they looked and after we took them down, I was afraid they would reanimate and keep fighting us because there was no way that fight should’ve been that easy after all that we’ve been through.

So we melted the metal, we oxidized the gears and screws, and we shattered anything that was fragile enough to not withstand the full power of my human-lizard kick. It looked like overkill at the end, but better safe than sorry.

The were-sheep were tough little rascals. I thought they were cute at first until I saw their carnivorous teeth. They were prancing instead of charging at us and they were letting out adorable “Baas”. I was lured into a sense of false security, but thankfully my instincts kicked in fast and I was able to punch them away.

It felt wrong using martial arts on animals, but these were monsters, and at the end of the day they were food too. As we had climbed around six or seven floors, we called it a day and cooked the meat. 

We had a good meal, the best one we had in a month or so. My month-long trek was simply an excuse to find more tails, so the food wasn’t always the best. Except maybe the dinosaur. But this building seems like it follows the general cycle of game and story design. The enemies will get tougher the more we climb, and hopefully the final boss will be at the top of the tower awaiting us.

Speaking of, does the final boss know we are climbing up? Have there been others that attempted to scale the Tower of Stars? I think a lot of people have been avoiding it because of its menacing look and dark power. Certainly, if I was not with Seiko, I would have avoided this place one hundred percent. But it seems with the abundance of monsters and enemies, that we are the first ones here in a long time. How long could the lord of the tower have been waiting for new challengers to approach them.

These thoughts do not give me excitement at all.