Cillian woke up with a quiet groan of pain. The ground was hard and cold beneath him, and every inch of his body hurt. Slowly, he blinked, once, twice, and then his eyes focused on the ceiling of a cave, stalagmites gleaming in the dim light.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He was in the Tower.

The Tower was a phenomenon that appeared in the Arctic circle five years ago. At first, no one knew where it was from. It just popped out of the ground, and every country started blaming the other for its existence. For a solid six months, nothing happened. It just sat there ominously as various countries fought and argued about who put it there and why and if it was a weapon or what.

And then, people around the world started to disappear. It took time, but scientists managed to track a strange energy signature from the point of disappearance to the tower.

A year later, some came back. They couldn’t speak about the Tower, couldn’t share any details. The most people knew was that it was a fight to the death, maintained by something called the “System”. Once countries around the world realized it was a hostage situation, talk of destroying the Tower died down, and all anyone could do was wait.

And now it had taken him, too. Waiting. Ha. He almost wished they hadn’t waited and said screw it, though it was a selfish thought. Cillian wasn’t physically fit. He rarely ever left his apartment, beset upon with severe agoraphobia and social anxiety. He didn’t have many friends. The closest he could count was Jeremy.

At least Jeremy knew he was gone. He could tell Cillian’s parent.

Slowly, Cillian sat up and looked around. It smelled like water and earth and moss in here, dank and wet. He wasn’t in his clothes. Instead, he was in rough, tight pants, a poet’s shirt, and a leather vest, with tall boots. There was a hatchet next to him in a sheath. Slowly, he peeled back the shirt and looked down at his chest. Great. The compression bra he was wearing before was still there. At least he hadn’t been completely stripped.

A blue screen flickered in front of him, and he stared at it in silence.

System booting 14%.

Should he wait?

A crazy thought hit him. Maybe he should just die here. That sounded easy. It wasn’t like he had a whole lot to live for, anyways. And it would be the perfect excuse. No one was going to expect him to stay alive. His dad was probably already mourning.

No.

He had been working on that. He hadn’t even so much as hurt himself in five years, and had the pride flags tattooed over his scars to prove it.

System booting 20%

Slowly, he picked up the hatchet and climbed to his feet. The belt seemed relatively simple to put on, but there was a strap that seemed to go over the thigh. It looked like the head of the hatchet was kept out in a sheath at the bottom and pulled straight out from the handle. There was a metal button keeping the shaft in place, which would probably make things easier.

His fingers fumbling, he strapped on the belt and straightened it out. It fit perfectly. They even took in the fact that he was left handed, and the attention to detail was unnerving. It was one thing to be stripped, but for them to know his dominant hand… He actually didn’t like that.

System booting 24%

It sure was taking a long time. Would he be attacked the second it set up? Or would it give him time? Okay, okay, what would he have a smart character do in this scenario? He had written it a million times, but he didn’t think he would actually be in this position.

First, take stock of surroundings. It was a cave, a massive cavern, and there was glowing moss and mushrooms dotted just about everywhere. Were the mushrooms poisonous? He didn’t know. It was probably important to find food, unless you didn’t have to eat here. Well, he would just wait and see if he got hungry.

Anyways, there didn’t seem to be much movement, but there were a lot of eerily still pools, which definitely made it difficult terrain. He inched near the closest pool, and found himself staring down in inky black depths that seemed to go on forever and ever. When he was young, his dad took him to see Carlsbad Caverns. Cillian had been absolutely elated, always interested in the weird and strange and creepy, but when he saw those endless pools, he remembered a fear settle in his stomach. He had been terrified he’d fall in, and clung to his dad for the rest of the trip, despite being twelve, utterly convinced the ground would go out on him and he would drown in one of those pools.

Even now, he could feel his heart skip a beat as he stared into the abyss, and common sense told him to back up. There was a chill in the air, and he turned around to sniff out a breath of wind. If there was wind, maybe there was a way to get out of here without having to fight anything. It should be relatively easy, after all.

No wind seemed to stir, but he became aware of a dropping temperature. There was the taste of ozone in the air, and he looked around. Was there anywhere he could climb? If this was like a video game, then that meant combatants could spawn out of virtually anywhere, at any time. Which meant climbing up might be dangerous.

System booting 46%

It sure was slow to load, he thought bitterly. They had the capacity to teleport anyone, anywhere, but they couldn’t do this much?

Now that he was looking at the room in detail, there didn’t seem to be a passage out. It was just an enclosed hole, without any exits whatsoever. Which… didn’t that mean he was going to get swarmed? He played a lot of video games when he wasn’t writing or reading, and an enclosed space generally meant either a boss, or a swarm. That… that didn’t sound great, to him. That didn’t sound great at all.

Cillian’s pulse was picking up, and he hefted up the hatchet he had been provided. Who was he kidding? As much as he played video games, he was ultimately terrible at them, and he knew it. He always died a lot. Granted, he played a lot of games where the goal was to get as far as you could and ultimately die, but even so. Based on the sheer amount of litrpgs he had read, the odds were relatively high that he didn’t have some kind of crazy respawn ability. And there was no respawn in the Tower, otherwise more people would have escaped. Unless something else was keeping them here…? Who knew?

His palm was sweaty around the smooth wooden shaft, and he switched hands to rub his left hand on the rough pants that were slowly beginning to feel more and more like a sensory nightmare.

System booting 62%

Could it just hurry up already?

System booting 76%

Wait, no, he took it back. Wildly, he looked around. The water was still. Nothing seemed to be lurking in the dark cavern above. It seemed safe but he wasn’t ready. What if it stalled? Could it stall?

System booting 87%

No, no, no, he wasn’t ready. His hand was sweaty. He felt sick. His body was cold and hurt a lot. The air felt clammy. He was a writer, for fucks sake. He made these stories, he didn’t live them. This wasn’t his area of expertise. He couldn’t even remember the last time he left his apartment. Even his groceries were delivered. He was pretty sure his car had been towed.

System booting 96%

No, no, he was going to die immediately, and he had tried too fucking hard to live to do that so easily. It wasn’t fair. Cillian had spent every day of his adult life fighting and crawling and kicking and screaming to remain alive. He took his meds. He went to therapy. He had been doing everything right, and beat his own personal demons, every day, and now he was just supposed to?? Die?? For some higher power’s entertainment??

No, no, no---

System booting 100%

System complete.

Tutorial will begin.

The cave was silent, but not in a comforting way. It was silent in the way the wind shifted before a hawk dove in for the kill, the way its wings fluttered in the breeze as it circled in the wide, wide blue like it was born to hunt. The silence was suffocating, and then there was the sound of a single drop of water landing on one of the pools. The ripples spread, out and out and out, and Cillian stared at it in horror as he gripped his hatchet.

There was another ripple, not from a drop of water, and Cillian started to back up rapidly, his eyes wide as the ripples started up on every single pond. The air seemed to vibrate, and he bit back a preemptive scream of terror.

It moved faster than he could follow. The water crested and broke, and something black and sleek sprang out, and Cillian screamed, squeezed his eyes shut tight, and swung the hatchet wildly. Something hard and wet caught him in his chest, sending him flying, and he screamed even louder as he sailed across the room and hit a stalagmite growth.

He couldn’t breathe. The hit hurt so bad, and he couldn’t get in a breath. Spots were dancing in his vision, and he tried to focus his eyes, but something big and black was close, and then it was closer, and closer, and he couldn’t breathe. Not a single breath could make it into his lungs and it was only the bare minimum latent instinct of self preservation that prompted him to fling himself to the left as the massive creature slammed into the rock with a loud crack!

It was a salamander. Smooth, sleek, with rounded, soft lines, and beady black eyes that seemed to stare in his soul. And it was mad, now that it had slammed its entire head into a rock thanks to him. Cillian scrambled back as it advanced on him. Its black tongue flicked out in the air, and Cillian managed to get a breath that was closer to a sob as he backed up and up and up. His hand was barely managing to cling to his hatchet, but it felt useless in his hand.

He was going to die. He was going to die, and it would mean nothing. Sobbing, he continued to scramble back on his butt. He was going to die. He was going to die. He was going to die, die, die, die, die, die, die---

A large foot landed on his chest and shoved him back to the ground, flat on his back, and he felt his weak ribs bend as the weight continued to descend. A slow, inexorable pressure, and he stared up at the creature, which seemed to be watching him with some kind of detached interest.

It was toying with him, he realized, and the realization was bone chilling as they hit the pressure threshold that made it hard to breathe. It wanted to watch him slowly and painfully die, watch the light drain from his eyes, watch him die like an insect here on the ground beneath its crushing weight.

He couldn’t breathe.

He couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t die like this.

It was just some kind of generated creature here to test him, and he was going to die on level one.

He couldn’t breathe.

He was scared.

His chest hurt.

Its eyes were still studying him, waiting for him to fight back, and all he could do was scrabble around on the ground, his legs twitching like a cockroach that had already died. His fingers were numb around the shaft of the hatchet, and he didn’t even think he had the strength to swing it. His head felt hazy, like it was drifting, but his body felt like a block of ice.

No.

He had survived so much fucking shit, he had survived God Himself wanting him dead, and now he was going to die to a lizard?! A lizard?!?!

It was like some burst of fury coursing through his body, and he barely managed to lift his arm just enough to swing the hatchet. There was a sickening crunch, and it hit its mark in the salamander’s leg. It was worse than cutting through raw meat. Sinew and tissue separated, and blood sprayed all in Cillian’s face, and for a long, long moment, the salamander stared down at him, like it was somehow shocked he had the audacity.

Cillian was surprised he had the audacity, too.

And, then, without warning, it opened its mouth, and Cillian’s eyes widened as he made to yank out the hatchet, the gullet descending down on him, and…

FWACK!

The hatchet buried itself right on the thing’s tongue, and more blood sprayed over Cillian’s face as everything went blank.