Mildly sweet, with a smooth taste that filled the mouth with a pleasant note of tropical sunshine. Other than that, there was absolutely nothing remarkable about this glass of coconut milk that he had to pressure the beautiful server quite hard to receive. 

Zack kept drinking, glancing once in a while at the server who stared at him as if he’d stolen her purse. He didn’t understand this eccentric situation very well, but his life experiences taught him one very important fact about reading people. 

People tended to get emotional about things that were important to them. And as a general rule of thumb, the more emotional they got, the more important that thing probably was. 

Judging by that metric, this glass of coconut milk was within the realm of importance to the server as her house catching on fire without insurance. She was visibly seething, and Zack couldn’t help but relish the feeling for some odd reason. 

He wasn’t sure why, but he just enjoyed taunting her, as if he felt some kind of cathartic release from a previous lifetime. 

Continuing to sip, he finally discovered that there was an object at the bottom of the glass. He continued to slurp absentmindedly, and the golden orb quickly traveled up his straw and into his mouth, then down his throat. 

So delicious. 

In fact, the golden orb did not have any particular taste, but Zack felt immensely satisfied after swallowing it. He felt a strong sense of freedom just going with the flow that the red-eyed presence within him wanted him to go with, rather than operating logically like he had for the most of his life. He didn’t have to think or anything, he just had to follow that weird feeling of instinct. 

“You!” the beautiful server shouted in alarm when she saw the golden orb disappear into Zack’s mouth, her eyes wide in offended shock like a cat that had just discovered its owner changed its evening meal bowl’s contents from deluxe kitty gourmet wet food to an inferior brand of dry cat food. “Did you just swallow that? Are you kidding me??”

She ran over, dropping her serving tray while reaching for his mouth, her cold and slender fingers sliding into the insides of his cheeks as she pried his cheeks open like a dentist would. Zack didn’t even flinch, still feeling that tremendous sense of satisfaction from earlier. He felt full in his belly, and he just sat in his chair with a dumb content look on his face, letting the pretty server to do whatever she wanted. It didn’t really matter at the end of the day, he thought. He’d already done what he needed to do. He just felt it. And plus, if she was this aggravated, he must be doing something right. Given the attitude the server had displayed so far, he’d be a lot more worried if she looked too pleased at any point in time, because if she looked too pleased, he was probably getting scammed some way or another. 

“Ugh, spit it out, spit it out!” the blonde server said in a high and shrill voice, any semblance of innate elegance from her beauty completely shattered by her fingers digging around his cheeks and tongue as if she was fishing for gold. 

“Ionthinuwannadoat,” Zack mumbled.

“What did you say?” She took her fingers out of his mouth, a look of absolute disgust on her face as she noticed the saliva dripping from her hands. She quickly produced a handkerchief from within her chest pocket and wiped her hands. 

“I don’t think you want to do that,” he replied. “You’re not gonna find anything.” 

The server pressed the front of her wrist against her brow in an expression of absolute frustration. “Do you even know what you just did? You just wasted a–!” She stopped right before that last word. 

“A what?” he asked innocently, trying to coax her to spill some more details. 

“You don’t even know, do you?” she replied with crossed hands. “Figures, since you’re a no-sponsor piece of trash that wasted such an important item!”

“I am in so much trouble now. Ugh… fine. I’ll help you survive the first round so that this won’t all be wasted.”

Now he was getting somewhere. Now that he was starting to sober up a bit, he was curious about why she kept mentioning rounds and surviving, which did not match his idea of the afterlife at all, a place he imagined to be rather quiet and serene rather than some kind of morbid survival game show. 

So maybe this wasn’t the afterlife. In that case…

“Where is this?” Zack asked, gesturing around at the dainty cafe that would not look too out of place on a Parisian street corner. “Who are you? And what are these rounds you keep talking about?” 

The blonde server sighed, defeated. “You really are clueless, aren’t you? I don’t understand how someone so weak can use the voice of authority instinctively…” 

She crossed her arms across her chest and leaned towards one hip, and Zack had to admit that she could be a model with her gorgeous figure and delicate facial features alone. 

“My name is Clarice Roseline, a Guide, and you are in the waiting room for entry into the Tower of Tartarus.” 

Clarice pointed towards an unassuming brick wall by the side of the cafe. “A portal will appear there once all the subjects from the 174th cycle are assembled. It just so happens that you are the first, so you’ll have to wait here a bit longer than usual. Aren’t you excited?” 

She emphasized the final question with an unnerving amount of interest. 

“I guess I’d be more excited about that if I knew what exactly was going on here,” Zack replied coolly. 

“Tch. Guess I have to explain everything to a no-sponsor. Anyone of any social status would’ve been filled in already by their sponsor’s owned guides. You’re the first no-sponsor that I’ve had the displeasure of guiding, you know that? Fine, fine… no reason to cry over spilt milk.” 

She took a long inhale, her face conflicted as to whether or not she should continue to speak. With her eyebrow twitching in frustration, she continued to speak. 

“The Judges see and hear everything we say, so I’m going to give up a whole lot of points to give you this information, so you better not get yourself killed and waste it, you got that buddy?”

He nodded, finding the concept of Judges and Guides used oddly familiar, and interested in what she had to say next. 

“Let me start from the beginning. Once the portal appears, you and others from your home world will enter the Tower. That’s where you’ll be put into Scenarios where you’ll fight for survival and lovely prizes. Prizes will start as food and water to begin with, but as the Scenarios increase in difficulty so will the rewards. You’ll start with Tutorial Scenarios at first, and those are easy.” 

The server looked increasingly agitated as she spoke. It almost seemed as if every word she spoke was deducted straight from her paycheck. 

No wonder she’s pissed off. Good for me though. 

“Agh… this tip is going to cost me a fortune. Don’t get too cocky and rush through the Scenarios–there’s a lot of hidden goodies there if you know where to look. I can’t tell you where exactly to look though. That’s all I can tell you for now. If you manage to survive the first round, count yourself lucky to learn more.” 

“Ah, and before I forget–you’ll be needing this passport. If you don’t have that when you enter the Tower, your head will explode~” 

Clarice reached into what seemed to be thin air, and pulled out what appeared to be an American passport with its familiar deep navy hue. But upon closer inspection, the entire face of the passport was blank. 

She handed it to him with a bit of hesitation, as if she didn’t think of him as worthy of the passport. Zack simply ignored that and took it from her hands, a bit spooked now that she mentioned his head exploding. He flipped it open to the first page, which had a similar display of personal information as a regular passport, with some rather peculiar differences. 

Surname: Baker

Name: Zack

Nationality: Federalist States of America 

Sex: M

Residency: None

Class: None

Titles: None

The page was engraved with an intimidating silhouette of a horned demon overlooking a stone archway.

“On page fourteen on your passport should be the visa section,” Clarice explained with a cross between professionalism and her newly revealed venomous attitude. “You might want to flip to that if you value your life. Visas are essential for the survival of both new climbers and veterans.” 

There she went on again about survival. Now that the buzz was from earlier was beginning to subside, and now that he kind of figured out that he was not dead, old rational worries began to creep back into his head. Zack began to feel a whole lot more apprehensive about this situation, and then there was his mom’s surgery to worry about as well. If he died, there’d be nobody left to take care of his mom. He had to survive this ordeal no matter what. 

He flipped through several blank sheets within the passport until he came across the visa section. 

“You’re familiar with visas in your home world, right?” Clarice asked, clearly annoyed that she had to lower herself to do basic guidework for a no-sponsor. 

“Yeah, sort of,” he replied. Zack never had the opportunity to travel abroad or even obtain a passport because of his family’s hardships since dad’s death, so everything that he knew about passports and visas was through his childhood reading of old library books. 

He vaguely knew their purpose. They were a kind of certificate to allow travelers to visit a foreign country. And if he had to guess, that meant…

“Climbers don’t start as residents of any area in the Tower of Tartarus. The moment that you enter the tower, you will be in a new area, and your visa will have a certain amount of time left before it expires. The exact amount of time varies depending on the rules of that particular area–”

“So,” Zack interrupted. “What happens when my visa expires?”

Clarice gave a crazed smile to him, her eyes narrowing into smiling crescent moons. “When your visa expires and you are still in that area, you expire.” 

“I’ll die?”

“Yes, and not in a pretty way either. You’ll explode like a balloon!” Clarice laughed. “That’s just how the Tower works. Even the sponsors don’t have the power to change that.”

What the hell is this, the Hunger Games? Well, at least this guide is helping me now. I should fish for as much information as possible before it’s too late. 

“I see. So we need to leave the area or move onto the next area before the visa expires, right? Or, I guess, extend our visa some way.”

“You are very correct! Well done for a piece of trash, it looks like you have a bit of gray matter in your brain after all!” 

Her blatant sarcasm and condescending tone were simply tremendous. Zack’s mom raised him to be a gentleman, but he had a raging desire to just–pardon his language, mom–kick her in the cunt right now. 

The only people he met in his entire life more disrespectful to him than Clarice Roseline were Barry Cullen and his corrupt scumbag father. 

“One of the main objectives of every climber in the Tower is to continuously extend their visa so that you don’t expire. You can do this by fulfilling requests issued by the Tower itself, or by taking a task ticket from the central bulletin board and completing that task or scenario.” 

That sounds suspiciously simple. So I could just extend my visa forever by doing dishes or folding laundry? No, it wouldn’t be that easy. 

“I’m assuming these events are not going to be easy.” 

“There will be a range of difficulty for these events, but I guess I’ll tell you– some days, you won’t have a single easy task available. So you better stock up on visa extensions while you can, otherwise you might get thrown into a medium or even difficult task. That’s how many rookie climbers die.” 

Her eyebrow twitched again as she glanced to her right. “That info cost me a thousand points? Are you joking right now?” 

The blonde server’s glare returned to him. “If you die, I am going to dig up your grave and feed it to the dogs.”