Tower of Tartarus - Chapter 5 – [Special Evaluation]

Chapter 5 – [Special Evaluation]

Tower of Tartarus by sinkorswim

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Hot sunlight blistered down from the cracks of the castle wall, as the black haired young man with piercing blue eyes and quite a skinny physique marveled at the fact that he was in fact not hallucinating, and that he’d somehow gotten transported from that chic coffee shop with his guide Clarice Roseline into what appeared to be a battleground, where the smell of horses and the glistening of lances accompanied what was left of a battle-worn cavalry battalion retreating into camp just a few feet away from him.

“Hurry up!” said the gruff man who was roughly forty years old, knocking Zack on the helmet with a whack of his palm.

The young man rose to his feet, the plated joints of his heavy armor groaning as he moved. As a studious highschool graduate of the modern era who spent the majority of his time on the computer like everyone else, an experience like this one was disconcerting at best.

So this was the evaluation that Clarice Roseline had told him about?

As if to answer his question, a blue screen with floating white runic text appeared in front of him. It was like staring at a computer screen, which was quite bewildering. He couldn’t recognize the runes which looked nothing earthly, neither English nor remotely close to the mandarin that his grandmother taught him.

And yet as he squinted his eyes, the runes appeared to organize themselves in a way that he could understand and even read them.

Very strange, and yet it felt quite natural. Now that the runes were translated, he could read them easily. He quickly noted that the contents within the screen were quite alarming.

[Special evaluation has been enacted.]

[The once great Empire of the Kaldun fell nearly twenty thousand years ago. You have been brought back to the beginning of the end of the Kaldun Empire, twenty four thousand years ago, when marauding dragons and unspeakable monstrosities began to destroy the lands during the Great Calamity. You have been placed in the care of the elite Templar force of the Kaldun Empire during the first day of the Calamity. The Templar fought valiantly against the Great Calamity before they too vanished, their unique and powerful fighting style forever lost to the sands of time.]

[Difficulty level: Impossible.]

[Do not attempt. Death in the evaluation will result in death of the climber.]

[Mission: Survive the marauding dragon’s onslaught.]

[Secondary objective: Slay the marauding dragon.]

Uh oh. This was not good.

From the bottom of his heart, Zack had hoped for a slightly more challenging evaluation ever since Clarice Roseline said that the difficulty of the evaluation was adjusted based on the climber’s personal abilities. Call it personal pride or ego, he wanted to feel above average, and he just felt like he could step up to the plate and deliver.

But he didn’t ask for something like this. He was expecting and even looking forward to a mini-boss of some sort, but marauding dragons that brought down a fallen empire? What the hell was this? Did they just throw the final boss at him in the very first stage?

Zack walked gingerly as the gruff man directed him to follow, his mind still swimming as he gawked at the surroundings of the battlefield. So far, the only thing he saw out of the ordinary were men wearing silky capes and comically large hats. They didn’t seem to fit the battlefield, until he saw what could only be a sorcerer’s staff with an affixed jewel at the top glowing with some sort of aura. So magic was real in this world.

Still, no sign of dragons.

“Stop gawking and get a move on it,” the gruff man said loudly as Zack paused for a moment to stare at a person in white clerical robes casting what appeared to be a healing spell on a dying man laying with his back against the fountain of the town square.

Zack nodded and continued to follow, digging at his pockets to find his passport, vividly remembering what that voice had told him to do once he left the prying eyes of Clarice Roseline.

[You have accessed a dimensional pocket that contains your passport. Rest assured, your passport may not be destroyed by any means as it is a physical copy of your Tartaric Records. However, others may view its contents, so it is best to keep your information private unless absolutely necessary.]

Hm. He still found it a bit strange how there was a whole world of living, breathing people surrounding him, and yet only he could see these strange runic screens. But given his background as a modern highschool graduate who dealt with smartphones on a daily basis, he quickly got used to it. It was just like walking back from school while looking at his phone… well, if the commute back was through a battlefield and his phone was a visual hallucination.

You got the point.

Zack kept up his pace as he quickly flipped through the pages of his passport while shielding the document from the prying eyes of civilians and soldiers on the battlefield who would wonder why he carried such a conspicuously modern booklet with him in a time where scrolls and scribes were more common.

Page thirty two. Wait until she is gone. Never speak of this to anyone.

He flipped to page thirty two, just as the voice had said, to be greeted by several passages handwritten in cursive nested in the middle of the page.

I hope that this reaches you well, my dear younger self. You have already seen some of the horrors that this world has to offer with father’s murder and mother’s illness, but believe me, the worst is yet to come. For now, simply grow stronger and fill out your records, and when it is time for your next evaluation I will give you additional guidance.

You are currently undergoing my final evaluation before my own life’s end. Although I, strong as I was, managed to defeat the dragon, it is impossible for you to do so in your current state. Fortunately, the prize for you is not the dragon. It is the Book, kept in the Holy Mausoleum. It will be destroyed by dragonfire in less than an hour. Make haste.

Make sure that you obtain it, no matter what. Don’t let anyone get in your way.

I hope that with my sacrifice, you will find yourself able to change what I could not change… what cannot be changed.

P.S. Good job swallowing the orb. Even I wouldn’t have thought of that. Clarice can be quite pleasant if you get onto her good side, and that means two words. Paying up.

P.P.S. Remember the boating incident with Hugo? That’s how you’ll survive. Bring a weapon–you’ll need it. Preferably a spear.

Zack gulped after reading the entirety of page thirty two in one go. He’d trained himself to take in information astonishingly fast during his years as a library-hugging grub, and a letter to himself was no exception.

He had doubts about the authenticity of the letter until the very last message. The boating incident with Hugo… how could anyone else know about that? His mother would’ve gotten a heart attack if she found out what had really happened during the storm. That curved scrap of metal from an old ship that Hugo had found in the junkyard looked quite appealing as a pirate ship back when they were six years old.

And it sailed like a beauty indeed, until the storm overturned the damned thing and sent them adrift. They barely survived that night, finding refuge in a cave out at sea before the waves calmed the next morning and they could swim back to shore.

Zack had told his mom that he stayed at Hugo’s house, and Hugo told his mom the opposite. Neither of their parents found out, and they promised to keep their near death experience as a secret till the grave.

Hugo had gotten him almost killed a bunch of times, but the worst time came from his own idea. After that, they called it even.

Anyway, he needed to find this Holy Mausoleum and get out of dodge before dragonfire brought this whole camp down.

“Sir, where is the Holy Mausoleum?” he asked as they stepped inside to a private training room filled with other soldiers.

The gruff man groaned. “Newcomer, shut your damn mouth unless you want a spear in your back. I’ll tell you after you finish your sparring session.”

Zack looked around slightly in panic. “Uh, are you sure that we need to do the session right now?”

There was not much time until the hour was up, and he’d spent the first ten minutes simply walking with the man and reading the message in his passport while trying to shield its presence from wandering eyes.

The gruff man spun around, pulling a long dagger from his cloak and quickly shoving it underneath the gap of Zack’s helmet. He felt the blade prick his throat.

“If you run your mouth any more or even think of wandering away, I’ll slit your throat and send you back to the orphanage you came from in pieces. You should count your blessings for being able to enter the tutelage of the Templar.”

Zack gulped, nodding. So here he was, with full knowledge that the item he needed the most in the entire world would be burned to a crisp with dragonfire in less than an hour, and now this instructor was going to force him to do a sparring session when he barely even knew how to fight?

This evaluation was going from bad to worse in a matter of minutes.

“Stand over there.” The gruff man pointed towards a line of new recruits.

Zack groaned internally. There were four recruits in line before him, so he’d be trapped here for even longer as his future faded with every minute. He didn’t have time for this.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. He didn’t like to do this, but what choice did he have?

“I’ll go first!” he shouted.

A large, intimidating high-ranking templar adorned with ceremonial armor at the front of the room looked at the newcomer with new interest, as the gruff man who now stood behind him smacked Zack on the back of the helmet hard.

“Where do you get this insolence, boy?” the gruff man said angrily. “You are in the presence of a Grandmaster. Do not show such insolence!”

“It is fine,” the high-ranking templar said with a booming voice, gesturing for Zack to step forward. “How curious. I sense a great power within you, boy. Yet it is unrefined.”

Without warning, the templar raised his sword. “Defend yourself!”

Zack suddenly realized that he bit off a lot more than he could chew. Sword fighting was not part of the curriculum in highschool, although the old money clubs at Vermillion University might still have some events running…

Nevertheless, he was not born into privilege and so he’d never attended a sword fighting class like some of his richer classmates had.

Here goes nothing.

He drew his sword and stood in an amateurish pose, facing down the templar in front of him. A shiver went down his spine as an immense pressure poured from the large figure, his aura alone causing Zack to gulp.

The templar’s sword began to glow with light, prompting oohs and aahs from recruits and instructors alike.

“So that is sword aura!”

“I heard that only Grandmasters can use it.”

Zack’s eyes narrowed, staring at the grandmaster templar’s technique. For some reason, it seemed oddly familiar.

A golden record glowed white hot in a cosmic darkness far away…

His eyes narrowed further, feeling energy coursing through his veins, calling to him to reclaim the power that he once had.

Suddenly, despite his shoddy posture, his sword also burst into a brilliant golden white glow.

----Chapter 3 – Requirement 
 
An impish operator with a mana headset looked smugly at a translucent crystal screen floating above his office desk. On the screen was a lanky human in gym shorts and a gray synthetic t-shirt with black sleeves. The human’s posture was slightly slouched, his narrow brown eyes squinting into the darkness beyond the window, a severed steel pipe in his hand. The impish operator began to speak, his bulging eyes still glued onto the screen. “This cycle’s progenitor seems incredibly average. How long do you think he’ll last?” 
 
His senior, an older human man sitting at a control tower in the seat to the right, puffed out a plume of blue smoke from a pipe. “First boss room.” 
 
“Really, Berndith? He’s alone! I don’t think we’ve seen a lone progenitor since… when was it…”
 
“The Red Cloak, fifty seven cycles ago,” said Berndith, finishing his junior’s sentence. 
 
“Right, quite a while ago. I wasn’t here yet. I think this one will die in the first room. How did he manage to get initiated alone, anyway? Isn’t there some protocol to bring a good handful of initiates in at the same time?”
 
“Normally, yes. Something’s off this time around,” Berndith replied. “The whole system is online weeks before schedule. I don’t even think the dungeon is fully prepared.” 
 
The impish operator seemed to have not heard what his superior said. His eyes glinted with greed. “Oh, I wish we could record this. Do you know how well a video of the progenitor of a world seed getting skewered in the first room would sell?”
 
“About ten million zed, maybe twenty million to an enthusiast. But don’t do that. I know a guy who leaked a progenitor death tape before Airing Day–plenty of progenitors die, you know. It’s not a big deal. But you don’t want to mess with the top brass, Ifrim. They’ll have you eaten alive.” 
 
“It can’t be that bad, just don’t have to get caught, hee hee–” Ifrim started to gloat before getting cut off. 
 
“No.” The senior operator known as Berndith placed his hand on his junior’s shoulder. “Don’t even think about it. You’ll get eaten alive. Literally. The last guy I knew who did it got thrown into the Tar Pit, and trust me, you don’t want to be there.” 
 
The junior operator gulped, any thought of greed fading away when he heard of his predecessor’s ill fated end. Even imps knew of the infamous Tar Pits. 
—---
 
Zack peered through the grainy window of the subway car, seeing several lit torches in the distance. They appeared to lead into a hallway of some sort. 
 
The soothing female announcer began to speak as the subway car’s doors slid open once again, bidding him to leave the well-lit and clean, white hospital-like interior of the car and venture forth into the darkness. 
 
You have arrived at Delver’s Alcove Station. 
 
Please watch your step as you exit the car. Subway service will be terminated for the duration of the stay. Return service will be available at 3 AM local time. 
 
A fare of ten iron coins will be required to board the return service.
 
You will begin by searching Delver’s Alcove for iron coins. The Initiation has begun. Good luck, travelers. 
 
A fare box erupted violently from the floor of the car, causing Zack to flinch in surprise. There was a narrow slit carved onto the top of the box. 
 
New quest! Collect ten iron coins. Completion (0/10).
You have reached the entrance to the dungeon Delver’s Alcove. To return to your home world, collect ten iron coins for the return fare.
Time remaining, 5:49:59
Reward: You will receive the privilege of returning to your home world. 
 
After waiting for something else to happen, nothing did. 
 
No point wasting time here. I’ll get going. 
 Truth be told, he felt a bit guilty going on an adventure into some magical homicide dungeon rather than studying. This was going to have quite the impact on his GPA. And if this involuntary spelunking episode pushed his grades below the threshold he needed to maintain his hard earned Charterhouse scholarship… the monsters in this dungeon would have hell to answer for.  
Swallowing his rage, Zack brushed the notifications to the side and emerged from the subway car into a gothic looking platform with overhanging structures, platforms with metal poles, and a single wrought-iron gate hanging open that led into a dark dungeon corridor illuminated by torchlight, rows of torches lining the descent into the abyss.
 
As he exited the subway car, the lights on the car spluttered before shutting off completely. The car was dead, presumably staying that way until five hours from now, when it’d return back to Wharf Street Station. 
 
Speaking of which, the track that the W train rested on was only one of ten tracks. The other tracks appeared to be unoccupied. 
 
Maybe there’s supposed to be other trains coming here? Could be other people around if that’s the case. 
 
He wanted to call out once again but decided against it this time around, remembering that earlier achievement’s warning about hostiles. Instead of shouting and possibly drawing unwanted attention to himself, he picked up a pebble and threw it down the room, then hid behind a pillar. 
 
Like before, silence was the only response he got back as the stone clacked against the floor. He was alone. 
 
Zack exhaled softly, his vision now returning to a menu bar indicated with three thick horizontal bars inside a square with rounded edges that now rested at the bottom left of his sight. It looked similar to a smartphone icon. He touched the menu with his hand, bringing up the windows he had minimized previously until they reached the forefront of his view.
 
The first window showed the quest that he’d just received to collect ten iron coins. 
 
You know, this is starting to feel awfully like some kind of dungeon crawler game forced into reality. At least it better not be one of those mobile games with energy and gems and stuff. 
 
He brushed the quest window to the side again, marveling at how the holographic blue box obediently followed his hand gestures. 
 
The next window was what he was looking for. It pulsed slowly with a golden glow, indicating the window’s high importance. 
 
You have been granted [Boon of Requirement] 
A blessing from an unknown source. This is the first instance of such a blessing being generated in any records. You will be granted a randomly generated boon that most fits your required need. 
 
Analyzing need. 
 
Out of 10,172,558,000 lifetimes, the number of lifetimes in which passenger Zack Baker survives until the second –redacted– Phase is… 0. 
You die on the surface 9,915,264,000 times.
You die in a dungeon 257,294,000 times. 
 
I managed to die ten billion times? How the fuck…
 
Zack gulped. He thought of himself as hardy and resilient, so to hear the system tell him so unsubtly that he sucked at surviving to such a degree felt embarrassing. 
 
Your situation has been analyzed. The outlook is bleak. 
Your requirement is surviving an unavoidable fatal stellar destiny. This requirement is Impossible to fulfill. A blessing cannot be generated.
 
…
 
Error. 
 
Due to the extraordinary number of deaths that passenger Zack Baker has accrued across multiple lifetimes, the Karmatic Clause has been invoked for this lifetime. 
 
Difficulty restriction has been overridden by an ancient rule. 
 
This requirement’s difficulty has been reduced from impossible to near impossible to fulfill. 
 
Generating a unique blessing to fit your required need. 
 
…
 
Unique blessing generated: [??]  
 
This blessing’s true nature cannot be revealed to you in your current state. You must prove yourself worthy of this blessing. 
 
[??] demands an offering: Defeat your first enemy. 
Reward: Stellar memory fragment. 
 
The window finally ended. 
 
Holy shit. 
 
Those were the only two words that occupied Zack’s mind after getting veritably blasted in the face with back to back mind-shattering revelations. 
 
First of all, it appeared that he didn’t just suck at staying alive– he seemed to be doomed to die across not one… not two… not three lifetimes… but every single lifetime across both the foreseeable and unforeseeable universe. Ten billion to zero was no fluke, and the Fool’s words made a lot more sense now. 
 
Secondly, whatever was happening to him right now was so unusual that even this ‘system’ running the floating blue box operation had trouble processing things. 
 
He knew he got very, very lucky this time around–but that luck didn’t come free. Everything in this world had a price, even a man’s life. In exchange for his life, he was now a pawn in a game far too complex for him to understand. 
 
He might be totally clueless about the machinations of cosmic deities or ancient rules or any of this fantasy gibberish, but he did know one thing. He was going to be the most stubborn pawn to ever grace this multiversal chess board, and if he went down, he’d go down kicking and screaming, fighting till the very end with everything he had at his disposal. 
 
Time for this disposable pawn to get to work. I might die some day, but it sure as hell won’t be today. Now let’s see how bad a dungeon that killed me two hundred million times can be. 
 
Closing the window, he immediately got to work. He began by pacing around the platform, inspecting it. Just like the Wharf Street Station platform, there was no way to go but forward into the corridor engraved with strange figures and drawings of hieroglyphs that he could not understand. The entrance to the dungeon. 
 
Taking a torch from the wall, Zack entered the dungeon with his steel pipe in hand, and a flaming torch in the other. 
 
New Achievement! You have entered a dungeon. 
You have entered Delver’s Alcove, a dungeon prepared for the assimilation of this planet. This is a level 1 dungeon. You will be allowed to choose a class at the end of the stage based on your points accrual during the stage.
Reward: You have received information about the assimilation. 
 
New Achievement! Lone traveler.
You have entered a dungeon alone. You are awfully confident in your skills, aren’t you? Good luck, because you’ll be needing it.
Reward: Five lesser health potions.
 
New Achievement! Style points.
You have entered into a dungeon that will be graded. Any additional points will increase the pool of points that you can purchase with at the end of the level.
Reward: Reach the end of the level to utilize a special shop carrying special items.
 
New Achievement! A beginner’s guide.
Your journey has just begun, and it is fitting for you to be given a beginner’s guide to traversing the dungeon.
Reward: You have received the Tutorial.
 
The achievements were now being read in a voice that spoke directly into Zack’s head, allowing him to delegate his vision to scanning the dark corridor for any possible monsters from emerging from the shadows, as the system messages had warned him about before.
 
He noticed that a new menu item had appeared at the bottom of his vision-screen, depicting a small flask. Zack touched it, already suspecting what it would contain.
 
An inventory menu popped up, and within it was a stack of five red health potions in the first slot. He wondered where the map that was given to him from an earlier achievement had gone, before realizing that he now had another menu item right beside the inventory icon. In fact, there were several more menu items appearing now, most of them grayed out and inaccessible, including the map and tutorial functions for now. 
 
Zack decided to experiment a bit with the inventory menu first before proceeding.
 
So how does this work? Do I just...
 
He reached for the stack of lesser health potions and simply grabbed at the air near the floating icon. Right as he did that, a light appeared around his hands, and the potion flask appeared out of thin air as if it had been 3D printed on the spot. So this was what it was like to have a magic inventory.
 
This new reality with magic and dungeons and everything was obviously foreign, and yet felt so close to home. Inventory menus, health potions, collection quests... to be honest, everything felt uncannily ripped straight out of a video game or a comic. Zack felt right at home using all of these functions. He felt exactly like that gorilla in a video he saw on the internet a few months ago–in that video, a zookeeper demonstrated to a gorilla how to use swipe motions to scroll through photos on a smartphone, and the gorilla easily grasped it after seeing it demonstrated for the first time.
 
Everything about this system felt like it was designed for humans in mind, intuitive to a suspicious degree, and here Zack was that gorilla. Not that he was complaining. He’d rather not die a miserable death due to a convoluted system, and yeah, he needed every break he could get.
 
Anyway, he had to go. Time was ticking, and he needed to secure ten iron coins before he ended up in another death scenario. With the heavens stacked heavily against him, Zack brandished his steel pipe and walked forward, taking the first step through that wrought iron gate into the abyss.

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