This was it. The building was finally in front of her. She just needed to enter and complete her mission as fast as she could. Before approaching the entrance, Gale needed a minute to reassure herself. She started thinking back to the last few days, and the reason why she was doing this.

Gale was the second child of a farmer family in the small town of Grassroot. She had always been different to most people in her village, preferring more intense and risky situations to the boring calm and safety of a farmer’s daily life. As such, whenever she had free time, instead of learning homemaking skills from her mother like her little sister, she visited the local guard, a 40-something year old man who would always tell her exciting fighting stories she was sure he was making up on the spot. Still, they were quite entertaining by themselves, so she kept coming back. She also liked spending time with the local magician, an old guy with affinity with earth magic, which was very useful to a farming village such as hers. Her 2-years-older brother was learning some earth magic from him, since he had the affinity for it, and had already started applying his new knowledge to their own fields. Sadly, while the magician had confirmed that she also had talent for magic, he could only tell that it was not of earth element and could not really teach her anything useful. Thus, she decided to ask the guard instead, and start learning sword skills when she was only 12 years old. Now, at 16, Gale was more proficient than the guard if she could say so herself, even though their fighting styles greatly differed. He preferred to wait for an opportunity while standing his ground, while she fancied a more flexible and dynamic technique, well suited for her fast-moving body. Her mother almost died of shock when she bought back game from the forest from one of her secret hunting expeditions, which suited her newfound style quite a bit. It was in one of these expeditions that she found a secret building in the forest, which she named “The Tower”.

The Tower was now in front of Gale. It looked like a regular cylindrical building made of grey stone of around a hundred meter diameter, with small windows in each floor starting from the first, and a big ornate wooden double door with some small stairs in front on the lowest floor. Try as she might, she had always been unable to see the top of the structure, so she could only tell that it had more than 67 floors last time she counted. The building itself looked abandoned, with some climbing plants circling the lowest floors. Still, she figured that a building with such ornate doors must contain some leftover valuable items, so she decided to explore inside. The village was in dire need of money, given the heavy drought they have been experiencing for the last couple of years. Earth magic was useful to till the fields and modify the terrain but could do nothing against the lack of water. This lack of water resulted in a lack of harvest, so they had little food for themselves and could not obtain other necessities by trading, like medicine for the villagers. During this time, the oldest couple in the village had died of a cold, and the newborn child had also died of sickness. She was able to provide some meat for the village, but solo hunting was wildly insufficient. Thus, she had secretly decided to “borrow” some items from this place and alleviate the situation, even if temporally.

She had woken up before sunrise, to secretly prepare her supplies. She packed into her cloth bag some flint, an unlit torch, three coils of rope, and some dried meat form her last hunting expedition. She wanted to travel light to be able to bring back as much as she could. She got dressed in a cloth shirt and undershirt, comfortable pants, and her hunting shoes. They were all some tone of brown-gray, perfect for hiding purposes. She also put on her leather chest plate, a present from her teacher for her 15^th birthday, and which still fitted her quite nicely. Finally, she grabbed a short utility knife, a reinforced wooden shield (a pot lid with two wooden reinforcements on the back), and her trusty sword. This sword was the most recent present from her teacher, given to her when he first lost a match against her. It was mid-length and made of iron. Having trained with it for a while, it was like an extension of her arm by now.

Before leaving, she checked herself out in the mirror. Gale liked quite a bit how she looked right now, with her weapon and clothes she resembled the adventurers from her teacher’s stories. She was neither short not tall, with her 172cm, and had a toned body from her training and hunting. She had mid-back long teal hair, with some strands ending in a deep red color. Her eyes were similar, with some red lines amidst the teal base color. She quite liked these colors, even though they seemed to be highly unusual. She was always told that she had quite a pretty face, but unlike her mother she never really cared about that.

Finally, she left her hometown for her quest. It only took her a few hours to reach The Tower, the sun already high in the sky. She checked her equipment one last time, breathed deeply and stepped forward. She climbed the small set of stairs and opened the tall double doors, easily 3m tall. They were not locked. From the open door the inside seemed to be very dark, and she could not really see anything from her position. She finally entered the building, leaving the doors ajar as she did, and took a couple of steps inside. Suddenly, she heard the sound of the doors closing behind her, and a series of candles lit up all over the room. The entrance seemed to be a big foyer, around 10 steps wide and a hundred long, leading up to what looked like a set of ornate white and golden double stairs. There was also a set of descending stairs in between them. On the left side, there was a small door, much more modest looking than the rest of the room, but also white and golden. There were white and golden thin tables (she didn’t really know the name of the specific type of furniture) on each side of the room, evenly spaced along its length, and each having a tall mirror just above it. In between the mirrors, several candles shone brightly, affixed to the walls, which were the sources of light in the room.

Turning around, she found the door was not there anymore: only a grey wall of identical material to the walls of the foyer. She could feel herself starting to panic a bit, so Gale used what her teacher had taught her and, breathing deeply, started analyzing the situation. This was most likely some kind of magical anti-theft countermeasure, not out of place in a building in which the lights turned on by themselves. Still, she now needed to modify her plans. Before starting her search for valuable items she could carry back (not furniture), she needed to secure a way out. She then remembered the windows that seemed to decorate the rest of the floors of the building, and decided to drop her rope from the lowest one and use it as a means of escape.

The double stairs seemed to be the obvious way up. After climbing around 50 steps, she reached an ornate wooden door matching the rest of the room. This door was also unlocked. She started opening the door slowly, but stopped halfway through after hearing a loud sound from inside. It seemed to be a snoring of some kind. Peeking from the slightly open door, she saw a huge form that seemed to be sleeping on the floor at the opposite side of the room. Her blood run cold when she recognized what it most likely was: a goblin lord. These were some of the most fearsome monsters one could face in human dwelling countries, and usually their presence required the dispatch of the anti-monster specialized units from the government, as they were normally followed by an entourage of regular goblins. They were 3m tall, strong, muscular, and normally wielded a huge tower shield and an appropriately sized battle axe. Their green forms didn’t seem to show much intelligence (even if it was higher than that of regular goblins), but their raw strength more than compensated for it. This was not an enemy she could face alone, even if it was currently sleeping. Thus, she slowly closed the door again and turned back, deciding that with such a foe around, that road was effectively closed for the time being.

She was starting to panic once again, her situation just became much more dire. Not only did she need to find a new escape route, but there were also powerful monsters inside this building. Without any other option, she returned to the foyer to check the other two possible routes. From now on, though, she was going to move much more carefully, trying to minimize the sound she made. Her hunting expeditions were very useful for that. She decided to start with the stairs going down, which seemed like the likeliest possibility. While she knew that from the outside there didn’t seem to be any exit from the back or the sides of the lowest floors, the way down could lead to an underground tunnel and an exit somewhere. After only a few steps she found another ornate door, identical to the one above, which she carefully opened this time.

Upon opening the door, a strong smell of blood invaded her nostrils. It was a very bad sign. Still, she could neither see nor hear any enemy from her position, so she decided to enter the small room. The scene inside was dreadful. A battle had clearly taken place inside. There were huge four-fingered claw marks on the walls and floor, and blood splatters on many places. The furniture might have been like that of the foyer, but was also completely destroyed. Even the two mirrors were shattered. Only one of the lights inside seemed to be working, and the wooden door on the opposite side was completely torn off. From the room, she could only see the stairs going down into the darkness, and a trail of blood following them. On some places in the room, she could distinguish some pieces of metal, which she decided to examine. Of the ones she could recognize, which were only a few given their state, there was a piece of a metal breastplate, a steel sword broken in three places (the handle was missing), half a metal helmet and a steel shield broken into three parts. When pieced together, the shield seemed to have portrayed a yellow square cross. She also found pieces of a bow in a corner, surrounded by a blood marking on the floor and walls. It seems that a heavily armed group fought something here. Given the state of the metal remains, at least some of the members must have died. Still, there was no corpses anywhere, or any kind of remain, and they could not have been dragged back to the foyer, there was no blood outside. Therefore, she concluded, it was likely that they had all been defeated there, and then dragged further downstairs. She decided to retreat to the foyer and forget about the way down completely: she was much more likely to beat the goblin lord upstairs.

This left her with only one possible route left: the smaller door on the side. She once again opened it carefully, expecting to see a dreadful monster inside. Instead, she found a well-lit corridor, easily twice as long as the previous one, which seemed to have a slight curvature. But something was wrong: how could there be such a long corridor inside? If her calculations were correct, the building should have ended much sooner than that. She started traversing it, finding a side wooden door halfway through. This door was also unlocked, so she cautiously peeked inside: she found the remains of a camping site, of 5-6 people she estimated, with two tents, some leftover supplies, and a turned off fireplace. On the side of one of the tents, the yellow square cross symbol was also displayed. It seemed to have been left behind 2-3 days ago, and the owners were most likely intending to return to it at the time. She decided to consider this place her new base for now, she could guess what happened to the previous owners and were quite unlikely to return.

In any case, she needed to finish checking out the long corridor. Starting from her base, she soon could see the end of the corridor. There were 3 different stone archways, one on the far wall of the corridor, and the other two opposite each other, close to the end of the hallway. Still, before being able to check them out, she noticed that there were two goblins standing guard in front of one of them. The two goblins were 1.4m tall and had tattered clothes and rusty swords. Their green faces seemed to be out of it, and they had somehow not noticed her yet, even though their pointy ears were supposedly very sensitive. She had no idea what they were doing there, but knew that she needed to take them out: they could be scouts or regular troops belonging to the goblin lord, or even worse, part of the group of the downward path. She could not allow anyone to know of her presence, much less this close to her base. They needed to go. She was strong enough to defeat two weak goblins by herself.

Gale took a deep breath, just like when she was about to duel her master, and run towards the one closest to her. They did not notice her until she was quite close already, so they were not ready for the fight. With an upwards arch, she sent the sword of the first goblin flying away, making a loud clang sound as it hit the floor, and deeply cut the goblin in its stomach and chest. Instead of the expected blue blood rushing out from the wounds, black smoke started coming out while its whole body turned black. A couple of seconds afterwards, it had disappeared. Gale was dumbfounded for a second from this bizarre occurrence, which almost costed her a nasty cut from the second opponent. She avoided it in the last moment, so the sword clashed against the floor, and with a horizontal slash she beheaded the second goblin. Once again, only smoke came out, and the goblin disappeared completely in seconds. Only the markings on the floor from the goblins’ swords were left as testament of the battle that had taken place, not even the weapons themselves. This had been a baffling encounter, but since she had no way of investigating this issue, she decided to ignore it for now. It’s not like they were unable to cause very real damage to her, so she needed to treat them as normal enemies anyway.

Finally, she was able to check out the archways. The one in the furthest wall seemed to be missing a few stones, which seemed to have been taken out somehow. It had a big “XIII” symbol written on the topmost stone. The ones on the sides, opposite each other, seemed to be intact. The one that the goblins seemed to have been guarding had a big “II” symbol on top of it, while the opposite one had a bit “I” symbol on top. These stones were white color, much unlike the walls of the building. When she tried touching the part of the wall inside the ”I” arch, her hand went straight through. She could feel a breeze on the other side. They were not arches; they were portals! She retreated her arm from outside the portal, and tried to do the same with the other arches. The “II” arch behaved in the same way, but the “XIII” did not work, most likely because it was missing a few pieces. Was this done deliberately, so it could not be used? That was an ominous thought.

She needed to decide what to do. These two portals were her only way out of the tower it seemed. She needed to explore them. She decided to try the “I” archway, since the one guarded by the goblins could be for all she knew a direct way towards their base. Gale checked one last time her equipment, closed her eyes, and run towards the portal.