Castle made her way back to where they’d started the day before, hoping to find others nearby the starting area. She was still more than a little pissed about how Aster had been, but could respect that the woman wanted to go off by herself. Honestly, it should be less of a headache this way. Aster seemed to be adapting to this world faster than anyone had a right to, and Castle figured she’d find a better pace with the other people on the island.
Aster was an enigma to her. For a long time, the girl had held on to life well past others would have. Though Aster hadn't let her actually care for her as her nurse, Maria was still able to get information about her and her health, and as far as she could tell in the days before the integration Aster had been held together by sheer will and anger. Maria had known people like that before, but never to the extent Aster had taken it to. And now? The bitch was fighting off dinosaurs like she'd grown up in the cretaceous, min/maxing System mechanics like it was second nature to her, and abandoning everybody and everything else around her in order to get stronger-- in what was honestly a matter of hours.
Castle was adapting to this world, but Aster seemed like she'd finally woken up in it. She shook her head and continued onward, knowing that regardless of the cocktail of stupidity and excellence that was Aster, there were going to be far more people around who weren't the same and who were going to need help.
Speaking of adapting to this world, she had a couple of important System notifications to go over.
*’DING!’ Class [Warrior (Heavy)] has reached Level 5 - Stat points allocated, +1 free point*
*’DING!’ Class [Warrior (Heavy)] has reached Level 6 - Stat points allocated, +1 free point*
*’DING!’ Race Human - G has reached Level 3 - Stat points allocated, +1 free point*
*Warrior (Medium) class skill selection available*
Before even thinking about that second prompt, she pulled up her status menu and familiarized herself with it.
Status
Name: Maria Castle
Race: [Human (G) – lvl 3]
Class: Warrior (Heavy) - lvl 6
Profession: N/A
Health Points (HP): 160/160
Mana Points (MP): 120/120
Stamina: 150/150
Stats
Strength: 28
Agility: 15
Endurance: 20
Vitality: 23
Toughness: 19
Wisdom: 14
Intelligence: 13
Perception: 13
Willpower: 13
Free points: 4
TP: 3085
She had a number of stat points she wanted to distribute before making her skill selection. Aster had mentioned what she’d gotten before they split, and Castle wanted her stats at max before making a selection.
Besides, she already knew where she’d put them. With a grin, she put two into Strength and two into Vitality. As Aster had said, she had a name to live up to.
Now, on to skill selections. They were, for the most part, nothing to be particularly excited about, although she did receive more options than Aster had mentioned getting.
[Basic Aggro (Inferior)] - Passively garner attention from foes, making them more likely to focus on you instead of your comrades. Adds a minuscule bonus to the effect of Strength and Willpower when using the skill.
[Basic Lunge (Inferior)] - The strike that hits doesn’t always come from the shadows— sometimes it comes head-on. Propel yourself forward, striking before your opponent can react. Adds a minuscule bonus to the effect of Agility and Strength while Lunging.
[Basic Vault (Inferior)] - Move quicker than before, allowing yourself to be where you need to be in battle. Adds a miniscule bonus to the effect of Strength and Perception during combat.
[Shield Priority - (Inferior)] - Raise a shield or your weapon, to a lesser effect, and draw your enemy’s attack to it instead. Directly competes your Willpower against your opponent’s. Adds a minor bonus to the effect of Willpower and Strength during combat.
Alright, Castle thought. No common-quality skills, but still… She considered her choices and what it was that she wanted to get out of this all. She’d already put her free points into Strength, and had a decent amount of vitality.
Basically, there were two options for her: either offense or defense. Either she could choose Lunge or Vault, which honestly sounded way too similar, or she could go for a more protective measure.
Castle hadn’t fought with a shield in the day or so she’d been in the tutorial, but with everything going on she hadn’t really had enough time to consider it. Sure, she’d used her halberd to deflect or block attacks, but…
Being able to “gather aggro” and make enemies focus on her would be fantastic— if she were to pair up with another fighter like Aster again. Holding monsters’ attention while they got picked off by someone else seemed like the way to go if she had someone else who could deal damage.
But is that what I’ll find? Castle’s face wrinkled as she thought. If she chose the Basic Aggro skill, she’d be more limited to fighting with others, right? But then again, I’ll be more capable when defending others…
After a few more moments of thinking, Castle ended up deciding on the Shield Priority skill. With it, she’d be able to help keep herself alive longer to help defend others should she find herself in that situation, while at the same time keeping herself safer in general. No nurse gets far in medicine without taking care of themselves first, she recalled the words of a past mentor she’d once looked up to.
Closing out the System menu, Castle looked around, deciding where to go. She shut her eyes and tried to visualize all the different pillars with people on them that she’d seen yesterday— where they might be in relation to her and Aster’s starting spot. That gave her a decent idea and set her heading opposite the direction Aster had headed, out toward the rim of the island.
--
Aster had little problem scaling the honeycomb structure, although she did feel a little acrophobic. Heights had never been her thing, and even when she’d been into diving she’d do her best to drown out the heights and just focus on the thrill of performing the stunt as best she could. Knowing she'd beaten the competition would lift any apprehension, after all.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
As she stood currently, she was maybe a third of the way up the structure and was easily ten meters high— a bit higher up than the peak of the hill she’d climbed earlier. Without a rope to secure herself with, she did the most logical thing with her two available free stat points and put them into Toughness. Hopefully, she’d be able to survive a fall at terminal velocity. She doubted it heavily, but figured she’d just have to not fall. After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
The view from this height was spectacular, and she took a moment to take it all in, now that she could see the island better.
The desert island was more like a caldera, with a depression growing deeper towards the center. Dense forest seemed to be thriving there, and a mist clouded the area. She spotted movement within the canyons again, and couldn’t help but grin when she thought about the fights that lay ahead of her.
With that in mind, she began climbing again. The honeycomb makeup of the structure provided her with plenty of hand and footholds, along with spots to sit and rest should she feel like it. It was easy.
Twenty minutes of climbing later, she figured she must be near the top, which she’d estimated to be forty meters tall, and stopped to take a look back out over the island. Absorbing the view, she frowned.
“What the hell?” Aster murmured.
She was maybe, maybe ten feet higher than when she’d last stopped. Looking up, she couldn’t see the top of the structure as it was kind of cone shaped, but she still felt like she should be a lot closer to the top than she was. Am I going crazy?
That couldn’t be it. Aster narrowed her eyes. There has to be some kind of bullshit going on.
To test this, Aster climbed for another ten minutes, then checked again. Again, how much she’d climbed was not correlated to how much ground she had gained. Determined to figure what the fuck was going on, Aster set her spear carefully against the wall of the structure, tip down and the butt of the spear braced against the wall. And then, she began to climb.
First, she climbed up to just the next honeycomb. When she reached for her spear, it was still within reach. This was expected, as she had only climbed a few feet. This would be easier if I had rope or something to test with…
Things only began to get weird at the time she got to the third honeycomb up. When she reached down for her spear, she still found it easily within reach. That definitely shouldn’t be the case, she thought.
Four honeycombs later, about twelve or so feet by eyeballing it, and she could still reach her spear, albeit with a bit of difficulty and a touch of a headache coming on. Convinced by now that there was some sort of spacial fuckery about the whole structure, she decided to pull her spear up before continuing.
It barely budged.
Aster cursed under her breath as she braced herself against the walls around her and heaved. The spear came toward her, inch by grueling inch, but it did not move the way it should have. She felt the strain in her System-supported muscles as she brought the glorified stick up to the same height as her. When she had it within her grasp, the last few moments of pulling on it becoming easier and easier, she fell back and gulped down air.
That was weird as hell, she thought, which proffered the obvious followup question: what was she going to do, now?
She’d already discovered that it was easier to go down than it was to go up, with the sense of space-dilation decreasing back to near-normal upon descent, and she was reminded of an old Super Mario game she used to play with her mother as a child.
In Mario 64, you couldn’t ascend the stairs to the endgame without retrieving so many stars, naturally collected by completing levels of the game. If you tried, you’d find yourself climbing into infinity, with only a handful of stairs behind you when you finally gave up and turned around.
However, this was not the same as that. She was making progress... albeit slower than a limbless sloth.
This raised yet another question: what was hidden at the top of the honeycomb structure? If her progress was slowed only and not hampered entirely, this wasn’t an impossible task. Just a damn hard one, she thought, squinting up at the sky surrounding her and the tower.
In the end, she did what she figured anybody would do, and continued to climb.
----
Castle had walked for long enough that she’d almost given up on wearing her heavy plate armor. Even with her increased stats, her armor was uncomfortable after so long in the sun. Sweat ran down her neck and between her breasts, irritating her skin in its wake.
She had stopped for a dip in the stream she was following when she heard them— voices. A spike of adrenaline started to ease as she realized it wasn’t another monster, but her unease continued to grow at the prospect of seeing other people again. Other people who were normal, at least, and not Aster.
As the voices seemed to be coming closer, Castle propped herself up against a wall of the box canyon, leaning her halberd against the rocky side as well. It was within reach, as she wasn’t an idiot, but far enough that she could hopefully not come across as a threat when the male voices she heard rounded the corner.
“I’m telling you, the old man is wrong,” said a deep voice. “This isn’t temporary or any kind of mass hysteria or anything like that. This is reality now.”
A less-deep sigh answered, followed by a new voice. “It doesn’t matter. People are all gonna do what they want. The only reason we’re all grouped up is for saf— whoa!”
Castle looked over to where she knew the two men would round a bend and see her, finding a pair of college-aged youths carrying makeshift buckets made of chopped up leather armor. The one who had been talking, a well-groomed kid around twenty, with blond hair and a full head’s worth of height on his friend, stopped. The other, a buff black guy with glasses, took a little longer to see her standing there. Once he did, however, Castle couldn’t help but notice how he stepped between her and the other kid.
“Hello there,” Castle said, a grin on her face. “Nice to see some faces that aren’t all scary and scaly.”
“Who are you?” The man with glasses said, his hand going to a mace attached to his belt. The taller man behind him tried to sidestep his protector, but the shorter man cut him off with a slice of his hand through the air.
“Easy,” Castle frowned. “I’m Maria. I go by ‘Castle’. I’m not here to cause any trouble.”
“Castle?” Asked the blond.
She shrugged. “On account of my name.”
“Maria?”
Castle turned her attention toward the man closer to her. “He hasn’t invested many points into Intelligence, has he?”
Though he kept his ground, the brawny fellow seemed to relax a bit. “No, he hasn’t. But you didn’t answer my question.”
Castle raised an eyebrow. “I told you my name. Maria Castello, hence 'Castle'.”
The blond chimed in, seemingly haven taken offense to the quip about his intelligence. “But we don’t know you.”
“And you know every lady in armor on the island?”
“Shut up, Matt,” said the other before he turned back to her. “Probably not, but we haven’t seen you around before.”
“And how is that strange?” Castle folded her arms.
“Because everyone we’ve met so far is from our school,” he replied. “We’re from a large school, yeah, but still. I think we’d remember a face like yours.”
Castle laughed. “Stop it, you’ll make me blush.” When neither of the boys seemed to appreciate her joke she continued. “I’m a nurse. A private nurse, hired to care for a classmate of yours. She and I entered the Tutorial together, but we parted ways earlier today.”
The blond, Matt, finally rounded his buddy, standing at the other’s side. “Who?”
Maria Castle angled her head, wondering if it was okay to share. However, no problem came to mind, so she spoke. “Aster. Aster Rose.”
They were silent.
“She’s a… rather, she was a doctorate student.”
Matt spoke first, turning to his friend. “Derrick, she can’t mean—”
“Aster?” Asked Derrick, cutting him off.
“Yeah,” Castle said. She searched the two of them as they shared a look between themselves. “Why? Do you know her?”
After a moment, it was Matt that answered. “Yeah. She’s dead, though.”
A cold spike of fear ran down Castle’s spine. “What?!” It’s only been a few hours! “What do you mean? How do you know that?”
Once again, Derrick put himself between her and Matt, “Because she died almost a month ago.”
That… wasn’t what Castle had expected to hear.
