One Week Later:
I was sipping some tea in a nondescript cafe in the town on the third floor.
I, like most other players that had made it to the main tower were all currently looking into the sky.
There, multiple screens, stretching across the horizon were displaying a timer.
[02H:03M:26S]
[02H:03M:25S]
[02H:03M:24S]
...
All of us were probably thinking, 'What will happen when that timer hits zero?'
I mean, even I didn't know what was going to happen, as I don't remember having coded anything like this in the 8 years that I was coding the game.
'Well, sitting here and doing nothing won't be helpful at all.'
"Let's go ???."
"Where are we going?"
"We need to grind a bit more to get your level up, since you're still a one-shot for most players in the tower right now."
"But I don't want to grind. It's dirty, boring, and tiring." She whined.
"You know that won't affect me right? Even though you look like a 5-year-old, you're more like a billion years old, yuh know?"
"Hmmph, you know you shouldn't assume a girl's age YUH KNOW?"
She tried punching me, but because she was in the body of a 5-year-old, and because of my stats, it felt like nothing.
I grabbed her arms and started dragging her on the floor.
She started digging her feet into the floor, and when that didn't work, she proceeded to kick and punch at me with her other hand whilst screaming and crying the whole time.
"Stop pouting like a baby when you're an existence so much higher. Don't you have any pride at all?"
I guess that hit a nerve or something as she stopped pouting and just reluctantly followed behind me in silence.
It had been a little less than a year since the the "Tower" had appeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and along with its arrival, 1 million people mysteriously disappeared from the face of the Earth overnight.
That included my two older sisters that were very dear to me.
Well, their family had actually adopted me for some unknown reason 6 years ago, but that hadn't stopped them from loving me and supporting me.
We had each actually become one of the 3 strongest people in Tokyo, my oldest sister becoming a Lieutenant General in the JSDF, my younger sister becoming one of the top politicians in the city at a extremely young age, and me, the founder of a start-up that was now worth hundred of millions of yen, that I had started at the age of 15.
But, this had all come crumbling down when my two older sisters had disappeared in a single night, along with the 1 million other people that had been erased off the face of the Earth.
After this happened, my adoptive parents had just completely changed their attitude about me and had gotten rid of me.
My start-up had been sued, and after we had lost all of our money due to a corrupt trial (Because the government was too focused on the tower in the ocean as we were the closest country to it after all), I had to file for bankruptcy.
I had been kicked out of my home and had been forced to live homeless, sleeping in tunnels, parks and under bridges for who knows how many nights.
But now, I was in the wilderness in an unknown place, staring at the starry night sky from atop an unnamed mountain.
Why you ask? Well, it was solely due to a status window, like in a game, that had appeared in my vision a few days ago.
You see, after the 1 million people disappeared and the tower had risen in the Pacific Ocean, blue screens had started filling up the skies, live streaming what seemed like a death show.
Everybody had just ignored them... until they started recognizing that the "Players", as the stream called them, were actually their sons or daughters, mothers or fathers, husbands or boyfriends, wives or girlfriends, or other acquaintances that had disappeared when the tower had risen out of the ground.
The whole world had watched in horror as their loved ones died in real time on the screens.
I had been shocked to see both my Onee-sans fighting for their lives in there, but I was also relieved that they seemed to make it out of every trial relatively unscathed.
At least, that was until that one player, "Anonymous", the top player in the whole world, had for some reason decided to approach my Onee-sans, and then had proceeded to torture Onee-san and had broken all of the bones in her limbs. (See chapter 29 for reference.)
At that moment, after seeing the brutality, I had sworn to myself that I would somehow get into the tower and take revenge for my sisters.
'Well, it's about to start.'
After admiring the familiar beauty from the top of my secret mountain for the last time, I pulled up my status window.
[Time until the "Tower of Ordeals" is opened: 10 seconds.]
I took a deep breath and steadied myself.
"I'll catch up to you guys and meet you in this dreadful tower, me dear sisters."
Smiling until the very end, a bright light engulfed me, sending me into the tower.
...
Slowly opening my eyes, looking around at my new surroundings, I knew something had changed from what we had first seen in the live streams. Instead of being asked to enter my nickname, race, and position, I was unexpectedly in a black room filled with other people.
All at once, our status windows were forcefully pulled up, giving us a system announcement that sent an unnerving ripple through the entire crowd.
[To advance into the "Tutorial Tower" and become a "player", please kill all other aspiring players in the room until only you are left. Good luck!]
A slaughter started almost immediately after we had each read the system message, my own hands were slowly getting dyed red from the blood of my victems.
...
Watching the situation unfolding from one of the huge projections in the sky from the first floor of the main tower, Shin gaped at the new "Entrance Exam."
'I know I never added something like this into my game, so what's happening!?'
He thought about it for a few more seconds.
It was then that Shin and Kagami, whilst they each were killing things, one slaughtering monsters while the other was slaughtering people, both realized something.
"Something about this unnerves me."
"There's something seriously wrong here."
And although there was an endless distance between them, a sudden thought appeared in each of their minds at the exact same time.
'For some reason, the tower... has changed.'
End of Volume 1.