Tower Climber (A LitRPG Adventure, Book 1) Jakob Tanner (reading comprehension books TXT) 📖

chickens. It meant the foxes of the night had free reign and Ninja had keys to the coop.

He arrived at a tall apartment building.

Most of the window lights were off. The foolish traitless. So at ease with the danger all around them. Monsters were summoned to attack the city and they’d got so use to the manatech defenses they didn’t even blink twice about it. They didn’t even contemplate all the climbers sacrificing their lives month to month so that they could just sit around and go to bed without a care in the world.

It was pathetic, thought Ninja.

But tonight wasn’t about killing traitless as much as he wished it might be.

He walked up to the edge of the apartment building and planted his feet on the wall. He imbued mana onto his feet and started walking up along the walls of the building, breaking the laws of human physics in the process.

Ninja ran up the side of the building, counting the floors as he did so.

Floor one...

Floor two...

Floor three...

Eventually he got to the eighth floor.

Apartment 803.

That was his destination.

The wind blew gently across his face as he stood eight stories above the ground on the side of the building. Screams and explosions could be faintly heard at the other end of the city, closer to the tower where the monster wave battle was taking place.

Ninja moved to apartment 803 and silently stepped onto the balcony.

He double-tapped the window quietly and the defense ward flashed red, lighting up the area.

He quickly grabbed his specialty knife and cut marks through the rune itself, disabling it.

With the defense ward removed, he was able to slide open the glass door and step into the apartment.

All the lights were off. It was silent.

He crept across the living room and silently opened the door to one of the bedrooms. There was someone sleeping under the blankets.

He had been told that there should only be one person in the apartment that night. This sleeping person must be his target then.

He quietly stepped towards the sleeping boy.

He grinned. There was always something satisfying about a clean and easy kill. It meant he’d done everything right up to that point and when it came to assassination, preparation was key.

He lifted up his knife high above the boy’s chest.

Sayonara kid, he thought to himself.

He plunged the knife into the sleeping kid, stabbing him through his blankets.

The knife bounced back. Blood didn’t splash or leak the blankets. A few tiny down feathers flew in front of him.

Ninja swiped the blanket away to see that he hadn’t just attacked a sleeping kid, but rather a pile of pillows.

What the—!?

SLICE!!

A bright golden light of energy pierced Ninja’s back and shot through his stomach and intestines out the other side.

The light of the energy blade glowed up at him, revealing the bleeding hole in his stomach.

The energy blade disappeared, slicing out of his flesh, leaving the open wound to simply gush blood.

Ninja fell to the floor.

How is this possible...?

A voice spoke behind him. Male. It was the kid he was meant to kill.

“I lived most of my life in an orphanage with an abusive perverted old man. I’ve slept with one eye open for most of my life.”

But the boy is unranked, thought Ninja, wincing in pain as blood poured out of his stomach and onto the living room floor.

How can he be so powerful?

“Who are you?” demanded Max. “What do you want from me?”

Ninja couldn’t believe this was it. This was supposed to be a trivial assignment. An errand. A chore no one wanted to do.

Yet he was dying. He was going to die here.

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a red pill. Trembling, he lifted the pill to his mouth.

Ninja had no other choice. If he lived tonight, he’d be jeopardizing the whole plan. There was only one thing left that he could do to help the cause. One last act of redemption after he’d failed here so miserably tonight.

He placed the pill on his mouth and quickly swallowed it.

“Tell me now,” shouted Max at the man trembling on the floor in the darkness. “Who are you!?”

His attacker didn’t respond and then—

Poof!

The man disintegrated into puff of black dust. Even the blood that had leaked out of him so profusely only a few moments before had disappeared as well.

Max stared at the ground. He turned on the light.

The floor of his bedroom was completely empty.

It was as if no one had even been here that night.

The attacker was gone without a trace.

22

Max waited on the couch for Sakura to get home.

The B-ranked climber woman got back to the apartment just after one-thirty in the morning.

“What are you doing up—?”

She stopped. Her face went from surprised to concerned.

“Is everything okay? Did something happen?”

Max nodded his head.

“Someone came into the apartment and tried to kill me,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

Sakura quickly looked around the apartment. “Are you serious? You’re not tricking me in some elaborate way to come out on next month’s monster wave?”

Max shook his head. His skin was pale.

“Okay,” she said. “I don’t see any blood. I don’t see any signs of an attacker.”

“He was here,” Max gulped, shivering. “He came through the window.”

“The window!?” balked Sakura, heading towards the balcony. “That shouldn’t be possible with the defense runes—”

She stopped and looked horrified. Her finger pressed on the window to conjure the defense rune. Nothing came up.

“Someone must’ve disabled it,” she gasped.

“He climbed up the side of the apartment building,” said Max. “I was watching the monster wave so I saw him approach the building. That’s when I hid. He came into my room and stabbed my blankets, thinking I was there. If you didn’t give me your slice ability before you left—I would’ve been screwed.”

Sakura headed to the kitchen and grabbed a can of beer, cracking it open.

“Are you doing okay?” she asked.

Max gulped. He felt surprisingly fine. In fact, it was his lack of panic or guilt that was concerning him more