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

told them to, ‘ascend to the floor above you’ or ‘ascend to the endless forest.’ Never ‘ascend to floor-2’ as that wouldn’t have worked.

Max strode towards the teleporter now.

He also remembered the instructor explaining that once you’d ascended to a floor you could ascend multiple floors at once, from one arrival teleporter to another.

He stepped into the light of the teleporter and tried an experiment.

If they were on floor-4.

That meant the endless forest was floor-5.

That the archipelagos was on floor-6.

He closed his eyes in the light of the teleporter and thought to himself:

Ascend to floor-6.

His stomach lurched and his hair stood up and then seconds later, he was standing on the island where he had started the mid-term exams.

He walked to the beach and saw there was a whole marina of boats.

He walked up to one boat that had a group of sailors throwing up ropes to one another and looking as if they were preparing to depart.

There was a man with a big nose and slicked back gray hair and wore a captain’s hat. He had a copper-ranked climber’s badge on his chest as well.

“Ya looking for a job, laddie?”

Max shook his head. “I need to find an island to train on.”

“Ah, I see now,” said the captain. “You’re a climber! Or a wannabe one!”

Max nodded. “Pretty much. Are there any good islands on this floor to train on?”

“Ah, there’s one just yonder there,” sighed the captain looking out to the sea.

“Could you drop me off there?”

“I could,” said the captain. “But we’re on a long voyage to hunt down a specific nasty kraken, won’t be coming back that way for a while.”

“How long is a while?” asked Max.

“I reckon a week and a half, maybe two weeks,” said the captain.

Max grinned. That was perfect. “Works for me,” he said to the captain.

“You sure, lad?”

“I guess if I was going to be nervous about anything,” said Max, “It would be about you guys coming back at all? The kraken won’t kill you all, will it?”

The captain laughed.

“Hah! You just worry about surviving for two weeks on Ogre Island,” said the captain. “Now climb aboard.”

Max walked up the plank and sat on the deck, trying to stay out of the way of the other sailors.

Max sat on the boat and watched the sailors get ready to set sail.

They all had copper E-rank badges on them. He didn’t see any higher ranked climbers than that. Even though they had climber badges, they appeared more like regular sailors than climbers.

“Are you guys retired climbers?” asked Max to a passing sailor.

The man laughed. “Of course not! Though it’s been awhile since any of us have been back to Zestiris. We mainly work across this floor, the archipelagos, and what a floor it is!”

So that was their job. They loved the world of this floor and so they never left or explored much further beyond. Max figured that a top-level E-rank climber could go as high as floor-30 without suffering significant tower sickness, but if you found a floor you enjoyed and didn’t see yourself hitting D-rank, you might as well stick with it.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Yeah,” said the captain. “Stay out of the way.”

Max stood at the back of the deck and watched the sailors work: climbing rope ladders, loosening up sails, shouting orders.

They worked like a clockwork machine, all recognizing how their individual roles gave shape and control to the massive wooden frigate sailing across the ocean world.

They eventually arrived at an island of similar shape and size to the one he’d done his mid-term exams on, except this island one sailor assured him, “They’d never test students on.”

That sailor looked Max over, shuddering, and said, “Nice knowing ya, kid.”

The ship docked at the island and the captain came up to Max.

“There you go, kid,” said the captain. “First stop, Ogre Island. But I gotta ask: you sure about this? You can stick with us for the next two weeks on the trading route, learn some of what it takes to be a sailor of the archipelagos!”

“Thanks,” said Max. “But I gotta go train on my own. I got the climber final exams to think about.”

The captain laughed. “Oh my, it’s been so long since I had to do any such test, it’s making my stomach lurch just thinking about it. Alright. We’ll be coming back this way in about two weeks or so. See you then?”

“Sounds good,” said Max.

He then hopped off the boat and waved goodbye to the captain and sailors.

He then turned around and faced the looming island in front of him.

Just under an hour later, the captain put down his spyglass away from the island they had just left and reeled off some more directions to his crew.

The crew got to work, retying the sails and adjusting for a new westerly wind.

“You think that kid’s going to be alright,” said one sailor.

The captain sighed. He had been feeling guilty about it since they’d left the island.

“The kid had pluck, I’ll give him that,” said the captain. “But I’ve never heard of anyone surviving on Ogre Island on their own for more than three nights, let alone two weeks. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

He turned back and looked at the foreboding island once more, before returning his attention back to their next destination.

77

Max walked off the beach and headed into the jungle.

His eyes darted in every direction, keeping eyes out for ogres, but so far he hadn’t seen any.

A few birds chirped nearby and it was enough to make his shoulders jump.

Relax Max, he said to himself. You’re going to be living on this island for the next two weeks.

The first thing he had to take care of was making a shelter and base of operations. While the beach was nice, if there was a high-tide or big wave, it could come and flood his base, so he ultimately chose the best of both worlds by being in sight of