Tower Climber (A LitRPG Adventure, Book 1) by Jakob Tanner (interesting books to read for teens .txt) 📗

He took a deep breath and triggered his trait, intuitively unleashing the ability his mimic power had now memorized.

“What the hell is the punk doing?” shouted a member of the audience.

“Why won’t this kid just die already!?”

Max ignored them and focused on channeling the rock golem’s power.

His arms and hands began to glow with a new aura and the arena floor rumbled.

The ripple of broken arena and shards of wood and stone rushed in a blast right to the side of the golem.

“Is this kid an idiot?”

“What happened to his slice ability!?”

“Does he not know how to aim?”

Max kept his cool. Stage one of the strategy complete. He just kept thinking about that conversation he had with Sarah so many months ago.

“You’re up against a stronger opponent, so you need to take advantage of everything else to stand a chance against them.”

The rock golem huffed at the attack, not intimidated in the least.

“Finish him!” chanted the crowd.

They were sick of the back and forth. They wanted blood.

The rock golem swerved. It was going to rush Max head on.

SMASH!

The golem had turned to the right to get on clear footing to rush Max.

There was just one problem.

Max had triggered the trait again and this time sent the ability right where the monster was going.

The trait already doubled the ability’s original power, so in fact, Max’s version of the rock golem’s ability was even more powerful than an average D-ranked ability, arguably even tipping into low C-rank in terms of raw power.

If you then added in the fact that the rock golem was moving at a quick speed to get into better terrain and Max’s attack had hit it by surprise, the resulting level of damage was significant.

The rock golem crumbled on the ground into so many stone pieces it would be impossible for it rebuild itself.

“Incredible,” said the audience in awe.

Even the people who had betted against him—which was the majority of them—nodded in satisfaction.

“Good fight, kid,” they cheered. “I haven’t been so surprised in a while. Well done.”

Max smiled at their accolades and walked over to the rock golem who had now disappeared, leaving behind a silver monster core and some coins.

He picked it all up and placed them in his pouch.

He couldn’t wait to drain the cores he’d won today to increase his mana affinity stat.

He briefly daydreamed of the number jumping by ten points, immediately ranking him up, when a loud alarm went off.

RIING! RIING!

Max looked around in a panic.

What was going on?

Someone yelled out, “RUN! THE CLIMBER POLICE ARE HERE!”

43

Sakura rushed into the underground arena behind a squad of police climbers.

It was pandemonium as tamers tried to keep control of wild tower monsters and the gambling audience ran out the emergency exits to escape arrest from the police.

One police climber with an airbringer ability slammed the monster tamer against the wall with the force of the wind.

“You pathetic fools,” said the airbringer police climber. “You use your powers for such base entertainment, making yourself complicit in the death of young climbers. You disgust me.”

Sakura looked around. This was an insane operation. This was what the people of the tower-zone craved. To watch climbers use their powers for mere entertainment? And yet it was these same people who complained about why it was unfair that the city was divided the way it was. These same people who craved the entertainment of death and destruction.

Sakura rushed through the throng of police and criminals, moving through the chaos.

She wouldn’t feel better until she’d scoured this whole place and confirmed that Max wasn’t here. That he wasn’t the student climber who had been killed earlier.

She entered a smaller arena from the main one. There were a group of police climbers standing in the ring over the corpse of a sixteen-year-old boy.

She hurried over to them.

“What happened?” she gasped.

“They put this student climber up against a D-rank thunder spider,” said the police climber.

A student climber against a D-rank thunder spider!?

What were the arena organizer’s thinking?

“They knew there was no way this kid was going to survive against it,” said the police climber. “They weren’t even betting on whether he’d win or lose. Just how quickly he’d lose. They put him up here with the sole purpose to watch him die.”

Sakura shook her head.

She felt horrible for feeling a sense of relief that the boy on the ground wasn’t Max. The sense of relief didn’t last long when she thought about how the boy was someone else’s Max, someone with a family who cared about him.

“Were there any other student climber casualties?” asked Sakura.

“There was one other death,” said the police climber. “One survivor. A boy named Harold. He said it was his idea to bring his two friends here to train.”

Sakura sighed. So Max wasn’t here after all. Thank god.

A police climber yelled down from the top of the room. “Found another arena here. Looks like another student climber.”

Sakura’s heart started racing again and she rushed out of the arena and towards the other room.

She entered the other smaller fighting room and saw Max standing in the center of the ring, covered in dirt and scrapes.

She rushed over to him and grabbed him by the wrist.

“What the heck do you think you’re doing?” she shouted.

The boy blinked at her, confused.

“Are you a fool?”

“Sakura,” he said. “But I won...”

“Yeah, two out of four students climbers who came here today didn’t. Guess what happened to them? They’re dead.”

Max gulped. “I didn’t know. That’s horrible. I figured if they were coming here they were pretty confident with their abilities.”

“You think all these rules in place are to make your life difficult,” said Sakura. “But they aren’t. There in place to protect you. To protect everyone. I thought you were smarter than that to come to a place like this, Max. Seriously. I’m relieved—no, I’m bloody happy—to see you’re alive, but I also can’t look at you. I’ll see you back at the apartment.”

With that the woman walked away from