Choi Hansook was tired of his cowardice. Stuck in his apartment he had been. Stuck for more than a few months. Thank the universe for online deliveries and the like. He did not know exactly how he would have survived otherwise.

It was worse when he considered his family back at Jeju. They thought he was studying. They thought he was in school, getting ready to graduate as a lawyer. How wrong they were. But he could not tell them.

It's not like any of them was going to visit him here anyway, in the big city. They just gave him a few clothes and sent him off. Sent him to fight the world alone.

Hurdled in his blanket in a fetal position, Hansook found himself increasingly folding his body in a show of athleticism he should not have possessed. He heard them. The voices of happy people.

No, not even happy people. The voices of those who had friends. No. Not even that. The voices of those who could walk confidently around on those crowded streets. Those cruel streets.

Sometimes he wished the world would end. Sometimes he wished everyone knew the kind of emptiness he felt everyday.

Sometimes he just needed someone to talk to.

A knocking sound came from his door. He only huddled further into his blanket, trying to make as little sound as possible. They would go away if he said nothing. They always did.

"Is there someone in this room?" a girl's voice asked, not the first and probably not the last too.

"There is someone," a familiar yet faceless voice answered. "They've been staying there a whole year. I've never seen them. But sometimes you see the lights on late in the night."

"Oh, okay…" the female voice replied uncertainly, "sure it's not a ghost?"

The male voice chuckled nervously. "Probably…not, right?"

He could hear them both gulping. They were probably going to bond over that.

And then they devolved into their own conversations, right there in front of his door. The quiet of his tiny room let him hear everything even as he tried to cover his ears.

He had ways to tune people out. This was the mordern world. Who cared about having physical friends? Talking to strangers on the internet was a far better pass time. And playing games too.

With his head sets inserted, Choi Hansook could pretend the rest of the world didn't exist. He could pretend only the tower he was trying to climb did. The infinite castle, it was called, filled to the brim with demons and ghosts and many other monsters.

The game play trailer for the next part of the video game was also interesting. A whole continent that would only be unlocked after the infinite castle was defeated. Choi Hansook was already on the one hundredth, thus the last level of this tower.

He had failed to beat it before. Mostly because he wanted to try out multiple builds. And also he'd been stuck at level seventy-five for a while, and he couldn't find any mentions of how to get past it to a hundred. It wasn't the max level. Of that he was sure.

At first even getting past fifty had been a hustle, but he'd maxed out all his five skills and he'd gotten past .

This time he'd tried that, but apparently he was missing something. Not that it mattered. All he had to do all day was troll the internet and play this game he was addicted to.

He knew ways to defeat the level one hundred boss even as a level seventy-five. He'd just not done it at first because he had thought struggling against the level one hundred may give him some inspiration on how to break through level seventy-five.

Well, no need to hold out anymore. On this occasion, he'd gone with a broken summoner skill. It allowed him to capture beasts he defeated in balls he could summon and unsummon.

He was like a necromancer, as he could even capture beasts he had killed. As an epic skill, the number of balls he could summon increased every fifteen levels. He started with two at level one, and now with the skill at fifty he had five tamed monsters. Two were above level eighty.

By the time he'd finished the boss, finishing the game for the first time since he'd bought it, there were no more voices outside.

He sighed. It was well past three hundred hours. Again. If he wanted to become a functioning member of society, he needed to fix his sleep schedule first.

He went to the windows of his one room apartment, wanting to at least look at the stars. It was the only chance he got to look at the true sky these days. When everyone else was asleep. When there were no fingers to be pointed. No judging faces or anything.

He looked at the stars for a minute. And as he did something flickered into existence, blocking his view.

Gargantuan and black and tapering toward the sky. It was like a spear pointed towards the heavens. Towards the cruel beings who came from above to torture innocent demons. It was also a very familiar structure.

Very familiar because it was the image of the starting menu of the game he'd spent the last few months of his life playing. The view of the sky had even shifted into a cataclysmic violet. The world of the game was a post apocalyptic world, and the broken sky he was seeing fit into that vision well.

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Choi rubbed his eyes to ensure he was seeing right. And as it turned out, he wasn't. The sky was normal. No abnormal tower had appeared out of nowhere in the outskirts of Seoul.

"Maybe they have a point about loneliness causing mental illnesses. I haven't even smoked anything in months."

He didn't realise he was speaking in a different language. And it wasn't the last time he saw the tower too.

Someone on the internet claimed to have seen a heavily misted coastline during a luxury cruise, yet none of his fellow passengers had seen it. The way he described it matched the trailer of the game play for the next update of the infinite castle.

"What the hell is going on?" Choi Hansook couldn't help but ask, and his heart stirred as something like hope started to flicker there.

America was keeping a tight lid on it, but something was happening in the world. Russia had decided to get into some kind of nuclear war with almost every other country in Europe, and Africa was seeing more tourists than usual.

The political situation had turned bad overnight.

Conspiracy theorists on the net were having a blast. Some talking about the third world war and such. Choi Hansook hoped they were wrong. That would be so boring.

A third world war was nothing. An apocalypse though. A chance to reinvent himself. Maybe even a lucky tower he had climbed dozens of times and whose secrets he was well aware of. Now that would be a dream, wouldn't it?

****

Althea Bennett hadn't felt this uncomfortable in her skin since she was a little child. Now though, after days socking in a harsher than usual sun, and nights surrounded by a perpetual cloud of mosquitoes despite the sharp smelling repellent she'd been forced to wear. Her skin itched, and it had way more red spots than usual.

Still, she had to get used to traveling around the world like this. She was the Chosen. The prophet had said so. She was going to be the face of the new government once the old world order collapsed.

The prophecy didn't put too much pressure on her. If anything, it made her proud. She was going to be the strongest.

The first thing she did when she returned to her private cubicle was search through her emails. She wasn't allowed to communicate with anyone while out on the field.

She wanted to curse when she saw the Email from that damn glorified sheriff. These were some of the last Emails she was likely to receive. The tutorial, as calculated by the illuminati, was in two weeks.

She frowned though, when she received two more Emails from the same man. The first had come about two months back, then one had come in two weeks later, explaining how the man had returned a sports car to the house, but no one had been there.

Of course Rafe had bought a sports car. Spoilt little prick. Getting reports about what he had been up to through similar Emails had made up a whole bunch of her vacations over the last year.

But this seemed different. The officer had returned the car, only to realise the house hadn't been lived in since apparently Rafe had hosted a party there after losing at the state basketball championship preliminaries with his team.

That was typical Rafe behavior. Nothing new.

Only, the next Email said he hadn't been to school in a while.

Thea knew she would regret it, but she needed to check. Filtering through their chat, she found all the reports on what Rafe was getting up to from the officer. It was strange. There had never been a mention of skipping school she could find.

She read the first message. The message the officer had sent after being given her Email. Her mother hadn't wanted to deal with the man, so she'd foisted him onto her. He still thought he was talking to the older woman, because the Email ID was an ABennet instead of her full name. Some times the man was less than appropriate.

Still, Thea thought there was something strange about that last message. Maybe she ought to talk to her aunt about it.

And there at the end of the menu. The reason she'd chosen to open her Email before any social media. Not that she was active on those kinds of things. They were a waste of time, especially as she knew what was coming.

There was a meeting being organized. This time most of the family would be in attendance, including her cousin Reyna Kingsley.

Family meeting was good though. There was probably no better time to speak to her aunt about her suspicions.

Only, Theodora Bennett, her grandmother, the scariest human being she knew was there as well.

"Report," the older woman said once Thea arrived.

"The situation in Central Africa has been dealt with. There is supposed to be an announcement of a new government in two weeks."

"Hmm," her grandmother said in lieu of a response. "That will be sufficient I guess. The whole continent will be distracted just before the apocalypse hits."

"How goes Europe?" Theodora asked Thea's aunt, Barbara Kingsley.

This was probably for their benefit, hers and Reyna's.

"Russia will use their nuclear weapons, of that we have no doubt. Their continental war, as they all know, will be short-lived. Still, they prefer to use their nucs before they become irrelevant. South Korea may become involved."

"Any powers we ought to be wary of," Theodora Bennett stepped in.

"We are on course to capture China," Barbara reported. "The island nation and North Korea are already aware of a few things, and are planning to start up a few factions of their own. You know, guilds."

"Not that any of that matters," a voice like gears grinding against each other interrupted them.

His prosthetic jaw was loose in preparation to say something more. On this occasion, his right hand was also metallic. He was in the process of manufacturing synthetic lungs and most of the other organs. He was having a little trouble with blood, but he said it would be easy once the Essence arrived. He was going to turn himself into a machine, the prophet was.

"My holy sisters, the oracles, have sent more agents here. I know at least three others. And I'm sure there is one on at least every continent. We will have this world in the control of the illuminati eminently."

Thea hated his voice. It always left her nerves tingling. It sounded like the static over the communication radios. Only it was magnified a hundred fold.

"Hey, aunt, I have something to say about Rafe," she tried.

"Why are you bringing that up?" Her grandmother asked. "That is insignificant to the dilemma we are going to face soon."

"I agree, grandmother," Reyna, Rafe's sister said into the intervening silence. "However, why shouldn't we warn him? We can't just let him die."

There was a shared look between the prophet and her grandmother, but only Thea noticed at the table. Barbara was busy typing on her laptop, and Reyna had buried her head in a cup of coffee once she'd finished speaking.

"Just send him enough pocket money barbie," Theodora said.

"Dear chosen," the prophet said. "Are you trying to ignore me?"

Thea sighed. Barbara didn't seem interested in talking about her son.

"What do you want?" she asked him. The prophet had surely come for nothing more than to irritate her.

"How cold!" he gasped. "There is a project, based on my…" he gestured at his half synthetic body, "genius."

"Why do I need to know this?" Thea asked.

"Because you might have competition once the apocalypse starts. I figured it would be a good motivator. We need you to blaze a path for the rest of Earth. Remember, the goal is to blast through the tutorial as fast as possible. A rival is likely a good thing."

A rival? Thea mulled it over in her head. Still, there was a nagging feeling in her head. She didn't hate her cousin as such. For some reason, Reyna had no love for her brother, and her grandmother seemed to just wish to forget of the boy's existence. His mother thought giving him a lot of money would shut him up. As long as he was quietly sitting in Crosshill town, there was not a single thing wrong with the world.

There were a lot of things wrong with the world.

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