Awakener's Guide to Climbing the Tower

Misha stared up at him in disbelief. "You insufferable–"

A goblin lunged at her from the side.

She pivoted and drove her rapier into its throat before the insult could properly leave her mouth.

「 You have killed a Goblin!

EXP +3 」

Kylo loosed another arrow.

Swoosh!

A second goblin crumpled before it could climb over the breach.

"Try not to die. I’d hate to lose a competent distraction," he called.

Misha bared her teeth. "Then keep your arrows straight and your mouth under control!"

That was how it started. It was not with trust, not with strategy, and even not with agreement. It was just survival, annoyance, and the deeply unfortunate fact that they were good at covering each other.

Kylo rained arrows from above with brutal precision, targeting whatever got too close to Misha or whatever looked smart enough to become a problem later. Misha held the breach, fast enough to cut down the goblins that slipped through the first line, and sharp enough to finish what his arrows crippled. She helped the rest of the defenders on keeping the monsters from spreading through the city.

It should not have worked and yet, it worked disgustingly well.

A Goblin Chieftain forced its way through the rubble with a rusted saber raised high. Misha ducked the first swing, but before it could recover, Kylo’s arrow punched through its shoulder and spun it sideways. She stepped into the opening and drove her rapier through its neck.

「 You have killed a Goblin Chieftain!

EXP +20 」

"Left!" Kylo shouted.

Misha turned just in time to avoid a goblin spear thrusting for her ribs. She caught the shaft under one arm, yanked the creature forward, and buried a dagger into its eye. Blood sprayed warm across her hand.

「 You have killed a Goblin!

EXP +3 」

Another arrow hissed past her cheek.

A Warg yelped and rolled off the broken stone with an arrow buried in its skull.

"Mind the four-legged ones," Kylo called. "You’re too slow to leave openings like that."

"Your voice makes this worse!"

"And yet you’re still listening."

A group of students from one of the Academies reached the breach then, faces pale beneath half-fitted armor, weapons held too tightly in hands that had not yet learned how to shake quietly. They looked rather young, probably in their teens.

One of them still had the innocent gaze of someone who had probably worried more about exams than dying a week ago.

"We’re here to help! Hold the line!" A senior-looking student shouted, voice cracking halfway through the command.

To their credit, they tried.

A spear-user stabbed down from the side and caught a goblin in the chest. Another student with twin short swords helped Misha cut down the next two that came crawling over the broken section. A mage in academy robes threw a burst of fire so panicked and sloppy that it still managed to burn three goblins alive because there were simply too many bodies packed together.

"We can do this!"

Then the battlefield reminded them what inexperience cost.

A Warg sprang through the dust and tore straight into the shoulder of one of the students before anyone could react. The boy screamed once, high and raw, before the beast dragged him off the rubble and down into the crush below.

Another student froze at the size.

That single moment of hesitation was enough. A goblin axe struck the side of her head, and she disappeared from Misha’s vision in a spray of red and white.

Someone vomited, someone else ran, but not all of them.

One girl with a dented shield and blood running from her hairline planted herself beside Misha and screamed as she blocked a Hobgoblin’s blade.

"I’m not dying here!"

Misha almost laughed at the desperation in that. "Good!" She shouted back. "Then stop screaming and hit it!"

Kylo’s arrow took the Hobgoblin in the thigh, the girl slammed her shield into its knee, and Misha slipped in and opened its throat.

「 You have killed a Hobgoblin!

EXP +25 」

The shield girl stared for half a second, as if surprised that teamwork actually worked in the middle of hell.

"Again!" Misha snapped.

That got the girl moving.

More students arrived from different Academies groups after that, not in a proper formation, but in clumsy little bursts of courage and terror. Some stayed only long enough to realize what real battle looked like before they broke and ran toward the inner district. Some died so quickly Misha never learned what they looked like before fear reached their faces. And some, against all reason, pushed through.

One of them caught Misha’s attention almost immediately.

A tall boy with short blond hair and a battered academy coat moved through the breach with a long staff-spear in his hands, the weapon crackling with violet mana.

He did not fight like the others. He planted the spear, twisted, swept low, then burst upward with a precise arc of force that sent two goblins flying back into the ones behind them. He never wasted a step. His eyes kept cutting across the battlefield before attacks even came, like he had seen this exact shape of chaos before and knew what to do.

Probably a battle mage. Misha thought at once. And a terrifying good one.

He flicked the butt of his weapon into a Goblin Chieftain’s knee, spun around the creature, and drove a burst of mana straight into its spine. He did not even look surprised.

Near him, another figure moved in sharp, efficient lines. A girl in a torn academy blazer with her long red hair tied back so tightly it had not come loose even now. Her dark skin gleamed with sweat and streaks of dust. She fought with a thin blade in one hand and a small, one-handed firearm powered by mana rather than conventional ammunition in the other hand.

Every movement of hers looked wrong for an ordinary student, it was too clean. She cut a goblin across the throat, ducked beneath a spear, shot another through the eye at point-blank range, then used the recoil of her own turn to drive her blade under a Hobgoblin’s chin. She looked like someone who had learned to kill before she had learned how to hesitate at the sight before her.

And then there was the third.

A lean boy in dark wrappings under half-ruined academy gear came flying in from the side wall like a launched weapon, heel-first, smashing a goblin’s face into the broken stone hard enough for blood to burst across the rubble.

His hair flashed strangely in the chaos, blue at the crown and white beneath, the two colors blurring together whenever he moved. Before the corpse even dropped, he slipped through the next three monsters in a vicious stream of close-range blows, elbow, knee, spinning kick, every strike fast and compact. Then he caught a charging Warg by the side of its neck, wrenched it off balance with raw force, and drove a dagger into it before kicking the corpse away to make room for the next kill.

What kind of students were they?

Misha couldn’t believe her eyes. They moved nothing like the other frightened students thrown into their first real battlefield. Their timing was too sharp, their reactions too fast, and their attacks carried a kind of instinct that should not have belonged to people their age. Even in the middle of the breach, with bodies falling around them and monsters pouring through the gap, they fought with a terrifying kind of control.

For one brief, humiliating second, Misha had to admit it. They were better than her.

"Don’t let them stack at the center!" The battle mage boy barked.

The red-head girl shot one goblin off the rubble and answered, "Then stop knocking them into my lane!"

The other boy laughed, breathless and sharp. "If you two have time to flirt with death, move left!"

"I am going to shoot you myself!" The girl snapped.

"You’ll have to catch me first!"

A goblin leaped for Misha, she cut it down.

「 You have killed a Goblin!

EXP +3 」

Another came from the right, one from behind the rubble, one low and fast.

「 Enemy movement prediction enhanced. 」

There. The gap in line, the goblin behind the goblin, the Chieftain further back driving the others forward, and the Warg circling left because its handler had noticed the defenders on that side were slower.

Misha moved first. She ducked under a crude blade, rammed her shoulder into a goblin’s chest and stabbed it through the mouth, then shouted, "Left flank! Warg coming in!"