"Halt, travelers," the one on the left ground out, his voice like a box of rocks in a spin cycle.

  "You must pay the fee to enter," the one on the right rumbled.

  "What's the fee? And what is this place?" Andrea asked.

  "This is the Tower of Rebirth. The Path has deemed fit to move it from our home world, where it has sat idle for centuries now, to this new world. We are the Endra, the architects of the tower. To enter the tower and challenge the floors, you must pay a diamond coin," the first guard explained.

  "A diamond coin?! Just to enter?" Andrea exclaimed heatedly.

  "That fee applies every time you enter," the guard said in a bored monotone.

  "What, so if we leave and want to go back in, it's another diamond?" Val asked, the surprise evident on her face.

  "Hahaha, 'if you leave,'" the guards laughed. "Of course you will leave. You believe it possible to clear the tower in a single try? Foolishness."

  "Well, that's rude," Sera muttered.

  The guards continued laughing for a moment until a pressure radiated from Veren and made the air stifling, a feeling like a naked blade pressed against the neck appearing in everyone's minds. The guards stopped laughing rather quickly at that and looked at the lanky man with respect and just a little fear, understanding that it was the pressure only a Grandmaster could release. Veren's eyes glowed silver for a moment, a sharp light like two swords cutting through space emitting from each of his pupils before the phenomena disappeared.

  "Mind how you speak," he said coldly.

  "Apologies, Grandmaster," the guard on the left said in a contrite tone, bowing slightly to Veren.

  "Explain this tower in more detail," Veren commanded calmly.

  "Yes, sir," the guard on the right replied. "The Tower of Rebirth is a place created as both a test and a reward. Aspirants must climb the tower one floor at a time without skipping any floors. It is recommended to climb individually for the first hundred floors. Your progress is saved for each new floor you reach, and you may leave the tower at any time and return to any floor you have already made it to. Floors after the first hundred are extremely difficult and it is recommended to fight as a group. It is not recommended to surpass floor two hundred and fifty before becoming Enlightened."

  "Wait, just how many floors are there?" asked Blood, looking up at the tower piercing the sky above them.

  "A thousand," the guard on the left replied.

  "A thousand!" most of the members of the group replied with expressions varying between shock and mild interest.

  "Every floor is a self-contained space that has been expanded and altered by the tower architects," the guard explained. "There are no restrictions other than paying the fee every time you enter the tower."

  "And what are the floors like? Just fights?" Bjorn asked, pondering the two guards who were only a bit taller than he was.

  "The floors are mainly fights, but there are a variety of challenges waiting within," the guard on the right explained. "The first hundred floors are quite well-known, but beyond that point there is much less information about the floors. Our people stopped using the tower many years ago because the cost to maintain it was not worth the rewards offered. Now, we guard and operate the tower while others use it. It works out quite well for us."

  "You mentioned rewards," Beth started, eyes lighting up.

  "You are rewarded for every floor you clear," the guard replied with a deep laugh. "Of course, only the higher floors have rewards that are worth a damn."

  "Sounds a bit like a scam," Beth said with narrowed eyes.

  "You don't have to go in," the guard on the left said. "I'm not going to twist your arm. Not when you're with a Grandmaster."

  "Well, a diamond coin isn't really that much," Beth said with a shrug. "What do you guys think?"

  "I can easily afford it," Veren said.

  "Yeah, no shit; I meant about challenging the tower," Beth said with a roll of her eyes.

  "It should prove interesting," he said off-handedly.

  The rest of the group all signaled their interest, so Beth turned to the guards and asked, "If we want to do the first floors solo, do we have to, like, wait or something? If we go in all at the same time, do we have to do it as a group?"

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "Not the first hundred floors," the guard answered. "You can be sent in to your own instance."

  "Is that what we're doing?" Beth asked the group, looking around at them all and getting affirming nods or answers. "Cool, then here's my coin."

  Beth handed the guard a diamond coin and he inspected it quickly, making sure the symbol shone correctly before gesturing at the doorway into the tower. Beth walked up and opened the door, stepping into the first floor and closing the door behind her, waiting a moment to see if anyone else showed up. When a minute passed and none of the rest of her group entered, she assumed they were either pranking her or had all been put in their own instances. She still could have asked a few more questions for clarification about the tower, but she thought it was fucking boring standing there the whole day talking. It was a tower about fighting and challenging one's limits; might as well just do it.

  She finally took a look around the floor she was on, seeing that the first few floors of the tower were really basic. The room she was in reminded her of a training room or a basic arena floor without any fancy settings engaged. It was fairly broad, likely two hundred feet across, much more like an arena floor, and was quite plain. A white floor, light gray walls, and a light gray ceiling combined with no other distinguishing features to make the place rather boring. The one thing that was different was there were a hundred goblins in the room. Beth wasn't sure if they were real or simulations, not that it would really matter all that much, but they hadn't noticed her. That confusing aspect was cleared up when she walked forward and stepped across some kind of invisible line, causing all the goblins to rush her at once.

  That would be concerning…if they were level four or five hundred, but they were all level ten. Beth walked forward and starting rapidly punching, not needing any skill or ability other than her natural stats. She killed the hundred goblins within a minute or less, mainly taking more than a few seconds as she had to get to all of them, which was messy. As soon as she killed the last goblin, a screen popped up in front of her, something the tower was projecting, congratulating her for her clear speed and rewarding her a few copper coins. Beth dismissed the screen and moved to a doorway that had appeared in the opposite wall from where she entered. The door didn't lead to a stairwell but simply led directly to the next floor, no walking or even elevator wait required.

  The next floor was basically the same, except it was a hundred level twelve spiders, or some type of spider-like beast with agile legs and venom dripping from its fangs. Beth had dealt with the sort a time or two before and wasn't really bothered, or challenged, killing the hundred in a minute or so. The main problem was getting to all the beasts and wading through the piles of corpses, though she could get that done through sheer force still. She was given a paltry reward that wasn't even worth the mention, and then the door to floor three appeared. Beth had a pretty good idea of what most of the first hundred floors were going to be now, so she decided to kick it up into high gear.

  She ran through the floors after that, quite literally, sprinting to the next door, running through floor three and killing everything as she did, running into the door for floor four immediately, and so on. She kept that pace up for quite a while, rolling through floor after floor, not at all impressed with the challenge, even when the beasts hit level fifty and were stronger variants. She breezed through everything thrown at her for forty or fifty floors until she hit the first floor that was anything unusual, being a room with an elaborate system of pulleys and levers embedded in the walls. It was a kind of puzzle where she had to make a sequence of signals travel in a proper order, but it was certainly not a challenging one, designed so that anyone with a little bit of novice problem-solving capability could handle it. She went back to the slaughter after that floor, tearing through another ten or so floors very quickly.

  She hit a snag when she hit a floor that was a maze, finding no good way to solve it without just knocking her head against it for an hour. She had tried using her mana sensing skill, tried just breaking through the walls, and even a couple other little gimmicks. None of them had worked, and she was forced to just run around and solve the level which, while not really difficult at all, was time consuming and just a bit boring. There weren't even any interesting beasts or monsters to fight, just a floor that had been stretched out to a massive size. She couldn't even Spatial Step, as that was one of the tricks she tried only to find teleporting had been disabled on the floor. She assumed that these early floors were some indication of what the later floors were like, just much easier versions to get the people challenging the tower prepared for what was coming up.

  A handful of hours, and several tedious puzzle and challenge floors later, she hit floor one hundred, which is when she realized they didn't have any idea how to meet up. She tried her communicator, but that didn't work within the tower, at least not sending and receiving transmissions. She realized what that meant, but she hemmed and hawed for a while before finally leaving the tower, showing up right in front of the two guards, the same two that were there earlier that day. They both gave her a bit of a side-eye but didn't say anything when she didn't try to re-enter the tower. She moved over to the side and out from the tower a bit, across from where the Bedouin had set up their camp, deploying the airship and hopping onboard. When the others came out, they could very easily recognize the ship and also hop on board.

  She wasn't really tired, so she didn't hit the sack, just moved up to the bridge and started reading through more Mana Physique materials. Their next two priorities were combined resistances and Mana Physiques. At least, she and Blood were working on combined resistance stuff, while only she was so concerned with her Mana Physique, though she knew Sera knew a decent bit about Mana Physiques from her upbringing. Her current book went into laborious detail about how to form the runes or mana patterns used to create the most basic building blocks of the Mana Physique, something she would need to have a great understanding of for upcoming Mana Physique construction attempts.

  The others all came to the same conclusion she had, though at various times, trickling out of the tower one at a time. Neph was the first, as she was able to do the first hundred floors without too much trouble, but immediately stopped there as the floors right after one hundred were quite a bit more difficult. Blood and Val were out next, at almost the same time, and Beth joked that Val came out so quickly because she was so used to playing chaperone that it was her instinct at this point. She was out early and ready to handle any issues or shepherd the rest of the team, but she wasn't used to a team that was extremely functional and highly independent. Bjorn, Kris, and Andrea all came out next, in that order, all having moved up at least a handful of floors above one hundred before exiting the tower. Sera came out after those three, having pushed up pretty far and pretty fast before deciding that it was time to regroup. Veren, of course, was the last out, and he had pushed very, very far up compared to everyone else.

  "Did you enjoy yourself?" Beth asked him when he finally joined them on the bridge, late into the night.

  "It was rather boring," he said with a shrug.

  "You're such a punk," Beth said, exasperated.

  "What floor did you go to, anyway?" Sera asked.

  "I stopped at floor two hundred," he said calmly.

  "You went all the way to two hundred?!" Andrea exclaimed.

  "It was not very difficult," he replied. "The floors after one hundred weren't much more challenging than those early tutorial floors. The difficulty changes again fairly drastically at two hundred, but it wasn't anything that could challenge me. If you don't have a weaponskill at Master, you will likely struggle after two hundred, and the guards did say that two hundred fifty was another jump. I did not push that far, but even I would be cautious if the difficulty really jumps by that much again. I would not push past floor two hundred fifty without Grandmaster in a weaponskill or a Mana Physique or both, depending on your stats and other skills."

  "So, I think the rest of us can push to floor two hundred without much problem, other than Neph. We'll have to get her some more time leveling and pushed through her first rebirth before she climbs much more of the tower," Beth said.

  "I think pushing it to floor two hundred is fine for now," Bjorn said. "We know which destination your world is in the CRA network now. We can jump back here even if you're busy with something and climb floors if we grow a lot stronger."

  "Okay, let's rest up first and then see about clearing some more floors," Beth said, indicating for the group to be about their business. The airship had plenty of rooms for them to stay in, especially since there were more than one couple onboard, meaning even less occupied rooms.

  Beth and Sera retreated to the captain's cabin on the bridge level while the rest took cabins where they wanted. They had all been on the ship before, other than Neph, so most of them took cabins they were used to. Val wound up in Blood's cabin, somehow, and Kris was in Bjorn’s, though Beth didn't pry into who went where. Veren meditated for part of the night before disappearing somewhere, Beth only figuring out he had left when she checked the logs the next morning. He hadn't entered the tower, either, so he had likely grown bored and decided to leave. Beth just rolled her eyes, slightly exasperated, but Veren had that kind of asshole personality and she was just surprised that he had even shown up when she had gotten the group together in the first place.