The Tower of Infinite Evil [A LitRPG Horror Comedy]

Useless Coward

The creature did not leave for twenty minutes. As I kept repeating the chant for the spell over and over again, all my focus on the sigil I was nauseated and tired in a way I had never been before in my life. Each time the spell took something out of me, and it was neither stamina nor exhaustion, but a secret third thing. Finally the banging stopped, I heard footsteps moving away, and I collapsed to the floor. I was soaked in cold sweat and my head was swimming. I kept focusing on the spell sigil, because somewhere deep within I understood that if I stopped I would have to think of other things. Without even really thinking about it, my hands went to the notebook and my character sheet now said:

Alex Vorhal
Useless Human Coward, Level 2
Abilities: Run Screaming, [choice available]
Capacity: Power 2* Resilience 3* Mind 4*

Notable Skills:
Spreadsheet Management Level 6
Game Master (Tabletop Role Playing Games) 4
Mixology 2

Notable Spells:
Seal Door 2

Traits and Features:
General Anxiety Disorder (Mild)
Trauma

"Fuck you," I said out loud. That's when I started crying. Unlike what I had feared, it hadn't all been for nothing. It had, in fact, made me worse.

Not daring to move away from the door, I had few other things to distract me but to keep reading the notebook.

Detailed Attributes:

Your detailed attributes are: Power: Strength 1, Agility 1, Intensity 1; Resilience: Stamina 1, Willpower 2, Self-Esteem 0; Mind: Knowledge 2, Arcana 0, Enlightenment 2

You have one unspent attribute point. Mark the attribute you want to increase.

Later, I thought.

My skills hadn't changed, but there was a new section in the notebook- appearing between two pages where there had been nothing before.

Spellbook:
Seal Door- Tier 1, Rank 2

This spell seals any intact door turning it into a magically impenetrable barrier with a touch of your hand. Non-magical weapons or attacks cannot break a door thus sealed. Furthermore, the wall adjacent to the door also becomes indestructible. Ends when struck by a disruptive magical weapon, any higher level dispelling magic. The door remains sealed for 10 x Arcane minutes after the hand has been removed.

Rank increased, choice pending!

Choice timer timed out, Lingering Seal Door picked automatically

Requirements to upgrade the spell to Rank 3:
Use the spell to trap a creature higher level than you into a trap that kills it 0/1

Fuck. I had missed the chance to pick whatever the upgrade option was, but it now claimed to keep the door sealed for a little while after I left it. I didn't dare. Not yet.

Traits and Features:

Trauma: you have experienced something too terrifying for your simple mind to bear. Some people learn to grow stronger from overcoming their trauma. You are probably headed for PTSD. If you come face to face with the source of your trauma again, there is a 50% chance that you will be completely unable to act. If you don't, it'll haunt you for the rest of your life. It sucks to be you.

Title:

Useless: You have shown a complete lack of ability in overcoming danger or protecting your allies. You are likely doomed to die here, so why don't you just get it over with? You cannot earn exp from performing useless activities, so you will not gain experience from this title. You are as good as classless, so you retain your Novice Recovery ability.

Class:
Coward: When push came to shove you freaked out and ran, leaving your comrades to die. Nobody would ever want to rely on you and if you do not change your class by the time there are 24 hours remaining in the challenge, you will be stuck with it for the rest of your life. So, survive at the expense of others. That's what you're good at, isn't it? You gain the 'run screaming' ability. You will gain experience from performing cowardly activities.

Run Screaming: When you move in a direction directly away from enemies aware of you, your movement speed is doubled.

Log:
You have discovered Library #4; gain 1 exp
You have successfully cast your first spell; gain 1 exp
You have survived an encounter with Spike Gremlin; gain 1 exp
Your title has changed to Useless
You have gained a class- Coward; gain 1 exp
You have gained 10 experience points. Go up a level. Experience points required for level 3: 0.1/25
You have gained enough skill experience to raise your skill Spellcasting to 1

Level Up!
1 Attribute point available
1 Class Ability available
Coward Class unlocked, Agility increased by 1

Abilities:

You have gained a level and have access to one of the following abilities. Circle your choice.

Dirty coward: When you betray your allies out of fear, you gain experience as if you had solved the problem causing the fear. Fleeing from a monster and leaving your friends to die would, for example, grant you the same experience as killing the monster.

Run and Hide: When you are out of direct line of perception of monsters, monsters will not enter a room you are in unless they are intentionally looking for you. Your skill in Stealth increases more quickly when you hide without intention to ambush or spy.

Lickspittle: When an intelligent enemy creature has a chance to kill you, there is a 25% chance that they will make you their servant instead.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I kept thinking of things I had said to those kids. That they probably weren't in real danger. That the monsters wouldn't be that deadly. I bet that was what they were thinking about as they died too. About how much of a fucking liar I was. Maybe if I had jumped in front of the gremlin Clara would have had a chance to escape. Fuck, what was I even doing. I was work-from-home data entry clerk. I had no business giving fucking advice to people in life-or death danger. I was sure I was in no condition to be making choices, but the abilities at least seemed easy enough. I didn't care enough about my own survival to pick the first or last at this point, so, with a pencil, I checked the box next to "Run and Hide", and felt a slight tingling come over my body.

Attributes were a little harder. Process of elimination- because of my hat I would gain nothing from putting a point in arcana. I wanted to raise it higher eventually if I lived, but I needed something to help me survive right now. I didn't deserve a point in self-esteem. Knowledge and enlightenment were high enough, though probably necessary in the long run. I didn't really think punching harder would get me anything, and I guessed that intensity was related to offensive magic, which I didn't have. It was really down to Willpower, Agility and Stamina for my purposes and all three had appeal.

I now had abilities related to running and hiding, and I was sure that agility would help with that. Stamina would maybe let me take a hit from a monster. Not like the spike gremlin, but I was still hopeful that it wasn't a standard monster for this place. I hoped that willpower would let me be less afraid, and so maybe let me get rid of the fucking Coward class sooner.

That was really it. If I wanted to advance I needed to get over my fear and despair. There was only one pick if I wanted to keep going. Agility or Stamina would probably be better at keeping me alive. But at this point I could barely wish to survive. I could only hope that Willpower could fix that. I took one of my pencils and I marked a dot next to Willpower. The pencil mark dissolved into the page, and the number next to my willpower attribute changed from two to three.

The result kind of freaked me out. As soon as I checked the mark next to "Willpower" and it went from two to three, I… felt better. Or, that wasn't really it. I didn't feel better, I felt stronger, more able to face the nightmare I was in. It had fundamentally changed my mind. But since it was for the better, I had to accept it. Could I only choose to accept it because my willpower had increased, making me more determined? Fuck that line of thought. I was in a library in a magical tower. If I had any chance of getting out of here alive, I would find it here. I had stopped trembling and crying. I stood, took a deep breath, and went exploring.

The room I found myself in looked like no school library I had ever been to. It did have the plain plastic and metal bookcases and an empty front desk. But it was only themed as a school library- the books were thick, old and many. This was the largest room I had been in so far in the Tower, larger even than the cafeteria, and that wasn't counting the fact that it was built on two floors, with a staircase leading up.

I didn't really know how changing classes and titles worked, but I needed to do both. I had managed to change my title once, from Nosy to Useless, and it felt like it was a significant change. On the other hand, it had all happened within the first three hours in the Tower. I liked books, but I didn't know if I was in a place where I could read. Maybe, somewhere in the stacks there was a fireball spell that would let me blast through enemies in this first challenge, but there were literally miles of shelving here. Still, I was in a library, I should at least check a few titles to see what I could find here. Any knowledge of the world I was in right now would be helpful. Knowledge really was power, I had seen it many times in my life, but it is hard to be excited about that sort of power when the power that your enemy has is bone spikes.

I shuddered at the thought of the spike gremlin, and I remembered my fatal mistake in the cafeteria. I decided that I would search the entirety of the library before I did anything else. If there was a monster hiding among the stacks I would like to at least know that it was here. Nausea came over me in waves and I still couldn't stop sweating, even though I was quite warm. I was not right. There was no way but forward.

Around each corner of the library, opening each container I nearly panicked. Every time I felt relief that there were no monsters here, and every time I had to gather determination to keep moving forward. It took hours to carefully walk and check every corner, and by the time I was done my imagination had provided the thought of some clever monster, circling around me, always moving to the next shelf as I examined one.

I decided I won't beat the coward allegations by getting stuck in a searching loop out of fear, so I decided I would pretend that I was safe for now. I looked over several titles, but none of them spoke of anything I recognized. I kept walking for a bit, and, huh. There was a book from Earth. It was some sort of a philosophy textbook about Plato's Cave. It seemed out of place among the alien authors of the others. I had a vague memory of the meaning of it, something about how people who only knew the world as shadowy shapes on a wall of a cave could leave, they would have no way to understand the real world.

But I wasn't here to half-remember drunk conversations with first year Philosophy majors from a decade ago. I wanted to know more about this world. I grabbed three books at random, and found that I could read them. It wasn't so strange, I had understood a lot of text in the Tower, so it would make sense if I could read the books, but it seemed more strange to read books about the historical implications of a war between two kingdoms that I knew for a fact did not exist. Apparently the Empire of Azar was still mighty, but in decline, and a guerrilla war enabled by elven illusionists of the Duchy of Corallean eventually led to the secession of a multi-species state, which even developed some sort of a democracy. Which was interesting, but useless, with the exception of my first update since my level-up.

Log
Progress in skill 'History' 1.25/10

I could even see it coming in useful if I managed to survive here for months or years, but I was only thinking about the next few hours. As far as I was concerned, the world would end 24 hours before the end of the challenge, where I would forever be stuck with the useless Coward class. I didn't want it. Sure, the abilities were actually useful, and maybe some of it was my pride, but the idea of progressing on the path of cowardice seemed like the dumbest possible thing I could do.

I bet if I managed to be, like, a wizard, it would also be much easier to get rid of the 'useless' tag. I quickly leafed through the other books, but as they were neither manuals of sword-fighting nor spell-books, I went back to the front desk. I thought I would write down what I had learned about this world and try to make a plan based on it, but as I was climbing down the stairs from the second floor, I heard a book fall from a shelf behind me. I had just been thinking about how I didn't want to be a coward, and so I turned and went back looking.

I peered down the row, and I saw a book on the floor. It was the history book I had been reading a minute ago, and I had left it a few rows down. There was definitely someone or something else in the library with me. I moved as quietly as I could, and down the rows, and I heard another noise- like a cup or a plate falling. What the hell? It had come from behind me again, in one of the shelves that I had explored before. I slowly turned around. My instincts told me that this wasn't a case of something stalking me, readying an ambush. My instincts had done me fuck-all good so far, but it just didn't feel like I had any reason to run or hide, so I tried to walk back. The same sort of pattern repeated. I heard a noise, went to check it out and found a grease and sauce covered plate shattered on the floor, and a few moments later heard the sound of a stack of papers falling from a height behind me. Just about as far back behind me as before. It was like I was swapping places with something or someone.

The pattern repeated once more before I decided I needed to come up with a plan. I was getting quite frustrated and tired, so the 'plan' I came up with was little more than lashing out. I heard the noise behind me again- a cymbal falling on to the floor, making a continuous, slowly decreasing noise- and I turned to the shelf whose direction the sound had come from, and I pushed as hard as I could. The shelves weren't bolted down, so even I could start a cascade. As the shelves began falling like dominoes, I heard a yelp- high pitched, but somehow gravelly. I looked directly at where it came from and a strange creature jumped out of the rows before getting crushed by books. He- I assumed- barely came up to my knees, had blood-red skin and two ram's horns. He was wearing the top of a tuxedo, which was barely holding on over his significant pot-belly. He also wore slacks, but these were ripped apart around where I'd expect his knees to be, to give space to the backwards-bending goat feet that he was standing on.

"Don't kill me, I'm familiar class," he screeched.