Tower Climber (A LitRPG Adventure, Book 1) by Jakob Tanner (free children's online books TXT) 📕

Max checked the publication date and it was 2063. The book was over two decades old.

He looked at the author. Esther Hupple. Never heard of her before. He guessed the T.C. at the end of her name stood for tower climber.

Max started the book and it was much more fascinating than the others. Rem was a merchant from a much higher floor, who’d made his business collecting abundant goods and commodities on one floor and then trading those commodities to other floors where such commodities were rare. That was his main business, but he also was fascinated by hunting for treasure throughout the tower.

“After many years of travelling and exploring the different floors of the tower, I’ve come to the conclusion that the rarest most unique treasures and finds are not only hidden extremely well. They’re hidden in clever places. In places you’d pass by, not even considering it might be a place to look...”

Max kept reading eagerly. His eyes bulged with excitement as he read more details from Rem.

He reopened the map book from earlier and started cross-referencing the two books.

He smiled.

He found exactly what he was hoping to find.

He’d found his nugget of gold.

45

Max had a plan now. A way to get more powerful and quickly too. But even still, he wasn’t ready just yet.

He needed to prepare. He also needed supplies. And for supplies, he needed money.

The day after his trip to the library, he headed up the tower to floor-2 to train and collect as much money as possible.

Once in the throngs of the endless forest, he decided to get to work. Sakura had explained to him that he needed to be as efficient as possible. As an unranked climber, he could use his trait consecutively three times at an overall total of six times per day. So he had to slay as many monsters and in as few moves as possible.

He explored the woodlands until he eventually found a group of four forest mules.

Perfect target, he thought.

He snuck up behind them and then placed his hands on the ground.

It was time to trigger his trait.

The ground rumbled beneath him.

Max was now able to create awesome earthquakes courtesy of the rock golem he’d fought in the underground arena.

The D-rank ability rippled across the ground, tearing it apart and sending shards of stone into the flesh of the forest mules.

They screamed.

One mule escaped into the shadows of the forest. The rest were too close to dying or crippled to move further on.

A few moments later, Max was staring at three copper monster cores and a bunch of coins. He bent over and scooped them all up and dropped them into his pouch at his side.

Three out of four mules in one attack wasn’t bad, he thought to himself. If only there was a way to get more within the radius of my earthquake attack.

He thought about strategies employed in a lot of online video games. There was one game called Arcane Guild Land that the other orphans had loved and fought over to play on the one computer they had available in the group home. The game had all sorts of rules, hybrid classes, and a species of cat people who liked to get drunk a lot.

A lot of the game was all about leveling up your character and there were a lot of strategies on how to do this. Farming for experience points was what it was called.

Max’s memory of the kids playing the game, gave him an idea.

He started picking up random stones and filling his pockets with them.

Next, he went and found a group of forest boars.

He whipped a stone at them.

CLUNK!

The stone hit the forest boar right between its eyes.

The boars already had naturally angry-looking faces to begin with, but now they looked super pissed off.

They charged at Max.

Exactly as I hoped, he thought.

He started running with the monsters chasing behind him.

He sprinted away until he bumped into another crowd of forest boars.

Max threw a scattershot of stones at them and soon enough he had a stampede chasing after him.

He led the small horde of monsters right into a group of peaceful forest mules.

Max swerved around and planted his hands on the ground.

If this doesn’t work I’ve got twelve angry monsters about to devour me.

He triggered his trait.

The ground rumbled and shards rippled through the monster mob. Blood splashed onto the nearby trees.

Two mules ran off and one boar chased after the easy prey, but other than that all of them had been hit.

Copper-level monsters didn’t stand much of a chance against his move. While Max didn’t know the exact stats of the earthquake attack, the fact that it was a D-rank ability meant that the ability’s strength was anywhere between 31 to 50 and that was strong enough to rip through the flesh of weak E-ranked monsters, even some D-ranked monsters as well.

Max stood up and took in the destroyed ground and the nine copper monster cores laying in front of him. He snatched up the cores and coins.

Nearby, a tree had fallen over during his attack and the branches had snapped into pointy edges.

Max grinned.

He had to be as efficient as possible.

An hour later, a group of student climbers were practicing their squad tactics against a group of forest boars when they heard a huge rumbling sound.

They looked through the forest and saw a cloud of dust fill the woods while a stampede of boars rushed through the crowd.

“We better get out of here,” said one of the students. “That looks like enough monsters to be a monster wave!”

“I thought this floor was supposed to be easy,” cried another student.

“What’s happening!”

Max was either crazy or stupid.

Probably both.

He sprinted with all of his might as fifty forest boars chased after him.

He eventually arrived at a patch of dirt where an “X” had been drawn in the soil.

This was the spot.

As the mighty stampede of boars rushed towards him, he placed his hands on the ground and