Tutorial #1

The anchor on the screen rattled on, an uneasy look plastered across her face.

"Withdraw the mandatory Basic Combat Subject!"

"Withdraw it! Withdraw it! Withdraw it!"

"If they add a subject like that, when exactly are our kids supposed to study?!"

"You're telling me children who should be holding pens have to pick up blades and practice killing instead?! Have you lost your minds?!"

Countless people, refusing to accept the government's decision, spewed their hatred. Watching the news, I had exactly one thought.

"What a bunch of batshit lunatics!"

This one, that one—nothing but worthless bastards as far as the eye could see. The world had warped into this sorry state, and teaching children to fight in self-defense was the inevitable, obvious thing to do. That anyone could oppose it left me unable to fathom what was wrong with their heads. And what I understood even less was that there were so damned many of them out there protesting like this.

"Shut your damn mouth!"

Even so, this world still had a few people with their sanity bolted on straight, same as me.

"To hell with studying—kids are dying out there!"

"Do you have any idea how many children dragged into the Tutorial have died?!"

"Learning how to fight is how you stay alive!"

Upstanding citizens with clubs in hand stormed the scene and set about beating the crowd calling for the Basic Combat Subject's repeal. Screams erupted on the spot, and the protest site transformed into a vision of pure pandemonium.

"AAAAAAGH!"

"S-Stop them!"

"Somebody do somethiiiing!"

"My head's cracking opennnn!"

If this wasn't hell, then what on earth was?

The screen cut away.

Not a single young face stood among the union members shrieking all of that.

"Since when were you lot even students?!"

"We're the ones who want to learn, I said! Us!"

"If we don't put those bastards in their place, we're the ones who end up dead!"

The ones charging back at the student union were kids in school uniforms. They looked possessed by rage, but in truth it was the fear of death that drove them.

"The only ones making that criticism are the Chinese and North Korean bastards!"

"Even little children get yanked into the Tutorial without warning—so why on earth would ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you block the Basic Combat Subject?!"

"Who's paying you off, huh?! China? North Korea?!"

A vicious war of words raged back and forth.

"Even so, we cannot turn children who should be holding pens into child soldiers, can we?"

"Then what about the kids being dragged into the Tutorial?!"

"That's something the children will navigate wisely on their own—"

"Watch your mouth, you son of a bitch! Let one of those kids die in the Tutorial, and I'll carve up your entire family!"

"Language! Language! Can you not keep the barest minimum of decency?! You piece of trash—how dare you threaten a professor!"

The professor jabbed a finger at the man issuing threats and kept bellowing, and then the screen cut to another segment.

I turned off the news.

"Are we seriously watching this country go under?"

Great empires always crumble from schisms within. Maybe the day the Republic of Korea truly fell was already upon us. Of course, whether it fell or not, those of us who meant to live still had to live.

"Let's get started."

I took my reinforced plastic training sword in hand and began.

—Whack!

I swung at an imaginary opponent, stepping in and out to control the distance, and repeated the drill for several minutes straight.

"Hoo... hoo..."

This was a world where anyone could be dragged into the Tutorial without a moment's notice. The odds of awakening as a Climber were slim to begin with, but if you trained ahead of time in your daily life, you gave yourself a fighting chance when the worst actually happened. Every single month, people were ejected from the Tutorial as corpses. The Tutorial made no distinction between man or woman, young or old. I had no intention of becoming a corpse that pointlessly.

"Oof, exhausting."

Once combat training and conditioning were done, I logged into the Tower communities and combed through the latest intel.

Granted, the information released to ordinary civilians like me—non-Climbers—amounted to little more than tabloid scraps and stale old news, but keeping up with it was still a must.

After a quick skim, I went back and read the Tutorial briefings thoroughly, line by line.

Though he never said it outright, the man who had written that post was a high-level Warrior I deeply respected, a man whose name carried tremendous weight in the community.

The Tutorial intel itself was well organized like this, and the government had even issued a directive ordering everyone to memorize it and prepare accordingly.

Training every single day and simulating the Tutorial so that I could survive no matter when I was dropped in—that was my routine. I was constantly thinking about what I'd do if I got pulled into it, how I'd live as a Climber if I became one. Such were the times.

"Hm?"

I was mid-scroll through the community when a post I absolutely could not scroll past appeared and snatched up my gaze.

A post by that very same high-level Warrior I'd mentioned before—the man I respected!

Had something changed in the tier list? His information was accurate, high-quality, and rock-solid dependable. I had to check it, no question about it. Skill cards spat out skills at random, so a newly discovered skill could shift a class's tier—and no doubt he'd caught wind of it before anyone else and shared it with the community.

As it turned out, the class tiers hadn't budged an inch.

"If I ever do awaken, please, let it at least be Tier 2."

You needed a Tier 2 class or better to climb in earnest. Tier 3 wasn't unworkable, but it made everything harder in one way or another. And Tier 4? That was just absurd. The Martial Artist couldn't even equip weapons, for crying out loud. How did a garbage class this far beyond the bounds of imagination even exist? Its very existence was a mystery—whenever something went wrong, it had apparently gone very, very wrong. The fact that "Martial Artist" counted as a profession at all simply refused to compute. Anyone in this world with empty hands was technically a Martial Artist already, so didn't that make me one, too?

Anyway. If you went through the trouble of awakening only to land a Tier 4 job, the tears would be very real. Honestly, compared to the Martial Artist, the Elementalist, Druid, and Blood Knight had it easy—those three could stand to be bumped up to Tier 3, frankly.

Still, Tier 4 Martial Artist or whatever else, a Climber's income was decent enough that you'd at least live in comfort.

"But that's not what I'm after."

I—

hated the Tower.

—Thump, thump.

Animosity bloomed from somewhere deep in my chest. My heartbeat quickened along with it, and a destructive urge swelled inside me—the impulse to smash everything in sight, like a psychopath stripped of all feeling.

The Tower had taken everything from me.

It had appeared out of nowhere back when I was serving in the military. Its arrival alone was a catastrophe, and the monsters came pouring out alongside it. As a soldier, I was carrying out defensive operations when... something hit me, and I dropped into a coma.

That's why I had no memory of the years that followed. By the time I came to, several years had already gone by and the catastrophe was over. I'd woken up in a world where the Tower and Climbers had been absorbed into everyday life.

The chaos had been brought under control. But my family wasn't there. They'd been caught in a monster wave and killed. I open my eyes, and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠years have vanished overnight. My family—all of them, dead.

I couldn't shoulder that loss, and I drifted for a long while afterward. No—who was I fooling? Maybe I was still drifting now. Hatred was the fuel that kept my life running.

"GRAAAAAAAAGH!"

The Two Minutes Hate.

George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 features a concept called the Two Minutes Hate: for roughly two minutes, you vent violent hatred toward the enemy—a mandatory ritual that hardens your ideology into armor.

Taking a page from that book, I spent two full minutes jabbing my finger in every direction, screaming at the top of my lungs and heaping bitter curses on the Tower, wringing out my hatred until it felt clean.

"Time for work."

I slipped on my shoes. Blowing off steam before the morning shift was part of my routine, too. With that under my belt, I could gut out the misery of labor on pure fighting spirit. Well—a man's gotta eat. Even an avenging ghost has to eat.

—Creeeak.

And in that exact moment, just as I opened the door to step outside—

—Ding!

"Huh...?"

An alarm chimed right beside my ear.

I had awakened.