A Common Story
It was a common story.
A house steeped in poverty. A father pickled in alcohol. A mother drained of all will. And a young brother and sister who had endured abuse under the twin names of violence and neglect.
The setup was worn thin—used to death in movies, dramas, novels, and comics.
Park Ji-hoo was no different.
For as long as he could remember, he had lived inside that hell. Even so, there was one thing he refused to surrender.
"Where's Si-yeon?"
He would protect his little sister, Park Si-yeon. He wanted her to grow up bright and whole, untouched by the filthy, ugly darkness of adults. So he had tried. Even if it cost him everything, he would keep their hands off her.
His father's brutal beatings. His mother's razor-edged venom. He had taken it all alone.
Until a month ago.
"What the fuck are you glaring at, you little shit?"
The violence that had been aimed at their mother changed course. Thick, calloused palms rose high as the man strode forward. Ji-hoo had been slapped by those hands more times than he could count. For a boy left small and scrawny by constant hunger, a palm hardened by a lifetime of hard labor was as good as a weapon. One clean hit split lips, rattled skulls, and dropped him into darkness.
Whoooosh—!
The palm carved through the air and burned itself into his eyes. Violence he had never once thought to dodge or block.
But things were different now.
Inside the Tower, his father would barely scrape Level 1. That attack was less threatening than a red goblin's sneeze. Ji-hoo stepped back on pure reflex.
Whoooom—!
The palm skimmed past the tip of his nose and cut empty air.
"You little bastard—dodging?"
Of course the man never saw it coming. Until now Ji-hoo had been a pathetic worm who never fought back—eyes full of poison, sure, but one hit and he would just curl up and groan. That Ji-hoo was gone.
I can see it.
The weak, timid boy no longer existed. The one standing tall in front of the same old violence was a Level 30 player. Someone who could crush a man like his father with a single finger.
"Last time I'm asking, so think carefully before you move. Where is Si-yeon?"
The voice was heavy enough to choke the room. Maybe it was the sheer wrongness of it, or the complete change in his son's presence—either way, the father only rolled his eyes and couldn't make himself step forward.
"Not going to answer, huh?"
Woom— woooom—.
Mana condensed in Ji-hoo's clenched fist, dense enough that a normal person would have flesh and bone torn apart by the mere touch. His father had no idea what it was, but instinct screamed danger.
"Th-the hospital! She's in the hospital!"
Ji-hoo had been ready to break at least one arm. He froze.
"…Hospital?"
"After you ran away there was… an accident."
An accident? What kind of accident?
"She was out late looking for you and ran into some bad guys, and…"
Ji-hoo's eyes went cold. He could guess exactly what kind of scum they had been.
"And? What did you do?"
"W-we settled it, put her in the hospital, she's getting treatment n-now."
"Settled it?"
He didn't need the details. That piece-of-shit father had taken the settlement money and blown every last coin on booze and gambling, the way he always had.
Ji-hoo's freezing gaze swept over the trembling man and the mother who kept her mouth clamped shut.
Mother.
For some people the word was warm, precious. For Park Ji-hoo it meant nothing of the sort. Perfect stranger. No better description existed.
He stared at both of them with eyes like ice, then turned away.
He wanted to kill them. If he followed the urge he would beat them, and beat them, and beat them until the rage finally ran dry and they stopped moving. But he couldn't. Whatever else they were, they had given birth to him and Si-yeon. He had no desire to live the rest of his life carrying the crime called patricide.
So this was where it ended. Before, it had been impossible. Now it was necessary—for the sake of the one little sister he had left.
He walked. There was only one hospital near this godforsaken neighborhood worth admitting anyone to; he didn't need to ask.
No curses followed him. No grasping shouts. Only two pairs of eyes boring into his back as if they wanted him dead.
Let's never see each other again.
And just like that, Park Ji-hoo cut every last thread tying him to them.
"Sia!"
The heavy iron gate swung open, and there she was—the face Lee Sia had ached to see.
"Mom!"
Eyes already swimming, Sia sprinted barefoot toward the woman rushing out of the house.
"Sia— blegh!"
Her mother gagged. The stench and the state of her clothes were to blame. Even so the woman never stopped. She closed the distance and finally pulled her daughter into her arms.
"Where on earth have you— ugh! You're finally home— bleaargh!"
The constant retching at the end of every sentence made it painfully clear just how wrecked Sia looked.
"Mom…"
Tears rolled down Sia's cheeks as she felt her mother's warmth. Family she had thought she would never see again. The comfort was almost too much, and under it lay a sharp stab of self-loathing at the condition she was in.
"Can I wash up first? I'll tell you everything after."
A whole month. That was how long Sia had been missing. Her mother looked ready to demand every detail this second. Still she nodded.
"Yes! Go wash! Then you can tell me— blegh! Tell me everything."
Relief, grief, anger, and patience all warred across her face as she agreed. Face crumpled with tears, Sia stepped back into the house she hadn't seen in a month.
Shhhhhhhhh—!
How long had it been since she tasted modern civilization? Hot water cascading from the showerhead melted every muscle in her body.
I'll probably lose two kilos just from this.
Monster scabs and bits of flesh that had hardened against her skin like a second hide peeled away, and she felt lighter, as if she were molting. Ten minutes. Thirty. A full hour of scrubbing before she finally felt clean.
"Next time I come out, I'm washing first."
She vowed not to make the same mistake twice and dried herself with a soft towel. When she opened the bathroom door her mother was waiting, clothes in hand, fretting.
"Mom!"
She hugged her again. The rotting stench was gone, replaced by the mild scent of shampoo. Only then did her mother cry in earnest and hold her daughter tight.
"Where were you?! Do you have any idea how hard your father and I searched for you? And look at the state you were in!"
She scolded at full volume, but every word was pure worry.
"Yeah, well…"
Sia hesitated over how to begin. Explaining the Tower was never going to be easy. She would be lucky if her mother didn't just call her crazy. But she couldn't brush it off either. She only had a week. After that she had to go back. If she wanted to prepare for that moment, her family needed the truth.
No choice.
Believe it or not—she would leave that entirely to her mother.
"What happened is…"
Sia started talking. The Tower. The Tutorial floors. Terra. Monsters. She softened every edge she could. Tell the unfiltered truth of what she had lived through and her fragile mother would drop from a heart attack on the spot. So she kept it to "a little rough, but not really dangerous." That was the version that might let her mother breathe.
Of course, the second she heard the part about being forcibly summoned, her mother's face drained of all color.
"Th-that's really true?"
Her mother stammered, expression complicated.
She's suspicious… but she doesn't look like she's listening to pure nonsense either.
"You went into that tower and came back out?"
"…That tower?"
Something in the way she said it suggested her mother already knew the Tower existed.
"You know about it too?"
Sia's eyes went round. Her mother nodded hard.
"You wouldn't know, but the whole world is upside down because of that black tower you just described."
She pulled out her smartphone, opened MeTube, and started a video.
Namsan. Where the landmark Namsan Tower should have stood, a black tower rose instead—so tall its peak vanished from sight.
"These things just appeared all over the world the day you disappeared."
Sia couldn't speak. Now that she thought about it, plenty of the players she had met on the first floor had been Black or White—far more of them than Asians, actually. Proof enough that the summons weren't limited to Korea. Most of them had probably been taken from countries where one of those towers had appeared.
Must be pure chaos out there.
Not one or two people—tens of thousands vanishing at once. Against the global population the number was tiny, but the method was so bizarre that every government had to be tearing itself apart trying to connect the towers and the missing.
I need to keep my head down.
She and Park Ji-hoo—and that damn monster—were almost certainly the first ones ever to leave the Tower. The moment that fact came out, every nation on earth would scramble to grab them for questioning. She refused to waste her single week of freedom on interrogations.
They absolutely cannot find out.
She would have to drill it into her mother too: never breathe a word that her daughter had been inside the Tower.
She opened her mouth to say exactly that—
"Oh my? What's this?"
The MeTube video ended and another auto-played. A news channel's live stream. The feed showed chaos near Namsan.
"Is that… a person?"
Her mother pointed at a ragged figure in a tracksuit tearing through soldiers. Speed and strength no human should possess, a single blade turning modern weapons and armed troops into a storm of broken bodies.
Sia knew that style far too well.
"…No way."
She focused, hoping she was wrong. Then certainty hit.
That lunatic was exactly the lunatic she thought he was.
A man who went berserk inside the Tower was hardly going to behave outside it.
"…Seong Yujin."
Crunch—.
While she had just finished deciding to stay careful, that crazy bastard was out there openly starting a riot. Instinct told her the quiet, free week she had hoped for was already gone. The second she got tangled up with him, any chance of an ordinary life vanished.
"Aigoo, that fucking guy."
The curse slipped out so naturally that her mother could only stare, dumbfounded.