The intermittent sound of scribbling echoed through the cream-white classroom of a private school, located in the city closest to the Great Tower. Outside the window, the faint chirping of birds was just enough to drift into the consciousness of a young woman with blonde hair and blue eyes that shimmered with a violet spark, reminiscent of cathedral stained glass. She sat with her chin resting lazily in her palm, elbow propped on the desk, her gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the glass pane — somewhere the birds were free to go and no one could call her back from.
"Hey! Freya! Where exactly is that mind of yours wandering?"
The stern voice of the teacher boomed across the room like a thunderclap. The surrounding students flinched and shot nervous glances sideways, some relieved it wasn't directed at them, others watching with the quiet anticipation of those who had witnessed this particular exchange many times before. Simultaneously, a piece of chalk infused with a green aura was hurled toward her with practiced precision. However, the moment it made contact with her body, it instantly disintegrated into nothingness — reduced to a fine mist of pale dust that dissolved before it could even settle on her uniform.
That aura was a reward the teacher had earned from the trial of a Mystery Box. A third-tier enhancement of kinetic force, if Freya recalled correctly from the academic file she had read out of mild curiosity two years ago. Impressive enough to shatter a brick wall. Against her, it was confetti.
"My apologies..." Freya uttered in a bored tone, the words carrying all the sincerity of a yawn, before turning her gaze back to the blackboard. The rest of the class exhaled collectively.
The blackboard was covered in dense sketches of the soaring tower, its silhouette rendered in thick chalk strokes and surrounded by a web of annotations, arrows, and cross-referenced explanations that the professor had clearly labored over. Freya scanned it in approximately four seconds and retained everything.
The summary of the text on the board was roughly this:
In 1957, ten years after the end of World War II, a colossal tower thrust itself out of the earth without warning, piercing the heavens like a needle through silk. The ground had not trembled beforehand. There had been no seismic readings, no prophetic whispers, no mythology that quite matched what emerged. It simply appeared — kilometers tall, its upper reaches vanishing into clouds that had not existed the day before. Multicolored boxes descended from the resulting rifts in the sky, drifting downward like leaves shaken loose from some impossible tree, and began seeking out those they would choose as owners. The selection criteria, if any existed, remained unknown to this day.
These boxes presented trials to those they chose. At the time, no one knew what was happening; they only knew that anyone who touched a box vanished instantly, as though swallowed by the air itself. Governments scrambled. Scientists were baffled. The religious called it rapture; the paranoid called it a weapon. Cordons were erected. Broadcasts warned civilians to stay away. None of it mattered, because the boxes did not ask for permission — they simply arrived at the doorsteps and windowsills and bedsides of whoever they had decided upon.
Soon after, hundreds of thousands of monsters surged from the tower's twenty-eight entrance gates in a tide that no military forecast had prepared for. They poured into cities and across plains and through mountain passes, bringing humanity to the brink of extinction within months. Even the most powerful weapons known to man — nuclear bombs detonated at the gates themselves — failed to eradicate them all. For every thousand that fell, ten thousand more pressed forward from the dark interiors of the tower, their bodies adapted to warfare in ways that suggested they had been waiting, patient and purposeful, for a very long time.
But a few months later, those who had been reported missing returned.
They came back different. They came back wielding special powers, supernatural weapons, and spirit beasts that walked beside them like shadows given form and loyalty. Their eyes carried the particular stillness of people who had seen something that permanently rearranged the architecture of the world inside them. They did not speak much about what lay within the trials. What mattered was what they could do now — and what they did was push back the monster hordes with a ferocity that finally matched the enemy's own.
From that turning point, the Tower Exploration Unit was established: a global organization dedicated to delving into the spire, pioneering new floors, cataloguing its inhabitants and geography, and ensuring the continued protection of the human race. It attracted the bold, the brilliant, the desperate, and the grief-stricken in equal measure.
Seventy-three years had passed since that day. Humanity had managed to push forward to the twenty-eighth floor. It might not sound like much — a number modest enough to be mistaken for modest progress — but each floor was as vast as an entire continent, with shifting climates, unpredictable terrains, and ecosystems that rewrote themselves between expeditions, demanding constant preparation and rendering old maps nearly useless. Surviving a single floor could take a decade. Truly understanding one could take a lifetime.
The difficulty of the higher floors bordered on the impossible. The twenty-seventh floor alone had claimed the lives of hundreds of high-level Welders — individuals who possessed no fewer than five boxes each, veterans who had survived trials that would have unmade ordinary people entirely. Their deaths had not been quiet. They had been catastrophic, the kind that sent shockwaves through the global Welder community and left entire units restructured overnight. This disaster had significantly slowed the exploration of the twenty-eighth floor, which now loomed at the edge of human reach like a door that no one was entirely sure they wanted to open.
"You're always like this," the teacher snapped, pulling Freya back into the present with a voice sharp enough to cut glass. "When are you ever going to be chosen by a box?" The irritation in his tone was genuine — not the theatrical frustration of a teacher performing discipline, but the particular exasperation of a man who could not reconcile what he saw in front of him with the category he had been trained to place it in.
Freya didn't care. She had sat through this version of the conversation enough times to know every beat of it by heart. She had no desire to become a "Welder." She lived a comfortable life outside the tower — a life with texture and warmth and people who expected her home for dinner — and she had zero intention of entering that impossible spire, even though she had read extensively about how floors one through five had been transformed into human settlements over the decades, places where people lived alongside the tower's intelligent races in arrangements that were, by some accounts, genuinely peaceful.
She knew the statistics. She knew the culture. She simply had no interest in belonging to it.
"I never said I wanted a box," Freya said, the words unhurried, as she began gathering the few items on her desk with the calm efficiency of someone who had already decided the conversation was over. She stood, the legs of her chair scraping softly against the tile. "It's dangerous. If you don't pass the trial, you just die." She said it plainly, not for effect, the way someone states that fire is hot — a fact so obvious it barely warranted the breath. "Besides," she added, slinging her bag over one shoulder and allowing herself the smallest ghost of a smile as she turned toward the door, "I'm already a 'problem child,' aren't I, Professor?"
With that, she strolled out of the room at a pace that suggested she had somewhere better to be, which she did. The door swung shut behind her with a soft, definitive click.
The teacher stood at the front of the room for a moment, chalk still in hand, the lesson half-written behind him. Then he exhaled — a long, slow release of breath that carried within it the accumulated weight of two years of identical exits — and turned back to the board.
There was nothing to be done. Everyone in the school knew it.
When exam day came, Freya always ranked first. Not by a narrow margin, not by the kind of lead that could be attributed to harder studying or better memorization, but by a distance that occasionally made the graders review the paper twice. She was a once-in-a-decade genius who had breezed through the simulated trials designed to replicate the cognitive and adaptive demands of the real boxes, scoring in ranges that the school's assessment rubric had not originally been built to accommodate. She had sat those simulations with the same expression she wore in class — somewhere between present and absent, like a musician listening to a piece of music playing only inside her head.
Yet, despite all of it, not a single box had ever chosen her. They drifted past her in the streets, past her window, past every place she happened to be standing, as though she emitted some frequency they could not register. This absence — inexplicable, unbroken across the entirety of her nineteen years — had earned her that ridiculous nickname among students and faculty alike: the "Problem Child." A genius the boxes ignored. A candidate the system could not process. An anomaly with perfect grades and no power to show for them, which, in a world that measured human worth largely by what a box had decided to give you, read to many people as a kind of failure.
But those words meant nothing to her. She did not lie awake measuring herself against the boxes' silence. She did not scan crowds looking for the ones who had been chosen and compare their trajectories to her own. She simply walked home through streets that smelled of early evening and warm pavement, past the bakery on the corner that always had the same radio station playing through its open window, and felt, in the unremarkable texture of that walk, something that most Welders she had read about seemed to spend their entire careers searching for inside the tower.
She just wanted her daily freedom. She wanted the particular quiet of her own thoughts. She wanted to spend her days with the family she loved — and if the boxes never came for her, then as far as Freya was concerned, she and the boxes were in perfect agreement.