Casey’s face paled. “That demons live there and other societies of races—similar to humans—but different and sometimes much more powerful. The higher you go the more dangerous it becomes. Do you think they’ll just send us to a floor and tell us to survive?”

Max shuddered. “I hope they give us more direction than that, but if that is what happens, we’ve done all the preparation we could’ve. We’ll just have to roll with the punches.”

Max gulped. He wasn’t just trying to convince Casey when he spoke, but convince himself as well. Another floor in the tower meant a whole new environment with new monsters and new obstacles. But what more could they have done? They’d bought survival supplies and Max had even trained so hard that he had ranked up and gained a new ability.

He took another deep breath and thought consciously about how much they had prepared for this. When he thought about that, he became less agitated. That was the whole point of this preamble to the exam area. To put their backs up and not necessarily in a good way.

The examiners stopped when they arrived at the departure teleporter.

“Alright, class,” said the instructor. “We’ve been through this before. It’s the exact same thing every time. Stand in the light and think to yourself: ascend to the next floor.”

The students all shuffled and hesitated, no one volunteering to be the first to ascend to a part of the tower they hadn’t been to before.

“What if there’s monsters right in front of the teleporter that I can’t handle!?” said one student.

An examiner snapped. “If you’re scared of such a possibility then you might as well give up now. The tower and its different floors is a very dangerous place. If you’re scared about being chaperoned for an exam in here, there’s no way you’ll be able to survive against higher-ranked monsters or withstand the pressure of a multi-floor conflict.”

The student who spoke nodded his head and whimpered an apology at an almost indecipherably low volume.

Max was more intrigued by a different part of what the examiner had said.

Multi-floor conflict.

He knew that some floors were large enough to contain whole worlds, some bigger than Earth even. Did these different floors actually have diplomatic relationships with one another? So much so that sometimes relationships fell apart and they went to war with each other. What was the scale of a multi-floor conflict?

Max didn’t even want to think about it, it seemed so massive. He sighed. Every time he thought he was beginning to understand the tower and its machinations, he quickly realized how little he still knew about the mysterious spire and all of the worlds and people it housed.