WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Mordor

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Escaping the Tower at Hell Difficulty ◈

Chapter 1

──────

I was a game streamer.

Calling myself a streamer might make it sound like I was something special, but it really wasn't that impressive.

My average viewer count was between one and two hundred.

I mostly uploaded game guide videos to YouTube, and every now and then, one would hit a hundred thousand views.

The income was a little too unstable to stream full-time, so I also worked part-time at a cafe.

Even that was only possible because of the unique nature of the game I played.

Escape from the Spire.

Better known as Tower Escape.

Players became Hunters and tried to escape the tower with valuable loot.

It was modeled after the very towers and Hunters that had appeared around the world several years ago.

The problem was that it recreated them far too well.

In Tower Escape, players were absolutely powerless.

No matter how much you leveled up or improved your skills, one badly placed bullet from a random low-level monster could kill you.

And if you died, you lost everything you had.

The game itself wasn't particularly well made, either.

It had been out for several years, after all.

At least it was updated regularly.

The game was unfriendly, brutal, and downright nasty.

That didn't mean it wasn't fun, though.

That was exactly the problem.

There was one thing it did better than anything else.

Looting was ridiculously satisfying.

There were countless items, and every single one had a use.

Combined with the fact that you lost every item when you died...

That rush of looting drove people crazy.

The game was unfriendly, but never shallow.

Everything was implemented, even characters eating, drinking, and sleeping.

Of course, you moved slower if you carried too much.

That made Tower Escape one of the biggest streaming games around.

The game was too filthy and unfair to be worth playing yourself.

But watching streamers suffer was entertaining.

Real Hunters clearing the tower were too bloody and uncomfortable to watch.

A replica game was just right.

Still, this was getting risky.

Tower Escape was the kind of game that demanded you grind your life away.

It was so hardcore that there was a limit to how much the stream could grow.

Only people willing to play it played it, and only people willing to watch it watched it.

You could say its floor was high, but its ceiling was low.

I had tried streaming other games whenever I could, since I had no idea how much longer this game would last...

The response hadn't been great.

I had a rare day off from streaming and was thinking about future content when I got a message from a streamer I was fairly close with.

[What are you doing? Want to get together for the first time in a while? Escape Life's coming too.]

Escape Life.

He was one of the more successful Tower Escape streamers.

His average viewer count was close to a thousand, if I remembered right.

At that level, he probably didn't need another job.

We kept in touch enough to arrange collaboration streams and the like...

But honestly, he wasn't the type I liked.

We were competitors splitting up a limited pie.

Our streaming hours even overlapped.

I was about to turn it down because I had no desire to hang out over drinks, but the next message changed my mind.

[Escape Life got dumped by his girlfriend yesterday.]

[Where are we meeting?]

Escape Life was famous for having a pretty girlfriend with a great personality...

So she'd finally dumped him.

There was no way I could miss a show like that.

I wouldn't even need snacks tonight.

When I hurried over, Escape Life was already chugging straight from a bottle.

One look told me it hadn't been an amicable breakup.

That only made me more excited.

Escape Life looked surprised to see me.

"What, Kang Hyun's here too?"

"I live nearby. You two went head-to-head in the Streamer Battle once, right?"

"Oh. Why are we bringing that up again...?"

The Streamer Battle.

I won.

Honestly, when it came to Tower Escape, I wouldn't lose to anyone.

If the game had a pro league, I would've gone pro ages ago.

Escape Life welcomed me more warmly than I expected.

He probably wanted someone, anyone, to vent to.

"Anyway, glad you came."

"Come on, tell us. How badly did you get dumped...?"

"How many times do I have to say it? I dumped her!"

Naturally, no one believed him.

Not even the restaurant staff.

Once he told us what had happened, it was a complete spectacle.

"Weren't things going well? Why'd you suddenly break up?"

"...She knew I was a Tower Escape streamer, but she fell for a real Hunter."

Not basement-dwelling gamers like us. In other words, not fakes, but real Hunters.

The people who risked their lives in the tower to bring back loot.

"A real Hunter? What rank?"

"I don't know. E-rank? D-rank?"

"That's practically the bottom of the barrel."

The tower had seven floors in total.

If you entered the first floor and returned alive, you became E-rank.

The second floor meant D-rank, and so on.

If you returned alive from the seventh floor, you became EX-rank.

There wasn't a single EX-rank Hunter in Korea.

Forget EX-rank, I didn't think I'd ever even seen an S-rank Hunter.

Apparently, only the first clear counted.

Even if you returned from the seventh floor later, you weren't an EX-rank Hunter.

You were just someone with experience clearing the seventh floor.

"That guy's probably a poser Hunter. I bet he didn't even bring anything back."

"They say anyone D-rank or below barely gets treated like a Hunter."

You didn't need any special qualifications to enter, so...

Apparently, plenty of people went in for fun.

Most of them died, of course.

After we spent ages trash-talking his ex-girlfriend and her Hunter boyfriend, the conversation shifted to games and streaming.

"Isn't there any good content we could do?"

"People don't even do Pistol Runs much anymore. A lot of them only bring a knife."

Tower Escape was a filthy, unfair game, but it had still been made for people to play.

Streamers who did nothing but eat and play games had mastered it long ago.

They had done several streams where they entered the seventh floor with little preparation and escaped with only a knife.

The response was decent, but it was such a high-difficulty challenge that it took too long.

"Think there'll be a major update soon?"

"They need something new to appear in the real tower before they can update it."

The developer of Tower Escape was completely insane and updated the game to match the real tower's progress.

They could put up with people calling the game bad, but not people saying the details were inaccurate.

That obsession was probably why they could make a game like this in the first place.

"Maybe the seventh floor is the end of the tower? I doubt there'll be any hidden floors..."

"The Hunters can't even properly clear the seventh floor."

"Should we do a collaboration stream raiding the seventh-floor military base?"

"Come on, we'd need to show some chance of clearing it first. That's like throwing eggs at a rock."

As we talked about Tower Escape, the owner brought us complimentary drinks.

We must've been talking too loudly.

"You must be Hunters. These are on the house."

"Oh, thank you."

It was too late to explain that we were talking about a game, so we just accepted them.

Escape Life's face twisted a little.

"What's so great about Hunters...? Should I just go into a real tower myself?"

"I don't know. Wouldn't the third floor be manageable?"

We had all been drinking, so instead of stopping him, we egged him on.

What was a guy making piles of money from streaming going to do as a Hunter?

The conversation went in circles until it returned to his ex-girlfriend and her Hunter boyfriend.

"If I clear the third floor and come back, will she return to me?"

"You said you didn't have any lingering feelings several times earlier..."

Watching him made me keep drinking.

We changed places, then went for a second round and a third.

"The third floor should be doable."

"Where are you going to get equipment?"

"They say the Hunter Association gives you everything with taxpayer money once you register."

"Wow, our taxes were being spent on that? Maybe I should get a refund too."

How long had we been talking excitedly like that...?

[You have entered the seventh floor of the tower. Upon successfully escaping, you will be granted an up-to-EX-rank skill based on raid progress.]

An unfamiliar voice woke me, along with a dull ache.

At some point, it seemed like my memory had suddenly cut out.

"Ugh, how much did I drink?"

Talking to myself came naturally, an occupational habit for streamers.

You had to keep talking even when there were barely any viewers.

But there was one problem.

"Ugh..."

A foul smell hit me the moment I sobered up.

Seoul's air wasn't exactly pleasant, but it wasn't this bad.

When I looked around, I saw a city that was practically in ruins.

It looked like it had been bombed.

"...What is this?"

Escape Life was collapsed beside me.

I quickly shook him awake, and he looked at me with unfocused eyes.

"Huh, Kang Hyun?"

"Get up. Where are we?"

"Where else would we... Fuck?"

He seemed to realize the same thing I had.

We'd never been here ourselves, but we'd seen this scenery countless times in Tower Escape.

A ruined city, corpses and heaps of trash scattered everywhere.

We were in the tower.

And not just anywhere. We were on the seventh floor, infamous for being the hardest difficulty.

"Don't tell me we entered the tower yesterday?"

"..."

Unlike me, Escape Life seemed to remember bits and pieces.

He must've done it while drunk.

But not the first floor, or even the third.

The seventh floor.

Then heavy footsteps began sounding nearby.

Without needing to say a word, we both hid in the nearest alley.

"Kiik..."

"Krk."

Soon, Orcs and Goblins carrying guns passed nearby.

'This is insane. It's exactly like the game.'

Why did those bastards have guns...?

The setting was that they picked up weapons humans had brought in, or copied them.

Tower Escape was endlessly obsessed with accuracy, so it was probably true.

'How do we get out?'

Honestly, I could probably manage to escape from the third floor somehow...

But the seventh floor was impossible.

It wasn't something to brag about, but I'd never done any real physical work in my life.

Escape Life, the bastard responsible for dragging me here, had gone stiff with fear.

But time wasn't on our side.

We needed to get a grip and move.

The alley was full of trash.

Some of it had been lost along with the lives of Hunters who came before us, while other things had been created by the tower itself.

Everything else about the seventh floor was awful, but the quality of its loot was very good.

"Ugh."

I was still staggering from the hangover.

My body was also desperately craving water.

In a nearby alley, we found corpses wearing military uniforms.

They looked like they hadn't been dead long and were still rotting.

Despite the overwhelming stench, I quickly searched their backpacks.

I had always adapted quickly to bad situations.

'Found it!'

Just as I thought, there was water and food.

Most Hunters who raided the tower aimed to escape with loot.

If there were Hunters on the seventh floor, it meant they had begun their raid from the seventh floor.

Usually, they cleared it by descending one floor at a time.

That meant they still had plenty of water and food to spare.

Other Hunters didn't bother taking bulky, low-value food and water with them.

Escape Life watched what I was doing and sighed.

"Y-you're really good at this..."

"You should get moving too."

If you looked at it that way, I was here because of him.

Sure, I'd gotten blackout drunk too.

Seeing him just standing there idly made me want to wring his neck.

In the end, Escape Life reluctantly began rummaging through the corpses as well.

They said your sense of smell got numb quickly...

Apparently, that didn't apply to the smell of rotting corpses.

Then he found something promising.

"Huh?"

A handgun, miraculously hidden inside a corpse's clothes.

It even had exactly one bullet in it.

Normally, we wouldn't have given a weapon like that a second glance, but we'd entered empty-handed.

"Wow, that's a relief."

"We're saved."

As a Tower Escape pro, Escape Life knew exactly how valuable that handgun was.

Too well, which was the problem.

He also knew how difficult it was to escape from the seventh floor.

Click.

Without hesitation, he raised the handgun to his own head.

"Huh."

He didn't say anything, but I could tell from his face.

Sorrow, regret, and just a little apology toward me.

Bang!

Like the professional he was, Escape Life demonstrated a comfortable, speedy escape.

"Y-you bastard!"

Left behind alone, I swallowed my curses and moved away in case something came after me.

Footnotes:

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried