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[attr="class","bannertext1"]CATCH UP.

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[attr="class","bannertext2"]TRISTAN WU.

[attr="class","inner"]         Tristan struggles against the man’s firm grip. He was originally supposed to be another target of his petty crimes - obviously he had underestimated the size difference and the sheer disparity in build. Involuntarily he grunts as he tries his best to break free, seemingly to no avail. The man reaches for the wallet - his wallet - that was held captive in Tristan’s other hand. It is a two way rough scuffle, with both parties exerting their most to get what they want. That was always how the streets were.

         At least, that was how Tristan understood them to be. A system window emerges into his vision. The man must have seen it too, since he was distracted enough to be shoved off of Tristan with a firm kick to the stomach. Immediately he starts running, only taking in the contents of the message after he considers he had gained enough distance from his previous adversary. He ignores most of the words. It was a difficult task to read while running, after all. The only thing that pulls his attention is the listing of three certain choices, centered dead in the middle of his field of vision. However, the concept of a class was foreign to Tristan: the only exposure to video games he had were the arcade machines he’d barely scraped enough coins for, to let his brother get a chance to play. He picks the one he innately responded to - there was no time to think, after all.



         Still on the move, he feels his surroundings change along with the text on the system window.


         Tristan finds himself in unfamiliar territory - he knows for a fact the sun was just about to set, so how is it right at its peak in the middle of the sky right now? The neighborhood looks more lifeless than usual, which is an observation that he couldn't fathom he was making. In fact, it isn't the same neighborhood at all, let alone the same city. He'd been transported - moved somewhere reminiscent of an urban cityscape yet tangibly different. There was no trace of humanity here.


         He had taken a bit of time to take in the atmosphere. There wasn’t enough time to think about it. There wasn't even enough for him to comprehend the prompt asking him to read his abilities. The floor will start sinking? Tristan doesn’t try to reason with that: the adrenaline from the previous encounter still surges all over his body. It gets him running. It gets him in motion. The act of running feels different - better, smoother, as if he had unlocked some primal instinct. It really was as if the wind was on his back. The wallet that was just in his clasp now drops to the ground.

         On the outskirts of his vision he notices a marker of sorts. It points to a certain building a few hundred meters away. The distance wasn’t the problem, though. The building is colossal. A few dozen floors tall, at least. Surrounding it are diminishingly shorter towers, but still tall enough that it would take a lot of effort to get up to their peaks. He speeds up in the direction of the nearest building. It doesn’t matter right now how tall it is. He just needed to get to higher ground.

         Tristan enters the parking facility. A quick glance at the directory shows six floors. There are two empty spaces in the wall: a chamber from the ground floor all the way to the top. He realizes they are elevator shafts - but why are they vacant? It doesn't matter. He wouldn't have taken them anyway. He sprints up the narrow stairway, turning a hundred and eighty degrees every half-floor. Using the steel railings as a pivot for his momentum, he makes good pace.


         He hears an alarm ring in his head as he reaches the rooftop parking level. The countdown timer has ended. But he is focused now - there isn't much that was going to stop him from running. He was headed towards an adjacent building now, roughly double the height of the structure he was on. The screams from below startle him for a split second. They weren't complete screams. It was as if an audio tape had been cut as it was running. He peers down over the edge of the building to see the floor has turned black. Black, not like paint, but some unknown, eerie substance. It seemed intangible, yet present in the space. And it was rising. Tristan turns his eyes to what he catches in his peripheral vision. A silhouette of a woman on that very black - then nothing.


         He is fully aware of the consequences now. He makes the short jump to reach a balcony on a floor of his target building, a meter lower than he was. Tristan makes out that it is some kind of office building. Again, it was ominous how there was no furniture at all - not even a chair or a potted plant. Just corporate gray. Running on, he scans his environment. He bursts towards what he figured would have been the fire exit stairs - there weren't any signs to tell him otherwise - and makes his way up as fast as his legs would allow. It was taller than he thought. He wasn't counting the floors, and there were no windows in the stair chamber to even prove to him he was making progress.

         Eventually he reaches the top floor, after all. Unfortunately, the stairs did not go past the ceiling. He was stuck with the options he had here. In fact, there were only four. Tristan thanks his luck for the fact that the interior has no obstructions - he could see through the windows on all four sides of the building. He looks through the window in the direction of the marker. Nothing. The window of the wall on the left of that one, however, reveals some kind of triangular platform just parallel to his current elevation. He doesn't question it - the instinctive thought is to open the window - it wasn't locked - and jump across the gap, slightly larger than the one he had made earlier.

         He internally sighs, relieved that there is a whole path of ascending triangular platforms of the same sort in the direction of the marked building. His intuition tells him that it's the wrong path. His intuition, which was almost never wrong. But what other choice did he have? There is no other route to take - no other building to climb, and the black 'fog' was up to more than half the distance between himself and the ground now. This was the only way.

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level

1

stats

POWER 5 F
DEFENSE 10 F
SPEED 15 E
MAGIC 12 E
VITALITY 8 F
WILLPOWER 10 F
LUCK 0 F
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stacks

FLOW 0 (+1)
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abilities

Concrete Jungle
turns active 0/2
cooldown 0/2
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items

n/a