Chapter 1

The Return (I)

"My back is killing me..." Cain groaned under breath as he opened his eyes. They quickly widened as he failed to recognize the moldy ceiling for a moment. It was just a moment, however. "I'm... back? Holy shit, I'm really back! Mother Mary, I'm fucking back!!" he exclaimed in excitement as he shot up to sit down. "Ay-ay-ayaa... that hurt... my poor back..." he yelped in pain just as quickly as his excitement dimmed, rubbing his lower back.

Looking around pensively, he realized he really was back -- back in his old apartment. A very old apartment. Moldy walls, the pervasive smell coming from the Chinese restaurant down below, narrow, cheap-looking with torn clothes strewn across the floor...

Yet such an ugly sight, one that would make any other man regret the lifetime worth of decision, was enough for Cain to shed a tear.

“... I really am back, bitches...” he mumbled to no one but the walls themselves, taking a deep breath. “Hah, take that Claire. It sure-as-shit was worth sneaking into that damned Chrono's room and stealing his Timecube..." though he continued to speak aloud to nobody and nothing, he didn't find it strange. After all, it's a habit he had developed over many years of solitude as a means of not going utterly insane. It did little to help, however.

Stretching, he once again yelped in pain, cursing who he was in the past. By the young age of thirty-two, he'd already capped his body to the point he needed weekly physical therapy just to be capable of work. Grunting in displeasure, he managed to sit up and stretch a bit, nodding his head in satisfaction.

“Yup, my body’s just as much of a piece of shit as I remember it being...” glancing to the side, he saw his phone on the table and quickly reached for it, unlocking it and noticing the date -- May 5th, 2026. “Oh? I’m quite early, aren’t I? The Towers won’t appear for another three months... oh well, gives me time to enjoy life a bit after that hell...” and, thus, without a second thought, he reached into the drawer and took out all of his savings -- 226.33$ in total and headed to the nearby bar.

Just before he left the apartment, however, he quickly scurried back and took a shower, shaved, and put on the best clothes he had -- the old prom suit that he ended up selling three days from now in the past.

“... that’s what I’m talking about,” he grinned in front of the mirror, rubbing his blond, gelled hair with pride. The look in his green eyes was strange but, all in all, he was a handsome man -- in his eyes, at least. “Time to get drunk and get laid...”

He headed out of the apartment and into a dark alley; it was already near midnight, and shady-looking characters could be seen scurrying about. Such was life living around six different criminal enterprises that for some reason also included exotic animal importers... right next to the sex-trafficking organization. The world sure is strange, huh?

Humming a low tune to himself, he shoved his hands into pockets and headed off toward Lar’s, the best bar in the city. Well, to claim it was best would be a bit of an oversell -- but it certainly was the most expensive one. A single bottle of horse-piss-tasting-beer, after all, went for 15$. Only morons ever went there, and tonight... Cain can afford to be a moron.

After all, he had returned from twenty-five years into the future, from the hell where getting drunk was easy, but getting laid was impossible -- at least for someone like him. He had gone back to just before the whole world was turned upside down, spat on, shat on, pissed on, and then kicked in the guts until it began drowning in its own fluids. Did he do it to prevent the world from collapsing? Of course not.

Entering Lar’s, he immediately got a whiff of the extremely expensive atmosphere. Everyone he saw was wearing a suit that went for at least two grand, and the music was so loud he questioned the point of people leaning into each other’s ears to chat.

Walking over to the bar, he signaled the bartender to bring him a glass of whiskey, something that he couldn’t get drunk on in the past -- or, well, the future of the past. After all, who would care for making quality booze when they were too busy getting their high-on and hard-on inside the Towers?

He quickly scouted the place and saw a woman sitting in a corner, a displeased look on her face. Hmm... six-outta-ten? Maybe? Eh, good enough.

Shrugging, he ordered a dirty martini and walked up to the woman. The moment she noticed him, her eyes went up and down as she frowned. Cain smiled instead, sitting down next to her and sliding the dirty martini skillfully over to her end of the table. He’d completely forgotten the etiquette of hitting on women in bars... but her taking the drink is a positive sign, right?

“Cain,” he yelled out just enough for her to hear him over the sound of music.

“... Maria...” the woman replied in kind, accepting his handshake. Rather than letting go, Cain slid along the leather cushions and arrived right next to her, startling her for a moment.

“... are you as saintly as you sound?” he leaned into her ear and whispered. She seemed temporarily stunted by his direct and aggressive approach, though quickly recovered, lifting her lips into a smile.

“Oh, most definitely not,” she replied with a coquettish voice and a smile. “What about you? Are you as Biblical as you sound?”

“... depends,” Cain grinned. “I’m pretty good with chains and whips, you know?”

“Oh? That’s such a coincidence,” she said, her hand sliding down his chest and near his crotch. “I just happen to be really good at being chained and whipped...”

“...” Damn, I caught a maniac! Nice! His grin widening, he flung his arm around her shoulder and brought her closer toward himself as her hand slid directly into his pants. “I just came back from a really, really, really bad and dry place,” he said. “So, I’m like a loaded gun. Just a handjob might not be enough, you know?”

“... there are plenty other jobs,” she whispered as he held back a moan. Oh sweet Maria... you are... fucking terrible at this... but it’s been almost twenty years... so you may as well be a handjob goddess...

Wasting no more time, he quickly headed over to the bar and paid for both of them, shelling over 90$ as though he owed millions. The key is confidence! Pretend like you have millions!

It seemed to have worked, Cain mused, as the glimmer in Maria’s eyes grew. Well... that shithole I live in will be a dead giveaway...

“... I have a key to a buddy’s place just a few minutes from here,” he said as the two exited the bar. “It’s kind of a shithole, but it has a bed.”

“And the bed is all we need.” she said with a giggle, causing him to smile faintly as he led her over. Man, to think just how terrible I used to be at lying...

The night proceeded to be fairly lengthy; after all, almost twenty years of celibacy, even if technically speaking his current body didn’t live through it, is quite insane. In his mind, he hadn’t seen a naked woman that hadn’t been mauled, shot, beheaded, or a variation of dismembered for almost two decades. That reality... it does things to a man. Terrible things.

Walls were thin and moans were loud, which resulted in several people knocking at his doors in the middle of the night, telling him to hush it. It was slightly annoying, being unable to let his inhibitions go even for a few hours and just have some fun.

By the end, it was almost 4 A.M., and Maria was asleep on one side of the bed, blanket ruffled beneath her fairly sizable breasts. Cain was sitting up on the other end, slumped over, faint embers of the cigarette between his fingers the solitary source of light besides his phone and the moonlight coming from the windows.

"... it really worked," he mumbled, puffing out a cloud of smoke. He had gambled, mostly just because there was little else to do. Yet... the gamble somehow paid off. He was back, back to before the world was spun on its behind and reamed by everything and everyone. "Do I still have a Status Window?" he subconsciously mumbled when cyan light suddenly flashed in front of him, startling him momentarily. "Eh? I really do? I thought they were connected to the Towers... guess not..." he rubbed his chin as he inspected the blue screen in front of him, one he'd stared at hundreds of thousands of times before.

“... sheesh, I was expecting it,” he groaned, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “But I really didn’t get to keep anything...”

///Name: Cain Gregory Age: 32 Race: Human

Class: N/A

Strength: 4 Vitality: 5 Agility: 5 Stamina: 5

Intelligence: 9 Wisdom: 6

Traits: Labourer(D-), Quick-witted(C), Tenacious(E)

Skills: N/A

Items: N/A

Titles: N/A

Achievements: N/A \

Sighing, he took another puff of the cigarette and dispelled the screen. It was depressing, looking at it. He really had been quite a failure at this point in his life. No success, no ambition, no desire... he spent the years in a strange delirium, as though waiting for something that would never come. Even marrying and fathering a kid felt more like something he should have done rather than something that he wanted.

It was no surprise, then, that shortly after he divorced, and that he was now paying alimony for a kid that barely talked to him even when he got to see her once or twice a week. When the Towers ‘descended’... he thought he finally found that something he had been looking for. However, even there, he was almost a nobody, a passerby who somehow managed to survive through that hell.

In the end, he wound up burying everyone he ever cared for, losing what little motivation he had to begin with. Why was he toiling away laboriously at a job he abhorred? Even though Lana hardly wanted to spend time with him, he still wanted her to have everything he never did.

Sighing once again, he walked up to the fridge and took out a can of beer, moving to the window and leaning over the pane, letting the barely-fresh air just before the dawn belt against his cheeks. He’d been given another chance -- no, he earned another chance, another shot at life. Though he would still be starting at the bottom, it was different this time.

It wasn't merely that he knew the events of the future, what was to come, and how to play the 'game'... but he was also different. His mind was no longer aimless, he himself no longer a deadpan cynic hiding in a self-made cocoon. In life, he learned, everything was fleeting. Rather than spend it tiptoeing around and speaking in hushed whispers, it was best to chase after what you wanted. And what he wanted... was simple. So simple, in fact, he was never able to forgive his past self for never being able to achieve it.

Though the Towers would descend in a few months, there was little in terms of preparations he needed to do. Besides just strengthening his body to a certain degree, he only needed to score enough cash to buy a plane ticket for L.A. where one of the Towers would descend, and the Tower that he had to get sucked in at the start as that’s where the class from his previous attempt was.

He had no desire to change anything or pursue the footsteps of those who steamrolled ahead of him. He was simply late -- by a good margin at that. By the time he got ‘Classified’, the Towers had been sitting on the Earth for nearly four years, and a good deal of people by then had already breached past 30th floor and achieved the first metamorphosis.

“... I’ll probably have to travel to Kyoto soon after,” he mumbled. “To get the Tear. I should pin Rio on the map as well down the stretch once I’m strong enough to challenge the 10th floor... hmm...” he continued to muse aloud, stroking his chin. “Maybe... I should start writing things down? Yup, I need to do that.” he hardly trusted his memory enough to remain even remotely fresh for a considerable period of time.

Even as it stood, he was fairly certain he'd miss many things he should know from the past. But there was little he could do about it; good thing was that the best things from Towers were usually world-shattering in some way and would make headlines daily, so much so that he was incapable of forgetting them even if he wanted to.

“... the first one will definitely be Illumity,” he sighed. “Will Diya score it again? I guess I can get my hands on the staff... it’s pretty valuable by itself.”

There was a lot to write down, he realized -- years and years of Tower exploration that led to the fuller picture of what the behemoths that settled upon the Earth were like and the secrets they hid within their vaults. Even by the time he got his hands on the Timecube, no single Tower had actually been conquered, twenty-and-chump-change years into the future. No, we could have conquered them, he shook his head, sighing once more. We just got too busy having cock-measuring contests with one another that we just... stopped paying attention to Towers completely...

That didn’t matter to him, though, as he hardly had the aspirations to lead the charge and become the herald of the Tower Conquest. He’d almost never been a part of the raiding teams back in the past, and would only pick scraps left behind by those who did charge ahead and try to understand the Towers. Most, however, were content with becoming demigods, living like royalty, and basking in the glory afforded to them entirely by the Towers. Making a team doesn’t sound too bad, though... he mused, a faint smile creeping on his lips as he stroked his chin. It'd be fun to see what awaits us at the top of those Towers and who the hell put them there, to begin with...