The room they had us meet in for our first tower run was…boring. White stone walls with a single door leading out of it, we were all crowded around the door, making sure we had everything we could get out hands on that would give us an edge. I looked around at my friends before checking my own gear. I had a short spear on my back and a xiphos on one hip. A length of chain was hooked around my waist and a reinforced Kevlar vest with metal plates hung with every random tincture and potion I could find, which admittedly wasn’t many.

When we had all found out about some of the gear you could get from running the tower, we had been psyched. Magic equipment would make things so much easier, we could slaughter a ton of monsters and level up like madmen. But of course life isn’t that simple. We searched everywhere for some gear and then finally figured out why every highsider doesn’t just gear themselves senseless before going in. When you get something magical from the tower or make something amazing (with the lower skill levels on this plane that one happens less often) you obviously want to get the best value for it. But because you’re trading with supernatural beings across various planes in an ideal situation, cash isn’t exactly king.

In fact, highsiders in general only care about one thing. Experience. To buy high ranking gear or powerful potions supernatural entities pay in experience. There are stones that can be willingly infused with XP, different colors for different values. Red stones could hold ten experience, orange one thousand, and so on. While this was theoretically fantastic because it meant you could power level by being a trader or merchant, in reality, the kind of gear that dropped from even the hundredth level of the tower paled in comparison to the things created and dropped on the other planes.

I had managed to get a basic breakdown of value by looking around. From what I could tell, basic common level gear (not to be confused with normal people trash you could buy in the human world, even the simplest highsider equipment is leagues above anything humans make) are worth anywhere from one to one hundred red stones, uncommon, the next rank are worth orange, after that the rankings are curious, strange, rare, epic, mythic, and legendary.

Those of you paying attention may have noticed I mentioned eight ranks and the rainbow has seven colors, supposedly you need black stones to buy legendary gear assuming you can find anyone dumb enough to sell it, and since by factors of a hundred each black stone would be worth so much an entire family of highsiders couldn’t fill one it’s a moot point. Some of the elder demons and higher angels had the kind of XP necessary to fill one of those if they did it as a group, but the kind of auctions that use that kind of currency take place in major supernatural capitals, youll never see something like that on earth. Especially since the XP deficit for being thin blooded makes it exponentially harder to fill even simple stones.

A key factor of the stone system is that it requires sacrifice, stones can be filled over time,but you still have to drain away your very strength. Not to mention the higher tier stones themselves are actually kind of hard to find, only dropping from powerful monsters or being made by merging lower tier stones at half efficiency. You need two hundred blank reds to make a blank orange, which isn’t really worth it, except nobody takes lower level stones in bulk for gear, why would they bother, its literally a hundred times more carrying weight when all they would need to do is find someone else. Gear is always in demand.

Our gear was human quality. Best we could find but we just didn’t have the XP to burn at our levels. The potions had required some XP burn, we each gave up ten, with me giving fifty. I was already level three and the fifty XP left me just barely at that threshold. We managed to scrounge up thirteen reds, and used them all to buy potions. We considered getting weapons or something, but upon further reflection, we would only be able to buy a weapon for one or two of use and only shitty ones, it made more sense to but enough potions for us all and just find some gear as we went.

Luckily for all of us, the first five levels of the tower were all geared to level one highsiders with every five after raising one level of difficulty. Since the highest level person in the school was only in the twenties, the upper floors didn’t get much traffic, though I’d heard rumors that the last floor’s boss guarded an actual gate to limbo, the neutral plane that could access all of the other planes. Supposedly the gate lets out pretty close to purgatory, the first of the nine demonic planes, and is the reason the school is even here.

I took a look around. We all had stoic faces on, readying ourselves for our first real test as a group. I had a few stamina potions to restore energy, and a mana potion on me. My mana was thirty at level three and through trial and error I had surmised precognition burned through about five per second. I didn’t regenerate mana in combat so without a mana potion I was useless. We had forgone healing potions in favor of mana potions for Sarah, since this way she could gain more experience anyway and everyone else was using either stamina or mana depending on their class.

I took a deep breath and nodded to my friends before finally pushing the door open, glancing into the first room to find…a rat. Of course it would be rats on the first level. Granted it was a two hundred pound rat the size of a Shetland pony, but still, I was somewhat underwhelmed. I held up my hand to stop my friends and without speaking, I activated precognition. Assuming I sent my team out immediately after the activation the rat would try to bite the most obvious threat, Magnus, who had a giant ass axe. I quickly called out the sequence of events dispatching my friends to whatever position I saw that fit best.

The battle took only a minute or two, the rat had based on my Revelation only about four hundred HP and we all did a hell of a lot of damage for our levels. Well, except me but I was level three so my strength was up to three points now from training. As the final axe blow fell and finished off the rat, I couldn’t help but grin to myself. The experience notification rang out as our first enemy fell, and the rat dropped a leather breastplate to the ground as it dissolved. This was going to be fun.