Last week we talked about Bam and Rachel arriving in the tower through unusual means. They went through the first test with Headon, in a sense, and made it through the initial tests. We met a lot of the important characters for this story and now it’s time for everyone to do their individual tests. It turns out that everyone is divided into five different classes. I’ll be honest, these aren’t that important for the story. It’s pretty much abandoned for a lot of the story, and in the cases where it’s relevant it’s clear who fills what function. To run it down regardless, let’s quickly go over it. You have your classical combatants in fishermen who are like melee combatants. Spear Bearers are ranged attackers. Scouts are speed oriented fighters.

The two that differentiate a little bit are the wave controllers and the light bearers. Wave controllers use Shinsu, the energy that is found in the tower, to attack. Light bearers operate the lighthouse and tend to be the brains of the operation, so to speak. They gather data and devise strategies. Khun is one of the more important light bearers in the story.

This arc feels quite nice. It’s like a breather in between the more heavy material. Anaak and Endorsi do get into a fight, and we learn that Anaak is the daughter of the former Jahad Princess by the same name. Princesses aren’t allowed to have kids and are akin to shoes in a display case for the king to have on display. Anaak’s mother was murdered by a royal assassin and Anaak has sworn vengeance ever since. The scouts have to make 10 friends for their assignment and Shibisu and Hatz convince Khun and Bam to be their friends among others. It is at this point that Khun betrays the test, but we’ll get to that later. There are now two tests left. 

The first test is a game of tag with the ranker Quant. Quant is a boastful, slightly dumb guy whose arrogance is definitely his weakness. The goal of this game is to catch Quant or have the runner make it to the exit of the battlefield. We’ve heard some talk of rankers, but they’re people who have made it all the way to the top of the tower. They’re much, much stronger than regulars, not to mention those in the test floor. You’ll see regular large time skips in this webtoon, because characters require a long time to grow, get stronger and climb the tower. I digress. This entire test is meant to rank the remaining people and pick who out of which class gets to pass. We all know where this is going. The unknown characters are going to be weeded out and the named characters are going to continue. And everyone will happily go up the tower as a team. Right?

Not quite. Hoh receives a letter telling him to take care of Rachel so Bam will lose his reason to keep climbing up the tower. While Khun is busy double crossing all the double crossers there is something way more nefarious going on. One of the test examiners is secretly one of Jahad’s assassins. A powerful ranker from the Lo Po Bia family named Ren. I haven’t talked much about the ten families, but they’re the ten most powerful families in the tower. If memory serves, Khun and this examiner are the only people introduced from these families. And Yuri, but I don’t know if that’s made particularly clear early on. Ren has shown up to deal with Anaak and Bam. And his first trick is to get Rachel killed by Hoh, who is desperate to get a spot to go up the tower. Unfortunately things don’t go as Hoh planned and because Bam is an irregular with powers that border on cheating, Hoh gets stopped and ends up killing himself. Serena is so shocked by this and it’s what ends up making her decide to stop going up the tower. This is a very brave decision honestly. It takes a special kind of person to persevere in the tower. Many die on the way up, and lots give up on the way. The test ends kind of abruptly and the remaining regulars have to choose if they want to support the final test.

Bam requests a special test from the administrator, which is something he can do as an irregular, to allow Rachel to go up the tower with them. Big mistake, but we’ll get to that. The administrator accepts and Hansung Yu prepares a new test. The test is complicated and mostly irrelevant. If you’re here for the recap just know that a strange creature named the Bull is running amok during the test and Ren uses this to almost take out both Endorsi and Anaak. Luckily for both of them, big sister Yuri shows up with her gang in tow, and they take out Ren without a sweat. Not before Ren sends the Bull to take out Bam. Bam just barely manages to take out the Bull and then he and Rachel are ready to go up the tower.

Except they’re not. Rachel betrays Bam at the very last moment, pushing him into the water as she escapes alone. Bam is presumed dead and Khun and everyone else vow to go up the tower with Rachel’s in Bam’s stead. But there might be more to this story? Want to find out what more there is? Read the next entry. Or better yet, read the webtoon. It is free in its entirety on the Webtoons app (barring the latest 3 chapters), and recently continued its run. This current summary ends at the end of season 1 in the Webtoon which was completely covered by the first season of the anime. If you are planning to get into the story after only reading this I highly recommend picking it up from the start and I’ve personally been having an absolute blast rereading the story, so I can recommend that too. The arc I’m talking about next time is one of the more boring since it’s mostly set up, but it does introduce some very fun characters, so do look forward to that.