From Alessio Leone's Perspective
The five figures hovered before him like verdicts carved into the endless white: the colossus with shield and axe; the duelist with light steel and blade; the hooded archer; the old man with staff and grimoire; the priest in white robes with the heavy rosary in his hands. Above them all floated the translucent blade with its immutable decree:
Choose your path.
A novice might dismiss it as trivial—just a casual click, curiosity guiding the hand like in any other MMO. In most games, the culture of "reroll" was an escape hatch: create a side account, test a class on a whim, throw away hours like swapping a skin. Not here. Here there was no indulgence. The Tower was no theme park. It was a contract without fine print, a sentence with no appeal.
Alessio knew the truth: one account only. One class choice. No undo. No restart. No shortcut.
And those five classes, behind the familiar veneer of clichéd labels, were not simple. They were destinies. Each carried its own balance of strengths and weaknesses that, added to the player's real body, would shape months—perhaps years—of progress. The Tower did not forgive those who treated their avatar as detached fantasy. Starting stats, plus the bonus of the chosen class, derived from the player's own body. That subtle law, invisible to the naive, was absolute.
He examined each option with the cold precision of a lawyer reviewing case files.
Tank
A living wall. Heavy metal encased him like a second skeleton: overlapping plates that, under the shadowless white light of the oval chamber, gleamed with the promise of weight and impact. High defense, strong attack, bonuses in vitality and strength—but not to be confused with speed. The Tank was a giant pendulum: when it moved, the world felt it. Low agility, low intelligence at the start. That meant shorter reaction windows, weak spells, and a deliberate, ritual-like rhythm.
The class of aggro control, of taunts that bound monsters like invisible chains, of positioning that saved entire groups—turning bosses, anchoring lines, shielding flanks. The Tank spoke the raw language of the system: mitigate, absorb, lock down. In exchange, it paid in mobility and magic bursts. The meta might shift, but the shield's ontology never did: it took the blow that would crush another.
And here was the inconvenient truth: the Tower mirrored biology. A weak body walked in owing a debt. A Tank with a frail heart, slack legs, and lazy lungs didn't become a wall; he became a bottleneck. The game wouldn't absorb the blows for you.
Warrior
The blade seemed to breathe. Lighter armor, perfect balance, high attack combined with speed, bonuses in strength and agility. The Warrior was relentless pressure, a factory of DPS within arm's reach. But he paid dearly for the privilege of fighting face-to-face: low HP and weak magic. Execution had to be clinical—last-frame dodges, pattern reading, stamina counted as if every point were hard currency.
Between Tank and Warrior, the border was clear: one made space into a bastion, the other into a blade. Both fought head-on. In both, the body mattered. And here lay the most common mistake: the skinny, untrained gamer who picked Warrior thinking the game would cover his lack of fitness. He would suffer. Badly. Reflexes might be sharp, but without the muscles to back them, nothing worked.
Archer
Leather, a recurved bow, the lean frame of one who trusted the space between himself and death. The Archer operated in the math of distance: line of sight, flight time, cover, angle. In the Tower, it wasn't just "point and click." Ballistics—simulated wind, gravity, arcing trajectory—surprised those who thought range meant ease. Bonuses in agility and intelligence gave speed and specialized skills which, though not spells in the classical sense, demanded calculations and precision as exacting as any.
In exchange: low strength, low vitality. Any mistake pulled the enemy's blade closer than it should. Physical attributes still mattered—posture, stability, fine control—but less than in melee classes. A poorly piloted Archer was a tourist. A well-piloted one controlled the battlefield.
Mage
The Mage was more than a spellcaster.The Tower demanded of him an architect—someone capable of bending simulated laws of physics with the rigor of an engineer or the judgment of a magistrate.
It wasn't enough to lift a staff and shout the name of a spell. Every cast was a math problem in real time.
Lightning wasn't just a blue line in the air: it was electrical discharge, requiring calculations of conduction, resistance, dispersion.
A fireball wasn't merely a burning orb: it was expanding gases, atmospheric pressure, thermal impact.
An ice field wasn't cosmetic: it was a state change, slippery surface, molecular expansion and contraction.
The Mage's brain worked like a CPU in overclock, running invisible equations with every gesture. His massive intelligence bonus wasn't just "more mana." It was processing power—decoding hidden logic, adapting in fractions of a second to battlefield shifts.
But the danger was real: get the model wrong. A magic circle drawn incorrectly meant a miscalculated area—and in the Tower, that wasn't just missing enemies. It meant hitting allies, structures, or even himself. That was why Mage was both the riskiest and highest-ceiling class. A genius shone. A careless one burned his own team alive.
Healer
At first glance, the most passive class. White robes, golden embroidery, a heavy rosary. But that was an illusion. The Healer wasn't the last bastion of hope; he was the first manager of chaos.
His immense intelligence bonus wasn't just for cure spells—it was for interpreting, in real time, the biological collapse of allies.
A deep cut demanded calculating clotting time, predicting how many seconds before unconsciousness.A fracture wasn't just "HP loss"—it was compromised mobility, weight limits, risk of systemic collapse if pushed.Poisoning required chemical reasoning: neutralizing agents, effect durations, balancing antidotes with active defenses.
Healing in the Black Tower wasn't pressing a button. It was triage under fire: deciding who lived and who died in seconds, with moral weight heavier than any boss's strike.
And beyond that, the Healer had to anticipate.
A good Healer didn't wait for the health bar to drop; he predicted the blow and prepared shields, buffs, energy transfers.
He read the fight like a chess master—always two moves ahead, forecasting collapse before it happened.
That was why veterans saw the Healer as the class of hidden strategists. He didn't command by shouting, but by silent calculation. His mind was a map in constant update, angles and timings weighed with the coldness of a battlefield surgeon.
Alessio drew a long breath. Cold analysis didn't lighten the weight of the decision—it only clarified it. Strengths and weaknesses weren't entries in a glossary; they were logistical routes stretched across months of grinding, raids, and floors that reenacted—with didactic cruelty—the turning points of human history. Class was the first filter of everything that came after: gear, synergies, builds, meta. And more importantly, future evolutions.
The Tower, generous and cruel, allowed evolutions—branches, specializations, metamorphoses within each archetype. But the tree had fixed roots. A Tank could evolve toward damage, adopt more aggressive styles, drift toward castle-like gladiators. But he would never stop being a Tank. His damage ceiling would never surpass that of a Warrior born to cut—just as a lawyer who studied criminal procedure all his life doesn't improvise brain surgery on a whim. Choices carved limits—and limits were the metaphysics of the game.
The reverse held as well: a Warrior trying to become a wall could mitigate better with time—but he'd never inherit the core of containment that was born with the shield. An Archer would never become a bastion; a Mage would never wake up a bruiser just by standing on the frontline. The Healer could walk paths of prevention, barriers, even aggressive reversals, but his orbit always circled keeping others alive.
On paper, it all looked clear. In practice, it was a trap for vanity. The opening choice stitched the fabric of the next hundred hours—and the thousand after that. Those who chose poorly, thinking they could "switch later," were in truth signing the terms of their own frustration.
Alessio felt the weight of his own body—fibers reforged by morning runs, squats, shoulders seared under iron. His mind, meanwhile, held the methodical dryness of law and the instincts of a ten-year veteran of the Tower: risk control, pattern recognition, cooldown management like compound interest. He knew every design trick disguised as freedom. He knew where the Tower seduced the impatient, punished the arrogant, rewarded the patient.
In the end, the synthesis was simple and terrible:
This is, probably, the single most important choice in the entire game.
And yet, many would make it like clicking past terms and conditions—careless, credulous, pushing off to "later" a consequence that had no later.
The five silhouettes waited, impassive, as silence tightened its grip on the moment. The translucent screen didn't blink, didn't plead, didn't explain. It demanded.