I Got a Monster Spaceship from the Tutorial Tower - Chapter 1

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 1
Prologue
Seven years ago, the Tutorial Tower was built because Earth was deemed too weak.
The warning came with it: if humanity did not conquer the tower by ascending all 100 floors within ten years, Earth would be destroyed in a massive cosmic invasion.
Humans who Awakened under the designation “Pilot” were issued fighter craft ranked from F-grade to S+-grade and began their ascent.
And now, seven years later.
— Dammit! How are we supposed to take down fifty Orcish fighters with just us?
— Stop wasting breath and move faster!
The enemy always outnumbered the Pilots.
Meanwhile.
“Launch carrier-based aircraft.”
Screeeee!
At Yeon-woo’s command, dozens of carrier-based aircraft lifted off one after another from the runway of an enormous space battleship.
An overwhelming force that far exceeded the enemy count.
Each one worth the lives of Pilots themselves.
The space battleship watched the battle from afar with serene composure.
「S+-grade Clear.
First record achieved.
Notification to all Pilots.」
Yeon-woo, the captain of the space battleship, stood on the bridge and thought.
‘……Just a convenience store clerk until recently.’
Episode 1
Beep! Beep!
The scanner’s sound echoed through the neatly organized Convenience Store.
Seo Yeon-woo was scanning barcodes with a vacant stare, the items piling up on the counter before him.
‘How much of my hourly wage comes out of what they make selling this stuff?’
The thought made him want to sigh every time, but he swallowed it hard with a customer watching.
Whoosh!
The customer waiting to pay was too engrossed in watching the real-time Tutorial Tower strategy streams to care.
These days, five out of every ten customers who came into convenience stores had Heroes of Earth—some mysterious streaming site that appeared alongside the tower—already playing.
‘They say the payout is insane even if you don’t hit the main channel.’
With so many users, even low-grade Pilots earned roughly what a salaried office worker made.
Of course, to Yeon-woo the convenience store clerk, it was unimaginable wealth.
‘Sigh… I’d like to do something for Mom and Dad.’
Yeon-woo’s parents had repeatedly warned him never to think of entering the tower, saying that the moment he mentioned Awakening, they’d forbid it as too dangerous.
His mother had been selling kimbap since before dawn.
His father cleaned sewers in the stench of waste.
Thinking of his parents, who had lived that way their whole lives, made Yeon-woo’s heart heavy.
Could things really improve just by working like this?
As he paused mid-calculation with such thoughts, his gaze and the customer’s met.
Swipe.
“…….”
“Ah, sorry…….”
Yeon-woo apologized quietly and reached for the next item—when it happened.
Beep!
Whoosh!
「You have Awakened.
Relic Grade Space Battleship.
Congratulations.」
Yeon-woo tilted his head in confusion.
‘Huh, I must’ve stared at the Heroes of Earth screen too long—I’m seeing things now.’
He hadn’t even pressed the scanner button yet.
Awakened? What was that about?
That was an opportunity that only came to heroes with the resolve to stake their lives on battle.
Yeon-woo, on the other hand, checked every single order five times over before processing it.
He was just an ordinary citizen who tested bridge stones repeatedly before crossing them.
He must be hallucinating.
But the illusion didn’t last long.
‘Wait.’
Awakened?
‘Me?’
“Huh?”
“?”
Yeon-woo and the customer tilted their heads in unison.
The light that erupted from Yeon-woo’s body the instant he Awakened blazed far too intensely to ignore.
The flustered customer gaped for a moment, then pointed at Yeon-woo and asked carefully.
“Um, part-timer… surely you don’t mean…?”
Yeon-woo gestured at himself, his own mouth falling open.
“Probably…?”
But neither of them had time to discuss it further.
「Entering Tutorial Tower, Floor 1.」
An Awakened Pilot was bound by rule to enter the Tower immediately.
“Crazy… aaaaah!”
Yeon-woo screamed as the space around him seemed to fold in on itself, and he was sucked into the Tower—
No, into his Space Battleship.
The next moment, Yeon-woo found himself in a place utterly unlike the Convenience Store.
‘Where is this?’
Usually, when you Awaken and receive a fighter, you’re transported into a cramped cockpit, or so the stories went.
The experience varied by Grade, but most accounts agreed it was punishingly tight and deeply uncomfortable.
People even joked that the current record holder, challenged all the way to Floor 73, might’ve climbed five more floors if only the cockpit had been wider.
But the space where Yeon-woo stood bore no resemblance to any of those accounts.
It was spacious—easily as wide as a university lecture hall.
And in every corner, elegant warm-white indirect lighting gleamed softly.
The vast, unbroken panoramic window stretched across the forward view, and the sense of openness it commanded was overwhelming.
Beyond it lay an infinite expanse of cosmic void.
Stars—the kind you’d never see through Seoul’s haze of fine dust—glittered in brilliant chorus, filling Yeon-woo’s eyes.
By every measure of the interior, by the view itself,
this resembled a luxurious private suite in a high-end hotel far more than a fighter’s cockpit.
Yeon-woo felt oddly out of place simply standing alone in such an elegant, spacious room.
Was he really inside the Tower?
“For a fighter, this is… far too spacious.”
A voice, clean and measured, reached him from behind.
“Captain, welcome to the Bridge of our Space Battleship. I am Urelka, Vice-Captain of this vessel.”
“Huh?”
‘Another person in a fighter cockpit besides the Pilot?’
Just like with the cockpit itself, information about Awakening flooded the internet the moment you searched for it.
It was common knowledge that a fighter was piloted by the Pilot alone.
Yet here, everything was different from start to finish.
Yeon-woo, the dutiful citizen, turned around cautiously.
A Vice-Captain in a fighter? That made no sense. Still, this stranger surely knew more about the situation than he did.
“Pardon me, but— gah, X!”
The Vice-Captain’s appearance hit Yeon-woo with startling violence.
Hideously ugly?
A hulking, hairy brute?
If only it had been something so simple.
A frame so slight it barely reached Yeon-woo’s chest.
A body so gaunt the bones showed through, skeletal and thin.
A head disproportionately large for that frame.
Eyes that bulged even behind spectacles, a jutting nose ridge, sharp protruding teeth.
And most damning of all, skin the color of deep forest green.
The one who’d introduced himself as Vice-Captain Urelka was, unmistakably, a Goblin.
In that instant, scenes Yeon-woo had watched in videos flashed through his mind.
A Goblin breaching a cockpit and tearing at a Pilot’s throat.
Goblins swarming in numbers, ripping at a soldier’s neck.
A Goblin slipping from the shadows to tear at a civilian’s throat.
Reflexively,
Yeon-woo’s hand rose to his own neck, touching it gently.
He was grateful only a curse escaped his lips.
If his fist had swung on instinct—
he didn’t even want to imagine it.
These creatures were true monsters—they drooled at the mere sight of humans and drove rusty weapons into flesh.
Though one wore a naval uniform pressed neat as a parade ground, dressing up didn’t make a goblin any less a goblin.
Yeon-woo’s face had gone pale, his arms and legs trembling visibly.
But the goblin took it a step further.
“X? Such harsh words, and we’ve only just met…….”
Anyone could see the creature had taken it to heart.
The goblin.
Its large eyes glistened, mouth corners and shoulders drooping.
Yeon-woo felt an unexpected pang of guilt and scratched the back of his head apologetically.
“I-I’m sorry.”
The goblin then adjusted its glasses with a casual flick, unbothered, and spoke.
“It’s quite all right, sir. I’m accustomed to it. Though if you continue standing idle like that, you won’t fall to my attack—you’ll be obliterated when an unmanned drone destroys the bridge of your vessel, and you’ll perish with it.”
“What?”
Urelka extended one arm in a courteous gesture, pointing directly ahead toward the Bridge.
Yeon-woo’s eyes reflexively followed that gesture.
Screeeee!
“……?!”
A pitch-black unmanned drone was barreling straight toward them at full throttle.
Ah.
Of course. They were inside the Tutorial Tower.
The single small unmanned drone on the first floor was infamous.
The first opponent in a stage of drones stretching all the way to the tenth floor.
Being the very first enemy one encountered, it had become a meme all over the internet.
Screeeeeeeee!!!
Yet seeing the drone in person was far more overwhelming than Yeon-woo had imagined.
For some reason it appeared closer than it actually was, which only intensified the dread.
‘I’m really going to die like this!’
Yeon-woo snapped back to his senses.
As Urelka had said, the goblin’s intentions might be unclear, but the drone’s hostility was unmistakable.
Was it survival instinct?
Yeon-woo’s mind raced.
“S-so what do I do?”
Yeon-woo grasped at Urelka like a drowning man clutching at straw.
He had to survive first, figure out the rest later.
Whirrrrr.
Just then, the floor in front of Yeon-woo opened, and a long device rose up from below.
Atop a silver column traced by elegant curves sat a transparent sphere.
About the size of a soccer ball, give or take.
“This is the control device for the vessel. It’s called the Master Ball.”
“The Master Ball?”
He felt like he’d heard that somewhere before—but that didn’t matter now.
At this rate, he really was going to explode on the first floor along with a space battleship.
Clank.
The drone was now unfurling laser cannons from beneath both wings.
“So what do I—?!”
“Simply place your hands upon it, and you’ll understand what needs to be done.”
Yeon-woo grabbed the Master Ball firmly with both hands.
Or tried to.
“……This won’t explode or anything when I grab it, right?”
It was hard to trust a monster’s word completely when he didn’t even know what was happening.
Urelka answered in an exasperated tone.
“No, it won’t.”
“It does seem to be trembling quite a bit though…….”
“That trembling is your hands, Captain. At this rate, you’ll genuinely fail to clear the first floor.”
The goblin was surprisingly abrasive.
Meeting someone for the first time, wasn’t it natural to be suspicious?
A space battleship, whatever that was—he had no grasp of what kind of combat machine he was supposedly piloting.
Yeon-woo gripped the Master Ball with all his remaining strength.
Fwoooosh!
In that instant, an overwhelming torrent of information crashed into Yeon-woo’s mind like a tidal wave.
The first image to flood in, and the dominant one at that, was unmistakably the Space Battleship.
The overwhelming mass of the vessel filled Yeon-woo’s mind like water pouring into a vessel.
How vast was it.
How did it move.
What surrounded it.
What of all that should he be seeing.
What did he need to use, and how.
And…… was it really this overwhelming.
Breath drawn in softly.
With his mouth slightly open, Yeon-woo let his will flow instinctively into the Master Ball.
The response was instantaneous.
Nothing like the intricate interface of a fighter in the footage, nothing like the flashy, desperate movements of pilots.
Whirrrr…….
The massive Main Cannon at the Bridge’s front swiveled toward the Unmanned Drone.
Whether the drone knew of this fact or not, it came on without any evasive maneuvers.
Urelka, who had been watching Yeon-woo, nodded.
“Excellent. Now, annihilate it as it is.”
“……How?”
He asked reflexively, though the method was already forming in his mind.
‘Fire.’
And that would be the end.
Zzzzeeeeee……!
Deep within the lengthy barrel of the Main Cannon.
From that profound depth came a force like the roar of a beast waking from hibernation, building to a crescendo.
Building, building, building…….
Even Yeon-woo, who had issued the command, was taken aback.
“What is this…….”
Was it really all right to fire something like that?
At just a single drone?
But the order had already been given.
BOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!
From the cannon’s muzzle erupted a radiant pillar of light.
From the recoil, the hull of the immense Space Battleship shuddered violently.
Crash!
“Urgh!”
A shock far more violent than anticipated.
Searing light flooding the Bridge.
Yeon-woo reflexively squeezed his eyes shut.
By any measure, this was not a weapon designed to take down a single drone.
Yet the result was certain.
Crackle!
The drone, rushing forward with all its velocity, found that speed meaningless.
Without so much as firing the machine gun it had eagerly drawn.
It was swallowed by the pillar of light and literally vanished.
Not a trace left in the vast cosmos.
“It can’t be…….”
Yeon-woo gasped in shock.
He tried to sense the presence of the vanished drone through the Master Ball, but felt nothing in the vicinity of the battleship.
Clench.
Strength poured into Yeon-woo’s hand gripping the Master Ball, though he barely noticed it.
Thump-thump, thump-thump.
His heartbeat echoed like a drum.
“So……I just did that?”
Urelka watched the wonder cross his face and began to clap.
Clap, clap, clap.
“Magnificent. Synchronization, and now the Main Cannon in one go. Your talent as Captain is unparalleled.”
“?”
That’s all there was to it?
Until moments ago, Yeon-woo had been pulling the trigger of a scanner at a Convenience Store.
And now, that same man was wielding the Main Cannon of a colossal Space Battleship.
A single shot had obliterated the unmanned drone.
From the moment he finished aiming to the instant he fired, mere seconds had elapsed—though it had felt like an eternity.
All of it had become possible the moment his hand touched the Master Ball.
That exhilarating rush of adrenaline brushed against something deep within Yeon-woo, some trigger he didn’t even know he possessed.
Before his eyes, system windows began to materialize, indifferent and inevitable.
「Tutorial Tower, Floor 1.
S+-grade Clear.」
“S+-grade clear…?”
It was a clear rank he’d never heard of in his entire life.
‘What in the world is all this?’
Then came a cascade of messages.
Yeon-woo’s eyes went wide.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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