Chapter 10: The Latecomers (1) |
I was surprised after reading the item description.
A rare+ grade skill?
And it wasn’t just a simple Skill Stone, either.
It was giving me a choice, telling me to pick one out of five.
True to its name as a spellbook, they were all magic-type skills.
I read through the skill descriptions one by one.
[Skill: Lower Mind Control (Rare+)]
Dominates and controls the minds of lesser creatures of low standing. Up to ten entities can be controlled simultaneously. Requires 3 minutes of Mental Concentration to cast.
Classification: Magic-type
Cooldown: 1 hour
Lower Mind Control.
It said I could control lesser creatures of low standing.
Was that old wizard’s control over the Goblins this very spell?
[Skill: Teleportation (Rare+)]
Teleports within a range of 10 meters. Requires 30 seconds of Mental Concentration to cast.
Classification: Magic-type
Willpower cost: 150
Cooldown: 1 minute
This one was Teleportation.
Just a straightforward teleportation ability, as the name suggested.
[Skill: Corrupted Flame (Rare+)]
Sprays a Corrupted Flame that decays living organisms. Requires 20 seconds of Mental Concentration to cast.
Classification: Magic-type
Willpower cost: 20 per second
Cooldown: 30 seconds
Corrupted Flame, huh.
This one seemed like an offensive skill similar to Flame Strike.
[Skill: Shadow Swamp (Rare+)]
Spreads a Shadow Swamp across the area to bind and damage enemies. Requires 3 minutes of Mental Concentration to cast.
Classification: Magic-type
Willpower cost: 200
Cooldown: 10 minutes
Oh, wait, could this be…?
The description looked similar to the ability the old wizard had used.
Some kind of area-of-effect skill, maybe.
[Skill: Life Drain (Rare+)]
Absorbs the life force of nearby living organisms. Requires 1 minute of Mental Concentration to cast.
Classification: Magic-type
Willpower cost: 10 per second
Cooldown: 1 minute
And lastly, Life Drain.
An ability that absorbed life force.
The details on the effect weren’t spelled out.
So what’s the benefit of absorbing life force? Does it heal my injuries?
“Hmm…”
So I had to pick one out of these.
Mental Concentration time and Willpower cost weren’t even worth considering.
The only things that mattered to me were a skill’s effect and its cooldown.
Lower Mind Control and Life Drain.
I eliminated those two immediately.
Lower Mind Control had way too long a cooldown to begin with. An hour? Really?
On top of that, the description saying “lesser creatures of low standing” was vague.
If it could only control monsters on the level of Goblins, it wasn’t an ability worth coveting.
Life Drain was cut for similar reasons.
I couldn’t tell exactly what the benefit of absorbing life force was.
‘Probably health recovery or wound healing, I’d guess.’
Judging by the Willpower cost of 10 per second, it seemed like a sustained skill that kept running once activated.
Could I actually use this in combat? Could I move while using it?
And there was the condition of needing to be close to the target, too.
All in all, it was uncertain and vague.
That left three skills.
This was where the real dilemma started.
Because all three had their own distinct advantages.
[Skill: Corrupted Flame (Rare+)]
Sprays a Corrupted Flame that decays living organisms. Requires 20 seconds of Mental Concentration to cast.
Classification: Magic-type
Willpower cost: 20 per second
Cooldown: 30 seconds
This one also had a per-second Willpower cost like Life Drain.
But then, didn’t that mean I could keep using the skill indefinitely as long as my Willpower didn’t run out?
Plus, the description said it “sprays” the flame, which gave me a rough idea of what form the attack took.
Probably something like a flamethrower.
‘Unlimited flamethrower is pretty tempting, not gonna lie.’
For someone like me who practically never had to worry about running out of Willpower, it looked more than decent.
The only catch was that I already had one offensive skill.
[Skill: Shadow Swamp (Rare+)]
Spreads a Shadow Swamp across the area to bind and damage enemies. Requires 3 minutes of Mental Concentration to cast.
Classification: Magic-type
Willpower cost: 200
Cooldown: 10 minutes
I’d already seen this one with my own eyes.
It was probably the same spell the old wizard had used.
Being able to instantly cast an area-of-effect skill like this?
Yeah, this one looked really good too.
The cooldown was a bit long, though.
[Skill: Teleportation (Rare+)]
Teleports within a range of 10 meters. Requires 30 seconds of Mental Concentration to cast.
Classification: Magic-type
Willpower cost: 150
Cooldown: 1 minute
And finally, Teleportation.
This one… was just good.
Of course, taken at face value, it was absolute garbage.
A 30-second cast time just to teleport a measly 10 meters? What kind of spell is that, seriously?
‘I could crawl 10 meters and it still wouldn’t take 30 seconds.’
But for me, Mental Concentration time was meaningless.
Meaning I could freely use instant Teleportation at will, even in the middle of combat.
Especially in situations like last time when I got hit by that arrow, where I’d stop time and find myself facing an unavoidable attack.
With Teleportation, dodging would be possible.
It essentially meant gaining a highly useful evasion tool.
I mulled it over, then made my decision.
[You have acquired ‘Skill: Teleportation (Rare+)’.]
The moment I selected the skill, the wizard crumbled away and vanished.
They all looked good, but Teleportation was the right call.
There was one more reason, and it mattered most of all.
The Tower shared a general theme for each floor regardless of difficulty.
Nightmare Floor 1 had been absurdly harder compared to the other difficulties, but in the end, the task was still fighting Goblins.
And the theme for Floor 2 was the Jump Map.
Lava rising from below while Climbers had to hop across platforms to get higher, if I remembered right.
So with Floor 2 in mind, Teleportation was clearly the correct pick.
After all, I needed to choose whatever would help most with the very next floor.
I tried using Teleportation right away.
Pop.
After 30 seconds of Mental Concentration, my body teleported.
“Oh.”
I turned around and checked the distance I’d traveled. It was pretty incredible.
Having wrapped up the first teleportation experience of my life, I moved on to check the other rewards.
[Rare Skill Enhancement Stone]
Enhances one skill of rare grade.
A Skill Enhancement Stone had dropped.
I’d heard these were even rarer than Skill Stones.
The only rare-grade skill I currently had was Flame Strike.
Should I use it on Flame Strike right away?
I didn’t agonize over it for long.
‘Sit on it too long and it goes to waste.’
There was no chance of earning another skill as a reward unless I entered Floor 2.
And if I was going to enter Floor 2, there’d be no reason to be presumptuous enough to walk in without using it first.
[Would you like to use ‘Rare Skill Enhancement Stone’? (Available skill: Flame Strike)]
[‘Rare Skill Enhancement Stone’ has been used on ‘Skill: Flame Strike (Rare)’.]
[‘Skill: Flame Strike (Rare)’ has been enhanced; the number of flame projectiles increases.]
[Skill: Flame Strike (Rare)(+1)]
Launches two concentrated flames that explode on impact. Requires 20 seconds of Mental Concentration to cast.
Classification: Magic-type
Willpower cost: 100
Cooldown: 30 seconds
A +1 appeared next to the skill name.
The number of flame projectiles increased, so now I could fire two?
I thought about testing Flame Strike in an empty area but decided against it.
Using Teleportation once had already drained all my Willpower.
Couldn’t be bothered to wait, so I’d check it later.
The last reward to check was… a Magic Stone.
[Supreme Magic Stone]
A Magic Stone of supreme quality.
It seemed slightly bigger than the one from the last reward.
‘Still a useless item to me, though.’
Selling Magic Stones required registering as a Climber and obtaining seller qualifications. Since I was an unregistered, illegal Climber who’d never filed any paperwork, it wasn’t like I could sell this thing anywhere.
Well, it wasn’t like I’d ever hoped to make money from this anyway.
The only reason I was going in and out of a Tower I’d never planned to set foot in for the rest of my life was purely for the sake of world peace.
Ha… was there any more tear-jerking self-sacrifice than this?
If I died doing this, maybe someone would put up a statue of me or something.
‘But something does feel off.’
Weren’t the rewards a bit too generous?
Even accounting for the First Clear Reward and the Hidden Route bonuses.
Just from Floor 1 alone, I’d already earned one rare skill, one rare+ skill, and a +1 enhancement on a rare skill.
On top of that, my level was already 15.
…What kind of godforsaken trial was waiting on Floor 2 that they were handing out this much?
That was what truly unsettled me.
“Can’t someone else just clear Floor 2 for me…”
I wished desperately that someone other than me would clear all the way up to Floor 2 before the Time Limit.
Though of course, there’d need to be at least one Floor 1 clearer first for that to even be on the table.
I wondered how that Nightmare clearing project they were running in America was going.
That spirit of self-sacrifice I’d been going on about in my head moments ago had long since evaporated. In truth, it was never there to begin with.
I don’t want to do this either, for real.
I already did Floor 1, okay? Huh?
From Floor 2 onward, someone please do it for me.
If that happened, I was confident I’d cheer harder than anyone.
[Would you like to exit the Tower?]
I left the Tower.
I’m hungry.
Time to heat up that leftover braised short rib and have it with some rice.
*
After clearing the Floor 1 Hidden Route.
Time passed quickly.
Whenever I had spare time, I’d pop into Floor 1 and do Repeat Clearings.
Perhaps because I’d already cleared the Hidden Route, the old wizard no longer appeared when I went down to the Underground Passage.
I didn’t need Magic Stones, but the reason I kept doing Repeat Clearings was, well, just to stay sharp.
I couldn’t exactly sit around doing nothing to prepare for Floor 2.
[Rhino: Thank you as always. Have a good day, sir.]
Every now and then, I exchanged Whispers with Rhino as well.
He was still consistently coming to me for advice.
All I was doing was sharing my experience in as much detail as I could, so calling it advice felt like a stretch, but if even that was helping on his end, then good for him.
Through my conversations with Rhino, I also added more detail to my info posts.
For example, whether there was a set interval before the next trio of Goblins appeared, or if all three had to be defeated first; exactly how long it took for the stone gate to close; precisely at what timing the Crossbow Goblin showed up… and so on.
Even these minor details could prove critically important.
Rhino had been the first, but after him, plenty of others reached out to me via Whisper asking for advice on Nightmare Floor 1.
Among them was even someone from Korea’s Tower Climbing Special Agency.
I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but I supposed Korea was doing its best in its own way too.
I helped anyone who came to me for advice on Floor 1, regardless of country or nationality, as much as I could. Any messages about other matters, I flat-out ignored.
I just wanted someone, anyone, to succeed in clearing it and give me a shred of hope.
And perhaps my wish had finally reached someone.
[Nightmare (2)]
“…Oh!”
One day, I opened the Communication Channel and was startled by the changed number.
It had been about three months since I cleared Floor 1.
At long last, a new Nightmare Floor 1 clearer had appeared.
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