Chapter 61: Sub-Tower (7) |
[You have entered Floor 9.]
The moment I moved to Floor 9, I stopped time.
What I saw was… a stone.
An elongated, person-sized cuboid stone floated low, about a hand’s width above the ground.
So now I’m supposed to fight a rock?
We were on the ninth floor, so naturally something was bound to be off.
I imagined the stone might start spinning like a drill and come flying at me the moment I unfroze time…
After finishing my Mental Concentration, I led off with a Flame Strike.
KABOOOOOM!
When the flames cleared, the stone was gone.
Huh…? Did I get it?
I hadn’t.
Looking around, I found that the stone had somehow drifted up to the ceiling above my head.
“…?”
I hadn’t noticed it move at all.
Did it teleport or something?
I tried firing another skill.
Light Bullets traced their luminous tails toward the stone, and…
BAM BAM BAM BAM!
They only struck the innocent ceiling.
This time I saw it clearly.
Right before the attack hit, the stone vanished.
The vanished stone reappeared in midair to my left.
…So it really does teleport?
“Plli.”
I sent Plli to attack the stone.
Plli leapt up and swung his massive forepaw at the stone.
And of course, the stone vanished.
It reappeared on the right side, low to the ground.
The instant I spotted the teleported stone, I stopped time.
After finishing Mental Concentration, I fired off a Destruction Ray.
Once the beam died down and I confirmed the stone wasn’t there, I scanned the area…
“…”
…and found the stone had appeared behind me.
It had dodged through teleportation again, no surprise there.
Plli chased the teleporting stone around in circles while I kept hurling spells. We repeated this several more times.
Not a single attack landed.
I paused for a moment to think.
A teleporting stone.
It didn’t attack or counterattack at all. It only dodged my attacks by teleporting.
There seemed to be no cooldown, no delay, no restriction on its teleportation whatsoever.
Which meant I couldn’t land a hit.
Floor 9 seemed to be all about figuring out how to land an attack on this cheeky little rock.
Should I try attacking from Concealment?
“Diul.”
I approached the stone while concealed by Diul’s ability.
But the moment I attacked, the stone teleported away as if mocking me. Failure.
‘Is there a pattern?’
I came up with another idea.
What if there was a pattern to where it teleported?
I could predict its next location and fire an attack simultaneously, catching it where it appeared.
I started attacking the stone again.
It appeared on the left, then the right, in front of me, then behind.
High, then low, mid-height, far away, close, sometimes right in front of my face…
After watching it teleport over a hundred times.
I couldn’t find any pattern at all.
It was completely random, no matter how I looked at it.
I kept trying other methods.
I sprayed skills randomly in all directions. Failure.
I set up a Scorching Zone in advance and kept attacking, hoping the stone would teleport into it. Failure.
I tried sneaking up and just touching it instead of attacking. Failure.
Failure, failure, failure…
I tried every method I could think of, and every single one failed.
“Goddammit.”
I was starting to lose it.
What the hell was I supposed to do here?
I calmed myself down and thought it through again. Anger wouldn’t help.
‘How is it dodging my attacks?’
I didn’t mean the teleportation itself.
To dodge an attack, the stone had to ‘perceive’ the attack first, didn’t it?
How exactly was that stone perceiving my attacks and dodging them?
It wasn’t dodging by sight, since it had no eyes. And Diul’s Concealment didn’t work either.
As I stood there with my arms crossed, brooding over it, an idea suddenly hit me.
Vrrrrrr…
I fired off another Light Bullet at the stone, the umpteenth one I’d thrown that day.
But this time, I didn’t intend to land it. I planned to stop it right before impact.
The Light Bullet sped through the air and halted right in front of the stone. And…
“…!”
The stone didn’t teleport.
The instant I tried to move the Light Bullet again, it teleported away.
“Ha.”
…Now I get it.
I finally understood how this rock was dodging.
My intent was being read in advance, completely.
In other words, it was reading my mind.
‘So how am I supposed to hit it?’
Attack without the intent to attack?
I tried firing another Light Bullet while thinking, ‘I’m not going to attack the stone.’
The stone teleported away.
Yeah… that wasn’t going to work, was it?
It’s not like I could just decide not to have intent.
If the stone was reading my mind completely, deceiving it was impossible.
Unless I could fully deceive myself first, that is.
…So, if I could attack the stone with absolutely no intent behind it…
One plausible method came to mind.
Right now, the stone was floating low to the ground, some distance ahead of me.
I closed my eyes.
And started spinning in place.
I spun like a madman for a long time. Until I’d completely lost any sense of which direction the stone was in.
…Alright, done. I had no clue anymore.
I stopped spinning and started firing skills wildly in every direction, all 360 degrees.
KABOOOOOM!
Since I had no idea where the stone was, naturally I couldn’t know which attack would hit.
And if I didn’t know, then the stone wouldn’t either.
I kept blasting skills with my mind blank, and soon a message popped up.
[Floor 9 has been cleared.]
I opened my eyes.
Looking behind me, I saw the stone, smashed to pieces on the floor by a Flame Strike.
Ha… success!
Worked exactly as I’d planned.
Only Floor 10 remained.
“Pretty challenging, actually.”
That was my impression after clearing through Floor 9.
With all the various gimmicks mixed in, the difficulty was no joke.
Still, nothing compared to Nightmare difficulty.
[Proceed to Floor 10?]
What kind of final boss would I face?
Clearing Floor 10 would earn me the special reward the Tower had mentioned.
I took a thorough rest, fully replenished my Willpower, and then entered Floor 10.
*
Life on easy mode.
That was how I’d describe my life.
Because I had a superpower.
Not as a metaphor. An actual, literal superpower.
I didn’t realize it as a kid, but as I grew older, I came to understand that I was different from everyone else.
The Time Stop Ability.
Though it wasn’t all that incredible, really. I couldn’t move inside frozen time either.
Still, even that much was more than enough to coast through life.
Every second other people had, I could stretch into a full hour of useful time, and that made it a broken ability when it came to studying.
When taking tests, I was the only one with no time limit. From elementary school onward, my grades were always at the top of the school.
Beyond that, the ability had countless little uses in everyday life.
I figured I could probably put it to good use in sports like soccer or baseball, but I wasn’t really into anything physical, so I never bothered going down that road.
I grew up as a textbook model student, and today happened to be CSAT day.
As always, I took the exam with a light heart and headed home.
“I’m home.”
After dinner, I downloaded the answer key and graded my exam.
The result was exactly as expected. A perfect score.
Of course, I’d worked hard too.
Even without time pressure, scoring perfectly still required the actual ability to solve every problem.
I hummed a tune and stretched my arms.
“Seoul Med? You’re a total pushover.”
Ah, so easy.
Doesn’t it bother my conscience to cheat when everyone else worked their ass off?
Well, what can I say.
Life isn’t fair.
And besides, why let a gift like this go to waste once it’s been handed to me?
Anyway, all that was left was to enjoy myself for a bit, prep for the med school interview, and that’d be it.
My life had been smooth sailing so far, and it was going to keep being smooth sailing.
I was about to open my bedroom door to share the good news with my family.
“…?”
A faint sense of déjà vu hit me, and I froze with my hand on the doorknob.
What was that?
It felt like something like this had happened before.
After this, an earthquake hits… and a message appears in front of me like a video game…
“Tower?”
I muttered the word that had popped into my head and tilted my head in confusion.
Tower? Why a tower, all of a sudden?
And why the hell would there be an earthquake in Korea out of nowhere? What was I even thinking?
“…Did I have some weird dream last night?”
The strange feeling soon faded, and I shrugged it off and headed out to the living room.
I proudly announced my perfect CSAT score to the family.
“I just checked my answers. Looks like I got a perfect score.”
“…Oh my! Really?!”
“Hahaha! Good work, son!”
“Haha, I’ve still got the interview left. Need to prepare for that too.”
.
.
.
I got into med school, and went on to enjoy my college years with friends.
I served my mandatory military service as an active-duty soldier during college. The service period was way shorter that way than going in as a military doctor after graduation, so I figured it was the better option.
After graduating, I worked as an internal medicine resident at a university hospital.
I became a doctor without much trouble, and my life kept rolling along smoothly, just as it always had.
Good job, good salary, good work-life balance.
I took my parents on trips to nice places here and there, teased my younger sister who somehow still hadn’t grown up despite their age while slipping them some pocket money, started dating a junior I’d known since residency…
It was a daily life of small, continuous joys. What a wonderful life!
“…Oppa? What are you thinking about?”
I’d zoned out for a moment while walking with my girlfriend at Han River Park.
“Yeah, it’s nothing.”
I gazed out at the lush green grass.
Sometimes I’d get this strange feeling.
Like my life wasn’t a calm, even green like that grass over there, but rather some spectacular blend of every color imaginable…
But that couldn’t be right, could it? My life had always been smooth.
I was satisfied with my current life, yet for some reason, my chest would feel hollow at times. Strange, really.
After dating for a few years, my girlfriend and I got married.
We went to Italy for our honeymoon.
We were busy marveling at the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
“Wow, how is that thing still standing without falling over? Right, Oppa?”
“I know. It’s incredible.”
My girlfriend, no, my wife, gripped my hand tightly.
I stared up at the towering structure for a long time, lost in thought, before I spoke.
“Hey, this might sound a little strange, but want to hear it?”
“Hmm? What is it?”
“I get this thought sometimes. A tower suddenly appears in the world…”
“A tower? What kind of tower? Like this one?”
“Yeah. Anyway, this huge tower appears, and people climb it. If they don’t climb, the world ends. They go inside, fight monsters, avoid traps…”
My wife giggled.
“What’s that supposed to be? Have you been playing some game like that lately, Oppa?”
“Even funnier, I’m the only one who can climb the hardest tower nobody else can manage. Risking my life and everything.”
“You? The Oppa who pops a handful of supplements every day to stay healthy?”
“That’s right. Anyway…”
Just as I was about to say more, my wife’s expression turned serious.
“Oh, enough already. We’re on our honeymoon and you keep going on about weird stuff. Try to tell reality from games, will you?”
“…”
What was this?
Suddenly the world felt off.
I looked back at the tower and asked.
“Hey, what’s our age difference again?”
“What? Three years. You’re forgetting that now too?”
That was really strange…
I had a rock-solid preference for older women. Whether in high school or college, I’d only ever dated upperclassmen…
So how did I end up meeting and marrying this woman?
Huh? Wait, who even was this person?
I stared at the unidentified woman whose name I couldn’t even remember, and let out a weak laugh.
“Hahaha…”
Goddammit.
It all came back to me.
“…Oppa? Why are you suddenly laughing?”
What was going on here? How was I supposed to get out?
This was a dream.
And the simplest way to wake up from a dream was…
“H-hey, where are you going! Oppa!”
I sprinted toward the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Security guards tried to block me. I narrowly slipped past them.
I went inside the tower and climbed the stairs.
Wait, did the Leaning Tower of Pisa actually have stairs inside? Didn’t know, didn’t care, I just kept running.
“Hah… hah…”
I made it to the top.
Catching my breath, I climbed onto the railing of the tilted tower.
Below me, people were looking up and murmuring, and the guards who’d followed me up were frantically trying to stop me.
“Please calm down and come down! It’s dangerous!”
Just as I was about to jump, my feet hesitated.
What if I was the one who’d lost it?
Which side was reality? That bizarre world where a tower rose up out of the Pacific, or here?
By any reasonable measure, it was here.
Look, every sensation was as vivid as real life.
Just as the confusion was creeping back in, wondering if maybe I really had gone crazy, a faint reverberation echoed in my head.
…Quit screwing around and get out of there already! You moron of a master!
That sensation of two souls connected to one another. Somehow, the connection felt familiar.
“Ah…”
With that, my certainty came back, and I let out a relieved laugh.
Right. Reality was the other side.
I was in the middle of clearing Floor 10 of the fifth Sub-Tower, after all.
“What kind of trick did this bastard pull on me?”
First things first, time to wake up.
I spread my arms wide.
And tipped my body forward, down toward the ground.
With a dizzying rush of free fall, my body plummeted toward the pavement. And…
CRUNCH!
*
I opened my eyes.
A pitch-black ceiling came into view.
When I sat up, I felt something foreign on my head.
I tore the thing off with my hand.
“…The hell.”
Some strange creature like a glow-in-the-dark jellyfish, tentacles squirming in the most revolting way.
So this thing was the culprit.
Had it gotten me the moment I entered Floor 10? I had no memory at all of how it had happened.
“Thanks for the nap, you bastard.”
I slammed the jellyfish down onto the floor and crushed it.
Splat!
[Floor 10 has been cleared.]
A message appeared.
I looked over at Diul, floating in the air beside me.
“Thanks, Diul. You kept calling out to me, didn’t you.”
Only now did I remember that he’d been calling out to me, telling me to wake up from the dream.
Lucky I caught on at the last second. Otherwise, I might really never have woken up.
Diul circled my head a few times as if grumbling, then drifted back into the bracelet.
I let out a sigh.
A boss that traps people inside dreams…
Some seriously creepy stuff out there.
The time I’d spent inside the dream felt like only a fleeting instant, as if my whole life had flashed before my eyes.
It was the kind of life I really might have lived if the Tower had never appeared.
[The fifth Sub-Tower has been cleared up to its final floor.]
In any case, that was the end of it.
I’d successfully cleared the fifth Sub-Tower without incident.
I stood up and looked at the messages scrolling into view in front of me.
[A special reward will be granted.]
[Please select one of the following as your reward.]
More messages followed.
Right. The reward.
I’d put in the work, time to collect.
What exactly was this ‘special reward’, I wondered?
“Drumroll, drumroll, drumroll…”
I made my own sound effects out loud as I looked over the options. And.
“…Huh?”
One of the choices made my eyes go wide.
[1. Tower’s Curse Immunity]
[Special Item: Tower’s Curse Immunity]
Permanently grants immunity to death from the Tower’s Curse. Can be used on someone other than a Climber. Disappears after a single use.
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