Retry (4)
Rustle!
The weary-looking blonde woman reading the newspaper snorted with laughter.
Hollywood actress Sela Devereaux.
She looked at the black-bobbed girl drinking coffee in a robe behind her.
Whoosh...... Watching her silky hair flutter in the breeze that blew in, famous actresses would look shabby by comparison.
Even Sela, who was convinced she was straight, would sometimes lose herself when she saw that mysterious figure.
“Honey~ It seems like a lot of people are still cursing you. I guess they're upset that a female Awakener forced a married actress into marriage?”
The black-bobbed girl sipped her coffee with a bored expression and said.
“......Leave it.”
“Hehe. People just don't know what that rotten asshole put me through. You're the one who saved me, honey.”
“Don't call me honey.”
“But we're supposedly married?”
“Only on paper.”
“Hehe, keeping your distance, are we?”
Sela Devereaux rested both arms on the back of the sofa and gazed at the girl with a suggestive look.
Tier 4 Tower graduate, Yuna Sinclair.
Nationality: unknown.
Age: estimated mid-twenties.
Nothing about her was known, and she looked like a girl in her late teens with no information to go on at all, but she was an SSS-Rank Awakener who had rolled around in the Ascension Tower for years.
With both dazzling looks and beautiful abilities, she was one of the world's brightest stars, but.
......She was close to a wreck, simply counting the days until her coming death.
Dozens of times a day, she was slashed apart by blades her own past had sharpened, and she lost sleep at night.
'If I'd made that choice back then, I could have saved my comrade.'
'If I hadn't said that back then, everyone would have been happy.'
'Back then, if I'd climbed the Apocalypse Tower instead of declaring graduation.......'
Looking at Yuna's eyes with their deep dark circles, Sela would sigh several times a day.
It would be nice if she stopped being bound by the past and lived out the rest of her life happily. The path ahead of Yuna was so bright and brilliant that it was all the more heartbreaking to see her quietly rotting away like this.
But lately, Sela was in a good mood.
It had been a few days since the announcement of the Apocalypse Tower Break deferral had come down.
For the first time in a long while, life was returning to Yuna Sinclair's eyes.
Of course, she still showed no emotion, and her eyes were as dead as ever, but she was doing something resembling 'activity,' in her own way.
Yuna was even checking the Tower Community for the first time in ages, when she'd refused to look at it to save her life.
[Apocalypse 1] Yu Hyun-sung: Hey, you sons of bitches, shut up already, will you?
[Apocalypse 1] Yu Hyun-sung: Didn't I say I'd kill you all? Wait a bit, yep. See you in the Lounge soon......Of course, it was full of nothing but conversations not worth reading.
One thing was certain.
'Yu Hyun-sung is really climbing the Apocalypse Tower.'
When he'd suddenly thrown himself into the Apocalypse Tower, she'd thought he had made an extreme choice.
Even that pathetic look of him playing the bully in the community was exactly the same as before.
'Yu Hyun-sung. What on earth are you trying to do.......'
Since long ago, Yu Hyun-sung had been a mad dog that even the top vanguard didn't mess with.
Since she had once climbed the Tower with him, Yuna knew his personality and his unpredictable behavior well.
And because she knew him well, she couldn't figure it out at all.
He never moved for the sake of others. He was a man who lived solely for his own safety and pleasure.
“What on earth is he thinking.......”
Her head was a mess.
He was moving to stop the Tower Break, to protect Earth?
A tiny handful, the top 100 rankers, had known.
That the Tower Break of the 'Apocalypse Tower,' which no one had challenged, wasn't far off. But even knowing that truth, the rankers had all chosen to graduate.
They each had their reasons, but Yuna Sinclair had developed severe trauma from 'a certain incident' and could no longer climb the Tower. She'd also had no choice but to return to Earth to save her old friend.
'Yu Hyun-sung. I thought you'd give up on everything and come back to Earth too.'
But he hadn't. He had chosen to challenge the Apocalypse Tower.
“Honey? From what I hear...... that man, Yu Hyun-sung. It seems he currently has a firm grip on every social system inside the Ascension Tower. Impressive, isn't it? Even when you were there, that was impossible.”
Was that so? He had finally taken complete control of the Ascension Tower Lounge's society.
Yu Hyun-sung had always said.
'I can't stand watching those bastards run around like sons of bitches, trusting nothing but their strength.'
The atrocities of the rankers. As long as you had enough power, you'd be forgiven for anything, whether killing people for fun, using them as slaves, or raping them. Yu Hyun-sung loathed that to the extreme, so he went around brutally slaughtering such people left and right.
“......Even Yu Hyun-sung can't clean up Earth's society too.”
Of course not. He was a player who had climbed the Tower bare-handed, without receiving even a single blessing.
Even if he graduated from the Tower, he was surely fated to live being shoved around by the top rankers.
But.......
What if he graduated from the Apocalypse Tower?
She'd thought Earth's Awakener system had now settled firmly in place. But it was incomplete. Because it was running far too much like an aristocratic society.
The law of the jungle.
A society where those with extremely strong power monopolized everything.
Yuna Sinclair hated that, so she hid her power as much as possible and lived in hiding with her old friend Sela Devereaux in a quiet forest deep in the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States.
Surely, as time passed, Awakeners would be divided more and more into classes according to their power, and those who had nothing would fall into slavery.
......Just as the 'early generation of the Ascension Tower' had.
How horrific the atrocities committed inside the Ascension Tower had been back then. Days so painful that just thinking about them made her mana leak out and run wild.
It wouldn't be long before Earth's future changed like that too. Yuna Sinclair had hidden away even knowing that.
The Tier 4 Tower graduates were already all intoxicated with their own power and considered wielding authority their rightful due. No one wanted to change that society.
But if there had been one person inside the Ascension Tower who had tried to overturn that horrific hell.......
It could only be that man, and him alone.
'Yu Hyun-sung. Don't tell me you're really planning to change even Earth's Awakener society?'
What a grand dream, for a body without any Divine Power or blessing. Everyone had laughed at him, but she had never once seen his eyes waver.
He might be about to begin another journey on which he'd stake his life, to achieve his goals and convictions.
Yuna knew well how horrific and agonizing that was.
Even the Tier 4 Tower, which she'd climbed with her comrades, had been so agonizing that she'd lost her mind and run wild several times.
And yet he was challenging the Apocalypse Tower, alone?
Maddeningly agonizing, mentally ravaging days would go on and on.
Crumple! When Yuna clenched the newspaper tightly and pressed her lips shut, Sela Devereaux smiled suggestively and said.
“Honey. A beast of prey can't live quietly grazing on grass in a forest like this.”
Yuna looked at Sela with confused eyes.
Sela stroked Yuna's cheek.
“Why not go back out into the world?”
Checking the newspaper once more with trembling hands, Yuna squeezed her eyes shut. She'd thought she'd never have reason to go out into the world again, but.
If, truly.
If Yu Hyun-sung had leapt into the Apocalypse Tower with such a great cause in his heart.
Even someone like me would do.
However feeble.......
On Earth, he needed someone to help him.
***
“Ahh~ I want to go home. Out there, I've got dozens of penthouses of my own built all over the world. My retirement plan to munch on nachos, chug beer, and binge hundreds of backlogged movies all at once~ My game room~”
Grumbling all the while, I dug up the ground with my bare hands without a break.
[Apocalypse Tower 1st Floor (Retry)]
This time, I didn't fight the Gatekeeper. Even without carrying out the stage's quest, there were plenty of things I could do here.
“Haah. With the body specs of a Tier 4 Tower graduate, I could eat nothing but fried chicken my whole life and not worry about getting gout or diabetes. I could've just lived carelessly with really messy eating habits. Seriously, I'd have tteokbokki and fried chicken every single day.”
A Tier 4 Tower graduate with superhuman specs!
What was I planning to do with this body, you ask?
Go out and fight monsters there too? Join a war? Am I crazy?
I'd planned to just trust in my stamina and hole up in some corner living as a reclusive wreck. And play my backlog of games too, of course. I already had over 500 games wishlisted in my Steam library.
Among this year's games, what was it, Crimson Desert? I heard that one's a total masterpiece. Flagmata? Some child-raising game is rumored to be fun too.
Haah, I seriously want to play them!
A few hours of digging bare ground.
My fingernails had long since been worn away, and blood was streaming down.
“......”
I wanted to scream from the pain. Pain is fair to everyone. But I endured it. Endured it and dug and dug the dirt. When my hands hurt too much, I dug with my feet, and gnawed with my teeth. Like a madman.
And.
Finally, the message I wanted appeared.
[Skill 'Basic Detection' acquired!]
This skill was good for sensing terrain features, hidden shelters, traps, and danger zones.
Nobody these days grinds to get skills like this. You could learn higher skills with TP, and if you got on the good side of a Celestial, you could have high-grade skills bestowed on you one after another, so why spend the time and suffer like this?
The prevailing opinion was that it was better to clear even one more stage in that time.
That.
Is actually an excuse.
Acquiring skills directly like this was far better. Skills you learned yourself could evolve through 'Awakening,' but skills bought from the shop window couldn't be upgraded.
Even if they could be upgraded, you'd have to do quests or spend huge amounts of TP for them to get a tiny bit stronger.
It was inefficient. Now the whole world knew that.
Thanks to my guides.
Even so, nobody did it.
The reason was simple.
Because it was hard.
Because it was agonizing.
Even knowing this was the better path, it was so painful that they couldn't do it.
To me, that looked like, how should I put it.
The spoiled whining of people who'd never faced a real near-death crisis.
In my day, there were no guides and no growth routes. They didn't know the thrill and hope I felt when I gnawed on dirt floors back in the days when you had to get a skill, any skill, and acquired a single cheap skill.
Everything's easy now. The Tier 1 Tower survival rate is close to 30%, or something like that?
So many of them make it out alive.
If you threw a class of about 30 students into the Tier 1 Tower, it meant that 6 of them would pair up and become Awakeners, Hunters.
In my day?
If 30 went in, all 30 died. Only after that kind of generation repeated dozens of times did one person barely survive and climb up.
He became the first graduate, and the second conqueror of the Tier 1 Tower's 100th floor became the first challenger of the Tier 2 Tower.
'She' was...... hm.
One of the people who fiercely opposed my methods. In the end, her words turned out to be right.
She was one of the 100 who, as part of the top vanguard, cleared the Tier 4 Tower first, and compared to them, I was a latecomer who lagged far behind.
Whoever's stronger and faster has the louder voice, after all. That's why most of the players currently climbing the Tower follow my clear methods but don't follow me when it comes to acquiring skills or training.
According to rumors going around, it's said that 'Yu Hyun-sung's stage clear methods are perfect and need no fixing, but his growth methods are atrociously stupid.'
What can I do? The problem is that I'm a latecomer.
Even after I cleared the Apocalypse Tower's 1st floor, that public opinion didn't really change.
After the Vanguard Ten fell flat on the Apocalypse Tower's 1st floor long ago, I was the first to clear it, but public opinion of my methods was still the worst.
There was even a random opinion forming that the Tier 4 Tower graduates currently out on Earth could easily handle the Apocalypse Tower's 1st floor too.
Give me a break.
It was obvious those bastards, who fought relying on their Divine Powers, would fall flat without being able to do a thing if they came in here.
Well, if they got lucky and cleared past the 10th floor, their Divine Powers and blessings would recover to some degree from then on, so they might have the advantage over me, but.......
Caught up in these idle thoughts, I raised my head. The Gatekeeper, with a fucking pissed-off expression, was swinging its club at me wildly, but I rolled around here and there while barely even glancing that way.
[Skill 'Danger Sensing' acquired!]
And at last, I acquired my second detection-type skill.
Unlike Detection, Sensing was used to sense living things. For now, it only sensed the movements of living things within a 2m radius, but the difference between having it and not was obvious.
Deliberately fighting without looking at Gurgorka had been the right answer. The first time I got this skill, I'd gotten it by deliberately taking and dodging poison needles from goblin archers.
It was more dangerous now than back then. Because one wrong hit from the Gatekeeper's club meant instant death.
But, well, I knew I wouldn't get hit, so I tried this stunt.
Because I'm used to it.
And.
There was a reason I'd bothered to acquire these seemingly useless skills.
[The skills 'Danger Sensing,' 'Basic Detection,' and 'Weakness Detection' are being merged.]
[The skill 'Sixth Sense' is being created.]
That's right. I had the formulas for how skills merge and evolve into higher skills completely memorized. The reason I'd acquired those skills from the start was for the cheat skill called [Sixth Sense].
“You can go now.”
Having taken down Gurgorka, I checked my status window. It had already been 2 weeks since I'd started looping the Apocalypse Tower's 1st floor.
[Apocalypse 1] Yu Hyun-sung Lv. 15
▣ Skills
[B]
Emergency Evasion 4% / Rapid Recovery 1%
Sixth Sense 1%
[D]
Basic Weapon Mastery 5%
Pain Endurance 11%
Mental Endurance 2%
Big Swing 1%
My skill window had filled up a bit more. The Weapon Swap skill had merged with Weapon Mastery, which was more efficient and cleaner.
Being merged didn't mean the Weapon Swap skill had completely disappeared.
[D] Basic Weapon Mastery 5%
*Basic Spearmanship
*Basic Archery
*Basic Axemanship
*Basic Swordsmanship
*Basic Unarmed Combat
*Link: Weapon Swap
Skills merged this way get categorized as derivative skills. Some skills grow exceptionally more, and some grow less.
I wonder...... what weapon I'll end up using. Until now I'd used the halberd, but that was only because I had no proper skills to use and hadn't learned anything else.
I'd have to use a weapon that leads to some fateful opportunity.
I'd raised my skill proficiency reasonably well and had completely adapted to my weakened body. I now had a perfect grasp of my body's limits.
“......Guess it's about time I go to the 2nd floor.”
Clearing the Apocalypse Tower's 1st floor didn't extend the Tower Break indefinitely.
At least the Apocalypse Tower's deadline was a little more generous.
Normally, the higher the difficulty, the longer the grace period.
On the lower floors of the Tier 1 Tower, clearing one stage only gave a grace period of 3 days, but in the Tier 4 Tower, clearing one stage gave a grace period of a few weeks to a month.
That's why the experts had guessed that there were probably 10 to 20 years left until the Apocalypse Tower Break.
Of course, not even my ancestors knew exactly how much of the grace period was left.
It could only be guessed based on the Tower Breaks that had occurred so far.
Based on experience so far, it was estimated that there wasn't much time left until the next Tower Break.
[Challenge the Apocalypse Tower's 2nd Floor?]
Maybe the Celestials, who had gotten sick of my repetitive grinding over the past few days, had snapped their eyes open, because messages saying they were watching suddenly poured in.
[The Chain That Links the Heavens takes an interest in your actions.]
[The Wolf That Swallowed the Moon expresses interest in you.]
[The Skein of Fate watches you.]
Whoa, this is kind of fun. I'm even seeing some Celestials I've never heard of before.
I doubt even the top rankers challenging the Tier 4 Tower got this much attention.
Is the Apocalypse Tower that important to you guys?
Fine, well, if you're going to show me this much interest, I have no intention of being a clown, but I'm more than willing to play with you.
Though I still have no intention of moving the way you guys expect, of course.
[Moving to the Apocalypse Tower's 2nd Floor.]