Chapter 133: Nightmare, 10th Floor (6)

No matter how far I crossed the endless desert, no matter how long I kept going, the oasis never drew any closer. Not even by the slightest bit.

[Nightmare]

Population: 573,620

Time Limit: 18 days 4 hours 11 minutes 5 seconds

Reached Floor: 8F

Had my family read my will?

No. This was no time to be thinking about that.

At this rate, there was no way I could clear the floor within the time limit.

I desperately searched for another way.

...But every attempt amounted to nothing more than futile struggling.

[Nightmare]

Population: 573,620

Time Limit: 9 days 20 hours 37 minutes 29 seconds

Reached Floor: 8F

Where had it all gone wrong?

What should I have done differently?

I only needed to have saved a few minutes.

If I’d discovered the underground tunnel a little sooner, solved the puzzle a little faster, broken through the maze just a little quicker... Aah.

Regret changed nothing.

[Nightmare]

Population: 573,619

Time Limit: 1 day 16 hours 54 minutes 39 seconds

Reached Floor: 8F

The world was about to end.

And I still hadn’t found an answer.

No.

I already knew.

I knew there was no other answer.

All I had to do was cross a set distance.

That was the only way to clear the floor, and I had simply gone wrong from the very first step.

If I hadn’t accepted the Tower’s proposal.

If I’d at least been able to use the Scales of Life...

Would I have found some way to clear it in time?

Considering that, of all things, the Tower had specifically forbidden the Scales, maybe I would have.

[Nightmare]

Population: 573,617

Time Limit: 1 hour 1 second

Reached Floor: 8F

When only a single hour remained on the clock, I stopped time.

That was the only resistance I had left.

Inside that frozen moment, I sank into anguish and despair again and again.

I stayed there, clinging to the hope that some miraculous solution might come to me.

...I don’t even know how much time passed.

A year?

Several years?

Maybe more than ten.

So much time passed that my thoughts stopped functioning properly, until even my sense of self began to blur.

Still, no solution came.

In the end, I—

I gave up.

...I’ve done enough, haven’t I?

Right.

The Ark.

At least I’d left the Ark deployed outside.

The end was bound to come eventually anyway.

From the beginning, the idea of clearing this godforsaken Tower forever had never made any sense.

So this isn’t my fault.

I did everything I could.

Because of me, at least a small number of people would survive.

I let time resume, released everything I had been holding onto, and stared blankly at the countdown as it ticked toward zero.

...No matter how much I tried to justify it to myself, somewhere deep down, I knew.

In the end, countless people were going to die because I had failed.

[Nightmare]

Population: 573,617

Time Limit: 1 second

Reached Floor: 8F

The moment the timer reached zero, I closed my eyes.

[The Nightmare difficulty’s time limit has expired.]

[The Tower’s Curse activates.]

[99% of humanity dies.]

.

.

.

Dozens more days passed.

And at last, I reached the oasis.

[You have successfully cleared Nightmare difficulty Floor 8.]

I ignored the message, which had long since lost all meaning, and left the Tower.

The moment I stepped out of the hotel room I had entered so long ago, I found the Fallen waiting in the corridor.

Of course.

Exactly as the Tower had warned.

The world was over.

Ninety-nine percent of humanity was dead, and every one of the dead had become one of the Fallen.

I cut my way through the Fallen flooding the streets, heading in a single direction.

Home.

At that moment, all I wanted was to see my family.

I wanted to make sure they were safe.

They had to be.

Of course they were.

Our home was within the Ark’s range.

When I reached Gangseo-gu, Seoul, where the Ark stood...

The entire area was in chaos.

Outside the Ark’s veil, corpses and Fallen swarmed together as densely as ants.

But things were hardly normal inside, either.

The city was overflowing with people, while human corpses lay abandoned wherever they had fallen in the streets.

No one so much as glanced at the bodies.

Everyone was rushing toward the same place.

At the end of the road stood climbers distributing food.

“Hey! Wait! Everyone, wait your turn! Stop pushing...!”

I could see the carcasses of Zone 1 monsters nearby.

They were distributing meat hunted on Floor 5 to the people?

The starving crowd looked like a horde of famished ghosts.

Was this because I had opened the Ark to everyone?

The chaos before me was far worse than anything I had imagined.

Anxiety tightening in my chest, I hurried toward home.

My family...

What had happened to them?

They had to be all right.

They had to be.

I reached the front door of our apartment.

For a moment, relief washed over me when I sensed people inside.

Then I realized the voices weren’t my family’s.

I ripped the door off its hinges and stepped inside.

Strangers were there.

They flinched the moment they saw me.

“...Who the hell are you?”

I demanded to know where the people who lived there had gone.

No one answered.

It was only after I beat every last one of them that someone finally spoke.

A long trail of blood stretched all the way to the master bedroom.

My hands trembling, I opened the bedroom door.

“...”

Three bodies lay inside.

Something in me snapped.

I killed every one of the intruders.

And afterward, for a long, long time, I couldn’t do anything at all.

...What is this?

Is this really happening?

Why did this happen?

Was opening the Ark to everyone the mistake?

If I’d known this would happen, I never would have done it.

I wouldn’t have cared whether every other person on Earth lived or died.

What the hell...

What did I even do all of this for...?

The stench of blood filling the house made me choke.

Half-dazed, I stumbled outside as though fleeing.

People were still fighting in the streets, tearing food out of one another’s hands.

Like cockroaches crawling over each other.

“...Ugh.”

A surge of revulsion rose inside me, so violent I doubled over.

A few men passing nearby crept closer and began rifling through my pockets.

I swung my hand without thinking.

The head of the man digging through my trouser pocket exploded.

“Huh...?”

The other two staggered backward, their faces turning white.

I burst their heads as well.

The pressure that had been boiling inside my chest eased considerably.

I stared down at my blood-soaked hands and released a long breath from deep within my lungs.

Nothing matters anymore.

Thud!

I launched myself into the air and dropped into the densest part of the crowd.

The chaos stopped instantly.

Every eye turned toward me.

“...Get out of the Ark. All of you.”

I spoke to everyone there.

“Or I’ll kill every last one of you.”

After that, how many people did I kill?

Those who refused to leave the Ark.

The climbers who tried to stop me.

Part of me wanted to kill everything that entered my sight.

Maybe the fact that I stopped at merely driving them out of the Ark was the last shred of conscience I had left.

Paying no price.

Sacrificing nothing.

Wriggling so desperately just to save their own miserable lives...

I drove every last one of those repulsive insects out of the Ark.

“Let all things be done according to the will of God. Grant this lowly servant the privilege of following you.”

Absurdly enough, some climbers actually stepped forward and offered to serve me.

Ye Tianwei, China’s top Nightmare difficulty climber, was one of them.

He spoke to me about the future.

About how I would become a true ruler and reign over the people.

About how we could manage them, control them, and make efficient use of them...

I didn’t care.

I wondered whether watching people suffer might dull the feeling that was driving me insane.

It didn’t.

Whenever the rage became too much to endure, I went outside and vented it by slaughtering the Fallen.

What am I even doing?

What the hell am I doing?

[You can no longer clear new floors of the Nightmare difficulty.]

The fucking Tower had even taken away my chance to lose myself in climbing.

Once the Nightmare time limit expired, further progression through the Tower became impossible.

The world was already broken beyond repair.

And so was I.

With no purpose left.

No meaning left...

I simply withered away, little by little.

Thinking that the death waiting for me somewhere not far ahead would be the only rest I would ever receive.

***

“...That’s the end of it.”

After listening to Person123’s entire story, I had no idea what to say.

To think something like that had happened.

It made the version of me from this world a little easier to understand.

And at the same time, I found myself wondering.

Would I fall this far too, if I lost my entire family?

To be honest, if I were put in the same situation, I probably would have lost my mind just as badly.

All I could do was sigh.

“What a hell of a world.”

After muttering that, I asked,

“What did you do with your family?”

“I buried them on a mountain.”

“Right. Then...”

I rose to my feet.

“Let’s go together. I want to pay my respects too.”

Person123 looked at me in silence.

We stared at each other for a moment.

Then he stood as well.

“Follow me.”

Person123 shot straight up into the sky.

...Had he opened up to me a little?

I followed after him.

We tore across the sky and returned to the Ark in no time.

There was a small hill behind an apartment complex in Gangseo-gu.

That was where he had buried his family.

I looked at the three graves before me.

Mother.

Father.

Younger sibling.

Each headstone bore one of their names.

...This feels strange.

I bowed first.

Person123 stood quietly beside me and watched.

After I finished paying my respects and stood again, neither of us spoke for a while.

Eventually, I broke the silence.

“This probably won’t be much comfort, but... in the world I came from, my family is alive and well.”

For just an instant, something trembled in Person123’s eyes.

He squeezed them shut, then opened them again.

Then, without warning, he pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

What the hell?

He smokes?

I’ve never touched a cigarette in my life.

“Let’s assume everything you’ve told me is true.”

“It’s not ‘let’s assume.’ It is true.”

“How did you clear Floor 8 within the time limit?”

I scratched my head before answering.

“I used the Scales of Life.”

“...”

“You accepted the Tower’s proposal, so the Scales were forbidden to you. Right?”

Person123 nodded.

The regret etched across his face was too deep to hide.

Then I asked something else that had been bothering me.

“By the way, you don’t have a Demon King?”

“...Demon King? What are you talking about?”

“You never met the Sage either?”

Person123 frowned as though I were speaking complete nonsense.

I had suspected as much.

Even at the very end, he had never once used the Demon King’s power.

So the version of me in this world really had never met either the Demon King or the Sage?

Maybe those two were something like bugs in the system.

Huh.

Wait.

Then this guy cleared Floor 7 without the Demon King’s power?

That was actually more impressive than what I had done.

Person123 exhaled a stream of smoke and said,

“You said earlier that this world is Floor 10. And that the worlds inside the Tower are worlds the Tower swallowed.”