Chapter 166: Nightmare Floors 13, 14 (2)

[All difficulties have completed Floor 13.]

[The Tower calls new people.]

I was moved to the Reward Room.

This time, Floor 13 took quite a long time, but the clear itself ended simply enough.

Thankfully, the gamble had paid off perfectly.

I wondered what I would have done if it hadn’t worked, but well, it worked, so whatever.

I checked the reward.

[Epic+ Skill Enhancement Stone]

When used, it can enhance one Epic+ grade skill.

An Epic+ grade skill enhancement stone appeared.

Looks like they start appearing as Epic+ grade from Floor 13 onward. The reward grade had evolved.

[You have used ‘Epic+ Skill Enhancement Stone’ on ‘Skill: Elemental Arrow Barrage (Rare+)’.]

Without hesitation, I enhanced Elemental Arrow Barrage.

Without hesitation, I enhanced Elemental Arrow Barrage.

[Difficulty: Nightmare]

[Floor: 14]

[Level: 157]

[Willpower: 13,120/13,120]

[Skills: Radiant Incarnation (Legendary+), Elemental Arrow Barrage (Epic+)(+3), Destruction Ray (Epic+), Weakness Insight (Epic)(+4), Hellfire Eruption (Epic)(+1), Subspace (Epic), Air Walk (Epic), Finger Flick (Epic), Life Devour (Epic), Decisive Strike (Epic), Phantom Shift (Epic)...]

[Nightmare]

People:

1,173,617

Time Limit:

5 years

342 days

23 hours

47 minutes

15 seconds

Highest Floor Reached: Floor 14

After checking my status window.

I exited.

When I returned to the living room at home, I saw my family’s faces.

“...Seo-hyeon!”

Mom and Dad welcomed me with relief, along with my sister.

They must have been worried sick.

After all, more than a week had passed because I had been checking whether that bastard would die according to the lifespan shown by the Broken Scale.

After resting for a bit, I immediately entered Floor 13 again.

[You have entered Nightmare Difficulty Floor 13.]

The mirror space.

After I stood still and waited for a moment, the bastard soon appeared.

- Switch... Switch with me...!

I approached the mirror.

My life probably wouldn’t be in danger.

Let’s see what normally happens when I touch the mirror.

When I held out my hand, the bastard excitedly held out its hand too.

And when our hands touched against the surface of the mirror.

“...!”

For an instant, my vision wavered.

That was all, and nothing had changed.

...No, something had changed.

I looked beyond the mirror.

The bastard was happily dancing around.

“I’m out! I’m finally out...!”

That was the reality where I had been until just now.

And I was now inside the mirror.

‘So I really do get trapped inside the mirror.’

Was it structured so that I would remain trapped here forever and fail the clear?

Or maybe the accelerated aging would be applied to me exactly the same way, causing me to grow old and die before that bastard.

The bastard looked at me inside the mirror and taunted me.

“Hehehe, I’m never switching back! Stay trapped in there forever! Idiot...!”

Yeah, sure.

[Would you like to exit the Tower?]

I exited Floor 13.

Come to think of it, I was able to eliminate that bastard with the Demon King’s power, but for other Climbers, the only way to clear this would probably be to endure until it died...

Leaving the mental side of things aside, Floor 13 wasn’t an environment where food and drinking water could be obtained independently.

Unless someone had an immortality ability like me, they would inevitably die.

Unless they entered from the very beginning with enough supplies prepared to last an extremely long time.

How the hell were you supposed to know that and prepare for it... There wasn’t even any point thinking that.

Was this the first or second time? If you don’t know, you die was basically Nightmare’s fundamental move.

[Person123: This is the information for clearing Nightmare Floor 13.]

Because of the time issue, I couldn’t personally test what I assumed was the standard clear route.

I quickly organized the information based only on what I had figured out and posted it.

Then I prepared to enter Floor 14 sooner than my usual interval.

I had wasted quite a lot of time clearing Floor 13.

[Would you like to enter Nightmare Difficulty Floor 14?]

After saying goodbye to my family, I entered Floor 14.

***

Floor 14’s theme was escaping a planet.

The clear condition for the other difficulties was to find a spaceship on an alien planet and escape.

They said the difficult part of Floor 14 was having to reach the spaceship while fighting monsters through various extreme environments.

[You have entered Nightmare Difficulty Floor 14.]

The moment I entered, I stopped time.

What I hadn’t expected was that I was floating in midair from the very beginning.

...And right in the middle of outer space, at that.

‘What the hell.’

I released Time Stop.

When I turned my head behind me, a nearby planet came into view.

A reddish-yellow planet with horizontal stripes.

Countless chunks of rock were floating around it...

Right now, I was positioned extremely high above the planet.

High enough that I could see the entire planet at a glance, a height closer to the realm of outer space than the planet’s atmosphere.

I quickly had to stop time again.

Because there was one problem.

I couldn’t breathe.

Well, of course I couldn’t breathe because this was space...

They take away my ability to breathe right from the start?

Naturally, the other difficulties didn’t have an ordeal like this.

They didn’t even start out floating in space like this in the first place.

‘Do I need to descend to the planet’s surface?’

Maybe I would be able to breathe once I descended into the planet’s atmosphere?

Surely it wasn’t really telling me not to breathe throughout the entire clear, so it was a reasonable assumption.

Were the rocks around me perhaps there so I could use them as footholds while descending?

I didn’t need to do that. I could simply use Air Walk.

Or I could fly with the Demon King’s power, or use the teleportation device... Ah, the teleportation device wouldn’t work.

I needed to hurry down before I reached the limit of how long I could hold my breath. Ten minutes was too long.

Then an idea suddenly occurred to me.

Would this work?

After sharing the thought with the Demon King, I released Time Stop.

I took the Sea Dragon’s Orb out of Subspace, then handed my body over to the Demon King.

CRACK-

The Demon King covered the area around my mouth with ice. Like a mask.

Then he melted the inside of the ice while leaving an empty space and filled it with water.

That left my nose and mouth completely blocked by water.

‘...This actually works?’

Amazingly, I could breathe.

The effect of the Sea Dragon’s Orb, which allowed underwater breathing, was being applied.

How much oxygen could possibly be dissolved in this tiny handful of water? Physically, it made no sense...

But questioning the laws of physics when it came to the Tower’s power was nonsense. If it worked, that was enough.

From now on, I could use it like this in environments where breathing was impossible too.

With my breathing secured comfortably, I began moving.

I forcefully stepped through the air with Air Walk as I descended toward the planet’s surface. No, flew toward it.

After I moved somewhat closer to the planet...

At a certain boundary, gravity suddenly began acting on me.

It was stronger than Earth’s gravity. It seemed several times stronger.

Even though the planet itself looked much smaller than Earth.

I simply let gravity pull my body down and descended at tremendous speed.

The rocks floating around me did the same.

BOOM!

I landed safely.

Feeling the unfamiliar sensation of my entire body being pressed down, I walked out of the crater.

The gravity was so strong that every time I took a step, the rocky ground sank beneath my feet.

I wondered if an ordinary person’s body would simply be crushed.

Of course, with my physical abilities, it was still an easy level to handle.

More importantly, things were going crazy overhead.

I threw myself to the side.

A rock fell like a meteor onto the spot where I had just been standing.

Large and small rocks were raining down from the sky at a rather terrifying speed.

Gravity at least several times stronger than Earth’s, plus a rain of rocks.

Well, this much was still whatever.

I shattered the ice mask.

“Inhale, exhale.”

Just as I had expected, once I descended onto the planet, I could breathe normally.

I stopped time.

Now it was time to think about what the clear condition might be.

‘Do I need to find the spaceship?’

The clear condition for the other difficulties was to find a spaceship and escape.

I didn’t know how Nightmare would differ, but for now, I should act with the existence of the spaceship in mind.

But normally, they said you were given something like a beacon from the beginning, and it guided you to the spaceship...

Was Nightmare telling me to just find the damn thing on my own without anything like that?

Was I supposed to search the entire planet?

‘...There were craters.’

The view of the planet I had seen from above flashed through my mind.

There had definitely been one enormous crater at each pole.

Should I head toward one of them first?

It would be better to check the places that stood out first.

To get my bearings, I avoided the rain of rocks and rose back into the sky.

Getting my bearings wasn’t difficult.

The planet had clearly visible horizontal stripes, so I just needed to keep moving vertically.

No, there wasn’t even any need for that.

I took out the teleportation device.

The distance to the pole where the crater was located was considerable.

Teleporting there would obviously be faster than moving there myself.

‘It’s hard to estimate the distance, though...’

Earth’s circumference was about 40,000 kilometers.

This planet was clearly smaller than Earth.

Since my current position was right around the equator... Should I set it at around 3,000 kilometers?

I decided to set it a little shorter than my intuition suggested and travel the remaining distance myself.

I always made sure to recharge the teleportation device whenever I had the chance, so its Willpower was completely full.

I activated it immediately.

Until the time was up, I waited while weaving around and avoiding the rain of rocks.

[0:01]

When the time was up, I teleported toward the pole.

I rose into the air and checked, and I had almost reached the crater. But...

‘What the hell is that now.’

The center of the crater.

Looking closely, I could see something pitch-black.

I stepped through the air with Air Walk and moved toward it.

When I got closer, I saw that the pitch-black mass was actually monsters.

Huge insect-type monsters resembling ants were swarming across an enormous area. There seemed to be at least tens of thousands of them.

But what caught my attention even more than that was...

‘...There it is!’

An object standing tall like a rocket in the middle of the monster horde.

It was definitely a spaceship. It really was here?

I rapidly approached the spaceship.

But once I got within a certain distance, the monsters reacted.

SSSSSSS-

They raised their heads toward the sky as though showing hostility toward me.

And what exactly are you going to do by staring at me?

The instant I had that thought, the ant monsters all spread their wings at once.

“Ah.”

You can fly?

The ant army took to the air.

It looked like a black tidal wave surging toward me. Disgusting.

I cast Elemental Arrow Barrage.

Now at +3 enhancement, forty flaming arrows rained down toward the swarm of ants.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

Ants burst apart one after another in midair.

I continued indiscriminately bombarding them while firing off magic skills.

But there were so many of them that counting them was impossible, so in the end I had to break through with my body.

With Skin Hardening covering me, I charged through the incoming ants.

I kept moving straight forward, slicing apart the ones that clung to me with the Sword of Heaven’s Gatekeeper.

They were trash mobs that weren’t even strong enough to trigger Sixth Sense in the first place.

At most, maybe around Level 70 or 80?

Their only means of attack were ramming into me with their bodies or biting me with their jaws, and no matter how many there were, they couldn’t inflict any damage on me.

The occasional red individuals mixed among them were somewhat stronger, but not by much.

Covered in the ants’ blood and bodily fluids, I easily reached the spaceship.

Now all I had to do was get in this thing and escape, and the clear would be successful!

...There was no way, right?

‘That’s too easy.’

For Nightmare, everything up to this point had been far too easy.

Naturally assuming there had to be something more, I placed my hand on the spaceship.

Information appeared.

[Special Item: Sub-Light-Speed Spaceship in Need of Repairs]

A spaceship that travels through space at a speed close to light. Once boarded and activated, it automatically travels toward its destination. Its major components have been separated, leaving it inoperable. Recover all the components and repair it!

Recovered Components: 0/3