Chapter 61: Sub-Tower (7)

[You have entered Floor 9.]

The moment I entered Floor 9, I stopped time.

What awaited me was... a stone.

An elongated, person-sized block of stone hovered about a hand’s breadth above the ground.

So I’m supposed to fight a rock now?

This was the ninth floor, so naturally there had to be more to it than met the eye.

I imagined that the moment I released Time Stop, the stone might start spinning like a drill and launch itself straight at me.

After completing Mental Concentration, I opened with Flame Strike.

KABOOOOOM!

The fireballs slammed directly into the stone.

But when the flames cleared, the stone was gone.

Huh...? Did I get it?

No.

Glancing around, I found it hovering near the ceiling, directly above my head.

“...?”

I hadn’t seen it move at all.

Did it teleport?

I tried another skill.

Light Bullets streaked toward the stone, luminous trails streaming behind them.

BAM BAM BAM BAM!

They struck nothing but the innocent ceiling.

This time, however, I saw it clearly.

Just before the attack connected, the stone vanished.

A moment later, it reappeared in midair to my left.

...So it really can teleport.

“Plli.”

I sent Plli after it.

Plli sprang into the air and swung his enormous forepaw at the stone.

Naturally, the stone vanished again.

It reappeared low to the ground on my right.

The instant I spotted it, I stopped time.

After completing Mental Concentration, I unleashed a Destruction Ray.

When the beam faded and I confirmed that the stone was no longer there, I scanned the room.

“...”

It had appeared behind me.

Once again, it had escaped by teleporting.

Plli chased the stone around the room while I bombarded it with spells. We repeated the same process several more times.

Not a single attack connected.

I stopped to think.

A teleporting stone.

It neither attacked nor counterattacked. All it did was evade my attacks by teleporting.

There seemed to be no cooldown, no delay, and no obvious limitation on its ability whatsoever.

Which meant I had no way to hit it.

Floor 9 appeared to be a puzzle: figure out how to land a blow on this infuriating little rock.

Should I try attacking from Concealment?

“Diul.”

Using Diul’s ability, I concealed myself and approached the stone.

But the instant I attacked, it teleported away as though mocking me.

Failure.

‘Could there be a pattern?’

Another possibility occurred to me.

What if its destinations followed some kind of sequence?

If I could predict where it would appear next, I could launch a second attack at the same time and strike it the moment it reappeared.

I resumed my assault.

The stone appeared to my left, then to my right. In front of me, then behind.

High, low, halfway up the wall. Far away, close by, and sometimes directly in front of my face.

I watched it teleport more than a hundred times.

There was no pattern.

No matter how I examined its movements, they appeared completely random.

I continued testing other methods.

I fired skills indiscriminately in every direction.

Failure.

I created a Scorching Zone in advance, then kept attacking in the hope that the stone would eventually teleport into it.

Failure.

I tried sneaking up and touching it without any intention of attacking.

Failure.

Failure after failure after failure.

Every method I could think of ended the same way.

“Goddammit.”

I was beginning to lose my patience.

What the hell was I supposed to do?

I forced myself to calm down and reconsider the problem. Getting angry wouldn’t solve anything.

‘How does it know when to dodge?’

The teleportation itself wasn’t the real question.

In order to evade an attack, the stone first had to perceive that an attack was coming.

So how was it detecting my attacks?

It obviously wasn’t relying on sight. It had no eyes, and Diul’s Concealment hadn’t fooled it either.

I stood with my arms crossed, brooding over the problem, when an idea suddenly came to me.

Vrrrrrr...

For what felt like the hundredth time that day, I fired a Light Bullet at the stone.

This time, however, I had no intention of letting it hit. I planned to stop it just before impact.

The Light Bullet shot through the air, then halted directly in front of the stone.

And...

“...!”

The stone didn’t teleport.

The instant I tried to move the Light Bullet forward again, it vanished.

“Ha.”

...Now I understand.

At last, I knew how the stone had been avoiding my attacks.

It was reading my intentions in advance.

In other words, it could read my mind.

‘Then how am I supposed to hit it?’

Attack without intending to attack?

I fired another Light Bullet while thinking, ‘I’m not going to attack the stone.’

The stone teleported away.

Yeah... of course that wasn’t going to work.

It wasn’t as though I could simply choose not to possess an intention.

If the stone could read my mind completely, deceiving it would be impossible.

Unless I could deceive myself first.

...Which meant I had to attack the stone without knowing that I was attacking it.

One possible method came to mind.

The stone was currently hovering low above the ground some distance in front of me.

I closed my eyes.

Then I began spinning in place.

I spun like a madman until I had completely lost all sense of direction and no longer had any idea where the stone was.

...All right. That should do it.

I stopped spinning and began firing skills wildly in every direction, covering the full three hundred and sixty degrees around me.

KABOOOOOM!

Since I had no idea where the stone was, I couldn’t possibly know which attack, if any, would strike it.

And if I didn’t know, neither could the stone.

I emptied my mind and continued blasting skills in every direction.

Before long, a message appeared.

[Floor 9 has been cleared.]

I opened my eyes.

Behind me, the stone lay shattered across the floor, destroyed by a Flame Strike.

Ha... success!

Exactly as planned.

Only Floor 10 remained.

“That was surprisingly challenging.”

That was my honest assessment after clearing Floor 9.

With so many different tricks and gimmicks mixed together, the difficulty was nothing to scoff at.

Still, it was nothing compared to Nightmare difficulty.

[Proceed to Floor 10?]

What kind of final boss would be waiting for me?

Clearing Floor 10 would earn me the special reward the Tower had mentioned.

I rested thoroughly, replenished my Willpower completely, and then entered Floor 10.

***

Life on easy mode.

That was how I would have described my life.

Because I possessed a superpower.

Not metaphorically.

A real, literal superpower.

I hadn’t understood it when I was young, but as I grew older, I gradually realized that I was different from everyone else.

The Time Stop Ability.

Admittedly, it wasn’t quite as extraordinary as it sounded. I couldn’t move while time was frozen either.

Even so, it was more than enough to make my life remarkably easy.

A single second for everyone else could become a full hour of usable time for me. When it came to studying, that made the ability absurdly powerful.

During exams, I was the only person who effectively had no time limit.

From elementary school onward, I had always ranked at the top of my class.

The ability also had countless smaller applications in everyday life.

I could probably have used it to excel at sports such as soccer or baseball, but I had never been particularly interested in physical activity, so I never pursued that path.

I grew up as the very definition of a model student.

And today was the day of the CSAT.

As always, I took the exam without much concern and returned home afterward.

“I’m home.”

After dinner, I downloaded the official answer key and graded my exam.

The result was exactly what I had expected.

A perfect score.

Of course, I had worked hard as well.

Having unlimited time didn’t mean much if I lacked the knowledge required to solve the questions.

Humming to myself, I stretched my arms over my head.

“Seoul Med? Piece of cake.”

Ah, life was easy.

Didn’t I feel guilty for cheating while everyone else had worked their asses off?

Well, what could I say?

Life wasn’t fair.

Besides, what was the point of receiving a gift like this if I refused to use it?

All that remained was to relax for a while, prepare for the medical school interview, and secure my admission.

My life had been smooth sailing until now.

There was no reason to believe it wouldn’t remain that way.

I was about to open my bedroom door and share the good news with my family when—

“...?”

A faint sense of déjà vu washed over me.

My hand froze on the doorknob.

What was that?

It felt as though something like this had happened before.

After this, there’s an earthquake... and then a message appears in front of me, like something out of a video game...

“Tower?”

I murmured the word that had surfaced in my mind and tilted my head.

A tower?

Why had I suddenly thought of a tower?

And why would an earthquake strike Korea out of nowhere?

What the hell was I thinking?

“...Did I have some strange dream last night?”

The unsettling feeling soon faded.

I shrugged it off and went into the living room.

Then I proudly announced my perfect CSAT score to my family.

“I just checked my answers. It looks like I got a perfect score.”

“...Oh my goodness! Really?!”

“Hahaha! Well done, son!”

“Haha, I still have the interview. I’ll have to prepare for that too.”

.

.

.

I was accepted into medical school and spent my university years enjoying myself with friends.

During college, I completed my mandatory military service as an active-duty soldier. The period of service was much shorter than it would have been if I had gone in as a military doctor after graduation, so it seemed like the better option.

After graduating, I began working as an internal medicine resident at a university hospital.

I became a doctor without encountering any serious difficulties, and my life continued to unfold as smoothly as it always had.

A respectable career.

A good salary.

A healthy work-life balance.

I took my parents on trips to beautiful places, teased my younger sister for somehow never growing up despite her age while quietly slipping her some spending money, and began dating a junior colleague I had known since my residency.

My days were filled with small but constant pleasures.

What a wonderful life.

“...Oppa? What are you thinking about?”

I had drifted off for a moment while walking through Han River Park with my girlfriend.

“Oh, nothing.”

I gazed across the lush green grass.

Sometimes, I experienced a peculiar feeling.

It was as though my life wasn’t a calm, uniform shade of green like the grass before me, but a dazzling mixture of every color imaginable.

But that couldn’t be true.

My life had always been peaceful.

I was satisfied with the life I had, yet every now and then, an inexplicable emptiness opened inside my chest.

It was strange.

After several years of dating, my girlfriend and I were married.

We travelled to Italy for our honeymoon.

One day, we stood together admiring the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

“Wow. How is that thing still standing without falling over? Isn’t it amazing, Oppa?”

“It really is.”

My girlfriend—no, my wife—held tightly to my hand.

I stared up at the towering structure for a long moment, lost in thought.

Then I spoke.

“Hey, this might sound a little strange, but do you want to hear something?”

“Hmm? What is it?”

“Sometimes I imagine a tower suddenly appearing in the world.”

“A tower? What kind of tower? One like this?”

“Something like that. Anyway, this enormous tower appears, and people have to climb it. If they don’t, the world ends. They enter the tower, fight monsters, avoid traps...”

My wife giggled.

“What is that supposed to be? Have you been playing some game like that lately, Oppa?”

“And the funniest part is that I’m the only one capable of climbing the hardest tower—the one no one else can handle. I’m constantly risking my life.”

“You? The same Oppa who swallows a handful of supplements every morning because he’s obsessed with staying healthy?”

“That’s right. Anyway...”

I was about to continue when my wife’s expression abruptly hardened.

“Oh, enough. We’re on our honeymoon, and you won’t stop talking about strange things. Learn to tell the difference between reality and games, would you?”

“...”

What was this?

All at once, the world felt wrong.

I turned back toward the tower.

“Hey. What’s the age difference between us again?”

“What? Three years. Are you forgetting that now too?”

That was strange.

Deeply strange.

I had always possessed an unshakable preference for older women. In both high school and college, I had exclusively dated upperclassmen.

So how had I ended up meeting and marrying this woman?

Wait.

Who was she?

I stared at the unfamiliar woman whose name I couldn’t even remember and let out a hollow laugh.

“Hahaha...”

Goddammit.

It all came rushing back.

“...Oppa? Why are you laughing all of a sudden?”

What was happening?

How was I supposed to escape?

This was a dream.

And the simplest way to wake from a dream was...

“H-hey! Where are you going, Oppa?”

I sprinted toward the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Several security guards tried to stop me, but I narrowly slipped past them.

I rushed inside and began climbing the stairs.

Wait, did the Leaning Tower of Pisa actually have stairs inside?

I didn’t know.

I didn’t care.

I simply kept running.

“Hah... hah...”

At last, I reached the top.

Breathing heavily, I climbed onto the railing of the tilted tower.

Far below, people were staring upward and murmuring among themselves. The guards who had chased me to the top were desperately trying to talk me down.

“Please calm down and step away from the edge! It’s dangerous!”

I prepared to jump.

But at the last moment, my feet refused to move.

What if I was the one who had lost his mind?

Which world was real?

The bizarre world where a tower had risen from the Pacific Ocean?

Or this one?

By any reasonable standard, this world was reality.

Every sight, sound, and sensation felt perfectly real.

Doubt began to creep back into my mind.

What if I truly had gone insane?

Then a faint voice reverberated through my head.

...Stop screwing around and get out of there already! You idiot of a master!

The sensation of two souls connected to one another.

Somehow, it felt familiar.

“Ah...”

My certainty returned.

I laughed in relief.

That’s right.

Reality was on the other side.

I was currently clearing Floor 10 of the fifth Sub-Tower.

“What kind of trick did that bastard use on me?”

In any case, the first thing I needed to do was wake up.

I spread my arms wide.

Then I allowed my body to tip forward over the edge.

The ground rushed toward me in a dizzying blur as I plummeted toward the pavement.

And then—

CRUNCH!

***

I opened my eyes.

A pitch-black ceiling loomed above me.

As I sat upright, I felt something unfamiliar clinging to my head.

I grabbed it and tore it away.

“...What the hell?”

It was a bizarre creature resembling a luminescent jellyfish, its tentacles writhing in a thoroughly revolting manner.

So this thing was responsible.

Had it caught me the moment I entered Floor 10?

I couldn’t remember how it had happened at all.

“Thanks for the nap, you bastard.”

I hurled the jellyfish onto the ground and crushed it beneath my foot.

Splat! ℯ

[Floor 10 has been cleared.]

A message appeared.

I turned toward Diul, who was hovering beside me.

“Thanks, Diul. You were the one calling out to me, weren’t you?”

Only now did I remember hearing his voice repeatedly urging me to wake from the dream.

I was fortunate to have realized the truth when I did.

Otherwise, I might never have awakened.

Diul circled my head several times, as though grumbling at me, before retreating into the bracelet.

I sighed.

A boss capable of trapping people inside dreams...

There were some truly disturbing creatures in this place.

The lifetime I had experienced within the dream now felt as though it had passed in a single fleeting instant, like my entire life flashing before my eyes.

It was a life I genuinely might have lived if the Tower had never appeared.

[The fifth Sub-Tower has been cleared up to its final floor.]

In any case, it was over.

I had successfully cleared the fifth Sub-Tower without suffering any serious mishaps.

I rose to my feet and watched as more messages appeared before me.

[A special reward will be granted.]

[Please select one of the following as your reward.]

Several options followed.

Right.

The reward.

I had put in the work.

Now it was time to collect.

What exactly did the Tower mean by a ‘special reward’?

“Drumroll, drumroll, drumroll...”

I supplied my own sound effects as I examined the options.

Then—

“...Huh?”

One of the choices made my eyes widen.

[1. Tower’s Curse Immunity]

[Special Item: Tower’s Curse Immunity]

Permanently grants immunity to death caused by the Tower’s Curse. May be used on someone other than a Climber. Disappears after one use.