Chapter 367

Regression (14)

The best way to avoid getting sick is prevention, ahead of time. Rather than going to the hospital after you're already sick, keeping regular habits and a steady diet is the real shortcut to health.

By the same logic, the best way to protect a fortress with two hundred humans inside it is to wipe out the monsters before they ever reach it.

"Sure, easy to say."

But the overwhelming majority of people live however they want and only go to the hospital once they're already sick. Everyone knows a regular lifestyle is better, but living that way in modern society, with nothing but human willpower to hold it together, isn't easy.

Same thing here. Most people can come up with the idea of "just wipe out the monsters beforehand," but they never get as far as actually doing it.

"Strength."

Because obviously, they don't have the power for it. It's the kind of advice that sounds like "no bread? eat cake then," or "study your textbooks and you'll get a perfect score." That kind of talk only means anything to someone who can actually sweep away every monster through sheer strength. To everyone else, it's just noise, empty air.

But to someone with enough strength? Someone who can actually pull it off?

"There's no better plan than this."

I don't even know if "plan" is the right word for it, but wiping out the monsters ahead of time comes with its own mix of upsides and downsides.

The downside first: it robs the players of a chance to grow. The five days spent at Floor 4's fortress hand out an absurd amount of experience points, and people get to temper themselves under the most extreme conditions imaginable. If you asked players in the future when they started actually trying, when they got serious, most of them would point straight to Floor 4.

So if I sweep away every single monster myself, they lose that chance to grow. They lose the chance to wake up and get their act together. Choosing to save everyone out of my own selfishness, and in the process making other people weaker for it, that's the kind of thing people could argue about.

"Still. I have to do it."

But I remember. A woman who survived with eyes gone hollow and empty. A man found stiff and cold, having thrashed and fought to the very last second trying to save people. Baron George, throat straining with veins as he resisted to the end.

If I don't clear the monsters out ahead of time, someone will die and someone will live. I could chalk that up to the natural order of things, except the problem is that I'm too strong for that excuse to hold.

I can choose. I can control who lives and who dies. Which means if someone dies on Floor 4, that will be my choice, and if someone survives, that will be my choice too, just the same.

It's not like I lack the means. If I can save someone and choose not to, that's no different from killing them myself. For the sake of making the better choice, and for the sake of my own peace of mind, I'm not going to worry about experience points. It's not much of a substitute, but I'll hand out Elixirs instead, so forgive me for that.

Well, "doing the right thing" isn't the only upside worth counting here.

For one, this plan fits perfectly with the thing I keep hammering on, keeping my identity hidden. Honestly, every other plan leaves some kind of trace, one way or another.

Talk them into fleeing, like before? That only worked because I'd already revealed my identity and persuaded them directly. If I put on a mask to hide who I am and tell them, all sinister-like, to just follow me, would they actually follow? Well... maybe some would. But Choi Ji-won's already slated to use that exact approach, and any overlap between us could become a problem down the line.

So what, just kill every monster in the fortress outright? That's not a great option either. For one thing, the fact that my weapon is a sword becomes an issue.

Even channeling mana into it, at best I can cut down maybe three monsters with a single swing. Swing my arm until it falls off and I could barely hold one entrance. If a monster slips through a gap in the fortress like it did before, there's no way I can respond in time.

So to handle every monster without a single casualty, I'd need to use mana, no way around it. And that's where the next problem shows up: my mana is extremely distinctive. White mist spreading in every direction, monster bodies freezing in place, and a man floating in midair. How could that not get noticed? How could word not spread?

Well... using it to build a reputation as an "immortal sage" might not be so bad. People might just hear that some mysterious man spread mist and killed every monster, without ever connecting it to me, Kim Jun-ho.

But considering that this exact floor, Floor 4, was a major factor in my identity getting exposed in the past, I want to be as careful as possible here. If I have no other option, I'll take this plan. But if there's a better alternative, I'd rather follow that instead.

"And in that sense, this plan right now is about as close to perfect as it gets."

The plan is simple. The moment I come to my senses, I run toward the direction the monsters come from. Flying would be faster, sure, but I can't lean too hard on the Hero trait, so I need to manage my mana. It's not an infinite resource.

Running and running, at some point I'll run into the monsters. At the very least I should be able to reach their point of origin, and from there my approach splits two ways.

If there's some kind of portal the monsters are spawning out of, I destroy the portal. If they're just spawning on their own with no portal, I just cut down whatever I see, one after another. The important thing is that my "chill" works with absolute effectiveness against enemies with no mana of their own.

"And if I freeze the back of the neck, around the cervical spine..."

Any living creature dies from nerve damage there, guaranteed. So as long as I can move around and spread my mana wide enough, I can kill every monster my mana touches. They have no way to resist the cold.

I'm making it sound grand, but really it's a simple plan: run ahead to where the monsters spawn and wipe them all out before they ever reach the fortress.

Of course, it's not a perfect plan. Something far stronger than expected could show up and force me to burn more mana than planned, or I could wear myself out before finishing off every monster. So it's not a plan guaranteed to succeed.

But the payoff if it does succeed is too good to pass up. I never have to show anyone what I'm capable of in a fight, and at the same time I save every human being on Floor 4. Feels like exactly the kind of plan that suits a broken munchkin like the one I've become.

"Executing it is simple enough, at least."

I can return to before I entered the Tower anyway. If something feels off, I just fix it later, that's all. But there was one thing nagging at me here.

"...The variance."

The monsters on Floor 4 don't spawn at a fixed rate. If we defend well against them, stronger and more numerous monsters come pouring in the next time. If we take heavy losses to the monsters, the wave the following day stays roughly the same level.

So it's a kind of "scaling difficulty," and if you think about it for even a moment, there's something strange about that.

"The monsters come from beyond the horizon."

They don't just pop into existence out of nowhere. They come pouring in from somewhere far off, somewhere you can barely even see. That's exactly why I was able to lead every human on Floor 4 to safety, and why the fortress stayed safe up through the third night.

But think it through. If we defend well against the third-day assault, the fourth-day assault gets stronger. But if it takes three days to reach the fortress, then logically the fourth-day wave should have set out on day two. Doesn't that strike you as strange?

How would the monsters know how well the players on Floor 4 are going to defend and send reinforcements ahead of time to match? I've had a similar question nagging at me for a while now, so I figure this is a good chance to check it out.

Save some people while I'm at it, and stir up a little trouble too.

"Let's go, then."

This should lay some groundwork for the future.

[Entering Floor 4.]

Snow brushed against my face. In the past, I remember it feeling bitterly cold, but now it felt almost warm and gentle. Probably because of the chill that had settled into my body.

Other than that, everything matched the scene in my memory exactly. The pale sunlight, the worn-down fortress, and the other people staring at me...

"?"

For some reason, everyone was staring at me. The timing should have been more or less the same, right? No... what was this? I hadn't matched it down to the minute, but the timing was accurate. If I'd come in late enough to be the only one on Floor 4, that would be one thing, but there were plenty of people around, which meant the timing itself was fine.

So why? What butterfly effect, what variable, had everyone staring at me like this? When I first entered Floor 4, nobody besides Yoon Joong-hyun had ever spoken to me.

"...It's really him?"

"What?"

"What is this?"

"Move, move!"

Among the murmuring voices, a man came running toward me, out of breath.

"Yes! It's him! I could feel it!!!"

He grabbed both my hands and bounced on the spot, wearing the exact expression of someone who'd just found a fifty-thousand-won bill lying on the ground.

I'd definitely seen that face somewhere before. Definitely... definitely...

"Ah."

I remembered.

"Eom... Hong-jun?"

"Huh? How do you know my name?"

Back when I'd been deep into clearing Floor 4, there had been a man who kept disappearing off somewhere and never coming back. More precisely, a man who'd survived the monsters by climbing a mountain.

"What is the meaning of this?"

The reason everyone was staring at me right now had to be this man.

I needed an explanation.