Chapter 378

Regression (25)

-You have cleared Floor 15.

After returning to reality, I fell into deep thought for a long while.

"Jun-ho-ya, what's wrong?"

"It's just... the monster..."

"..."

Choi Ji-won had grasped the truth too, and joined me in mulling it over.

She said that compared to how she'd been at Floor 15 the first time around, her technique had grown to the point of being incomparable, but her status window stats were roughly the same, so she hadn't noticed any dramatic difference.

"Now that I think back, the stone slab did seem a little bigger... but not enough that it caught my attention."

The hypothesis: the strength of the monster that appears in reality depends on the strength of the player entering Floor 15. No, given the size of the boulder I'd seen, it wasn't a hypothesis anymore. It had to be treated as confirmed. (Unless the elder had developed dementia and just felt like pulling out a huge rock all of a sudden.)

Either way, if the strength of the monster appearing in reality changed based on the strength of the player who entered Floor 15...

"The monster shows up a year later."

So a year from now, the monster created because of me would appear.

Making a guess here, the monster appearing in reality would probably be far stronger than the player had been at the moment of entering Floor 15. Made sense, given there was a full year in between.

Over the course of a year, a player would naturally grow much stronger, and could also draw on help from other players who'd already gotten ahead. Michael Zetter really had beaten back the dragon that showed up in America, hadn't he. Even if the monster that eventually appeared ended up far stronger than the player had been at Floor 15, it wasn't necessarily a huge problem.

"Normally, sure."

My case was a little different. I wasn't some player at the Floor 15 stage, still in the middle of growing. I was, instead, a player whose growth had already reached something close to completion, someone with mature, seasoned strength. If you had to pick the single most overwhelmingly strong being on Earth right now, it would probably be me. I hadn't met that woman called "the Empress," but I doubted she was stronger than me.

Which meant the monster invading Earth because of me was, in all likelihood, going to be strong on a level nobody had ever seen before. Genuinely a different class entirely.

The dragon that appeared because of Michael Zetter had nearly wiped an entire city off the map. Then what about me? What kind of monster would show up because of me? If it wasn't stopped properly, what would happen? Actually, was stopping it even possible in the first place?

Even if I could win... could I stop it "without damage"? Buildings collapsing, people dying, the world getting torn apart... could I block all of that perfectly, without any of that collateral damage? Even with the Hero trait?

Think about the heroes I'd seen in all kinds of fiction. How many stories had a hero cutting into their own sleep to save people, only to get blamed, not the monster, when their own house collapsed or their own family died?

And on top of that, this monster really would exist because of me. Could I honestly claim to be free of that blame landing on me? My head was a mess. It was making me irritable.

"No. I still don't know anything yet."

I still didn't know how strong the monster would be. Strong, sure, it would be strong. But I didn't know in what way it would be strong.

If it reflected my trait, "regresses the moment I take a single hit," then, absurdly enough, it might die from a single hit too. Or it might look flawless on the surface while actually carrying some massive weakness.

"...Jun-ho-ya, I hate to be the one to rain on this, but you're... kind of amazing, when I think about it."

But according to Choi Ji-won, there was also the possibility the monster could come out with some bizarre, twisted trait in reverse. Not "regresses the moment it takes a single hit," but something like "all damage instantly reverts the moment it takes a single hit."

"...Hm."

An unbelievably powerful monster that reverts to full health the moment it's hit even once? I didn't even want to imagine that. There'd genuinely be no beating that. Then again, thinking it through, wasn't beating a regressor also supposed to be impossible? So maybe that would count as an accurate reflection, in a way?

"And just because the monster's created because of you doesn't mean it necessarily has your trait. The dragon made because of Zetter wasn't some Zetter-like monster, was it?"

"...True. My thinking was off."

"I think your strength, Jun-ho, is being able to sit down and think things through carefully at moments like this. Calm down. Let's think it through, slowly. How's that sound?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

Following Choi Ji-won's advice, I took a few quick breaths, then started turning my head again.

First, it was confirmed: a year from now, the monster would come crashing down. So given that, what could I actually do right now?

There was one obvious, simple solution. Just try to clear the Tower within the year. If the me before reaching Floor 15 had been told "a year from now a monster will hit Earth," I would've picked this option without hesitation.

A monster? If I clear the Tower, wouldn't it just not appear at all? And even if it did show up anyway, by the time I'd conquered the Tower, I'd be strong enough to crush some monster like that under a single finger. So all I had to do was climb the Tower...

"...I can't do that right now."

What if a year passed and I still hadn't managed to kill the monster? What if the "time I'm forced to remain inside the Tower" ended up stretching past a year, and I was still in the middle of climbing when it happened? That would be a genuinely terrifying situation.

Couldn't I just kill the monster then, you ask? Sure, I probably could kill it. But that's exactly where another variable creeps in.

Right now, I don't know how to "become weaker." Mana is something like focus, it clearly exists, I can use it at will, and it's a consumable strength... but I can't just make it vanish on my own terms. Mana simply always exists. So then, could I weaken my body instead? I could get away with various workarounds, sure, but if I actually tried to weaken myself in earnest, there's a very high chance it would get judged as "damage" and trigger a regression.

So why does not knowing how to weaken myself matter? Because of Floor 15, in the end.

The moment I climb the Tower and grow even stronger from here, there's an enormous risk attached to going back to "before Floor 15" again. Right now, in my current state, I already don't know what kind of monster will get created. If I grow stronger than this, then I could end up creating a monster that's truly... truly unimaginable.

Also, since Floor 15 already generates a monster tied to the player's strength, there might not be a similar floor elsewhere, but couldn't there also be one? If some other monster showed up while I was even stronger than I am now, there'd be no way to handle it.

So, paradoxically enough, the stronger I become, the more trouble I run into using the "true regression" I've only recently mastered. At the very least, the risk of returning to before Floor 15 grows without question. The moment I'm freest to act however I want is right now, while I'm at my weakest.

What should I do? What was the right move here? I thought through every option, things I could do in reality, things I could do in the Tower, or even spreading influence by using other people, but no clean answer came out. The reason was simple, really.

"I have no idea what kind of thing is going to show up."

I don't know the enemy. I have no idea what kind of thing is going to appear. So I can't build a plan. If I could even get a rough outline, I could at least guess, but I have zero information. The one halfway realistic method would be... asking some other player who enters Floor 15 after me what shape of stone statue they saw? That could at least let me guess at the enemy's appearance.

But flip that around, and all I can guess at is appearance. In the end, there's no way to actually find out except to experience it myself.

"...Haah."

But why had I avoided spending time like this until now. I'd had to consider the emotional toll on Ji-won and me, and I hated wearing down my own sanity too, that's why. But right now, there really was no answer.

"I guess I have no choice... I need to go check it myself."

Just as I finished making up my mind and was about to explain the plan going forward to Choi Ji-won.

"...Jun-ho-ya, want to take a look at this?"

Choi Ji-won, who'd been searching for something for a while now, held her phone out to me.

I took the phone carefully and focused on the screen.

'Raise your very own cyber cat! No need to feed it, no need to clean up after it!'

The content was some chaotic video about raising an AI cat. At a glance, it looked like an ordinary ad.

-Waiting for your call. This is urgent. M.Z. (The elder who appears on Floor 15...)

A single sentence stayed fixed right at the center of the screen. It was the method I remembered. Embedding Tower-related content inside an ordinary-looking ad, built so that anyone who hadn't cleared a certain floor couldn't read it. Back then, when I'd first cleared Floor 15, I think I'd received a message the same way. That had probably been our first contact.

"I thought I told him not to look for me."

Michael Zetter was looking for me.