Chapter 382

Invasion (3)

"Hmm..."

I spun the globe in circles, marking X's with a red marker. Seoul, New York, London, Tokyo, Beijing... The timing when the chaos would begin wasn't perfectly identical in each place, but the margin of error stayed within a few hours. These X marks were a forecast of chaos that would erupt simultaneously in the future.

"Floor 12 onward needs other people to make progress."

Floors 12, 13, and 14 all required cooperating with other people to climb. Even if one person overwhelmingly outpaced everyone else, the structure itself would force a bottleneck. So it wasn't strange at all that the timing of the monsters' appearances clustered close together.

That was one problem, but not the only one. Among the scattered issues, one was that I didn't know exactly how strong the monsters were.

"Gathering players is possible, at least."

Framing it as something like a "Player Association joint training exercise," I could station them at designated locations. I'd bring in multiple cameras, and create a situation where players couldn't help but fight. Anyone who ran would get branded human garbage, driven into an atmosphere where they'd never be able to show their face in society again... so most players would probably end up fighting.

But player resources were limited. More precisely, "trustworthy" player resources were limited. Take Kang Chan, for instance. Kang Chan could take down the tiger in Korea with a single punch, with very high probability. Or Michael Zetter. Given enough information, he could complete Adaptation and win cleanly.

"But the rest..."

The rest of the players were an unknown. I hadn't fought them myself, so I had no way of knowing exactly how strong they were, and no way of gauging their temperament either. The Player Association had run various tests to clear away that fog of information, but from what I'd heard, plenty of players held back their strength for the idiotic reason that "you should always hide thirty percent of your power."

Sure, from their own perspective it probably felt like a reasonable call, but from where I stood, trying to draw up the big picture, I genuinely wanted to strangle every one of them. I was trying to build a plan, and the information itself was already lacking.

Were the players the only unclear variable? The monsters' strength was shrouded in mystery too. The information I'd gathered was all postbattle information. I'd seen what damage the monsters did to society, gotten a rough sense of how they moved through footage... but I still hadn't seen them with my own eyes. And footage had its limits too.

So to sum it up, I didn't know how strong the monsters were, and I didn't know how strong the players were either. I could only guess at rough estimates.

"Hah."

The problem was, even under these rough estimates, there weren't enough players. Russia and Africa especially fell painfully short.

Player numbers tended to scale with population, so India and China had the most. China in particular had been systematically cultivating its players, so the overall quality was fairly solid. They lacked any overwhelmingly dominant figure, but if India and China were simply told where the monsters were expected to appear, they'd probably manage to hold the line without much trouble. (Assuming, of course, neither of them tried anything funny.)

But places like Russia and Africa, where the land was absurdly vast but the population and player quality didn't scale to match, were the real problem. They had some decent players of their own, but not enough to take down a monster solo, and asking for help from other countries' players felt awkward too.

When your own country's getting torn apart by a monster right now, what player's going to volunteer their time in Africa or Russia? Meaning the hands available just weren't enough.

"Hmm..."

In the end, did it come down to me? It seemed like the only option left was to borrow the strength of the teleportation-capable player under Michael Zetter's command and run around handling it myself. Zetter and Ji-won had agreed to team up and take care of New York's dragon, so that place would be fine. Which meant I'd probably have to handle whatever problems came up everywhere else.

I knew this much about the future, and things were still this uncertain. I hadn't expected it to be easy, but this was harder than I'd imagined. Nothing to do but sigh.

"Hah."

Thinking about how short-handed I was, the still-untraceable "Empress" crossed my mind.

The Empress, supposedly a match for Zetter in strength. Her whereabouts still hadn't come to light.

Once you cleared Floor 26, a training space opened up on Floor 1. Time flowed at one-fifth speed inside, and you could shape the environment however you wanted... calling it a heaven-sent training ground wouldn't be an exaggeration.

"...That's not a sane person."

She probably just never left that training ground. No one in reality had ever seen her, which meant she'd holed herself up in there the entire time.

Still, even people who train alone eventually miss company, want a little rest now and then. But this Empress woman seemed like a real hardcase. Even when Earth got invaded in the future, she never once showed her face.

Even so, this much counted as some kind of resolution. This was my best.

"Whew."

Now there was nothing left to do but throw myself in and adjust as I went.

Time passed. One week before the decisive day.

- Entering Floor 16.

I entered Floor 16 and refreshed my regression point. For some reason, the placard angel now in charge of Floor 16 had changed to Anael. I exchanged greetings with him, lightly scratched the stone, and cleared right away.

"...Hah."

Back in reality, I caught my breath in a penthouse in New York. My heart pounded hard. I was just sitting still, but my body somehow felt like it was spinning.

Pressure. The pressure kept catching in my throat, and it brought on dry heaves. I'd grown far stronger than any human had a right to, but I still hadn't learned how to bear the weight of it. Billions of human lives rested on my back. There was no way I could stay fine.

I didn't want to do this. I just wanted to rest. Hole up in some room, order delivery food, play games.

Once, Michael Zetter had asked me this.

'Why do you go this far.'

Right. Why did I go this far. Nobody had forced this role on me. Nobody had told me to do any of it. If you looked at it plainly, I'd volunteered for this suffering myself.

A day after that question, I called Ji-won aside and apologized.

'...Ji-won-ah. I'm sorry. Because of me, you also had to...'

Because she was tangled up with someone like me, she was walking through the same thorn-covered path. Choi Ji-won had become wildly famous, had to run around nonstop catching criminals, and had to show her face to the press every so often too. She could've lived peacefully, and I was the one who'd dragged her into all this, and that guilt was unbearable.

'Don't apologize. Why would you apologize?'

Ji-won snapped back at me instead. I'd never seen her get that furious across every cycle of my regression combined. She grabbed my collar, shook me hard, and Choi Ji-won's eyes welled up with tears.

'Do I look like some kind of puppet to you? I'm with you because I want to be. I chose to be here with you. It's my choice, so why are you the one apologizing?'

'...'

'Don't feel sorry. Don't apologize either. Just do your best. I'm satisfied with this. And sure, we might fail. We're human, aren't we? We're not gods. Why would failure be your fault? If we fail, we accept it and try again. We have that chance, don't we? So... so don't apologize. I'm sorry too. I love you.'

Then Choi Ji-won brought up her father. Every time her father headed into danger, she used to ask him.

Whenever he came home, he'd laugh it off, pretend it was nothing, say things like "that was scary" or "it could've gone really wrong" or "thank god." She'd ask him why he kept stepping up every time. Why couldn't he just watch from the sidelines?

And her father always gave her the same answer.

"...Because I can't look away. And because there's something I can do."

Because I got lucky. Because thanks to being luckier than most, I picked up the broken ability called Regression, and from here on I get to walk a golden road paved by that luck.

Because I found out. Because I learned that a lot of people were going to die and get hurt.

Because I can. Because with the strength I've been given, I can stop the disaster.

Because if I can do something and don't, I think I'll regret it. Because the bitter taste of that would linger forever.

So all I'm doing is acting. That's how it's always been.

I sat cross-legged on the sofa. Settled my mind, sharpened every sense in my body. I ran countless simulations in my head. What if a monster turned out stronger than expected. What if it turned out weaker. What if a particular region's defense collapsed. What if a player I'd assigned did something unexpected. I laid out every variable that could possibly occur and worked out countermeasures for each. Day and night, I stayed rooted in that same spot, wrestling with thought after thought after thought.

"...Time, huh."

A red sun rose between New York's towering forest of buildings. The long stretch of preparation had finally come to an end.

The decisive day had dawned.