Chapter 384

Invasion (5)

The fourth. Four cycles now, repeated in a row.

The peerless warrior. The strategist whose schemes outwitted gods and ghosts. The regressor who sees straight through the future.

Despite every grand title I could stack up, I'd already failed four times.

Several tangled factors were at play here.

'Aaaaaah!!!'

'Save me!!! The players are all dead!!!'

'Run!!! Just run!!!'

First, my last four cycles had all been spent figuring out "what exactly the problem was." Which meant, in every one of those four cycles, Earth went straight to hell. If anything, the damage might have ended up worse than when Michael Zetter had been winging it on his own.

I'd been so sure everything was perfect, and then watching Earth blow up in one place after another had been almost unbearable. People dying, that was heartbreaking on its own. But on top of that, after all the time and blood and sweat I'd poured in, everything failing anyway just didn't make sense to me.

Still, where there's a cause, there's an effect. Find the cause, and I could change the result. After spending the next four cycles digging into the problem, I finally managed to pin down the reasons behind the failures. The scale was planet-wide, and everything erupted at once in so many places that it took me a full four cycles just to sort it out clearly.

First cause of failure. The timing of the monster appearances had shifted. This was the single biggest source of chaos.

While drawing up the plan, I'd positioned players under the pretext of "simulation training." I had them write reports on the theme of, "If a monster like this appeared right here in the real world, how would you respond?" and had them actually deploy in practice runs.

Naturally, that drew a flood of curses. What kind of bullshit is this, the Association idiots are pulling more nonsense again, that sort of thing. But once the monsters actually showed up, those complaints dried up fast.

"After the first cycle, though."

Across these four cycles... the monsters kept popping out a little earlier, or a little later, than scheduled.

I couldn't pin down exactly why the timing shifted. Maybe it was because I'd warned Michael Zetter not to touch things. Maybe it was because I'd acted differently on Floor 2 and Floor 3. Who knew.

The monsters currently surfacing in reality all traced back to players who'd entered Floor 15 a year ago. And a year ago put us roughly two, three weeks after I'd cleared the Tutorial.

What had I been doing back then? I couldn't remember. Aside from the warning I gave Michael Zetter, I couldn't even guess. I think I'd just been quietly climbing the Tower. Building up Ji-won's reputation on the side, maybe.

But some tiny action of mine must have set off changes somewhere, because the timing of the monsters appearing in reality drifted slightly from what I remembered. As little as ten or fifteen minutes off, as much as an hour. Their locations shifted a bit too, a difference too significant to ignore but too minor to dig into properly.

Out in the field, though, that "minor but impossible to ignore" margin of error was the first domino, throwing players into confusion and gutting every prepared response.

"Still, this part's fine."

This much I could handle. This had genuinely been a case of "not knowing," so once I knew, dealing with it was simple enough. Tweak the plan slightly, tell the Association staff on deployment to stay more flexible in their responses. Done.

The fact that I'm even saying that means there was a bigger problem waiting. Second variable. Compared to the past, the quality of players this cycle had changed.

In the earlier cycles, the Player Association's influence hadn't grown this large. The growth of the Association's influence was good news in itself, it let me shape the situation more to my liking.

But the problem was that the players themselves had also changed because of the Association. In the original history, these were players who should have been climbing the Tower hard, racking up plenty of real combat experience. Instead, a large number of them, rather than focusing on getting stronger inside the Tower, had thrown themselves into wealth and pleasure back in reality.

"...I mixed it up because the floor numbers looked similar."

Remember the survey Ji-won and I ran on players worldwide, back in the past? Thanks to that, I remembered roughly how far past players had climbed, and I compared those numbers against this cycle's players. The floor counts really weren't all that different, and that led me to assume their strength would be similar too. That assumption was my mistake.

People always act in whatever direction benefits them. Once players realized the Association factored "Tower floor reached" into its rank calculations, they scrambled to climb floors as fast as possible. In reality, from Floor 11 onward, how much reward you squeezed out of a single floor mattered more than simply clearing it, but these players kept clearing floors half-assed just to pump their floor count. It mass-produced players who looked impressive on paper, high floor, high level, but hollow underneath. All show, no substance.

When I drew up the plan, I'd assumed every player would at least pull their own weight relative to their level... but with balloon-muscle types doing half a job, six-tenths of a job, accidents flaring up everywhere was basically inevitable.

Of course, not every player acted this shamelessly. As a baseline, I'd already explained the plan in advance to players who'd climbed past Floor 15, telling them monsters would show up. Some believed it, some dismissed it as "the Association pulling more shady tricks," but either way, the important thing was that everyone was aware. In the end, some spots had gaps because players had grown weaker than before, but other spots had players crushing monsters with ease because they'd grown stronger than before.

Players also responded faster and panicked less when the situation actually hit, precisely because they'd been aware a monster "might" show up. There's a huge difference between someone who has a dragon suddenly appear in front of them on the way home from work, and someone who's already been thinking "a dragon might show up."

"Whoa, a monster actually showed up on Earth. This is insane."

"Looks like it's a little late, but... no damage. Fall back! I'll kill this one myself!"

That wasn't all, either. Whether they'd been provoked by Choi Ji-won, or won over by my persuasion (a deal by any other name), plenty of Tower-climbing addicts who'd never once intervened on Earth before came out into the real world and helped bring down monsters. Spending that much time inside the Tower meant these were people whose hunger to grow stronger outweighed any desire for wealth and comfort in reality. Their skill was the real deal.

These freelance players ignored the Association's instructions but took it on themselves to clear out monsters near where they lived. Recognizing this, I switched from deploying "players strong enough to kill the monster" to deploying "players who could hold out well enough." That turned out to be a clear win.

"..."

So, does the problem analysis end there? Not even close. Running an entire planet to my own liking wasn't like running some small group, not even a company, not even a country. It was genuinely brutal.

"Civilian control's a mess."

Players fighting monsters were one thing, but civilian control had real problems of its own.

"My laptop! I'm just grabbing my laptop and leaving!"

"If I post this on YouTube it's gonna blow up. Film it!"

"Run, you insane bastards!!!"

I'd gotten cooperation from various countries and deployed police forces. Kept civilians away from the area, issued evacuation orders. But crazy bastards exist everywhere. People who crawled closer no matter how much you begged them to get lost, to stay away. Civilians who got in the way of the fighting because they'd left something at home, or because they wanted the perfect angle for YouTube. Once people who didn't know the first thing about fighting started wandering into the mix, the whole combat situation naturally turned into chaos.

"It's dangerous there, get back! Get back, I said... kuh!"

A player who got hurt trying to evacuate a civilian.

"Can't you hear me? I said get lost! You trying to die?!"

A player who, swept up in the extremity of battle, accidentally killed a civilian, and because it happened to be live-streamed, got branded a murderer.

"Alright, live footage right now from the drone! Like and subscribe..."

"That crow thing's moving weird."

"That drone! God fucking damn it!!!"

Someone flying a drone outside the control line to broadcast the fight, only to pull the monster's aggro and lure it right past the perimeter.

Nearly every kind of uncontrollable disaster imaginable erupted simultaneously, all across the globe.

"The Tower..."

Part of me just wanted to climb the Tower as far as it would go. Get ten times, twenty times, a hundred times stronger than I was now, and maybe none of this would even be a concern anymore. Just wrap the entire planet in chill and freeze every monster solid, wouldn't that solve everything?

Whatever task the Tower threw at me, whatever monster came crawling out, as long as I had Regression, I could win. If some floor turned out to be truly, impossibly hard, one that ate up too much time, I could just give up and regress. Now that I could regress to before entering any given floor, nothing inside the Tower could restrict how I moved.

But if, hypothetically, some situation forced me to go all the way back to before Floor 15 to resolve everything... there'd be no undoing it. If a version of me stronger than I am now cleared Floor 15, that alone would be a catastrophe.

"Hah."

I let out a sigh and shook off the tangled thoughts. I'd identified the causes. Timing errors, the decline in player quality, and the civilians. Each problem looked minor on its own, but tangled together, they'd been enough to bring down a plan I'd believed was perfect.

Still, it was fine. I knew what the problem was. I was adjusting the plan piece by piece.

It was fine to fail. It didn't matter if there were problems.

In the end, I win. Holding onto that single thought, I revised the paper in front of me again and committed it to memory.

The moment I lose is the moment I give up.

"Again."

And I don't give up.