Chapter 391

Calamity (3)

"To put it bluntly, it's impossible."

"...Why not?"

Inside a conference room at a company based in Texas, the entrepreneur widely known by the nickname "Mellon" shook his head.

"A significant portion of the rocket launch process is already automated, sure. Launch sequencing, flight path correction, things humans used to handle are now mostly judged and adjusted autonomously by computers. But."

"But?"

"AI is still relatively poor at handling unexpected situations. That golem you mentioned. You said considerable mana flows across its surface, right? Mana, as a force, interferes with how machinery operates. It can burn out circuits, fry chips, that kind of thing."

Not might, but does. There was a certainty to how he said it, an aura that only someone who'd actually run the experiments could give off.

"An enormous number of variables come up during a rocket launch. That holds true even when you're launching an optimized rocket, not some massive structure. If a rocket already deals with that much, a thing like your golem would be worse."

"Hm."

"And more than anything, our company doesn't have the technology to send something that heavy outside the atmosphere. Given the size you described, it's probably over 500 tons. Modern technology can't manage that."

"...Shouldn't you have led with that?"

"Ha, I assumed you had some kind of item for it. You asked about strapping rockets on so casually, I figured you must."

Mellon smirked, slick as ever. So this plan was dead in the water. I clicked my tongue, a little deflated. My ambitious plan to exile the thing into space had been scrapped before it even started.

"By the way, this 'golem' you mentioned, is its appearance just a possibility, or is that a conclusion from the Association's prediction system? We'd need the information too, to prepare a response."

"I'll let you know later."

I left Mellon still trying doggedly to dig for information, stepped out of the building, and waited. About three minutes passed, and as the appointed time drew close, I felt my body lift with a floating sensation. The next moment I came to.

"You're back?"

"Yeah."

I was inside Ji-won's apartment. I'd originally felt some resistance to using the power of Michael Zetter's subordinate, the "long-range teleporter," but this wasn't the time to be picky about that, so I was making good use of it.

"What'd he say?"

"No go. Says it's impossible with current technology."

"Hm... too bad."

Sending it far off into space, impossible. It would've been the easiest, most certain way to deal with the golem, so hearing it was a no-go sapped my energy regardless.

I'd also considered another method, detonating something like a nuclear bomb to push the golem out of Earth's orbit, but the scientists said it would take dozens of consecutive nuclear detonations to generate enough force to push the golem past Earth's orbit.

But if you set off dozens of nukes in a row in open air, even if it pushed the golem out, Earth wouldn't come out of it intact either. So that was out too.

I racked my brain, but no decent idea surfaced. What should I do? What would it take to bring that thing down?

The first thing that came to mind: use my chill to freeze it, then detonate something to hit it with intense heat? I vaguely remembered something like that from science class. Sudden contraction and expansion could crack even a massive boulder.

Or was there another option? What about shoving the golem straight into Dok Su-hee's Inventory? Hm... that probably wouldn't work. Then what about using teleportation to place a nuclear bomb directly inside the golem?

"Jun-ho-ya, I heard the Teleport trait can't overlap with an object that has heavy mass, only something light, like air."

"Uh... when did you hear that?"

"Last time."

"Guess I forgot..."

Well, so that was out too. I did remember the part about needing the object to not resist with mana in order to teleport it. (Meaning moving the golem directly was also impossible.)

So the option with the highest odds right now was freezing it and then hitting it with a violent shock.

"...In that case."

In the end, my current mana wasn't enough. I needed something far, far stronger.

So I had to do it after all. Maybe this was a possibility I should've addressed first, the one I'd been putting off until now because of how far its ripple effects could reach. The last resort.

"...I'm going to regress. Ji-won-ah. Back to one month ago."

This time, I'd use the Hero trait.

- Kim Jun-ho declares himself a regressor! Player Association president says "we are looking into it"

- Is the concept of a regressor even real? Should we believe him?

'Frankly speaking, there's no way for us to verify it. If he regresses, it'll never have happened in the first place. We just have to take it on faith.'

- If the regressor regresses, what happens to us? Does the regressor just disappear and that's it?

- Didn't you see the interview? They said the whole world goes back with him, and it just never happened.

- How are we supposed to believe that? Maybe he just slips off into a parallel universe and leaves the rest of us screwed.

- Whatever the case, Kim Jun-ho's definitely the strongest thing on Earth right now. Guess we just have to trust him.

[The effect of the Hero trait has been activated!]

[The effect of the Hero trait has been activated!]

[The effect of the Hero trait has been activated!]

[The effect of the Hero trait has been activated!]

[The effect of the Hero trait has been activated!]

[The effect of the Hero trait has been activated!]

It was a sensation I hadn't felt in a while. Every sound in the world, every trace of light, every current of air, amplified hundreds of times, pounding against my whole body. If I wanted to, I felt like I could look down on the entire planet. Of course, if I actually tried something like that, I'd regress immediately. Even now my head throbbed with a dull ache, like a nosebleed was about to start.

I slowly closed off my senses. The vast web of mana that had blanketed an entire planet gradually narrowed its range, shrinking until it covered just enough to blanket the nearby desert.

"Mm..."

Looking down from this vantage, answers to a few problems I'd been mulling over came to me naturally. The nature of divine power, the secret of mana, the path swordsmanship still had left to walk. Problems I could understand just from changing the height of my gaze.

I found myself entertaining the useless thought of whether I should trigger the Hero trait occasionally just for the sake of enlightenment, and before I knew it, only about a minute remained. Knowing full well my energized body didn't need it, I stretched out of habit anyway, then slowly poured intent into the mana blanketing the area.

"Heart of Eternal Winter."

My heart flared cold, radiating chill in every direction. More precisely, toward the exact spot where the golem would appear.

I dare say it was a cold that could freeze the entire world. Even the air froze into glittering ice crystals, and everything fell into a blue silence, as if time itself had stopped. I'd never once used raw power at the same time as the Hero trait until now. This should be enough to put even the Heavenly Demon on the ropes.

I focused my senses. Three seconds. Two. One. Splitting the seconds finer and finer, down to the exact instant the golem would appear.

Whoom.

"Hup!"

I concentrated every scrap of mana spread across the area! The instant a tearing sound ripped through the air, my mana blanketed the golem's massive body entirely. The mana flowing along its surface stopped moving, and the golem, once floating steady in the air, began falling toward the ground, slow but certain.

I didn't wait. I drew my sword and started running straight at it. I gathered the remaining chill and poured it into the blade. Shaped mana crystallized around the sword into the form of a blade, until it looked like a massive greatsword made of ice.

My target was its core. I gripped the sword with both hands and swung with everything I had, the first time I'd used full power while the Hero trait was active.

KWAAAAAAANG!!!

The recoil was stronger than expected, and the sword slipped out of my grip before I even realized it. The blade had shattered into fragments and vanished, and the chill that had wrapped it scattered into the air, glittering as it dispersed. All the strength drained out of my body at once. I really had put everything into that one strike, and just from that single impact, I'd burned through most of the power granted by the Hero trait.

But it worked. A long horizontal crack ran across the golem's body, a massive scar left behind. If I could land maybe five more hits like that... no, ten, I could take the golem down for good. I could shatter its core. There was hope. If I could just recover a little more strength and strike again...

"?!"

As if mocking my brief moment of joy, mana even more intense than before burst out from the golem's center. An attack? Some kind of counterattack? I braced myself hard, ready for whatever came next.

"...Ha."

All I could do was laugh in disbelief. Its mana didn't attack me at all. Instead, it flowed through every crevice of the cracked body, and before I knew it, the broken section had been cleanly repaired.

So it really had no offensive function whatsoever. Instead, it came with self-repair.

The conclusion was clear. To destroy the golem, I'd have to shatter its core in a single blow. If I didn't blow it apart in one strike, it would just keep endlessly repairing the damage and return to being perfectly intact.

But splitting that enormous golem in half in a single strike? That was... impossible.

"Ha ha."

Even for me, wielding the Hero trait.