Chapter 181: Nightmare Floor 17 (2)

My father’s limp body fell onto the living room floor.

“Aaaah! Honey!”

“D-Dad! Daaaaad...!”

My mother screamed in horror and embraced my father’s fallen body.

My little sister turned deathly pale and let out a piercing scream.

His neck had been broken, killing him instantly.

‘...’

I could not believe the scene unfolding before my eyes.

This... was reality?

Really?

“You cannot believe it? Astonishingly enough, it is reality.”

The Demon King sneered.

“This has only just begun. Surely thou wilt not fall apart already.”

The Demon King stretched out his hand once more.

This time, his fingertips were pointing toward my mother.

I screamed desperately.

‘Stop! I said stop!’

Please stop.

Please, just stop, time! Please...!

Begging did nothing.

Time no longer stopped at my will.

And neither did the Demon King’s hand.

‘I’m sorry! It was all my fault! Please don’t do it, please...!’

All I could do was desperately beg for the Demon King’s mercy.

But the Demon King merely delivered a cold sentence.

“Thou art already too late.”

SLICE-

An unpleasant cutting sound.

My mother’s head dropped to the floor.

Not a single drop of blood spilled from the frozen severed surface.

My mother’s collapsing body fell across my father’s corpse.

‘...Ah.’

It felt as though something inside my head snapped.

I could no longer remain sane.

“...Mom?”

My little sister collapsed onto the floor.

She stared blankly at our fallen parents in a daze, then raised her head and looked up at me.

Tears streamed down from her empty eyes.

“Why...?”

...It wasn’t me.

No, please, no... I...

The Demon King’s hand moved once again toward my little sister, who had frozen like a statue.

‘...Please.’

I begged through clenched desperation.

To save at least my last remaining family member.

‘I’ll beg you like this. Please spare my little sister, please...’

The hand stopped.

The Demon King laughed and spoke.

“How pitiful. Very well. We shall take pity upon thy wretched groveling and spare one.”

The Demon King walked past my little sister toward the living room window.

“In exchange, We shall now kill nine-tenths of humanity. That is the price of thy sister’s life. Watch closely, for they shall all die because of thee.”

‘W-Wait...’

The Demon King launched himself through the air and landed in the middle of a busy district.

The pedestrians around him immediately turned their attention toward him.

“W-What?”

“He fell from the sky. Is he a Climber...?”

The Demon King swept his hand toward them.

SHAAAAK!

Blue lines were drawn through the air, slicing apart people’s bodies.

Hundreds of people died in an instant. The street was dyed with blood.

“Aaaaaah!”

“U-Uaaah...!”

People fled in terror.

The massacre began.

The Demon King rampaged through the area, killing everything in sight.

Using my body, he crushed people, blew them apart, and sometimes unleashed waves of cold over a vast area, slaughtering them all at once.

Please stop... Don’t do this...

As though he could no longer even hear my pleas, the Demon King did not stop.

All I could do was watch helplessly.

This... was not reality.

There was no way this could be reality.

“Ku-ku, denying reality, are we? Go on, continue denying it.”

The Demon King taunted me as though amused.

The city center had become ruins.

As time passed, helicopters and fighter jets filled the sky.

But they were nowhere near enough to stop the Demon King. Every one of them was shot down in an instant and crashed.

People’s death screams echoed endlessly in my ears.

...My mind felt like it was collapsing.

I could no longer hold myself together.

The Demon King continued the massacre as he moved from one city district to another.

How much time had passed?

The Demon King stood on the rooftop of a building.

Looking down at the mountain of corpses and sea of blood below, he spoke to me.

“What a pleasing sight. Well? Thou killedst them all.”

...At least hundreds of thousands of people must have died.

But even that did not seem enough for the Demon King.

“We still have a long way to go. If We continue nibbling away at humanity like this, killing nine-tenths of them will take quite some time.”

The Demon King began Mental Concentration.

FWAAAAASH!

Mental Concentration ended, and my body became light.

He had used Radiant Incarnation.

...How?

Even if the Demon King had control of my body, he should not have been able to freely use my skills...

“Did We not tell thee? We accepted the Tower’s offer. All of thy authority as a Climber has passed completely into Our hands.”

The Demon King soared high into the sky.

There was no way I could fail to understand what was about to happen.

Just like when he had wiped out the monkey army on Floor 9, an enormous amount of cold compressed together.

...FWAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!!

And when it burst outward in every direction.

The world turned white.

The ground below.

People, buildings, everything in sight froze together with the blizzard and scattered apart.

The Demon King moved while maintaining Radiant Incarnation.

The blizzard was not satisfied with freezing all of South Korea. It continued expanding endlessly.

China, Japan, Russia... then beyond the Asian continent and across the entire world.

When I had been transported to Kanyuk’s world on Floor 15, the Demon King had said that he could erase all life in that world as quickly as possible.

There had not been the slightest exaggeration in those words.

The bitter cold swallowed most life on Earth.

“Dost thou see?”

The Demon King spoke as he looked down at the frozen land.

“Thou didst all of this. Billions of lives have been extinguished.”

‘...’

I had reached the point where I could no longer think at all.

“To think that the world thou struggled so desperately to save would ultimately perish by thine own hands. What a tragedy.”

...Because of me.

They all died because of me. My family, everyone else.

It was no different from me having done it all myself.

The world had been destroyed in an instant.

‘...I’m going to kill you.’

All that remained was emptiness and futility.

And hatred toward the Demon King.

The Demon King chuckled.

“Yes, go ahead and try to kill Us. But how exactly dost thou intend to do so?”

Still mocking and ridiculing me, the Demon King flew somewhere.

He returned to South Korea.

Perhaps he had avoided Seoul when freezing South Korea, because for some reason, only the Seoul area had remained untouched.

The Demon King headed toward my house.

...My little sister was still sitting on the living room floor.

The Demon King strode toward her and grabbed her by the back of the neck.

‘...!’

A dizzying rage, hot enough to burn out my brain, surged through me.

I barely suppressed it and spoke.

‘You promised you’d spare my little sister...!’

The Demon King said.

“Release time.”

...What?

Time was already flowing normally, yet the Demon King suddenly started spouting nonsense.

My Time Stop ability had already been blocked, so what the hell was he talking about now...

“Shut up and release it. Dost thou wish to watch thy sister die as well?”

‘No... It isn’t even stopped, what the hell are you talking about...!’

“Simply decide that thou wilt release it, just as thou normally dost when releasing time! Hurry!”

The Demon King roared.

The Demon King’s hand tightened around my little sister’s neck.

I had no choice but to do what he said for now.

“Didst thou do it?”

‘I did! I released it!’

At that moment.

The scenery before my eyes changed completely.

‘...?’

Huh?

What I saw was a gigantic balance scale.

A black sphere and a white sphere rested on the two pans.

At that moment, the black sphere rapidly expanded, becoming even larger than the white sphere that had originally been far bigger.

CLUNK-

The balance tipped toward the black sphere.

Without even having time to understand what was happening, I stared at the sight.

And then...

The voice of the gigantic being behind the balance rang out.

- You won.

[You have successfully cleared Nightmare Difficulty Floor 17.]

...???

“Haah, fucking hell! You finally fell for it, you bastard.”

The Demon King spoke as though utterly sick of everything.

W-What the hell is this...

I had no idea what was happening.

[Absorbing the power of the floor.]

[Your level has increased.]

[Your level has increased.]

[Your level has increased.]

.

.

.

[Your level has increased.]

[You are the first to clear Nightmare Difficulty Floor 17.]

[Moving to the Reward Room.]

My vision changed again.

It was the Reward Room.

I wiggled my fingers.

Control of my body... had returned.

Feeling something strange on my forehead, I took off what I had been wearing.

It was Pankera’s Crown.

“...Demon King.”

I stared blankly at the crown and asked.

“Was all of that the Mental World?”

The Demon King answered.

- What else could it have been but an illusion? We are sick of explaining it. Everything was done in order to clear Floor 17.

The Demon King seemed to understand this entire situation.

But I still understood absolutely nothing.

Still completely dumbfounded, I asked again.

“What the hell happened...?”

***

The theme of Floor 17 was an unknown dimension.

Apparently, you had to fight monsters in a mysterious purple space with neither ground nor gravity.

[You have entered Nightmare Difficulty Floor 17.]

I stopped time the moment I entered.

‘Hmm...’

A space filled entirely with purple.

I was floating in midair.

There was nothing there, only space stretching endlessly in every direction, making it somewhat similar to outer space.

Nightmare seemed to at least take place in the same location as the other difficulties.

I released time.

Then another message appeared.

[Win the wager proposed by the Demon of the Balance.]

“...?”

That was the only message that appeared.

I furrowed my brow.

It was the kind of floor that told you the clear condition from the very beginning.

But in my experience, floors that kindly explained things at the start tended to be more troublesome than the others. Just look at Floor 12...

‘What’s the Demon of the Balance?’

Win a wager?

I looked around while floating through the weightless space.

There was still nothing in sight.

Then it happened.

“...!”

Along with an enormous presence, a blurry figure appeared in front of me.

A black giant.

Its face had hollow openings for its eyes, nose, and mouth like a skull, and though its body was enormous, it was gaunt and skeletal.

For a moment, I was overwhelmed by its ominous and eerie presence.

It felt as though I had encountered a being of an entirely higher order.

Was this thing the Demon of the Balance...?

The being, which looked unmistakably like a demon to anyone who saw it, looked down at me with empty eye sockets.

I had to fight something like this... no.

It said I had to win a wager.

But the demon did not react at all for quite some time.

Eventually, I spoke first.

“You’re the Demon of the Balance, right? Let’s make a wager.”

Only then did the demon respond.

Its intention was transmitted directly into my head, like telepathy.

- A wager. Good.

The Demon of the Balance seemed to smile.

- If I win, your soul belongs to me.

“...And if I win?”

- I will peacefully send you outside the Demon Realm. This is not a domain for humans.

The Demon Realm?

So this place was the Demon Realm?

- And I shall decide the contents of the wager. If you refuse to accept them, there will be no wager.

“...You’re not going to make it some wager I could never possibly win, are you?”

- I am the Demon of the Balance. The wager is fair.

“How am I supposed to believe that?”

The demon gave no further answer.

As though telling me to simply decide whether I would wager or not.

[Win the wager proposed by the Demon of the Balance.]

The message itself also said to win ‘the wager proposed by the Demon of the Balance’...

So I was not allowed to have any say in the contents anyway?

For now, I had no choice but to accept.

“Fine. What’s the wager?”

The Demon of the Balance raised a hand.

Then a gigantic red balance scale appeared before me.

A large iron sphere rested on the right pan.

And there was nothing on the left pan.

Naturally, the balance was tilted toward the right.

Though this was a space without gravity, the balance sure worked just fine.

The demon spoke.

- I shall produce three balances in sequence. If you balance all three or tip them toward the opposite side, you win. If you fail even once, I win. There is no time limit.

“...Any other conditions? Nothing at all?”

I asked as I examined the balance before me.

- Each balance has its own rule. This red balance operates only through the mass of your physical body.

The mass of my physical body?

I soon understood what that meant.

In other words, I was supposed to use my own body weight to balance the scale.

‘...How?’

I looked at the iron sphere on the right pan.

It was almost as large as my entire body.

It looked like it had to weigh at least several tons.

I stepped on Air Walk.

As I approached the left pan, the pan pulled my body toward it with an attractive force.

I stood on the left pan.

Naturally, the balance did not move even slightly.

I asked the demon again.

“There aren’t any restrictions besides what you just said, right?”

- Correct.

Then couldn’t I just move the balance itself?

With that thought, I tried forcing the balance to tilt toward the left.

“Ugh...!”

But no matter how hard I pulled, the balance did not budge.

The same was true when I tried to touch the iron sphere on the right pan.

The iron sphere seemed firmly fused to the pan and would not come off no matter what.

- The only way to move the balance is through the rule I stated.

The demon spoke.

Of course, cheap tricks weren’t going to work...

I stood on the left pan and thought carefully.

The iron sphere had to weigh at least dozens of times more than my body.

It wasn’t like I could change my own weight, so how the hell was I supposed to tip the balance toward the left?

“...”

A way.

There probably was one.

“Fuck...”

Remembering the Floor 11 clear, I let out a groan.

I have to do that shit again?