Chapter 361 Regression (8)

Regression (8)

Someone out there might be muttering, "Of course the Tutorial has a hidden piece stashed in it, doesn't it always," with a snide little twist of the mouth, but honestly, a hidden piece in the Tutorial wasn't unreasonable at all.

Think about what the Tutorial actually was. The starting stage everyone passed through. The learning phase nobody got to skip. Sure, it was a problem that this Tower supposedly tested people while actually trying to kill them, and that the Tutorial's survival rate wasn't exactly great either, but the core purpose was still "learning." You learned how to fight. You learned how to handle your abilities. You got it hammered into your skull that the Tower would force choices on you. The Tutorial made humans learn, whether they wanted to or not.

So in a place like that, the field where everything begins, wouldn't it make almost too much sense for something to be hidden inside the one stage every survivor of the Tower already knew inside and out? A secret buried in the most familiar place of all. Anyone would find that plausible.

And on top of that, there was the symbolism of it, coming back to a Tutorial I'd already passed through and digging up its secret. That felt like exactly the kind of beginning that suited "regression." If this were some novel titled The Regressor Regresses, this would be Chapter 1. In these stories, the regressor usually claws through hell for years, tastes one bitter failure at the very end, and gets sent back to the start, and the first thing they always mutter is something like, "Hm. So this is the Tutorial. Ten years from now, they'll uncover the secret hidden here."

"...A little uneasy about this, honestly."

Of course, there was a difference between me and those regressors. I hadn't watched ten-plus years pass before I regressed. And in the future I'd actually lived through, nobody had ever discovered that the Tutorial had a hidden piece. So there was a real chance this whole theory was just me making things up in my head.

"Well, let's just try it anyway."

For someone with nothing but time on their hands, or more precisely, someone with unlimited everything except mental stamina, a little experiment like this probably counted as a healthy dose of stimulation for the soul. I'd been under a ton of stress lately from repeating regressions over and over, so surely a bit of fun exploring wasn't too much to allow myself.

"S, status window!!!"

"It's real! It's actually real!"

While I'd been lost in thought, people had started shouting about the status window. Choi Ji-won was keeping watch on me from a corner of the clearing. I let her wary gaze roll off me and headed for the pile of weapons stacked up nearby.

Swords, spears, axes, flails, more axes... every weapon a modern person could imagine was heaped up there, and a few people had already beaten me to it, including a man I remembered from before.

"Hm... hmmm..."

A man digging through the weapon pile. A man convinced a hidden piece was buried somewhere in there. Back when I'd first been summoned to the Tower, I'd actually watched this same man and dug through the pile myself, following his lead. No results back then either.

"This time's different."

But this time really was different. For one, I'd gotten stronger than I could even compare to my old self. Not just in raw mana, I'd come equipped with eyes that could see souls now. Basically, slap on whatever label you want, second cycle, munchkin, monster, whatever, the point is I was a fucking monster.

"Excuse me, step aside for a second."

"Uh, uh..."

"Y, yes..."

I naturally cleared everyone else out of the way and let mana loose from my body. White mist spread out, freezing everyone in place, and at the same time I felt the Awe trait kick in. I'd been fighting nothing but absurdly strong enemies lately, so it was easy to forget how well Awe worked on ordinary people.

'Guess it doesn't matter either way, since I'm strong enough to handle ordinary people without any help now.'

Anyway, I let loose a huge amount of mana, focused on my soul to widen my field of vision, and scanned the weapon pile with everything I had.

"..."

"..."

"Wh, what's there?"

"...Nothing."

Shockingly, the weapon pile turned out to be, well, exactly a weapon pile. No special "hidden weapon" waiting inside. Just... iron weapons. That's all it was.

'Was kind of hoping for something.'

Ji-won had Bung-bung, a weapon and companion rolled into one. Kang Chan and Michael Zetter had their trusty fists.

Meanwhile, I fought with a sword and didn't even have a unique weapon to my name, just some standard-issue dwarf-made blade I'd been using this whole time, and honestly, that stung a little. Some part of me had been thinking, isn't it about time I picked up something rare for once? But apparently that had just been wishful thinking on my part.

'Still fine.'

Still, it was fine. I had more to try.

[You have taken damage.]

[Returning to the moment of first entry on Floor 0.]

Actually, back when I'd first entered the Tutorial, there'd been people searching for hidden pieces even then too. One of them was the man digging through the weapon pile earlier.

More specifically, there'd been three of them: a man digging in the ground, a man rummaging through the weapon pile, and a woman swinging a sword around, Choi Ji-won.

"Not giving me anything..."

The weapon pile was the first thing I'd checked. The next thing I tried was swinging a sword, holding a perfect stance and swinging as fast as I could, roughly five swings a second, for three straight days and nights. The result, I could say with total confidence that there was no achievement in the Tutorial for swinging a sword an insane number of times.

So two out of three leads had turned up nothing, leaving only the digging.

"I'll dig a bit next to you too."

"Uh, sure. Go ahead."

Pa-pa-pa-pak!!!

"?!"

Obviously, the speed at which I could dig wasn't remotely comparable to an ordinary person's. I tore into the ground at a mechanical, ridiculous pace, and whenever a mound of dirt threatened to collapse in on itself, I just froze it solid with chill.

"Uh, isn't that a little too deep for..."

"Just wait."

I kept digging and digging, tossing aside stray rocks, flinging out the odd strange animal bone, digging so deep that the people watching from above finally backed away, worried they might fall in.

Clang!

"Huh?"

A sound rang out that shouldn't have been possible. Why shouldn't it have been possible? Because the edge of my shovel was wrapped thick in mana at this point, and any ordinary rock just gave way and let it slide right through.

So if there was something down here my shovel couldn't cut through, that grayish-white stone had to be.

"This is it."

Something wrapped in mana too, in other words. Which meant this was the "hidden piece" I'd been looking for...!!!

A smile crept onto my face, and I poured even more mana into the shovel's edge. It only took a few more strikes for the shovel to break, and I called up to the people watching from above to toss me down a new one.

Kwajik!

"Hm."

Four shovels broken already. But there was progress. The grayish-white stone was crumbling steadily, and if I just dug a little further.

Rustle rustle.

"There we go."

The hole broke through. Not big enough to fit my whole body through, but big enough to fit my head at least. Grinning ear to ear, I stuck my head in, determined to savor whatever hidden piece I'd found.

Beneath the Tutorial island. What exactly had been hidden down here...?

"A maze... I guess."

A dungeon beneath the Tutorial island. The scene inside looked exactly like a maze. Hollow and empty, though, giving off an eerie, abandoned feeling.

"Let's see..."

Right as I was about to push in and check things out properly, something, something about the structure felt oddly familiar. Like I'd seen this exact layout somewhere before...

Something on the tip of my tongue, something I clearly knew but couldn't quite dredge up, that strange feeling...

"Floor 25?"

That's when I recognized the source of the déjà vu. I hadn't cleared Floor 25 yet, so I couldn't recall the details, but I was almost certain the maze on Floor 25 looked exactly like this...!

Right, they'd said this was beneath the Tutorial island. Made sense I'd blanked on something so obvious, since it was a floor I hadn't entered yet, my memory must have been interfering with itself.

And if that really was the Floor 25 maze down there.

"..."

Then this was a bust. That maze... was completely empty.

This was a world the angels had built. A kind of space generated fresh for every single Tutorial.

Since it existed purely for the Tutorial, that maze was just there for the sake of being there, nothing of value inside it at all. It'd be a real problem if some ancient monster happened to be sleeping down there, wouldn't it. So, I guess in gaming terms, you'd call it dummy data.

"Hey, can you see anything down there?"

"Looks like there's a hole or something..."

Ignoring the chatter from the people above, I let mana burst gently from my body.

Not yet... still not it.

[You have taken damage.]

[Returning to the moment of first entry on Floor 0.]

Every attempt so far had failed, but one last hope remained. The final thing I decided to try was activating the Hero trait.

"Everyone, just trust me on this."

"Oh, ohhh...!"

"It's the regressor, the regressor!"

"Yeah, that's right, I'm the regressor."

I hadn't even revealed myself, and yet someone had somehow guessed my true identity out of nowhere, but with the help of my various traits, I managed to successfully activate the Hero trait. Not just with the people around me, either, the Goblin Shaman lent a hand too, and through it, I got the goblins' help as well.

Anyway, that overwhelming sense of omnipotence surged through my body again. Sheer, absolute power wrapping around every inch of me.

"Everyone, stand back."

Back when I activated the Hero trait on nearly every Earthling at once, I'd been able to fly through the sky. I wasn't at that level now, but with the limited help of the Hero trait and careful mana control, I could reproduce a rough, clumsy version of it.

Woong.

Spraying out mana like that, I lifted just barely off the ground, about a meter up, and slowly drifted toward the edge of the Tutorial island.

The last thing left to try was obvious.

"Let's go, then."

I planned to cross over that poison swamp and fly as far out as I possibly could.