Chapter 387

Invasion (8)

Player traits and the existence of status windows.

Alongside the Tower, which had suddenly begun exerting influence over Earthlings one day, this miracle or curse that had emerged in humanity had initially been dismissed as nothing more than a personal superpower, or maybe just a quirk of individuality. But once players started climbing the Tower and its influence began bleeding into reality itself, it quickly rose to become a core variable that could determine the survival and future of all humanity.

Naturally, governments and corporations around the world kept researching player abilities, over and over. Under the belief that whoever uncovered the secrets tangled up in all this would end up leading the future, they poured in time and budget without a shred of hesitation.

It also came out, somewhere in this process, that players couldn't speak about the Tower directly. But even if that particular truth stayed locked away, there was still plenty of other information to be gathered.

"So, traits, they activate without you consciously willing them?"

"Some traits work that way, some don't. If you want to put it in game terms, I guess some are like passives, traits that activate without me having to think about it. And then there are others that work more like actives, ones I have to consciously choose to use."

"Is that right? Then what does it feel like, using an active-type trait?"

"That varies by type too... there are traits where my body just moves on its own, and there are traits I can use, but only after training them. It's kind of like having a third hand grow out of nowhere. The sense that the movement itself is something I'm doing, if that makes sense."

"...Fascinating."

The specific categories of traits.

"Hmm... right now my traits activate whenever I decide to use them, but that wasn't always true before."

"Please explain in detail."

"How should I put this. Traits used to only activate if I earnestly wished for them to, but earnestly wishing for something in the middle of combat isn't exactly easy, right? So usually I'd tie it to a physical motion instead. Like, the trait activates when I swing my sword, or it activates when I snap my fingers... basically hypnotizing myself into it. Though once you get used to climbing the Tower, at some point you don't need that anymore."

The specific activation conditions of traits.

"So your Strength stat is currently at 13, is that right?"

"Huff, huff, yeah, that's right."

"Hmm... it seems the stats in the status window might vary from person to person. Earlier there was another woman whose Strength stat was also 13, but her ceiling was a bit lower."

The efficiency of status window stats, and so on. Scientists kept trying, over and over, to uncover the rules behind traits and status windows, and to quantify them.

Among all the topics these scientists debated and wanted to uncover, the single most actively researched question was this: "Do traits follow any rules at all?"

The variety of traits was genuinely staggering. It wasn't simply a matter of whether a trait activated by will or worked passively at all times. Some traits let you talk to animals. Some let you convert your own body into an electrical signal and infiltrate the internet. Some let you show hallucinations to other people.

So did that mean traits were just the universal manifestation of what people commonly wished for? That theory fell apart the moment you considered the man who received "a trait that reflects double the pain you receive back onto someone else." He stopped climbing the Tower entirely. He hated pain too much. For him, that trait was clearly a curse, not a blessing.

After roughly a year of steady research and mountains of data analysis, scientists around the world provisionally arrived at a single conclusion.

Either traits followed no rules at all, or at minimum, they followed rules too complex for humanity to ever decode. Crudely put, traits really were handed out however the hell they pleased. No clear causal link could be found with a person's wishes, talent, environment, race, age, or anything else.

Drawing inspiration from that, one possibility occurred to me. No, actually, maybe it's a direction anyone would eventually land on, given enough time.

Sweep up every single player who held a buff-type or debuff-type trait. And with their help, build a massive "formation" to stand against the coming catastrophe.

Would gathering them actually matter? It would. This plan wasn't something I dreamed up overnight. It was a conclusion I reached after a fairly long stretch of careful thought.

First, buff-type and debuff-type players existed in huge numbers. Why? Because their Tutorial survival rate was abnormally high.

Think it through. Say a player who can debuff enemies, or a player who can buff other players, shows up in the Tutorial. Anyone can see they're a valuable asset, someone whose presence helps the whole team. Naturally, they'd get folded into the strongest group inside the Tutorial, and their survival rate climbed accordingly. (Though when Golden Marbles ran short, they were also usually the first to get abandoned. Even accounting for that, their survival rate still ran high.)

That's not even the whole picture. Players with buff-type or debuff-type traits died inside the Tower at a noticeably lower rate than players with other kinds of traits.

Why? Because to begin with, they didn't enter the Tower much at all. The proportion of active players among buff-type trait holders was strikingly low.

At its core, the Tower is a place where you have to protect your own life yourself. Plenty of floors just hand you a weapon and say "survive on your own." And even if you form a team, that doesn't guarantee you'll enter the Tower with that same team intact. The headcount required differs floor to floor, and so do the conditions.

Say your conditions match everyone else's, but the trait you're holding is specialized for group combat. That basically means your efficiency tanks the moment you're forced to fight alone, and it also means you're less likely to survive than everyone else.

So, aside from a small handful of exceptions, buff-type and debuff-type players simply didn't climb the Tower. And not climbing the Tower meant not dying.

Which means, as a result, a large number of these players were still alive and well in reality!

I had no idea how strong the "catastrophe" caused by me would end up being, but the number of players who could exceed whatever threshold I needed was limited. Already fixed, in fact. But the number of support-type players who could help those top-tier fighters? That was genuinely inexhaustible.

"Wait, would they actually be useful? Aren't they people with low levels and low stats, since they never even climbed the Tower to begin with? They probably don't even know how to properly handle mana."

When I first floated this idea, one of the players in the room pushed back exactly like that. Fair point. A completely fair point. But.

"Bundled together, they'll make a huge difference."

Each of them individually might contribute next to nothing, but bundled together, they'd make a real difference. I was certain of it.

The defining trait of players who gave up on climbing the Tower was simple: their buffs and debuffs were weak in power and short in duration.

To actually help top-tier players, you'd need to fire off your trait at maximum output, but with such a low Mana stat to work with, most of them could only manage a few seconds of impact before fizzling out.

But what if dozens, hundreds of buffers took turns buffing a single combatant? What if they took turns raining debuffs down on an enemy? The whole picture changes. You cover the mana depletion problem with sheer numbers, and you maximize each individually weak effect by stacking them. It's a picture of miracles built not by a single genius, but through the cooperation of countless ordinary people.

This works. I can say that with confidence. This absolutely works.

So through Zetter's side, I had them start gathering buff-type and debuff-type players. Would people who'd given up climbing the Tower and settled into ordinary life actually agree to help us?

They'd have to. Whether it took money or force... we didn't have enough strength to spare. Even if it meant applying pressure, I needed their help.

And needing this kind of "help" wasn't limited only to the support-type players I'd been talking about.

"We need to build a process for immediate response readiness."

"Realistically, that's..."

"It needs to be built."

I leaned on governments around the world to develop a process for civilian survival. So that no matter where the catastrophe surfaced, people could evacuate immediately.

"How's the player training coming along?"

"There's been solid progress."

I gathered top-tier players and ran repeated simulation drills against "a single, extremely powerful enemy." Once support-type players were gathered later on, we'd also drill fighting alongside their support. We'd need to study formations that could protect players with weaker physical ability, the ones who never climbed the Tower, while still fighting effectively. With so many sharp minds involved, it should be doable.

And as a genuine, absolute last resort, I'd already secured authorization to use modern weaponry. Missiles, tanks, even nukes... a contingency measure, but one still worth preparing for regardless.

I didn't tell civilians about the catastrophe. Knowing wouldn't have given them anything they could actually do, and it seemed more likely to trigger needless panic than anything else. Once Mahesh pinpointed exactly where the thing would appear, or once I'd regressed, I planned to issue a warning three days in advance. Sometimes, not knowing really is for the best.

One month left until the catastrophe arrives.

The world looked calm on the surface, but beneath it, everything was moving quietly, and more busily than ever, to prepare for the coming storm.

All to prepare for that single day. The day humanity's fate would hang in the balance.