Chapter 390

Calamity (2)

"..."

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

The small alarm clock ticked loudly. The sun poked its head over the eastern sky, dim and hazy, a single beam of light slipping through the tightly closed blinds. It felt like time had stopped. Or maybe I had.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

After clearing Floor 17 in an instant and returning to reality, I just sat there, staring blankly into empty space. I wasn't thinking about anything in particular. I wasn't doing anything either.

I was just wasting time, blankly, blankly.

Normally I would have thrown myself into planning what came next. Study the enemy. Analyze its weaknesses. Find a way to break it down. Every regression I'd gone through so far had followed that same process, and that process was what let me win.

But now? What was I supposed to do now? I didn't know. And because I didn't know how, I just sat there, blank.

Ding-dong.

The doorbell rang right on cue. I dragged my heavy body up, opened the door, and found Ji-won standing there. If I had to describe her expression in one word, it probably looked a lot like mine right now. Blank. Like she couldn't believe what she'd just seen.

I stepped aside to let her in, and she shuffled her way to the couch and sat down. I took the spot next to her and went back to staring blankly into space.

What do I do. What do I actually do. That thing, that thing was...

The scene I'd witnessed before regressing crept back into my mind, slow and creeping. The desperate faces of my allies. The buffers who'd wrung out every last drop of mana to keep casting buffs. Buff, collapse, buff, collapse, over and over. The buffers had given everything they had.

The Association staff hadn't stood idle either. They ran back and forth between the makeshift storage and the players, dropping off potions nearby, swapping in fresh gear for broken equipment, throwing themselves fully into support. The Association staff had given everything they had.

As for the frontline players, it went without saying. They never stopped swinging their weapons even as their grips tore raw. They poured out everything they had, attacking the golem with everything left in them.

The ground shook when Kang Chan's punch landed. Dok Su-hee's thrown dagger exploded with a deafening roar. Choi Ji-won's sword flashed, wrapped in blue lightning.

Even the Empress, who'd only been watching until then, joined the fight. Every time she swung her golden spear, the sky rang out like it was screaming.

Everyone had given everything they had. The strongest heroes humanity currently possessed scraped every last bit of skill from the bottom of the barrel and poured it all into destroying that golem.

And still... nothing reached it. Not even a small scratch. It felt like punching a mountain bare-fisted. The helplessness of hitting and hitting and only hurting yourself. The despair. And somewhere in the middle of it, the question of whether any of it even meant anything.

The biggest problem, to start, was the mana flowing across its surface. That intense mana carried its own resistance to interference, so most attacks got swept up in the flow and lost their strength, or produced nothing more than a faint spark. Players below a certain threshold struggled just to break through that mana barrier at all.

And that wasn't even everything. Even if an attack somehow broke through the primary mana barrier and reached the true body, the bizarre characters etched into the golem's surface reacted instantly, almost like they were alive. Every time those characters flashed, the path of the incoming attack twisted, and whatever force it carried weakened. It was like each tiny etched character held its own will to refuse the attack.

And then, in the rare case that an attack broke through both of those defensive layers and finally reached the golem's true body. (Kang Chan's punch had managed that much.) That was where the real problem started.

The golem's material was harder than anything that existed on Earth, no, harder than anything I had seen anywhere in my climb up the Tower, by a margin that wasn't even comparable. The Empress's spear, Kang Chan's fist, even my sword loaded with all the chill it could hold, none of it made any difference. It felt like tapping a thick sheet of steel with a limp reed. A solidity so absolute that not even the faintest vibration seemed to pass through, let alone a scratch. I think that alone explains why I felt so hopeless.

Yeah. There was no hidden gimmick or clever strategy waiting to be discovered. It wasn't that the golem struck back and killed everyone, leaving me the sole survivor who barely regressed.

It was simply that... our attacks had been too weak. Not strong enough to break through the golem. That was all there was to it.

"..."

And that helplessness had settled deep in my chest, eating away at me.

If it had just been an incredibly strong enemy? There'd be hope of bringing it down. Gather information on the enemy, analyze it, organize it, find even the smallest weakness. Build a plan around that information, position people beforehand according to matchups, dig into that weakness and twist the whole fight in my favor.

I could win. No, I would definitely win. Because I could make that happen. Because it was an "enemy." Because I had Regression.

But the golem I'd seen was closer to an artificial structure built for a single purpose. Broadly, it had two defining traits.

First. Absolute durability.

Second. It spread mana to block every form of "communication."

In other words, it was closer to a curse totem. An unbelievably sturdy one. Sturdy enough that the strongest players in the world could hammer at it all day and still fail to break it.

When I collapsed onto the desert floor mid-fight, exhausted from pounding on the golem. When I saw despair settle into everyone else's eyes.

I could feel a certain intention behind it. I could feel, clearly, the malice of whoever had made that golem.

The fact that stronger monsters appear on Floor 15 the stronger the player who clears it means there's a monster set precisely to counterbalance each player's strength. In other words, the monster's strength scales in proportion to the player's power. A player with roughly 10 strength clearing Floor 15 should summon a monster around 20 strength to Earth, and a player with roughly 50 strength should summon a monster around 100 strength. Given how mechanically the force called "divine power" operates, it made sense to assume some kind of equation governed Floor 15 as well.

In that sense, the golem was the most efficient possible compression of the strength allotted to it. No offensive capability whatsoever, but overwhelming durability, and a catastrophe that could collapse civilization by its mere existence.

The golem didn't kill people. It didn't seem to have anything resembling intelligence, and it didn't even seem to carry malice, not really. The golem didn't move. It just floated there in the sky, motionless, radiating its ominous mana.

Instead, it was unbelievably sturdy. And at the same time, it radiated mana that blocked human "communication." Did blocking communication kill people outright? No. And if abilities could be ranked by tier, wouldn't an ability that doesn't kill directly rank lower than one that does?

What would happen if the golem were left alone? I hadn't regressed after confirming exactly how our civilization would change if left unchecked, but... if that golem were left alone, humanity would likely go extinct.

Plenty of people would die, but plenty would survive too. Everyone would just have to become self-sufficient. Reproduction? Some form of it could probably still happen. But it would be primitive, the same way. Homo sapiens would survive. But humanity, the concept of it, wouldn't.

I couldn't accept a future like that. I had to do something. Anything.

Which left the option of... climbing the Tower. Regressing back to the very start of the Tutorial and giving everything I had to climb the Tower within a year. Was that really the only answer left?

If I used Regression well enough, it might be possible. Clearing every floor in the most optimized way, in the fastest time possible... maybe I could break through within a year.

"...And if it doesn't work? If it's physically impossible?"

"..."

Ji-won asked, almost like she was talking to herself. What if it didn't work?

If no matter what I did, I couldn't conquer the Tower within a year. If I got stuck on Floor 65 by some cruel margin. If the Tower's very design simply didn't allow for clearing it in a year, no matter how hard anyone tried.

"Then... what do I do?"

Then, it would be over. I would have grown far stronger than I was now, and the catastrophe appearing on Earth would have transformed into something so terrifying I couldn't even attempt to fight it. Humanity wouldn't just be likely to go extinct. It would go extinct, for certain.

If I were an ordinary person. If Earth ended this way. Could I accept that?

"...No way."

It was a thin thread, but... there was still hope. Too early to give up.

I hadn't given it my all yet. I hadn't thrown everything I had at it, the way everyone else had.

Right. I couldn't give up. Not when what rested on my shoulders wasn't just my own life, but the fate of all humanity. I had to try everything I could. Even if I gave up later, I had to try hard enough that I wouldn't look back and regret not having truly given it everything.

"The first thing that comes to mind is..."

I shot up from my seat. The part of me that had been sinking under helplessness started spinning back into motion.

The first thing to do was accept, head-on, that I couldn't defeat it. And then, shift my thinking entirely.

Destruction wasn't the only way to win.

"Ji-won-ah. Once we regress, let's gather every scientist we can find first. Oh, and that famous businessman too."

"What are you planning? Why scientists?"

"We strap rockets to the bottom of the golem. Ones with insane thrust."

I pulled back the blinds and looked down through the window. The massive golem hadn't appeared yet, not here, not now, but I muttered toward where it would soon show up, like a declaration.

"We strap on hundreds, thousands of rockets, and send that damn rock straight into space. What do you think, sounds doable?"

Seeing me grin as I said it, Ji-won finally found a faint smile of her own too.

You're getting exiled from our planet, you piece of shit rock.