Chapter 394

Calamity (7)

The Awe trait wasn't something you could trigger just by being strong. The stronger the opponent, and the stronger their sense of self, the harder it became to trigger.

And right now, I'd triggered Awe against every single person who'd been a subject of "Project Prometheus." Not simply because I was strong, or because I was a regressor. I'd worked my way into their hearts with precision.

Over the course of "Prometheus," I'd faithfully played the role of teacher and savior to those players. My long life had served as an answer key for the anguish and trials they went through, and I'd guided them through it gladly. I'd given them strength to keep moving at the threshold of death, and shown them new paths when they hit the wall of growth. Naturally, all of that built up genuine respect and gratitude along the way.

Of course, that alone wasn't enough. Especially for players who were arrogant or wary of me, I needed a different approach. I mixed in the information I had with a bit of lying and prodded at the deepest corners of their hearts.

"That swordsmanship of yours... the flow of mana breaks off, just barely. There was a swordmaster I met in a past cycle who struggled with the same issue as you. That man... met his end, in the end. Later I figured out the solution, but that didn't mean I could go back to that moment. Seeing you reminds me of him... ah, I've said too much. Forget what I just said."

For proud geniuses, I acknowledged their talent and guided them along while letting slip a weakness of my own to win their sympathy. (For the record, the "man who struggled" I mentioned there was me.)

"I've seen someone in the Tower who resembled the 'younger sibling' you mentioned. She didn't know who I was, but she was searching for her older brother. Her beloved brother, she said. Her admirable brother..."

For those bound up in old wounds, I offered the kind of comfort only I could give. Whether it was true or false didn't matter. I simply told them the words they desperately needed to hear.

Through all of this, I grew genuinely close with the players. Training, eating, sleeping, through all of it I quietly traded this and that story with them, and eventually, the players who'd been searching for an outlet under all that pressure started pouring their own stories out to me.

Based on those stories, based on each individual's temperament, I designed the optimal image for earning their awe. I performed, myself, the image of the hero the players desperately longed for, the figure they wanted to become.

"...So you're the knight I've been waiting for."

"If it's you... I think I can trust you. Please, save this Earth."

"I hate relying on someone else... but you're the regressor, so."

The Awe trait wasn't limited to simply activating the Hero trait against Earthlings. It could be triggered against a large number of strong individuals, and its true power lay in copying strength from every player against whom Awe had been triggered.

-Awe [A]

-Praise for your greatness. Fear of what cannot be understood.

-You can use a degraded version of a trait from a target affected by Awe one time.

An A-grade trait became an E-grade trait. An S-grade trait became a D-grade trait. A trait had to be roughly SSS-grade for it to degrade down to B-grade, something that at least felt somewhat usable. The word "degraded" written into the Awe trait's description meant genuinely, enormously degraded, so much so that each individual trait, taken on its own, seemed unlikely to do much of anything.

-Acceleration [D]: Uses mana to instantly increase the body's speed.

-Rotation [E]: Adds rotational force to mana, slightly increasing destructive power.

-Target Lock [D]: Marks an enemy as a target, dealing extra damage with any attack that lands on that target.

-Multi-Blade [C]: Summons three mana clusters shaped after the currently wielded weapon.

-Mana Amplification [C]: Slightly amplifies the mana being used.

But those degraded traits became one inside me, and synergized. Small bits of power gathered and gathered and gathered again, and together they surpassed the power of ordinary high-grade traits.

The new traits granted to me, counting all of them together, weren't just one or two. There were hundreds. Honestly speaking, activating hundreds of traits at once felt as complicated as suddenly growing dozens of extra limbs, and every nerve in my body groaned under an overload I'd never experienced before. Just being able to use all these traits at the same time cost me several cycles of investment.

But after quite a lot of time passed, once I'd finally gained control over all that power, I became certain I could wield a new tier of strength. Something beyond me simply activating the Hero trait, something that reached, perhaps, toward the path of a true transcendent.

For the record, the Awe trait never triggered on Choi Ji-won. Curious why, I asked her about it.

"I mean, I know you way too well to feel awe toward you, don't I?"

That was her answer. Fair enough. Awe was hard to feel toward someone you knew that well.

Time passed again, and I stood once more before that familiar American desert. I faced the golem for another round. This time was different. Hundreds of disparate powers wrapped around my body, fire and ice devouring each other and evaporating at once, light and darkness flashing from every direction, and space itself warped before snapping back to normal without warning.

An explosion of raw, unrefined power gathering at the tip of my sword. A single strike of chaos, drawing together the collected talent of all humanity.

I gathered every ounce of power surging through my body into the tip of my blade and drove it straight into the golem's core!

-KWAAAAAAANG!!!

Destructive power like nothing I'd ever experienced. The world itself seemed to warp as the golem was blown far backward, and a deep wound carved itself into the golem's stone body, space and all, along with the strike.

The mana it gave off went unstable. There was no doubt the blow had dealt massive damage. No doubt at all, but...

-Hmmm.

A moment later, the wound had healed over, as if none of it had ever happened.

"..."

The one-time-only, all-or-nothing strike, the strongest blow forged from all of humanity's combined talent... hadn't reached it. It still hadn't reached the core. The crack carved into the surface had only gone a little deeper than before. Nothing like a dramatic breakthrough.

Why? Why was the difference this small? The raw power behind the attack had surely grown far stronger than before, hadn't it?

Right before the strike landed, right before every trait's power left my body, my senses, stretched to their absolute limit, had caught what the problem was. The problem was the script carved into the golem's surface.

The thing dispersed incoming impact in every direction. The bizarre script first reflected all incoming force, and at the same time spread that entire force across the golem's whole surface. That wasn't all. Part of the spread force radiated outward and reduced its own destructive power, and in the process, the mana flowing through the creature's entire body absorbed the remaining impact a second time, and that absorbed impact got reflected again by the script carved beside it. What made all of this possible was a body of abnormal, almost inhuman hardness.

The creature's hardened body, the bizarre script carved into its surface, and the mana pouring out of the core, these three elements passed impact back and forth like a game of ping-pong, and the force that kept bleeding away through that process eventually converged to zero and vanished completely. And to top it all off, all the accumulated damage got instantly repaired by the golem's mana. It really was, without exaggeration, a viciously malicious defense structure.

If I'd read this correctly, brute force alone, no matter how hard I swung, wasn't going to break through. This thing had been designed from the ground up to withstand attacks. In a manner of speaking, it was like a diamond. Not something you could just smash your way through by wanting to smash it.

Right. The plan built around the Awe trait had... failed. Simply attacking harder, with more force, wasn't enough. I needed a different direction. I needed to change the direction of the force meant to "destroy" it.

"...It's fine. There's still a way."

Too soon to give up. Diamond is the hardest material on Earth. Nothing can scratch a diamond.

But diamond has a grain, at the level of its atomic structure, and if you strike along that grain, even a small impact can split it apart easily. In the end, having enormous resistance in one particular direction usually meant there was a good chance of a gap somewhere else.

The golem was incredibly resistant to mana and physical impact. So might it have a weakness against a different kind of force?

'What kind of force isn't mana or physical force?'

There was one. A force I'd encountered fairly often, one I'd once studied seriously, and at the same time, one I'd concluded I could never use myself.

The force that the beings inside the Tower wielded so effortlessly.

-You know, if you read what the regressor's written, "divine power" comes up a lot, right?

-Yeah, I think he said it was some kind of mechanical force. Why do you ask?

-Can the regressor himself not use it? Looking through web novels, a lot of them end with the protagonist becoming a new god of Earth eventually. Would be nice if the regressor could use divine power too, wouldn't it?

-Isn't divine power usually something only a god can use? Isn't he human?

-Well, wouldn't he be able to use it if he founded a religion or something? Divine power's supposedly generated from people's faith, from what I understand.

-- I've been reading along for a while and gotta ask, wouldn't the regressor getting divine power just make him stronger? The condition said he's not allowed to get stronger.

-I've factored that in too. If we assume divine power is something usable once people's "faith" gathers, then once he regresses, that faith would just disappear, wouldn't it? All the people giving him that belief would've regressed away too, so it'd be weirder if the power stuck around. Fits the condition perfectly, doesn't it?

-...that actually makes sense.

-So here's my proposal. The regressor-nim regresses back into the past, then founds a religion. Religion and faith aren't things you can whip up easily, so there'd be some trial and error, sure, but I think it's worth trying.

Like the person who wrote that comment said, the old me might not have found it easy to put my hand to religion. Everything I'd done up to now had been backed by overwhelming power, more like "listen to what I say" through sheer force, not the kind of thing that made people worship me and draw out genuine faith.

But the me now had grown used to triggering Awe against countless people. I'd become quite skilled at playing the prophet and hero who led everyone. I'd mastered the art of guiding people's hearts freely, wherever I wanted them to go.

Not the old me, but the me now.

"A religion, huh..."

Building one religion wouldn't be all that difficult.