Floor 16, Waiting Room (1)
7 hours 45 minutes remain until the Tower of Trials' 16th floor. Please rest.
I finished my combat training and lay down on the bed, but sleep wouldn't come.
These days I hadn't slept more than four hours at a stretch. The higher my Constitution stat climbed, the less sleep I seemed to need.
It wasn't a good thing. Sleep matters—not just for the body, but for the mind as well.
Hah…
I tried forcing my eyes shut, but the harder I tried, the more awake I became.
Fine, then. Rather than wasting time pretending to sleep, I should do something constructive.
I'd already run my combat review during training, so… hmm, might as well check the community. Better than letting the hours rot away.
I'd opened the community without much thought, but the threads were scrolling up at an absurd speed.
Something had happened, and it was burning up the boards.
Reading through the posts at my own pace, I found the reason: an assassin.
An assassin—at first I'd assumed someone was just messing around.
Stirring the pot, as they call it—spreading rumors through the community—happened often enough.
You might wonder how that could happen on a board where everyone's name was out in the open, but…
Over several hundred thousand people were in the Tower. Some of them were bound to be a few screws loose.
Every so often, perfectly sane climbers would post jokes like this too.
But this is way too many witnesses to be a prank.
It wasn't just party members reporting it, either.
Some of the high-tier climbers said they'd come across corpses on the road to the fortress.
Besides, the people who'd first posted about the assassin weren't the usual pot-stirrers.
Which left one conclusion.
The mysterious assassin was real. It was unsettling.
Calling them simply a madman doesn't quite…
Few of the dead seemed to be mourned by anyone.
Some party members were actually glad their leader was dead—glad enough to thank the assassin outright.
Others only posted about the dead's misdeeds after the fact.
Party leaders probably held enough power that no one had dared speak up until now.
It was a flaw I'd half expected ever since the party system was introduced.
Hmm…
And among the misdeeds coming to light, some crossed the line entirely.
Leaders demanding sexual favors as the price of loot distribution, for one.
Or freezing out party members they didn't like, keeping them from contributing inside the trial so they could never earn points.
My thoughts grew tangled.
Should I call the assassin a murderer—or a necessary evil?
Huh?
But as I combed through the community more carefully, I found that six or so of the victims seemed to be ordinary people.
Party members swearing up and down that they were never bad people.
That changed the story.
The assassin might just be a psychopath, couldn't they?
But within the community, the narrative had already gone off the rails—people were insisting those ordinary victims must have secretly been villains too.
Because the party members who'd suffered under the dead were loudly proclaiming the assassin an apostle of justice.
Of course, no one knew the truth. Those six really might have been ordinary climbers.
Then a thought brushed past the edge of my mind.
The fundamental question underneath it all.
If the assassin really killed for the greater good—how did they know those people were villains?
The misdeeds the party members revealed were things even they had been too afraid of retaliation to talk about.
If only two or three people had died, the assassin might have overheard climbers complaining at the shelter.
That would explain knowing the dead were bad people.
But the dead numbered over twenty.
Worse, they all held different rankings, so the shelter theory fell apart from the start.
In other words, the assassin couldn't have known they were all villains.
Which meant…
They're probably just a psychopathic killer.
It was entirely possible that, by pure luck, about three-quarters of the people they killed happened to be evil.
The Tower of Trials—a place where killing was rampant and strength was everything.
A fertile breeding ground for humanity's basest malice and selfishness.
Among the climbers passing each other by, far more were the type to stomp on others to get ahead than to lend a hand.
So right now, the community is worshipping a psychopath as a necessary evil.
Unless someone knew the future, there'd be no way to tell who the villains were—
The thought snapped short like a bolt of lightning.
Someone who knows the future?
A prophet. Or a regressor.
If a regressor… then I had one right beside me.
Ha Heijeong.
It didn't take long to arrange my thoughts.
Long story short: the odds that Ha Heijeong was the assassin were high.
Setting aside the fact that a regressor would know who the future villains were, there was the matter of the 6th floor—and the 15th.
Going back to the house of that man she'd called a traitorous piece of garbage on the 6th floor.
And on the 15th floor, refusing to enter the fortress even though there was no reason to wait for me.
There were counterarguments to be made, sure. But as circumstantial evidence, it was enough.
Heijeong…
Still—Ha Heijeong would never kill someone without a reason.
The people the regressor Ha Heijeong killed had to be people who deserved it.
Villains who committed crimes they could never confess to later, or who brought harm to other climbers.
I was certain. I trusted Ha Heijeung completely.
You've been carrying all the hard parts, haven't you.
But I didn't want to leave the weight of murder on Ha Heijeong's shoulders alone.
She and I were climbing the Tower as a single fate, bound together.
No matter how much her personality had changed, no one was immune to the psychological toll that killing exacted.
Killing monsters and killing people are different things.
The Tower of Trials protected climbers' minds with some unknown power.
Because of that, slaying other species didn't deal a crushing psychological blow.
You could tell just from watching me vomit a few times after killing goblins on the 1st floor before growing used to it.
Murder—killing an Earthling—was another matter entirely.
The community after the 8th floor made that clear enough.
The climbers tricked into murder by the skill-thieving Gremlin mostly suffered devastating psychological shock.
And I wanted to share that weight.
Her hands alone shouldn't have to be stained with blood.
To find out, I sent Ha Heijeong a message.
Blunt and to the point. Between Ha Heijeong and me, there was no such thing as beating around the bush.
Ha Heijeong took a long, slow breath after reading Kwon Suhyeok's message.
Kwon Suhyeok wasn't stupid, so of course she'd expected him to ask. She'd even prepared an answer—
But the thought of lying to her closest friend sat in her chest like a stone.
Still, she couldn't bring herself to tell the truth.
Kwon Suhyeok was more innocent and upright than he looked. He pretended to be cold on the outside, but he thought too much, and he was softer than he let on.
She'd hoped he'd experience the shock of his first kill early, on the low floors like the 8th, and overcome it—
But he'd gone and cracked a hidden mission wide open right in front of everyone, so that hadn't happened.
But telling him now, of all times…
The 16th floor was right in front of them.
Ha Heijeong thought back to the first regression.
Kwon Suhyeok had killed a party member who betrayed the party and tried to sabotage their climb.
The shock of his first kill had hit him harder than anyone expected, and it lingered a long time.
He'd never been the type to turn his heart to stone.
And even if Suhyeok knew they were villains…
Having his best friend confirm, flat-out, that she was the assassin was another matter entirely.
She was afraid of how Kwon Suhyeok would react.
Even before this, she'd felt a slight distance opening between them since the regression.
She couldn't tell whether her personality had changed from what she'd lived through—or whether the bonds of camaraderie forged in shared desperation, like before, simply hadn't bloomed again.
If he learned she was the assassin, he probably wouldn't let it show—but the shock was a foregone conclusion.
He might be disappointed and pull away from me. Or he might end up hurt instead.
It was an unnecessary worry, but Ha Heijeong thought it anyway. Having clawed hope back from the void, she didn't want to drift even a single step away from it.
And…
The first regression. Those desperate moments.
There had been precious few saints in the Tower of Trials. Even in the smallest things, the vast majority were villains.
She didn't want to hand her friend that truth.
So it's better if I'm the one who handles this filthy work.
Since Ha Heijeong had denied being the assassin herself, I wiped the thought from my mind that she might be.
Of course, the odds were decent she was lying. But if she said it wasn't her, I didn't want to doubt her any further.
Even if it turned out to be true, it wouldn't have been a bad thing.
Whatever the circumstances, I trust Ha Heijeong.
Thinking about it rationally, she had a point.
The future had changed because of Ha Heijeong's regression. The 7th floor where I'd posted my strategy guides, and the 14th floor where I'd made my name.
People who'd died during Ha Heijeong's first run were still alive now.
Over a hundred thousand of them.
It was entirely possible a pleasure killer had been among them.
One in a hundred thousand. The odds were plenty real.
As I typed my reply, a stray question occurred to me.
In Ha Heijeong's first run, who had actually become the villains of the future?
I found myself nodding along to her messages without thinking.
She was right. No matter what villains were out there, none of them could touch me or Ha Heijeong now.
That went without saying in raw power, and it held inside the Tower too.
If there was ever a trial designed to let villains harm us, Ha Heijeong would warn me before it ever arrived.
Then, with a soft pop!, a round elixir materialized on the desk in front of me.
Immediately, a message flew in from Ha Heijeong.