Chapter 167
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 167
Chapter Title: 16th Floor - Temple of Time (2)
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My movement would be the last.
If things went wrong, I was prepared to intervene—no matter how much trouble it meant for my counterpart on another timeline.
The God of Time would be furious beyond measure, but that was a problem for later.
Golden light flashed from the temple.
The kid came hopping over and gave me and Hiu a meaningful look.
I recalled her wild antics on the 8th floor.
Still, it was a relief to see her brighter. She remained clumsy at expressing her feelings, but now she smiled readily and pouted when miffed.
It seemed her mental age—frozen somewhere in the past—had finally started to advance.
Next came the maknae. The muscular giant returned with a calm expression.
Somehow serene, yet filled with resolve.
It was a hard-to-read face.
He approached me and bowed his head once more.
"What's up?"
"I'm grateful."
"For what?"
"You could have killed me back then. Thank you for sparing my life and bringing me this far."
"It was just necessary."
With a smile like the slum pastor's, the maknae stepped back. Then he quietly began to pray.
Thoughtfully, outside the Temple of Time.
I recalled the first time I'd seen the maknae.
Back then, that man had acted like a thug—and he truly was a remorseless thug.
How much of it had been an act?
Maybe it wasn't an act at all. In the end, whether the maknae was a villain or a good man didn't matter.
What shaped him was his environment, and he had simply been dealt a bad hand.
In any case, someone who could quietly sort himself out didn't need any words from me.
The next order was all but predetermined.
After becoming an angel, Hiu had to head to the 12th floor. Otherwise, there was no beating Sharkma.
This was due to Hiu's highly unusual matchup.
Classes generally fell into three broad categories: strength, agility, and intelligence.
And their matchups interlocked like rock-paper-scissors.
Intelligence was weak against agility.
Agility was weak against strength.
Strength was weak against intelligence.
Of course, this only held for equals.
Brute-force killers were generally trash, not even treated as proper classes, because they fell outside these matchups as absolute weaklings.
As an assassin, there was no way to slip past Sharkma's detection and slit her throat—half her resources went into strength.
As a warrior, it wasn't even worth discussing; she'd toy with you.
Before a mage's myriad utilities and mobility options, a relatively slow and heavy warrior was helpless.
So we needed an overwhelming racial matchup advantage.
All angels were holy and held absolute superiority over undead.
A death lich ranked as a high-tier race, but it was more like 1.5-tier—a notch below—thanks to such stark affinities.
Now, the question was who would head to the 10th floor for the angel card.
I chose the elder.
It was a choice I'd already had in mind when leaving the 10th floor.
"Please."
"Time travel..."
"Is it too much? If so..."
"As if. It's the very experience I desired. I set out after you to see a wider world, didn't I?"
The elder chuckled heartily and stepped toward the temple altar.
He prayed lightly, was enveloped in golden radiance, and vanished.
Hiu, waiting her turn, diligently reviewed the 12th floor's layout.
To avoid getting lost, unlike on other timelines.
10th floor.
He felt his connection to the goddess sever.
His feet touched the ground amid golden radiance.
In truth—including time in the abyss—less than four months had passed.
Yet for Trdongt, the journey had begun in that first forest.
Exiles might see it differently, but subjectively, it had been half a year.
Stepping onto his homeland's soil again felt like even longer had gone by.
His home after decades.
On this continent, his later years had been spent ousted from key posts, shuffling through dead-end jobs.
Now, all those long years meant nothing.
Not for some grand reason like learning the world's truth.
He simply hadn't wanted to stay there.
An orc raised by humans was a heretic to the greenskins as well.
That was the sole realization of his old age.
Of course, anyone content with their life wouldn't follow an exile.
Everyone had their own circumstances.
He recalled the vampire sword master from the future.
That clan master had been deeply impressed—even envious—but ultimately hadn't followed.
In the end, it hadn't been enough for him to abandon the world he'd known.
Not even after confirming the very truths he'd doubted.
Trdongt hadn't truly grasped what the exiles meant by "NPC" until he left.
He'd known vaguely. But it hit home—piercing to the bone and chilling him—only when he realized it himself.
This world was all fake. And so was he.
No one had told him it might be so; he'd realized it on his own.
Less a thrill than a creepy horror that raced through his body, making even his beard stand on end.
But it also awakened the long-dormant curiosity of a shaman.
It had truly been the right choice to leave this land.
Smoke rose faintly all around. The plain, reduced to a buckwheat field, was the exact scene he'd last seen before leaving the 10th floor.
In the distance, the stairs were being sucked away, vanishing.
He remembered those stairs.
The ones he'd rushed into under the saintess's escort.
Right after, the 11th floor had begun amid the crashing airship.
Trdongt walked slowly. There was no need to hurry.
His disciple spotted him belatedly.
"Master?"
Her bewildered expression was natural.
Trdongt's attire was neither a shaman's robe nor a warrior's minimal armor baring the upper body.
It was an unknown fiber acquired during his travels through time.
Seeing its otherworldly form, the saintess grew slightly wary.
"I come from another time, disciple."
Great confusion crossed the saintess's face, then quickly subsided.
Her god must have informed her.
Time travel.
An unimaginable concept. Even legendary great archmages could only halt time.
The very idea of defying it didn't exist yet.
Her devout faith swept all doubts aside, allowing her to accept his master unquestioningly.
"What brings you?"
Her master had left just moments ago, only to return immediately—yet she asked calmly. Faith in this era was still like that.
The goblins of the future were the strange ones.
"I've come to find something. Will you lend a hand?"
"Yes, gladly."
"What does Discipline say?"
"Your boundless grace upon me means any request is no issue at all."
"No, I don't mean doctrine. I'm asking about your curiosity toward me from the future."
Of course there was some.
For the God of Discipline, it was utterly unexpected.
Yet plausible once known.
From how Trdongt had turned to their side and protected the saintess, to the events in a certain fairy's forest.
He'd been mildly curious about Karkrish's death.
The Karkrish he'd known as an exile wasn't one to die so easily.
A standard hero unit as a warrior, but an NPC with divine faith.
He survived most ordeals.
The Temple of Time had appeared.
Major deities were terrifyingly rare to encounter—save for the relatively accessible abyss golem shrines drifting in the depths.
The Temple of Time had a very low chance of spawning beside the kingdom's gates.
Many completed their exile lives without ever seeing one.
That rare chance had fallen to them.
The God of Discipline had to think it over.
This named orc shaman held key information about the future.
At this point in time, the server had been open for barely three months.
A new exile had brought Discipline faith, finally allowing him to perceive the saintess and other NPC followers.
Yet this orc's attire alone suggested he'd reached far into the future.
The 6th floor's snowfield was an unusually tough tutorial. So not only a future timeline, but possibly even a space-themed one.
Regardless of his swirling thoughts, his words to Trdongt remained kind and polite—ungodlike, even.
Even gods found future talk sensitive. Exiles who met the Temple of Time were rare.
They usually converted to Time faith right then, leaving no way to learn what came after.
This could be a very expensive trade.
Feeling his throne vibrate with demands for payment, the God of Discipline sighed.
Still, it was a trade he had to make.
Trdongt greeted Varbaroi.
The clan master who'd just handed over his clan looked dazed and exhausted.
The ragged vampires were the same.
Trdongt comforted him, assuring that the future was his.
That everything would go well.
The goddess of this era made no response.
The exile party that had just descended the stairs were her only exile followers.
Left behind was an empty shell of a chaos deity, playacting as a god.
The goddess would learn of this future Trdongt's words only as one record among mountains piled high.
Of course, he didn't share such blasphemy with Varbaroi.
Trdongt newly realized just how immense the exiles' informational edge was.
Now, time for the main objective.
The most likely spot for the card was underground.
The emperor's imperial guard had retreated under the saintess's bombardment, buying time to descend again.
In the scorching hellfire, the saintess shielded Trdongt with holy power.
Below, a fierce battle raged. The fairy king and fairy heroes clashed against the greenskins' three mightiest champions.
The saintess asked if she should help.
Trdongt shook his head. That would burn through his own debt.
One had to be sensitive to such things with followers of Discipline and coin.
As the old orc had foreseen, the greenskin heroes fell.
Their fight had been doomed from the start—a battle to the death.
With the fairy king and queen awakened, victory was impossible.
They had only bought time here for retreat, for their descendants and successors.
He watched the legendary heroes he'd once revered fall and meet their ends.
Yet Trdongt felt no emotion—surprisingly so.
To a shaman who'd beheld a world too vast, this tiny continent felt utterly trivial.
After the battle ended, Trdongt walked slowly forward.
The fairy king welcomed him.
"Your attire is unusual, orc who fought at our side. From the future?"
"You know."
"I've lived a very long time. I remember the exiles who appeared in my youth."
A tale from before even the ancient Fairy Wars.
That distant legend no longer seemed so grand.
Trdongt calmly paid his respects and requested their cooperation.
The victorious fairies didn't refuse a request from the party that could be called their benefactors.
The search began in the hellish underground ruins amid blistering heat.
The card was more accessible than expected. They merely dug out a collapsed corridor in the corner, and there it was.
The ancient ruins, frozen in time for eons, now lost their power and began to crumble.
"Indeed, a time attack. If you don't find it quickly, the structure ensures you never will."
Tutorial race cards were a form of hidden reward.
Aiding one side to victory in these ancient heroes' tomb while finding it was designed to be brutally difficult.
Especially since it collapsed over time.
Amused by Trdongt's mutterings, the fairy king spoke up.
"You talk just like an exile, orc shaman."
"Do I?"
He truly did. Trdongt realized he lacked only a mind map to be a full exile.
The grumbling orc followed his leader's instructions and asked the saintess to draw the card.
The shimmering card's glow peeled away.
A human form emerged—not with soft feathered wings, but mechanical straight ones. A round halo hovered above its head.
The saintess trembled in surprise, clearly recognizing it.
She'd become an orc via a card, then used another to revert to human; it would be stranger if she didn't know.
But she handed it to Trdongt without concern.
The search had ended faster than expected, leaving a bit of time.
Uncertain if he'd meet this disciple again, Trdongt decided to linger before returning.
As they ascended to the surface, the approaching imperial guard came into view.
The saintess gathered holy power. Trdongt stopped her.
The approaching orc wore shaman's garb. High-rank shaman's garb, at that.
An old acquaintance.
"Pardon the intrusion, human cleric. We've come to negotiate a temporary truce with the fairy king."
"Long time no see, Mundongmun."
"Hmm? Trdongt? Truly it's been ages. Heard you went missing—how are you still alive? And that outfit? Finally quit being a shaman?"
"Something like that. Now I'm an exile."
"Boring joke."
He saw comrades from days past.
He saw the disciple-not-disciple he'd left behind.
Trdongt felt everything tying him to his homeland neatly sorted in his heart.
Farewell to it all—the home he might never set foot in again.
Every labyrinth resident stepping into the kingdom felt the same.
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