Virtual Reality (3)

"...?"

My eyes went round at the window that had suddenly popped up.

Wait. She came to our house? For real?

"Are you all right?"

"Ah, yes... I'm fine. Just, uh, a message from someone I know."

I couldn't show Soph what I was looking at, so I left it at that.

"What a fascinating ability."

"Well, fascinating is about all it is. Pretty useless otherwise."

The upsides of this power, if you could even call them that? Not falling for voice phishing. Making community browsing more fun. That was about it.

I didn't feel like explaining, so I brushed it off. It was a pretty pathetic ability to go around bragging about, after all.

"I don't think it's useless at all."

Soph, however, seemed to disagree. With hands trembling so finely they almost shook, she took mine in both of hers and leaned in slightly at the waist.

"You came to save me with it, didn't you? And you can save the people trapped here, too."

"..."

Genuine praise. How long had it been since anyone had given me something like that?

Aside from Uncle Haseong, nobody ever complimented me.

...So I still had a need for recognition left in me after all.

I'd thought it had all burned away that day.

"So please don't hate your own ability, Miss Eunha."

"Ah, okay... More importantly, your hands are a little... hngh..."

"I-I'm so sorry! I was clinging too much, wasn't I?!"

"No, it's not that, it's just... I have a bit of a woman allergy..."

Soph startled and scrambled back. She looked so sincerely apologetic that I ended up feeling bad myself.

...Maybe I should have just toughed it out.

"We're almost there now."

"There, as in..."

"Where the people are trapped."

I'd assumed everyone was locked up separately, but it seemed the others were confined somewhere on the Trial of the Tower side.

A tower you had to climb to the seventieth floor. At its deepest point, no less.

People only ever think about going up.

Nobody considers going down.

Maybe something had been deliberately steering their thinking away from the idea of descending.

Anyway.

When we reached the end of the passage, a pitch-dark space greeted us. Complete with a gatekeeper standing watch over a massive door.

"You may not enter beyond this point."

"..."

A soldier guarding the underground. Wait—was he even a soldier?

He wore simple gear, but the aura rolling off him was nothing like an ordinary person's. It felt almost like looking at the giants from Titan Impact.

"Let's head back for now, Soph."

"...Yes."

I'd tried using my ability to get underground, but the final coordinates kept locking onto this spot. Forcing our way in didn't seem possible.

Which meant there had to be some kind of condition...

"What do we need to do to go inside?"

"Only those who are qualified may enter."

Only the qualified, huh...

In cases like this, there was only one answer.

Climb the tower all the way to the top.

Defeat the boss on the highest floor, and the mastermind behind all this would come crawling up from the basement to monologue about everything—why they'd done it, what they were after, the whole tedious lot.

"Guess I need to climb as fast as I can..."

After we'd left the underground, I muttered to myself while staring blankly up at what looked like a blue sky.

Whoever this guy was, he sure played dirty.

Gates are full of monsters you can't reason with, so fine, whatever...

But watching humans use that as an excuse to do truly vile things made me sick to my stomach.

What's so wrong with clearing a gate? Why set traps for the raid teams?

Making weapons out of mana stones—sure, fine. But then why use those weapons to commit bombings?

"Ugh..."

An old memory surfaced without warning, and a full-body shudder ran through me.

If I had to get tangled up in something, I'd rather it be a gate.

Let's just wrap this up quick and rest.

I was never doing something like this again. Not even if Uncle Haseong asked. Absolutely not!

The Trial of the Tower Gallery.

Lately, one person had been setting the place on fire.

Her name: RichHikineet.

A prodigy among prodigies who'd reached the thirty-first floor before even shedding her newbie badge.

On top of that, she had a cute face and a timid personality.

Talk to her and she'd mumble and shrink into herself. Call yourself a fan and she'd give a little pleased shrug of the shoulders. Ask for a photo and she'd go all shy and fidgety again.

If this had been a simple game, it wouldn't have been that big a deal. But the Trial of the Tower was a virtual reality game through and through—users had to move their own bodies to hunt monsters.

You might ask whether that meant active Hunters had the advantage. You'd be wrong.

No ability usage.

Virtual reality was still virtual reality. Powers from the real world simply didn't work here. That was why even Hunters registered as A-Rank struggled on the higher floors of the Trial of the Tower.

Luck. Or some kind of exploit.

Whatever scraps of that opinion had still been hanging around the Trial of the Tower Gallery went up in flames all over again.

It didn't take long for the gallery to settle it: RichHikineet was the real deal.

Now the only questions left were how fast she'd climb—and whether she could clear the Trial of the Tower at all.

Even users above the fiftieth floor were no different. If anything, knowing just how brutal those floors were only made them root for RichHikineet harder.

From the fiftieth floor up was a hellish stretch that took a full day at best and a whole week at worst just to clear. You could practically feel the developer's intent to make sure nobody ever reached the top.

But RichHikineet was climbing at a pace that made that difficulty look like a joke. Two floors a day as a baseline. Three on a good day.

People focused on her more and more. Paid her more and more attention. It got so bad that even the ones who'd given up climbing and just lurked in the community started logging back in just to meet RichHikineet.

The content even hit the algorithms on video sites, and a second wave of Trial of the Tower fever swept through. User numbers soared day after day. Concurrent players hit a full million.

The very moment every teenager and young adult in South Korea had their eyes locked on the Trial of the Tower—

—the incident hit.

An incident that would rock not just the community, but the entire world.

"Haaah..."

"You've worked hard, Miss Eunha."

The sixty-second floor—the highest record any user had ever set. The moment I cleared it and stepped out, Soph handed me water and a towel.

Somehow she was treating me like a husband coming home from work. Not that I minded, but after spending the last few days with her, this whole routine had gotten weirdly comfortable.

"By the way, it's really noisy around here..."

"I wonder what happened?"

I'd stopped by the neutral floor before heading up to sixty-three, and the place was in an absolute uproar. Some kind of event going on?

If it was something fun, I figured I might stick around and watch for a bit.

"I can't log out!"

"What the hell kind of bug is this?!"

"I have plans tonight..."

"Get the admin out here!"

The problem was that it wasn't a festival—it was a funeral.

Everyone gathered in the plaza was screaming about bugs, but I already knew. This wasn't a bug. This was intentional.

They were seriously planning to trap every single logged-in user...

I hadn't spent my time in the Trial of the Tower just climbing. I'd wandered around gathering all kinds of information. The biggest piece? That the Trial of the Tower itself was a place built for experiments.

It really did turn into an anime, huh.

I scratched the crown of my head as ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I watched the panicking crowd. They weren't about to have some admin suddenly appear and say "Now kill each other," right?

"Let's get out of here, Soph. Getting caught up in this sounds like a hassle."

"Yeees..."

Soph seemed a little spooked by all the shouting. Crowds had gotten a bit easier for her, but people screaming like that still set her off hard.

Same for me, honestly—which was exactly why I hurried us out of there.

Who the hell is it?

Whoever had the bright idea to build a massive virtual reality and use it as a testing ground. Taking a god-tier game like this and wasting it on some garbage experiment...

If I ever met them, I was going to slap them senseless.