To the 11th Floor
I chose the 11th Floor Random Zone on behalf of the party.
Appearing out of nowhere in a Fixed Safe Zone would have looked unnatural to anyone watching. Showing up as a random spawn on the 11th Floor would let us slip in among the others and get a read on the lower floors — far more naturally than announcing we'd come down from the 20th.
When I laid out my thinking, the party agreed. Someone even said it sounded fun.
Well, fun does matter.
It felt like getting necessary work done while taking a break at the same time, so the pressure was lighter.
Na-yeon and Han Ba-da's group would take it deadly seriously, but there was no need for the rest of us to match their intensity. They weren't bad people by nature — they'd talk a big game, but they'd still treat it seriously when it counted.
Even if they really were just in it for the entertainment, it would still help them. That was enough.
All that thinking and preparation, however, turned out to be meaningless.
The moment we descended to the 11th Floor, we could see exactly what kind of wreck the lower floors had become.
Clang!
The sound of metal striking metal rang out through the air.
"Fuck! You bastards! You call yourselves human after that?!"
"Hahaha! Does this still look like Earth to you? You're the ones who haven't caught on!"
This early in the Tower, you could search with your eyes peeled and still not find a mage. Every last one of them was waving a sword around. A rare few wore armor and carried shields. Archers appeared here and there, and that was it. Not a single person who looked like a priest or a mage. You'd think there'd be at least one or two priests — but apparently nobody was willing to follow them all the way onto a battlefield.
The place we'd been summoned was the middle of a cavern. And this cavern was in the thick of a war.
"Wh-what the hell?"
Our party and the people around us — every last person wore a look of utter bewilderment.
But even in that confusion, our party's movements were swift. They formed up to protect the rear line, just as they'd been trained. Almost reflexive. The mind might be startled, but the body remembered.
They ringed the perimeter with Na-yeon, Cho Yeon-eun, and Joo Ha-yeon in the center. Na Seoyun sometimes dropped back to the rear depending on the situation, sometimes burst forward to the front — right now she was up front.
In a chaotic situation like this, adding more people to the rear just meant more things to protect, so it was a good call. It seemed closer to instinct than calculation, but it was still worth praising.
"Huh? What's this? Newbies?"
"Hey! Hey! Newbies! Holy shit! Six women!"
Four in our party, two in Han Ba-da's. Six was right. Eight people total, six of them women. An unbalanced ratio.
"And they're young! And pretty, too? The boss is gonna love this."
...Wherever we'd landed, it didn't look good. Apparently the trash and the ones with some remaining conscience had finally had enough of each other and gone to war. I just hoped this wasn't a war between Cartels. If it was already at that level, we'd have a headache on our hands — because we'd have to kill most of them.
No wonder the number of people coming up recently had been on the rise.
Figures. Nothing but actual garbage collected here.
That was how the Tower's system worked. In the early stages, trash had a higher chance of surviving. No matter how high your potential, everyone was more or less the same at the start. If you were outnumbered or lacked street smarts, surviving was hard.
Even Na Seoyun, who was growing at a monstrous pace now, hadn't been able to get through the tutorial with Na-yeon. That said it all.
This side looked like a complete trash-faction advantage.
"Hey! You there! Everyone, come this way! Don't go over there!"
A man shouted at us. Seeing us summoned, the conscience formation — even as they were being pushed back — desperately tried to advance toward us.
"Hey! How long has it been since we've seen pretty women like that! You gonna let those bastards take them? Stop them!"
A rumble of bodies. At the order of someone who looked like one of their commanders, the trash formation blocked the people coming our way.
Numerical advantage to the trash. With no great gap in skill between the two sides, the conscience formation couldn't get any closer to us.
"Damn it! Damn it! You sons of bitches!"
The man who'd shouted at us hurled curses and kept charging, but it wasn't enough. The ones who looked like the conscience formation hadn't even taken half the cavern, and now they were being pushed further and further toward the passage.
And the trash formation had surrounded our party, watching us with amusement.
"Whoa, every last one of them's a looker. Ah, that one's a bit young, though?"
"That's the good part. What's there to fuss about in a world like this? Even back on Earth, plenty of places treated that age as adult."
What was this, the Joseon Dynasty, treating a sixteen-year-old as an adult? Genuine pieces of shit.
"Two guys, huh... so you boys have been having some fun?"
"We've been generous enough to share by now!"
"Oh, so now we're the new husbands? Haha!"
"Wahaha."
The surrounding trash cackled like they'd just heard the funniest thing in the world.
"What's... so funny?"
That was Han Ba-da, one of the two holding the vanguard for our side.
"Haha. Sorry about that, newbie. But you know how it is. There aren't many chances to laugh. Gotta laugh while you can. So, about that — we'd like you to give us a little entertainment. Just tell us this one thing and I think it'll be a real riot. Mind answering? You — what's your cup size?"
"Puhahaha!"
Another round of remarks that were basically sexual harassment. No — they just were sexual harassment. It was a scene that brought back what had happened on the 8th Floor.
Han Ba-da didn't reply. She just looked around.
The conscience formation had been driven almost to the mouth of the passage. Most of their people were dead or being pushed back. They knew they'd lost, but they were holding out to the end. The way their eyes kept going to us, it was because of us.
They really were the last remaining conscience of the Tower. These weren't the Cartel. They were a proper, morally upright group. That was my read.
And Han Ba-da seemed to have reached the same conclusion.
"...Shin-hoo."
"Yes."
"I think these ones are the problem. I'd like to... do a little cleaning."
"I'll help."
"I won't refuse."
A grin. Han Ba-da and I looked at each other and smiled.
"Haha. Thinking of resisting? Then later we'll give you even rougher treatme—"
The man never finished the sentence. And he had every reason not to.
Crack!
His head had been smashed in. He was dead on the spot.
"...You fucking—"
A beat late, the trash realized what had happened and hurled curses at Han Ba-da, who'd just crushed the man's skull.
"You bitch, I'll tear you apart!"
"Casa! Fireball!"
Casa — Fireball
Now that battle had been declared, the party didn't hesitate.
They should have gone for the rear line no matter what, whether it worked or not. A Spirit Master was in the mage category — a body specialized for mass slaughter as much as a mage, and in some ways more so.
Not that they would have known that.
BOOM!
An explosion of fire.
"Hiiik!"
Five people were incinerated into lumps of charcoal in an instant.
"Wh-what the hell!"
"Magic! That's magic! A mage!"
"What! I thought mages couldn't use magic!"
Terror spread through the surroundings.
Technically, it was a Spirit Master. And if a mage couldn't use magic, were they even a mage? The sad part was that in the early stages, that was actually true. Even the Tower couldn't do much about that.
It wasn't so much an early-game nerf because they were strong later — it was because magic as a discipline was just that advanced. A field with a nightmarish entry barrier.
Ping—
Grab.
An arrow sniped at Na-yeon from a distance, and I did something insane: I caught the shaft with my hand.
My strength might have dropped, but my agility, stamina, and mana were unchanged. An arrow of this pathetic caliber I could catch with my eyes closed.
"...Wh-what."
"He caught the arrow? With his hand?"
A gulp.
Catching an arrow with your bare hand is genuinely difficult. Catching an arrow in the middle of combat — one you don't know when it'll come, within effective range, fired with killing intent — with your bare hands? That's just superhuman. And doing it like it was nothing. These people had gotten stronger from the status window's corrections, but not strong enough to pull off a stunt like this. In other words, they hadn't reached the level where they could be called superhuman yet. They had, however, reached the level where they could recognize how incredible this was.
If the arrow had even had mana in it, my hand would have been torn apart — but nobody here had reached the realm of putting mana into an arrow yet.
It was a technique as difficult as Sword Qi. If you could put mana into a flying arrow, you could rightfully be called a first-rate archer. Even a swordsman who used Sword Qi would find it hard to put mana into an arrow flying over a hundred meters. But first-rate archers loaded mana into arrows that flew hundreds of meters, and those with the ability formed Sword Qi on the arrowhead and loosed it. That was the realm Cho Yeon-eun would reach — the realm she had to reach.
Holding the arrow in my bare hand, I looked around at the surroundings that had gone quiet, and spoke.
"Well then, gentlemen husbands. You were planning to steal my wives?"
I put on the most sly expression I could manage.
It was a provocation, and at the same time, building a justification. I doubted there was anyone in the conscience camp as rigidly black-and-white as Na-yeon used to be, but it was still good to stack this kind of justification. People like that would welcome anything we did as long as they felt our actions were "justified." Of course, if we went too far that might change — but these were people who'd been fighting to the death until a moment ago. Pretty much any action would be justified.
Pfft.
At my desperate provocation, one of the women in our formation let out a snort of laughter. I pretended not to hear and continued.
"They're openly trying to steal my women. If I let bastards like that walk, I wouldn't even be a man, would I? Don't you think?"
I asked, slowly drawing up my mana.
Something was going wrong. The trash seemed to sense it.
Just a little welcome-the-newbies joke...
An excuse that didn't even make sense.
You expect us to believe that?
I cut it off coldly. I looked around and said,
Then the woman who'd snorted with laughter a moment ago — Joo Ha-yeon — answered.
I fought desperately to keep my expression in check.
We started running wild inside.
This was trash territory. But now that we'd entered, the story was different.
"Casa!"
Magic Arrow
Steadfast Shield
We stayed in a slightly tight formation, protecting the rear while cutting down anyone who charged us, steadily reducing the trash's numbers.
One Spirit Master and one Magic Swordsman. Plus one archer steadily thinning the enemy. The melee fighters kept the rear line locked down.
If they didn't close in, they died in droves to spirit magic and Na Seoyun's spells. If they did close in, they were torn apart by a melee formation that was off the charts.
The trash had no idea what to do.
Ranged attacks didn't work either. Joo Ha-yeon was using Steadfast Shield, and every melee fighter was defending with razor-sharp movements.
The gap in level was simply too vast. To take on our party of eight, you'd need another eight hundred of these ragtag leftovers. No — honestly, I was confident we could handle even more than that.
This wasn't an open plain. It was a Labyrinth of caverns and passages, a restricted space, and the enemy's level was obvious. Given time, I was confident we could massacre not hundreds but thousands with ease.
Under the continued slaughter, the trash all started to panic. This was the decisive difference from monsters. Of course monsters also panicked when overwhelming power or a natural predator appeared. But with humans, it was far more severe.
"Damn it! Nobody told us about this!"
Deserters finally started appearing.
"Hey! Where do you think you're—"
I had Na-yeon prioritize the ones cursing at the deserters.
Fear spread one by one, and its influence reached all the way to the conscience formation in the distance — who by now were as good as driven out. The conscience formation had been in an it's-all-over atmosphere, but somehow, watching the trash formation crumble and waver one by one, they started pushing with everything they had left, as if this were their chance.
At last, the people who'd been driven into the passage and pushed back started squeezing back out one by one into the cavern, shoving the trash formation aside and securing a share of the space.
Meanwhile, we kept shifting position, hunting down fleeing trash one by one — playing the role of shaking them from the inside.
Once they started running in earnest, I dropped the keeper role and immediately burst out, cutting down fleeing enemies one after another. The collapse of their formation accelerated.
"I-I don't want to die!"
"What is this! Nobody said there were people like this!"
"Spare me, spare me!"
I didn't spare a single one of the people begging me for their lives. I didn't ask the clichéd And did you ever spare anyone who begged you? I just ignored them and cut them down.
They were enemies anyway. I had no intention of splitting hairs. I didn't have Na-yeon's temperament, and I was doing this because it was necessary.
These people were only ever going to be this much. As time passed, the deserters increased, and the trash's share of the cavern steadily shrank.
And at last, we and the conscience formation met. By then the trash formation had, for all intents and purposes, given up the cavern and had no choice but to fall back.
After the one-sided battle ended, a man from the conscience camp approached us.