The Regressor Agonizes (2)
The Regressor Agonizes (2)
The moment I stepped outside Choi Ji-won's house, a grim atmosphere already hung in the air.
"Mom, can't I play a little longer?"
"Ji-min, let's hurry inside."
A child innocently pestering a parent, and a mother dragging the child away with a pale face. Moms these days are quick to catch wind of rumors; she must have heard that a monster had appeared.
"The car..."
"Just get in. But we probably won't make it to our destination driving."
Even as I started the engine, a lingering unease gnawed at me.
"Move, you bastards!"
"Get out! I said get out!"
That premonition proved dead-on. The closer we got to Namsan, the more hopeless the roads became. Traffic ground to a halt; the delays caused people to abandon their cars one by one. The abandoned cars then paralyzed the roads completely, forcing even more people to abandon their cars in a vicious cycle.
"Let's get out now and run. We're running out of time."
"..."
The scene made Choi Ji-won restless. My heart, on the other hand, sank—heavy and cold.
This moment right now was a hard-won instant I had waited ten whole months to reach. Rationally, the best move was to gather as much information as possible.
But Choi Ji-won was trying to save people. Asking something like, 'Are you sure you have to fight just to collect data?' was meaningless. That was simply the kind of person she was.
"..."
I don't want to see... her get hurt, or die.
"Ji-won."
"Yeah?"
"If... if a situation ever comes where you're badly hurt... I'll regress. So please, as much as you possibly can, be careful."
"...Okay."
As we ran, she nodded at me. At least she had acknowledged it, but the anxiety wouldn't leave me.
As worry after worry consumed me on our rush toward Namsan, I found both our footsteps slowing.
"..."
"..."
We'd arrived. The tiger was here. The thick stench of blood stinging my nose was proof of that.
As we walked slowly toward the source of the smell, my expression hardened, mirroring Choi Ji-won's.
"...Ah."
A residential area near Namsan. It had everything you'd expect in a Seoul neighborhood.
The tree-lined streets, the halted cars, the high utility poles, the cozy villas.
"Fuck..."
And countless bodies—crushed, ripped apart. Scattered everywhere like a bratty elementary schooler had dipped wads of wet toilet paper and hurled them at a wall for fun.
Most were unrecognizable hunks of meat, and every single corpse still holding a shape had grotesque terror and agony etched onto its face.
Crushed and contorted cars. Half-destroyed buildings. And blood running along the gutters.
"Urgh..."
An involuntary dry heave escaped me. It wasn't the first time I'd seen death. But all the death I had experienced until now had happened inside the Tower—an abnormality within a world already defined by the abnormal.
The sole difference—that the backdrop of this death was the modern world—brought a rush of unbearable revulsion. A corpse of a young man who looked like a college student, only his upper half remaining. A middle-aged woman in hiking gear. A police badge glinting amid the gore.
"If only... if only I'd come a little faster..."
Choi Ji-won muttered, her face ashen. She was right. If we had gotten here a little sooner, maybe we could have prevented this slaughter. Even I, who had prattled on about how 'you can't save everyone once a monster appears,' couldn't say that when faced with the reality of this carnage.
"Kreaauuugh!!!"
What jolted me and Choi Ji-won out of our frozen shock was an enormous roar from Namsan. At the same time, a prickling presence stung my skin.
"...They're fighting it."
"Let's go."
Forcing ourselves to ignore the strewn corpses, we sprinted toward Namsan with everything we had. At last, the giant tiger Choi Ji-won had mentioned came into view.
"Grrrrrrr..."
The hiking trail was a wreckage of smashed trees and churned-up earth. At the top of the blood-smeared steps, a massive tiger crouched low, baring every fang it had.
Its body was bigger than the white Porter truck I'd seen on the way, and from the way golden glare streaked from its eyes, it clearly wasn't a tiger that had simply grown oversized.
"Huff, huff, huff."
"Those of you in bad shape, fall back..."
The giant tiger was locked in a standoff with a group of roughly twenty players. A single glance told me not one of them was unscathed. The only small comfort was that the tiger also bore quite a few deep wounds.
Among the surrounding corpses, plenty wore dwarf-forged armor. Whether for the sake of rewards or for the people, the number of players who had lunged at this tiger and met a brutal end was by no means small.
"Huh? Jun-ho!"
"It's Choi Ji-won!"
The standoff broken, some of the players let out small cheers at the sight of us.
Their faces were familiar—people I'd met in passing once or twice. A few were members of Kang Chan's guild. The rest were people who'd been called talented.
"That tiger can teleport short distances!"
"It sometimes turns invisible too. Be careful!"
The looks on their faces held not a shred of doubt that Choi Ji-won and I would take care of everything.
"Where's Kang Chan?"
"Mr. Chan is away on business in Daejeon for a while... I doubt he'll be back anytime soon. We'll have to handle this ourselves."
"..."
In practice, right now, Kang Chan was the strongest fighter in South Korea. Since the country's population isn't that big, there aren't many exceptional players, and among them, Ji-won and I had fallen behind because we'd stopped climbing the Tower. The other players here, to be blunt, weren't going to be much help.
Knowing this would happen, should I have let Choi Ji-won climb the Tower on her own? I'd gotten too greedy gathering information. I kept choosing only the safest paths. Fuck. I'm such a fucking idiot.
"Jun-ho, can you keep a little distance? So you don't get hurt."
While I wallowed in self-reproach, Choi Ji-won was calmly preparing for battle. She thrust Boongboong-yi into the ground, straightened her ponytail, and fixed her gaze on the tiger.
It was the same for the tiger, pacing slowly as it glared back. The eyes of both beings never broke from each other's movements for even a single instant.
"...Heart of Lightning."
The moment all preparations were done and Choi Ji-won's body, gripping Boongboong-yi in both hands, erupted with blue sparks—
Kwuaaaaaaang!!!
With a deafening boom, the forms of the two monsters vanished. If I hadn't been channeling mana into my eyes, I would've lost track of the movement too.
"I-is it alright if, if you don't help?"
"I need to protect all of you."
In the split second I managed to see, Choi Ji-won had parried the tiger's fangs with her sword and simultaneously kicked it in the belly. She must have done that deliberately to pull the tiger far away from me.
I didn't want to make Choi Ji-won worry either, so I kept my distance and only watched the fight. There would be no worse nuisance than getting dragged in by accident and regressing.
"How does it look?"
"Choi Ji-won is winning."
With my eyes wrapped in mana, I watched the battle closely.
Choi Ji-won was driving the tiger back hard. She hadn't allowed the tiger to land even a single blow, and the tiger's hide was accumulating more and more wounds.
Every attack from the tiger missed by a hair's breadth, almost as if it were a choreographed stunt. Each flash of blue lightning wrung a pained groan from the tiger, and droplets of blood gathered at the tip of Choi Ji-won's blade.
But the longer the fight went on, the more the flow started to shift.
"...She's being pushed back."
The tiger's body was riddled with injuries. Choi Ji-won's body, by comparison, was relatively fine. Yet Choi Ji-won was the one being gradually overwhelmed.
The reason was clear. Stamina.
Triggering the trait 'Heart of Lightning' was pushing Choi Ji-won's physical body far past its limit. Having the two personalities split the burden had lessened the load—but clearly, sustaining the state of lightning crackling across her entire body was too much.
Meanwhile, the tiger was fiercely resisting, fueled by its overflowing vitality and regenerative power. Choi Ji-won, slowly exhausting herself. The tiger, driving on with feral force. At this rate... she was going to lose.
"This isn't good."
I had to take a risk and jump in. I would rather take a wound and regress than watch Choi Ji-won die.
"Uh, uhh..."
"Mist?"
As I steadily drew up the cold energy, a mist-like aura naturally seeped out from my body and my heartbeat slowed. Feeling the chill spread through my entire body, I dove onto the battlefield.
"Grrrrr."
"Jun-ho?"
The tiger's sidelong glare fixed on me. Choi Ji-won looked flustered, as though asking what I was doing. My interruption brought the frantic fight to a momentary pause.
Even if it meant regressing here... my goal was to kill that tiger outright. Not only might my Achievement Level go up, I might gain a trait, and I might even reach some kind of enlightenment.
But more than all of that... after seeing the brutal way it had butchered people back there, after seeing it corner Choi Ji-won, I couldn't feel satisfied unless I killed this monster myself.
"Coming."
A sharp, icy pain sank in. My already slow heartbeat dropped even lower. I had roughly five to ten seconds of full-power movement before bracing for regression. I'd end it inside that window.
"Hoo."
As the breath I exhaled froze into glinting frost in the air, a hot energy flared from my hip. The scabbard I'd acquired on Floor 3 was generating a sword.
A scabbard that reacted to my emotions, manifesting the right weapon for them. What I felt now was fury.
The cold energy coiled around the searing blade. This could work. One blow to end it.
I bent my left knee, my eyes already fixed on the tiger's throat. I settled into a drawing stance.
With everything, I'll cleave—
Kwuaaaaaaang!!!
Before I could act, a deafening boom shook the very space. The earth quaked. Light flashed.
It felt like a bomb had gone off. My ears rang with tinnitus, and I could see nothing through the thick cloud of dust kicked up.
"Wha... what."
What was that? Did the tiger do something? But it didn't even move, did it?
Startled, I blasted out the cold energy sharply. The dust scattered, and my obscured vision cleared. And what my restored sight caught was...
"..."
Choi Ji-won, catching her breath, looking bewildered.
"...Huh?"
And a man standing atop the corpse of the tiger—bisected at the waist—haughtily surveying his surroundings.
A cold, handsome face. Hair cut into a short sports style. A dangerous aura emanating from his entire being.
"Kim Jun-ho. Am I a bit late?"
The man who greeted me in that characteristically growling voice was Kang Chan. The same Kang Chan who was supposedly away on business in Daejeon.
"Uh, uhh..."
I was curious how Kang Chan had gotten here so fast, but what truly seized my attention was something else.
A girl wearing a hood pulled over her head, standing next to Choi Ji-won and looking at me.
She was wearing a mask, but I recognized her.
"...Dok Su-hee?"
She was... Dok Su-hee, the one who had betrayed me on Floor 3.