The Regressor Is Panicked (3)
The Regressor Is Panicked (3)
A frigid blade of wind raked across my face.
"What the hell! Fuck!"
"...Hey, shut up."
"Oh, one more just arrived."
The shock of the cold lasted only a moment. As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw people. Not just a few—a teeming crowd.
I looked down. A thick set of cold-weather gear covered my whole body. Between the heavy clothes and the sheer number of people, the space already felt cramped.
"Whoa, how many people is this..."
"Ninety-eight, sir."
I hadn't expected an answer to a thought that slipped out. I turned toward the voice and found a middle-aged white man in the crowd, smiling warmly at me.
"Nothing remarkable. It's floating up above."
He pointed a finger skyward. I raised my head and saw text suspended in the air.
[98/100]
"...Thank you."
I gave a short reply and turned away. He might think I was rude, but I had no intention of getting too friendly with people—unless they showed real promise, like Kang Chan or Ahn Gyeong-jun.
"..."
More importantly: where was I?
I pushed forward through the crowd, shoulder after shoulder. The Barrier of Benevolence blocked my view ahead.
After about thirty seconds of struggle, I finally broke free of the mass.
Thunk.
"Ow..."
The tip of my nose tapped something invisible. Thank goodness the crowd had slowed me down.
I reached out and felt a transparent, semi-spherical barrier against my fingers.
The reason everyone had been packed together wasn't just the cold—they'd been trapped.
"Looks like this thing vanishes once a hundred people gather..."
I took my hand off the barrier and lifted my head.
At the very top, a blue sky so sharp it stung, and heavy sheets of snow. Lowering my gaze, I saw jagged mountain peaks piercing toward the heavens. When my eyes finally reached the ground, I took in the frozen dirt courtyard, the snow just beginning to settle, enclosed on all sides by fortress walls.
Yes, I was inside the walls—encircled by stone on every side.
"Hm..."
I turned around. A fortress loomed at my back, rough and utilitarian. Not the elegant castle you'd see in a fantasy world—the design belonged to a stronghold. Blunt, old, solid.
This seemed to be an inner courtyard, then...
"Hey, ninety-nine now."
"The clothes help, at least it's not cold..."
"My legs hurt from standing..."
I could hear people making a fuss while staring at the sky. Everyone was fixated on the headcount.
"...Excuse me."
"...Yes?"
I spoke to a man with narrow eyes who was rubbing his hands together and watching the sky. No particular reason—I'd just noticed the snow piled on his clothes and figured he'd been here a while.
"Um... what is that?"
About a hundred meters away, on the far side of the courtyard where the players were clustered inside this barrier, something black and semi-spherical rested there.
Glossy and utterly alien against the old stone walls. It looked at least three times the size of the barrier containing us. Staring at it gave me an uneasy feeling.
"Ah, that... well, probably nothing. It was there when I first arrived."
The narrow-eyed man answered nonchalantly. He genuinely seemed unconcerned.
"...But what if something bursts out of it?"
"Uh, hm... then we'd fight, I guess. But I don't think it'll happen. Usually, a floor hands out weapons at the start, right? There wasn't anything like that inside the barrier, so I figure it's probably nothing."
"...Ah."
I'd assumed he was just blindly optimistic, but he had a reasonable point. Yeah, they'd give you weapons first. They wouldn't just let the unarmed die.
"Anyway, friend, you've got a bit of an unhinged vibe—look like you can fight. If this turns out to be players competing against each other, how about an alliance—"
"Sorry."
I declined and walked a full circuit along the barrier's edge. The snow was fierce, the fortress old, the mountains high. Part of me wondered if I should've waited for Choi Ji-won. My mind felt unsettled for no good reason.
"...It is beautiful, though."
Beneath the falling snow, the mountain range stood aloof and majestic. I half-wanted to climb to the summit. The sight pulled me in strangely—like looking at an old Windows desktop wallpaper.
"Hey, hey! That's a hundred!"
"Did the mission pop up? I don't see anything."
Other people's shouts yanked me out of my drifting thoughts.
I instinctively looked up. The number had updated to [100/100].
"...Is it starting?"
The moment I muttered those words, a message window appeared before my eyes.
[All personnel have assembled.]
[Floor 4 begins.]
<Floor 4>
-Clear Condition: Survive for 5 days. When the timer ends, you will be automatically cleared and transported to Floor 1.
-120 : 00 : 00
The instant the message appeared, the barrier holding the hundred or so players vanished.
"Wait... Survival?"
"Doesn't this feel kind of screwed...?"
Nobody moved. Everyone stood frozen, reading and re-reading the message in front of them.
Floor 1 wasn't really a floor. It was a rest area, practically base camp.
Floor 2—well, I'd twisted and bent that one so much that it became a gentle floor where no one died or got hurt. And now, because of the changes I'd made, it supposedly served as a kind of training ground where unskilled players got used to combat.
Floor 3 had been brutally, punishingly difficult... but that was only because I'd picked the hardest difficulty. From what others said, if you chose a difficulty suited to your own abilities, it wasn't terribly hard.
In fact, a post I'd read online claimed the clear rate was over seventy percent. The floor was structured so that if even one person died, everyone got wiped out—so trolls didn't exist either.
In other words, people's guard was completely down. Floor 3 had emphasized cooperation, and that had fostered a sense of camaraderie among the players.
Then, out of nowhere, Floor 4's mission was survival.
Put simply: stay alive, and you clear it. An absurdly easy condition. But at the same time—
"...What's coming?"
—it was a declaration that something would threaten that survival.
As people stood rigid, the same memory surfaced in everyone's mind simultaneously: the Tutorial. Unless you killed the hidden boss, it had permitted only twenty-five percent to live. The despair they had felt then. The blood. The screaming. The desperate struggle.
A hundred people stood in the courtyard, and only the wind made a sound.
"Hey, hey! Run!"
"Go, go!"
A group of five broke the unnatural silence, dashing toward the fortress.
"Find the food, find the food first!"
The group—three men and two women—all carried weapons, and the gleam was distinctive enough to mark them as items. They'd probably earned a Gold reward on Floor 2 and picked weapons from it.
"H-hey!"
"Come on, let's go too!"
And with that, as though it suddenly dawned on everyone that they might be competing against one another, most of the crowd began running for the fortress.
That first group's judgment had been right. If the food supply was limited, food itself would become a source of power.
And with the snowstorm getting worse by the minute, getting indoors was probably on everyone's mind too.
A short while later, only a handful of people remained in the courtyard.
Counting the genial middle-aged white man and the narrow-eyed man who'd asked about teaming up, about ten of us stayed behind.
"..."
"..."
A brief exchange of glances passed between us, and in that moment I knew two things for certain.
First: the people who remained had confidence. They were the type who could take food by force if it came to that.
And second: they were sharp.
"Everyone's pretty observant."
The narrow-eyed man grinned as he spoke.
His eyes were fixed on the black semi-sphere at the far end of the courtyard.
In that moment when the message had appeared and the chaos of people running toward the fortress had taken over—
Crack.
—the black semi-sphere had begun to splinter.
Ordinary people hadn't noticed in their panic, but everyone still standing here had caught it.
Crack. Crack-crack.
What started as hairline fractures spread rapidly, and then—
Crash!
—it shattered entirely, black smoke billowing out.
So. What would come out?
Monsters? Weapons? Food? An angel?
The fierce blade-wind swept the smoke away in seconds. The interior was about to be exposed.
"..."
"..."
The ten of us watched each other warily and edged closer to the semi-sphere.
And inside, what finally came into view...
"Cough, cough..."
"Haah, haah..."
"Ughhh..."
...was a mass of people.
Far more than the player count. Easily over three hundred.
"Wh-what..."
"What is this..."
We'd known something would emerge, but not a whole horde of people. The players stood at a loss, exchanging uncertain glances—
"Cough, is no one there!"
—and then a man stumbled out of the smoke, coughing violently.
"I am Baron Jorge! Aid, I require aid!"
A long, flowing beard. Antiquated clothes. The words were translated and reached me in Korean, but the accent was unmistakably foreign.
The odds were very, very high that he was not from Earth.
"..."
Towering mountains. Driving snow. An ancient fortress. And the sudden emergence of hundreds of otherworlders.
That was how Floor 4... began.