Breaking the Citadel's Curse
Releasing a single statue weakened the curse ever so slightly.
Which meant one thing.
Somewhere else along these walls another statue still waited, and only by finding every last one of them would the curse fully lift!
In a previous life, Hyun Si-woon had immediately set out hunting for the rest.
He died countless times while scouring every corner of the map.
Along the way, stumbling across the ancient siege engines was almost inevitable.
You have discovered the blueprint for the ancient siege weapons.
You may repair and use the ‘Automatic Ballista’ and ‘Automatic Catapult’.
Naturally, back then he saw no reason not to use them.
He repaired the engines according to the blueprint at once, buying himself more time to search for statues.
Yet something was wrong.
No matter how thoroughly he combed every inch of the walls, he found no statue other than the praying knight Carius.
In the end he gave up and pushed into the next wave.
Hm?
His eyes narrowed.
Far off, beneath a collapsed watchtower, the pixels of what had been an empty clearing looked ever so slightly different.
Only someone who had died and revived dozens of times—someone who had memorized the position of every single stone on these walls—could have spotted it.
He approached at once, and sure enough a brand-new statue stood where none had been before.
…No way.
A lightning-fast hypothesis flashed through Hyun Si-woon’s mind.
He had searched this spot countless times; he knew it for certain.
The statues respawn when the wave changes!
He switched to his staff character, drew near, and cast Healing Light. The familiar message appeared.
The soul of Knight Lamia finds rest.
The citadel’s curse is weakly released.
Hell yeah!
From that point on—Wave 3, Wave 4, and beyond—he continued advancing while locating each newly appeared statue, releasing it, then throwing himself into the fighting.
But it proved far harder than expected.
With every successive wave the enemy assault grew fiercer, and the window of time in which he could hunt and free a statue shrank steadily.
In Wave 3 he had to search while battling a Dullahan; in Wave 4 he had to punch through a giant spider-monster’s webs just to leave the walls.
Hyun Si-woon brute-forced every step of that process through endless retries, mapping and memorizing the exact location of every statue that appeared in each wave.
When he had finally endured nine waves and restored rest to all nine statues—
—the system message at last appeared.
The citadel’s curse is fully released.
Yet for certain reasons, Aegis rages.
Aegis does not appear.
Huh?
Hyun Si-woon’s brow furrowed.
Certain reasons?
What could possibly keep her from showing up?
And then—
—KRAAAAAAAH!
From the far edge of the plain beyond the walls rose a familiar roar.
The spectral knight-commander, Valerius.
His entrance, heralding the start of Wave 10, remained unchanged.
What the hell? Shouldn’t something be different once the curse is broken?
It felt wrong.
He could handle Valerius by throwing every siege engine into the fight… but leaving a clear hidden unsolved after finding it was something he simply could not accept.
So he tried again.
He built hypothesis after hypothesis, dying and verifying each one.
Did the statues have to be released in a specific order?
Within a certain time limit?
Or did he have to kill every single monster of a given wave without letting even one slip past?
Dozens, then hundreds of attempts.
Through that relentless probing he finally seized the thread of the answer.
…The siege engines.
That, too, was only a hypothesis.
What if I clear the curse without ever using a single siege weapon?
Surviving the waves without them was doable.
The real problem would be the boss who came later—Valerius.
He put the idea into action at once. The moment he reached Wave 10—
The citadel’s curse is fully released.
Aegis appears.
“Hah!”
He had finally met the true hidden.
The recollection ended. He was back on the 6th floor.
“Fair enough.”
Baek Yeon-ho didn’t press any further.
“If you say so, then that’s how it is.”
Traveling with Si-woon had taught him one thing.
In this Tower the easy path was never the right one.
The harder the road, the greater the chance of a proper opportunity.
Unconventional clears… wait for rewards beyond common sense.
“All right, everyone move! The monsters will be pouring in soon! Screw it—we’ll tank them with our bodies!”
At Baek Yeon-ho’s shout the party members nodded.
Besides Yeon-ho, none of them even knew what siege engines were.
“Hyung-nim Yeon-ho.”
Hwang Dae-un grinned.
“Yeah?”
“You still had an ego left?”
“What?”
“You just need to stop thinking and follow Hyung-nim Si-woon’s orders.”
“……”
Yeon-ho bristled a little but didn’t rise to the bait.
There wasn’t a single thing wrong with what the other man had said.
And far in the distance—
—within the thick fog, the silhouettes of skeletal soldiers began to take shape.
—Grrrrr!
—Clack-clack-clack!
The spine-chilling sound of thousands of bones grinding together.
The first wave had begun.
“We’re splitting into teams.”
Hyun Si-woon spoke.
His gaze swept the long stretch of wall from end to end in an instant.
“As you can see, the wall only has two proper approaches—east and west. Plug those two and we’re good.”
The members’ eyes followed the tip of his finger.
He was right.
“Yeon-ho hyung, Dae-un, Cha-yul noona, Do-hee noona. The four of you take the east. One tanker, two melee DPS, and a healer. Most stable composition possible.”
“Yes, Hyung-nim! We’ll smash everything!”
“Got it.”
They began loosening up.
“Then the west?”
Baek Yeon-ho asked again.
“You and Si-a holding it alone? That’s gonna be brutal.”
“Hyung-nim, I told you to throw away your ego. Why do you keep trying to think? Turn off brain! Just pull the damn thing out!”
“You little bear-bastard, ever since earlier—”
Yeon-ho’s face hardened; Si-woon stepped in.
“No time for chatter. Stop worrying about me and just make sure the east doesn’t break.”
“A-all right.”
“Let’s go!”
“Move!”
Ssssht!
The members scattered to their assigned sectors.
Kang Si-a and Hyun Si-woon headed for the western main gate.
“Are we really holding this with just the two of us? Looking at the numbers, even the first wave is an army.”
“Not two of us. You’ll basically be holding it alone.”
“What?”
Even Kang Si-a, who normally kept perfect composure, was startled.
“Don’t freeze up. Lore-wise the citadel walls never actually collapse. You just have to guard the gate.”
“……I only have so many arrows, though……”
“Look over there.”
Si-woon jerked his chin toward the inner side of the wall.
Si-a’s gaze followed.
Beside the defensive emplacements that lined the battlements, hundreds of massive arrow barrels sat under thick layers of dust.
Inside them, iron arrowheads black with age and shafts of hard wood were packed to the brim.
“Arrows are practically infinite.”
“Then it should be doable.”
“I’ll join you down below once I finish my homework each wave.”
The east was safe with Baek Yeon-ho there.
He himself had reached Wave 10 many times without siege engines.
And right now his stats were higher, he had skills, better gear, and martial arts on top of that.
“I’ll give you a few tips.”
“Yes.”
“First, draw an oval in front of the gate.”
“An oval?”
“Yeah. Time your kills so they die right as they hit that line. You’re stacking a wall of corpses.”
“……!”
Kang Si-a’s eyes widened.
“They have no intelligence. They don’t treat their own dead as obstacles. They’ll actually use them as stepping stones to climb higher. Then you just shoot the ones climbing over.”
“So the wall keeps rising and their advance slows down?”
“Exactly. Second tip.”
Si-woon continued.
“Now and then you’ll see weird ones mixed in. Bones thicker than the other skeletons, red light in their eye sockets.”
“……Commanders?”
“Close enough. Mid-boss types. Drop them first and every skeleton nearby suddenly moves sluggishly for a second. Probably the control units. There aren’t many, so prioritize them the moment they show.”
“Understood.”
“Good. Let’s begin.”
With that, Hyun Si-woon unfurled the Moon Spirit Step and sprinted along the battlements.
He was hunting statues.
—Grrrrr!
—Clack-clack!
The skeletons had already reached the foot of the walls.
Kang Si-a drew a deep breath.
Corpse wall, then the commanders.
Sssht.
She pulled a heavy arrow from the nearest barrel. The weight felt unfamiliar, but there was no time to hesitate.
Not long after, Hyun Si-woon arrived at the collapsed chapel inside the citadel.
The exact place from his memories.
The statue of a knight praying in grief was waiting for him.
Carius.
The first of the citadel’s nine knights.
The youngest of the order.
The background lore of the 6th floor rose sharp and clear in Hyun Si-woon’s mind.
The master of this citadel was Aegis, who held the authority of protection.
At her side stood nine loyal knights led by the knight-commander Valerius.
Then the necromancer lord Moros had invaded with an undead legion, and everything turned to tragedy.
The knights fought to the last to defend the citadel, yet every one of them fell.
Especially the commander Valerius—his sense of duty and lingering attachment to the citadel had bound his soul to this world, and Moros, sensing that weakness, had exploited it in the most horrific way possible.
He had shackled Valerius’s soul and turned him into a Death Knight.
There was a separate reason Aegis raged, too.
The ten knights had died, yet in the end Aegis won the war.
Moros was sealed; the citadel stood intact.
But in the final moment before the seal closed, he had laid a vicious curse over the entire stronghold.
A curse with two effects.
One bound the souls of the fallen knights.
The other planted his own demonic power into the siege engines he left behind!
The more anyone used those engines, the weaker his seal would become—that was the design.
That’s why she raged even after the curse was lifted.
In any case—
The story no longer mattered.
What mattered was clearing the 6th floor and receiving a magnificent hidden shield from the summoned Aegis!
Wooooong—
Hyun Si-woon drew his staff and cast Healing Light.
The soul of Knight Carius finds rest.
The citadel’s curse is weakly released.
Good.
Golden cracks spiderwebbed across the statue’s ashen surface, and it began to crumble little by little.
Hyun Si-woon simply waited in silence for the light to vanish completely.
But in that instant—
“Hn?”
A chilling sensation crawled up his spine.
Every hair on his body stood on end.
A terrible gaze fixed on him.
It felt as if cold, sticky tentacles had stretched up from the deepest abyss to caress his very soul—an unpleasant, overwhelming pressure.
A sensation that could never be felt inside the game.
—Hoh.
Ha-wol, who had been watching everything, murmured in awe.
—I sense the aura of at least a Ranker…! How can this exist on the Tower’s 6th floor…?
Hyun Si-woon knew by pure instinct.
Moros.
This was Moros.
Rage at the fact that someone was dismantling the curse he had laid.
But…
Hyun Si-woon had never once encountered Moros on the 6th floor.
Aegis would be summoned, Valerius would be purified by holy fire, and the floor would clear. That was the end.
This might mean…
His eyes gleamed with sudden intuition.
There could be another hidden I never knew about.