Tower of Despair, Floor 2 (4)
He kept feeling it.
That the game and reality were different.
He would stress it again: tapping a few keys on a keyboard versus actually moving your own body was a difference of heaven and earth.
“Huuup!”
His body went into free fall. Air resistance slammed against his chest like a wall, and pressure wrapped his entire frame. Even so, he did not close his eyes. He kept his gaze locked on the faintly visible pattern below.
The landing zone was narrower than he had expected. Drift even a little, and it was a straight fall to death—his body bursting apart on impact.
“Kkuh!”
The pattern drew closer and closer, growing denser in his vision. In the Tower of Despair, landing had never meant broken bones or bleeding.
Please. Let it be the same this time.
It was his first jump, but he seemed to have lined up the angle well enough. The pattern was right beneath him. In an instant it rushed up—
Woom!
Light burst from the pattern. At the same moment, a sensation of weightlessness took him. His falling speed bled away, and his body settled naturally into place.
“Haah—haah!”
The breath he had been holding tore free. A sharp thrill of pleasure and excitement flooded through him.
“Whew.”
Success on the first try. He was lucky.
Fwaat!
The moment Hyun Si-woon stepped on the pattern, lamps flared to life throughout the darkened space. At the same time—
Krrrrrng!
—a path unfurled from the pattern and ran along the wall.
You have discovered the Path of the Once-Powerful Dead.
You have been granted 15 minutes.
If you fail to reach the Soul of the Dead within 15 minutes, you will die.
The messages lit up.
That’s right.
Exactly as he had seen it in the Tower of Despair. When he first found this place, how hard his heart had hammered! The developer had hidden this path in an absurd location, and only Hyun Si-woon had dug it out—the fruit of a truly obsessive dive.
The real problem starts now.
The path ahead was a kind of puzzle maze. Complex jump sections and obstacles waited; the slightest mistake or delay meant a straight drop. Back then he must have challenged this thing hundreds of times. As a result, every timing and every shortcut was already mapped inside his head.
But doing it with his actual body was another matter entirely.
First things first.
The beginning was easy. He sprinted along the path cut into the wall, then—
The seventh hole.
—that was where he had to go in. There were roughly thirty holes in all. Some routes took far too long; others were traps that led only to death. The whole thing had been made foully difficult so that only someone with real obsession could clear it.
And once you entered a hole? There was no light at all. Absolute darkness ahead.
Fwoosh!
Every minute he had to hurl a Fire Bolt and, by that feeble glow, pick out the narrow path.
1 minute has passed.
“Crazy—already?”
The curse slipped out. Calm down. Clearing it in one go would be nice, but here it was better to throw away that kind of greed from the start.
2 minutes have passed.
Two minutes just to clear the first cave and emerge. Outside, light returned.
“Huu.”
Hyun Si-woon drew a breath and looked once more at the vista ahead. Even knowing what waited, the sheer scale of it was enough to crush the spirit.
A cliff. And not an ordinary cliff. Far below in the pitch darkness, massive rocks jutted up, barely visible and viciously sharp—like the fangs in a beast’s maw waiting for prey to fall. Giant thorn-like stones rose in dense ranks.
One misstep, and you would be skewered on them and die.
“……”
Was this even worth it? Truthfully, he could have cleared up to the thirtieth floor without it… His mouth went dry. A prickling numbness ran through his toes.
From here it was the jump map. He had to cross by stepping on invisible platforms set over the abyss and reach the far side.
Trust myself.
He simply knew where they were by feel. He had done this countless times, and Hyun Si-woon had never been the type to forget solutions of this kind.
He bent his knees—
Taat!
—and threw himself forward.
Thump!
His toes slipped for a heartbeat and he nearly lost his balance, but he found the platform. No time for deep breaths. With things like this, speed was the only answer.
Taat, taat, taat!
Hyun Si-woon kept launching himself into empty air. When fear came on, you had to drive it back before it could take root—give it no time to arrive.
“Hwaaaaaah!”
After a stretch of that he finally let out a shout. He had been holding his breath the whole way; he forced the air out because he needed to breathe. Roughly twenty platforms behind him, and not a single miss. The moment he set foot on the path on the far side—
Drrrkkk!
—the path began to drop away, rotating clockwise. Farther out he could see multiple paths turning like a set of gears.
“……Shit.”
This wasn’t some old variety show challenge course.
“Hwat!”
Hyun Si-woon timed his leaps and kept jumping. There were plenty of razor-thin moments. One wrong step and he would slide straight off. Honestly, making it this far already felt like a miracle.
8 minutes have passed.
Eight minutes already. The problem was that he hadn’t even reached the halfway point. He only managed this pace because he had the route memorized; anyone trying it for the first time would have to die over and over just to learn it.
Every kind of obstacle waited along the way. On a narrow stretch, bricks would suddenly shift and try to shove him off. From blind corners, whirling flails smashed through walls with a whoosh-whoosh. There were sections that demanded a slide, and others where the floor collapsed from behind the moment you stepped on it, one tile after another.
The worst stretch of all was—
Wraith Archer
Shweeeeek!
Thuck!
An arrow loosed from far away punched straight into Hyun Si-woon’s heart.
“Guhk!”
He had to sprint across a vast open space while dodging that thing’s arrows, and even knowing they were coming made it nearly impossible. Honestly, this section was pure luck. All you could do was keep sliding and weaving and pray the shafts missed. Dodge three times and you could reach the path on the other side…
He had already been hit. In the instant pain choked off his breath—
Thuck!
—another arrow buried itself between his eyes.
Damn it.
His vision went black.
Regression has activated.
This is your thirteenth regression.
“Huuuk!”
He opened his eyes again. His body was whole, and his skills were still there.
“Right.”
He had never expected to clear it on a single coin. A brief wave of emptiness hit him, but having come this far, he could not quit. Having to run through the whole sequence again was a little annoying, but…
Hyun Si-woon simply claimed a safe spot and rested there. He did not even need to head toward the stone gate of the dead. After a little while he crossed paths with Yu Jae-jun’s group again, and events flowed much the same as before.
“Just sit tight and wait. If you go wandering off alone and get yourself killed, that’s not on us.”
Yeah, yeah. Hurry up and go in. He didn’t even have the energy to answer.
The same picture as last time. The only difference was that Baek Do-hee had learned Healing Light. They went back down into the basement to take the hidden route, and Hyun Si-woon started the same challenge over again.
Having done it once, he cut the time down from before. But—
Thuck!
“Fuck.”
He died in the exact same place again.
Regression has activated.
This is your fourteenth regression.
“……Let’s see who wins.”
He kept repeating it. Sometimes he slipped and fell to his death.
Regression has activated.
This is your fifteenth regression.
Almost at the end—
15 minutes have passed.
You die.
Boom—his body exploded.
Regression has activated.
This is your sixteenth regression.
“Hwaaaaaaaaaaah!”
That time he thought he had screamed while crying.
“I was almost there! Almost there!”
He was so furious he slammed his fists into the floor until they shattered. Healing Light fixed them afterward.
Seventeenth. Eighteenth. Nineteenth.
As time passed, more and more slack entered his body. By now he could run the invisible platforms with his eyes closed.
Perception:11 → 12
Endurance:6 → 7
Along the way his Perception and Endurance stats rose. That much, at least, he was grateful for.
And then—
Regression has activated.
This is your twentieth regression.
On the twentieth attempt, he finally made it.
He committed to the last jump. Five meters below waited the black soul—and beneath it, the ordinary-looking sword. Roughly fourteen minutes and thirty seconds had passed.
Time’s enough.
It was certain now. If he failed here, he might truly go mad and give up.
“Hwaaaaah!”
Hyun Si-woon wrung every scrap of strength from his body and roared. In that instant every sense sharpened to the edge. He could feel the air sliding over his skin.
Exact trajectory. Exact speed. And—exact landing.
“Kuh!”
His ankle flared with pain. His breathing was ragged; his heart hammered as if it would burst. Of course his whole body was soaked in sweat, and his legs shook. But before he could feel the pain he jumped once more and stretched out his hand—toward the sword.
“Got it…….”
He seized it as he fell.
You have reached the Soul of the Dead.
Congratulations.
“I cleared it…….”
The emotion hit hard. His whole body hurt, but had he ever been this happy? Honestly, it felt better than when he had gotten it in the game.
“Ha… hahahaha.”
Even though it was a sword labeled . Even though he could not actually equip it and had only ever thought of it as future material. Even so, it was good.
“Hwahahahaha!”
He dropped to a seat and burst out laughing. In Hyun Si-woon’s grip lay a longsword so ordinary it was almost shocking. Not even a common pattern—it looked nearly identical to a low-rank Climber’s sword (Normal).
But—
◈ This weapon is the only one of its kind in the Tower of Despair.
“……Formless Sword?”
Wait. Not . This sword had a real name. What?
He opened the information window at once.
Type: Sword
Grade: Normal (Growth-Type)
Trait: The soul of a dead man—the Sword God—dwells within the blade.
Attack Power: 5
Durability: ∞ (Indestructible)
“……What the hell is this.”
Attack Power 5—identical to a real low-rank Climber’s sword. But it had the Indestructible option… and a Growth-Type option. On top of that, Sword God? He had cleared the Tower of Despair up to the thirtieth floor and never once heard that name.
“What is this.”
His hands trembled. He still didn’t fully understand the situation, but one thing was certain.
Jackpot.
Anyone could see this was no ordinary weapon. Look at what it took to obtain it. Was that not extraordinary? Without the Regression privilege, not even a genius could have gotten this.
This is……
A true fateful opportunity.
“Ha… haha…….”
He was so happy it almost felt absurd. A joy that threatened to split his chest open.
“Insane. This is actually insane.”
He now held a weapon no one else would ever know. What the Sword God truly was remained a problem to unravel later, but—
Drrrkkk!
At that moment, a section of stone wall near where the sword had lain slid open. A portal appeared with it. Stepping through would return him to the entrance of that basement.
Hyun Si-woon slipped the sword into his inventory and threw himself into the portal.