The Atla Raid (1)
Third Official Event – 「The Turtle That Swallowed the Earth's Axis, Atla」 Raid Event!
Remaining Event Period: Ends upon Atla's subjugation.
Details:
▶ Warning! In 168 hours, the ancient giant beast Atla (Republic of Korea Server: 8 creatures) will descend before each Tower.
▶ All Climbers must throw everything they have into stopping Atla.
▶ Breach Atla's shell and destroy its power source, the Gravity Core.
▶ On failure: Deletion of the Tower in that region.
▶ On success: 10 Despair Stones awarded to the Climber who records the highest contribution. (Awarded individually per Tower)
As expected.
His prediction had been right on the mark.
There it floated, plain as day—the event!
“Huh.”
What kind of bizarre event was this supposed to be?
Like the others before it, this was something never seen inside the Tower of Despair itself.
Hyun Si-woon drew the Formless Sword from his inventory without hesitation and addressed the semi-transparent girl drifting in the air.
“Atla. Raid. What the hell is all this?”
“Oh.”
Ha-wol received the shared event details and tilted her head, a spark of interest in her eyes.
“Has it already come to that?”
“To what?”
“How long has it been since that damned Tower appeared in your world?”
“I haven’t counted, but… about a year?”
He had held out as long as he could before entering the Tower of Despair roughly half a year in, and another half-year had crawled by since then. That sounded about right.
“Around then is when it usually starts. The selection process.”
“Selection process?”
Si-woon’s brow twitched ever so slightly.
Ha-wol crossed her arms, speaking with the air of an ancient noble instructing a foolish child on the ways of the world.
“The Tower is not benevolent. It is ruthlessly efficient and cold beyond measure. Places without potential no longer receive resources. First the channels, then the servers… then even the dimensions. Any place that fails to show climbing results will be deleted without a second thought.”
“…….”
Channels. Servers. Dimensions.
Si-woon closed his eyes.
Channels likely meant the eight regions—Seoul, Busan, Incheon, Daegu, Daejeon, Gwangju, Ulsan, and Jeju Island. The places where the Towers stood.
Servers meant nations. Dimensions meant this planet… Earth.
It wasn’t just some simple event?
The Tower was weighing them. Measuring which servers were worth the investment and which were not. And within those servers, which channels still held growth potential—and which did not.
The moment he grasped the true nature of that merciless system, a chill slid down his spine.
“What happens when a Tower gets deleted?”
“What happens? It’s abandoned. The first ones to rampage will be the Rankers who were stationed there.”
“…….”
“Before they leave, they’ll slaughter every Climber in the region just to suck up one last scrap of TC. The instant a Tower vanishes, the lives of the Climbers there become worth less than pebbles.”
“Hah.”
A heavy sigh escaped him.
Growing alone wasn’t going to cut it after all.
Until now, Si-woon’s goals had been crystal clear: his own survival, the survival of his people, and the climb. Everything else—other Climbers, the wider flow of the world—had been secondary.
Even founding Eden Camp and operating as a wandering merchant had ultimately been nothing more than tools for his own safety and convenience.
This event tore that entire premise apart.
If the Climbers of the Republic of Korea Server fell short of the Tower’s standards?
Even if he alone surged ahead, if the server’s overall average stayed low?
The result would be the same.
Deletion.
I refuse to watch that happen.
This server was the garden plot he had cultivated with his own hands. The absolute brand of the Wandering Merchant. The market economy shaped by the Hand of Midas. The information web controlled by the Owl.
He would not allow that garden to be plowed under.
Until recently, mere survival had left him scrambling just to protect those closest to him. But things were different now. His teammates had grown. TC and resources continued to pile up. And above all, he possessed the absolute weapons of information and regression.
In other words, he finally had room to breathe.
Enough room that living together no longer had to mean dying alone.
Si-woon took another long pull from his whiskey glass.
From now on… I’ll have to start lending a hand. Maybe even some donations.
The glass met the table with a soft thud.
Knock-knock.
“Hyung-nim! It’s Dae-un!”
“Si-woon, you saw the event, right?”
Before he knew it the members had gathered. The door creaked open and all five filed in as if they had been waiting for the invitation, claiming seats on the sofa. This room had long since become their unofficial conference hall.
“Raid in a week. Giant turtle, apparently. You know anything about it? Atla? First I’ve ever heard the name.”
“It’s gonna be rough, right?”
“Obviously. Looks like every Climber can join… we’re going in too, yeah?”
“Kenzo said it’s a pain but still very doable.”
“Chu Pung agreed.”
They settled in and began pooling what they knew. Having Rankers on their side made everything far smoother. The spirits were forbidden from revealing Tower secrets to Climbers, but that restriction applied only to internal matters. External events like this one? Fair game.
“The giant turtle itself is basically a giant sandbag—huge body, simple patterns. Any server whose Climbers have reached a halfway decent level can handle it without too much trouble.”
“Exactly. It’s more like a bare-minimum filter to weed out the truly hopeless regions. Nothing to lose sleep over.”
Ha-wol’s assessment ran along the same lines.
“Channels that survive these selection processes rarely even reach half. Most never manage to scratch Atla’s shell before their Tower is erased. But this place… is different. For a newborn server only a year old, the number of Climbers is abnormally high. Individual growth rates and overall level are also far above the average elsewhere. Talented ones are especially plentiful. At this rate, taking all eight isn’t impossible.”
Si-woon nodded inwardly at her evaluation.
Of course.
This was the Republic of Korea Server, after all.
Koreans. The nation of games.
He could feel it in his bones. Compared to any other server on the planet, their Climber level would rank among the absolute top tier. The grit forged in a mercilessly competitive society. The tenacity that hunted down every loophole in an unfair system. And above all, that racial trait of eyes lighting up at the mere mention of the word “game.”
The mere existence of another party that had already cleared the 7th floor—besides his own—said everything.
“Good.”
Si-woon rose to his feet.
“We’ll keep an eye on the situation for now. And…”
It felt right to aim a little higher.
“Those ten Despair Stones… I think we can take every last one of them.”
At that very moment, the community was burning hotter than it ever had before.
And the single most popular post among them was this one:
Everyone’s panicking, so calm down and listen for a second. Speaking as someone who’s cleared up to the 4th floor, I’m going to keep this as cold and rational as I can.
First: This is not a matter of “participate or not.”
Failure = deletion of the Tower in that region. You think that just means the Tower vanishes and everything’s fine? The entire region could be wiped off the map. Looking at how the system has behaved so far, I fully believe it’s possible. You have to participate. No choice. “Ah~ not my problem, the strong guys will handle it while I hide~” If too many people sit on their asses with that mindset, the whole region just holds hands and walks into hell together. Anyone who’s ever raided knows—one or two carry players don’t clear a raid. You push with pure numbers. Treat this like forced conscription.
Second: We need orders.
A raid this size without a command structure is just a mob of clowns. The big guilds need to step up. It’d be even better if the Wandering Merchant who’s been blowing up lately takes the lead. Or that party that just cleared the 7th floor. They draft the strategy from experience, and mid-to-low tier Climbers like us move as one. That’s the only way we get even a sliver of a chance.
Third: And this is the real kicker… regional imbalance. What are we doing about that?
Owl, you got any projected power assessments by region? Seoul and Busan are crawling with big guilds and info is flying everywhere, but places like Jeju Island or Ulsan barely have Climbers to begin with. If nothing changes, those Towers are 100% gone. Someone has to fix this—Busan guilds dispatching people to Ulsan, that kind of thing. Look after the weaker regions too.
Conclusion:
1. Don’t participate = we all die. Participate no matter what.
2. Big guilds, start giving orders.
3. Take care of the people in the provinces.
And…
★Wandering Merchant★-nim, EndSeeker-nim… I know you’re reading this. Please. Help us. T_T
It was the kind of post that practically begged for a Best of the Month badge—practical needs packed with real impact.
A dim night.
The door of a battered shipping container screeched open.
This place looked like the hideout of some Climber party.
“Leader.”
A middle-aged man spoke to the young man seated inside.
“Have you thought about what we’re going to do? The community’s still going crazy…”
“Just a second.”
The man clutching his head was Yoo Jin-hyeok.
Once the absolute front-runner of the Tower of Despair under the nickname Oracle. A former endgame streamer people had called the God of Physicals.
And the man who had cleared the 7th floor before Hyun Si-woon’s party ever did.
“Hah… ten Despair Stones is a pretty big reward. Clearing the 7th floor only gave one, remember?”
He always pursued maximum efficiency. Lately, though, he had begun to feel the pressure of an unscalable wall closing in behind him.
That wall’s name was EndSeeker.
His instincts told him clearly: some party was catching up to them at terrifying speed, and the odds that it was EndSeeker were high.
What the hell is that guy thinking right now?
Even Jin-hyeok had never predicted a raid like this would appear. That only made the confusion worse. Until now they had simply followed known strategies. From this point on, they were stepping into completely uncharted territory.
But then—
The light in Jin-hyeok’s eyes changed. The turmoil in his pupils hardened into something cold and unyielding. He clenched his fist as if rebuking his own weakness.
EndSeeker is an incredible player. In the game, he was.
He admitted what needed admitting. The man had been a monster of a gamer.
But game and reality are different.
Moving pixels on a monitor and staking your own life in a battle of blood and flying flesh were fundamentally different beasts. In a game you could die hundreds of times and start over. In reality, one mistake was the end.
Jin-hyeok thought of his teammates.
Jung Da-wit, Korea’s first UFC light-heavyweight ranker—raw power and stamina. Cha Dae-beom, the mountain expert who held summit records across seven continents—unbreakable will. Oh Jeong-min, leader of the top-secret special unit “Ghost” so classified that even most NIS and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel never knew it existed—ghostly marksmanship. Han Ji-yun, former aerial acrobat of a world-famous art circus—superhuman body control. Bok Dong-jin, ex-stuntman and action director—unmatched improvisation.
Every one of them was a genius he had recruited in the earliest days of the Tower’s appearance. Physical monsters, one and all.
This is reality, and we’re still number one.
Until now they had stayed veiled, concealing their very existence. No unnecessary attention, no pointless rivalries—only pure focus on the climb.
But the situation had changed.
An event that decided the fate of the entire Republic of Korea Server. Everyone was floundering without a center, desperately searching for a hero.
“Dong-jin-ajusshi.”
“Yeah?”
Bok Dong-jin lifted his head.
“I think it’s about time we stepped onto the stage.”
“What are you planning?”
“Post on the boards. Tell them the supreme command for this raid is ours.”