Project Leap

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His vision was dyed entirely red.

And yet he felt none of the searing pain of burns.

The flames coiled around Do-yun’s body instead, pouring strength into him.

It was the secondary skill he had gained while deepening his mastery of Sun Swordsmanship—Flame Assimilation. A passive that triggered on its own the moment he was exposed to fire.

Whoosh.

Of course, even Flame Assimilation had a limit to how much heat it could absorb. But a B-rank skill was not so meager that it would hit that ceiling on something as low as the ninth floor.

Weak.

Do-yun clenched and unclenched his fist amid the roaring blaze. For all the ominous talk of a “purification protocol” in the notice, the stat gains floating before his eyes were pitifully small.

Destroyer’s attacks jumped into double digits in an instant…

Perhaps his standards had simply risen too high. The flames currently roasting him were nothing to dismiss. An ordinary person would have been reduced to ash in a heartbeat. Even Do-yun, with his stamina system, would have lasted only a few seconds ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠without Flame Assimilation.

Yet he could not summon any real sense of crisis.

“The other challengers were far more dangerous.”

Everyone except him was an elite who had cleared the Tower of Trials to the end. Every move they pulled had chilled him to the bone. Sometimes the fight was decided in a single second, never mind a few. His clash with Sentinel right at the entrance had been the same.

By comparison, a trap like this felt almost polite—borderline laughable.

I can handle variables of this level.

Be too cautious and he might miss the moment he needed to press forward. He could trust himself a little more and move a little more boldly.

Thud.

Do-yun stepped through the flames. He worried for a second that the next tile might also be trapped, but mercifully it was safe. His theory—that they had numbered the tiles odd and even from the opposite side—seemed correct.

“So that sunken tile was just a decoy.”

“I’m sorryyy…”

Ciel mumbled in a tiny, crestfallen voice. Part of the reason Do-yun had decided the entrance tile was odd was that the suspicious one she had pointed out looked even from their side.

“It’s not your fault.”

He could hardly have ordered her to go step on traps herself. Spotting something off was already doing her job. In the end he was the one who gathered the information and made the call; he had no intention of blaming her.

“Right?”

At that single word, Ciel’s face lit up with a bright, simple smile. Watching her, he was reminded once again that her personality was more straightforward than he sometimes expected.

Thud. Thud.

Crossing the tiles like stepping stones—skipping every other one—he soon reached the slightly sunken tile Ciel had mentioned. He set his foot down with a faint tension, but nothing happened. It really had been nothing more than a feint.

Whoosh—

The moment his weight settled, however, wind blasted from a nearby vent. The second rule from the notice flashed through his mind.

“It said to take deep breaths right there, didn’t it.”

After the first rule had already screwed him over, he was in no mood to trust this one either. Sure enough, the reaction came soon after.

Ping.

The world spun. His head swam.

Some kind of anesthetic or sleeping gas?

Deep breaths, my ass. The longer he stayed, the worse the dizziness grew instead of any ventilation. The instant his instincts screamed that something was wrong, Do-yun clamped his hand around the hilt of the sword at his waist.

His fading consciousness snapped sharp and clear. A twisted smile curled across Do-yun’s lips.

“Fine. So that’s how you want to play it.”

He finally understood why the notice had written those rules at all. To the Company, employees were nothing more than consumables. Notices like this existed only to squeeze a little more use out of those consumables. They paid a certain amount of attention—but it was nowhere near genuine concern for the people involved.

Incomplete rules. Incomplete countermeasures. At this point, following them was meaningless.

“Eat shit.”

Do-yun abandoned every rule he had been observing and sprinted down the corridor at random. Flames erupted every time he stepped on a wrong tile, but he paid them no mind. If anything, they were buffs that pushed his stats higher. With every burst of fire that engulfed him, his speed increased a little more.

Screeeech—

While running he dragged his sword along the wall, scoring a long line across it. Rule three: Do not touch the frames or displays on the walls. He wanted to see what happened when ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠he broke it.

WEEEEEEOOO!

Alarms blared, but they meant nothing. Most of the security systems had already lost their power. The hollow noise did little more than hurt his eardrums.

Not a single drone or security robot in sight.

Most of them had probably been destroyed by Overflow. Anything that carried mana would not have escaped the reach of an SS-rank magic.

“Ah! I found a notice here!”

Ciel hurriedly stopped him as he charged forward. The spot she pointed to was a stretch of corridor that looked utterly empty. Precisely because of that, it felt even more suspicious.

Still, just casually dropping a notice while walking along? That’s weird, isn’t it?

Do-yun scanned the surroundings carefully. Absolute Sight soon caught a subtle irregularity—the seams in the wall differed ever so slightly from the rest.

Click.

A light press revealed a hidden space.

“Wow!”

Ciel stared at him in open admiration. Do-yun, however, had no leisure to notice. Inside the newly revealed secret room, dried crimson stains were clearly visible.

“…Blood?”

He entered in silence and looked around. Papers scattered across the floor and analysis data glowing on the monitor atop the desk immediately caught his eye.

He picked up the document resting neatly on the desk. Unlike the other papers strewn haphazardly on the floor, this one alone had been carefully arranged.

The countless figures and records in the document all pointed to one clear conclusion.

The Company had dissected human beings in order to uncover the structure of mana.

“You insane bastards.”

In any society that still guaranteed even a shred of human rights, this would have been unthinkable. Leaving ethics aside, no one with the barest scrap of human conscience could have done it.

Returnees were those who had endured hardship in the Tower of Trials and gained power to protect their own worlds. And these people had forcibly dissected them, extracted organs, and harvested data?

Did the scientists of this world not even understand the emotion called gratitude?

“I got a bad feeling the moment they started treating employees like resources…”

A few might have volunteered for the experiments, sure. But the data before him was far too varied to believe it came from only a handful of willing subjects.

So that’s why the fifth rule existed.

All individuals possessing mana were to be placed under isolation. It had never been a rule to protect them. It was a surveillance measure so that analysis samples would not be lost.

Rustle.

Do-yun kept turning the pages. The report was not finished. And in the analysis entries that followed, the origins of every machine he had faced so far were laid bare.

“Ha.”

Do-yun set the document down and closed his mouth. This was no simple weapons program. They had sought to understand mana, convert it into technology, and control it. Under the name “Leap,” they had justified every last atrocity.

“No matter what, you still can’t do this.”

The hand holding the papers trembled. He thought he understood why they had committed such outrages. The existence of returnees meant there were also things those returnees had to fight. The Company must have done this to seize power against gates and monsters.

Even so, there were lines a human being was not supposed to cross.

They remodeled people into robots.

It had felt off from the start. Even in the Tower of Ascension, filled with other races, entities composed purely of machinery had seemed jarringly alien. But if they had originally been flesh-and-blood humans, it all made sense.

“Do-yun-nim! There’s a safe over here!”

Do-yun closed the documents and turned at Ciel’s call. On one wall, in a spot easy to walk right past, sat a single safe.

“Looks like something pretty important is inside.”

He rapped the safe lightly with his knuckles. Bash was out of the question—too strong a shock and the contents might be destroyed. Should he use Scorching Sword for precise welding?

While various possibilities flickered through his mind, one skill he had almost forgotten surfaced.

“Come to think of it, there’s a skill made for exactly this kind of moment.”

Do-yun stretched out his hand and poured mana into it.

The safe’s locking mechanism melted away and the door swung open, revealing its contents. Inside lay a small mechanical device.

The moment Do-yun looked at it, a notification rose before his eyes.

Do-yun’s brow furrowed as he read the description.

Race change?

So the “Race” entry on the status window hadn’t been there for nothing. He had never seen that kind of description on ordinary equipment or items.

“Cyborg, huh.”

The contents of the document he had just read rose again in his mind. Sentinel. Protector. Destroyer. Artificial weapons remade from humans who possessed mana. Their transformations must have begun with a nano machine like the one before him.

“Completely useless to me.”

There might be advantages to changing race, but he had not the slightest intention of abandoning his humanity. Just as he was about to shut the safe door again—

The mechanical device suddenly sprang up as if it were alive.

Thwack!

Startled, Do-yun reflexively snatched the device out of the air as it flew toward his face. That was a mistake. The machine melted like smoke and seeped straight into his hand.

Brutal notifications immediately flooded his vision.