Another S-Rank Reward

Another S-rank reward had been placed before him.

Having secured two S-rank rewards starting from the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠second floor, Do-yun could barely contain his excitement.

"R-right. Let's check the effects first."

He reached toward the first option listed.

From the description alone, he couldn't quite grasp what kind of ability it actually was.

"Unsealing restricted power, huh."

At first it didn't click. It wasn't amplifying physical abilities or granting something new. What was the point of simply unlocking power that had been sealed away?

"Ah."

A sentence flickered through Do-yun's mind.

This reward wasn't meant for him.

It was for the finished monsters who had climbed the Tower of Trials to the end — for the prime-era power they had once held, the kind that could overturn the world with a single gesture. This was a reward that would let them wield that power again, if only for a little while.

To them, it would have been an irresistible option. To Do-yun, it was worthless.

"I don't have any sealed abilities to begin with."

Having never climbed the Tower of Trials, he possessed no restricted power at all. Without a second thought, he checked the next reward.

This one wasn't bad. For someone like Do-yun, who possessed a bugged-coefficient skill like Bash, weapon enhancement was a fairly tempting choice.

There was a catch, though. All he had right now was a battered F-rank longsword. Even if he stamped a great option onto it, the base itself was far too weak.

"I'll hold off for now."

When he checked the final reward, Do-yun's eyes widened slightly.

A single chance to pass through death. Compared to something like the First Aid skill, this was ironclad life insurance.

"This is the one, no question!"

Do-yun selected the final reward at once. A rainbow-hued stone materialized in his palm.

The stone glittered softly. Do-yun tucked the charm that would one day save his life carefully into his clothes. He was curious how it would activate, but there was no need to go out of his way to find out.

The moment he chose his reward, the prompt rose before his eyes again. Recalling what he knew of the third floor, Do-yun reached out with confidence. If anything, this trial might be even easier to freeload than the second.

The next instant, Do-yun stood inside a stone chamber sealed on every side.

Clack.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't a simple sealed room. It was a death box papered over with traps in every direction.

Thwick-thwick-thwick.

At the sound of arrows cutting the air from all sides, Do-yun reflexively ducked and spat a curse.

"Shit! Right out of the gate?!"

He twisted his body somehow and let five or six arrows skim past, but two more came in on trajectories he simply couldn't dodge and punched into his arm.

Damage alerts stacked one after another. What rose on Do-yun's face, though, wasn't crisis — it was certainty.

"Haha! This is nothing!"

Beginner protection that reduced damage by ninety percent. A health system that let him ignore pain. As long as those two things held, arrows meant nothing to him.

The third floor is designed to make challengers test their own limits.

A challenger could return to the Sanctuary Room at any time. Quit too early, of course, and the rewards would be poor. Push too hard and you risked elimination on the spot. How accurately you could measure your own limit was what the trial was really about.

— Stage one is the arrow trap.

— If you've got confidence in your reflexes, you can clear it easily.

— But if that were the end of it, there'd be no reason to make a guide video, would there?

A man's lecture voice replayed from beyond a smartphone screen. The structure of the Tower of Trials was the same for every returnee. Big data built from countless returnees' cases had produced a strategy that even ordinary people could use to hold out as long as possible.

— Press yourself as flat as you can against the wall at the six-o'clock position.

— If you just stand still and do nothing, you'll only take about four arrows.

— Even that alone will get you a C rank.

Do-yun threw himself toward six o'clock exactly as the man had said. He could feel it — fewer arrows were flying in from this direction than anywhere else.

Unfortunately, the four arrows the man had promised were long past. Unlike the Tower of Trials, which gave you a little time to settle in after the start, the Tower of Ascension poured arrows down without a breath of pause.

Thwick-thwick-thwick.

And even here was not a perfect safe zone. There were simply fewer arrows than elsewhere. Like clothes soaked by a drizzle, his health kept ticking down.

At some point his health had dropped to a dangerous level. For an ordinary person, this would have been the moment to start thinking about returning — the kind of situation where greed for a little more endurance could send you straight across the river of the dead.

That didn't apply to Do-yun. One use of the First Aid skill, and his health filled right back to the top as if it had never been drained.

A grin tugged at his mouth as he thought, If I just keep holding on like this, I'm invincible.

In theory, as long as he could use First Aid once a minute, he could stand in this spot forever. But if that were all it took, every dog and his brother would have walked away with an S rank.

Hissss.

At some point the air had turned foul. Smoke was seeping from the walls and staining the space around him. The moment it reached Do-yun's nose, a blood-red warning flared in front of his eyes.

On top of the arrows, poison pressure had been added. Most challengers held out a while longer here and then gave up. There were more than a few reckless ones who clung on with a single point of health left, trying for five more seconds, only to take an arrow by mistake and get eliminated on the spot.

Even so, there were hard-headed types who endured to the end — people who had picked recovery skills over attack skills from the start, people with the talent to weave past every single arrow with flawless movement. A final stage had been prepared for them.

His head swam. His vision blurred. He could barely tell up from down, and even standing still, the ground seemed to rock left and right.

Kh! They said the Tower of Trials wasn't this bad!

It wasn't this severe there, but sensory confusion in the Tower of Trials was still lethal in its own way. One moment when hands and feet that had been moving just fine suddenly tangled — and in that brief gap, arrows from every direction melted your health away. This wasn't something willpower or training could overcome. How exactly were you supposed to train yourself to move your right foot with the sensation of your left ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠arm, or turn your head with your back muscles?

In practice, a challenger became helpless from this point on, and their clear rank was decided by how much health they had managed to save until now.

If I just hold out another ten seconds from here, that would've been S rank in the Tower of Trials.

But Do-yun's goal didn't stop at an S rank from the Tower of Trials. First place in the Hall of Fame. The other competitors might somehow power through even a nightmare like this.

Stagger.

Do-yun groped his way through the scrambled senses and lifted his sword in both hands.

Whoosh.

He swung it from high to low. His stance was a mess, ready to topple at any second, but he didn't give up.

Whoosh. Swish.

The second and third swings were more precise than the first. He was slowly adapting to the broken senses.

A special effect attached to the old iron sword — the effect that ignored lower-grade status ailments.

The instant the chaos settled enough for him to use a skill at all, Do-yun cast First Aid. Health that had scraped the floor surged back, and his blurred vision sharpened again.

Clang.

He kept swinging and held on. As if to ask whether he still wouldn't quit, the trial's intensity climbed. Arrows now fired once per second, and the thickened poison smoke made it impossible to see. Around the time the interval on his once-a-minute First Aid skill shrank to ten seconds, a single notification finally rose before his eyes.

He closed his eyes and opened them again onto the Sanctuary Room's pure white walls. The moment he arrived, Do-yun let the longsword fall from his hand.

"Huuuh."

A long, deep breath left him. His head throbbed from the aftermath of keeping his nerves strung too tight.

"Seriously brutal. Just brutal."

He muttered it under his breath, clicking his tongue. More than once mid-trial he'd thought maybe it was time to stop. He never imagined someone would still be holding on that long.

"Who the hell was it?"

Unable to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠contain his curiosity, Do-yun checked the rankings.

Several unfamiliar names had climbed the board. Since the third floor's trial emphasized endurance over breakthrough, people with strengths in that area had apparently been added to the mix.

Do-yun started with the recording of Heavenly Demon Jin Cheon-woo, the one who had competed with him to the very end.

The man kept his center in silence, utterly still. Arrows were flicked aside with a single light motion of his hand, none of them so much as grazing his robes before shattering completely.

Ssshh.

Even when the poison began to spread, nothing about him changed. The currents of air he raised between inhale and exhale pushed the toxin away and seemed to purify the space around him.

— Hmm.

When the sensory confusion began, he showed a slight reaction — but not because he couldn't handle it. Bending his knees and steadying his breath, Jin Cheon-woo began batting arrows aside with movements no different from before.

How is that even possible?

Do-yun watched those ordinary-looking motions with his mouth slightly open. Having just lived through it himself, he could say it with certainty: under completely inverted senses, movements that stable were impossible. There were only two ways to make the impossible possible — borrow equipment to drive the status ailment out, as Do-yun had done, or understand your own body down to every last muscle fiber.

— So this is as far as This Seat's training reaches.

Then, all at once, he simply stopped. Clicking his tongue as if disappointed, Jin Cheon-woo was wrapped in white light and vanished.

"What?"

Do-yun couldn't understand why someone who had been holding out so well would speak the word of return. Right up to the end, the man hadn't taken a single wound.

Then one possibility occurred to him.

"A timed ability, maybe."

Or perhaps he had simply decided that this much was enough. Without Do-yun, he would have entered first place with a comfortable gap over third, after all. Either way, the impression he left was formidable.

If I ever run into him, I should avoid him no matter what.

Do-yun shook his head and checked the recordings from third place on down.

— O God, please watch over me.

A woman on her knees in prayer. A golden barrier shimmered around her. In the end it shattered under the storm of arrows, but considering it had blocked thousands of them, her defensive power was absurd.

— Activating anti-gravity field.

Fourth place deployed a blue barrier that looked like a product of cutting-edge science. Every arrow that entered its range was flung away in every direction. It couldn't stop the poison gas, so his whole body eventually melted, but for pure projectile defense it was nigh invincible.

— Yaaawn.

Fifth-place Grham used a technique Do-yun had already seen on the second floor. The moment his body turned into a rippling shadow, he took no damage at all, as if he had been cut free from the world. The longer he used it, the paler his face became — but without the side effects, first place would have been his.

Around the time Do-yun finished checking them, a notification rose before his eyes.

It was the clear notification from the Tower of Trials. The reward itself was simple: five stat points. Considering that the battered iron sword in Do-yun's hand alone raised his stats by a full ten, it might not have looked like much — but five freely distributable points were a fairly precious reward.

"I'll put it all into mana."

Without overthinking it, Do-yun dumped every point into mana. The source of his strength right now was his skills. Investing in the resource that let him use those skills more often was the obvious move.

Up to this point, it was the same as before. But one new line had been added.