Overcome Your True Fear
Announcing the trial of the 10th Floor.
Overcome your true fear.
The 10th Floor was called a gateway floor.
It belonged neither to the 1st Stratum nor to the 2nd, nor to any of the ordinary divisions of the tower. Like a gatekeeper, it existed to bar the way—and the difficulty of its trial was so far beyond the rest that comparison felt almost unfair.
Anyone who meant to pass it had to brace every mental defense they had, ready to throw everything they had built against the wall in front of them.
Do-yun, however, had had his attention elsewhere for a while now.
Grade: SSS
It was because of the luminous feather still resting in his palm.
At first he had assumed it was a mistake. Remiel had been hostile toward him from start to finish; she had no reason to leave behind something worthy of a triple-S grade.
But calling it a mistake makes even less sense.
If someone you disliked stood right in front of you, you would be all the more careful not to slip. By that logic, the odds were high that Remiel had left the feather on purpose—for some intention of her own.
He still could not guess what that intention was, and the uncertainty nagged at him.
"It doesn't even grant me an authority or anything."
Unlike the time he had received Reverse, touching the feather produced no system alert. Only the item's name and grade floated there, bare and silent.
Fwoosh.
Yet the feather kept shedding a soft light, and even a glance suggested some hidden function. With a grade that high, dismissing it as nothing was impossible.
"Ciel, do you have any idea what this feather might be?"
"I only know it's a vessel the Archangel filled with her own power! Beyond that, I'm not sure!"
He had hoped that, as a fellow angel, she might know something. Whether the gulf in rank was simply too wide, Ciel had nothing useful to offer.
"Ah well. No idea."
It would react when the time came. Do-yun slipped the feather into his coat and turned his gaze forward.
Across a broad plain that reminded him of Floor 0, ghostlike figures drifted in the air.
"Nightmares."
That was the name of the black specters floating out there. At this distance they were harmless enough—but close in even a little, and the story changed. From that moment a Nightmare would begin to twist into whatever the target feared most.
"They're the reason the number of returnees keeps dropping as the years go by."
A Nightmare dragged trauma up from the depths of its target's memory and took on the form that maximized that fear. For the earliest returnees it had barely been a problem. People who had lived in peaceful worlds simply did not carry trauma worth mentioning.
Time had rewritten that equation completely.
Endless gates and monsters had drowned Earth, and people had been forced to face embodied terror day after day. The vivid fear and trauma born of that era became the perfect fuel, making Nightmares deadlier than ever.
Even ordinary civilians live in a world where they have to look monsters in the face every day.
Actual combat against those monsters was still rare for non-returnees, but the nightmare creatures left deep scars just by being watched from afar. Those who entered the Tower of Trials late found the wall of the 10th Floor incomparably harder than it had once been, and with every passing year more returnees came home without even clearing it.
"Some people still clawed their way up to the higher floors, though."
Every coin had two faces. The more terrible the fear a Nightmare projected, the more people failed to overcome it—but those who succeeded forged a will of steel, unshaken by almost any later trial.
Someone even turned a Nightmare against itself and found a weakness in one of the Three Disasters.
One of the Three Disasters that had first given birth to the concept of a black-level alert: the Moving Mountain, the Owlbear. The only reason it could be slain was that someone had discovered its weakness on a Nightmare that had taken its shape, and built a strategy around it.
"I wonder what form mine will take."
Do-yun muttered the words and tightened his grip on his sword hilt. There were plenty of candidates.
The goblin that had stood over the first corpse he ever saw, a dagger slick with blood and brain matter, cackling as it looked at him. The ogre that had smashed the wall of a high-grade shelter with a single fist after days of Do-yun's pleading had failed to get him inside. One of the Three Disasters itself—the Demonic Dragon, roaring as it spread wings vast enough to blot out the sun.
Each of them shared a single trait: the moment he faced them, Do-yun had felt absolute helplessness and fear.
Thud. Thud.
As Do-yun walked slowly forward, one Nightmare slid toward him. He watched with interest as the black aura slowly solidified into a concrete shape.
What finally took form was nothing like what he had expected.
"Ah! That's the cat girl!"
"Kaya?"
Two cat ears rose from the top of its head, and that distinctive smile curved at the corner of its mouth. Standing there was the very Kaya he had gone to such lengths to eliminate.
"It looks exactly like her!"
Just as Ciel said, the Nightmare resembled Kaya so perfectly that, without having watched the transformation in real time, he might have mistaken it for the real thing.
"I never thought a person would come out instead of a monster."
Entering the Tower of Ascension had already thrown more than a few shocks at him, and it was true he had regarded challengers like Kaya as genuine threats. But if he asked himself whether Kaya was the single most terrifying presence in his life—no. She was not.
Whoosh.
While he was still puzzling over why the Nightmare had chosen Kaya's form, Do-yun cut the thought short and dropped his head low. Kaya's nails were already whipping toward his skull.
Even if it looked human, the hostility it turned on him was pure monster.
Huh?
He started to set his stance to block the follow-up strikes—then noticed something wrong and froze. By rights the second and third blows should already have been crashing over him like a wave. Instead there was no chain at all; even the first attack was still drifting slowly through the air.
Ah. Right.
Only then did Do-yun remember that he was facing a Nightmare, not the original Kaya. A Nightmare could reproduce appearance and habits—nothing more. It could not perfectly recreate the physical ability of the thing it copied. If it could, the clear rate of the 10th Floor would have plummeted into the decimal points.
"This is way too easy."
After a few more exchanges, Do-yun's face twisted in something like confusion. Against the real Kaya he had been forced to calculate the next move without a moment's rest. Against the Nightmare, he had room to spare. He had not used a single skill, and he was still toying with it from start to finish.
"Looks like it seriously misread what I'm afraid of."
He decided not to waste the unexpected luck. Eyes wide, he burned every one of Kaya's movements into his mind.
A precious chance to spar against Kaya.
A Nightmare's body was weaker, but it could flawlessly recreate the habits and patterns of whatever it became. There was even a recorded case of someone discovering a weakness on a transformed Nightmare and using it to bring down the Owlbear. Do-yun resolved to dissect everything about Kaya the same way.
Swish. Shhk.
Sharp nails carved the air a few more times, grazing past him. Dozens of openings for a counter appeared, but he refused to cut the copy down. Instead he deliberately staged a range of situations, drawing out its reactions to each stimulus.
Whoosh.
When he swung a fist, which way did it twist its body to dodge? If he took a half-step back, did it give ground or press forward to keep the pressure on? Every scrap of that data would be a priceless asset for catching her off guard in a real fight.
Clang. Clash.
Nails and blade rang together again and again. Drawn by the noise, Nightmares that had been drifting nearby began to gather one by one. Even then Do-yun felt no real concern. Copies of this caliber, he thought, would never pose a serious threat.
Slither.
It did not take long to learn how wrong he was.
The first Nightmare to close in took on a form utterly unlike Kaya's lean frame—something oppressive and armored. When the transformation finished, a man in heavy plate stood before him. Do-yun recognized the figure and let out a low sound.
"El Sion."
He had not known Nightmares could become different people. More than that, he had never seen so many of them working together at once.
In the Tower of Trials there was only ever one Nightmare to face!
Why the floor was packed with enough Nightmares to fill the entire space was easy enough to guess. Under normal conditions every challenger entered at the same time, so the field had been stocked to assign one Nightmare to each. The reason so many were coming for him alone was just as clear.
"Because right now, I'm the only challenger on the 10th Floor."
The Early Entry Ticket. He had never expected a privilege that let him enter thirty minutes ahead of everyone else to turn into poison.
"Maybe I should have just come in on schedule."
While Do-yun's brow furrowed, more Nightmares arrived and filled the space around him. Recent faces—El Sion, Siina, Angelina—and others he had met only once, like Jin Cheon-woo, Halleon, and Lily. Even challengers long dead, Destroyer and Grham among them. People in every kind of distinctive gear had somehow ringed him in.
"This is… definitely the worst-case scenario I imagined."
Do-yun looked around and gave a bitter smile. The Nightmares had not misread what he feared. They had simply needed more of their own kind to make it real.
Krrrng.
The scrape of weapons being drawn rose from every direction. Even the Kaya copy he had been using as a sandbag a moment ago had slipped into their ranks and was staring him down.
Every other challenger, united, trying to kill him. The nightmare he had never wanted to see made flesh, and it was already closing in.