A Debt Already Paid
Thirty minutes already?
Do-yun frowned at the newly arrived challengers. He had been so absorbed in the fighting that he had completely forgotten the early-entry privilege had a time limit.
“This is bad.”
The newcomers were still hanging back, trying to make sense of the situation. If they decided to side with the Nightmares and come after him, he would be finished. As it was, every face around him was a perfect copy of someone else’s — he could not even tell which ones were Nightmares and which were real. If a genuine challenger with overwhelming physical ability slipped in among them and struck from ambush, he would have no way to respond.
Return to the Sanctuary Room?
The one silver lining was that he still had an escape route. The notification had appeared the moment he took three Nightmares’ heads in a single stroke. Apparently the floor counted as cleared from the instant he killed even one of them.
“Still — I can’t just leave it like this.”
The number of Nightmares drifting across the plain was finite. That meant some people would never manage to kill even one. Just like the fifth floor, passage through the tenth would be first-come, first-served.
Bash (F)
The moment his calculation finished, Do-yun started cutting down the Nightmares nearest him without a second thought. Thinning their numbers now meant more dropouts later — future enemies removed before they ever became a problem.
Thud.
Then his sword, which had been moving without hesitation, locked solid in midair.
Fenia uses Evil Eye (F)
It was not only his sword. Strength had fled every muscle in his body. Barely managing to roll his eyes, Do-yun soon found the skill’s owner.
“Even if it is a doppelgänger, I have no desire to watch someone who shares my face die at another’s hand.”
A woman stood there in a billowing dress that had no business on a battlefield, a jeweled fan half-hiding her mouth. Sinister violet light glowed in her eyes as she fixed them on Do-yun. Her face was a perfect match for the woman his blade had been about to cut down.
“How strange. The content of a trial has never changed before — not completely. Some variation, yes, but never this.”
From that muttered remark, Do-yun could tell she had completely misread the tenth floor’s trial. It was hardly surprising. They had never witnessed the Nightmares’ transformation. From the moment they entered, they had found only people wearing their own faces. Mistaking the nature of the trial was only natural.
What a thoroughly annoying ability, though.
Do-yun gave up trying to force his unresponsive fingers to move. He could not quite place where he had seen the woman called Fenia. She must have been someone he had only glanced past while climbing the tower — a face the Nightmare had dredged up from his unconscious. In actual combat, however, her power was far more troublesome than a half-remembered face.
Judging by the skill name, Evil Eye, it has something to do with her gaze.
The fact that Fenia never looked away from him was no coincidence. An ability that could render an opponent helpless simply by looking at them was pure absurdity — but powers of that kind always came with a heavy price.
Either the cost of maintaining it is massive, or the duration is short.
It did not take long for his prediction to prove correct. Sensation began seeping back into his frozen body.
“How—! The duration of my Evil Eye should still remain!”
Fenia looked genuinely startled to see him moving. The paralysis had worn off far faster than she had expected.
All debuff durations are reduced by half.
The Chaotic Potion’s buff was doing its job — not that he had any obligation to tell her that. The instant strength returned, Do-yun tried to finish his swing.
“Son of a—”
His blade stopped in midair again. The reason was easy enough to see. The copy of the woman called Fenia standing right in front of him had just flared violet eyes of her own.
Until moments ago he had not even known the ability existed. The second he recognized that Fenia possessed Evil Eye, the Nightmare’s copy had reflected it perfectly.
Squeeze.
Unlike the original skill, which had stripped away sensation itself, the copy’s far weaker thrashing was something he could simply ignore with a little focus. Even so, Do-yun chose to duck rather than complete his cut.
Whirrr.
The fan Fenia had thrown skimmed past the space where his head had been and arced back to her hand like a boomerang.
Fine. I’ll drop this one.
Fenia seemed determined to protect the Nightmare that wore her face. Instead of locking horns with her, Do-yun decided to cut his losses cleanly. There were Nightmares everywhere else on the plain. There was no reason to obsess over killing her particular copy.
He turned his head. The other challengers were finally starting to move. Some, like Fenia, moved to defend their doppelgängers. Others drew weapons and radiated murderous intent. By sheer numbers, the second group was far larger.
“What the hell? Why does that thing look exactly like me?”
“Kahahaha! To think the bastard I’d love to chew to pieces would show his face again!”
Their reasons varied. Some were simply offended that a perfect double of themselves existed. Others had spotted the face of an enemy they had accumulated a blood feud with while climbing the Tower of Ascension. But anyone who closed to striking range met the same fate.
Sssss.
The figure standing before each of them melted like smoke and reshaped itself. Until now, Do-yun had been the only person on the tenth floor, so every Nightmare had been sculpted from his fears. The arrival of other challengers changed everything. Instead of clinging to forms drawn from a distant Do-yun, the Nightmares chose the far richer, more immediate material standing right in front of them and rebuilt their bodies from scratch.
“……You were supposed to be dead.”
The first to confront the change was a man with a spear. What filled his vision was a young girl, chest run through by a long spear, soaked in blood. The weapon piercing her was identical to the one in his own hands.
Creak.
Her neck twisted unnaturally as she slowly turned her head. On a face drained pale of blood, resentment and hatred were written plain.
“A monster—monsters swarmed us. I had no choice. You know that!”
The man gritted his teeth and muttered excuses, but the tremor in his voice betrayed that even he did not believe them. The man standing here was not the hero who had climbed the Tower of Trials to the end and earned the epithet Divine Spear. What remained was only a foolish man who had paid a brutal price for his overflowing arrogance — who, in trying to wipe out a pack of monsters in a single stroke, had driven his spear through the little sister who had run to help him.
His hands shook so hard he finally dropped his weapon. Variations of the same scene were playing out all across the plain.
“Grand Duke Rimern. Even in death, must you continue to hinder me?”
Fenia, who had been interrupting Do-yun at every turn, was no exception. Facing the tall, elegant man who had taken shape before her, she murmured under her breath.
“You poisoned Father out of greed for the succession. That expression of yours will not save you now.”
Her tone was calm, but she was gripping her fan so hard its surface warped. Even people tempered by countless hardships still had fragile places. Nightmares existed to dig into those places with relentless precision.
“Damn it. I worked so hard to forget that.”
“Has the demon we sealed by sacrificing half the empire’s people awakened again?”
And for those who had no past worth regretting — or who had already overcome it — a different kind of trial descended.
A black sphere floating in the air, draining the life from everything around it. A colossal beast bound in hundreds of layers of chain, screaming in a language no mind could parse. A shapeless mass of pale mist whose form could not be fixed. A giant whose skin endlessly wept rivers of red blood.
Beings that stirred Do-yun’s sense of danger on a level comparable to Earth’s Three Disasters revealed themselves one after another.
They might even be stronger than the Three Disasters. Stronger by far.
Do-yun swallowed dryly as he studied the things before him. These were monsters that made people who had become superhuman by conquering the Tower of Trials feel fear. Every challenger climbing the Tower of Ascension was a survivor of a ruined world. The odds were high that the creatures now appearing had each swallowed at least one world whole.
Maybe I should head back to the Sanctuary Room after all.
While he was weighing his options, the spirit brand on the back of his hand flared with light — and a promise he had almost forgotten came back to him.
— On the gateway floor of the tenth level. In the trial that divides the first layer from the second — protect us.
The bargain he had struck with Elysee on the eighth floor, in exchange for her cooperation with the World Tree. The golden-haired elf’s face flickered through his mind.
Do-yun lifted his head and looked out across the tenth floor’s plain — at challengers half-mad with trauma, flinging skills in every direction, and at dozens of world-ending calamities already circling through the middle of this hell.
He looked from the back of his hand to the battlefield ahead, then let out a long breath.
“Fine. I can’t take payment in advance and then shut my mouth.”
Gripping his sword tight, Do-yun took a step forward.