The Mad Strategy of the Battlefield Saintess
Every time the black sphere pulsed, an inexplicable fatigue blanketed his entire body.
Each roar from the beast bound in chains sent a sharp throb through his skull. The veil cast by the being of mist blurred his vision, and every step the giant took made the earth quake.
In the tenth-floor plain that was rapidly descending into chaos, Do-yun quickly scanned the forms of the Nightmares.
“It’d be better to head toward the ones that look a little weaker rather than that way!”
The disaster-class monsters the challengers had created radiated a palpable influence even from a distance. He had no idea what abilities they possessed, and frankly had no desire to find out. Do-yun simply rolled his eyes, hunting for the safest-looking path.
About half people, half monsters, huh. More even than I expected.
Having roughly grasped the transformed shapes of the Nightmares, Do-yun thought to himself. It matched the statistics gathered from surveying returnees on Earth. He’d expected something different from superhumans who had climbed the Tower of Trials all the way to the 100th floor, but that didn’t seem to be the case at all.
“There are more people who can’t do a thing than I thought.”
“Of course! Traumas are called traumas because they’re hard to overcome!”
As Do-yun muttered while surveying the surroundings, Ciel spoke up as if she had been waiting for the chance. It held little meaning—Do-yun had entered combat stance the moment he laid eyes on the Nightmares—but bolstering the courage of a despairing challenger was originally part of a fairy’s role as well.
“I’ve told you many times, Doyun-nim, but you’re the strange one!”
Not many people ignited fighting spirit the instant they faced a monster. And these weren’t ordinary monsters; they had taken the form of what each person feared most.
“Moreover, when they turn into people, the situation gets far more complicated!”
In a situation where a precious someone they had failed to protect appeared before their eyes, pouring out resentment and curses—how many could calmly overcome that and drive a weapon home?
He tossed a remark at Ciel, who was explaining all this as if teaching a lesson.
“But those people should have already gone through this trial once.”
Everything Ciel had just explained applied only to someone facing their trauma for the first time. The challengers over there would already have experienced the exact same situation on the tenth floor of the Tower of Trials. Climbing the Tower of Trials to the end meant they had succeeded, in some fashion, in overcoming the tenth-floor gate.
Yet he couldn’t understand why they were struggling this badly.
“Ah. Now that you mention it…”
Ciel trailed off as if the fact had never occurred to her. Leaving the fairy clutching her head behind him, Do-yun closely observed a nearby man.
The man was trembling violently as he stared at the girl who had appeared before him. Embedded in the girl’s chest was a spear of the exact same design as the one the man held.
Did he carry two spears around?
At first he assumed the man had already attacked the Nightmare, but Do-yun soon realized that wasn’t the case. Upon closer inspection, the spear in the Nightmare’s chest was fused with the girl’s body as if they were one. In other words, the man’s subconscious remembered the girl that way.
Only then did Do-yun understand how the situation was unfolding.
A luxurious spear that appeared to have been obtained while clearing the Tower of Trials. And the girl whose chest had been pierced by that very spear. Even at a glance, he could picture why the man was suffering so deeply.
“A trauma that arose after clearing the Tower of Trials, huh.”
Certainly, if it was that sort, the man’s freezing in place made sense. The trauma he had successfully overcome inside the Tower of Trials would have taken an entirely different form from this one.
Do-yun’s thoughts continued to chain together.
“Come to think of it, everyone’s timeline for clearing the Tower of Trials must be different.”
They had entered the Tower of Ascension at the same moment, but the time each person had spent in their hometown beforehand would vary. Some might have been dragged into the Tower of Ascension not long after returning from the Tower of Trials. Conversely, there would be those who received the Tower of Ascension’s call only after spending a long stretch of years back home.
The former case aside, for the latter, passing the tenth floor would be far harder. Not a normal world, but a world sliding toward ruin—they would have piled up nothing but agonizing memories.
“Is that why Elysee proposed a deal? Because she predicted a situation like this.”
He didn’t know exactly what had happened in the past. But it was clear she had endured something horrific after returning from the Tower of Trials—an incident that had carved a trauma deep and fatal enough that she was certain she could never overcome it alone.
At this rate, I need to hurry a bit more.
Do-yun had no desire to watch Elysee, whom he had gone to such lengths to save, thrashing about as a broken wreck. As he tried to quicken his pace, he spotted a crack forming in the ground where he was about to step and immediately retreated.
Puhwak!
From the split gap, a red substance erupted as if a volcano had exploded. Had it been lava, he might have charged straight in, trusting his Flame Assimilation skill. But no heat whatsoever radiated from the red liquid.
Blood?
Do-yun frowned as he wiped the liquid that had drenched him before he could fully dodge, using the back of his hand. A strange viscosity clung to his skin the moment it touched him, and a fishy stench brushed his nose. The red substance erupting from the earth was none other than human blood.
Before he could even grasp what this was, the blood droplets on the back of his hand began wriggling madly with an unpleasant, living motion.
-5 HP
-6 HP
Seeing the notifications flash one after another before his eyes, Do-yun recoiled in shock. The blood droplets weren’t merely wriggling—they were trying to burrow into his flesh. And roughly enough to trigger damage alerts.
“What the hell is this junk?!”
The blood droplets that clung like parasites finally fell away when Do-yun shook his hand with genuine force.
“Some kind of nanomachines that dig into the body, is that it?”
Do-yun stared with a strange expression at the droplets still twitching on the ground. After a few more spasms they rose into the air and flew off in a fixed direction. Lifting his gaze to follow them, Do-yun finally laid eyes on the culprit.
“A vampire, huh.”
Long fangs, blood-red eyes, skin pale to the point of corpse-white. A monster known as a vampire—or bloodsucker—stood there. And beneath him, a woman maintained a milky-white barrier.
Shhhk.
Watching the vampire hurl weapons forged from blood at the woman, it became clear that this was the Nightmare she herself had created.
I just got caught in the aftermath of the attack, then?
Do-yun absently looked over the stretch of ground that had erupted moments earlier. The crack that ran all the way to the woman’s position proved the previous strike had never been aimed at him.
“Just getting caught in the edge does this much damage?”
Do-yun muttered under his breath, his face blank with disbelief. There were limits to the power a Nightmare could manifest—and the same applied to the vampire currently forming a massive sphere of blood. No matter how powerful a monster that vampire might be, a Nightmare could never perfectly recreate it. Freely controlling blood droplets dozens of meters away to attack a target should have been impossible.
And yet it actually happened.
Only after closely observing the vampire did Do-yun grasp the reason. A faint, holy radiance clung to the monster’s skin—utterly unsuited to a creature of the night. Blood poured endlessly from a wound on its wrist as if from a broken faucet. And most decisive of all were the skill notifications blooming before his eyes.
Lunia uses Prayer of Regeneration (F)
Lunia uses Grace (F)
The woman was pouring every buff she possessed onto the very enemy targeting her, strengthening it.
“D-Doyun-nim? Am I seeing things wrong? Has she completely lost her mind to the point she can’t even tell friend from foe?”
Ciel blinked rapidly, as if the scene before her shattered every scrap of common sense she possessed. The only explanation her mind could offer was that the woman no longer even knew whether she was casting buffs or attacks.
“No. That’s not it.”
Do-yun had no choice but to shake his head at Ciel’s guess. If she had truly lost her mind that badly, she would never have been able to maintain the milky-white barrier protecting herself. Right now she was perfectly lucid.
“She’s consistent as ever.”
Do-yun had seen a similar spectacle once before. The Saintess of the Battlefield, Lunia. On the fifth floor she had eliminated Grham in much the same fashion—constantly healing the tiger so that Grham could never clear the floor before Do-yun arrived. He had assumed she had simply vanished after failing to enter the Hall of Fame, but unlike Grham she must have successfully cleared the losers’ revival match and regained her challenger qualifications.
“She’s strengthening her own Nightmare so it can eliminate the other challengers for her, is that it?”
From what he had overheard on the fifth floor, Lunia possessed only defensive and recovery skills. In the Tower of Ascension, where one had to eliminate other challengers to become the sole victor, that was a fatal flaw. So she was compensating for her lack of offensive power by using monsters.
“Even so, this is too much!”
Ciel’s wings fluttered as her voice trailed off. This wasn’t an ordinary monster—it was a Nightmare, a creature that recreated the very thing one unconsciously feared most. Simply standing one’s ground and fighting already demanded tremendous mental fortitude. And yet she was actively buffing it? Only an obsession bordering on madness could make such a thing possible.
Kwaang! Kwang!
Even now the explosions erupting against Lunia’s barrier grew louder and louder. A vampire’s power scaled with the total volume of blood it could control; the more blood spilled outward, the greater the power and range of its attacks.
Of course even a vampire can’t draw blood infinitely…
Do-yun let out a low hum as he watched the vampire’s body, incongruously radiating sacred light. Every time Lunia used a skill, the blood the vampire consumed was endlessly replenished. If a little more time passed like this, what would happen?
“The vampire’s blood would overflow until it blanketed the entire tenth floor.”
That was only the worst-case assumption. Reaching that extreme would still take considerable time. But it was an undeniable fact that the longer this continued, the larger the collateral damage would grow for every other challenger. Hadn’t Do-yun himself nearly been caught in it just by passing nearby?
“Are you going to take her out?”
Ciel asked in a suggestive tone. Do-yun merely gave a light shrug of his shoulders.
“No? Not my problem, is it?”
He had no intention of risking himself to interfere with Lunia. If she wanted to thin out the competition for him, he would rather cheer her on than stop her.
Just as he was thinking of it so casually, a sacred light poured down over his head.
Lunia uses Baptism of Radiance (F)
Do-yun’s expression hardened the instant he failed to keep up with the situation. Sensing that another being now radiated that same unpleasant holy power, the vampire’s gaze locked onto him.
“Oh, for fuck’s—!”
Realizing there was no way to extinguish the light pouring from his entire body, Do-yun clenched his teeth—just as a volume of blood that looked as if it had been drained from dozens of people came raining down upon him.