Chapter 1: Abyss of the Labyrinth
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 1: Abyss of the Labyrinth
There’s a saying that all real-time games are actually turn-based.
That is, if you consider ‘doing nothing for an infinitely small slice of time’ as completing a turn.
Sophistry, you say?
I thought so too.
Until I was possessed by this crazy game and became the Turn-Based Wizard.
*
<Abyss of the Labyrinth>
The game was a traditional D&D-style, turn-based strategy RPG. A single-player roguelike where you descend into the deepest part of a labyrinth.
You form a four-person party, uncover secrets, go on adventures, and engage in turn-based combat with the enemies you encounter.
I was given 60 seconds per turn. To win a battle, I had to formulate a thorough strategy within that time.
All according to the turn order of my party members.
[Shadow Leap]
I use my rogue’s movement skill to place him next to an enemy archer.
[Warden's Relocation]
The archer, feeling the pressure of close combat with the rogue, uses a movement skill to escape to high ground.
I was waiting for that.
[Position Swap]
On my mage’s next turn, I swap the positions of my archer and the enemy archer.
Now, not only is my archer on the high ground, but the enemy archer, with his movement skill on cooldown, is placed right next to our warrior.
[Dragon Strike]
On the warrior’s turn, he smashes the enemy archer with a powerful physical attack.
This is how you fight strategically—like playing chess, predicting the enemy's moves and assigning each party member's actions one by one.
You utilize every possible element: flanking, area control, mines, traps, ropes, hills, cliffs, rivers, snares, bushes, trees, sticky surfaces, neutral monsters, poison gas, oil barrels, magic arrows, bombs, summons, potions, and more.
It was fun.
And apparently, other people found it fun too, because for a while, the game ‘Abyss of the Labyrinth’ was quite popular.
The problem was…
-Fuck, this game is so damn hard.
-Has anyone actually seen the ending?
-I’m on the last chapter, but what the hell is this Labyrinth Master? He just kills everyone with one volcano spell.
-Even the Labyrinth Master’s minions are ridiculously strong.
The game was so difficult that no one had ever seen the ending.
I was the first person in the world to figure out how to clear it.
The key to the strategy was to shove all of the Labyrinth Master’s minions into the range of his own volcano spell, wiping everyone out.
And from my party, I had to ensure that at least the ‘mage’ survived.
You do this by casting a blessing of last resistance on the mage, allowing them to endure with 1 HP.
[Raise Dead Body]
Then, you use necromancy to resurrect your companions.
[Clockwork of Order]
The Labyrinth Master will then cast a dispel magic to kill the undead.
At this moment, the Labyrinth Master’s own ‘status effect resistance’ blessing also disappears, which was the goal from the start.
Now, it’s a one-on-one duel between the mage and the Labyrinth Master.
You just have to beat him down by spamming all sorts of status effect magic and CC items.
That’s how I cleared it.
The strategy I devised became a sort of official guide, and countless players followed my method afterward.
And then, I started raising the game’s difficulty.
After clearing the classic difficulty, a ‘Hard’ mode was unlocked for a second playthrough.
After a few months of struggle, I cleared Hard mode as well.
Difficulty: Strategist
The next difficulty unlocked.
From that point on, I couldn’t stop.
I became addicted, like a madman, clearing the game over and over with all sorts of bizarre methods and strategies.
Difficulty: Master Strategist
Difficulty: Endless Struggle
Difficulty: True Leader
Difficulty: Hall of Fame
Difficulty: Legend's Beginning
Difficulty: Penance
Difficulty: Desperate Struggle
Difficulty: Endless Challenge
Difficulty: Indomitable Spirit
Difficulty: Enlightenment
Difficulty: Great Wisdom
Difficulty: Absolute Strategy
Difficulty: The Pinnacle of Strategy
Difficulty: Transcend Humanity
Difficulty: God of Strategy
…
For a while, there were other players who followed me in challenging the higher difficulties, but at some point, they all disappeared.
So I stopped sharing my clear strategies on MyTube. I think that was around the ‘Hall of Fame’ difficulty?
But I kept at it simply because I enjoyed the strategic combat itself. And then one day…
[Difficulty: Developer]
I reached a difficulty with a rather strange name.
“Developer?”
For reference, the difficulty right before this was ‘Turn-Based Master.’
After a long string of cool-sounding difficulty names, suddenly, ‘Developer.’
It felt a bit anticlimactic, but at the same time, I had a gut feeling this was the end.
‘What do I do after I beat Developer difficulty?’
I thought to myself as I started a new game.
At some point, reaching the ending had stopped being a goal and had become a daily routine.
The thought of this game ending left me with a bittersweet feeling.
[Caleb]
I set my nickname and created a new character for Developer difficulty.
A mage, again.
My party members’ positions had changed many times, but my main character was always a mage.
Because the mage is the core of most strategies.
[Distribute 10 stat points.]
I allocated them like this:
[Strength (0), Agility (0), Wisdom (10), Constitution (0), Dexterity (0)]
The higher the wisdom, the more powerful the magic.
In the past, the meta was for mages to put a few points into strength and constitution early on to increase their survivability with stronger armor.
But in my experience, that doesn't work from ‘Absolute Strategy’ difficulty onward. No matter what you do at the start, you die in one hit anyway.
So the new method I developed was to dump everything into wisdom. If I’m going to be a glass cannon anyway, the idea is to kill them before they can hit me.
[Select a special ability.]
Special abilities were unique powers distinct from skills.
Things like ‘Corpse Eater,’ which let you recover health by eating corpses, or ‘Perfectionist,’ which increased your attack power when at full health.
‘This time, I’ll start the same way as the last difficulty… huh?’
As I was looking through the special abilities tab, I found an unexpected option that made my eyes widen.
[Select a special ability.]
…….
-Turn-Based Hourglass: Unlocked by clearing ‘Turn-Based Master’ difficulty.
“What’s this?”
The difficulty right before Developer was ‘Turn-Based Master.’ This special ability hadn’t existed back when I was playing it.
“Should I give it a try?”
If it sucks, I can just delete the character and start over. It’s not like I expect to clear the final ‘Developer’ difficulty in one go anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
I chose the special ability and moved to the next screen.
[Do you wish to enter the Abyss of the Labyrinth? Y/N]
The moment I pressed the Y button…
I lost consciousness.
When I opened my eyes again, I was inside the game.
I had become a mage.
*
I’m fucked.
I’m not one to curse often, but no other word is more fitting.
‘I’m truly, royally fucked.’
Even more fucked than that time in the army when a complete screw-up under my command fired an artillery shell toward the North, and North Korea responded with a propaganda broadcast.
I was at a magic university.
The scenery was familiar, as I had seen it countless times.
It was the opening scene when you start the game as a mage.
The difference was the perspective.
It wasn’t a quarter-view looking down from above, but a first-person view. I could see the terrified expressions on people’s faces.
About 20 people.
We were slaves of the magic university, purchased from a slave trader just last night.
“Today, you will enter the labyrinth. If you make it out alive, you can become students of this university. You can even shed your slave status by earning money in the labyrinth to pay off your own price,” an old professor explained.
I tried to come up with all sorts of hypotheses to understand the situation, but I quickly gave up.
For starters, the body I was in wasn't mine. It was Caleb, the character I had customized at the beginning. In this clearly non-physical situation, any attempt at logical reasoning was meaningless.
I had no choice but to accept it for what it was.
“The labyrinth is dangerous, of course, but you can survive if you are cautious.”
And I didn’t have time to dwell on unanswerable questions. This game throws you into the action right from the start.
“Everyone, come forward and pick up a magic wand.”
One by one, the slaves went up and took a wand.
I took one as well.
“You will be divided into groups of four. Then, follow the assistant instructor and enter the labyrinth.”
People immediately formed lines.
My team consisted of an elf woman and three human men. I was one of them.
The elf girl was on the verge of foaming at the mouth with terror, and one of the human men, a fat guy, was sweating profusely from extreme tension.
And the last one…
“Dum zillakaya sarabitanya wa ab-rapsaro kirimantaya…”
He was desperately muttering a prayer with his hands clasped together. Judging by the game’s lore, he was from the distant southern desert region. As a bonus, he was a cripple.
The prayer he was reciting roughly translated to, ‘Please take me to heaven when I die.’
‘This is bad.’
An elf girl on the verge of fainting, a terrified fatty, and a crippled fanatic.
None of the three seemed fit for combat in the labyrinth. In this game, the luck of your randomly assigned team at the start is pretty important.
I was confident I could come up with a strategy to fit any idiot on my team, but that was only when I had 60 seconds per turn in a turn-based game.
“Team 3. Follow me.”
We were Team 3. The expressions on our faces as we followed the assistant instructor were no different from those of cattle being led to a slaughterhouse.
*
“Your entry point changes automatically for each group of four, so once you go in, it’ll be just the four of you. The other teams will be randomly placed somewhere on the first floor of the labyrinth,” the assistant instructor explained.
He remained outside while the four of us stepped through the labyrinth gate.
Instantly, the entire world went dark. The gate vanished right behind us. Now we had to find an exit gate. In the pitch-black darkness, the sound of water dripping from stalactites echoed, and from deep within, we could hear the voices of monsters.
—Heehee! Heeheehee! Heehee!
A cackling laugh.
Thump!
The elf girl collapsed to the floor.
She trembled, clutching her wand.
“I can’t do it.”
Tears began to well up in her eyes.
“I can’t.”
“Hah… hah…”
The fatty was also so terrified he could barely breathe.
“Zarvankaya wa elostande kromi azzaraptami wa tellakro…”
Surprisingly, the fanatic seemed the most composed. He muttered a few more words of prayer, and his expression brightened.
“It is done! Do not worry too much now. I have finished my prayers, so even if we die, the Lord will guide us to heaven. Do not be afraid, it is alright to die! Hahaha!”
I take back what I just said.
This bastard is definitely the craziest of them all.
In any case, just sitting around like this was a problem. Unless you’re in a safe zone, you never know what might happen inside the labyrinth.
“We can’t stay here. We need to move… now…”
Just as I was about to encourage them, an unreal scene unfolded before my eyes.
As if played back on a high-speed camera, a green monster with a hideous expression leaped toward us from the darkness in slow motion.
It was what the game called a goblin.
In the game, a message saying ‘Ambushed!’ would appear, and a turn-based battle would begin with the enemies getting a bonus to their initiative.
But of course, fuck me.
‘That’s not how it works.’
Thwack!
A crude spear tip pierced through the fatty’s back and burst out of his chest.
Splattering hot blood all over my face.
“Heehee! Heeheehee!”
Two goblins were laughing wickedly behind the fatty.
“Kyaaaaaaah!”
The elf girl shrieked and jumped back.
“Ooh! Death! Come to me! My Lord in heaven! Open wide the gates of your kingdom—!”
Thwack!
Another spear flew out and slit the fanatic’s throat.
‘Crazy.’
My body froze.
All those stories about modern people getting isekai’d into games or novels and going on a rampage are a complete fallacy.
A modern person can’t do that.
Maybe if you were a former US special forces operative who served in the Iraq War.
But for someone like me, who until yesterday was taking bubble baths and eating steak from the supermarket, my brain just shut down.
A modern person never sees someone get stabbed by a spear and spray blood right in front of them. My mind went blank, and my body stiffened.
“Heeheehee!”
Even as the goblin raised its knife and leaped at me.
[Turn-Based Hourglass activated.]
Even as that message appeared.
I thought I was frozen in shock, unable to move, but it was slightly different.
[It is your turn.]
The entire world, including me, came to a halt.
[60]
[59]
[58]
An hourglass appeared before my eyes, counting down. Three seconds passed, but the goblin’s knife still hadn’t struck my neck.
“What… what is this?”
The goblin’s smile stretching to its ears, the blood fountaining from the fanatic’s neck, the blade just twenty centimeters from my own throat.
Nothing in the world, except for the hourglass, moved an inch.
*
All real-time games are actually turn-based.
If you consider an infinitely small unit of time as a single turn.
I was destined to have my head chopped off because I did nothing during the 0.0-something-second turn I was given as the goblin struck.
To be granted 60 seconds in that fleeting moment. To be able to devise a strategy during those 60 seconds.
That was my special ability, the ‘Turn-Based Hourglass.’