WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Irevi

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 32: Eve

──────

The Lizardman heroes were undeniably strong.

Each one wielded their weapons more freely than their own bodies, and their coordinated techniques were excellent too.

But after all that secluded training on the third floor, I'd already surpassed them.

I beat them without much trouble, collected the unimpressive clear rewards, and moved on to the fourth floor.

Both my stats and skill were already far beyond the fourth-floor standard, and none of the monsters there were a match for me.

Of course, that didn't mean everything was easy. There was something on the fourth floor far more fucking awful than any monster.

That goddamn sun glaring down at me from the sky.

“Fuuuck, it's hot enough to kill me.”

The fourth floor's main theme was the desert. An endlessly hot desert where night never came.

Whether I was sprawled out at an inn or wandering around hunting, I had to suffer through the blazing heat all day.

Even the monsters all used fire-attribute attacks.

They were palette-swapped versions of monsters I'd already encountered while climbing the Tower, like Goblins, Kobolds, and Lizardmen.

Their patterns weren't much different from what I'd seen before. They could just throw and breathe fire now.

Naturally, they didn't help me improve at all, and the more I fought them, the hotter and more irritated I got.

I'd already raised Fire Resistance as high as I could on the third floor, so there was even less for me to gain.

“Isn't there something like Heat Resistance?”

I stepped on the remains of the field boss I'd just killed and grumbled to myself.

I said that, but I already knew there wasn't a resistance skill like that. Fire Resistance probably filled a similar role.

The dehydration symptoms the Open Community's strategy posts warned about showed no sign of affecting me.

-Drip, drip.

The ice chunks I'd stuffed inside my clothes to cool down melted and ran down my body within seconds.

My body was practically as hot as an iron plate right now.

Even though I was this hot, my body temperature hadn't changed much, and I hadn't suffered from heatstroke so far.

That probably meant Fire Resistance was protecting my body from the heat. It didn't seem to protect my mind, though.

“Should I just move on?”

After defeating this field boss, I'd gotten most of what there was to get on the fourth floor.

There was still a quest to escort a caravan across the desert, but the rewards weren't anything special, so I could skip it.

I'd looted nearly all the medium and large treasure chests on my first day there, so only small ones containing Gold or Enhancement Materials remained.

Even if I cleared out the remaining quests and monsters, I probably couldn't expect any more growth.

“Let's move on.”

It was my fourth day on the fourth floor. Having conquered the entire field, I headed straight for the boss.

* * *

The fourth floor's boss monster was a fire-breathing lizard called a Salamander.

After constantly seeing bipedal lizard people, seeing an ordinary lizard crawling around on four legs felt incredibly strange.

The Salamander's main patterns were breathing fire, throwing fireballs, and biting with flaming teeth.

With my Fire Resistance already so high, I could take those attacks head-on without much trouble.

During its second phase, it wrapped its entire body in fire and charged at me, but its attacks were so simple that I dodged every one of them.

It was probably a difficult boss for ordinary fourth-floor Challengers, but it was a terrible matchup against me.

[Congratulations. You are the first to clear Floor 4 of the Tower of Trials.]

The first-clear reward was [Salamander's Soulstone], which could grant a fire attribute to an item.

Adding an attribute sounded impressive, but the extra elemental damage was nothing special.

When I searched the community, I found out that it was easy to get better attribute-granting items on higher floors.

So I used it on some junk item I had and got rid of it.

The maximum-contribution reward was, of all things, the [Fire Resistance] skill. The exact skill I already had.

I wondered what the hell I was supposed to do with a skill I already possessed, but it merged with my existing resistance and raised its level by one.

The final-blow reward was a staff called [Salamander's Eye]. It was a Mage item, so it would just rot in my inventory.

At first, I considered selling it to another Challenger during the Festival, but apparently trading wasn't possible on the event map.

The only things that could be traded there were event-related currencies and items.

There had been community posts about ways to trade indirectly through various loopholes and tricks.

But after reading the details, even those methods were impossible for a solo player like me.

“Wonder if it'll ever be useful.”

* * *

The Soulstone and staff I got on the fourth floor came in handy on the fifth.

The fifth floor's main theme was a snowfield, the complete opposite of the fourth floor, and the two items were a huge help in the freezing mountain region.

As flint.

I couldn't equip the staff because of its restrictions, but if I struck the red ornament at its tip hard enough, sparks would fly.

As long as I gathered something flammable for firewood and hit it with the staff a few times, I could quickly start a campfire.

And the dagger I'd given a fire attribute to worked perfectly as a hand warmer.

The monsters on the fifth floor had a little more effort put into them than the fourth-floor monsters.

Most were still recycled monsters with only a frost attribute added, but new monsters showed up here and there.

There were Snow Rabbits that used fairly powerful ice attacks, and Snowfield Trolls that looked like white orangutans.

I especially liked the Snowfield Trolls.

Other than being bigger, Trolls had body structures almost identical to humans, and they had exceptional regenerative abilities.

That made them perfect for practicing my unarmed techniques.

Seriously, they didn't die even after I beat the shit out of them with my fists for thirty minutes.

Ah, of course, halfway through, they started howling like they wanted me to kill them.

Anyway, thanks to that, I raised my Unarmed Combat skill by two levels in a week. My grappling techniques improved a lot too.

But they were still beast-type monsters, so there were clear limits to what techniques I could practice.

Other than the Trolls, the monsters were all about the same, and like on the fourth floor, I'd collected everything worth getting early on.

Most of the quests and hidden elements in this area were for Mages, so there was nothing else for me to dig into.

“Let's move on.”

After conquering the snowfield in two weeks, I headed off to fight the boss.

* * *

The fifth floor's boss was a Yeti that looked like an enlarged Snowfield Troll.

That didn't mean it acted exactly like a Troll, though. It was surprisingly intelligent.

Its patterns included swinging an ice club, firing magical icicles, and slamming its fists into the ground like a lunatic.

The Yeti's enormous body gave its ice club attacks incredible range, but their trajectories were too obvious.

Its icicle attack was fairly powerful, but it moved at a similar speed to a Lizardman's arrows, so I could just dodge it.

I only figured out what the pattern where it slammed its fists into the ground was after I killed the boss and searched the community.

“Ah, so that was a paralysis-inducing area attack.”

My Paralysis Resistance was high enough that I ignored it, but according to the Challengers in the community, it was surprisingly one of the dangerous patterns.

All its attacks had wide ranges and high power, so getting paralyzed even briefly could definitely fuck you over.

The standard strategy was for ranged damage dealers to position themselves outside the pattern's range while a small group of elite tanks kept the Yeti's aggro under control.

They said it was important to use tanks with enough stats to withstand at least one hit even if they got paralyzed and let an attack through.

I told all that shit to fuck off and killed it by charging in for close combat, but that's just how solo play works.

The fifth-floor clear rewards were [Yeti's Ice Club], a blunt weapon, and [Yeti's Fur Cloak].

The club was a huge, high-attack-power blunt weapon, like the Goblin Lord's axe.

The fur cloak was a unique item with an option that increased cold-attribute resistance.

It was a decent option, but relying on an item for elemental resistance might interfere with my resistance skills' growth.

So I equipped it along with the club, claimed the achievement reward, then shoved both into my inventory.

[Would you like to activate the Floor Transfer Gate?]

“Yes.”

In less than a month, I cleared the fourth and fifth floors and entered the sixth.

* * *

A slight floating sensation came over me, my vision filled with light, and another world appeared the next moment.

The entrance to the sixth-floor area had one obvious difference from every area I'd passed through so far.

“It's actually indoors.”

A sealed passageway without any light coming in stretched out before me, as if I'd already entered a Labyrinth Area.

According to what was known in the Open Community, the entire sixth-floor area was a traditional Labyrinth.

Minotaurs, Skeletons, Zombies, Slimes. I'd heard all kinds of monsters appeared there.

-Welcome to the Tower of Trials Open Community.

I opened the community for the first time in a while to look for detailed information. Then I immediately spotted a new post.

[Breaking: Fourth Festival Event Confirmed]

One month remained until the Festival, the large-scale event where the Tower of Trials' Challengers gathered.

Footnotes:

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried