WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 125: Nightmare Floor 9 (3)

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Looking down at the army of a million monkeys.

I stopped time.

'Insane...'

Overwhelming didn't even begin to cover it. The sheer headcount was beyond comprehension.

I tried to think through what to do next.

The proper clear route had probably been earning Gingoa's approval, but that was gone now. Destroyed.

Was clearing this even still possible?

If there was one method left.

Nothing came to mind except killing every last one of the million monkeys.

Just like back on Floor 3 Hidden.

Except back then I'd had a zero-cooldown, absurdly overpowered tactical nuke cannon to fall back on.

Now I had nothing like that.

If I wanted to do this, I'd have to do it on my own strength, pure and simple.

Not thousands. A million. Jesus...

It didn't look possible at all, but I figured I should at least try.

Right now I was maintaining Radiant Incarnation.

Light-speed movement, and an invincibility buff active the whole time.

Time to actually put Radiant Incarnation to real combat use.

I released time.

And started moving.

The world slowed to a crawl, and the space around me warped.

Once I could move at the speed of light, distance stopped meaning anything to me.

In under 0.001 seconds, I swept the entire battlefield in a single pass.

Even the monkey horde that had looked endless turned out to have an edge, of course.

Could I land a direct hit in this state?

I tried ramming into the monkeys on the ground at light speed.

But my body just rippled and scattered, then reformed back to normal.

Since my body itself had become light, dealing physical damage seemed to be impossible.

'Then what about skills?'

Next I tried using a skill.

I stopped time and concentrated to cast Destruction Beam.

'It works.'

The concentration went through normally.

So other skills could be used too.

I canceled the concentration and tried an aura skill this time.

'This one doesn't work.'

Physical-type skills applied directly to the body, like aura or Skin Hardening, didn't function.

But whatever the case with physical skills, magic-type skills were fully usable.

The enemy couldn't touch me.

But I had every way in the world to hurt them.

Which made the next step simple.

Fwoosh!

I weaved through the monkeys at light speed, spraying out magic skills.

Destruction Beam, Hellfire Eruption, Searing Zone, Frost Mist, Flame Barrage, Thunder Strike, Blade Whirlwind, Fairy Light Bullet...

My perception was tuned to light speed too, so control wasn't an issue.

I was moving so fast that even Destruction Beam and Thunder Strike looked like they crawled out at a snail's pace once cast.

Hundreds of monkeys burst apart one after another.

I aimed the spells at wherever they clustered thickest.

In what felt like a single instant to the rest of the world, I ran through a full cycle of skills.

Then I stopped time again, recovering willpower as I thought it over.

'...Still too many.'

Wiping out monkeys that were basically scarecrows was easier than breathing.

But there were a million of those scarecrows.

Then a thought struck me.

What would happen if I used the Demon King's power in this state?

While Radiant Incarnation was active, I took no damage of any kind.

So what about the overload that came from using the Demon King's power?

Wouldn't that get nullified too?

'Demon King.'

I kept Radiant Incarnation active and switched with the Demon King.

- What a strange power this is.

The Demon King, now in control of my body, laughed like he found it amusing.

Normally the Demon King dismissed skills as pale imitations, not even worth calling magic, but even he seemed to find something genuinely interesting in a Legendary-grade skill.

The Demon King began casting magic right away.

Shards of ice sprayed in every direction, popping monkeys as they went.

I kept stopping time whenever needed and recovering willpower to match.

Normally, exerting this much power should have started freezing my body over...

But I felt no strain building up. Not even a little.

Confirming that the guess had been right, I felt a faint shiver run through me.

While Radiant Incarnation held, the Demon King's power could be used without any restriction at all.

- Heh heh.

The Demon King, having confirmed the same thing, started cutting loose in earnest.

Unlike skills, the Demon King's magic had no cooldown.

A massive wave of cold pulsed outward, and blades of ice tore through the air.

The monkeys were swept away, literally.

In under a second, over a thousand of them seemed to have died.

Radiant Incarnation could last ten minutes.

Let's see, if we kept this pace and cleared roughly two thousand a second...

Wiping every last one out within ten minutes might actually be possible...?

Rumble rumble rumble...

That was when the tremor hit.

Damn it, now what?

A rocky mountain was splitting open all of a sudden.

What burst out from it was a black-furred monkey, mountain-sized.

It looked even bigger than the antlion boss on Floor 8.

That was the Floor 9 boss.

Groaaaaaaar!

When the boss monkey roared, heaven and earth shook.

As if responding to it, the other monkeys all howled at once, and dark red haze began shimmering around their bodies.

Some kind of buff effect, maybe?

The Demon King stopped weaving through the monkeys and rose into the sky.

Then the boss turned to look this way and opened its mouth wide.

Craaaackle!

A sphere formed with a burst of dark red sparks.

A massive beam fired out, just like when I used Destruction Beam.

I didn't even bother dodging. Just ignored it.

Hit directly by the destructive beam, my body scattered for a moment like scattered light, then reformed.

But why had the Demon King risen into the sky?

Whoooosh...

The Demon King began gathering cold.

Just like when he'd taken out the antlion boss and the isolation zone boss at once...

Except this time, there was no end to it.

With the constraint of overload gone, the Demon King started drawing in power endlessly.

'What the...'

I had to keep stopping time over and over, refilling willpower to match.

By the end, it felt like I'd refilled at least a few hundred thousand worth of willpower.

Without Radiant Incarnation, my body would have collapsed dozens of times over by now.

An unimaginable, staggering amount of energy gathered above the Demon King's head.

- Watch closely.

The Demon King declared.

- This is real magic.

He unleashed that massive wave of cold...

And the world turned white.

Whoooooooosh...

A blizzard howled.

The monkeys froze solid.

The boss monkey, the smaller monkeys, even the rocky mountain split in half.

Everything in sight turned to ice crystals and scattered away.

As if the entire world had frozen over and met its end.

The army of a million stone monkeys vanished into silence, just like that.

'...'

I stared down at the sight, blank.

Words wouldn't come.

Was this the Demon King's real power?

- Don't be fooled. Even this is weakened.

'...This is?'

- I'm not drawing on my true mana here, so naturally there are limits.

I guess at full strength he could freeze a whole planet or something.

The difference meant nothing to me either way, so I just took it as a given.

Anyway...

The boss was dead, and it looked like no monkeys were left.

For a long while, no message came up.

Did this mean the clear wasn't going through? Or was it...

I felt a strange sense of déjà vu from Floor 3.

Like the Tower had gone silent.

[Astonishing Clear.]

That was when the message finally appeared.

[You have successfully cleared Nightmare difficulty Floor 9.]

[Absorbing the power of the floor.]

[Your level has increased.]

[Your level has increased.]

[Your level has increased.]

.

.

.

[Your level has increased.]

[You are the first to successfully clear Nightmare difficulty Floor 9.]

[The reward tier has been significantly upgraded.]

[Moving to the reward room.]

[Floor 9 has been cleared on all difficulties.]

[The Tower is calling new participants.]

I was moved to the reward room.

Only then did I get my body back and release Radiant Incarnation.

An Astonishing Clear had popped up.

The second one since Floor 3 Hidden.

So it could show up even outside a hidden clear.

Back on Floor 3, the cannon had done the heavy lifting. This time, I'd pulled off a cheat-tier clear thanks to the Demon King's power.

Either way, sweet deal.

I checked the upgraded reward.

I'd half expected a Legendary-grade skill stone...

But what showed up wasn't a skill stone. It was an item.

An hourglass filled with shimmering, rainbow-colored sand.

I picked up the hourglass and checked its information.

[Special Item: Hourglass of Acceleration]

Select one of the following effects to apply permanently. Once chosen, the effect cannot be changed.

1. Reduces the cooldown of all owned skills by 70%.

2. Fixes the cooldown of one random skill to 0 seconds.

Reading the description, I was floored.

...An item that cuts skill cooldowns?

All of them? By 70 percent?

That was an insane effect.

A 70 percent reduction meant I could cycle skills three times faster.

Which basically meant my combat power tripled. At least in raw numbers.

And the other effect... fixing one random skill's cooldown to 0 seconds.

'...This one's broken too, isn't it?'

If I picked effect 2.

The one restriction I had, cooldown, would disappear completely.

For a single skill, anyway.

What if Destruction Beam's cooldown became 0 seconds?

I'd be able to spam Destruction Beam endlessly. Literally infinite.

Except it was random.

If some useless skill got picked, like some Common-grade Swing skill.

I'd basically be throwing a gem straight into the trash.

Sustained skills like Searing Zone or Frost Mist getting picked wouldn't mean much either.

How many skills did I even have right now?

Counting everything, even the minor junk skills, it came to well over thirty.

The odds of the skill I actually wanted getting picked weren't high.

There was also the constant worry that the Tower might rig the odds against me somehow.

Going the safe route, obviously effect 1 was the right call.

But...

"..."

Radiant Incarnation.

What if this absurdly broken skill's cooldown became 0 seconds?

I would become, without exaggeration, invincible.

I'd just confirmed that while Radiant Incarnation was active, I could even use the Demon King's power without restriction.

If I could keep Radiant Incarnation active indefinitely, my power ceiling would blow straight past Andromeda.

Thinking about it that way, picking effect 1 right now felt like too much of a waste.

...No need to rush into using it right away.

I put the hourglass into Subspace.

[Difficulty: Nightmare]

[Floor: 9]

[Level: 117]

[Willpower: 7,440/7,440]

[Skills: Radiant Incarnation (Legendary+), Destruction Beam (Epic+), Hellfire Eruption (Epic)(+1), Subspace (Epic), Air Step (Epic)...]

[Nightmare]

Participants: 773,619

Time Limit: 2 years 3 days 10 hours 29 minutes 56 seconds

Highest Floor Reached: Floor 10

"Phew."

Floor 9 cleared, one way or another.

Floor 8 had only just been cleared not long ago, and Floor 10 was waiting right around the corner...

There wasn't much sense of accomplishment.

I wasn't exactly in a position to savor it anyway.

[Do you want to exit the Tower?]

I exited right away.

Time to give my worried family the good news.

* * *

After Person123 posted the Floor 8 clearing info.

People had been discussing when he'd tackle Floor 9 next.

[Carolie: Since it almost went wrong once, won't he take on Floor 9 sooner than 20 days this time?]

[Golden: No guarantee something like Floor 8's gimmick won't show up again]

[Weed: I bet he'll announce something like a hundred-day buffer soon, yeah]

Even on Floor 8, the 20-day limit had nearly not been enough.

To avoid that happening again, people figured Person123 would move faster going forward.

Of course...

[Floor 9 has been cleared on all difficulties.]

[The Tower is calling new participants.]

[Crow: ?]

[KimPark: ??]

[Christopher: Sorry, what?]

Nobody had imagined it.

That Floor 9 would be cleared just days after Floor 8.

The world flipped upside down.

Footnotes:

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