Climbing the Tower with Time-Stop Ability - Chapter 126

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

◈ Climbing the Tower with Time-Stop Ability

Chapter 126

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Zone 5 (1)

"This is stunning news. Nightmare difficulty Floor 9 has been cleared. Just four days after Floor 8, Person123 has taken on another challenge..."

After Floor 9 got cleared, people went completely wild.

Challenging a floor when about 20 days remained on the Nightmare timer had been Person123's ironclad rule up to this point.

Sure, plenty had guessed something might change in his challenge cycle after what happened during the Floor 8 clear, but...

Even so, this was extreme.

[Desire: Is this for real... two floors back to back?]
[Davidson: LOL we're guaranteed another year of life!]
[NightSky: I'm too tired to even be surprised anymore. Is he even human?]
[Musashi: Still saying that? He's a god.]
[LightFootstep: He has now completely transcended humanity. Believe in the Person123 Church.]

The Floor 8 clear, the isolation zone crisis, the Floor 9 clear.

All of it had happened within a matter of days.

"What on earth is going on? Humanity hadn't even finished celebrating the Floor 8 clear before Floor 9 was cleared too!"

"It seems clear that something has shifted in Person123's mindset. There are signs he intends to secure a stable time buffer before pushing forward with clears..."

News broadcasts ran nothing but stories about him, all day long.

Experts came on air to analyze what he might have intended by challenging Floor 9 right away.

"Person123! Person123! Waaaaaah...!"

Within days, people had poured back into the streets, chanting their savior's name all over again.

The whole world was stunned and overjoyed at once.

The Nightmare timer had crossed two years for the first time since the Tower appeared, and it gave people a sense of hope and stability beyond anything they'd felt before.

"...Haah."

At the Kim Seo-hyeon household.

Kim Seo-a had been scrolling through the news when she closed her laptop.

The Nightmare deadline had stretched out to two years, but she couldn't feel happy about it at all.

Person123's true identity was Kim Seo-hyeon.

The family had only found that out recently.

Honestly, it still didn't feel real.

The highest-floor climber on Nightmare difficulty, the greatest climber in the world.

Humanity's savior, who had saved the world over and over.

That was her brother.

Even watching the whole world praise him, Seo-a only felt her chest tighten with something like suffocation.

She had admired the hero known as Person123 for a long time now.

She used to think it was amazing, the way he threw his life on the line without hesitation to save people no matter how impossible the odds were.

Not anymore.

She realized now that she'd only been able to think that way because he'd been a stranger to her.

Just days ago, during the isolation zone crisis, how terrified had she been that Kim Seo-hyeon might recklessly pick some extreme penalty?

In the end he'd chosen all nine and saved everyone, but still.

Even today, waiting for him to come back out from the Floor 9 clear, her whole body had trembled.

It was that terrifying, watching family risk their lives.

...After reading Kim Seo-hyeon's will, the family had already finished talking through what they'd do.

None of them wanted him risking his life to clear Nightmare. Not one bit.

Nobody knew how much their parents had cried while he was clearing Floor 8.

But how could they stop him?

The entire human race's survival depended on it, and the letter had spelled out exactly what mindset he'd been climbing with all this time...

And now, as if that bolt from the blue wasn't enough, apparently he had to climb the Tower at least once a week or he'd die.

All the family could do for Kim Seo-hyeon was cheer him on. And try not to show their grief, as much as they could manage.

Thankfully, the Floor 9 clear had ended sooner than expected.

He'd come back earlier and smiled like it had been nothing much. Said he fought some monkey monsters or something.

Seo-a opened her laptop again and pulled up Nightmare clear guides to read through.

The strategy posts Person123 put up on the Communication Window were all compiled online where anyone could read them.

Of course, Seo-a had already read through them several times by now.

The fight with goblins on Floor 1, the trap platforms on Floor 2, the undead on Floor 3...

Now that she knew Kim Seo-hyeon was Person123, the Floor 4 clear post was especially hard to look at.

It described how he'd burned his entire body and self-detonated with the boss to clear it.

Feeling tears building up again, Seo-a closed the page.

That was when she heard the fridge door open in the kitchen.

She cracked open her bedroom door and peeked out.

Kim Seo-hyeon, pulling out water to drink, turned to look at her.

"What. Why?"

A calm so total it was hard to believe he'd just come out of clearing another Nightmare floor.

But Seo-a knew better.

They'd lived under the same roof for years. Of course she knew. Kim Seo-hyeon was putting on that calm act for the family's sake.

How had he never once shown how hard it was, through all that time?

How much had he suffered alone, carrying all of it by himself?

Kim Seo-hyeon rummaged through the fridge and pulled out the ice cream Seo-a had bought.

"I'm eating some of this, 'kay?"

"Mm, go ahead..."

He headed back to his room.

Seo-a shut her door too and sat down on the edge of her bed.

"..."

These days plenty of people worshipped Kim Seo-hyeon like he'd actually become some kind of god.

But he was nothing like a god.

Just a person, struggling and suffering the same as anyone.

Seo-a prayed.

If there really was a god out there, please, watch over her brother. Watch over their family.

And if the only way this nightmare ever ended was by climbing the Tower all the way to the top...

Please let him make it there.

* * *

After clearing Floor 9.

I rested for a bit, then got back to the work waiting for me.

[You have entered Nightmare difficulty Floor 9.]

First, writing up the clear guide.

I entered Floor 9 again and rolled the boulder up to the summit.

Flash!

The boulder cracked open and I got the Circlet of Gingoa.

Before the boulder split, I'd tried backing off from a distance to see if I could dodge having it put on me.

Of course, that little trick didn't work.

Once the circlet went on, monkeys swarmed down from the mountain.

Instead of fighting, I ran through the air looking for the gold monkey. There it was.

Screech-!

Spotting me charging in, the gold monkey bolted at that same brutal speed.

I caught up without much trouble and broke every one of its limbs to subdue it.

Freezing it would've been simpler, but the whole point here was writing an accurate guide.

I wanted to test methods other Nightmare climbers could actually pull off.

I dragged the struggling gold monkey along toward the rock mountain.

The mountain course had flat stretches here and there, so with the right route planned out, dealing with a rockslide wouldn't be impossible.

I'd already confirmed the boulder could take some damage and still count for reaching the summit, so chipping the base to fix its balance point would work too.

Capturing the gold monkey looked like it would be a serious obstacle for other challengers.

Catching the thing, dragging it all the way to the magic circle, and fending off the other monkeys attacking along the way, all at once.

Though of course, the U.S. and China hadn't even cleared Floor 7 or 8 yet...

I pushed through the swarming monkeys and dragged the gold monkey to the magic circle in the cave.

The spirit flask drained the gold monkey's energy. Golden light.

I checked inside the spirit flask and found the golden liquid there, just as expected.

This was the Essence of Gold.

I gulped it down right away.

I felt the circlet loosen around my head.

I pulled off the circlet and looked at the monkeys outside the magic circle.

The ones that had looked ready to charge just a moment ago had gone completely docile.

[If you earn Gingoa's approval, the stone monkeys will crown you their king.]

Even outside the magic circle, the monkeys didn't attack me.

So it had gone exactly as the scroll said.

Anyway, what happened to the boss now?

Rumble rumble...

The moment that thought crossed my mind, the tremor started.

I got out of the cave fast. The monkeys followed behind me.

The rock mountain split in half, and the same boss monkey burst out.

Groaaaaaaar-!

Right, of course I still had to fight the boss.

I watched it for a moment and...

Suddenly the monkeys around me all charged the boss at once.

"Oh."

So that's how this worked.

Made sense now.

I'd wondered how I was supposed to solo a boss even bigger than the antlion on Floor 8 with no gimmick to help.

Turned out the trick was earning Gingoa's approval, then teaming up with the monkeys to fight.

More monkeys kept bursting out of cracking boulders and charging the boss.

Not all million monkeys came out, but easily a few thousand kept spawning in.

Of course, the monkeys alone weren't enough to take the boss down.

One swing of its fist or tail wiped out dozens at a time.

My job seemed to be landing hits on the boss while the monkeys held its attention.

I used Air Step to run through the sky and looked down at the boss.

Even this thing was so massive that killing it looked like it'd take forever...

'Huh.'

Something caught my eye.

On its head, poking out from the black fur, a single strand of white fur.

Felt like it might be a weak point, like the reverse scale on a dragon.

Kwaaaaaaang-!

The boss fired a dark red beam that swept across the monkeys on the ground.

I stopped time.

After finishing concentration, I aimed a fully charged Destruction Beam at that white strand and fired.

Then.

Keeeeeeeeee...!

Unlike the heavy roar from before, the boss let out a piercing, high-pitched shriek.

Kwooong!

Then it collapsed.

So it really had been the weak point.

[You have successfully cleared Nightmare difficulty Floor 9.]

The clear message.

I went in and out of Floor 9 a few more times and started writing up the guide.

[Person123: Nightmare Floor 9 clear info.]

I got it all organized and posted within the day.

[Person123: Going forward, I plan to climb Nightmare difficulty quickly instead of timing it to the 20-day deadline.]

I posted an announcement along with it too.

[BlueMarlin: Floor 9 guide is up!]
[Nebula: Posting the guide the same day he cleared it, damn]
[Blade: Huh? An official announcement went up too]
[Galapagos: Yeah, guess he's planning to climb fast from here on]
[Leviathan: Wait, does that mean he's tackling the next floor again in just a few days...? Why does it feel like Person123's in such a rush?]
[Muffin: Don't second-guess Person123-nim's judgment. He clearly knows what he's doing.]

After posting the guide, I headed to Floor 5 and started hunting in Zone 5.

[Zone 5 (83.9%)]

The Zone 5 boss gauge had crossed 80 percent now.

Of course, I was confident I could take it down easily.

My level was past 100 now, so it'd be manageable even without the Demon King's power.

The problem was that I didn't have much time left anymore.

Even climbing the Tower one floor a week, at the current pace, the deadline would probably run out around the time I hit floor 30 or so.

Crack!

I killed a bone dragon and paused.

A thought had suddenly struck me.

'Should I try using Radiant Incarnation here...?'

Up to now, the Zone 5 gauge had filled slowly for two reasons besides the fact that hardly any other climbers hunted there.