Climbing the Tower with Time-Stop Ability - Chapter 65

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Climbing the Tower with Time-Stop Ability

Chapter 65

──────

Floor 5 (3)

The Zone 1 boss was around level 20.

The Zone 2 boss was said to be around level 40.

So naturally, I could guess the Zone 3 boss would probably be around level 60.

If that was the case, couldn’t I take it down alone?

There was no way to know for sure until I fought it myself, though.

Obviously, I wasn’t the only one aiming for the first-clear reward from the Zone 3 boss.

People like Peacekeeper Captain Alex and Wang Kai, climbers at the very top level.

Of course, I was confident too.

If I joined the crowd and fought the Zone 3 boss together, I was confident I could claim the highest contribution.

But I couldn’t do that.

So if possible, I planned to face the boss alone. If possible.

The Zone 3 boss had never appeared before, so nobody knew where in Zone 3 it would spawn.

In the end, it was all luck, whoever found the boss first.

What if I was late and someone else killed it first?

That would suck, but there’d be nothing I could do.

Or what if I ended up in a situation where I had to raid the Zone 3 boss with everyone else?

Then, well... I figured I’d just pull up my hood and fight with them.

I couldn’t give up the first-clear reward just because I didn’t want other people seeing my face.

I’d think about that when the time came.

For now, the priority was filling Zone 3’s boss gauge.

[Zone 3 (90.9%)]

Zone 3’s current boss gauge was about 91%.

I had no exact way to tell how long it would take to fill the remaining 9%.

Still, from what people were saying, at this pace it would probably take about another month...

The reason it was filling much slower than Zone 1 was simple: the monsters were much stronger.

I heard even level-30-range monsters appeared in Zone 3.

That meant you needed to be at least in the upper level-20 range to hunt there, and that was probably around the top 1% even on Floor 5.

So I planned to pitch in from now on too.

I entered Zone 1’s forest, summoned Pli, and climbed onto its back.

“Let’s go, Pli.”

Pli took off toward the outer zones like the wind.

In no time, we crossed Zone 1 and entered Zone 2.

You couldn’t miss the zone boundaries; the field environment changed with ruler-straight precision.

Unlike Zone 1’s dense forest, Zone 2 was dry land.

I could see giant scorpion and spider monsters roaming around. Ugh, gross.

I ignored them and kept running.

The farther outward you went, the wider each zone became, so it took longer to leave Zone 2 than Zone 1. Still, it didn’t take long.

The moment we crossed into Zone 3, the air turned hot.

The field had changed into a lava zone.

“Oh...”

Lava flowed through deep cracks in the ground.

On rocky mountains in the distance, there were even lava falls pouring down.

I watched the scenery for a moment, then got off Pli’s back.

From here on out, it was hunting time.

“Go wild, Pli.”

I ordered Pli to kill every monster it saw. But no matter what, never attack people, and never reveal itself.

The instant I gave the order, Pli shot forward like an arrow toward a Lava Giant walking in the distance.

I set Pli to auto-hunt and hunted on my own.

I spotted a giant snake monster crawling in the distance and moved.

Alright, let’s fill the rest of this gauge fast.

* * *

Low-level climbers, or climbers who weren’t interested in boss raids, might not have known, but Floor 5 had felt like the calm before the storm lately.

The reason was the Zone 3 boss that would appear soon.

How strong would it be, would the raid succeed safely, and who would take the first-clear reward?

It was only natural for tensions to rise between the Peacekeeping Corps and the Black Star Society.

“We can’t let Wang Kai take the reward again...”

At the executive’s worried words, Peacekeeper Captain Alex let out a short sigh.

“Yeah. No kidding.”

“Are you confident?”

“Hard to say. That bastard Wang Kai is no joke.”

Wang Kai, China’s top Hard-difficulty record holder.
Alex, America’s top Hard-difficulty record holder.

In the end, it was a fight between the two leaders, one from the Peacekeeping Corps and one from the Black Star Society. One of them would take Zone 3’s first-clear reward.

If the Zone 3 boss appeared, the Peacekeeping Corps and Black Star Society had agreed to work together and raid it first. First.

It had been the same two years ago, during the Zone 2 boss fight.

And back then, Wang Kai took the reward with the highest contribution score.

The level gap between Alex and Wang Kai was currently four levels, in other words, just one floor apart.

It wasn’t a huge gap, so Alex wasn’t lacking confidence, but Wang Kai still had a slight edge.

To be honest, Alex never trusted this kind of competition.

Nobody even knew how strong the boss would be, yet instead of giving everything to cooperate, they had to keep each other in check...

But it wasn’t like they could split a single first-clear reward, and neither side could simply give it up, so this situation was unavoidable.

“I hear Wang Kai’s been showing up on Floor 5 a lot lately too?”

“Yes. Looks like the Black Star Society is going all-in on Zone 3 hunting.”

“The gauge is going to fill eventually anyway. What’s the rush...”

Lately, the speed of the Zone 3 boss gauge rising hadn’t looked normal either.

It had been around 90%, then in less than a week it passed 95%.

...No, even so, wasn’t that way too fast?

Had Wang Kai decided to go all out and rampage through Zone 3?

“What if Person123 is hunting in Zone 3 right now too?”

“...Person123?”

“Wouldn’t it make sense for him to be aiming for the first-clear reward too?”

Alex stroked his chin at that reasonable point.

If Person123 had really come to Floor 5, Alex and the Peacekeeping Corps were more than willing to yield the reward to humanity’s savior. The Black Star Society probably wouldn’t.

If he became their center, it might not be impossible for Floor 5’s climbers to unite as one, but he seemed to have absolutely no intention of showing himself to others...

“By the way, I’m curious. How strong do you think Person123 is?”

By now, everyone openly knew that Nightmare difficulty gave ten levels of reward per floor.

The executive answered.

“Looking at the difficulty of the sub-towers he cleared, he’s definitely not just around level 40.”

“Stronger than me or Wang Kai?”

“I don’t know about that.”

At any rate, if this pace continued, the Zone 3 boss would appear within a week.

If Wang Kai ended up taking the reward again, then so be it...

More than that, Alex wanted this to end without too many people getting killed or badly hurt.

* * *

Looking down into the canyon, I saw a huge swarm of Red Snakes packed together.

“Wow, jackpot.”

I split Flame Strike and fired it, bombarding them at random.

KWAAAAANG!

About half of them blew up, and I dropped down to finish the rest with other skills.

It had been about a week since I started hunting seriously in Zone 3.

Whenever I had time, I entered Floor 5 and worked hard to help fill the boss gauge.

There were three main monster types in Zone 3.

Lava Giant.

If you smashed their bodies, lava splashed out instead of blood, so if you fought too close, you could get hit badly.

Red Snake.

The snakes I just killed. They were absurdly huge, had no special abilities, but were fairly fast.

And lastly, pterosaurs.

Kkiiiiieeeek-

Perfect timing, one was screeching loudly as it flew over my head.

It looked exactly like a pterosaur, so people just called it a pterosaur.

I fired Flame Strike and shot it down.

Even Zone 3’s normal monsters were only around level 30 at most.

They weren’t even slightly threatening to me, so the hunting itself was going smoothly.

At first, though, I’d expected something like satisfying RPG mob-farming...

But cases like this, where monsters were clustered in one place, were rare. Most of the time, one or two wandered around far apart, so progress wasn’t as fast as I’d hoped. I wished the field had a higher monster density.

For the record, I had seen other climbers too.

Only once or twice, since Zone 3’s field was so huge. Of course, I just stayed hidden with Stealth and passed by.

Watching them hunt, everyone was having a rough time.

[Zone 3 (95.1%)]

Zone 3’s boss gauge had now passed 95%.

At this rate, it looked like it could hit 100% within a week.

“Ugh, smells burnt.”

I walked past the charred black corpses of the exploded Red Snakes.

Apparently, defeated monsters disappeared after a certain amount of time, so if you wanted byproducts, you had to process them quickly and carry them outside the zone boundary.

I heard Red Snake scales sold for pretty high prices too.

Naturally, I just hunted monsters and didn’t collect byproducts.

Even if I gathered them, where would I sell them? And even if I could sell them, processing each one would be a pain.

I left the canyon and moved elsewhere.

Zone 4, outside Zone 3, was a freezing region swept by blizzards.

The environment changed with ruler-straight precision.

I still couldn’t enter Zone 4. If I tried, an invisible barrier blocked me.

To enter Zone 4, I had to kill the Zone 3 boss first.

“I wonder if I can handle the Zone 4 boss too...”

Lately, I’d been thinking about whether I could take down the Zone 4 boss after defeating the Zone 3 boss.

I was always in a position where I had to push my specs as high as possible before challenging the next floor.

First, I had to kill the Zone 3 boss.

I kept moving around, searching for monsters and hunting.

* * *

Peacekeeping Corps Team 3, continuing its hunt in Zone 3, spotted a Red Snake approaching from far away.

“Red Snake! Careful!”

The members quickly prepared for combat and engaged it.

But the Red Snake was already badly wounded.

“...Looks like someone was hunting this one and lost it. Team 2 maybe?”

The members talking over the corpse turned their heads.

This time, people were approaching from the direction the Red Snake had come from.

The members’ expressions immediately hardened. They were climbers from the Black Star Society, not the Peacekeeping Corps.

The Black Star Society climbers who came close also stiffened after seeing the Red Snake’s corpse.

“We practically had that one finished... You think it’s okay to steal it like this?”

The Peacekeeping side’s team leader stepped up and spoke in disbelief.

“You’ve gotta be kidding. If you lost it, that’s your fault. And what are you even doing here? This is our zone.”

Peacekeeping Corps in the east, Black Star Society in the west.

That was the unspoken rule maintained to avoid conflict.

It wasn’t like the zones were split into perfectly measured halves, but still, this place was clearly Peacekeeping Corps hunting ground. And the other side had crossed into it.

A Black Star Society climber sneered.

“Your zone? Since when did we have bullshit like that? You talk like it was ever officially decided.”

“You little...”

“Anyway, that’s ours, so hand it over and get lost.”

“Stop barking nonsense and get lost yourselves. Unless you want to die.”

The mood turned ugly.

While hunting, it wasn’t unheard of for encounters like this to happen.

And each time, it had stopped at a standoff, then both sides backed off. It had never escalated into a direct clash.

But right now, with the Zone 3 boss issue, both the Peacekeeping Corps and the Black Star Society were at the sharpest edge of tension...

Like a rope stretched tight finally snapping.

“Aaaagh!”

“Y-you crazy bastards!”