WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Irevi
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Upbeat Newbie the Infinite Regressors Are Obsessed With ◈
Chapter 3: Initiation
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Monolith's official-release open run.
A smashing success.
I couldn't close my mouth at the sight before me.
“Whoa, it’s real! I’m really inside the Tower!”
I had never actually seen it in person.
Yet it was unbelievably familiar.
You know how you’ve never met a streamer in real life, but still feel a growing sense of familiarity with them?
That was exactly how I felt right now.
I had watched so many videos that I felt as comfortable as if I had come home.
The space around me was strangely white.
The platform beneath my feet had SAFE ZONE written across it in letters as large as a front door.
And before me floated a translucent window bearing Monolith’s distinctive interface.
[The Tower praises the courage of the player who entered it first!]
[You will receive a first-entry bonus.]
“I knew there’d be something!”
For the record, this wasn’t a planned reward grab using future knowledge.
My gamer instincts had simply told me there might be something for the first person in.
As for why I hadn’t known in my previous life...
‘The first entrant must’ve kept their mouth shut.’
It was a one-time reward that ended with the first entry anyway.
There was no reason to go around bragging about it.
Flash!
A dazzling swirl of light gathered over my palm.
Then a ruby-colored ticket appeared in my hand.
My heart pounding, I checked it.
[Random-Rank Mana Stone Exchange Ticket]
[Description: The Tower praises your courage in stepping into an unknown world before anyone else.]
[Use this ticket to receive a random-rank mana stone.]
“Oh, a gacha item.”
Mana stones were an all-purpose resource humanity couldn’t live without after the Tower appeared.
And they were handing them out gacha-style.
A fitting bonus for Monolith, a game savvy enough to keep up with the times.
I immediately tore the ticket along its dotted line.
Rrrip.
Ba-ba-ra-bam!
Fwoooosh!
[You have won an F-rank Mana Stone!]
The special effects went off like a feeble fanfare.
A small mana stone appeared in my hand.
“Damn it.”
I was an idiot for getting my hopes up.
This game was keeping up with the times a little too well, wasn’t it?
Rigging the odds right from the start?
Still, it was better than nothing.
It might be F-rank, but it would sell for a decent amount.
That was after the Management Bureau had been founded and mana stone research had progressed a little, of course.
‘Will the result be different next time around?’
Well, I wouldn’t know until I tried.
Hoping vaguely that it would be, I stuffed the mana stone away.
This mana stone gacha wasn’t the main event.
Right. The main point hadn’t been grabbing bonuses.
The Monolith open run.
That was the main event.
[Welcome to the tutorial.]
[The tutorial will begin once you leave the Safe Zone.]
[Defeat the enemy within the time limit.]
[10:00]
“Ahh!”
My disappointment over the F-rank mana stone lasted only a moment.
Tears of emotion welled up in my eyes.
I wiped them away with my clothes and took a deep breath.
“The normal-difficulty tutorial had five harmless slimes, right? And I could pick a weapon from the armory next door.”
This was the movement of an Infinite Regressor.
Nothing but charging ahead at full speed using future knowledge.
Unfortunately, this cheat stopped working from Floor 11 onward.
Information beyond that floor was treated as high-level information that ordinary people couldn’t access.
Anyway.
“Is it just normal difficulty? There’s no mention of hard difficulty.”
Honestly, that was a little disappointing.
Still, this was plenty.
Even at normal difficulty, things became utterly insane from Floor 10 onward.
If Han Siyeon hadn’t cleared the hard-difficulty boss, humanity would have been stopped at Floor 10 anyway.
So...
“Let’s run straight to Floor 10 first!”
With that, I stepped out of the Safe Zone.
Then noise began to fill the air around me, like the game system had malfunctioned.
Bzzzzzt!
[Warning! Warning!]
[A distortion in the time axis has been detected!]
[Readjusting difficulty!]
[Difficulty changed from Normal to Hard!]
[Difficulty changed from Hard to Extreme!]
[Difficulty changed from Extreme to Infinity!]
[A death penalty will be imposed upon failure!]
A blaring siren.
Red warning windows appearing all around me.
Flash!
Before I had time to sort out my thoughts, the scenery changed around me.
And the tutorial... no, the enemy for the Infinity-difficulty tutorial appeared before me.
“Squeeeal!”
A horrible stench.
A green giant that looked two meters tall.
Glowing red eyes and boar-like tusks.
...And a huge club in its hand.
The only thing it had in common with a slime was that it was green.
In other words, anyone who wasn’t an idiot could tell this thing was not a slime.
It was an orc.
Not just any orc, either.
The Orc Chieftain, the boss of Normal Difficulty Floor 10 that had driven humanity to despair.
My heart pounded madly.
‘Infinity Difficulty.’
Even while facing this monster, that one phrase kept circling my mind.
Right. You weren’t going to let me coast through it?
Not bad.
Like I’d thought before, there was a flavor to easy wins.
And there was a flavor to difficulty, too.
“Whew.”
The game had already started.
If I stood around blankly, it was game over.
I calmly regained my senses.
‘Whatever happens, I need a weapon first.’
I had awakened the absurdly overpowered ability of infinite regression, but my actual combat ability was that of an ordinary person.
It was common sense that characters with high potential had absurdly low early-game power.
While everyone else threw fire and lightning around, I had to claw my way upward.
In other words, there was no way an unaugmented ordinary person could beat that insane monster.
Even the strongest players had been stopped by that thing. What more was there to say?
I quickly looked around for a weapon.
Only then did I properly take in my surroundings.
This was a grassland.
A vast, natural grassland swept by a refreshing breeze.
Which meant it was an empty goddamn field!
“Huh?”
I wasn’t usually someone who got flustered easily.
But I froze for a moment.
“There’s no weapon?”
“GRAAAAH!”
Thwack!
A clean swing.
My head burst.
It was such a clean strike that I didn’t even have time to feel pain.
With only the thought that I should duck the first attack pattern flashing through my mind, I died.
That was my second regression.
* * *
My third life.
My second life as an Infinite Regressor.
I opened my eyes in my tiny apartment again.
Despite dying twice, I was far calmer than I’d imagined.
Was it because both deaths had happened so fast?
Clutching my throbbing head as phantom pain came belatedly, I opened the gallery menu.
“Whew, that’s a relief.”
I had died without even pressing the stop-recording button, so I had been wondering whether I would have to film it again.
Apparently, the system had an automatic save function that activated upon death.
I uploaded a post along with the saved video.
[Newbie Initiation]
[Author: Amor Fati]
(Thumbnail: face close-up through a fisheye lens)
The difficulty is completely insane lol
Going straight into attempt two
The comments didn’t appear immediately.
The video was fairly long, so people probably needed time to watch it.
I was looking forward to their reactions, but I had no time to waste.
The Tower at Infinity Difficulty was calling me!
After pressing record on the gallery camera again, I entered the Tower once more.
“Attempt two! Going in!”
* * *
Paradise Elven Heim.
This place, called a paradise on earth, was a beach bathed in warm sunlight all year round.
Recovel Mirazian lay in a hammock strung between palm trees, wearing sunglasses as she stared blankly into space.
“Hey, miss. You here alone?”
A blond Dark Elf.
The contrast between his hair and skin was striking.
How many times had she heard that line already?
Recovel answered without even looking at him.
“Fuck off, asshole.”
“Feisty. I like you even more, aaagh!!!”
With a flick of Recovel’s finger, his precious long ears were sliced off in an instant.
In Murim, the world of Martial God, this was a realm called the Heart Sword.
No one would dare criticize her for using such an exalted realm to deal with a punk like this.
Not in Fantasia Continent, the world she lived in.
Nor in the Infinite Regression Gallery.
There was no one stronger than her.
Recovel the Solo Hero.
Worn out by infinite regression, she was enjoying an eternal vacation.
“Heh-heh.”
She snickered at the thumbnail of the video uploaded by the newest newbie, Amor Fati.
“Is this guy totally nuts? Still, his hair’s black too. Maybe he’s from a world similar to Martial God’s?”
It was joy she hadn’t felt in a long time.
Hoping this newbie would last a while, she clicked the video.
The newbie, Amor Fati, whose nose was absurdly enlarged by the lens, immediately opened his mouth.
“-Newbie infi”
“Ahh, what the hell?!”
Recovel unknowingly let out a scream infused with aura.
Palm trees toppled over, a sandstorm struck the beach, and the humans and other races nearby lost consciousness from her Lion’s Roar.
“No, no. A newbie newbie’s tower-climbing journey begins now. Going in!”
“...”
How long had it been since her heart had dropped like that?
This newbie had tossed her emotions around in an instant.
After calming herself down, she watched the video the newbie had uploaded with her enhanced vision.
When the newbie rejoiced at entering the Tower, she rejoiced with him.
“Those are the good days.”
When she saw that the mana stone from the reward ticket was a dud, she smiled faintly.
His dejected feelings showed so clearly that he had a somewhat cute side, too.
“This is kind of cute. I should save it.”
Then she saw the difficulty rise to Infinity Difficulty.
“Ah.”
She despaired.
The newbie’s world.
A tower-climbing setting like that had an utterly abnormal level of difficulty.
It made it impossible to use the greatest advantage of infinite regression.
Everyone lived with their own lack.
And Infinite Regressors possessed the means to discover the deficiencies of those around them.
What did that mean?
It meant they could identify people who would grow strong in the future and gain more allies by fulfilling what those people lacked.
A panacea for someone living with an incurable illness.
Praise for someone who had never been recognized.
They could appear as the savior of people destined to rise to greatness, raise them into allies, and carve out routes together from countless angles.
The Tower shut down both of those advantages entirely.
It forced solo play from the start.
There were no other routes.
There was only climbing the Tower.
“Haa.”
Recovel herself insisted on solo play because she had been battered by betrayal and grown sick of people.
Still.
The base difficulty was already hellish, and now the Tower had assigned Infinity Difficulty to him.
“This newbie won’t last long.”
The Infinite Regression Gallery could help all it wanted, but the fate of an Infinite Regressor was to find their own way through.
No matter how exceptional the swordsmanship passed on to them was.
No matter how great the magical knowledge they were taught.
If they gave up, it all came to nothing.
She had experienced it countless times already.
Puppetmaster, a puppeteer from another dimension, had said this newbie had less than a two percent chance of dropping out.
‘Really?’
Wasn’t that before anyone knew the Tower was set to Infinity Difficulty?
The harder it was to reach a happy ending, the faster newbies gave up.
“He seemed unhinged, so I had some expectations. Too bad the difficulty isn’t on his side.”
Recovel decided she would only nurture him to a reasonable extent this time.
The more affection she gave them, the more unbearable it was when a newbie disappeared.
Just as her interest in the newbie was beginning to fade...
“Hmm?”
She saw it.
At the moment of death, the newbie had kept his eyes wide open as he watched the orc swing its club.
“This is...”
Recovel the Solo Hero pushed her sunglasses onto her head and watched that part again.
He was a natural.
It was not easy at all.
To face a fast attack head-on without closing one’s eyes.
That was a quality even a fully fledged knight needed.
A kind of vision one could only gain by overcoming human instinct.
“Well, look at this guy.”
Human instinct made people squeeze their eyes shut even when a ball came flying at them.
Yet he hadn’t closed his eyes while watching the Orc Chieftain’s club?
Recovel concentrated and looked more closely.
The newbie’s gaze had not merely been watching the orc’s club.
“!”
A route to evade.
At the moment of death, the newbie had been searching for a path to dodge.
Death was a horrific fate even Infinite Regressors could never become accustomed to.
But Amor Fati’s eyes lacked any fear of death.
Instead, they held the look of someone who could not wait for the next try.
“Could this newbie have what it takes?”
Just then, the newbie uploaded a new post to the gallery.
[Fuck, I can’t dodge this lol. Going for try three.]
Footnotes:
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