WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Editor- Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Regression is Too Much

Chapter 001

──────

Regression is too weak (1)

“Fuck! Where the hell is this place!”

I woke up to a racket coming from somewhere nearby, half-thinking some drunk was raising hell outside my house.

“Ugh… my head…”

Clutching my throbbing skull, I gingerly pushed myself halfway upright.

Every muscle in my body screamed. Did I get wasted and sleep outside last night? No, I even remember punching in the front-door passcode.

I scraped the crust from my eyes and forced them open only to find a sea of people trying to sit up just like me—instead of my familiar one-room studio.

My back felt damp and when I patted the ground, I realized I had been lying on moist soil, a surface that—softness aside—was a million light-years removed from any bed.

Now that I looked around, there were trees everywhere, almost absurdly many.

“Sss… ha.”

I took a deep breath and tasted air so clean it practically carried the tang of phytoncides. Wherever this is, it is definitely not Korea.

A broad clearing ringed by trees, packed with people sitting inside it.

“Fuck! Where are we! Did you even ask for consent before dragging us here!”

They say disbelief steals your voice. Aside from the bald guy squawking like a goose, nobody else raised their tone.

“What the… fuck… what is going on…”

Even the frantic uncle petered out and was left panting.

Pop!

With that cute sound effect, a creature that looked like a winged child popped into view.

“Greetings, lowly humans cheerfully wasting your lives! Lovely to meet you!”

It offered a breezy hello, yet every flash of its pointed teeth looked as razor-sharp as a predator’s.

Great. Wake up in a strange place, find a bunch of other people who seem kidnapped, and now a winged fairy shows up?

This scene feels familiar, so familiar it is downright cliché.

“It’s the tutorial fairy from webtoons…”

Someone muttered.

He was right.

Floating overhead was the tutorial fairy everyone knew, the one that blows heads off at the slightest annoyance.

“…”

I snapped my idiotically gaping mouth shut.

One careless word and I could become the unlucky prologue sacrifice. Plenty of others reached the same conclusion, and a heavy hush blanketed the clearing.

“Uh… um… never mind…”

The pot-bellied bald man, who had looked ready to speak, glanced around and sat down cautiously.

People parked themselves like a flock of docile sheep. Perhaps displeased by our meekness, the tutorial fairy pursed its lips.

“Hmm. Anyone care to speak up? No constructive feedback? If you talk now, I might even entertain it.”

The fairy, fingers itching, flitted about making eye contact. Yet instead of challenging it, everyone stared at the ground to avoid its eyes.

“So you all know us pretty well now, do you? Rather perceptive for lowly humans.”

It tried to provoke us, but…

Unfortunately for the fairy, no idiot in the clearing offered it a reason to pop a skull.

“Hing. Fine. Protocol it is.”

The fairy visibly drooped. Blowing heads must have been its only joy.

“I will stick to the bare-bones briefing and move on. I hate this too, but procedure is procedure.”

In a voice laced with irritation, gloom, and lazy resignation, it began to explain.

To sum up, god is fed up with humanity’s arrogance, and Earth now stands on the divine chopping block.

We must prove our worth, and the method is to climb this Tower. We are the chosen humans summoned for that ascent.

A Tower-climbing premise I had already seen a hundred times.

Basically, climb the Tower or everything dies. That is it.

“So, someone among you needs to clear Floor 66. Otherwise, humanity goes extinct. Understood?”

“…”

People bobbed their heads in cautious silence.

“Right, backdrop covered, so pick whatever looks good here…”

The fairy dumped a pile of assorted weapons in the middle of the clearing.

“The system will handle the rest. Tutorial start!”

With a lazy flick of its wrist, it vanished with another cute pop. An awkward silence lingered after the fairy disappeared.

“What the hell, fuck… my phone has no signal…”

“This isn’t some hidden-camera prank, right? I saw YouTubers build Squid Game sets… maybe it’s like that…”

“There have been simultaneous disappearances lately… do you think this ties in?”

Only then did people begin whispering, spilling the words they had swallowed earlier.

“…Ha. Shit.”

I let out a quiet curse of my own. I had gone to bed at home, yet woke up summoned to the Tower.

My head understood that a novel or webtoon plot had become reality, but it still did not feel real.

I almost pinched my cheek like a comic protagonist, then thought better of it.

“So we really are inside the Tower.”

If this Tower works like the novels I have read, dangers of every kind await outside this clearing, god’s malice poised to take my life.

From this point on my life will be on the line, and the thought made my headache pound even harder.

“Whew… let’s think positive.”

Even dragged into a tiger’s den, you can live if you keep your wits. Moping helps nothing. Now is the time to think and draw up a plan.

In Tower tutorials, how do protagonists usually act again?

“A Tower tutorial, huh.”

Just hearing the phrase made one particular figure pop into my mind, an entity inseparable from the Tower, like fish-shaped bread is from red-bean paste, like a hotdog is from ketchup.

“Sta-tus windowwwww!”

Someone else had the same idea, and his roar of “status window” echoed across the clearing.

“What’s with that kid…?”

“Did he eat something funny?”

The middle-aged folk who knew nothing of Tower fiction stared like he was crazy, while the younger ones, familiar with the trope, watched him with a spark of expectation.

“It worked! It’s up! The status window is up!”

The man screamed in celebration like a striker after scoring.

“Status window!”

“Sta-tus-window!”

“Sta! Tus! Win! Dow!”

Triggered by his success, people everywhere began yelling for their own status windows.

“…Status window.”

I muttered the words quietly, testing them.

[Name: Kim Jun-ho] [LV: 1]

[Traits]

-Regression [EX]

A translucent message panel, in a familiar shape, floated before my eyes.

It looked too barebones to deserve the name status window; shouldn’t there be at least some stats?

But something else grabbed my attention.

“Regression?”

With a trembling finger I pressed the word [Regression].

-Regression [EX]

-Returns you to the moment you first entered each Floor. No limit on uses.

So painfully concise, yet any web-novel reader knows, the shorter the description, the more broken the skill.

“Yes!”

I could not keep the shout of joy inside.

Death regression, the overpowered ability that tops every wish list.

Returning to the past whenever you die is practically the same as being invincible.

The key is that you carry future knowledge back with you.

I had been handed a chance to grow endlessly stronger. Granted, regressors usually get put through hell.

Hard? Sure, but it beats dying forever.

As long as my mind holds up, this power is virtual invincibility. I am chosen.

I am the protagonist.

I will conquer this Tower and save Earth as the hero.

Exhilaration flooded my body, and I trembled with excitement.

“Woo-hoo!”

I sprang up and bolted toward the patch of undergrowth ahead. Goblins? Orcs? Whatever, come at me.

I am invincible, my regression is god-tier.

Just as I burst through the brush…

“Ow.”

The leaves were sharper than they looked, and my ankle was nicked, beads of blood forming.

It’s fine, just a scratch. Information gathering comes first. I had to find out what lay beyond the clearing.

No, calm down. I am getting ahead of myself.

Come to think of it my hands were empty, I had charged off without even a sword.

I should head back and grab at least a blade…

“Huh?”

[You have taken damage.]

[Returning to the moment of first entry on Floor 0.]

A blade…

A…

I blacked out on the spot.

“Fuck! Where the hell is this place!”

My head is pounding like crazy.

A familiar voice. That same uncle from before. Instinct told me I had regressed, because I had already lived this moment once.

But why? When did I die?

Was there poison on that dense thicket?

Yet it did not hurt like poison, and my mind was clear up until the regression. Then did I regress for something other than dying?

I recalled the message just before the regression.

[You have taken damage.]

[Returning to the moment of first entry on Floor 0.]

Taken damage… me?

I did not remember being struck at all.

“No… that can’t be…”

Could I have regressed just because of that tiny cut from the grass?

It was barely a single drop of blood. I looked around the clearing on instinct.

Green here.

Green there.

The moment you step outside, the ground vanishes beneath a blanket of vegetation. It was practically a living prison made of grass and trees.

If… just if… merely being scratched by grass triggers regression…

“…Shit.”

Then escaping this clearing is going to be ridiculously hard.

Footnotes:

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