WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Regression is Too Much

Chapter 178

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The regressor wanders (14)

Einstein, who argued that time flows relatively, was a genius.

"...Should I text her."

Take lying in bed at night, debating whether to reach out to Choi Ji-won. Time moves at a crawl.

Flat on my back, fiddling with my phone. The pillow turned warm from body heat, so I'd flip it over. I'd force my eyes shut and lie there doing nothing, trying to will myself to sleep, until the restlessness won out and I sat up, only to find less than two hours had passed.

Blame the enhanced physical abilities. Sleep requirements had dropped. No battle fatigue to burn off, just sitting around at home, and staying asleep for long in this body would've been strange anyway.

Not that it was all bad.

Crack.

"Oh, almost got me."

A reflex sharp enough to stop my jaw mid-bite, half a second before a hairline fish bone could pierce the gum. That was new.

Lurch.

"Whoa, that could've been bad."

Whenever I mindlessly clipped a doorframe, I'd catch myself on one leg before anything worse could happen.

By the standards of ordinary daily life, I was basically past the point of ever needing to regress. Not because my skin had grown too tough to damage. I was just, simply put, too strong. At the very least, I would never regress over failing to manage my own body. That I could say with certainty.

Sitting at home with a drink and the TV on, I'd catch myself thinking: this is how I want my life to be. No crushing worries, just happy, slow and warm. Endlessly grinding the same situations while my sanity wore down to nothing, versus squandering time like garbage and taking it easy. The second option suited me far more.

Of course, if there are moments when time crawls, there are moments when it flies.

"Here, have a glass."

"Thank you."

Out meeting people, time burned through at a furious pace. Every moment was a calculation. Image to maintain, smile to keep measured, and then somehow it was already past midnight.

"Ah, now that's the stuff."

"Good whiskey really is something."

Oddly enough, a lot of players were genuinely fond of imported stuff. Not that you could get drunk on purpose the way characters do in wuxia and fantasy novels, deliberately suppressing your own body's defenses to let the alcohol through. That wasn't possible. Players past a certain floor simply could not get drunk. The technique required was well beyond anyone's current reach.

So why drink at all? Obvious.

"Do you know how much this bottle costs? Five million won. Five million."

To show off.

The ways a talented player could earn money were genuinely varied. YouTube, if that was your thing. Joining some corporation and getting paid steadily for cooperating with experiments. Selling Tower items, though the prices had cratered recently and the returns weren't what they used to be.

Earn more money than you should at your age, and naturally your eyes start drifting toward flexing. Buy an expensive car. Drop hundreds of thousands on games. Drink whiskey and post about it on social media. It was practically the standard path for players who made it big.

"Jun-ho-ssi, have some. Have some."

"Ha ha."

In my head, I drew a large X over the faces of players like these. Fools so distracted by the perks that the Tower had become an afterthought. Not that I was going to do anything about it. I wasn't crazy. But they were off my internal list of potential companions.

"Would you... be willing to spar?"

"Do you have any items worth trading for this?"

The diligent ones, by my measure, were out there too. The type who showed up with a sparring request, or came with items in hand looking to barter.

"Ah... I've actually stopped climbing recently, so..."

"...I see."

I turned down their offers politely, but in my head I underlined every name. Players worth keeping an eye on.

After wrapping up the meetings with Korean players and heading home, I'd find the Grim Reaper Yuuki's documents waiting on the desk where he'd left them. From what I knew, the number of black market information brokers Yuuki was running these days had crossed twenty, and when you factored in all the people those brokers employed in turn, the thickness of that stack made perfect sense.

"Ha. Incredible what's possible in a democratic society."

Skimming through the files, one thought kept rising to the surface. This world was far more dangerous than I'd imagined. With no reliable way to stop crimes committed through player abilities, countries with poor law enforcement had descended into outright chaos. Give it a little more time, and a nation collapsing wouldn't even be worth mentioning.

"..."

Truth was, I still hadn't made up my mind. Whether killing the people who needed to be killed was the right thing to do. Looking at how the world was unraveling, though, the elder's view, that you had to kill the ones who had to go, carried a little more weight with every passing day.

Short of some new technology being invented, there was no way to stop a deranged player from acting out. With all the rewards handed out from Floor 11 through 15, the average firepower of players was climbing every single day.

"The moment guns can no longer hold them back..."

A real age of players would be coming. Every time that thought surfaced, I found myself turning Yuuki's documents over in my hands. The human trash listed in those pages wasn't one or two people.

"..."

What was I supposed to do. Night after night, that question followed me into the dark.

One month. Two. Three.

Eight months after we had gone our separate ways, Choi Ji-won reached out.

"Hey, have you heard the rumor?"

"What rumor?"

"We just didn't know about it until now, but... apparently the US had an item warehouse. As in, up until about two months ago."

"What?"

"It's less rumor and more half-confirmed fact, honestly. I heard about it through government channels."

The American government had been pouring enormous attention into the Tower's nature and, accordingly, had been openly purchasing items.

"They stored everything in a warehouse out in Arizona... and then a government official leaked the location."

America's secret warehouse had its location exposed in the most absurd way possible. A mercenary group gambling their lives for a fortune launched an assault on it. The attack failed, but the site had been blown, and the story was that America's treasure vault had since been moved somewhere new.

"The raid happened a month ago, apparently. The warehouse was set up in Arizona two months before that."

"Don't tell me..."

"Think we could use this?"

Ji-won's voice carried a note of unmistakable pleasure.

"I'm not saying we steal the items. But... we use up all the one-time elixirs and buff items in one go, then regress. What do you think?"

"I'll keep it in mind."

Right. A regressor ought to have at least one lucky break like this. I burned the warehouse's rough location and the approximate dates into my memory. Something to put to use after regressing back.

Good news always comes paired with bad, though.

"...Still nothing."

No reply had come to the message I'd sent William Smith, the American healer. Hard to say for certain, but probably just swamped, no room to breathe. There was no shortage of sick people in the world, and William was the one person treating them for free.

Already stretched this thin now. If monsters started invading, how much worse would it get? How much more would his time be worth? I had wanted to warn him somehow, even indirectly, but with no response coming through, there was nothing to be done.

Still, Kang Chan, Ahn Gyeong-jun, Park Cheol-jin.

All the players I knew had managed to reach Floor 15 over the past eight months, and I had been able to warn each of them that monsters might appear. A small mercy.

The remaining time burned away quickly, spent warning every trustworthy player who had made it to Floor 15 or above that something might be coming.

-Estimated time: two hours from now. Please prepare.

"Ji-won, I'll come to you."

"Okay."

Ten in the morning. According to Michael Zetter's email, the hourglass of fate would reach its end around noon.

I arrived at Ji-won's apartment and settled in to wait. The large SUV I'd bought to prepare for whatever was coming was parked outside.

"..."

"..."

One minute to zero.

The TV was on in the living room, social media feeds open on the computer, YouTube running on our phones. The logic was simple: if anything strange happened, modern people would reach for their phones first.

"..."

"...?"

No matter how long we waited, outside was quiet. More precisely, nothing was there that shouldn't have been.

"Hey, give it back!"

"No? Why should I? How much are you gonna give me?"

Children playing, loud and easy.

"Oh, Jimin's mom!"

"Minseo's mom! What's that in your hand?"

"Oh, the supermarket had pork belly on sale~"

Housewives trading gossip.

Woof! Woof woof!

Grrr...

Dogs out for a walk, bickering with each other.

The warm, peaceful atmosphere of a midday weekday, the kind that students and office workers never got to feel. Not a trace of anything monstrous, no matter where you looked.

"...Did I get it wrong? Was that Indian player wrong too?"

"...Should we call this good news, I wonder."

The moment our taut, wound-up bodies finally started to go slack.

"...Huh?"

Over on Twitter, a video was racking up views at a ferocious rate.

"...It's a dragon."

In the video, a massive dragon was gliding through moonlit clouds. Reportedly filmed in Pittsburgh, and the scene was so utterly unreal, so impossible to fully absorb, that everyone was still arguing over whether the footage was genuine.

"...It has begun."

From where I stood, knowing what I knew, this video meant only one thing.

The invasion had started.

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