WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

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◈ Regression is Too Much

Chapter 185

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The regressor agonizes (7)

"Ah, I forgot to mention this first. I'm sorry for... for being the one to bring up regression."

Ji-won bit her lower lip and looked away.

"I know that waiting longer without regressing would be better for gathering information. The world is in upheaval right now, changing day by day."

"Even so, you still want to regress."

"Because we're... no. Because I'm too powerless."

She turned her phone screen toward me. An internet article.

-'Hero' Choi Ji-won, let's learn more about her.

-[Special Feature] Choi Ji-won, who is she?

-Korea's national power ranked second in the world?! America is stunned, China is on edge...

"Everyone believes in me."

Ji-won rested Bung-bung on her shoulder and bowed her head.

"Usually, that feels good. Like being recognized. The praise made me push harder, if anything."

"But now... because you've gotten weaker?"

"Exactly. Falling short of people's expectations, I can handle that. But... if something massive happens and I can't do a single thing about it, I can't stand it. These people are counting only on me."

Ji-won had always enjoyed attention without being consumed by it. Her late father had taught her that: the only person she ever truly needed to stand tall before was herself.

But this situation. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn't hold her head up.

"Even at Namsan, I would've lost without help. If that's what a single tiger could do to me, what about everything that comes after?"

"There's no guarantee they'll be stronger. No guarantee they'll be weaker, either."

"That's true, but... I just hate the idea of standing there helplessly while everything falls apart around me."

"..."

Ji-won's powerlessness aside, if a new monster appeared in Korea and she failed to stop it, she'd get absolutely buried in criticism. Bright light always casts deep shadow, and somewhere out there, people who hated Ji-won were already hiding. Give them an opening, and they'd come out swinging with everything they had.

"But if we regress and wait another ten months, isn't that pointless? We might know roughly when and where the monsters appear, but..."

"I want us to go straight into the Tower after we regress."

"Straight in?"

"Yeah. Right away. Nothing much happens in the early days after a regression anyway, right?"

"...Ah."

I understood what she was getting at.

"So... you want to climb the Tower as fast as possible, build your strength back up, and then come back to where we are now?"

"Exactly."

We already knew what was going to happen. The past and the future were both mapped out. The only thing missing was raw power.

That gap was why going back right now would be useless. Ji-won wanted to shoot up the Tower as fast as she could and close it.

"With your regression, it won't take that long in real time. Three months at most, probably. That should be enough to build the strength to kill the tiger that came out of Namsan."

Association President Michael Zetter was sitting somewhere in the mid-thirties for floors, last we'd heard. In terms of floor count, that wasn't dramatically higher than when we'd been climbing Floor 15, but the gap in power was incomparable.

"Just reach Floor 30... and then come back to this point. We won't have to watch helplessly anymore. We can actively change the world. It'll also cut down the time we need with each regression."

"That's true..."

Honestly, if someone told me to endure another ten months right now, I wasn't confident I could. Repeating regression inside the Tower felt like replaying a game you already knew, but repeating it in the real world felt like doing army drills day after day. Control your every move to minimize variables, and the stress doubled.

"...I think that's the right call."

Watching the world change lately, I had felt my own helplessness creeping in. More accurately, I'd started to feel like a bystander. All this time I'd been the one driving things forward, and being dragged along instead left me stifled.

The news articles about people dying, the videos on YouTube of grieving families falling apart. I didn't want to see any more of it. The guilt and helplessness pressing down on my chest, the long heavy sighs. I was done with all of that.

Right. Let's climb the Tower again. Let's go along with what the god intended.

"First, there are things to prepare."

So I could face myself without shame.

If you knew you were going to regress a year into the past, what would you do?

Back when the Tower didn't exist and monsters hadn't appeared, I used to daydream about exactly that. The fantasy always ended in the same place: cryptocurrency. Nothing beats it for making serious money fast.

Buy this coin here. Sell that one there. Use massive leverage, make a fortune. The goal was always tens, maybe hundreds of billions of won. Buy a house with it. Be generous to the people around me. Slip free of the shackles of work entirely and just live. That was the fantasy.

What I was doing right now wasn't so different.

"Timing-wise, is India first? Or Japan?"

"This site says India, but... this one has Japan by about thirty minutes?"

"Hmm... my friend who lives in Japan says it's Japan."

"You had a friend in Japan?"

"More like a younger acquaintance. Anyway, Japan is first."

The priority, naturally, was the monsters: when and where they'd appear, what kind, how dangerous. Nail that down first, and everything else would follow.

"Ugh... my head hurts."

"Fighting."

Since my memories were likely to blur through repeated regressions, almost all the memorizing fell to Ji-won. While she stared holes through the organized chart she'd put together, I read through a separate document.

"..."

A list of S-grade and A-grade players, provided by the Association. Ji-won ranked second, which made it obvious that pure combat power and ranking weren't strictly correlated. Still, getting your name on this list meant you were worth paying attention to in some way. Good family background, solid political standing, or just plain strong.

The primary goal was to remember their faces, and for those whose abilities had been made public, to remember the abilities.

The secondary goal was to remember what they'd done and the moments that had made them stronger.

There were more careless people in this world than you'd expect, people who went around boasting about exactly when and how they'd gotten strong. They probably figured it was all in the past, nothing to guard. They hadn't counted on a regressor.

Most of it had happened inside the Tower, though, so the details were invisible to me. That was why I decided to take a gamble.

"...Wonder if this'll work."

On my phone screen was a post from a French player describing what had made them stronger. It was a Fortuitous Encounter from Floor 15 or above, so the contents were hidden from me.

I stared at the photo as hard as I could, trying to commit it to memory as precisely as possible. The idea: once I cleared the relevant floor later, maybe the memory of this photo would update along with it. Possible in theory, unlikely in practice. A shot in the dark, nothing more.

"Ungh..."

"..."

Those two tasks were what I was officially doing. The third thing, the one I was doing on the sly, glancing at Ji-won between pages: reading through the report Azai Yuuki had sent over.

The disposal of the people listed in the Grim Reaper's report was, for now—hold. More precisely, hold for all but two. One had been raping dozens of men and women and living comfortably off it. The other had been using the appearance of wolves in America as cover to kill people and pass it off as monster attacks. A pleasure killer.

What the two had in common—irredeemable human garbage with no hope of rehabilitation. Neither particularly talented. Killing them wouldn't create meaningful variables down the line, so I could handle them without much hand-wringing.

That said, I wasn't going to move immediately. For now, I'd let the Grim Reaper put the fear of god into them and see whether their behavior changed.

Can people change? Are there those who do, and those who never will? That was exactly where the elder's philosophy and Ji-won's came apart.

So what I was planning was a kind of experiment. If the Grim Reaper drove them to the very edge of death and stopped at a warning. If I made them swear they'd never do it again and then left them alone, would they actually change? Or would their nature hold?

The results would set a precedent going forward.

As for the rest of the bad ones, I planned to have the Grim Reaper leave a note at their homes: we're watching you. That ought to keep them in line for a while after the regression. Some cases were morally ambiguous, and some were simply too talented to discard. I'd make my decisions after seeing how those first two behaved.

Either way, after about two weeks of eating, sleeping, and grinding through everything I needed to know, I was ready.

"We're not going straight to Floor 16, right?"

"No. Let's at least sit down with Michael Zetter first, then head into Floor 16."

"Alright."

A brief kiss. I let it linger a moment, then drew Bung-bung just slightly free and nicked my finger with the blade.

Time to climb the Tower again.

[You have taken damage.]

[Returning to the moment of first entry on Floor 15.]

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