WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

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◈ Regression is Too Much

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Chapter 207

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The regressor endures (4)

"What's with that guy?"

"Yuck, gross."

Enduring the stares of countless passersby, I lay stretched out on a bench and sorted through my thoughts.

"Hmm..."

When they said this was a floor you clear alone, let me set myself aside and assume a mysterious Player A instead.

A normal player with a fairly high level, decent weapon handling, newly awakened mana control, and one useful trait. In other words, imagine a slightly behind upper-mid-tier player around Floor 10 who somehow grew enough to reach this point.

If that upper-mid-tier player faced me, I would subdue them in ten seconds. Even if they forced up their immature mana, it would not be enough to resist chill. And even if I did not use chill, there was already a gap in swordsmanship proficiency. And that ten seconds was for subduing them. If I meant to kill, I could do it in one second.

I had already raised my stats evenly through achievement levels, and I had repeatedly regressed while scooping up one juicy reward after another.

"Hmmmmm..."

Yet even that normal upper-mid-tier player could not be beaten by a whole truckload of civilians. Guns? Neither Choi Ji-won nor I could reliably dodge gunfire yet, so sure, modern weapons like guns, missiles, and bombs were a different story. But anything else, arrows, clubs, tasers, baseball bats, no civilian could beat a player no matter what they tried.

There was actually a case on a gambling site where they matched an unremarkable upper-mid-tier player against a pro fighter. The fighter skillfully dodged attacks and built up damage, then made one mistake, got his bones shattered, and passed out. That is what happens when base specs are different.

So why even bring up this upper-mid-tier player story? Because I wanted to show how safe the modern world was for players.

Were players invincible? No. A sniper could put a bullet in your head and kill you. A missile could kill you. A nuke could kill you. But if you did not draw nation-level aggro, simply surviving was absurdly easy. Run, hide, lie low, surviving for a week was a joke, a complete joke.

"What, a meteor strike?"

That was why I expected something fantasy-like, not normal modern conditions. Maybe meteors would fall from the sky. Maybe gates would open and monsters would pour out. Maybe a zombie outbreak would start.

Whatever it was, I expected the end of this world. The word survival carried that kind of weight. Floor 4 backed up that expectation.

"..."

At this point, clearing was one thing, but my mental state was the bigger issue. Say a zombie outbreak happened. Could I survive? Not hard. But what about all the civilians?

Dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe more, would die in vain. They would scream in agony. They would beg me desperately to save them, to help them. If a world-scale apocalypse started, there was only so much one person could do. Even if I did my absolute best, people would still die.

Their dying words, their curses, would definitely damage my mind. I could not just write it off with, "They're just people inside the Tower anyway." This place was too vivid, too familiar. The moment I went numb to people dying here, I would also go numb when people in reality died.

"...First I'll do everything I can, and if that fails, I'll regress."

The best-case scenario was using regression to remove the root cause. Until then, do everything possible. If it failed, regress.

The problem was that my next move depended on what kind of disaster this was. If it was the kind where people harm people, like a zombie virus or an epidemic, I should head somewhere sparsely populated, like mountains or the sea. But if it was an indiscriminate disaster like a meteor or gate, then dense city zones with infrastructure and preparation would be better.

"For now, I'll stay in the city."

I'll know in a few hours anyway. No reason to gamble now. Stay in the city for now, see what the disaster really is, and regress afterward if needed.

Save as many people as possible. If the situation goes beyond my ability, give up and regress to protect my mind. Gather as much information as possible, and if possible remove the root cause so that I can end everything the moment I first enter Floor 21. That should be enough.

"Okay."

After organizing everything, I went to sleep on the park bench. I wanted to store up strength for tomorrow morning.

"I don't smell alcohol... Sir! Sir! We got a report and came out! If you sleep here, your face is going to freeze stiff!"

"...Police?"

"Yes, police. We'll take you home, so could you tell us your address? Ah, and please show us your ID."

"Damn."

"Sir? Sir! Where are you going!"

A good citizen reported me, so I had to run out of the park.

"...This is miserable."

Was this what foreign workers felt like? A person with no identity, no money, and no way to prove who he is cannot live normally in modern society.

Even without a survival mission, I was already a fugitive anyway.

Next morning, 8 a.m.

"Hoo..."

I think I slept for about thirty minutes. I slowly raised myself in an overgrown patch with little foot traffic. It was damp, with more insects and animals than people, but the faint chill I spread had frozen the moisture into a floor and drove away the annoying bugs.

"The pad..."

The iPad I had hugged to my chest was fine. I had worried the chill or moisture might break it, but that did not seem to be the case. I rolled my stiff shoulders, checked that my armor was fine too, then lay back down and checked the iPad.

"Hmm..."

First, I checked SNS. Nothing unusual. People were just posting their normal stuff, no talk of any strange emergency.

Then I checked the news channel.

"If anyone has seen this girl, please report it to 112 immediately."

The news on the iPad looked odd. A huge photo of a girl was behind the anchor, and the anchor's tone was dead serious.

"We sincerely ask for your active cooperation, citizens. Thank you."

And it was not just the news.

"...There's a missing child report on the front page."

Newspaper.

"Do they usually run missing children in ad campaigns now?"

"YouTube's been weird lately anyway. Just roll with it."

YouTube.

"Whoa, that startled me."

"Why is some kid's photo plastered that huge?"

Billboards.

Her face was everywhere, on every publicity channel one nation could mobilize. Round eyes, pale skin, baby fat not fully gone yet. She looked around fifth grade to first year of middle school.

What was strange was that this was not an everyday photo. It was a front-facing shot, almost like a criminal mugshot. The background was stark white too.

"...This is weird."

I had never seen anything like this in my life. Sure, I had seen missing child posters on walls, but ads like this everywhere were a first.

Yeah, if this were a kidnapping case, news coverage would make sense. Once it was confirmed as a crime, it being on the news was normal. But a simple missing person case getting this level of headline treatment...

A question born from that eerie mismatch kept growing until it was almost certainty. The timing was perfect too, just before 9 a.m. Calling this coincidence would not be naive, it would be stupid.

"But how is that girl connected to me..."

"Help... please help me, oppa..."

Just as I was wondering how this connected to the survival mission, a girl, pale to the point of being paper-white, staggered toward me.

"No way..."

No way? This was the Tower. I already expected something like this. The girl walking toward me was the exact same girl I had just seen on the news.

That was when I finally understood.

"So this is what they meant by survive."

If you step forward because you will die if you do not, driven by a desperate need to stay alive, that is not courage. That is survival instinct, something beasts can do too.

"Stay there and wait. I'll come to you."

Courage is walking into deadly danger on your own feet even when you know it is dangerous.

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