WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

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◈ Regression is Too Much

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Chapter 239

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The regressor is brave? (7)

I smashed through the wall and moved forward. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. There was no tension, no urgency, just mechanical repetition.

"...About this much, I guess."

By now, I was not really scared of ghosts anymore. If anything, I had started looking forward to what would pop out next. I won whenever I fought, so why fear them?

Still, as the ghosts got easier, my body got worse in return. My heartbeat slowed, my lips turned blue, and my skin went pale all over. My mana was running just as well as before, no, even better than before, but my body could not keep up with all this repeated use of chill. Even after putting points into Vitality right before this, I was in this state. If I had come in without that, I might already have regressed.

Well, right now I was fine. This was not reality, and once I returned to reality, my body would be healthy again. There were no side effects from overusing mana here, so I could go all out without worry.

Even so, part of me kept imagining what ending I would have reached if I had burned through chill like this without regression. Or if my regression threshold had been just a little lower, and my regression point had already been fixed after heavy chill use.

I probably would have collapsed from exhaustion and died, or even if I climbed the Tower to the end, I would have lived a short life. Going all out and then regressing was a restriction, but at the same time it was a shield that protected my body. Pretty ironic.

"Focus. Focus."

I shook off the useless thoughts and went back to smashing walls.

I wanted to rest. Even for a superhuman, repeating destruction with no end in sight was painful and exhausting. I wanted to lie down and sleep for just a bit, but if I fell asleep here, I felt like I would get dragged back into that hospital in my dreams, so I could not sleep.

Just a little more. Just hold on a little more.

After killing a giant eyeball with around three hundred human ears attached to it, I emptied my head and smashed through the corridor again. If Floor 24 was this long, how were other people supposed to clear this? They would go insane before they cleared it. Muttering curses at the angels to myself, I raised my sword again, and then...

[The assigned angel has requested an interview.]

[Y/N]

"Huh?"

Maybe I had worked too hard. Maybe I was hallucinating. I shook my head left and right, threw out the stray thoughts, and brought my sword up again.

[The assigned angel earnestly requests an interview.]

[Y/N]

"...?"

What kind of situation was this?

When people think of the word psychiatric hospital, they usually picture something frightening and negative first. That was why most people hated visiting one.

Naturally, hospitals knew that image too, so they worked hard to make the place feel as comfortable and warm as possible. They grew plants in consultation rooms, used soft colors for the interior, opened lots of windows for sunlight, and kept the lights bright. Basic stuff. They even avoided the name psychiatric hospital and used signs like mental health clinic instead.

And honestly, most psychiatric hospital horror stories were complete nonsense.

"Hey, our hospital has exactly one rule."

"Yes, doctor."

"Never, ever go into Room 404. Got it? No matter what happens. Never."

"...Excuse me?"

"Do not ask why. If you work here long enough, you will understand on your own."

That was true everywhere except here.

A fairly large psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of the city. Room 404 on the fourth floor was a place no one should enter under any circumstances. So far, twelve nurses had gone insane, six workers brought in to demolish the room strangled each other to death, and one police officer jumped naked to his death.

No matter what happened, you could not enter Room 404. Even if you did... you must never, ever fall asleep...

"...That is the setup."

The angel finished explaining while sitting on an old bed in Room 404. This was the first angel I had ever seen wearing glasses, and her hair was not straight but a short wavy perm. Like a pretty engineering major who looked easygoing and a bit rough around the edges.

"Climbers wandered along the boundary between reality and nightmare, and eventually found broken key fragments. You need three in total. The instant the complete key is made, a mysterious door appears in front of you. Open it and step through, and then, 'It was all a dream...' you wake up in Room 404... that was this floor..."

The angel slid a finger up her glasses.

"You encounter aberrations and run, sometimes die... then wake up again in the hospital room and desperately think of a way out. Courage, of course, but also every ability a human has. This floor was designed to test all of it..."

"Soo... why did you call me?"

Bang!

"Are you seriously saying that right now?!"

The moment I cut in, the angel slammed the bed frame hard.

"Climber... are you making fun of me? Huh? You did all that, and now you ask why I called you? A human... and especially a human like you...!"

"No, no..."

What was she even talking about? What did I do? This was unfair.

Whether I was still processing or not, the angel scratched her head furiously and spat out rage.

"One guy escapes by damaging his own brain, some weird girl stores key fragments in subspace so they remain even after game over, the ponytailed girl gets attacked by ghosts and just ignores them and keeps walking... and you, you...! You are the worst of them all!"

"..."

"Because of you, because of you...!"

"Please calm down a little. Hear me out."

I understood she was extremely angry, but I still did not fully get it from my side.

"Soo... I admit I cleared Floor 24 in a way different from the creator's intent."

"It is a trick! A bypass! You took a floor crafted with care and...!"

"So... why did you request this interview? I felt like I was about to clear it anyway if I kept going."

"Clear what?! My head is about to explode!"

Had there ever been an angel this irritable? Compared to this one, Anael really was an angel. Well, this one was an angel too, technically.

"Actually, there is no issue if you fail to find the key fragments and wander forever. Out of countless climbers, one being trapped forever happens all the time."

"...And then?"

"But what you did... what you did... please wait a moment."

The angel stopped mid-rant and sank into thought. She sent signals and called other angels over to hear things, tapped the air with her fingers and examined something closely, then pulled a notebook from her clothes and flipped through it rapidly.

It looked like she was deciding whether to tell me something or not.

After enough time passed, the angel made up her mind.

"Fine. I will explain what happened. This is not normally allowed, but I am explaining under my discretion. I need you to understand how terrifying what you did was."

She clapped twice, then waved both hands to draw a strange shape. A moment later, something lumpy rose up from the floor.

"...Is that the doctor?"

"To be exact, a madman who thinks he is a doctor. A soul that was abused in a hospital until he went insane, then truly came to believe what was done to him was treatment. Hard to call him pitiful, though, since he killed hundreds when he was alive."

The freak that had shoved a metal rod up my nose, the one with a reflective head mirror where eyes should have been. The doctor orderly stood there.

"Like this soul, the aberrations that appear on Floor 24... were personally collected by the archangel. Only unusual and grotesque ones were carefully selected."

"Ahhh."

"As you can probably tell, this is not the original. It is closer to a copy, or an offshoot split from the original."

"Ah, right."

I did not understand even after seeing it, but I nodded anyway.

"But to exist inside the Tower, they need a physical form, and they must carry at least a fragment of a soul. I saw you recognize your own soul earlier, so I trust you understand this much."

"Ah, of course. Of course. Speak freely."

"Understood."

She was dumping information I had never heard before in my life, but if I reacted with "Huh?" right now, that angel would shut up immediately. Staying quiet would get me more information.

"The archangel wanted to create a floor where terrifying beings appear and test courage... so the core of each aberration was stored separately in the Center of the World, while the rest was fragmented and designed to appear in the Tower. That way, even if multiple Floor 24 instances exist at once, everyone can still have the same experience."

"...?"

"To explain at a human level... think of storing the original on a large server and bringing copies into the Tower. But in a state that contains fragments of the original, so they can exist in the Tower. This method is fairly widespread now, but our archangel was the first."

So the monsters here had their originals stored somewhere else, and copies appeared inside the Tower.

If two people entered the same floor at once, there needed to be two monsters too, so it sounded pretty reasonable.

"The problem is that aberrations are all soul-form beings, so they are extremely vulnerable to external impact. Think of them as porcelain that shatters with a tap. Since they contain fragments of the original, when the copy takes damage, the original is also damaged. So to prevent aberration breakage, the archangel set restrictions on climber behavior the moment they step into the corridor, but..."

"But?"

"You... you smashed all of them, did you not?! Those fragile aberrations! With that barbaric sword of yours! Using an error!"

"Uh..."

"Because of you... most of the original aberrations stored in the Center of the World have been destroyed...! Copying is no longer possible! If I had not requested this interview, the damage would have grown even worse! What are you planning to do about this?! When the archangel returns, what, what am I supposed to do?! If a new climber enters Floor 24, they will think it is just an empty space! Because no aberrations will appear!"

"Uh..."

So... the monsters on Floor 24 were actually extremely fragile, things you were not supposed to touch...

And I killed all of them?

And the copies contained original fragments, so the originals died from the backlash when I killed the copies, and now they would not appear on Floor 24 anymore?

This... this...

"...?"

From a human perspective, wasn't this a good thing?

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