WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Regression is Too Much

________________

Chapter 257

──────

The regressor is troubled (4)

"Dok Su-hee... you said?"

"Yeah."

"..."

Her again? Dok Su-hee?

She'd swapped out an angel back on Floor 16, and now she'd gone and caused another incident. If the Empress mentioned earlier held the number one spot for climbing speed, then Dok Su-hee was undoubtedly number one on the list of players angels hated most.

"Hmm..."

More than that, what bothered me was that she'd caused trouble again. Some friction was understandable given the Association and the United States Government were already at odds. But the fact that she'd tried to kill someone on Floor 26, out of nowhere, that didn't sit right with me. Neither did the fact that she wouldn't answer my calls.

I wasn't sure if I should even admit this, but I felt something like guilt toward Dok Su-hee, and a small measure of goodwill. She'd betrayed me first, sure, but I'd blown her arm off in return. I still regretted how aggressively I'd responded.

She'd also come to me first and promised her full support, saying she wanted to be a player who was useful to me, and there was a chance she'd changed the future to stop the United States Government's potential abuses of power. Because of that, I'd tried to keep viewing her favorably up to now... but every time she pulled a stunt like this, the goodwill I felt toward her eroded a little more.

You said you'd be useful to me. You said you wanted to be recognized as the regressor's companion.

So why are you doing this? Why won't you leave the Tower? Why won't you answer? Why do you keep doing the exact things I hate? Do you even still want to be my companion? Keep this up and the goodwill I showed you starts looking like a burden I regret ever giving. Irritation rose from somewhere deep inside me.

No, that might be too hasty a judgment. Don't let emotion take over. I could decide how to feel about Dok Su-hee after hearing the rest of what Rose had to say. At this rate she was going to make me regress too.

"...Could you finish telling us?"

I calmed myself and waited for Rose to continue. He was staring at my face intently, and it seemed like I'd let too much slip through my own poor emotional control. Not that it mattered, since I was going to regress anyway.

"Sure. I'll tell you. Though I only heard this secondhand too, so some parts might not match the facts exactly. What I can guarantee is that this is 'how the players see it.'"

Laying plenty of groundwork first, Rose pointed his thumb toward the central plaza.

"Right there. It happened smack in the middle of the plaza. Every player entering Floor 26 gets summoned to the plaza's center. Same for leaving. The reason there are always people camped out over there is to keep track of who's coming and who's going."

"...People actually check on that, one by one?"

"For me, I watch so I can use the information later... others watch to control the pace of their own climb. If a Floor's concept demands competition, it's better to avoid the strong and go in with the weak. If it demands cooperation, the opposite applies. You might not know beforehand whether a Floor is solo or group, but it's still smarter to set things up in your favor as much as possible."

Rose added that this part wasn't important, then rummaged through his robe again and pulled out a portrait of a young man.

"This man is..."

"Yeah, the player affiliated with the United States Government I mentioned earlier. His dad's supposedly a minister. He guzzled Elixirs of Experience like water, so his stats are absurdly high. Nickname's 'Young Master.'"

Ji-won's face showed a flicker of recognition, and Rose nodded at that.

"Anyway, this guy used to be incredibly arrogant. Climbing fast, going around telling everyone he'd overtake Michael Zetter. That's what he was like, until he nearly died on Floor 25 and got completely spooked. Once he got to Floor 26, he gave up climbing entirely. Think of him as a kind of ghost haunting the place. His whole job became sitting in the plaza all day. On the side, he feeds the government information and gets to keep his own privileges in exchange."

"...You're just handing over information like this?"

"It's useless to me now. Listen."

Rose fanned himself with the portrait in his hand, like a paper fan.

"Anyway, one day, this guy's condition suddenly got weird. Cold sweat pouring off him, glancing around nervously, glaring at the center of the plaza. Everyone figured he was about to receive some kind of order."

Next, Rose pulled out a portrait of Dok Su-hee.

"That's when she showed up. Dok Su-hee. This wasn't her first time on Floor 26. She'd cooperated with plenty of people in the Tower before, so her face was fairly well known. Ah, how did I know she's Association? She came in alongside Michael Zetter when she entered Floor 26."

Rose added that the people seen with her at the time were Michael Zetter's inner circle, then set Dok Su-hee's portrait side by side with the young man's.

"But about two weeks ago, Dok Su-hee entered Floor 26 again... and this American Young Master shot up from his seat. Like he was thinking, here it comes."

The government-affiliated player pulled a paper from his robe with trembling hands and shoved it toward Dok Su-hee. It was a thing called a 'Contract,' sold in Floor 26's shops, an item that could inflict a penalty if the other party failed to honor the agreement.

"But this Contract isn't something you can just impose one-sidedly. The contract only takes effect if both sides agree beforehand, and the penalty can't be excessive either. So basically, if the penalty ever triggers, it means the person on the receiving end is trash. Normal people never trigger a contract's penalty in the first place.

Yeah. Assuming they're normal, that is.

At that point, apparently the moment Dok Su-hee saw the 'Contract,' her hand moved. And right after... the American player who'd been holding out the contract collapsed. Dok Su-hee snatched the contract from the fallen man's hand.

"Floor 26 has a 'no violence' condition in place, right? You can't directly harm anyone else. That's why the other players didn't even think to intervene in the moment."

Another American player later called it 'poison gas.' Not the relatively 'safe' kind spread across Floor 15, but a lethal poison that killed an ordinary person on the spot with just a single breath. The Young Master had survived purely by luck. He was apparently still recovering, even now.

"That Dok Su-hee has some kind of summoning ability. So she must have summoned poison gas straight at the American Young Master's face."

By the time an angel arrived, other players showed up, and the situation was finally contained... Dok Su-hee had been expelled.

"Expelled?"

"She broke Floor 26's rules. Think of it as basically a permanent ban. You can still climb the Tower since you can enter the next Floor from Floor 1 too, but losing access to Floor 26's facilities is a serious blow."

"..."

"Not only did she break the terms of the contract... she tried to kill someone. Then failed to run. And ended up expelled. You think people are going to look at that kindly?"

Rose shrugged.

"Of course, Michael Zetter came in person to apologize afterward. Said it wasn't something he ordered. Said he was sorry. Said he'd manage her properly going forward so she wouldn't cause trouble for other players again. Said the fight with the government right now was for the players' sake, so please don't misunderstand, and so on."

But a 'heartfelt apology' meant something between friends, not to top-tier players bound together by shared interests. Even assuming it really had been Dok Su-hee acting alone, some of the blame still fell on Michael Zetter for failing to keep her in check.

"Of course, Zetter's in the middle of a war, so... there's a decent chance it really was her acting alone, I think. But even if Zetter's genuinely innocent, the people under him have a bad reputation going around. Given all that, rumors are spreading that you, Choi Ji-won, since you're known to be close with Zetter, are all hype, a manufactured star, that kind of thing."

"..."

"Well, there are people out there who lost someone close to them fighting Zetter's crew too... like I said before, it's best to take all this with a grain of salt."

Rose wrapped up with something like, you've got the picture now, right? True to what he'd boasted, this information had turned out to be incredibly useful.

So, to sum up what had happened...

First, the moment Dok Su-hee entered Floor 26, the United States Government-affiliated player jumped to his feet in shock.

Second, the American player said something quickly and pulled a Contract from his robe, shoving it at Dok Su-hee. (The sound had been blocked with mana, so the exact words were unknown.)

Third, Dok Su-hee pulled poison gas from her Inventory and tried to kill the American, and barely failed.

Fourth and finally, Dok Su-hee was permanently expelled from Floor 26.

I had no idea what the contract Dok Su-hee had signed actually entailed, but she seemed to have wanted, really, truly wanted, to avoid honoring it. Enough to attempt murder over it.

And Michael Zetter. Why had he hidden this from us? Why had he claimed not to know what Dok Su-hee had been up to? He could have told us later, at any point. How had it slipped past Choi Ji-won's lie detector? Had he... deliberately tried to deceive us?

My head hurt. Disappointment in Dok Su-hee aside, I had no idea how to handle this situation. Ji-won seemed to feel the same way, sending me a pleading look, hoping I had some answer.

"Let's... go back to reality and think this over first."

That was as far as the deal with Rose went.

Check the reward waiting for us back on Floor 1... then return to reality...

It felt like the time had finally come to figure out, for certain, where I was headed from here.

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