WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Regression is Too Much

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Chapter 287

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The regressor fights (6)

A player had died. That meant a lot more than it sounded like on the surface.

"...Died? Who?"

"You know, that guy. The Brazilian one..."

"Ah."

He was the only South American player around, so I remembered him well enough. The guy who'd grinned and said we should fight sometime, bragging about combining mana with capoeira. A decent guy, all things considered. The one who'd handed me some unidentified purple drink once, insisting it tasted better than it looked.

"..."

My first impression of him hadn't been bad. That was about the extent of it. A faint, faint sliver of goodwill. If I regressed, he'd come back to life. Death was only temporary in front of me.

Still, it left a bad taste. Someone's death always did. If it had been me dying, fine, I could live with that, but when I was the one doing the killing, or someone near me died, my mouth went dry, I guess you'd call it. Felt wrong for someone wearing the regressor label to react like this.

No. This is proof I'm still human. It's fine.

"So, how'd he die?"

I steadied myself and asked Ji-won. She had to feel just as bad about this as I did. I couldn't afford to look weak in front of her. What I needed to do right now wasn't sulk, it was analyze cause and effect.

"So... his opponent was a beastman ranked 270th."

"270th?"

Ranked 270th out of a million was genuinely impressive, but from where I stood, closing in on rank 100 and eyeing rank 1, it barely registered as anything more than one obstacle among many. Not a rank that made me think I could lose.

"This beastman hadn't been active for a long time, so his rank had slipped. Either way, he named the Brazilian guy directly. Said he wanted to fight."

"And he accepted?"

"Yeah."

Lower-ranked players couldn't name higher-ranked ones, but higher-ranked players could name lower ones. I could guess why the Brazilian player jumped at the offer. Confident he'd win, he probably wanted to take down someone with a higher rank and climb fast. He'd been sitting around 700th, hadn't he?

"That guy wasn't weak, though..."

Anyone who'd reached Floor 28 at this point was strong. There was no way he'd been weak.

"It'll be faster if you just watch it yourself."

"Ah. So you can watch the footage if you pay."

"Yeah. Here."

Choi Ji-won played the video. I swallowed and focused on the screen.

It was a fairly big match. A fight between rank 270 and rank 700. Not exactly a main event, but enough to draw a crowd. Maybe because of that, the audience was huge, and the energy in the arena felt different.

"Whoaaaaaa!!!"

"Kill him!!!"

"I bet my whole fortune on this!!!"

"Let's go!!! Let's gooooo!!!"

The audio quality of the recording was awful. Even changing the angle over and over, the sound never cleared up. The crowd's roar piled together into something closer to an animal's howl. Just as unintelligible either way.

Even with the camera shaking under the pressure of the noise, the pressure waves.

"..."

The Brazilian player loosened up his ankles. Stretched a bit, spat carelessly on the ground. Cracked his neck side to side. The drone had filmed from too far to catch his expression clearly, but at least his posture radiated confidence.

His opponent, by contrast, just stood there, frozen still. A face closer to a wild dog than a human. A beastman. A fairly common race in this Colosseum.

What wasn't common, though, was how the beastman looked exactly like a timid man, for a beastman. Glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, a cloth outfit resembling a suit, plain trousers to match, and a massive backpack strapped to his back. Considering most beastmen wore flashy combat gear, nothing about his appearance said he'd come here to fight.

270th. That guy was 270th. Pass him on the street and you'd take him for an ordinary person, but he was strong. That strange mismatch, that frozen stillness, somehow only made the pressure heavier.

"$%#!#."

The Brazilian player said something, casually rolling his hips in a circle. His voice obviously didn't carry, and his lip movements were impossible to read. But the mood suggested he'd cracked some kind of joke.

Thud.

That was the sound it seemed to make. The beastman didn't answer. He just threw the backpack off his back onto the ground. The worn flap fell open, and everything inside spilled out.

"?"

The Brazilian player tilted his head. Swords. Spears. Bows. Sabers. Polearms. Flails. Axes. Every weapon imaginable lay scattered across the ground in a chaotic pile. All of it had come out of one absurdly oversized backpack.

"$%$#%#$."

The beastman, silent this whole time, finally opened his mouth. The Brazilian player's loose, swaggering posture stopped cold. The beastman's lip movements were unreadable, a different language entirely. The Brazilian player's expression wasn't visible. There was no telling what had been said.

"Match!!! Begin!!! 3! 2! 1!"

The beastman lifted a flail from the pile. The Brazilian player quickly took a stance and drank a potion. The distance between them closed. The crowd's shout swelled louder.

"!!!"

The Brazilian player moved first. He dropped into a low stance and closed the distance in a zigzag, using capoeira's signature footwork. The beastman just spun the flail in slow circles, not moving an inch.

Left. Right. Left. Right. A repeating, dance-like rhythm. The beastman didn't react. Left again. Right. Now.

Fwooosh!

A sudden high roundhouse kick. The beastman stepped back once and dodged it easily, but as expected, the Brazilian player carried the momentum into another full spin. Forced back another step, the beastman retreated again.

At the same time, the Brazilian player's body dropped low, nearly to the ground, held up only by superhuman strength that kept him from actually falling. From that impossibly low position came a sweeping low kick. Then a somersault kick right after. The moment that kick ended, a mid-level push kick followed. The attacks flowed together seamlessly, no gaps between them.

"Ooooh, whoa!"

"That's slick!"

"Let's go!!!!"

The crowd went wilder at the sight, like watching a dance. The Brazilian player's movement was uncanny. Each kick reshaped his own stance. That new stance opened up a new attack, and that attack reshaped his stance again. Endless transformation, endless offense, his center of gravity shifting up, down, forward, back, side to side without pattern, almost hypnotic to watch.

To anyone watching, it looked like the Brazilian player had the upper hand, pressing the attack. Yeah. That's how it looked.

"Huh?"

"Ah?"

Clang!

The flail slammed into the man's leg. His shin guard shattered, and his leg bent in a direction it was never meant to bend. Normally, a human leg colliding with a chunk of iron should shatter on impact, but in the world of superhumans, it worked differently. Wrap enough mana around a body and add the right gear, and the body frequently wins against the weapon. Common sense broken by another layer of common sense.

"What, what!"

"Fuck, what is that!"

The Brazilian player scrambled back on one leg. The beastman didn't chase. The shattered leg slowly began to regenerate.

"Some kind of healing ability?"

"First time we're seeing that skill."

"No. He'd been holding the potion he drank earlier in his mouth. Swallowed it the second he got hurt."

A sharp-eyed viewer picked up on the Brazilian player's trick. Now the leg was fully healed.

"..."

"..."

The beastman, no longer holding the flail but a spear now, closed in with slow, heavy steps. The healed Brazilian player charged again. One exchange passed, and this time a hole opened straight through his shin.

He fell back again. The beastman didn't chase. The wound began to heal.

"Isn't this getting kind of weird?"

Only then did the crowd start to catch on. Something was off.

"..."

If the crowd noticed it, there was no way the man actually fighting hadn't. The beastman was toying with him. Just planning to inflict endless pain, nothing more.

The Brazilian player was brave, but he wasn't stupid. There was no chance of winning. Charging into a fight you couldn't win was foolish. Survival came first.

The instant he finished that calculation and opened his mouth to call for surrender.

Thwack.

A spear, thrown at a speed too fast to see, punched straight through his skull. The footage ended there.

It was an execution.

"...What was that."

A victor didn't need to kill their opponent. Neutralizing them was enough. Worse, the Brazilian player had been about to surrender.

Malice. I could feel it, thick and deliberate. Some kind of grudge? Or just a plain psychopath? I had no idea.

"Any information on this beastman..."

"It's pretty expensive."

"...Hm."

No information to go on even if I wanted to talk to him, and the rank gap was still too wide to meet him in the Colosseum anytime soon. Unless he named me directly, there'd be no reason for us to fight.

"Didn't expect a variable like this."

A floor I'd figured would wrap up easily had just thrown up a massive wildcard. This one felt like it could become a real obstacle going forward. I didn't have enough information.

"For now... if a match gets scheduled, we fight it. Until then, gathering intel on this guy is the top priority."

"I was thinking the same thing."

We settled on that direction, and three days passed.

"Jun-ho..."

"..."

A second player had died. Five humans total now. All killed by the same beastman. The pattern was clear now.

That beastman was targeting humans, and only humans.

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