WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Regression is Too Much

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Chapter 288

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The regressor fights (7)

Repeat regression enough times and a person's sense of things starts to shift. To put it more plainly, your priorities change.

"Hey, hey, hey. This place any good? I heard it runs 500,000 won a head."

"Huh? What about it?"

"...You said you became a player, but you got rich too? Back in high school you were..."

First, your sense of money gets dull. Every time I regress, my bank account refills with two billion won, so money stopped mattering much as a physical thing. I stopped checking price tags when buying food or things. Whether I wanted something mattered more than how expensive it was.

Actually, it isn't just about money. I'd lowered the value of everything affected by regression. Money comes back when I regress. Items reappear when I regress. Even a person's life, even the bonds between people, return to how they were before, once I regress. The only exception is Choi Ji-won, and that's exactly why she means so much to me. Not that the rest stopped mattering. Just that it mattered less.

On the other hand, some things had become even more precious than before.

"Fine. Since you bought me a meal, I'll give you a good piece of information."

"Oh, really???"

"...Aren't you a little too excited about this?"

"Just hurry up and tell me."

Information, for example. Stats. Achievements. Things that stayed in my head no matter how many times I regressed. Things I could still use once time rewound. Things that never disappeared. I figured the reason for that didn't need explaining.

The same logic applied to the enemies I faced. The enemy I feared least was the type that turned easy once you learned how to beat them. Even if I lost right now, once I regressed, I could win without much trouble.

The enemy I feared most, on the other hand, was the type I could never figure out no matter what I tried. Same reason. Because I knew that whatever defeat I suffered now would follow me forever.

"Ugghhh..."

Looking at it from that angle, the beastman running around slaughtering humans floated somewhere between those two categories, an enemy I couldn't read yet and one that would turn easy once I could. It felt like something I could figure out, but right now I had no way to actually do it. The whole situation was a headache.

"I'd like to purchase information on that beastman."

"Which one would that be, sir?"

"You know, the one who's been killing humans left and right..."

"Ah, one moment please."

"...Is this price right?"

"Yes, that's correct, sir."

"..."

This beastman (I still didn't know its name) was apparently the single most popular celebrity in the entire universe's grandest Colosseum right now, and everyone everywhere was scrambling to buy information on it. The price, already steep to begin with, had been inflated over and over. Even combining every won I'd saved with everything Ji-won had saved, we couldn't come close to affording it. The price had reached an absurd, almost obscene level.

"Human Slaughterer!"

"Executioner!!!"

"Murder Specialist!!!"

Every nickname attached to it was brutal. It didn't just kill. It toyed with victims using a variety of weapons before finishing them off, so the people who hated it hated it with a passion, and the people who loved it loved it just as fiercely. Negative attention was still attention, and positive attention piled on top of that, so no wonder the price of information had climbed so high.

"Is there any way to meet it directly?"

"No. It has refused every request for a meeting."

I'd wanted to at least try talking to it face to face, but this beastman was flatly refusing every meeting, not just with me but with sponsors and other aliens too, apparently.

It just holed up in some back room and pointed at humans one by one. If the chosen human refused, it moved to the next target. If they accepted, it went to fight. One by one, it kept collecting human lives.

Naturally, humans everywhere were on edge. This place wasn't exactly dominated by humans the way Earth was, but the human population wasn't small either. There were humans modified into cyborgs, humans wielding sci-fi weapons, and others who looked like some mashup of wuxia, fantasy, and steampunk. Skin colors varied wildly too, but the beastman didn't seem to discriminate. It ate whatever kind of human came along.

"I'll be heading home. Ah, meaning I'm withdrawing from the Colosseum."

"I'm sick... my body's sick, I said... what damn match are you talking about..."

"I, I'm not human, you know? I'm a machine, a machine."

Most people ran. The beastman's methods were brutal, and its strength was overwhelming.

"You refused the challenge?"

"Fuck, if I fight it I die. What am I supposed to do about that?"

Even players were among those who dodged it. The pride of being top-tier, the pride of being a fighter in their own right. None of that meant a thing in the face of death.

"If I just kill that one, then I..."

"Heh heh... the only cure for a beast is the whip..."

Of course, not everyone ran. Some brave souls accepted the beastman's challenge. They pretended otherwise on the surface, but the real reason was money. If they won. If they survived. They could get rich. Greed drove them.

"Aaargh! Aaaaargh!!!"

"Just spare me! I'll give you every elixir, every martial arts technique I have!!!"

None of them ended well. The beastman never stopped. It felt like it might wipe humans out as a species from this Colosseum entirely.

"Ugghhh..."

If you thought of Floor 28 as a game, this thing was obviously the boss. Overwhelming skill. Flashy performances. On top of that, information hidden behind a veil. Beat this one thing, and this floor would probably clear itself in no time.

But I didn't have enough money to buy the information. Why not just ask someone else who already knew? The Colosseum's information came with a digital lock, so hearing it secondhand from someone else's mouth was impossible. You could only gain the knowledge by buying it yourself.

Why not just earn more money, then? That was the second problem.

"Jun-ho... I... I can't get anyone to fight me..."

"You too...?"

To earn money, we needed to fight first, but Ji-won and I were both running into the same problem as that beastman. Everyone we were supposed to face had gotten far too spooked.

We'd clearly acted weak, held back our strength, laid down every kind of smokescreen we could think of. And yet somehow, everyone was avoiding us.

"Hey, hey! Where are you going! You said you were sick! You said you couldn't fight because you were sick! Then what's this drink you're chugging right now?"

A fish-person woman fled from a shouting Choi Ji-won.

"No, seriously, this isn't right. There's no way she should've noticed anything..."

My acting might have been clumsy, but there was no way Ji-won's acting could be clumsy. Bung-bung was surely handling the supervision on that front.

Feeling that something was off, I eventually landed on a terrifying realization.

"Ji-won."

"Yeah?"

"What if we tried buying information on ourselves...?"

A bizarre situation, a person buying information about themselves. The price for information on Ji-won and me was absurdly high for a couple of ten-thousandth-ranked nobodies, and it took every last coin we had just to scrape together enough to afford it.

The result was the worst possible outcome.

-Choi Ji-won and Kim Jun-ho appear to be intimate individuals.

-Analysis of muscle movement and mana processes indicates both are holding back a significant portion of their strength.

-In particular, the individual 'Kim Jun-ho' uses almost no mana during combat. Caution advised.

-The individual 'Choi Ji-won'...

"..."

"..."

The Colosseum had flat out nailed it down. We were hiding our strength. Be careful, it warned.

I'd briefly forgotten. This place had a sci-fi backdrop, and even if these people couldn't see the bottom of my traits or my full strength, they were more than capable of sending a drone below the surface to check. Once the Colosseum itself officially tagged us as people hiding their strength, no one stupid enough to fight us would be left.

"But wait, that beastman slaughterer keeps fighting sometimes, doesn't he?"

"That's because it's popular enough, and there's heavy betting riding on it."

That thing made money. Win the fight, survive, and you'd rake in a fortune. The fight money alone had to be astronomical.

"But we don't make anyone money..."

Us, on the other hand? Not exactly famous. More like the kind of strong fighters only insiders knew about, because we'd been acting weak to hide our strength. What did that mean? It meant we weren't profitable. For idiots chasing money, there were far tastier targets than us lying around everywhere.

"Our rank's too low too... top-tier rankers have no reason to fight us."

Then again, did top rankers have any reason to fight us? Not really, no.

The timing was terrible. Normally, if you messaged a bored top-ranker asking for a fight, they'd usually agree. Rankers who went too long without fighting saw their scores slowly drop, so apparently the ones just trying to hold their rank would deliberately pick weaker opponents to fight. Under normal circumstances, this might have been a golden opportunity.

"Because of the Empress."

But right now, everyone was on edge, scrambling to steal the Empress's number one spot. Everyone competing for that top title. Rather than fighting weaklings who gave fewer points, they were desperate to devour other strong fighters and climb the ranks. Nobody had any interest in ten-thousandth-ranked nobodies like us.

"So, to sum it all up."

That's why, coldly summing up the situation as it stood now.

"This cycle's a failure."

There was no answer. The situation had tangled itself into an impossible knot. The only solution left was to wait until the beastman slaughterer picked us as its target. And nobody knew when that would happen.

"Going to regress?"

"Yeah."

There was a better way. The key, one way or another, was to build some kind of connection with that insane beastman. Whether it turned out good or bad didn't matter. We just had to get tangled up with it somehow.

"How?"

"I'll build a concept."

So, I said.

"What if I go with the concept of... loving beastmen way too much?"

I'd make sure that thing couldn't help but pay attention to me.

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