WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

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◈ Regression is Too Much

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Chapter 299

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The regressor fights (18)

Choi Ji-won had just declared that I, Kim Jun-ho, could beat the Heavenly Demon.

"Wait. I think I get it too."

"Hm?"

"The way to break it."

I'd watched the fight too. I could roughly guess what Choi Ji-won was getting at.

"Okay, so... the Heavenly Demon's goal was to drag things out. Am I right so far?"

The Heavenly Demon grew stronger while fighting. He kept getting stronger, endlessly. He absorbed the enemy's techniques and learned from them. The problem was that the trigger for that growth was combat itself.

"So basically, you have to take him down before he gets strong enough."

A fully grown Heavenly Demon couldn't be stopped. Short of some broken munchkin at the Archangel level showing up, nothing could hope to match him, I was pretty sure. From my position, since I regressed the moment I took damage, the deadline was the instant the Heavenly Demon became able to use mana. Getting exposed to that dark red mana of his was an instant one-way ticket back to the start.

So the best move was to kill him the second you laid eyes on him. That first encounter was when the Heavenly Demon was at his weakest. We weren't shonen protagonists. There was no reason to drag the fight out. Just unload your ultimate move the moment you saw him.

But once my thoughts stretched that far, something occurred to me.

It might sound a little irresponsible, but I had to say it.

"But... couldn't you do it instead?"

Choi Ji-won could joint-regress with me. Which meant she could use this regression-based counter just as well.

Theoretically I could pull off an insane peak using Heart of Eternal Winter, sure, but as things stood, my body couldn't hold up under it. And right now, Choi Ji-won was simply stronger.

If I could do it myself, I'd want to. Just watching from the sidelines didn't sit right with me. But I genuinely thought Choi Ji-won could do it better, so I was arguing that it made more sense for her to go.

Choi Ji-won listened to all of it, then said,

"Nope."

She shook her head. No.

"First, you're misunderstanding something. The Heavenly Demon isn't growing. He's reclaiming."

"...I get what you mean, but isn't that basically the same thing?"

"No. The speed's different."

Choi Ji-won was a genius. She'd come up with a counter for every new technique the Heavenly Demon threw at her, moment by moment. That was something I could never do, something most of humanity couldn't even replicate.

"But that's forging a new path. The Heavenly Demon's just walking a path he's already walked. You can't compare the speeds."

"Hmmm..."

But the Heavenly Demon's growth rate was faster than that, even so. Almost comparable to Regression, honestly. Like in those possession stories, where the protagonist starts weak, then one seal breaks mid-fight, then a second, and suddenly they're absurdly strong. The Heavenly Demon's case was probably something like that.

"And more than anything, from what I saw while fighting, the Heavenly Demon was holding back. At least, that's how it looked."

"...What?"

Whether or not my jaw dropped, Choi Ji-won kept going.

"There were a few moments where, if I'd been a little stronger or a little more skilled, I would've landed a critical hit on him. That part keeps bugging me. Was it something he predicted, or something he genuinely couldn't stop?"

"...What do you mean? I wasn't the one fighting, so I'm not following."

"I've got a suspicion right now."

Choi Ji-won tapped at her device and roughly sketched a wicked-looking wolf.

"Okay, this is the Heavenly Demon. From what I felt fighting him, he was holding back."

"Uh, okay."

The Heavenly Demon hiding his strength. Thinking about it, that wasn't even surprising. Beings like the Heavenly Demon were used to concealing things.

"But looking at how the fight actually went, I was clearly pushing him back. Except I could never quite land a critical hit. It was this ambiguous kind of win."

"Right?"

"I think that was the Heavenly Demon's design."

"What do you mean?"

"I think he decided swordsmanship was the best match against me. That's why that stretch dragged on so long. After that, he pulled out the whip and the dagger, right? As pure martial technique, the sword was way harder to deal with. The whip and dagger were relatively easy. But the fight still stayed even, didn't it?"

"So the techniques he used got weaker, but his body got stronger, so it balanced out?"

"Exactly."

So according to Choi Ji-won, the earlier fight looked like a carefully designed plan by the Heavenly Demon. When his body was weakest, he fought with the weapon he was most confident in, the sword, and as his body grew stronger, he switched to progressively weaker techniques.

"But there were two moments where I felt something was off."

I'd only been watching, so my memory of it was hazy, but Choi Ji-won, who'd actually fought him, remembered every single moment.

"When I cut a long gash along his arm, if I'd been a bit stronger, it could've been fatal. I could've hit the armpit instead of the arm, and that's not a spot even a beastman's regeneration heals easily. It's a joint, so raw physical strength doesn't help it either."

"If you'd cut there, would his arm be totally useless?"

"Yeah."

An attack had nearly landed on that critical spot, and the Heavenly Demon had dodged it, just barely.

"But thinking back on it again, if my condition had been just a little better, if I'd been just a little faster, that would've been a fatal hit. Regardless of anything the Heavenly Demon did, it just... didn't land, because I was too weak."

"Hmm..."

I understood what Choi Ji-won was getting at. She couldn't tell whether the Heavenly Demon had predicted her weakness and avoided the hit, or whether he simply hadn't been able to avoid it.

"But if he genuinely couldn't avoid it, that doesn't normally make sense. You just said he's hiding his strength."

"What if he's not hiding it?"

It was Choi Ji-won who'd said the Heavenly Demon was hiding his strength. But now she was saying he wasn't? I was struggling to keep up. What was she actually trying to say?

"The second thing that felt off was when the Heavenly Demon picked up the spear."

This time she drew a spear on the device.

"Every time the Heavenly Demon picked up a new weapon, I consciously wiped everything I'd learned up to that point. Different weapon, different way of handling it."

"You can do that?"

"It was hard, but I could. Because it's me and Bung-bung."

She said something incredibly impressive like it was nothing at all.

"But when the Heavenly Demon was using the spear, I made a small mistake."

"A mistake?"

"An opening, basically. From my perspective, it was definitely an opening. A weakness that had already been hit once, back when he was using the sword."

A bad habit Choi Ji-won had shown when the Heavenly Demon was using the sword. A bad opening. It had cost her a beat back then, and she'd thought she'd fixed it right away, but in the process of clearing her head to face the spear, she'd made the exact same mistake again.

"But the Heavenly Demon just stood there. Even though I repeated the same opening."

"...And?"

"What do you mean, and?"

"So what if he did."

"Don't you think that's way too strange?"

She drew a sword beside the spear.

"Even with different weapons, the underlying logic is the same. Most things you can do with a sword, you can also do with an axe or a spear. Sure, each weapon has movements only it can do, but the 'concept' of a fight isn't bound by that."

"So what you're saying is..."

The Heavenly Demon was a master. And it was strange that a master like that hadn't struck a weakness he absolutely should have struck.

"It's strange. Sure, I clear my head to adapt to his techniques, since I'm the one reacting to them. But why would the Heavenly Demon need to do that too?"

"Hmm..."

"The Heavenly Demon can't mix techniques together. I think we can call that basically confirmed. So do you know what connects with that?"

Sword next to spear. Axe next to that. Whip next to that.

"Maybe the Heavenly Demon... can't reuse a technique once he's already used it. Think about it, it's weird. Understanding a technique just by watching it, fine, sure. But actually using it yourself is a completely different matter. And the Heavenly Demon uses way too many techniques, way too fluently."

X marks were drawn over all of them. Over the sword. Over the spear. Over the axe.

"Jun-ho. Think back. You said Guntar used seventy-one different weapons back in his Colosseum days. It's the same with the Heavenly Demon. He was deliberately using a wide variety of weapons. At first I thought it was just to stall for time, but..."

"..."

"Maybe that was some kind of 'constraint.'"

"...A constraint."

"Here's my point."

Choi Ji-won circled the roughly drawn evil wolf.

"The Heavenly Demon might not be choosing 'not' to use his full strength. He might 'not be able' to."

"..."

"And it's not that he's deliberately using different weapons. He might be forced to. I think that's the part we need to dig into if we want to figure out how to beat him."

It was a plausible theory. Still just a theory for now, though.

"That's something I can check by fighting him again."

But with Regression on our side, we could check it as many times as we needed. Choi Ji-won still had plenty of chances left.

But then another thought hit me.

"So... why do I have to be the one who fights?"

Why me, specifically. Not Choi Ji-won.

"Obviously, because of the chill, right?"

She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. Wait, what did the Heavenly Demon's constraint I'd just heard about have to do with my chill?

"The Heavenly Demon doesn't use mana, right? Whether he can't or won't, we'd have to check, but either way, he doesn't use it at all before he's strong enough."

"Right?"

"But your chill... if he can't resist it with mana, resisting it at all is basically impossible, isn't it?"

"Oh."

...She was right.

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