WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 333: The past (12)

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The protective suit Dok Su-hee wore was no ordinary suit. It was a kind of item, imbued with the properties of a specialized insulator.

She swept every spent shell casing and every grenade fragment lodged in her suit straight into her Inventory. All the surrounding metal followed, vanishing into that same storage space.

What remained was a bullet charged with the power of lightning, a steel barrier, and Michael Zetter, standing in contact with that barrier.

In this situation, the lightning would go for the nearest conductor first.

Flash!

Of course it would. The steel wall, and Zetter touching it.

"This is—"

Crackle crackle crackle crackle crack!!!!

Lightning traveled at a hundred thousand kilometers per second. That was roughly 33% of the speed of light. Which meant that by the time you "saw" the lightning, it was already too late. That was exactly the gap Dok Su-hee had aimed for.

He's probably prepared some basic defense against this.

She already knew Zetter had taken precautions against electrocution. She had personally helped him run his experiments, shocking his own body with battery current over and over. If Zetter had prepared for every scenario, he would have prepared for electrocution specifically.

But lightning was a different story. Lightning changed everything.

Zetter kept his body reinforcement running at all times and wrapped his whole body in mana. He had pumped points into Mana rather than Strength, since raw muscle wasn't worth investing in on his status window. So Dok Su-hee had been mentally ready for the possibility that he'd survive even this. That he could.

Muscle could burn and still be repaired. The heart, as the wellspring of mana, could resist electric current better than most.

His skin might be flayed off entirely, every blood vessel in his body might rupture in an instant, his respiratory system might be wrecked, but Zetter could move without breathing. That kind of wound could be repaired too. So logically, there was a good chance Zetter would survive even a direct lightning strike. His body had gone past human limits. None of that would be strange.

But that wasn't what Dok Su-hee was actually aiming for. The real reason she'd chosen lightning as her trump card was that electric current struck the nervous system.

The nervous system ran on electrical signals. If something as excessive as lightning surged through it, even Michael Zetter's nervous system would break down. The brain could send all the signals it wanted, but if the nerves themselves were fried, the body simply wouldn't move.

The same applied to the brain's blood vessels and its very tissue. No matter how well he endured the raw heat of the current, a brain that lightning had swept straight through couldn't come out unscathed.

The brain. The nerves. Those couldn't be trained. No one could train a brain to withstand something like this. Zetter was no exception. After the incident on Floor 5, he had deliberately restrained himself from modifying his brain too aggressively, and even without that incident, he never would have done something as insane as hardening his own brain.

So.

"Guh...!"

Checkmate.

Every muscle in Zetter's body seized rigid. Moist tissue like his eyeballs cooked in place. The current itself had been a problem, but the heat energy released by the lightning was worse. Even Dok Su-hee, in her protective suit, had to grit her teeth just to endure it.

No matter how strong Michael Zetter was. No matter that he was the strongest player in the world.

"..."

Thud.

It wasn't the kind of defiance that could overturn heaven itself. Zetter lost consciousness instantly and collapsed, and Dok Su-hee swallowed the electrified steel wall back into her Inventory.

"...I won."

Her legs gave out under her, and she sank to the floor without meaning to. She'd won. Against Michael Zetter himself. Sure, she'd had to use a hidden card, but she'd won.

Should she kill him? No. Leave him. First, get on a flight to Korea as fast as possible. Find Kim Jun-ho.

"Phone, phone..."

She pulled her smartphone out of her Inventory, only to remember this was the Association's underground headquarters. No signal down here. Right, she needed to get outside first. Get outside, then use the phone...

"Dok Su-hee."

"?!"

But there was something Dok Su-hee hadn't known either.

Michael Zetter lived in time that moved far slower than everyone else's.

Of all the things Zetter had been careful about around other people until now, it was his eyes. Move them ten times faster than normal and anyone would notice something was off.

At baseline he operated in time slowed by a factor of ten, and in combat, up to a hundred. And in that stretched-out time, Zetter's eyes had caught it, the instant the bullet left the barrel. The strange mana wrapped around the round. The lightning shimmering around it.

An ordinary human's reaction speed was 0.2 seconds. Zetter's was 0.002 seconds. In that final sliver carved out from an already sliced fraction of time, Zetter had felt an unease he couldn't quite name. And because of that.

"I swallowed it."

"You couldn't have..."

"The Elixir capsule I'd been carrying in my mouth."

Michael Zetter rose unsteadily to his feet. His body was visibly starting to knit itself back together.

"With this... I've adapted."

"Bullshit."

Dok Su-hee's eyes went wide.

"An Elixir only works if you drink the whole bottle. And you're telling me you carried it around in your mouth? As a capsule? Bullshit. Even a small dose isn't something you can just keep tucked in your cheek."

"That's right. You're correct. An Elixir only works if you drink the whole bottle."

The white, cooked film over Zetter's eyes cleared back to normal. Flesh filled back in over his ears and the tip of his nose, which had burned crooked and uneven.

"So I drank almost all of it beforehand."

"...!"

"Leaving out only enough for one capsule."

"That... that's how it works?"

"Didn't think to test it yourself? I already tried this when I fed the Elixir to the President."

"..."

She'd known Zetter kept a reserve Elixir somewhere. Her plan had been to kill him before he ever got the chance to drink it. But a capsule, in his mouth? Drink most of an Elixir in advance, and the leftover portion still worked when swallowed later? And he'd thought to swallow it the instant the bullet fired?

"Give it up."

She hadn't known. Hadn't known any of it. If she had, she would have chosen a different method.

The conference room was already half destroyed. Mana was boiling off Zetter's body. He would probably wrap himself in every Adaptation he could manage and close the distance before his mana ran dry. There was nowhere to run. This was a cramped conference room.

Checkmate again. Dok Su-hee had failed the one strike she couldn't afford to fail, and now she'd pay the price. This was Michael Zetter's victory.

She had to run. Open a portal, flee to Floor 1. Inside the Tower, she'd be safe.

But could she even buy the time to escape? Wasn't it more likely that Zetter's grip would snap her neck before she could throw herself through a portal?

"Planning to run to Floor 1?"

"..."

"Not going to happen."

She needed time. And Dok Su-hee still had one thing left.

"...Not yet."

One last move remained.

Hummm.

Thmp.

Kkwaak!

Everything happened at once. Truly, in a single instant, all at once.

First, a blue portal opened in midair. A blue portal only Dok Su-hee could pass through.

Then, before she could even move, Zetter's iron grip closed around her throat. A little more pressure and her neck would snap in an instant.

At the same moment, a massive chunk of metal materialized on the floor. Zetter, controlling each eye independently, kept his gaze locked on Dok Su-hee while simultaneously studying the object that had dropped to the floor.

"!!!"

Then he went pale with shock.

The most dangerous weapon in Dok Su-hee's Inventory. A means of mutually assured destruction, never to be used except in the worst possible situation.

A nuke. That was unmistakably a nuclear warhead. Zetter had served in special forces once. He knew exactly what one looked like.

"Ha, ha..."

Even unable to breathe, Dok Su-hee smiled. In time slowed a hundredfold, Zetter agonized over it, again and again.

It had to be a bluff. Even with all her connections to the Department of Defense, Dok Su-hee couldn't have gotten her hands on an actual nuke. No one would have authorized that, and if she'd smuggled one out, Zetter would have known. A missing nuke wasn't something you could just fail to notice.

But what if it was real? What if that thing was genuine, one second from detonation?

Dok Su-hee would die, sure, but so would he. Certainly. No, everyone in this entire underground facility would die.

Adapt? He couldn't. He'd already finished adapting to radiation, but the heat and the blast were the real problem. Even Michael Zetter couldn't survive a nuclear detonation at point-blank range and walk away. If he could, he would have conquered Floor 66 long ago.

Then what? The answer was simple. Escape into a portal. If he retreated to Floor 1 the way Dok Su-hee was clearly trying to, he'd be safe.

But what if Zetter fled, and Dok Su-hee simply put the nuke back into her Inventory once she saw him run? What if she escaped afterward? That wouldn't work either. Let her go now, and she'd use the nuke to escape every single time. She'd become untouchable.

If he dismissed it as a bluff and it turned out to be real, he'd die. Unacceptable. He still had too much left to do.

But if he fled into a portal, and the nuke turned out to be real, that left Dok Su-hee free to use it again later.

If he just killed her outright, he'd lose the chance to extract information from her. And killing her wouldn't stop the nuke from going off anyway. Besides, if he simply retrieved the Escape Contract kept in storage, he could neutralize Dok Su-hee completely without killing her. Killing her would be a waste.

In the end, Zetter's mind arrived, in an instant, at the most efficient option available. The nuke needed to be spent, here, now. But Zetter couldn't die either. And Dok Su-hee couldn't die.

There was only one answer.

"Everyone, get to the Tower! Get into the portals!"

Even as he shouted that, Zetter threw Dok Su-hee into the portal. He'd twisted her neck slightly at the last second, guaranteeing she'd be unconscious and injured. That put the nuke out of her reach for good.

Then Zetter threw himself into his own portal. His team members had probably each ducked into portals of their own by then.

If the nuclear bomb really did go off... every human in this facility, everyone nearby, everyone except Team Alpha, would die.

There's no helping it.

It couldn't be helped.

* * *

About a minute later.

Michael Zetter returned to reality from Floor 1.

"..."

He picked up the shell of the nuclear warhead lying on the floor. It had been hollow from the start. Dok Su-hee never had a nuke.

So that was why she'd summoned it onto the floor in the first place. If she'd conjured it in midair and let it drop, the hollow thud would have given it away. A brilliant bluff.

"Wh... what happened?"

"Where's Su-hee? Why did you tell us to go into the portals... whoa!"

His team filed into the conference room, late. Zetter looked them over.

"Mahesh. Dok Su-hee escaped through a portal to Floor 1."

"...Yes, President."

"Seal off the spot where she was standing with concrete. After that, close down this conference room and release the knockout gas I mentioned before. Oh, and set up sensor turrets and cameras too. If she comes back, we take her down immediately."

A portal's position was fixed. You had to exit from the same spot you'd entered. Which meant remembering the portal's location mattered a great deal. Dok Su-hee had probably already worked that far out herself.

So what now. What would Dok Su-hee do from here. Zetter's mind already had the answer.

"...Floor 26."

She'd go to Floor 26 and wait for Kim Jun-ho. It was the only way she could reach him without returning to reality.

Jun-ho couldn't climb to Floor 26 anytime soon. He hadn't even cleared Floor 20 yet. There was time.

Would Dok Su-hee reach Jun-ho first? Or would Zetter get to her before that happened?

"Everyone... good work today."

Still no way to know. All that was left was to wait.

Footnotes:

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