Climbing the Mythic Tower as a Cheating Administrator - Chapter 71

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Mythic Tower Climbing With a Cheating Administrator (71)
Hildegard simply watched Wash with a serious expression.
And in that moment.
[Download Progress: 73.1%]
Kim Moo-saeng and Wash flinched simultaneously.
Moo-saeng’s eyes caught it.
“It’s rising.”
[Kree-kee-kee-kee!]
Wash felt it.
Hildegard noticed too.
“Is it working?! Is it actually working? I can’t measure that far myself, but if you two could tell me—”
[Download Progress: 73.3%]
Moo-saeng nodded quickly, meeting those eager emerald eyes.
It’s rising. No—rising doesn’t even begin to describe it.
“It is rising. It really is, Hildegard. And more than that—”
[At an incredible speed! Nothing like what you’d expect from this primitive planet—. Wait, am I already outside? Is the speed limiter completely gone? Kree-kee-kee! It’s rising, you fool! Rising at an absolutely staggering rate!]
Wash’s words rang true.
It had been twenty-nine years since Transmission had been granted to Moo-saeng.
Twenty-nine years, and Wash had only downloaded 73%.
Yet here, less than five minutes after the light fully wrapped around Wash, another 0.3% had been downloaded?
‘0.3% in five minutes. 0.6% in ten. 3.6% in an hour.’
Seven hours and thirty minutes.
Complete download in seven hours and thirty minutes.
Moo-saeng suppressed the trembling corners of his mouth.
His palm found his trouser leg and rubbed against it.
“I don’t remember the last time my hands were this sweaty.”
Tension. Excitement. Anticipation.
Emotions so overwhelming they threatened to explode, yet needing restraint.
“Hildegard, Wash—is there anything else we need to do? Should we just wait like this?”
“Well, if there are no process errors, I think we can just leave it? As long as Wash is comfortable—”
[Fine by me. Idiots, they probably never imagined something like this could happen outside the Tower, did they? Kree-kee-kee!]
If anything, Wash seemed even more delighted than Moo-saeng.
Watching Wash unconsciously unleash anger toward targets of vengeance, Moo-saeng himself felt some of his own burden lift.
If Wash was this pleased, things would be fine.
‘Please. God, Buddha, spirits of heaven and earth—please. Just this once. My parents, my wretched life, Ye-rin—I’ll forget it all, forget every miserable moment up to now. Just this once, please.’
A plea so desperate it bordered on absurd.
Understandable, though.
[Download Progress: 73.8%]
Moo-saeng had already witnessed how tremendous Administrator Authority Execute truly was.
Inside a dungeon, it was virtually invincible.
If he could use that power fully in the Tower itself—
‘It’s already changing before my eyes. Because of the light? Is that what a download looks like—?’
The irregular crackling that had covered Wash’s body was gone.
Since the light enveloped him, Wash no longer radiated any sign of instability.
If this continued—
Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.
In that moment of Moo-saeng’s anxious wait.
Hildegard, who had been monitoring several holographic windows, spoke.
“Wash, besides your echo pattern, I’m detecting another signal—could it be—”
[Shut it down now, you fool! Hurry!]
Wash cried out.
Hildegard’s eyes went wide, but as Metal Rhine’s leader and a member of Eight Seconds, she immediately halted the machine.
The two overlapping rings stopped, and the light enveloping Wash vanished.
[Download Progress: 75.1%]
“Wash! Why? What’s wrong—”
[Kim Moo-saeng!]
Moo-saeng had asked.
Wash turned his head sharply and spoke.
[We’ve been found!]
Just those words.
At those few words, Kim Moo-saeng felt the hair on his head stand on end.
* * *
It was a careless remark, but there was no way Kim Moo-saeng wouldn’t understand.
He immediately activated Dok-Sa and Mage Maia’s Magic Engineering.
Two dung beetle guardians came flying around Kim Moo-saeng at once.
Watching Kim Moo-saeng’s combat readiness, Hildegard also muttered with wide eyes.
“……Another administrator? No way.”
The genius girl had grasped it in an instant—something Kim Moo-saeng himself would have admired—but now wasn’t the time for praise.
“Wash! Time! How much do we have?!”
They’d been detected by the Tower’s administrators.
Would they come straight here?
Detected—but to what extent? At what level?
Would they come here immediately to crush Wash, and then dispose of both his contractor Kim Moo-saeng and the witness Hildegard?
[Don’t know. Can’t know that much. Compared to my incomplete state, they’re—. Either way, that’s why.]
Wash, too, hovered near Kim Moo-saeng as he spoke.
If Wash was now at seventy-five percent with a mere two percent gain, then compared to those existing at a constant one hundred percent, the gap really was that vast.
“Hah, hah……. Hildegard, you should leave right now—.”
Kim Moo-saeng tried to send Hildegard out immediately.
Before they arrived.
Whoever it was—them, him, her—another administrator was coming.
Before something potentially hostile to Wash appeared, he wanted to save Hildegard somehow.
“Eh!? No way! I never thought you’d say something like that after we’ve been to Dungeon 58 together, Kim Moo-saeng! Don’t you remember what I was like back then?”
But Hildegard wasn’t one to listen to such words.
Despite clearly grasping the situation to some degree and understanding its gravity, she gave this response.
Kim Moo-saeng let out a hollow laugh despite himself.
“I can’t take responsibility.”
“Since I was eleven, I’ve never asked anyone to take responsibility for me—don’t worry about it.”
The genius girl’s words were somehow reassuring.
Moreover, Hildegard’s appearance had already changed.
From a Storage-Type Artifact that she obviously carried, she’d already retrieved and equipped all manner of defensive gear and weapons.
It differed from the black armor known to the public, but she’d wrapped herself from head to toe in every sort of artifact.
Then silence fell.
Steadying his breath, Kim Moo-saeng could feel a bead of sweat trailing down below his temple.
When would they come.
“Phew, phew.”
From where would they come.
“Hah, hah.”
How would they come.
[Hmm…….]
Already, twenty-odd minutes had passed.
It meant twenty minutes of maintaining an extreme state of tension.
Only then could Kim Moo-saeng open his mouth.
“Wash.”
[What.]
“……That’s right, isn’t it?”
What in the world was happening.
They really had been detected by multiple parties?
At Kim Moo-saeng’s casual question, Wash adjusted his Black Horn-rimmed Glasses and opened his beak.
[It’s true. It’s not like those barbaric humans would do such a thing……. But they definitely noticed my other data being transmitted to me—.]
“That you can’t leave the Tower?”
[-Idiot. Can’t you see I’m outside right now? Besides, the very fact that you humans can use Awakened Abilities means the rules apply outside the Tower or dungeon too. I, at one hundred percent, would be able to do the same.]
“Hmm.”
Wash had said he could only exert power in the Tower or dungeon—was that only because of his incomplete ability?
Could those opposing Wash, currently at one hundred percent and at the Tower’s apex, leave Outside the Tower anytime and execute Administrator Authority Execute?
‘Global conquest—. No, that wouldn’t have been the goal from the start anyway.’
The Tower rose all across the globe, yet when one entered, its interior was shared—that was the nature of it.
Its very structure was beyond human technology to decipher.
How much less would the Tower’s administrators have set their sights on something as trivial as “mere global conquest” from the beginning.
“Then it’s something we could interpret as a situation……. There’s some circumstance preventing them from coming out—.”
They had the ability, but for some reason, the situation wouldn’t allow it.
Perhaps that was it.
Then, abruptly, something surfaced in Kim Moo-saeng’s mind.
“Hildegard.”
“Yes?”
“That pattern you mentioned earlier—the signal. Could you analyze whether it’s qualitatively different from Wash? Can you do that?”
“Yes. It will take some time, though.”
“Would you look into it for me?”
If the Tower’s Administrator had noticed it.
Wouldn’t it be possible to identify data that overlapped somewhat with Wash—something similar, of that nature?
Hildegard, too, seemed to grasp the idea and immediately began moving.
“All right, I understand. But ‘if’ something happens, you’ll have to take responsibility for what comes after, won’t you?”
“Heh, I just said I haven’t told anyone to take responsibility for me since I was eleven.”
“This is different. So where—”
Multiple holographic windows materialized again.
She tapped at a keyboard floating in empty space, plunged her hand directly into the depths of one holographic window and swiped through it, or with a few eye movements shifted data from another window.
“Parallel Thought, you said… I can’t learn that?”
“If you practice it a few times in the Tower, it should work fine. Once you get two or three running smoothly, it naturally gets acquired as a skill, and from then on it’s easy.”
“…That’s exactly why I can’t learn it.”
Her awe at his overwhelming data processing and computational ability was fleeting.
Hildegard quickly found the answer.
“The anomaly detected in the signal… Yes, there are two wavelengths. One is… that’s right. Just as you said, there are some overlapping frequencies with Wash. It’s clearly different, but we can treat it as a similar signal.”
[Hmm, so what about the other one?]
Wash had by now relaxed his guard somewhat and spoke.
The moment Hildegard was about to shake her head, it was Kim Moo-saeng who opened his mouth.
“Floor 25.”
[What? Floor 25… Eyes!]
“The Orin Eye? No, the Cheonri Eye? That’s it, right?”
Hildegard, who had been with him in Dungeon 58, immediately understood the moment she heard the word “eyes.”
Kim Moo-saeng nodded and laid out his deduction.
“Yes. I don’t know which one, but something was scanning the lower levels of the Tower. It saw me on Floor 25… Well, I suppose it probably didn’t judge me as anything unusual—”
“It detected Wash’s Download state… and examined it. That’s what you mean?”
It wasn’t entirely implausible.
If something had scanned several levels of the Tower and then turned its gaze outward.
[An eye picking up my signal… That’s not something you just manage to do.]
Wash accepted Kim Moo-saeng’s deduction to a degree, though he refined it.
“If it can’t just happen?”
[It didn’t sense my signal. It just happened to catch me incidentally while it was looking.]
Less reverse-detection, more a fortunate discovery.
Kim Moo-saeng paused to think.
‘Scanning the lower levels of the Tower… then turning that gaze completely outward. And not just outward, but to Korea, to Seoul. And that coincided with just before Wash was being downloaded?’
It wasn’t entirely impossible.
But wasn’t it extremely unlikely?
Why Korea of all places? Why Seoul?
‘Geum Su-a did mention that she’d checked Lee Jung-gi’s whereabouts with the Orin Eye, but there’s no way it would still be watching Lee Jung-gi now. And there’s no reason for them to be looking at Seoul anymore—hm?’
As Kim Moo-saeng logically arranged his thoughts, he noticed something.
Hildegard’s brow was furrowed.
“Wait a moment.”
“What is it?”
Hildegard selected one of the holographic windows and expanded it with a swipe.
Three unfamiliar silhouettes were moving within it.
Kim Moo-saeng quickly recognized the space where three indistinct shadows were moving.
It was an abandoned factory.
A place where no one should be.
“There are people on the first floor. Unverified Persons, not ours.”
Yet now, overhead, there were strangers.
Three of them, no less.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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