I Conquered the Tower with the EX-Class Character That I Raised - Chapter 74

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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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Chapter 74
Beep— beep— beep—
An alarm, or perhaps a warning tone.
The Guild Master of Pandemonium listened quietly to the eerie, unsettling ringtone emanating from somewhere.
“You should answer it.”
“Hmm. You don’t like the sound of this tone?”
“…Not particularly.”
Chuckle.
The Master laughed like a child before slowly picking up the phone.
“Yeah.”
[Master, I have a report for you.]
The caller was Kim Min-seok.
[Just now, five people entered the Tower.]
“You’re certain?”
[I observed them through an artifact. I’m certain.]
“Mm.”
The Master let out a short hum.
Five.
Five, then…
[The Guardian Han Seol-ah, Lee Ah-woon who distinguished himself in the Resonar subjugation, the Saint Yereche, and the remaining two are unknown to me.]
“Why don’t you know?”
[One is someone I’ve never seen before, and the other… I feel like I’ve seen him somewhere, but I can’t quite remember. He has a very common, ordinary appearance.]
“Common and ordinary? Hmm. Like a nameless extra from your textbooks—Chul-soo? In our terms, it’s like ‘John Doe.’ Let’s just call him ‘Chul-soo’ for now.”
[Understood. I’ll do that.]
Han Seol-ah, Lee Ah-woon, Yereche, Chul-soo.
Then the last one remaining…
“That must be First.”
“That seems likely.”
[…?]
Through the phone, I could sense Kim Min-seok’s curiosity, but the Guild Master abruptly hung up.
“Didn’t I tell you? First would still be alive.”
“I also thought he would be alive.”
“You bet on the idea that he ‘failed’ like I did. I wagered on ‘escape’ instead. If we’re counting failure as the same as death, then that’s what I thought.”
The Observer nodded.
“You’ve never actually seen First, so that’s why.”
“What exactly is he that you speak of him this way? Now that we’ve confirmed First is alive and well, and that he can re-enter the Tower… tell me already.”
The Master nodded.
“First is… a madman.”
“That’s why he made it to the 94th Floor, then.”
“No, no. That bastard is genuinely insane.”
The Master fell silent for a moment, as if carefully choosing his words or recalling the past.
“Let me tell you something that actually happened. There was a town struck by an epidemic—a disease that transformed people into werewolves. The mission was to find and eliminate the hidden werewolves to clear that floor. What would you do?”
“I suppose I would try to find the werewolves.”
“Right, that’s the orthodox approach. But First acted differently.”
Clap clap!
The Master clapped his hands with delight, breaking into a wide grin.
“He killed every single person in the town!”
“….”
“That way, he’d eliminate the werewolves, prevent the disease from spreading to other humans, and eliminate the risk of it spreading to neighboring towns. Right?”
“…I suppose that would be a viable approach.”
If one abandoned human sentiment and pursued pure efficiency, such an action seemed possible.
After all, identifying each werewolf individually would consume considerable time and effort.
This much seemed ordinary enough,
or so I thought in that instant.
“Haha! Hahaha! At first, I thought he killed them all to eliminate the danger. I assumed there was a clear reason for the massacre. But no. First didn’t think that way at all.”
“…Pardon?”
“He was just curious whether a ‘Hidden Quest’ would trigger if he killed everyone.”
“…Hidden, Quest?”
“That’s one reason First became so strong. Every floor has an objective, and beneath it lies a hidden true objective. Clearing those conditions makes you stronger.”
The Master’s smile deepened further.
“Of course, ‘killing all the townspeople’ wasn’t the condition for the Hidden Quest. First simply became someone who committed a massacre.”
“…I see.”
But the story didn’t end there.
“Here’s the question. What do you think the Hidden Quest for that floor actually was?”
“I’m not certain. Given the epidemic theme, perhaps eradicating the disease itself? The floor’s objective is saving the town. The true objective might be eliminating the plague?”
“Correct. That was the condition. So, what would you have done?”
The Observer thought with extreme rationality.
“Develop a vaccine, or perhaps eliminate all the werewolves….”
While speaking, I gauged the Master’s reaction.
The way of thinking displayed by this man called First was clearly twisted.
“What did you do, Master?”
“I eliminated all the werewolves.”
Somehow, this felt like the boundary line of what humans could rationally conceive.
It was slaughter conducted with the sole purpose of achieving the floor’s clear objective.
“…And First?”
“He spent a year on that floor.”
“So he chose to develop the vaccine?”
“Haha, of course….”
Vaccine development would certainly require that much time.
Since the ‘world’ within the Tower operated at a medieval technological level, even with modern knowledge, physically reconstructing the technology demanded considerable time.
“No.”
But that was wrong.
“First spent a year traversing the world within that floor, slaughtering every living human.”
“…What?”
The Observer’s voice turned hollow at this unexpected conclusion.
“He was told to eliminate the plague, so he simply erased all the ‘hosts’—humanity itself. If everyone became a werewolf, it wouldn’t be a disease anymore but a new evolution, a new normal. That’s what I thought was the ‘real Hidden Quest.'”
“…Was that actually a Hidden Quest?”
“No. It couldn’t have been.”
The Guild Master quietly stroked the back of his neck.
The memory made his skin crawl.
“He just came out and said, ‘Guess not.’ Then went to clear the next floor.”
“…He’s not just ordinarily insane.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying. He’s insane.”
The Master leaned back deeply into his chair.
“So I asked him. How could his mind be intact after committing such a massacre?”
“…I’m curious too. What did he say?”
“That they weren’t human. That they were NPCs. So it was fine.”
“…Like in games?”
“That’s the perception he had.”
The Master buried himself deeper into the chair, tapping his toes.
“When I learned the Korean Tower had 94 floors, I realized First was Korean. I figured someone that insane would climb far higher than me.”
With a light push of his toes against the floor, the chair spun with a creaking sound toward the window.
Swoosh!
He reached out and pulled the cord, and the blinds drew back to reveal the outside.
In the distance, the towering Korean Tower rose into view.
“While devouring other ‘failures’…”
Brilliant sunlight poured in, casting long, dense shadows across the room.
Yet in the pitch-black shadow behind the Master, where light could not reach, unspeakable ‘monsters’ of indescribable form writhed and squirmed like servants licking their master’s feet.
“I’ve waited long. First, for you to finally appear.”
Those who had ‘escaped’ the Tower rather than ‘failed’—climbers bearing the characteristic ‘inability to awaken’—had maintained this state for ten years, not just one or two…
I had failed to find and ‘devour’ them.
‘But watching that Tower, I knew you’d appear someday.’
Pandemonium’s mobile fortress.
Currently positioned west of South Korea…
Over the Yellow Sea.
Watching the 94th Floor that First had just entered.
A climber from India’s 74th Floor Tower.
Pandemonium’s Guild Master.
A hunter of climbers.
‘The Second’ Iransu laughed savagely.
“Go ahead and fail. When you do, I’ll come find you…!”
* * *
It felt like passing through sluggish, viscous innards.
I could have moved faster, but I was holding back.
The ‘boss’ of this floor needed to misjudge me.
[The ‘power’ you lost awaits you…]
The status window blazed brilliantly, as if urging me to choose quickly.
If I touched it, I could reclaim all the power I’d gained climbing from the 1st to the 94th Floor.
But it wasn’t time yet.
The past.
I had given up clearing the 94th Floor.
From a climber’s perspective, there are two ways a floor conquest can fail.
Being overwhelmed—lacking the strength to survive, being killed or collapsing dead.
This results in a ‘Tower conquest failure,’ and you’re expelled outside the Tower.
What happens after that, even I don’t know.
But when I think of those expelled for failing, one face inevitably flashes through my mind.
Second.
He had a straightforward personality, an eagerness to learn, and pursued efficient clears nearly as well as I did, so I taught him various things.
My subordinate, my prized disciple of sorts.
Even now, I think of him occasionally—he was quite capable.
Of course, since I haven’t seen him in the 75th Floor waiting room, I suspect he died breaking through the 74th Floor.
‘If he somehow survived that brutal difficulty… where would he be now, and what would he be doing?’
And then there’s the other case.
‘Abandoning’ the floor clear.
Not failure.
It’s the concept of temporarily suspending the clear.
We called it ‘escape.’
If you choose this…
You must abandon everything you’ve gained in the Tower and be expelled outside.
And stripped of the blessing called awakening entirely, you become an ‘awakening-disabled person,’ forced to endure a life worse than vermin.
The only way to reclaim the lost power is… to crawl back into this hellish Tower.
That’s my case.
‘…It took 10 years to return.’
Moreover, this escape is one-time use.
Once you escape and leave, when you return, only two conclusions remain: clear the Tower or fail and be ejected.
I came back to clear this Tower no matter what.
That’s why it took 10 years.
‘Because I believed the opportunity would come someday.’
That ‘power’ the brilliant status window speaks of is exactly that.
What I shed and left behind in the process of abandoning the 94th Floor conquest.
So then, the reason I gave up on clearing the 94th Floor.
It’s because of the “wasteland” that the Defense Team is currently experiencing.
‘I never imagined it would come to this.’
The 90th Floor is a colossal scenario where the theme carries over.
Whatever I do when clearing the 90th Floor doesn’t disappear—it persists into the 91st Floor.
The same applies to the 92nd and 93rd Floors.
So if I make even one wrong move on the 90th Floor, by the time I reach the 94th Floor, the snowball effect becomes completely uncontrollable.
The problem occurred when I cleared the 93rd Floor.
Even by that point, I had no idea that the 90th Floor range was a colossal scenario with a continuing theme.
‘The 80th Floor range wasn’t like that, damn it.’
There’s no helpful fairy or guide to explain things.
The 93rd Floor’s concept was agent protection and target assassination.
If I’d cleared it properly, I would have protected the key personnel, established a foothold for them, and then—
assassinated the leaders of the hostile forces threatening these agents to clear the floor.
But I was an efficiency-obsessed veteran, so I didn’t do that.
‘…I may have gone a bit overboard.’
I also wanted to break the hidden quest…
So I cleared the floor using a very twisted and bizarre method.
As a result.
By the 94th Floor, the “fortress” that should have been built at the “core” to become humanity’s vanguard and reliable bulwark never materialized and simply vanished.
I only realized this butterfly effect after starting the 94th Floor.
I was deep in “Offense” mode, happily slaughtering enemies, when suddenly guidance messages appeared simultaneously: “The fortress is under attack,” “The core is under attack.”
And then I saw the message: “If the core is destroyed, you will die.”
I immediately used my one-time-use escape ticket.
…Ten years ago.
And that’s what I’m doing now.
I feel sorry for the Defense Team.
But I assembled a party with sufficient specs to clear it while accounting for all of that.
…Besides.
What I said about finishing quickly isn’t a lie.
By my estimate, just one wave.
At most, three waves.
They just need to endure that much.
Splurt! Hack!
As my entrails slid out, my feet touched the pitch-black space.
Gruuuuu—
Along with a nauseating cry, the space opened its eyes.
As the pitch-black walls cracked open, thousands upon thousands of crimson, golden, and cyan eyes sprouted forth like weeds.
It’s such a grotesque sight that if used as a horror image, it could literally kill a few people from heart attacks.
The boss of the 94th Floor.
A Remnant of Foreign God.
Though calling it a “remnant” hardly does it justice…
The Break Bosses that had driven humanity to despair—Scathach and the Frost Dragon—looked almost endearing by comparison. This was a calamity on an entirely different scale.
The Tower’s bosses and Break Bosses simply operated in different weight classes.
There was a reason why South Korea’s most celebrated S-rank Hunters who had entered this 94th Floor were ground to dust without even bones remaining.
While holding back waves of mid-boss to boss-class magical beasts pouring from the Defense Zone.
You had to eliminate an out-of-specification monster that couldn’t even be scratched by ordinary specs—before the Defense Team collapsed.
This was the true difficulty of the 94th Floor, the one called hell.
Even with my level, synchronized with just one EX-rank Frost Mage, merely meeting those eyes caused blood to drip from my nose.
“Big brother’s here.”
From that space still shrouded in darkness between the eyes and eyes.
Squelch!
An enormous number of tentacles began pouring forth.
“Quite the hostile welcome?”
Don’t be fooled by that terrifying appearance.
This bastard.
It’s a coward that runs whenever it thinks it can’t win.
I remembered being frustrated chasing after this thing’s tail on my first attempt, when it got scared of my power.
There was a reason I synchronized only the Frost Mage.
‘If I appear weak with just the Frost Mage, this cowardly bastard won’t run away and will extend its tentacles with full force.’
As expected, it surrounded me from all sides, determined to thoroughly crush this insignificant prey before it.
It intended to seal me in completely, but from my perspective, it had taken the bait.
As I said before, failure means losing everything and being ejected. But ‘escape’ is different.
It means ‘the original power I left behind’ remains in the Tower, waiting for me.
“You’re finished.”
Before the Remnant of Foreign God’s tentacles that rushed to swallow me whole.
I reached out and grasped the brilliantly glowing status window…
with all my might.
[Restoring the suspended record of ‘First Climber’ Ha Sung-woon]
“Let there be light!”
Flash!
My sword, reclaimed after ten years, cleaved through the darkness.

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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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