The 7th-Run Regressor Collects Calamities - Chapter 23

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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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Episode 23. Ollie Barkley (1)
After the second loop’s destruction passed, Song Ji-hu began to move.
‘So this is Ollie Barkley’s inner world….’
A compass guided his direction. The needle spun wildly before settling toward what he presumed to be the city’s center.
[Activating Residual Thought, fragments of emotion embedded throughout the entire city came crashing toward him like a tsunami.
Fear, guilt, a vicious self-loathing. And beneath all of it, a melancholy sorrow that served as the foundation for every emotion.
The source of all those feelings lay in the direction the compass needle pointed.
“Let’s go then.”
Song Ji-hu pushed forward, treading through the ashes.
After passing three blocks, the debris beneath his feet began to writhe.
Rumble—
Concrete blocks from collapsed buildings, bent rebar, and shattered glass fragments fused together like metal drawn to a magnet, taking on the shape of a human form.
Thud, thud, thud.
Massive forms three meters high. Dozens of golems rose up simultaneously from every corner of the street.
“So it won’t be that easy.”
The golems surrounded Song Ji-hu as their heavy footfalls shook the ground.
The frontmost golem drove its enormous fist down. Song Ji-hu sidestepped and drew a short blade, slashing across the golem’s flank.
The moment the blade scraped across the concrete surface, he triggered his Mental Barrier.
Crack—
The attack with the short blade had limited effect, but the Mental Barrier’s power forcefully severed the golem’s binding structure.
“Is this an offensive skill or a defensive one?”
The golem’s flank crumbled, and debris rained down. He drove his blade into the core exposed within the wreckage, and the golem collapsed entirely.
‘Slow, and weak to Mental Barrier. The difficulty itself isn’t that high.’
He dispatched the second golem, evaded the third, and pressed forward without hesitation.
He severed the fourth golem’s arm and drove his Mental Barrier directly into the fifth, breaking its binding and shattering its core.
But it never ended.
Destroy one and two rose; destroy two and four emerged. In this ashen city, the debris that formed the golems was an infinite resource.
And there was one more critical problem.
Rumble—!
A third loop had begun since he’d entered this place.
The city rebuilt itself, pillars of light erupted, and shockwaves reduced everything to ash once more.
And when the loop reset, all the golems Song Ji-hu had destroyed were mockingly regenerated in their entirety.
‘… There’s no end to this. Is every dungeon in this inner world like this?’
Each time the destruction loop ran, the city rebuilt, and the rebuilt debris became golems again. The longer he dragged it out, the worse his odds became.
Song Ji-hu sheathed his sword.
‘If it’s like the Frozen Courtroom….’
Just as proving innocence in a guilty verdict courtroom had been useless.
‘I have to make Ollie Barkley himself stop this loop.’
Song Ji-hu changed his approach.
Instead of engaging the golems, he deployed his Mental Barrier in all directions and advanced with only minimal defensive responses.
The golem’s fists shattered against the barrier, he carved through the opening, and raised the barrier again.
Step by step, he advanced along the compass’s direction.
***
After advancing bit by bit in this manner, Song Ji-hu reached the edge of the crater in the city’s center and stopped.
It was vast. A giant pit hundreds of meters in diameter, with clear traces of entire buildings having been completely vaporized.
The slope had melted from the explosion’s intense heat, gleaming smoothly like glass.
‘Heat intense enough to dissolve concrete….’
Song Ji-hu descended along the slope, sliding as vitrified concrete crackled beneath his feet.
As he drew closer to the crater’s center, the emotional waves grew stronger.
And when he finally arrived at the crater’s bottom, at its very center.
“……?”
Song Ji-hu’s steps came to an abrupt halt. There was a boy there.
A child who looked to be about ten years old.
Golden-brown hair hung limply, obscuring his face, and he knelt with his head bowed low.
Over the boy’s body was draped an old leather jacket.
It would have fit an adult perfectly, but it was far too large for the boy—the sleeves swallowed his hands, and the hem dragged across the ground.
The holster at his waist was empty. And the boy never stopped muttering something under his breath.
“I broke it.”
His small, frail voice trembled as he spoke.
“I broke everything.”
“Ollie Barclay.”
The figure matched what he’d seen before the mental dive—it was unmistakably Ollie Barclay.
‘A younger version of adult Ollie Barclay, you might say…?’
An S-rank hunter, America’s strongest, now crouched down in the form of a ten-year-old boy.
‘Ego regression…?’
Song Ji-hoo immediately assessed the situation and pushed his residual thoughts and mental perception to their absolute limit. Fragments of all manner of emotion came flooding toward him.
‘At least there was information about Eun Seo-jin….’
Information about Ollie Barclay was virtually nonexistent aside from rumor.
“Such regression typically occurs when the psyche instinctively tries to escape from extreme stress….”
The core emotion that had pierced Eun Seo-jin was a profound sense of guilt toward his comrade, rooted in which was a vicious self-hatred.
“Then it means we’ve triggered some guilt that adult Ollie Barclay carries.”
Adult Ollie Barclay is an S-rank hunter, a being of power. The city endlessly repeating its cycle of destruction and reconstruction is continuously stimulating his trauma.
And Ollie Barclay has regressed to the form of a child to escape it.
Back to a version of himself that had not awakened, that could destroy nothing, when safety still existed.
But this regression was a double-edged sword.
In the form of a boy, he might feel safe, but if time continued to pass, Ollie Barclay as an entity would cease to exist. He would fade away, forever a child.
The boy has no power. So he can destroy nothing. So he is safe.
Ironically, this regression was Ollie’s last act of self-preservation.
If the adult form were maintained, fragments from the abyss could commandeer his power and send him spiraling, but in the boy’s form, his very strength was sealed.
“Ugh… how am I supposed to wake him up….”
First came the task of rousing Ollie Barclay.
***
Two years ago. Fallen, Nevada.
An A-rank Gate had mutated in the small city of roughly ten thousand residents, resulting in a dungeon break of S-rank caliber.
The USAA mobilized immediately, but the scale exceeded all expectations, and monsters infiltrated the city interior before civilians could be fully evacuated.
Ollie Barclay had to choose.
Push his energy to the limit and unleash an omnidirectional explosion to annihilate the monsters.
The problem was that even Ollie himself could not perfectly control the blast radius and destructive force.
The alternative was to watch thousands of civilians slaughtered by the monsters.
In the trolley problem, Ollie Barclay pulled the trigger. Result: monsters eliminated. Casualties: zero.
In that moment when everyone clenched their fists and cheered, the shockwave and falling monsters brought down dozens of buildings in their wake.
Dozens were seriously injured. Hundreds suffered minor wounds. An entire district of the city lay in ruins.
Objectively speaking, Ollie Barclay was a hero who saved thousands of lives. The media reported it that way, and the citizens offered their thanks.
But what Ollie Barclay saw through his own eyes was collapsed buildings, people bleeding and waiting for rescue teams, the terrified face of a crying child.
‘A strong man protects the weak.’
In that moment, what echoed through Ollie’s mind was his father’s voice from childhood.
The ten-year-old Ollie Barclay, who had yearned to become a hero who protected everything without a single casualty, like his father, appeared and whispered.
‘You’re not a hero. You’re a monster. Your power brings only destruction, not protection.’
The teachings of his father and the reality of the present.
In the widening gap between them, a fragment of the Abyss Lord seeped in.
The fragment took root in Ollie Barclay’s guilt and began to distort his memories.
After a year of relentless gaslighting, the solid self of Ollie Barclay finally could not bear the weight and collapsed.
“I destroyed everything….”
Ollie Barclay repeated those words endlessly, curling himself tighter within the crater.
Slowly sinking deeper, someone else’s mind forcibly connected with Ollie Barclay’s spirit.
***
Song Ji-hoo began to approach the boy Ollie.
One step, two steps.
As he took the third step, the crater convulsed violently.
Rumble-rumble-rumble-!
The entire city beyond the crater reacted to Song Ji-hoo’s approach.
Collapsed buildings rose up like enormous walls. Concrete, rebar, and glass tangled together, blocking Song Ji-hoo’s path toward Ollie Barclay.
Hundreds… no, thousands of burning shadows turned to regard Song Ji-hoo simultaneously.
Empty eye sockets. Gaping mouths. Faces engulfed in flame. And they began to scream.
Screeeeeeeee-!
The unified cry transformed into a shockwave, pouring forth from all directions.
“You’re afraid of me coming closer, then?”
Song Ji-hoo’s body was driven backward by the mental assault compressed from fear, pain, and resentment.
Whether it was Ollie Barclay’s defense mechanism or the amusement of the Abyss Lord.
Thud-!
The ground beneath his feet cracked, leaving deep gouges in the earth.
Snap!
A fissure ran through his mental barrier. The force was incomparably stronger than anything he’d endured in Eun Seo-jin’s inner world.
He gritted his teeth and poured his mental strength into mending the fractures.
Even as Song Ji-hu held his ground, he never took his eyes off Ollie Backley, who kept repeating the same words amid the rubble.
“I broke everything. I failed to protect it.”
Meanwhile, the loop was beginning to restart.
The city rebuilt itself, preparing anew for its own destruction.
Even the psychic projection couldn’t reach Ollie Backley, blocked by the screams that the shadows kept hurling.
“Stubborn one, aren’t you?”
He needed a new approach. Instead, Song Ji-hu drew his blade and began dismantling the wall that stood between him and Ollie Backley.
If mental skills wouldn’t work, the solution had to be physical.
Crack! Crack!
He shattered glass with his sword and loosened the connection points with every skill at his disposal.
Shriek!
The moment he pushed forward despite their interference, the shadows that had only been screaming began to hurl themselves at Song Ji-hu.
“A war of attrition? Let’s see who tires first.”
Song Ji-hu threw up a mental barrier against the charging shadows even as he continued demolishing the wall.
Scrape.
They raised their claws and raked against the barrier as though they would never be allowed to pass.
‘All I need is one opening large enough to reach through.’
He didn’t need a hole big enough for his whole body. Just enough space for his hand to extend and touch Ollie Backley—that was all.
Crack! Crack!
A chunk of concrete fell away, and the opening formed to precisely that size.
“Done.”
Song Ji-hu reached through the gap and placed his hand against Ollie Backley’s head, crying out:
“Mental link.”
The 7th Return Collector of Calamities
Author
: Song Tan
Date of Production
: July 13, 2026
Publisher
: Aces Media Co., Ltd.
Editor
: Aces Media Editorial Team
Address
: 10F Urban Bench Building, 325 Teheran-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
Email
: [email protected]
※ This work has been published by Aces Media Co., Ltd. under contract with the copyright holder.
No portion of this content may be used in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher and author.
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UCI
: G720:N+A129-20260709064

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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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