The Regressor's Ice Is Golden - Chapter 43

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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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043.

Crack!
The rotation of the second jump unwound, and her right foot touched down on the ice, sending up a spray of frost.
Following the Triple Lutz, the Connected Triple Loop—Ha Seol’s signature move among junior competitors.
Connected Triple Loop.
“Whoa!”
Chizuru stared, transfixed, at the skater.
The one she’d already faced and would face again soon.
In the latter half of the program, the skater who’d just landed the competition’s most difficult combination sequence was grinning fiercely.
Two more spins to go, and the Short Program would be finished.
The Camel Spin rotations were fast.
Followed by the Change Foot Combination Spin.
Every position from this program was executed with meticulous precision.
Layback Spin, gathering the foot before lifting it, flowing into the Sit Spin…….
‘Ping—!’
……?
A faint sound of something shattering echoed from somewhere distant.
Chizuru glanced around absently, though she couldn’t immediately place what it was.
The music ended with a bang and crash of instruments breaking, drowning it all out.
At the same moment, the skater unwound from her rotation and struck the closing pose.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
‘Did I mishear?’
So Chizuru began to clap anyway.
The skater who’d just finished relaxed her posture, breathing hard.
She acknowledged the torrent of cheers and applause.
Turning solemnly to left and right, she suddenly looked up toward Chizuru’s section.
“!”
“Oh my.”
Their eyes met, and Chizuru’s widened in recognition.
It was Ha Seol, all right.
She was smiling, that familiar grin, as she left the ice.
Her mother quietly nodded beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
“You’ve got quite the friend, Chizuru.”
“Yes, um.”
Too remarkable a friend, if anything.
If she skated decently through the Free Skating, she’d definitely qualify for the Grand Prix Final.
Which meant it would be some time before Chizuru could truly face her again.
‘……’
It felt distant.
Meanwhile, the monitor showed the skater and coach sitting in the Kiss and Cry.
That meant the judging was nearly complete.
Another round of cheers rose, and the skater waved lightly with a smile.
{Kim’s score is…….}
After a brief silence, the announcement came through, and the scores appeared on the display.
[66.34]
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
Cheers erupted, but Chizuru could see it.
That peculiar smile on the skater’s face in the monitor.
Her head nodded, yes, but it didn’t look like the smile of someone satisfied with the result.
‘It dropped?’
The Thailand competition score had been around 67 points, so this was considerably lower.
Even with the combination pushed to the second half for higher base value, it should have been more.
Either way, the score was in, and the next skater’s performance began.
“Are you going to leave now?”
“Um, I thought I’d stay until Rika’s skate.”
That way, she’d have the courage to go see Ha Seol afterward.
She couldn’t explain why, but that was just how it was.
‘Ha Seol.’
Chizuru sent her a light congratulation and made a resolve.
When they met again, she wanted to see her smiling brightly.
So that while they still didn’t need to fight, the memory of being good friends could remain.

At that moment, the person who had just finished competing returned to the waiting room and immediately kicked off her boots.
“You okay?”
“I don’t know.”
That metallic cracking sound she’d heard near the end of the program when she lifted the blade—it hadn’t been her imagination.
The sensation was still vivid on her fingers as she’d wiped away the ice shavings while coming off the rink.
I exhaled softly and slowly peeled away the blade guards.
The skate blade, still wet from melted ice, gleamed under the light.
And across the center of that blade ran a clear, jagged crack.
“Will this be all right?”
“With a crack like that? Of course not.”
Besides, it was equipment she’d used far too long already.
After her parents passed away, the inheritance she’d converted to cash had been barely adequate for training expenses.
But that didn’t mean she could use her equipment carelessly.
She’d kept trying to make them last, sharpening the edges on the whetstone whenever they dulled, again and again.
These skate blades she’d brought all the way to Nagoya had been sustained that way.
Coach Park came over with a screwdriver and slowly began loosening the fixings.
Click, click.
The small metallic sound of screws coming undone pierced her eardrums, releasing a creeping sense of dread.
And the moment the last screw came free.
Clang.
The skate blade, now in two pieces, fell away from the boot.
I looked toward Coach Park slowly.
Coach Park looked back at me.
The eyes of two people confronting catastrophe met.
“Ha Seol, stay calm. Even if the sky falls, there’s always a hole to crawl through, and if you keep your wits about you, you survive even in a tiger’s den.”
……
“First things first, I need to call the company. You go find someone from the federation.”
“…… What am I supposed to tell them?”
Coach Park lost his words and closed his mouth.
Right—even just the Short Program, the score had been so low it was practically a wasteland.
With biased judging already suspected, if a report came in about equipment failure?
‘They could interpret it as me wanting to withdraw.’
One wrong word and she could actually be disqualified—a complete disaster.
She doubted they’d be stupid enough to do that, but the Ice Skating Federation was exactly the kind of place that could be.
“All right, let’s just call the company’s management team first. Nagoya has plenty of ice rinks, so there should be places we can get equipment. Today’s competition is over, so we have time until tomorrow’s run-through. Let’s look around and see what we can find.”
Coach Park wrapped an arm around my shoulders while desperately rattling off contingencies.
“You focus on managing your mental state.”
I nodded slowly.
The final group’s competition had started, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch it.
When I might not even be able to compete tomorrow, why did that matter?
While Coach Park was on the phone, changing clothes and packing my things felt like an eternity.
Coach Park’s call was taking longer, and he still hadn’t come back.
There was still some time before the fifth group finished, so I picked up my phone too.
Park Ji-ho shrieked when he heard the news, and Cha Jin-hee hung up on me completely.
“Hey! You……!”
“…… That’s what happened.”
“Then tomorrow……! Oh, my god……!”
It was me who got screwed, so why were you falling apart like this?
But I didn’t have anything particularly to say either, so I just tried to soothe the kid as he cried.
“What are you going to do? So you’ll just do the Short Program, and, sob, have to end it there?”
“Coach Park said he’d look into it, and since we’re in Nagoya, there should be ways to find equipment. Don’t worry too much.”
“No, I mean……”
“It’ll be fine. Stop crying, wipe your feet, and get some sleep. I’m going out there for the Free Skate tomorrow.”
“…… How?”
“Somehow.”
After I hung up, I left a note and stepped outside the Ice Skating Rink for a moment.
Whether by misfortune or grace, not a single ant crossed her path.
The damp night breeze tugged through her hair and moved on.
“Haa…….”
Her lips trembled as she exhaled deeply, breath catching on the heat rising in her chest.
That heat scraped against her heart, her lungs, merciless and raw.
Even her left foot, silent throughout the competition, had begun to throb.
‘Why.’
Why did it have to happen now, at such a crucial moment?
It was because she hadn’t replaced her equipment in time—but that didn’t change anything.
Trying to stretch what she had a little further wasn’t frugality; it was just cheap-minded foolishness.
The prize money from Thailand had come through, and she’d used it for hospital visits and utility bills—was that the mistake?
It wasn’t even her right foot, the one that struggled with the Loop and Toe Jumps.
She kicked her useless left foot irritably.
Two advanced jumps that dominated her Free Skating instead of the Triple Axel—Lutz and Flip.
Both were Toe Jumps, launching off the right foot’s toe pick, with the left foot’s edge being the critical judging criterion.
Flip required a thin Inner Edge, nearly neutral; Lutz demanded a deep, angled Outer Edge…….
Then a sentence came rushing back, striking her like a blow.
Something Choi Ji-hwan had told her once, in a text exchange.

[Choi Ji-hwan: By the way, I noticed you were really hard on your boot when you did that Lutz earlier. That’s what’s been giving me trouble. I wanted to mention it out of concern.]

‘I should have listened to that.’
Wasn’t it a little sad that even when time had turned back, some destinies remained forbidden?
Or maybe it wasn’t destiny at all—maybe she’d just been careless.
So even now, with time turned back, she was still……
Ding.
……?
A direct message had arrived on her social media.
It was from Chizuru.
[When are you coming? Everyone at the Club was looking forward to it. Your performance today was amazing! I’ll come meet you nearby.]
Right—after the Short Program ended today.
She’d made a voice call, half-dazed.
The connection went through quickly.
“Moshi moshi?”
She murmured in halting Japanese, the kind she’d memorized using a translator app.
“Chizuru, tasukete…….”
“Eh?!”
Ah, saying it that way definitely invited misunderstanding.
Though honestly, the situation wasn’t that different from what she was implying.
They ended the voice call and switched to texting to sort things out.
After Chizuru heard the whole story, she gasped in alarm and fussed, then resent the address of the Ice Skating Rink she’d mentioned before.
[(Address) This is our Club—we train here! Koyama at the front desk handles skate equipment too, so let’s ask him!]
Really?
She jumped to her feet and sent a message through the translator.
[Can you go today? Mine are Edia Icefly. The size is 240mm. My boots are fine, so I just need the blade.]
Then she immediately got up and ran into the rink.
Coach Park was just finishing a call and returning to the waiting area.
“Coach!”
“Oh my, that startled me! Did you go get some air?”
“We have those interviews with the top Short Program skaters, right? When does that finish?”
“Um, well……, once Group 5 wraps up it shouldn’t take long.”
“I need to go somewhere right after it ends.”
“Where?”
Instead of answering, she showed Coach Park the direct message exchange with Chizuru.
Coach Park’s eyes widened as she scrolled through, furrowing her brow.
Just then, a new message arrived.
[They have 240mm! I have mine too, so come quick!]
“Even if the sky falls, there’s always a hole to crawl through.”
Coach Park chuckled slowly at her words.
“That’s right. First, we finish what we need to do and then we go, hmm?”
“Yes.”
I left my things with Coach Park and went straight to do the interview.
When I checked the results, I was in second place.
First was Amasaki Rika, and third was… Cha Seo-hee.
The lineup was incredible, but that wasn’t what mattered right now.
“I want to work even harder and stand on the podium tomorrow!”
I steadied my wavering eyes and answered each translated question with conviction, pouring everything into my words.
The moment the interview ended, I bowed politely and then bolted down the hallway at full speed.
Coach Park, clutching my bag, scrambled after me.
“You can take the subway and buses, right?”
“Of course I can!”
If I couldn’t, Chizuru would’ve come to pick me up anyway!
I ran breathlessly while searching the address from the DM on my phone’s map app.
Thankfully, it wasn’t far at all!
“This way! Follow me!”
I pulled out the Japan transit card Coach Park had prepared.
I barely caught one train, got off midway, ran again… and again.
Then hopped on another line and sprinted like I’d lost my mind.
Every passing landscape blurred past like a lantern show.
And at the destination I finally reached—
“Haah, haah…”
There stood a white building with a golf equipment shop on the ground floor.
On the light blue sign, a bear character wearing skates was drawn.
“Where, where do I go in?”
“Ha Seol!”
At that familiar voice, we both whipped our heads around.
Chizuru was bounding toward us, waving her hands excitedly.
The Returner’s Ice Rink – Episode 43
E-book Release Date | 2026.06.05

Author | Korkarolli
Publisher | Heo Heung-beom, Park Gun-won
Published by | Potent

Address | [04783] 10th Floor, 8 Yeonmujanggil 11, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Korea
Phone | 02-6320-8500
Fax | 02-6320-8585

UCI | G720:N+A101-20260514092.0043
Retail Price | 100 KRW

ⓒ Korkarolli 2026

This e-book is protected under copyright law.
This e-book is published by agreement with the author and may not be reproduced, distributed, shared, or transmitted in any form without the written consent of both parties.

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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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