But Still, I Didn't Feel Like It.

15th floor.

"It's over already."

Starting around the 11th floor, monsters resistant to fire or too tough to defeat with explosions alone began appearing little by little.

I cleared a few floors thanks to the bonus stats from my necklace and ring, along with the points I'd earned while climbing the Tower and put into Strength and Agility.

Now that I thought about it, Strength affected physical power, Agility affected speed, and Intelligence didn't make you smarter; it seemed to strengthen skills with a more magical feel.

After leaving the Tower, I flew to the exchange counter with my magic stones and drops and traded them all in.

My bank account had passed three million won ages ago.

I heard that climbers look for better equipment to take on increasingly powerful monsters, and that some classes, like Blacksmith, support Awakened people in that area. But...

Nothing really appealed to me.

Even though I now had money I could barely have dreamed of touching before I Awakened, I didn't feel much of anything.

If anything, all I could think was that it was a nuisance.

Apparently, there are people who pray to become Awakened so they can make a lot of money, but...

'What's the point of that?'

If I died while climbing, everything I'd earned up to that point would be meaningless anyway.

It'd be nice if it went back to society or to my family, but it'd be another problem if someone else around me took it.

"It's not something I need to worry about, though."

Maybe I should get a phone. Whenever I walked around downtown, it seemed like everyone had a smartphone, and I'd wondered what they were all so absorbed in.

As I browsed the phones on display, a black-haired woman with horns came over.

She looks familiar. She's the person who was sitting on the hospital bench.

"Why are you staring so hard? Are you buying one?"

"......"

Was she talking to me? My eyes met hers.

Her glittering amber eyes, with sharp, reptilian pupils, were looking right at me.

Why was she looking at me? I averted my gaze.

"Who are you to be talking to me?"

"I just get bored wandering around by myself~"

"The grown-ups told me not to follow strangers."

"They're good people~ Where are they?"

"The building burned down, and they all died."

"Cough. S-sorry..."

The black-haired woman muttered, "Well, I walked right into that one..." Looking closer, I saw she had a huge tail behind her, too, in addition to the horns. I hadn't noticed it before.

Then she shook her head, composed herself, and spoke to me again.

"Did you know Awakened people have their own dedicated smartphone stores? Some people aren't good at controlling their stats yet, so they end up breaking the phones they just bought."

"Is that so?"

"They get a lot better once they've climbed a few floors and gotten some experience~" the horned woman told me.

Why was I talking to a strange woman in front of a phone shop?

More to the point, why was this woman talking to me?

"Oh, right! I never asked your name! I'm Han Mi-reu! You know K■'s first online portal was called 'Hanmir'? Isn't that amazing?"

"Joo So-jeong."

"What's your hobby? I've been streaming lately~"

"I don't know what streaming is, but my hobby is suicide."

"That's pretty hardcore~"

Even before I got here, I'd deliberately let a few bullets hit me on the way. Judging by how accurately they went straight through my head, the shooter must've been pretty good. What were they doing instead of competing on the national team? I'd heard that a few years ago, the Awakened and ordinary people got separate divisions.

"These days, Awakened people with special classes overseas keep causing trouble~ They say things like they want to become gods of a new world, like they're in some manga. Oh, vampires are an exception. Just give that one a few blood packs, and they quietly keep to themselves. It's a relief that all the special-class Awakened people in our country are so well-behaved, right?"

'She's so talkative.'

"Speaking of which! There's a succubus among Korea's special-class Awakened, you know. A virgin succubus, of all things! She's insanely rare even among rare types, and completely pure, too! She was sooooo cute~"

'So noisy...'

While I was wondering how to get this talkative Awakened woman off my back, she took my hand.

"So..."

"!?"

"Why don't you come with me for now? There may be a lot fewer of those terrorist bastards, but plenty of idiots still haven't given up. These days, they don't even care if there are ordinary people around, you know?"

She suddenly took my hand and dragged me somewhere, and I went along helplessly.

Even if I tried to pull away, her Strength was already beyond anything I could handle.

"...I guess you've cleared more than the 50th floor."

"I've climbed just about every Tower in Korea, you know? That's how I ended up in a high-ranking position, but it's a pain having so much work to do! Good thing I hired plenty of capable employees. Right?"

She really did drag me to a smartphone store exclusively for Awakened people. From the outside, it looked no different from an ordinary store.

The woman who'd dragged me there browsed around as if she were shopping, picked up a display model, and showed it to me.

"How about this? It comes with a stylus, and it's incredibly durable. It also has extremely high resistance to all kinds of attacks—fire, ice, electricity, corrosion, you name it! It's the latest model! Don't you want one?"

"I'm not interested. And why are you buying a phone for me when I don't even know you?"

"Hey, shopkeeper! I'll take one of these!"

"Are you listening to me?"

I never said I wanted to pick one out, but she went ahead and chose one and paid for it herself, making a huge fuss.

Come to think of it, she paid by card. It was pitch-black, and looked expensive, too.

"Here, this one's for our So-jeong! I paid in full, and I saved my number in it, so call if you need anything!"

"I never said you could call me by my name. And I have no reason to call you."

"So you're going home now, right? Can I ask for your address?"

"It burned down. I don't have a home."

"Why did you bring me here?"

"You said you don't have a home, right?"

"I don't."

"You can stay as long as you like!"

"No."

"Are we using separate rooms, or sharing one?"

"Don't ignore me."

Before I knew it, I'd been dragged to the black-haired woman's home and plopped down on her living room sofa.

The place was high enough to overlook the whole city. She lived much higher up than I'd expected. There was even a balcony, and the windows were huge. I could see planes flying through the sky, too.

'So high... The top floor...'

"Bring me something to driiiink!?!?"

So this is what it feels like to fall from somewhere high up. If I'd kept falling from the tenth floor without using Flight, would I have felt like this the whole time? Did the tenth floor even have a floor?

"No! Don't give up on the world all of a sudden!"

Han Mi-reu spread her huge wings and fell after me from above, caught up in an instant, grabbed me, and flapped her wings hard to carry us back up to the balcony.

"I-I thought my heart was going to fall out."

"I wonder what it feels like to have your heart removed. Could you let me experience it now?"

"No, no, don't give up on life so easily!"

"For reference, my heart is right here. If you put your hand through my flesh and reach the warm heart wrapped in my ribs..."

"No Fatalities, okay!? And don't try to pull it out yourself!"

Unfortunately, thanks to Han Mi-reu's interference, I couldn't experience what it felt like to have my heart pulled out. I'll have to check next time I climb the Tower.

"Good grief... I had a feeling when I first saw you, but I didn't realize it was this bad."

Han Mi-reu said her arm was sore from moving so suddenly, lightly thumping it with her fist.

"Your class..."

"I'm a dragon. Pretty awesome, right?"

"The bespectacled doctor said they knew someone with a special class..."

"You know them too! They were my doctor before I Awakened! My mom and dad both died because of the Tower disaster, but I Awakened and got all healthy instead, you know?"

So the special-class person the doctor knew was a dragon.

"How old... no, how many years have you lived?"

"Now, now~ You shouldn't ask a woman her age~"

"I used to be a man."

"So was I!"

"?"

"Sorry. I was kidding."

"Don't joke like that. It's scary."

After that, the two of us kept talking.

The conversation kept going in a stream of consciousness, even as it felt like the whole thing was five minutes away from turning into a complete mess.

From that chaotic conversation, I learned that Han Mi-reu was one of the earliest Awakened, the head of the Management Bureau (technically its director, though people called her the chairwoman), and one of Korea's special-class Awakened. Astonishingly, Han Mi-reu was a dragon.

"If you register with the Management Bureau, the information inevitably gets to me. Then I saw you were a special class and wondered what it was, and it said Phoenix. So I got curious and came to check you out!"

"Yes. I really don't die. I had bullets go through my head a few times, and I still didn't die."

"Yeah. A few days ago, there was an uproar because an Awakened person got shot and ran in from below. We've got to deal with the monsters that came out when the Tower collapsed, so why are those bastards so hell-bent on killing Awakened people?"

"...When the Tower collapses... Oh, right. Monsters come pouring out when a Tower collapses, don't they?"

When a Tower collapses, monsters pour out.

Back then, the military started firing missiles indiscriminately at the Towers that had suddenly appeared, hoping to blow them up. But when a Tower collapsed, monsters emerged in droves, and many people died. Similar things seem to have happened in other countries, too. Needless to say, it was even worse in China and India, with their huge populations.

North Korea's government had already been destroyed, and survivors were only barely rescued. I heard the country still hadn't been fully restored.

Modern weapons worked on them, at least, but once you got to the higher floors, even those stopped being effective.

Apparently, a number of powerful Awakened people managed to deal with them and successfully reclaim South Korea. Han Mi-reu had been one of them.