Chapter 7
There are far more kinds of monsters than you'd expect.
Beast-types, goblins, kobolds, and the like are just the basics.
Bird-types, fish-types, angels, demons, yokai, dragons... There are all sorts of them in droves.
But humans are adaptable.
The Awakened who clawed their way up the Tower exchanged information, eventually figuring out how to deal with monsters. They even gathered information on the monsters climbers had encountered and put together an entire field guide.
[Defeat the Soul-Stolen Dwarf Hammer Soldier.]
KWAANG!!
Somewhere in an artificially made tunnel, a massive hammer slammed into the spot where a woman had been, causing a small earthquake.
A short, stout dwarf clad head to toe in armor swung a hammer larger than itself with ease, muscles visible even through the armor.
But perhaps because it had no soul, the dwarf's eyes were completely white, without even pupils, reflecting nothing at all.
"This is my first time seeing a dwarf."
-That thing's dumb, but its strength is no joke.
-Lots of Awakened get caught off guard and sent flying into a wall or slammed into the ground.
Whether it could see her or not, the dwarf charged straight at Joo So-jeong and swung its hammer.
So-jeong narrowly dodged its heavy attacks with little more than a glance, sometimes leaping over them and landing behind it.
"Dwarves are resistant to heat, right?"
-Yeah.
-It's all muscle, so you can't kill it just by beating on it.
-It's faster to stab it with a blade.
"Hmm..."
After reading the accounts from Awakened viewers, So-jeong looked at the dwarf charging toward her.
To other people, she might have looked as if she were wondering, 'How should I fight this thing?' Or perhaps, 'Has she frozen up and can't move?'
'Come to think of it, are there any dwarves among the special classes...?'
She was simply thinking about something else.
[Grrraah!]
'Whoosh!!'
With a beastlike roar, the dwarf swung its hammer high overhead. So-jeong slipped to the side, and just as the hammer finished its swing, her leg moved.
'Wham!!'
With a wide low kick, she struck both of the dwarf's legs at once, as if stealing the ball in a soccer match, and launched it into the air.
As the dwarf flailed in surprise at suddenly being airborne, So-jeong didn't pull back her kicking leg. She followed through with an axe kick, knocking the airborne dwarf even higher. It was heavily muscled and weighed a great deal, but her Strength was more than enough to handle it—the weight was practically irrelevant.
The kick was so powerful that the dwarf dropped the hammer it had been holding. It spun backward through the air several times as it fell, only to be launched back up by another kick to the abdomen.
Kicked around like a soccer ball, the dwarf spun through the air. Then it rapidly rotated its body, building up momentum before slamming down into the ground, where it was buried in a hole shaped like its own body.
Its joints had been smashed with every kick in midair, leaving the soulless dwarf unable to move properly. A hand shaped like a gun pointed at it.
"Bang."
With a quiet word, a tiny spark popped from her fingertip and drifted toward the dwarf. So-jeong turned and leisurely walked away without bothering to see what happened.
And the moment the little spark touched the helmet the dwarf was wearing...
'Boom-boom!!!'
A huge explosion brought down the tunnel ceiling, burying the dwarf beneath it.
The explosion alone was more than enough to blow the dwarf apart, so the pile of fallen rocks made a fine substitute for a grave.
"Well... I guess it looked round like a ball, so I felt like kicking it."
-It's insanely heavy because it's so muscular. You need Strength just to move it.
-Kicking a hunk of iron around like a soccer ball, lol.
"That's why I put points into Strength and Agility after Intelligence. The set bonus from my gear gives me extra stats, too."
She'd only been able to play with the dwarf like a ball because of the bonus stats from the Phoenix Ring and Necklace set effect, on top of the points she'd invested.
Otherwise, she might still have inflicted meaningful damage, but she wouldn't have been able to do this much.
"Next."
So-jeong moved on, figuring she'd wasted enough time already.
This time, it was some kind of forest.
[Defeat the Shadow Elf Assassin.]
"It's a forest."
-It sure is.
-Poor thing.
-It thought she was specialized in hand-to-hand combat, so it tried to hide its presence and assassinate her. And of all things, lol...
-Let's go, arson party~
Without asking questions or hesitating, Joo So-jeong set the forest on fire with Pyrokinesis.
On top of controlling the flames, she infused them with mana to increase their power, and soon fire had consumed the entire forest on the 19th floor.
A scream came from somewhere, and the message announcing her victory appeared.
"Still, maybe I should've at least seen its face out of courtesy."
-I guess so.
-Poor elf didn't even get to make an entrance before it died...
-Ahem. Call it a pointy-eared worker who got off early.
She decided she might as well head to the 20th floor and moved on.
"Blub blub?"
As soon as she arrived, a blue expanse and bubbles greeted her, but...
-?
-What the heck?
-Looks like she's underwater.
-Shit. Fire Chicken's useless in the ocean.
She'd lived a monotonous life. Of course she'd never learned how to swim.
She had an immortality skill, so she wouldn't drown, but she slowly sank as she wondered what she should do.
[Defeat the Blood-Soaked Jaws.]
'Kuwaaaagh!'
'Oh, a shark.'
The shark swam toward her at a terrifying speed, opening its mouth to devour her. Rows of closely packed, razor-sharp teeth came into view.
She was holding its lower jaw and nose to keep herself from being dragged into its mouth, but Jaws was swimming so fast that it pushed her back relentlessly.
The water's buoyancy made it hard to move her legs properly, so she could do little more than hold on. In that situation, she tightened her grip on its nose.
[!!!!]
She'd read somewhere that sharks were especially sensitive around the nose. So she decided to try it, and just as she'd expected, the shark reacted violently.
She thought she might have incapacitated it, but it was a monster, after all. Instead, it thrashed wildly and headed somewhere. It looked as if light was shining from behind her.
-Splash!!
In just a few seconds, So-jeong burst out of the water with Jaws. From the outside, it really did live up to its name, Blood-Soaked: it had eaten all the fish on the 20th floor, and blood covered its body like a tattoo.
She forced its mouth shut by pulling its lower jaw and nose together, then kicked its belly and launched it into the air. Jaws spun around in midair.
Using Flight, So-jeong spread her wings to right herself and rose to the water's surface. Then she used Pyrokinesis to spew fire from both hands and shaped the flames into a huge sphere that engulfed Jaws.
After about five seconds, she dispersed the sphere of fire. Blood-Soaked Jaws fell into the sea with a splash, then soon floated back to the surface.
Maybe her firepower was stronger than she'd thought. Despite its size and being soaked through with seawater, just five seconds trapped in the fire prison had left Blood-Soaked Jaws thoroughly roasted from head to tail.
So-jeong studied the corpse, climbed onto its back, cut off one of its fins with a fire blade, and took a bite.
"It's saltier than I expected."
-That's because it went in and out of seawater.
-You should've cut it off and grabbed it before it went in.
-It's only salty because it got soaked in seawater. Shark-type monsters' fins are actually a delicacy.
Some monsters were edible. Sometimes, you could even get certain monsters' meat as a byproduct.
In particular, some edible monsters could permanently increase your stats. If their meat went on the market, it could fetch tens of millions of won or more at auction.
'My Health and Strength went up after I ate it.'
Blood-Soaked Jaws' fin was one of those things that could raise her stats.
For the record, eating a given food only raises your stats the first time you try it.
Of course, plenty of Awakened people made mukbang videos with edible monsters, even when they didn't raise stats.
'I got the points as I climbed each floor, so maybe I'll check the rewards outside.'
"Exit Tower."
After leaving the Tower, she checked her rewards.
She could ignore the skeleton bones. There were fragments of the Soul-Stolen Dwarf's armor, a piece of the elf assassin's cloak, the Cannon Cow's hide, and several fangs from Blood-Soaked Jaws.
The skills she'd had from the 11th to the 15th floors had only been upgraded. This time, she'd gained two new skills and five upgrades to existing ones.
The new skills were Flame Blink and Blaze Step. Flame Blink was a short-range teleport that also inflicted fire damage around the departure and arrival points. Blaze Step wrapped her body in the energy of fire, increased her movement speed, and inflicted fire damage around wherever her feet touched.
The equipment was the Phoenix Bracelet and Phoenix Boots.
But the Phoenix Boots were basically the leg pieces of a suit of plate armor.
Maybe because I focus on kicking.
'Huh?'
As she put on the bracelet and picked up the boots, a piece of paper fell out.
A neatly folded note... maybe?
She unfolded it. Inside was a letter written in an elegant, old-fashioned hand.
[You should learn to swim when you get back.]
"?"
-What's this? A letter.
-It shows up after clearing the 20th floor this time.
-More importantly, looks like it was watching her fail to swim, too.
The viewers reacted as if they knew something when they saw the letter.
"...Do you know who sent this? I have no idea."
At her question, a notification went ding, and black letters appeared on a red background at the very top of the screen.
-Think of it as something like a constellation. Sometimes, when Awakened people with special classes whose species has changed clear every ten floors, beings believed to be members of the same species as their class leave comments. I hear you can even talk to them directly if you climb the Tower high enough, but I don't know the details.
"I see."
So the necklace and ring had said they were for a young member of their kind, and now someone had sent her a note they'd written themselves. Was the one who wrote it another phoenix?
"It doesn't really matter, does it? It's not like I'll ever meet them anyway."
-True. Yeah.
-I don't know about one-on-one conversations, but you can count on one hand the number of special-class Awakened who've met them in person...
-If you want to meet them face-to-face, climb the Tower. (Those were their actual words.)
-Come to think of it, wasn't the vampire able to talk to them, too?
-I heard they became a shut-in and cut off contact.
"How do I turn off the stream?"
I should go to Ms. Mi-reu's place and ask her.
This time, she couldn't be bothered to cash anything in, so she took it all and flew over.
The T-shirt flapped in the wind as she flew.
-Please move the camera inside her T-shirt!! I'll do anything!!
-Gasp
-Gasp
-Gasp
"I don't know how to move it."
-Oh, please.
-Aaargh!
-What is Mimir-chan doing, not telling her something this important?
-Dear heavens, please let it rain.
-I'll pray for rain every day starting today.
-You perverted bastards.