Chapter 7
#7. Rotten Grit
The saying that when you get badly injured, adrenaline or something keeps you from feeling pain turned out to be true.
Once I staggered out of the boss room and collapsed face-first on the ground, my ankle started hurting in earnest. No, it had hurt before too, but now it hurt like hell.
It felt like someone had jammed a heated iron rod into my ankle. The wounded part felt like it was burning. Was this some kind of elemental attack?
“Ugh, ngh, shit, ah...”
I flailed around and checked my ankle, but that wasn't it. It just seemed that getting hit by an arrow hurt this much.
The pain that had felt like it was burning turned into a wringing, squeezing pain as time passed. My vision kept flashing.
I needed to pull out the arrow, but how the hell was I supposed to do that? Would it come out if I just yanked on it?
-crrk.
I grabbed the arrow, breathing hard, but when the arrowhead twisted, a jolt of pain crashed into my brain.
“Aaaagh!”
You fucking idiot, it obviously isn't going to come out just by yanking it! I need to do something about the arrowhead first!
My arm, which had nothing to do with it, trembled like a leaf, and every breath sent a needle-like pain through my chest.
Ah, right, I got hurt here too. Did I break a rib? Was there even any bone in here besides ribs?
HP : 19/340
While I was thinking stupid thoughts, I saw my HP gauge steadily ticking down. Bleeding damage. If I kept this up, I was fucked.
“Huff, huff... fuck, huff...”
I took a hard breath and gripped my sword. I brought the blade to the arrowhead buried deep in my ankle. The blade of my Sharp +6 sword sliced the arrowhead off with ease.
Now I just had to pull out the shaft. Fuck, this time it should come out, right? Please come out in one go.
Maybe because my Strength stat was so high, when I grabbed the fletching and yanked hard, the arrow slid smoothly out with a whoosh. And it hurt like hell.
“Ugh, ngh!”
It felt as if electricity were running through the shaft. The instant it slid out along the wound, my whole body convulsed.
My chin was even trembling—no, why the hell is my chin shaking? Fuck, fuck, fuck. And the blood, why the hell won't it stop?
HP : 17/340
My HP kept dropping. My vision, which had been flashing like lightning a moment ago, was slowly going dark. I was getting sleepy.
There was no way I could get sleepy when I was in this much pain and misery. This was it, then—this was dying. I was on the brink of death.
If I couldn't stop the bleeding, I'd die. I clamped my hand over my ankle, where blood was gushing out. Lights flashed in front of my eyes again.
“Ghk, ugh, aah...!”
Please stop, stop coming out, I don't want to die, Mom, fuck, why do I have to live this piece-of-shit dirt-poor life just to die like this? Stop it already, fuck!
No matter how hard I clutched my ankle, blood kept seeping through the gaps between my fingers. The HP shown in the status window kept decreasing, and tears welled up again.
I wasn't clutching the pierced ankle anymore; I was clutching the status window. Please, for the love of God, make this cursed HP stop going down.
-Ding.
Then, while I was fiddling with the status window, the inventory window opened.
[Red Potion]
Use: Slowly restores a small amount of HP.
If applied to a wound, it heals faster.
Only then did I realize there were potions.
“Fuck, you dumbass...”
**
The Tower of Trials has a game-like structure, but it isn't a real game.
Since drinking a potion doesn't instantly fill your HP, challengers on the open community warn not to trust potions too much.
Also, even if your HP gauge hits zero, you don't necessarily die, and having full HP doesn't necessarily mean you're safe either, so judge the situation carefully.
I couldn't do that. Stupidly, I'd stacked up a whole pile of potions and still hadn't thought to use them.
They say people completely lose their judgment when they panic, but I never imagined I'd be like that too. I always thought that kind of thing happened to other people.
“Ah, shit, this is embarrassing...”
I downed three potions in one go and poured another onto the spot hit by the arrow, and my body was soon back to normal.
It still felt like some kind of hot, indescribable pain lingered, but once I took a breath, I realized it had only been an illusion.
-Screech, clang!
I tore off the armor top that had been turned into a rag by the Goblin Lord's attack. It was useless now.
It was the highest-tier armor I could use at this point, and yet a few hits from the Goblin Lord had turned it into trash.
Maybe I should have boosted durability instead of just defense. No, if I had, I might have been dead by now.
The potion had healed me, but it felt like my chest bones had been smashed along with the armor. The boss's attack power was just too much.
I swapped into the spare armor in my inventory and checked my condition once more.
The boss room door was still right in front of me. I could challenge it again anytime I wanted.
But I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
There's no way I can clear that alone. I nearly died even after getting everything worth taking from this floor.
As a solo challenger, there's nothing I can do about it.
**
There was still plenty of time left in the day, but I was too exhausted.
I went back to town, bought only a change of clothes, and headed straight for the inn I usually used.
The clothes I wore under my armor were soaked in blood, and at some point I had even pissed my pants. Fair enough.
Anyway, I bought an unnecessarily expensive set of regular clothes, changed into them, and flopped onto the bed. Then, as always, I opened the open community.
[Beginner's Guide to Clearing the Floor 1 Boss Without a Carry.txt]
The floor-by-floor boss strategy guides listed one after another in the community notice board happened to catch my eye.
This was the same one I had skimmed before entering the boss room. Right up until I looked at it, I thought I could handle it.
The gist of the guide was this.
As soon as you enter the boss room, the tank draws the boss's aggro, and the damage dealers quickly cut down the Goblin Royal Guards.
If you quickly wipe out all the first summoned guards, there's a fairly long delay before the next summon, so you focus-fire the boss during that window and push through phase one.
I thought that since my stats were high, I could quickly kill the three guards and handle the boss, but once I actually fought them, that wasn't the case at all.
Since I was alone, the boss's aggro was fixed on me from the start, and the Goblin Royal Guards were more tenacious than I'd expected.
Thanks to that, I was mobbed in no time, and because the second guard-summoning pattern came around so quickly, by the end it was a straight-up 6-on-1.
The guards' armor was the biggest problem.
Unlike other goblins, they were equipped with heavy armor, so to deal damage, you had to either stab through the gaps or break the armor outright.
The former was just difficult, and the latter meant switching to a blunt weapon or something similar. And honestly, I didn't think that would even work.
I searched for a few more pieces of information related to the Floor 1 boss fight. What caught my eye were the clear records.
Among the various clear records, excluding ranker carries, the smallest group that beat it was a party of seven. The party's average level was around 18.
Judging by the timing, the strategy must already have been fairly well established by then. Even so, it still took seven challengers around level 18.
I'd reached level 22 and had nearly all my gear at max enhancement, so I was surely much stronger than those challengers—but no matter how you cut it, I wasn't seven times stronger.
Even if I got a little stronger through a class change, it would be the same.
Even if I changed classes right now, skill proficiency and level wouldn't rise that easily, and I couldn't challenge it alone by relying on the existing strategies.
“Fuck, of course I can't...”
I was giving all sorts of long-winded reasons, but I'd already reached my conclusion long ago. I simply couldn't do it.
I didn't want to go through that horrible pain again. Why the hell would I?
**
Still sprawled on the bed, I wrote a post lamenting my lot on the open community.
[Author : Seo Jin-hyeok#2661]
[Title : Newbie Is Screwed]
(Photo)
I tried to take the boss on solo today and nearly died, fuck.
What kind of regional tower is this that nobody's coming in?
I can't do anything until another challenger comes in, lol.
- lol, idiot, why'd you do it solo?
- ㄴ Because I don't have a party, you fuck.
- ㄴ Loser, lol. Just pay for a carry, lololol.
- ㄴ You think there'd even be a carry?
- ㄴ ? Huh? Which tower is 2661 even from?
- You've been posting nothing but flex posts every day, so it's nice to see you like this, lol.
- What's with the 1/1 chat? What country is this?
Since people were already suspicious of the server tag #2661, they started bombarding me with comments, asking if I was really alone.
I had time to spare anyway. I replied to every comment from people curious about server 2661.
Maybe because of all the bragging I'd been doing over the past few days, there were far more people who envied having the tower all to myself than people who pitied me.
True, I was stuck on Floor 1 because of the boss fight, but in the end it would be solved once other challengers came in.
Honestly, calling it a lament was one thing, but in the end this was just more flexing.
Anyway, I spent the whole day hanging out on the community like this and fell asleep late at night. I didn't have anything else to do anyway.
But even long after that, no other challengers came in.
And so time flowed meaninglessly on and on—
[Tower of Trials#2661 (1/1)]
Before I knew it, half a year had gone by.