Chapter 1: Entry |
Life on easy mode.
That was my life in a nutshell.
Because I had a superpower.
Not a metaphor. An actual superpower.
“Daddy, Daddy.”
“Hm? Hold on, Seo-hyeon. Daddy’s busy.”
“Why don’t you just freeze it and think? That way the clock doesn’t run.”
“…? Shh, go play over there for a bit. Let me just finish this game.”
“Nooo! You’re almost out of time! I’m telling you, just freeze it and think!”
Up until around kindergarten, I had no idea.
I just assumed everyone could do what I could do. I was a kid, after all.
My parents brushed it off as the wild ramblings of an imaginative child.
But as I grew older, I came to realize I was different from everyone else.
Whenever I willed it, the world stopped.
The people in front of me, the objects, everything froze. Time itself stood still.
Time Stop Ability.
Then again, it wasn’t all that incredible.
It wasn’t the broken, overpowered ability people usually imagine. It was only half the deal.
In frozen time, I couldn’t move either.
I could only sit still and think.
Of course, even that alone was more than enough to coast through life.
“Seo-hyeon, you’re home? Did your midterm scores come out?”
“Yeah. I got one wrong in science, unfortunately.”
“Really? What about the other subjects?”
“Got them all right.”
“Ha, that’s my boy! Well done!”
Studying was the easiest thing in the world.
For me, it really was.
Hit a part I didn’t understand while studying?
Freeze time and think until I got it.
Too much to memorize?
Freeze time until I had it all down.
Slack off until the exam was right around the corner?
Just freeze and unfreeze time the night before, cram hard, and call it a day.
What was one minute, one second for everyone else, I could stretch into an hour’s worth of productive thought.
And of course, when taking exams, I was the only one with no time limit.
Whenever I hit a tough problem, I’d just freeze time and mull it over.
That was how, from elementary school on, my grades were always at the very top.
Beyond that, the little everyday uses for the ability were endless.
Think of it like a pause function in a video game. When you pause the game, the character can’t move, but the real-life player can still think. In that sense, this was actually the more accurate analogy.
It’d probably be useful in a fight too, right?
Not that I’d ever been in one in my entire life.
I had zero interest in anything physical, so I’d never really used the ability for sports either.
I simply grew up as an unremarkable model student.
And today was the day of the CSAT.
“Don’t be nervous, okay? Just relax and go in with a clear head.”
“Okay. I’m heading out.”
I rode my parents’ car to the exam site.
I waved goodbye to the two of them, who seemed more nervous than I was, and walked through the front gate.
Light and easy, same as always. I took the exam and came home.
“I’m back.”
After dinner, I downloaded the answer key and graded myself.
The results were exactly as expected. A perfect score.
Of course, I’d put in the work too.
Even without time pressure, I still needed the actual ability to solve every problem for a perfect score to be possible.
I hummed a tune and stretched.
“Seoul National Med, you’re a damn joke.”
Ah, easy peasy.
Didn’t it prick my conscience, being the only one using a cheat while everyone else studied their hearts out?
Well, what could they do about it?
Life was never fair to begin with.
And there was no reason not to use a gift I’d been born with.
Anyway, all that was left was to have some fun, prep for the med school interview, and that’d be that.
My life had been smooth sailing up to this point, and it was set to stay that way.
I was about to open my door and share the good news with my family.
Then, suddenly, everything shook.
RRRRRUMBLE.
I grabbed the edge of my desk and steadied myself.
From outside, I could hear my family’s panicked voices.
What the hell? An earthquake?
One this strong, in Korea?
Before I could think any further, something appeared in the air before my eyes.
[The Tower calls its Climbers.]
[You have received the Tower’s call.]
[Your assigned difficulty is ‘Nightmare.’]
[Easy]
Personnel: 100,000
Time Limit: 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 45 seconds
Reached Floor: 1F
[Normal]
Personnel: 100,000
Time Limit: 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 45 seconds
Reached Floor: 1F
[Hard]
Personnel: 100,000
Time Limit: 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 45 seconds
Reached Floor: 1F
[Nightmare]
Personnel; 100,000
Time Limit: 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 45 seconds
Reached Floor: 1F
[If the Time Limit is exceeded, the Tower’s Curse will descend.]
[If the Easy difficulty Time Limit is exceeded, 10% of humanity will perish.]
[If the Normal difficulty Time Limit is exceeded, 20% of humanity will perish.]
[If the Hard difficulty Time Limit is exceeded, 50% of humanity will perish.]
[If the Nightmare difficulty Time Limit is exceeded, 99% of humanity will perish.]
[Will you enter Nightmare difficulty, Floor 1?]
All I could do was stare at the messages as they floated up, one after another, with trembling eyes.
November 13, 2025.
The world was upended.
A powerful earthquake struck across the entire globe in a brief span of time.
With it, a massive tower-shaped structure rose from the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
A select few received the Tower’s call.
That was how the messages that appeared before their eyes described it.
Easy, Normal, Hard, Nightmare.
One hundred thousand people were chosen for each of the four difficulty tiers.
Those who received the Tower’s call were known as “Climbers”.
Each Climber could enter the difficulty they had been assigned to.
The black tower had emerged in the middle of the Pacific, but it was nothing more than a structure with no entrance, no way in or out.
The Climbers, however, could enter the Tower whenever and wherever they wished.
The adventurous ones were the first to climb.
It was quickly discovered that clearing a floor added one year to the Time Limit.
The Tower had warned humanity: when the Time Limit expired, the Curse would fall.
Easy meant 10% of humanity.
Normal meant 20%.
Hard meant 50%.
…And Nightmare, the difficulty I’d been assigned, meant 99% of humanity would die.
As of yet, with less than a year since the Day of Upheaval, it was still an unfulfilled warning.
Governments around the world scrambled into action.
They had no choice. Humanity had been thrust to the brink of extinction out of nowhere.
Just watching the news, every single day was a spectacle.
The Korean government urged Climbers to voluntarily report to the state as soon as possible.
They would enact legislation, establish facilities and agencies, and spare no effort in providing full support for climbing the Tower, they said.
I did not report that I had become a Climber.
I simply watched the day-by-day progress through the text floating before my eyes.
[Easy]
Personnel: 95,361
Time Limit: 9 years, 237 days, 11 hours, 52 minutes, 06 seconds
Reached Floor: 10F
[Normal]
Personnel: 94,022
Time Limit: 5 years, 237 days, 11 hours, 52 minutes, 06 seconds
Reached Floor: 6F
[Hard]
Personnel: 96,081
Time Limit: 2 years, 237 days, 11 hours, 52 minutes, 06 seconds
Reached Floor: 3F
[Nightmare]
Personnel; 97,910
Time Limit: 237 days, 11 hours, 52 minutes, 06 seconds
Reached Floor: 1F
They say Climbers grow stronger the higher they ascend.
Like a game, they level up, use skills, and gain power beyond human limits, or so they claim.
Easy difficulty was progressing the fastest.
The enemy on Floor 1 of Easy was said to be a single Goblin.
They’d already reached Floor 10, and the Easy Time Limit had accumulated to over nine years.
Normal and Hard had reached Floors 6 and 3, respectively.
The only difficulty where not even Floor 1 had been cleared was Nightmare.
None of that had anything to do with me.
I had absolutely no intention of climbing the Tower.
Why the hell would I?
Once you entered the Tower, you couldn’t leave until you cleared the floor.
In other words, fail and you die.
Just look at Nightmare’s progress.
Out of the two thousand who’d gone in so far, not a single one had made it. Every last one of them was dead.
With no survivors, there was zero information to go on.
Going in was just throwing your life away.
Any sane person valued their own life, which was exactly why Nightmare had far fewer entrants compared to the other difficulties.
Someone would clear it eventually, though.
There were still over 200 days left on the Time Limit, right?
With that thought, I focused on nothing but my own daily life.
I enrolled in medical school and went about my college years.
The world was changing at a breakneck pace on one front, but the vast majority of people still carried on with their normal routines.
This wasn’t denial.
I was just someone who’d gotten unlucky.
Someone else would handle it. Someone…
[Nightmare]
Personnel: 94,936
Time Limit: 135 days, 1 hour, 6 minutes, 32 seconds
Reached Floor: 1F
[Nightmare]
Personnel: 92,571
Time Limit: 56 days, 21 hours, 18 minutes, 56 seconds
Reached Floor: 1F
[Nightmare]
Personnel: 87,920
Time Limit: 10 days, 3 hours, 43 minutes, 23 seconds
Reached Floor: 1F
.
.
.
Time passed.
The collapse was now staring them in the face.
And, remarkably, no one had done it.
─ The Nightmare difficulty Time Limit is now less than one week away. The United States government, which has announced it is considering a direct nuclear strike on the Pacific tower…
─ The number of unentered Climbers in Nightmare difficulty still exceeds 80,000…
Every day, the news blared about whether the world was going to end just like this.
Governments worldwide dangled every incentive imaginable, urging Nightmare Climbers to attempt Floor 1, but it didn’t seem to be working.
Korea was relatively stable, but overseas, riots and violence were surging with each passing day.
─ Holy shit, is humanity actually going extinct?
─ Not extinction, technically. 1% survives.
─ No but what the hell are the Nightmare Climbers even doing?
─ The world’s about to end and over 80,000 of them still haven’t gone in. Selfish pieces of shit, seriously.
─ Would YOU challenge a difficulty that’s ground up over ten thousand people with a zero clear rate? lol
─ Are you a Nightmare Climber?
─ The government needs to track them all down and force them in, no?
─ Get real.
─ Short of voluntary reporting, there’s no way to find them if they keep their mouths shut.
Scrolling through comments online, that was all anyone was talking about.
“The end is nigh! Those without faith shall be cast into hell…!”
Just yesterday, I’d seen people on the street shouting through megaphones.
It was the end of days.
Not just talk. The end of the world was genuinely closing in.
[Nightmare]
Personnel: 77,105
Time Limit: 3 hours, 36 minutes, 7 seconds
Reached Floor: 1F
The Time Limit was down to the final day.
The number of survivors was plummeting.
It was still dropping in real time, even now.
I understood how they felt.
At this point, it must have been a feeling of there’s nothing left we can do.
And yet, the Reached Floor still hadn’t changed.
Over twenty thousand people had challenged it, and not a single one had succeeded?
Was this a joke? Was it even possible to clear?
Staring at the numbers before my eyes, all I could manage was a hollow laugh after hollow laugh.
“Ha…”
Ninety-nine percent of humanity, wiped out.
Roughly eight billion people would die.
Not every last person, no.
But it was a staggering enough number to ensure the world as we knew it was finished.
If I’d never been chosen, at least I wouldn’t have had to agonize over this.
Everyone else could only accept the coming death.
But I, at the very least, had the option of grasping at straws.
“I don’t want to die either, goddammit…”
I didn’t want to die.
And it wouldn’t just be a simple death.
Enter the Tower, and who knew what kind of horrific, agonizing end awaited.
I wanted to just sit here and pray that someone, anyone, would succeed in the next three hours.
I wanted to cling to even that 1% chance of survival.
But what good would that do?
Could my family and I all survive on odds that slim?
…That kind of miracle wasn’t going to happen.
When the Time Limit runs out, will 99% of humanity really die? Does that even make sense?
I tried denying reality.
But I already knew.
Whether it made sense or not didn’t matter.
From the day the Tower rose, the world’s common sense had long since been twisted beyond repair.
I sat at my desk, eyes closed, for what felt like an eternity.
Then, at last, I opened my eyes and rose to my feet.
I place the farewell letter I’d written in advance into my desk drawer and set an alarm on my phone.
I change my clothes and step out of my room. My father, my mother, and my younger sibling are all gathered in the living room.
“…Where are you going?”
“Just want to get some fresh air.”
“Alright. Don’t stay out too late.”
My mother smiled weakly.
My sibling had been sniffling for a while now.
On the TV screen, the time [3:15:09] is displayed in enormous digits, ticking down, and a news anchor is talking frantically.
My father spoke as if leaving a final reminder.
“Come back soon. Let’s at least have one last dinner together as a family.”
“Okay. I’ll be right back.”
But I probably wouldn’t be coming back.
They were perceptive people. They didn’t say anything unnecessary.
I’d written it all in the farewell letter already. If I didn’t come home, the alarm would go off on time, and they’d find it and read it.
At a time like this, what did it even matter, really? But still, they deserved to know, at the very least, why their son never came back.
I left the house and walked down the empty, deserted streets.
I ducked into an alleyway and stared straight ahead.
[Will you enter Nightmare difficulty, Floor 1?]
It had been exactly one year since that day.
The message appeared the moment I made up my mind to enter.
From here on, I am walking to my death.
And yet, there is no other choice.
“…Enter. You son of a bitch.”
The instant the word left my lips, the world before my eyes shifted.
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