I'm the Only Wizard Climbing the Tower - Chapter 46

Chapter 46

TL: DDTL

Fwash-!

The bright halo of light settled.

I slowly took in my surroundings.

A vast plain filled my vision.

Grand and unbroken all the way to the far horizon, not a single tree standing in it.

I muttered under my breath.

“Looks like the Mongolian steppe or something.”

The scenery was almost identical to the Mongolian plains I’d seen on a TV documentary once.

The only difference being.

What wandered across that plain wasn’t peaceful nomads but Orc bastards.

I said to Hye-ji-ssi.

“Hye-ji-ssi. You know the clear condition for Floor 18, right?”

“Yes. It’s the March Map, isn’t it? I heard it’s really rough.”

The March Map.

That was what climbers called Floor 18.

Literally a map that demanded a high-intensity march.

Starting from the entry point and pushing forward nonstop for a full 680km.

A map that demands an absurdly long trek!

680km.

The number alone probably doesn’t land, but…

it was a monstrous distance.

In our country’s terms, it was about the same as starting in Busan and walking all the way to Sinuiju on the Chinese border.

Floor 18, the ‘March Map’, meant walking a distance that ran clean through the entire Korean Peninsula.

Which was why most hunters loathed Floor 18.

[ah fuck floor 18 really is the F-you floor;] [TL Note: “eighteen” in Korean (sip-pal) sounds like the curse “ssibal”.]

[walked like a dog for 2 weeks, this shit sucks]

[is the tower the army? nah, even the army doesn’t march this far. 680km, be serious…]

[they say 680km but you’re wandering around for food and water, and when a mid-size orc village shows up you gotta loop way around it, so the real distance is way longer fuck]

[if you want food you have no choice but to find a small orc village and hit it. raiding a village just for that nasty-ass jerky and cheese, the existential crisis hits fucking hard…]

[seriously the map is way too big. and some stretches have god-awful terrain, so annoying.]

[why the hell do i have to swim across a river;]

Because that dizzyingly vast distance had to be crossed purely on foot.

Plenty of hunters held a grudge against Floor 18.

But on the flip side, there were no shortage of hunters who liked it.

[floor 18 is nice tho lol you only fight when you need food, otherwise you just walk and walk.]

[that sa~vory funky-smelling orc jerky and cheese is delicious, why do people hate it? philistines who know nothing about food, tsk tsk]

[you can spot orc villages from way off and just avoid them, total gravy. safety first.]

[long walks out in the wide open, what’s not to like. reminds me of the cross-country trek i did before the tower haha]

As such.

Because fights were infrequent and danger zones like Orc Villages were easy to steer around,

there were plenty of hunters who liked Floor 18.

Of course, that was all just talk from ordinary folk.

An Extreme Lunatic Hell hunter like me is a different breed from those common foot-sloggers!

Glance.

I turned my eyes to the Fairy.

“Iing-iing. I’m counting on you.”

-Iing-iing!

Iing-iing thumped its chest as if to say leave it all to me.

That’s right.

We had the Fairy’s Telekinesis shuttle service.

We could fly through the sky and move fast!

“Iing-iing can carry the two of us at roughly 140km an hour, so…”

“If we head straight for the Exit Portal, we could clear it in five hours.”

Thanks to that, a distance everyone else spent 17 days walking themselves half to death to cover,

we could clear in just a few hours.

This was the importance of a flying mount.

There was a reason flying mounts were mandatory in RPGs.

Of course, I had no intention of simply flying straight through and clearing Floor 18 fast.

“Today, at last! I shall realize the great Loot clean-sweep and avenge yesterday’s humiliation!”

“That Loot obsession of yours…”

“What? Making lots of money is a good thing. You’d feel great too, Hye-ji-ssi, if you collected a pile of Loot and made a pile of money.”

“I’m unpaid, though.”

“Ah, that’s rough. Poor you.”

“…”

Sadly, Hye-ji-ssi was still unpaid, so she didn’t seem to have any appetite for Loot.

Well, no need to worry.

Once we get past Floor 20, I plan to cut her a reasonable share of the take.

Just tough it out unpaid until then.

“Then let’s go!”

-Iing-iing!

Twinkle-poof.

And so we soared into the sky.

Floor 18 had turned from a marching floor into a flying floor.

* * *

We rode Iing-iing’s Telekinesis north.

The trip was cozy and comfortable.

All I had to do was stand there blankly, letting the Telekinesis carry my body.

As always, nothing beats the trusty Fairy self-driving shuttle.

Onward like that for a while.

Hye-ji-ssi scanned the ground below and spoke.

“I can see an Orc Village down there. Ji-ho-ssi. You’re going to deal with it, right?”

“You bet.”

“Right. Iing-iing, let’s descend.”

-Iing-iing.

We dropped altitude and approached the Orc Village.

A small-to-mid-size settlement holding a few dozen Orcs.

Out of pure habit I started to draw a Fireball…

and changed my mind.

‘I decided to practice anti-personnel magic on this floor. Let’s try out the new spells.’

I’d tested a bunch of new spells yesterday.

The firepower was satisfying, the destructive force too, but…

the problem was that they were too strong.

Beyond simply protecting me in daily life,

there was a risk of leveling everything around me as well.

Which made them unsuitable for self-defense out in the real world.

So I’d designed a few anti-personnel spells.

And today, on Floor 18, I would try them out.

I raised my Staff.

“Let’s start with Shock Bullet, then.”

The first spell was Shock Bullet.

Unlike the existing Air Bullet or Wind Cutter, which compressed air to the extreme in order to pierce or slice,

this spell compressed the air itself to the limit and then expanded it, destroying the enemy’s sensory organs and incapacitating them.

I raised my Staff.

‘Stack circles endlessly, compress them to the limit, then release them all at once. That’s the structure.’

I laid out the ‘blue dots’ along the array I’d drawn in my head.

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

A cluster of air orbs formed above my Staff.

I leveled the Staff and fired.

“Now then. Let’s see what it can do.”

Shreeeeek!

The swarm of Shock Bullets flew off with a shriek of torn air.

And then the Orc Village began to be blown to scorched rubble.

-BOOM⸻!

-BOOM⸻!

-BOOM⸻!

Violent bursts of compressed air erupted through the Orc horde.

Seemed decently useful.

-Kraaaaagh-!

-Wurk! Wuuuurgh!

-Uwaaaaaargh!

With every violent shockwave,

the Orcs’ eyeballs and eardrums burst, their innards were churned to pulp, and the bones in their limbs crumpled with a wet crunch.

The time it took to incapacitate dozens of Orcs came to barely a few seconds.

And astonishingly, not one single Orc had died.

They bled from every hole in their bodies and groaned as they crawled along the ground on broken limbs,

but their core organs, heart and brain, had been kept safe, sparing them from instant death.

Exactly the result I’d intended.

‘This is a suppression spell first and last. The goal is incapacitation, not killing.’

Shock Bullet was, above all else, a spell for wrecking an enemy’s sensory organs.

Blind them, deafen them, ruin their sense of balance,

and subdue them without killing.

Of course, since it hit harder than I’d expected,

their organs got mangled and every bone in their bodies shattered too, but…

still, it has to be at least this strong to have even a little effect on those upper-floor hunters, right?

I clicked my tongue.

“Anyway, the efficiency really is garbage, huh. Less lethal than Fireball, and it eats three Fireballs’ worth of Mana…”

“They do say keeping someone alive is harder than killing them.”

“Fair point.”

Maybe because it prioritized suppression over lethality…

its efficiency came out worse than Fireball’s.

Well. It’s not a spell I’ll be using often anyway, so I’ll take what I can get.

The efficiency problem will sort itself out once my Mana pool grows.

At any rate, my test subjects were all broken now,

so I sprinkled a Storm over them.

A tempest of thunder and lightning churned through the space.

-KRA-KRAKOOOOM⸻!

-Uwooaaaaaaargh!

-Kreeeeeek!

-…!

The incapacitated Orcs sprawled across the ground went golden brown and died in a single stroke.

Mass-produced another batch of Garroshes today.

Electric-roasted whole chicken sounds good for dinner.

Though I hardly ever see the trucks that sell it these days.

“All right. Let’s grab the Loot and move to another Orc Village. I’ve got more spells to keep testing.”

“I’m starting to feel sorry for the Orcs who get your magic tested on them. That isn’t weird, is it…?”

“That’s because you’re too soft-hearted, Hye-ji-ssi. Don’t pity the monsters. Let’s kill Orcs! Orcs are the enemy of mankind!”

And so we kept tearing through Orc Villages,

testing the new spells one by one.

“Hye-ji-ssi. Call me a Lurker.”

“A Lurker? What’s that?”

“Come on, I keep telling you to play the national game. We can’t even hold a conversation. Homework, Hye-ji-ssi. Go home tonight, install Battle.net, and run a few ladder games.”

“…”

The first was Spike Hell.

A modified Earth Manipulation spell in which rocky skewers shot up from the ground and ran the enemy through.

-Shk-shk-shk-shk-thunk!

It skewered the Orcs from below and chopped them clean in half.

The killing power was tremendous, but the visuals were hideous.

And since it only worked within reach of my spiritual senses, the range was short.

5 out of 10.

“The spell I’ll be using this time is Nerve Paralysis-sis-sis-sis. It runs a strong current through them, locks up their muscles, and incapacitates them.”

“Uh… isn’t that just electrocuting them?”

“Precisely.”

Nerve Paralysis.

A spell that pushed a heavy current through an enemy’s body to paralyze it completely.

-Bzzzzzzzzzt!

-Kwoaaargh! Uwaaargh!

“Hm… do regular Orcs and Orc Fighters withstand different amounts of current? Having to tune the current for every single opponent. What a pain.”

Regulating the current was difficult.

Nudge the current up even a little and they’d go golden brown and turn into another Garrosh, honestly…

On top of that, having to adjust the current for each opponent meant a lot to keep track of.

It used little Mana and was efficient, but the chance of accidentally cooking the target counted against it.

6 out of 10.

“Hye-ji-ssi, would you call me Colonel Kilgore? I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”

“…? It isn’t morning right now, is it? And what’s this about napalm anyway?”

“Come on, Hye-ji-ssi, you don’t know this famous line? It’s from a classic war movie.”

“I don’t watch war movies, so no. Anyway, it burns things, right?”

“Yep, that’s right.”

Flamethrower.

A spell that spewed high-heat flame and turned enemies golden brown.

-Fwoooooooosh!

-Wooaaargh! Uwaaargh! Uwaaaaaaaargh!

“Hm… even for Orcs, burning them alive feels like a bit much.”

“Ugh… Ji-ho-ssi, you’re a demon.”

-Iing-iing…!

It literally burned the Orcs alive.

The Mana cost was low and the firepower was decent enough, but

I kept thinking I’d be better off just throwing a Fireball instead,

and even for enemies, it seemed like too agonizing a way to die, which put me off.

Unless things got truly point-blank, I doubted I’d find much use for it.

4 out of 10.

In that fashion.

I tested spell after spell, wiping out Orc Villages one after another.

The variety of magic I used was wide.

Suppressing enemies with compressed-air bombs, running current through them to paralyze them, thrusting stone spikes up from the ground to impale them, burning them away entirely with fire…

And every single one of those spells had a flaw somewhere.

Too much Mana consumption, restrictive operating conditions, difficult control, and so on.

Drawback after drawback kept surfacing.

I smacked my lips.

‘I figured anti-personnel spells would give me something usable in no time, but every last one has something wrong with it, honestly.’

Making a high-power area spell was easy.

Frankly, dump in a mountain of Mana and cast it wide, and that’s an area spell right there.

But perfecting a spell with the right amount of power, easy to handle, good for general use, that was hard.

Balancing cost-efficiency against performance wasn’t simple, I suppose.

Whenever the efficiency looked good, the usable conditions narrowed; whenever I made something general-purpose, the Mana cost-efficiency turned to garbage.

Creating something really is difficult…

And then I readied the last spell.

“Hye-ji-ssi. Would you call me the Railgun? Or you can call me a Level 5 esper if you prefer.”

“What is it this time… please stop. Why does your name keep changing?”

Hye-ji-ssi grumbled, but I ignored her.

Honestly, my gimmick is allowed to shift a thousand ways, so why does she grouse about it every single day?

Keep that up and… I’ll turn back into an attack helicopter, you know?

Anyway, the spell I was testing this time was a sort of ‘Railgun’.

‘It guzzles Mana and needs a projectile prepared separately, so it’s a surprisingly high-maintenance spell.’

The structure of a railgun was simple.

Place a metal projectile between two rails.

Run current in the order rail, projectile, opposite rail, and the circuit completes, forming a powerful magnetic field.

At that point, as current flows through the round inside the magnetic field, a Lorentz force is generated, acting perpendicular to the rails and launching the projectile at tremendous speed.

…or so the wiki said.

‘Simply put, stick metal between the rails, dump in a ton of current, and bang, it fires.’

Just going by the structure, it’s a mechanism even a high-school-graduate meathead like me can follow.

But needing a projectile prepared separately, and eating so much Mana,

it feels like it’d fall short in real combat…

Anyway.

“Hye-ji-ssi. Hand me one of the Orc axe heads we collected.”

“Why?”

“To use as a round.”

“?”

Baffled, Hye-ji-ssi handed me an Orc axe head.

I planned to use this as the Railgun’s projectile.

It’s metal, so it’ll work somehow, right?

First I formed two imaginary rails…

‘Send a massive current down one rail, through the projectile, and recover it on the opposite rail, and…’

the metal round would launch.

I shoved a massive current through, like clenching every muscle at once.

And at that same instant.

-KABOOM⸻!

The Orc axe head shot away in the blink of an eye.

Louder than I’d expected.

And the recoil was terrifying.

“Gah, that startled me!”

“Eek!”

-Iing-iing!

Hye-ji-ssi and Iing-iing, both got spooked by the blast.

But honestly, I was the one who got the bigger fright.

My wrist was stinging, after all.

If the wrist of this Extreme Lunatic Hell hunter is stinging…

then just how strong is that recoil?

But more astonishing than any of that.

-THWUUUUUMP!

“Whoa.”

The propulsive force had blown right past its creator’s expectations.

The 3-kilo Orc axe head, fired off with a bang, scattered a shimmer of transparent heat haze as it ripped through the air,

punched clean through an Orc Village far off in the distance in a single stroke,

and kept going and going until it buried itself in a distant hill.

-THOOOOOM…!

The Orc axe head projectile, lodged in the hill.

The impact must have been enormous; a plume of dust burst upward.

I muttered quietly.

“Whoa… the range on this thing, I think it flew kilometers?”

“Ji-ho-ssi, what was that just now?!”

“It’s the Railgun spell, and this thing is the real deal. Feels like a full-blown high-power, high-firepower long-range sniping spell?”

It felt like a super-charged bamboo spear.

A spell that could punch through anything in one shot.

It needed a projectile prepared separately and devoured ten Fireballs’ worth of Mana, but…

the power and accuracy were genuinely terrifying.

At this level, sniping from several kilometers out seems entirely doable.

Right now that’s only because I fired a 3kg Orc axe head as the projectile.

Use a smaller projectile,

and fire it with only a moderate amount of Mana…

and wouldn’t that make it plenty usable for anti-personnel combat?

‘This looks worth researching.’

I feel like I understand why every nation on earth is developing railguns as weapons.

Overwhelming range, and devastating power on top of it.

The projectile flew like some kind of laser, punching through everything in a straight line…

Truly impressive.

Indeed. I realized something.

Just as sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic,

sufficiently mastered magic can replicate even the latest modern weaponry!

A railgun that no nation in the world, not even the United States, has managed to field…

and yours truly has perfected it!

Heh heh. Are you watching, Elon Mengsk?

I’ve now gone beyond Teslra’s self-driving technology.

I’ve overtaken the technical might of the world’s defense contractors as well.

My business territory expands by the day.

It felt like I’d become one of our country’s conglomerates, sprawling its tentacles into every industry at once.

Anyway.

With that, I’d tested every spell I’d prepared at least once…

“From here on I’ll just use Fireball and clear the Orcs out fast.”

“…You have no intention of heading straight to the Exit Portal, do you? Killing every Orc along the way is going to take forever.”

“How could I possibly ignore Orcs lying around everywhere? That’s all money, money! We’re clean-sweeping every last one of them!”

“Sigh… fine.”

After that, it was ordinary Orc slaughter.

Riding the Fairy-taxi north, every Orc Village that came into view got boom boom boom boom.

I flung Fireballs and swept them all away.

Thanks to the Fairy’s overwhelming mobility, I could kill a great many Orcs in a short span of time.

After investing roughly ten hours,

we finally killed every last Orc

and cleared Floor 18.

[Baek Ji-ho (South Korea : Floor 18)]

[You have completed Floor 18 of the Tower.]

[You have slain 913 units of Orc (10).]

[You have slain 97 units of Orc Fighter (100).]

[You have slain 18 units of Orc Shaman (300).]

[Points are being settled.]

[Floor 19 of the Tower has been opened.]

[Returning.]

Tried out several new spells.

Racked up plenty of Points and Loot.

All in all, a thoroughly productive run.