Rumble...!
...Darkness?
The instant I opened the door and entered the tower, endless darkness greeted me.
I couldn’t see anything.
It resembled the space within that anomaly I had seen before.
Blink.
It’s back?
The moment I blinked, it returned to the usual appearance of a tower.
As though I had simply seen it wrong, the familiar tower welcomed me.
"...Was that some kind of loading error?"
It had only lasted about three seconds at most.
I hadn’t heard anyone speaking, nor had my head hurt.
The apparently bug-like occurrence bothered me, but there was no way to find out anything.
Rumble...
"Is it an ordinary tower?"
The door shut, yet the setting remained unchanged. I muttered quietly at the sight.
On floors divisible by ten, I was often moved to entirely different places.
The Tower of Fate had always been inside a tower, but I had thought the fiftieth floor might be different. Unexpectedly, it was not.
I had prepared myself for it to take days, like the Tower of Wisdom, but it was just an ordinary tower.
No message, and no response from the Wiki.
I waited a while, but nothing changed.
Thinking that perhaps something would happen if I approached the door, I cautiously took a step.
Step.
"What is this...?"
Nothing happened even when I reached the door.
There was no writing around it, and no trap activated belatedly as it had on some floors.
There was simply nothing—nothing wrong at all.
Swipe.
"What the hell is this now...?"
When I checked my phone just in case, I frowned.
An unfamiliar, bizarre phenomenon was occurring on the Wiki, which had displayed no notification.
[Tower of F%#?]
-#@`#!th Run, Floor 5# Walkthrough: Data !naly$is Unavail#ble.
I feel like I’m losing my mind.
This was another first.
It plainly said data analysis unavailable; there was no need for some difficult interpretation.
Of course, I didn’t know whether this was because it couldn’t tell what I was supposed to do here, or whether the Wiki was simply displaying an error.
What the hell is this?
Was there a bug in the fiftieth floor itself?
I looked all around and checked behind me, but nothing changed.
No message appeared, nor did a Wiki walkthrough.
Swipe.
Still, just in case, I grabbed the handle of the exit.
Click...!
"Ha."
I gave a hollow laugh at the door, which for some reason was not locked.
Rumble...!!
For a moment, I wondered whether it had been skipped due to a simple error, but that wasn’t it either.
Darkness again.
The message that should have read Tower of Fate, Floor 50, was nowhere to be found.
I couldn’t tell whether leaving this place would mean nothing, or whether I wasn’t on the fiftieth floor to begin with.
Swipe.
"..."
I let go of the half-open door handle and slowly looked back.
Would something appear if I simply stayed put?
Maybe it would, but personally, I didn’t think so.
Even if staying still was the right answer, fundamental questions about this tower filled my mind.
The anomalies I had experienced so far. The story that the little kid from the Tower of Wisdom had told me.
Step.
They stirred a fundamental curiosity within me.
I wanted to know why only I was experiencing these things.
Boom!
The door closes again?
Beyond the door I opened, there was nothing but darkness, just as before.
Even the now-closed door had, at some point, been dyed black by the darkness.
One second... two seconds...
My head didn’t hurt.
My eyes weren’t hot, and I couldn’t hear anyone’s voice.
As I looked around and silently counted the time—
Blink.
"Six seconds."
I muttered as the ordinary tower came into view once more.
It was identical to where I had been before opening the door and moving on.
No message appeared.
[Tower of F%#?]
-#@%#!th Run, Floor 5# Walkthrough: Data !naly$is Unavail#ble.
Nor did the Wiki walkthrough change.
Clench...!
A sudden sense of fear rose alongside my questions, and I gripped my sword tightly.
"Phew..."
It wasn’t the Tower of Trials, yet I was somehow beginning to feel tense.
The moment I became certain that what I was experiencing was not normal, my body felt heavy.
Step.
My lips were parched.
The tower, lit only by faint light, gave me chills for no reason.
A space where the only sound was my breathing.
A place where no interaction occurred aside from my footsteps.
A place where only I existed, where I could never meet another person for the rest of my life.
I can’t even use the Gallery, and I don’t know how long this will repeat.
What I was doing now was not climbing the fiftieth floor of the Tower of Fate. It was no different from walking endlessly to escape this tower’s anomaly.
Only after objectively assessing my situation did I understand just how dangerous it was.
Click.
Rumble...
"Ha."
The handle I grabbed once again pulled the door open toward me.
Beyond the door, opened with an unpleasant sound, only darkness greeted me.
Rumble...!
The door that had been an exit soon became an entrance again and slammed shut.
One second, two seconds.
Engulfed in darkness again, I counted silently.
Five seconds, six seconds...
There was no one and nothing to be seen anywhere.
Only darkness—only the anomaly—welcomed me.
In this place where I couldn’t even tell whether I was standing or falling, the only thing I could know was—
"Twelve seconds."
—that the time I spent adrift in the darkness was growing longer.
Prick!
"..."
The only other thing I could know was that a headache had begun, one I hadn’t felt during the first two stretches of darkness.
*
"One minute and thirty-three seconds."
Was this the eighth darkness? Or the ninth?
I opened a door, looked around, walked forward, and opened another door.
Darkness greeted me, and there I quietly counted the time.
Repeating only that, without doing anything else, was beginning to confuse me.
The time is definitely increasing, but nothing else is changing.
Nothing changed. Only the time I drifted in the darkness was increasing.
"No... that’s not it."
More precisely, things were changing.
The headache had grown severe enough to make my head throb.
I could feel the heat in my eyes steadily rising.
It felt as though if I opened and passed through the door another ten times or so, I would faint and go blind.
I wished something would appear soon.
If it didn’t at least send me back to the original tower, this was going to become dangerous.
...Should I have stayed where I was at first?
Step...
Dragging my body, which somehow felt heavy, I walked toward the door again.
The door I had passed through—the firmly shut door—would not open.
Well, if I were going to stop now, I wouldn’t have opened the door and gone through it in the first place.
Click...
Rumble...
If I was going to die anyway, I wished whatever was supposed to happen would hurry up and show itself.
I didn’t care if the ending was inevitably death, but this pain right now was damned unbearable.
One second... two seconds...
*
Rumble...!
"..."
Which number door had I passed through just now?
I couldn’t remember very well. My splitting headache kept me from properly counting even the time.
There has to be something. Something has to appear.
With only that thought in mind, I walked aimlessly through the darkness.
Thud.
"Urgh..."
I ran into something while walking blankly.
I had been ignoring the alarm bells ringing through my body because I felt like, if I stopped once, I would never be able to walk again.
A handle...
Forcing my hand to move and feeling around in the darkness, I found the handle I had kept pulling.
I gave a hollow laugh when I realized what I had collided with was a door leading to the next space.
I hadn’t expected to find another door while the darkness had not even lifted yet.
Click...!
This darkness would end soon anyway, and nothing would appear anyway, so I opened the door.
Enduring a headache that felt as if my head were splitting apart, feeling the burning heat in my eyes that made me want to rip them out—
The moment I somehow crossed through the newly opened door—
"...Ah."
Rumble...!
Overwhelmed by the rushing pain, I could no longer endure it and collapsed.
*
Thud!
"Did you nod off?"
"..."
I regained consciousness to the sound of a door closing.
I frowned at the voice coming from behind me.
"It must be boring. Though honestly, this isn’t something you should be bored doing."
Boring...?
"There may not be much to do, but if something happens while you’re dozing off here, that’ll be a real problem."
"..."
My eyes were hot.
Though I should have had them open, I couldn’t see anything.
"Hah... hah..."
The thought that I might truly have gone blind made me laugh without realizing it.
"What, are you crying? Did you have a nightmare or something?"
"A nightmare...?"
I was crying? Me?
I wasn’t sure.
My head was still throbbing.
Something was wrong—was I unable even to feel tears running down my face?
"Well... whatever. I came to relieve you, so go get some rest."
"..."
"If you die too, I can’t manage this alone. There aren’t many of us left now. And it’ll still take time before that thing is complete."
"Complete...?"
"You know Z-63. I hear they’re fixing something because the management code got tangled up, but I don’t really know about that side of things."
I had no idea what they were talking about.
I wanted to know what they were managing. I wanted to ask, but the words wouldn’t come out properly.
The best I could do was force out vague fragments of words.
Swipe.
"Can we really survive by doing something this absurd?"
"..."
"This tri—no, your eyes are way too red. You seriously need to rest."
"No..."
I didn’t need to rest.
Either I would die, or I would return to the tower I had been in. It would be one of the two.
So I didn’t care whether I died or returned. I just wanted to hear more.
"What do you mean, no? Go back right now and run the vaccine—"
Bzzzt! Bzzzt! Bzzzt!
"Ah, shit%, did they find us#? It can’t be headquarters, can it&?"
The sudden noise ringing loudly in my ears made me frown.
My consciousness was wavering. I didn’t know what was happening.
I wanted to see something. I wanted to ask properly.
"What... are you... saying...?"
My body had completely slipped beyond my control.
I didn’t even know whether I was standing or sitting, but at some point my body was collapsing sideways.
Thump.
"%, hey—!! Snap out of it#@$!"
"..."
*
Flash.
"Gasp...! Gasp...!!"
The instant my eyes opened, I gasped for breath.
A tower. I was back in the tower.
A slight headache remained, but not enough to make me collapse.
My eyes still felt hot, but I could see clearly.
The door...
[Tower of Fate]
-50-
The door was open.
I frowned at the message visible beyond it, as though I had cleared the tower.
I hadn’t done anything. No matter how many times I had opened doors to find it, nothing had appeared.
[Tower of F%#?]
-#@%#!th Run, Floor 5# Walkthrough: Data !naly$is Unavail#ble.
"..."
The Wiki walkthrough was unchanged.
It had not changed one bit.
And yet the door stood wide open.
What the hell was that...?
Had what I just seen been a dream...?
It felt strange to call it a dream.
Though, considering my condition had been anything but normal, perhaps that was only natural...
Step.
I forced myself upright and blankly stepped toward the door.
I had to see whether it had really been cleared, whether passing through that door would swallow me in darkness again.
I had to find out whether I would experience what I had seen earlier all over again.
[Tower of Fate]
-50-
Without even thinking that I should record it, I passed through the dark passage, leaving the floating message behind.
-1-
[End 303:04:09:21]
[Section 1:04:09:21]
[ 198 / 63 ]
I frowned at the cavern and the floating timer that soon appeared.
Not even a few minutes passed...?
I had spent at least dozens of minutes wandering in that darkness.
Setting aside that scene, whatever it had been, simply moving from the cavern to the tower, opening a door, and coming back out should have taken at least that long—
Did time not pass at all inside the tower?
From the moment I had last looked at the timer, entered the Tower of Fate, exited it again, and returned through the corridor.
If I counted only that, wouldn’t roughly this amount of time make sense?
"..."
Ding!
[Tower of Fate, Floor 50 Clear - TP +5,000]
[Fastest Clear of Tower of Fate, Floor 50 in History - TP +1,000]
As I wracked my throbbing head, a notification sounded.
At the sight of it even giving me a bonus, as if I had truly cleared it, I laughed without meaning to.
"This is seriously driving me insane."
What the hell was it hiding?
And what was this Irregular that it kept showing me things like this?
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