Chapter 4

Crisis

“They’re here, they’re here!”

The five had waited desperately for an entire week.

This time, fifteen pillars of light descended from the sky, and a large crowd of people materialized inside the waiting room.

“Welcome! I’m Toing, the manager of the First-Floor Waiting Room!”

The newcomers stared at Toing with fascinated eyes. The women, in particular, looked ready to kidnap her on the spot just because she was so cute.

“Hello!”

“Those folks over there are the challengers from last time,” Toing introduced, pointing them out.

The group of twenty quickly mingled and broke the ice. Because they all shared a massive common denominator, conversation flowed easily. The five veterans—who had been there a whole week—generously shared various tips and insights with the newcomers.

“Come on, you’re just pulling our leg, right?”

“Seriously. How on earth could a first-floor boss be that strong? We’ve all heard the rumors, too!”

Baek Hyun thumped his chest in frustration.

“I’m telling you the truth! We thought the exact same thing until we got our teeth kicked in!”

“Right! Sigh… There’s no point talking about it a hundred times—you guys just need to go down there and experience it for yourselves.”

Seeing is believing.

Rather than arguing further, the veterans simply told them to head down and see for themselves. In their minds, staying in the waiting room and wasting time was pointless since there was nothing else to do here anyway.

Not long after, pillars of light descended once more into the first-floor waiting room.

“Son of a bitch!”

That was the very first phrase uttered when they returned.

[You have defeated a challenger.] [You have defeated a challenger.] [You have defeated a…] […]

Thud.

“Haaah…”

Jean Evrium slumped onto the floor, gasping for breath.

This was his first battle since that sudden onslaught of five challengers a week ago. Thanks to those five persistently running in and out over the past seven days to hunt down basic monsters, he had managed to stockpile a considerable amount of mana without wasting his own energy. Even if they didn’t enter the boss room, simply challenging the first floor and leaving counted as defeating challengers.

“If I hadn’t prepared in advance, this might have been a bit tough.”

He had figured that by this point, a fresh wave of challengers would enter and eventually make their way to the boss room, and his prediction had hit the mark.

While the ongoing seal still made it difficult to cast other complex spells—leaving him with only Dark Arrow and Magic Missile as offensive options—it was more than enough to deal with ordinary people who were no different from civilians.

The real prize was the mana capacity. Unbeknownst to the challengers, every failed attempt increased the boss’s mana pool, allowing him to accumulate a substantial reserve.

“Already past 1,000.”

If there hadn’t been a time restriction preventing instant re-challenges, it would have climbed even faster. Still, having a limit made this the natural ceiling, which was a bit regrettable.

Even so, things were going smoothly.

At least, for now.

“The real problem is what comes next…”

A total of twenty people.

When newcomers first entered the Tower, each challenger was allocated a hefty sum of 1,000 points. Normally, nobody spent points on the tutorial first floor…

‘Things are different now.’

Twenty people at 1,000 points each equals 20,000 points. If they pooled those points and funneled them into a single person, they could buy items capable of posing a genuine threat to his current self.

‘[Lower-Grade Mana-Blocking Shield], [Lower-Grade Agility Elixir], [Butcher’s Sword]…’

Dozens of items flashed through his mind. Items capable of threatening him—especially the one-time-use consumables designed strictly to clear the first floor with maximum short-term efficiency.

Of course, he didn’t expect them to collude and sacrifice their personal points for just one person. Humans were inherently selfish creatures, and trusting strangers enough to hand over personal assets didn’t happen easily. It wasn’t as if they were backed into a corner with no escape, either; they knew challengers would keep arriving, and they harbored the firm conviction that they would eventually clear the floor.

And to ensure that conviction remained unshattered, he had to carefully regulate and display his combat power, delaying their realization that they had walked straight into a trap for as long as possible.

Even so, unpredictable variables could always arise. The Tower was a place where unimaginable, chaotic situations occurred at all hours. He had to account for every single variable and prepare accordingly.

While the challengers viewed this merely as overcoming a buffed-up boss monster, for him, this battle carried far too much weight—his own life, and the future of humanity itself.

There was no time to relax.

While raising his overall Mana Grade was the fundamental requirement to elevate his magical caliber, there were other methods as well.

Namely, increasing his Intelligence stat.

He circulated his mana.

It was a mana-operating method he had forged in his past life: a high-precision technique requiring absolute control, discarding low-purity mana entirely while extracting and converting only the highest-purity mana into magical power.

He filtered and disrupted the ambient mana entering through his breath, erecting a fine mesh to block impurities from absorbing into his physical body.

Drip. Drip.

Sweat rolled down his cheeks.

To an outside observer, he might have looked completely still, but a brutal war was raging within his body.

[Intelligence has increased by 1.]

The spoils of a fierce internal war.

He wore a satisfied smile as he watched the system message fade.

“Haa… haa…”

That brief spell-operation alone left him breathless and drenched in sweat. The Tower did not grant growth to passive challengers; to become stronger, one had to act incessantly. Furthermore, regulating mana absorption purity consumed a massive amount of energy, leaving no room to rest while his mana pool regenerated.

“Upsi-daisy.”

Dragging his creaking body upward, he forced himself to stand. His slender arms and legs were painfully apparent. If anyone assumed a mage possessed frail stamina, zero physical strength, and no agility simply by default, they wouldn’t survive long in this cruel world of the Tower.

“Hoo-ah!”

With a loud grunt, he began running laps along the perimeter of the boss chamber.

[You have defeated a challenger.] [You have defeated a challenger.] [You have defeated a…] […]

[ Jean Evrium ]

Class: Necromancer

State: Sealed – Stage 1 Unlocked (Details*)

Title: Details*

Health: 830 / 1020

Mana: 2080 / 5140

Strength: 10 (+17)

Agility: 10 (+17)

Intelligence: 25 (+27)

Skills: Details*

[Mana Grade has reached Lv. 1.] [Physical body seal partially unlocked.]

Unlock Stage 2: Mana Grade Lv. 2

[Sealed – Stage 1 Unlocked]

Basic Stats +15

Nearly a month had flown by.

Just as he anticipated, the challengers hadn’t reached the point of pooling their points together. Instead, they stubbornly bought individual weapons and hurled themselves at him repeatedly, leading to the exact results you see now.

With the rise in his Mana Grade, the elevation in his magical caliber was palpable. The physical seal dissolving had repaired his mana meridians, reinforcing the pathways connecting them.

Hummmmm—

Mana began to condense at his fingertips.

Fwoosh—

Crimson mana burned brightly. A blazing orb of fire flickered into existence in the palm of his hand.

Element magic was finally within his grasp.

“Things should have a bit more breathing room now.”

Since the influx of challengers had increased quite a while ago, the next wave should be arriving soon.

‘Looks like they’ll be challenging me again shortly.’

[A challenger has appeared.] [A challenger has…] [A challenger has…]

System messages flooded his vision so rapidly they were impossible to count.

“Has the time really passed that quickly?”

Being cooped up inside the boss room made keeping track of time remarkably difficult. Seeing the sheer volume of challenger notifications, a full week had clearly passed since the last raid.

‘What kind of strategy are they bringing this time?’

Counting the notifications, fifty challengers were marching to kill him.

Ba-thump, ba-thump.

His heartbeat began to race.

‘What is this?’

This unfamiliar sensation—was he feeling pressured by the sheer number of fifty challengers?

His entire nervous system went on high alert at the bizarre sensation. With his increased Mana Grade and partially unsealed body, fifty first-floor challengers shouldn’t pose a threat worth fearing.

So why was he reacting like this?

He couldn’t place it. The challengers hadn’t even reached the boss room yet. But his instincts regarding death felt like they were slowly clawing their way back to life. A sense of crisis—reminiscent of the genuine mortal peril he used to face—began creeping up his spine.

‘No way…’

Allows you to pierce through the nature of death.

One of the active traits of the Insightful of Death title. If anything could explain this uncanny sensation, this was it.

Outwardly, nothing looked amiss. But his intuition was screaming at him: this time is genuinely dangerous.

‘They’re here.’

The heavy footsteps of a massive crowd echoed from beyond the boss room. The collective vibrations of fifty challengers marching shook the ground all the way to where he stood, feeling as though those tremors were slowly tightening around his windpipe.

What on earth was threatening him? As a mage with an elevated Mana Grade, first-floor greenhorns shouldn’t possess any dangerous elements.

Lost in deep, troubled thought, he didn’t realize the crowd had already spilled into the boss room.

“Is that guy the boss?”

“It was real…”

“I can’t believe it…”

The newly arrived challengers felt the suffocating atmosphere radiating from Jean Evrium and swallowed hard, tensing up involuntarily.

It wasn’t just them.

The boss’s aura was starkly different from before—viscera-cold and murderous enough to make them realize they might actually die here for real.

‘What is this?’

‘Why is he acting like this all of a sudden? Did he figure something out?’

‘Sh-Shit… I can’t even move.’

Those who had faced Jean Evrium in previous rounds froze entirely upon feeling his chilling hostility.

“Everyone, snap out of it! We follow the plan!” Kim Kang-cheon roared.

Yolking back their composure at his shout, the rest grit their teeth and scrambled into their predetermined formations.

“This time, we’re definitely clearing it! Don’t let your guard do—!”

“Guaack!”

“Aaaargh!”

“Wh-What? Why is he launching a preemptive strike all of a sudden…?”

Up until now, the boss had only ever leisurely countered their attacks, never taking the initiative to strike first. But this time, the moment they crossed paths, a razor-sharp hostility enveloped the room, and he launched an assault without warning.

‘Damn it… Something has genuinely changed!’

Gritting his teeth, Kang-cheon stepped forward with his shield raised to regain control of the situation.

“Vanguard, to the front! Get as close to the boss as possible! Even if he’s a necromancer, his arsenal is limited to basic attack magic! We won’t die in one hit, so don’t be scared—move forward!”

Avoiding the boss’s magic was fundamentally impossible. Their only option was to endure with shields and force him to burn mana by throwing bodies at him. Even if Dark Arrow was lethal, magic missiles should be survivable at least once for those who had invested in health and strength.

Like a swarm of zombies, the challengers slowly compressed the distance between themselves and Jean Evrium.

Jean Evrium remained composed. The situation hadn’t escalated to a point where he needed to pull out Tier 2 spells, yet his body’s alarm bells were still blaring warnings.

‘What is it? What on earth did they prepare?’

He hadn’t spotted any overtly threatening items in their possession yet. They were undoubtedly hiding a trump card, waiting for the perfect timing to unleash it—and he still couldn’t figure out what it was. At this stage, the mathematical permutations of what they could afford were limited.

“Die!”

At that moment, challengers who had managed to close the distance attempted to break into effective striking range.

‘If they’re hiding a trump card, I just need to force them to play it.’

The properties of the mana swirling at Jean Evrium’s fingertips began to shift violently.

“What?”

“Fire?!”

“D-Dodge!”

The challengers who had closed in panicked at the sudden generation of flame in the boss’s hands, flinching back.

“Don’t dodge!” Kang-cheon barked at them.

Boom! Craaaack—!

Suddenly, an explosion detonated right in the center of the boss room, instantly freezing the movements of everyone caught in the radius.

The flames erupting from Jean Evrium’s fingertips vanished like smoke, and his expression instantly hardened into stone.

‘Mana-Freezing Bomb…!’

The very mana that always sustained his physical movements refused to obey, as though frozen solid by an unknown force.

At the same time, his vision caught sight of the challengers lunging toward him, their faces twisted with sheer desperation.