Until just a few days ago, the life of Kim Seonwoo, twenty-eight years old this year, had been ordinary.
It was a life he had lived diligently, working quite hard in his own way,
a life where effort did not always bring reward in equal measure, but where he had achieved a certain degree of results in the fields he challenged.
And because of that, he had thought himself fairly satisfied.
His days had been spent working hard, studying, exercising, living busily and restlessly.
It had already been a full two years since he joined Estella, an agency that had only just begun in the vast K-pop market.
In fact, he had been there from the very beginning, so he could be called a founding member.
An agency that had been established for only two years and still had no clear representative artists who could be said to have hit it big... that kind of company.
The young female president who had abruptly founded the company without any proper foundation always boasted that she would grow Estella into a global entertainment group, but, well,
from Seonwoo’s perspective, she did not seem particularly talented in this field.
Still, he liked the overflowing drive of the twenty-six-year-old president—young, or rather, still almost a girl—and he liked her bright, sparkling energy.
He also liked that she trusted him and pushed him forward, letting him proceed with whatever he thought was right.
He was still in his twenties, with many things left to experience, and part of the reason he had thrown himself into it rather recklessly was because he thought it would be good experience.
And so, while assisting the female CEO, he had run around from the company’s earliest stage and filled in every gap with his own two feet.
At first, Seonwoo had practically taken on the roles of COO, CFO, and CTO all by himself, which would have been laughable if anyone passing by had heard it.
Now, at last, people recruited from here and there had each taken on their own roles, and Seonwoo, though the title still made him cringe, now carried the title of director and served only as COO.
The artist management departments, marketing department, content production department, OR department, global strategy department, and so on had also become more subdivided, and now the company had taken on a fairly proper agency-like form... but in the beginning, it had truly been nothing of the sort.
Normally, if an agency failed to generate profits to this extent, it would have been only natural for it to shut its doors soon after, but perhaps the president was the child of some noble household, because she easily brought in enormous budgets,
and in the jungle-like entertainment market, the fledgling company Estella managed to hold out for quite a long time even without any major hit albums or groups, thanks to its solid outside transfusions of capital.
That was why Seonwoo often thought.
The president was surely at least a third-generation chaebol.
Otherwise, with this level of expertise, there was no way she could have started something this big and kept patching it up as she went.
It seemed that, to some extent, that thought had been correct.
Truly, the spending habits of the young female president, who was only twenty-six, exceeded imagination.
In any case, that was how he had thought of her: someone who worked at the same company as him, but in truth lived in a different world.
Until Jeong Suji, the young female president of Estella, confessed to Seonwoo.
“Uh... ah...? Pardon? You mean... me?”
“Ahaha! Why are you so clueless, oppa? Is there anyone else here besides us? Should I say it again? I. Like. You, oppa.”
Though Suji’s face was bright red, in contrast to the boldness of what she was saying, Seonwoo was so out of his mind that he could not even register that sight.
“Uh... no, President, why would someone like you like someone like me...”
“What’s with the inferiority complex? What’s wrong with you, oppa? You’re tall, smart, good at your job, nice... What are you lacking?”
“Ah, uh... th-thank you for saying that.”
“You knew too, didn’t you, oppa? That I had feelings for you.”
In truth, Seonwoo had not known at all.
All the more so because he had always thought President Suji was about on the level of a third-generation chaebol, and that she was never in the same league as him.
Because of that, he had never thought of it in that way, and had simply taken it as goodwill toward him for working hard.
Yes, that was it. Not affection, but goodwill.
Although she was young, she was undeniably his superior at work, and it was goodwill she showed to an employee who did his job well.
That was why he had not known.
“B-but... I’m just from an ordinary family...”
“Ahahaha! You’re so funny today, oppa.”
As if trying to hide her awkwardness, Suji laughed exaggeratedly and patted Seonwoo’s broad chest with her small hand.
“Do people who aren’t from ordinary families eat something different? Why worry about that? For reference, no one in my family will say anything about whoever I date, so don’t worry about that and just tell me how you feel, oppa. So I can... prepare myself. Whew.”
She spoke so boldly, then drew in a breath, terribly nervous, and it was cute.
He thought for a moment. How did he think of this woman, Jeong Suji, as a woman, not as the female president?
He did not dislike her at all. No, rather, he liked her.
She was bright, pretty, slim, and had a good personality.
But if asked whether that alone meant he could date her right away, that was not quite it either.
Was meeting someone, dating them, and going even further something that happened only because of conditions like those?
In any case, even so, there was nothing bad about it. She was attractive, and Seonwoo did not dislike her.
It was just that until now, he had completely closed off any possibility of that sort, so he had not known. Now, things could change.
And so he cautiously opened his mouth.
“I... I don’t dislike you either, President. That much is only natural. But I need a little... time. I hadn’t yet been thinking of you enough in that way... uh, so...”
“Does needing time mean I can take it as a positive sign?”
“Pardon? Positive...? Ah, ah! Yes. Of course. I’m asking you to wait while thinking of it in a positive direction.”
“I see. As expected... you’re careful. That’s one of the things I like about you too, Director Kim. All right. Let’s take some time and think about it again. I pushed you so suddenly today that you must have been very flustered, right...? I’m sorry...”
Suji smiled primly.
From that day on, Kim Seonwoo’s ordinary life was shaken from its very foundations.
Jeong Suji. A woman with money and background like a third-generation chaebol.
Young though she was, she was the president who had founded Estella.
For someone like that to approach him first...
A great ripple spread through Seonwoo’s daily life, a life in which he had been immersed in work and running forward while looking only ahead.
Her family, her unknown background, bothered him, but he decided to ask about that gradually.
Because she had said she could cover it...
* * *
Surprisingly, the uppermost sections, where there were few small fry and large bosses were the main focus, were being cleared faster than the lower floors.
Before they knew it, they had entered the 91st floor in just 65 days.
Their climbing speed was actually increasing.
From the 91st floor onward, the monsters in charge of each floor differed in shape and type, but they all shared the common trait of being “rock giants.”
It was fortunate that they were not amorphous monsters, but since their basic size reached several dozen meters, they were quite troublesome to clear.
On top of that, most of the super-enhanced androids had melted somewhere and broken down after being exposed to Ignis’s extreme heat, so they were left shoved into subspace as they were,
and the remaining ten enhanced androids that had not been taken out in advance were brought out and placed at the vanguard of the battle.
And the insufficient damage output was made up for by all nineteen members of the raiding team, including Suho, participating in combat.
If Suho had stepped forward a little more seriously, an even faster clear would have been possible, but the Ultimate Line also needed a variety of combat experience, so they decided to beat the bosses down through ordinary combat.
When the S-rank admittees of the Ultimate Line, who were finally participating properly in battle, poured out their full capabilities without holding back, even the enormous giants were taken down without much trouble.
The tower climb was still advancing triumphantly.
Ten days later, they arrived at the top floor.
The moment the raiding team reached the top floor, the 96th floor, was only the 76th day—an astonishing, legendary speed incomparable to any raiding team since towers had appeared on Earth.
And the chief of the rock giants, who guarded the final floor and welcomed the challengers, was a creature as tremendous as the high tower itself.
“That... has to be it, right?”
“Probably... It’s not like that thing is just a statue...”
“I’ve never seen anything like that before...”
“Open the bestiary.”
“I’m already looking... Here, this must be it. Karnoas.”
One of the clan members, who had been searching through the 3D hologram bestiary projected from a wearable device, brought up the boss’s information.
A colossal statue stood alone at the far edge of the vast field.
Perhaps aggro would only be drawn once they entered a certain range, because it did not move an inch and stood there quietly, just like an actual installed statue.
It felt as if a mountain range had taken on the shape of a human and risen to its feet.
Though its surface was not smooth but remained exactly like rough stone and rock, its overall form resembled that of a human with muscles about to burst.
If thousands of world-famous sculptors were mobilized all at once to carve the image of a human into an enormous rocky mountain, would it look like that?
The Statue of Unity in Gujarat, western India, is 182 meters tall, nearly twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, which is 93 meters including its pedestal. Built to commemorate the achievements of former Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, even the size of its big toe is almost that of a bus.
But the stone giant Karnoas, which the raiding team was now facing, was 1.5 times larger than that.
It was so massive it looked as though it could put the 63 Building in a headlock and snap it in two.
Everyone was left speechless and blankly staring at its sheer immensity.
It looked as though it had simply been made for sightseeing, not at all like an opponent they had to fight.
Just as no one would look at a building like the 63 Building or Lotte Signiel and think, “I should fight that.”
It gave the feeling that they should just take a few commemorative photos with it as the background and then go down.
“...Haha... What is that?”
“That thing looks like it wouldn’t budge even if it took an intercontinental ballistic missile...”
“We’re screwed...”
“What kind of size is that... Is this insane...”
At the despair washing over them, everyone muttered a word or two.
The boss of the 96th floor was... far too huge.
With a size that looked to be nearly 300 meters in height alone, the raiding team was on the verge of losing their will to fight.
“Wh-what do we do, Team Leader...?”
“......”
There was no way Danbi would have any clever solution.
Until now, she had thought they had cleared a fairly wide variety of high towers... but she had certainly never faced a monster this gigantic before.
Suddenly, she recalled Joshua’s story about how an American S-rank raiding team had challenged the boss of the 100th floor, only for more than half of the twenty-member team to die and only eight to return alive.
But even they probably had not faced a monster like that.
If it had been a creature like that... it would not have been strange if all twenty had died, the raid failed, and a Tower Break occurred.
“What does it say its skills are?”
Danbi asked while still keeping her gaze fixed on Karnoas, and the team member who had the 3D monster bestiary open answered.
“Hmm... Ground Uplift, Rock Shield, Earth Shatter, Gigantic Throw, Roar of Gusts... Those are presumed to be its main skills?”
“Presumed?”
“Yes. It’s never actually appeared in a tower before... so everything in this bestiary is only conjecture.”
“......Tch.”
Among monsters, there was at least a fair amount of information on those that had either been encountered by a raiding team in a tower at least once, or had tasted the outside air through a Tower Break.
But for unknown monsters, there was only a “predictive bestiary.”
It was a system bestiary that predicted evolutionary mutations caused by environmental changes or natural selection among monsters, and estimated in advance the traits and abilities of new monsters likely to appear as a result,
or simulated the possibility of higher-ranking monsters appearing by combining the energy emission patterns, aggression, and growth potential of various lower-ranking monsters recorded to date, then had a high-performance AI system analyze those energy patterns to infer and catalog the forms, abilities, and behavioral patterns of monsters that had not yet appeared in the world.
Naturally, a predictive bestiary or estimated bestiary only showed high probabilities, and was not accurate.
“In other words... it’s a boss where everything is unknown...”
“That’s right.”
Amid the bleak situation, Danbi lowered her head.
With their current strength, it felt as though even fighting only that thing’s foot would require a life-or-death struggle.
For starters, its sole looked large enough to cover all of the team members and even the androids.
Even those enhanced androids, which had seemed so reliable, looked like mice standing in front of an apartment building.
If that enormous foot stepped down, even a super-enhanced android would undoubtedly be reduced at once to the state of a robot crushed under a press.
Even assuming the thing would obediently remain unconscious while they smashed its foot, it seemed like it would take several hours just to break that foot.
That was how absurdly huge it was.
At a complete loss as to what to do, Danbi looked at Suho.
Right—hadn’t they been able to clear this high-rise tower so comfortably until now all thanks to this man?
Suho’s face, which she looked at with an inexplicable sense of expectation, was surprisingly calm. No, not merely calm—it was brimming with anticipation.
Still, she found herself asking without realizing it.
“Is there... perhaps some way, Clan Leader?”
“Ah, a way? There are plenty.”
“Plenty?”
“Yes. In fact, there are so many that I was wondering which method I should use to take down this big guy.”
At Suho’s words, Danbi and all the clan members around them widened their eyes.
“H-how?”
“What do you mean, how...? It’s nothing special. If something’s big, you just beat it down with something bigger. Oh, right. What does the bestiary say is the weak point for guys like that?”
“...Pardon? Ah, yes. Most of these things supposedly have a core in their chest...”
“Okay! Now, what I need all of you to do first is equip your flight wings and head up into the sky. At least ten kilometers up, so you can get completely out of that thing’s attack range. Got it?”
“A-and then?”
“After that... you can just watch. Leave this place to me.”
Giant monsters were Suho’s specialty. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say he was perfectly specialized for this.
“Uh... There hasn’t been a single section so far that we didn’t leave to you, Clan Leader...”
“True.”
In response to the words pouring in, Suho merely shrugged and smiled, then shouted loudly.
“All right, move out!!”
At Suho’s command, every member of the raid team shot up into the sky with their flight equipment equipped, while Suho stored the ten enhanced androids in his subspace warehouse.
Then he spread the Tempestbane Wings wide, flew at high speed, and charged in a straight line toward Karnoas.
When he was about three kilometers away from the creature, it began to move with a sound like a landslide.
It seemed that was the edge of its detection range.
Kwaddddddd... Rrrrrrrrrumble....
As if it had powered on, the colossal stone statue emitted a crimson glow from both eyes and took a step forward.
Kugugugugung... Kugugugugung....
Every time one of its feet touched the ground, the earth shook and the air trembled.
It looked incredibly slow, but considering the length of its stride, it was moving at an astonishing speed.
When he had closed to about 1.5 kilometers, Suho changed direction from heading toward it to flying straight up vertically. He continued rising until he reached an altitude of roughly ten kilometers.
At that point, the entire field of the 96th floor came into view.
“Wow... so there was a limit after all?”
Each floor differed in size, but in the case of this top floor, the 96th, its width seemed to approach at least ten kilometers from end to end.
That meant an area of roughly one hundred square kilometers.
It was an enormous expanse of land. To think one floor of the tower was like this—it was almost absurd.
“Anyway, I’ll fill it to the brim. Ravi.”
At Suho’s request, Ravi materialized a slab of Obelun ten kilometers wide, ten kilometers long, and two hundred meters thick, then dropped it so that it completely filled the field of the 96th floor.
Since Obelun had a specific gravity 2,016 times greater than water, a mass of metal weighing approximately 40.32 trillion tons began to fall from a height of ten kilometers, tearing through the air with a terrifying roar.
There had been calculations showing that dropping an object weighing just 3.56 trillion tons from a height of twelve kilometers would be enough to bring about an end-of-the-world scenario... This was more than ten times that mass. Truly overkill.
Just before the Obelun collided with the ground, the atmosphere was swallowed by a momentary silence, and in the next instant, with a sound like exploding thunder, a tremendous storm spread outward in every direction.
Kwakakakakakakakakaka─────
Kukugugugugugung─────
“Aaagh!!”
“Go higher!!”
Even the members of Ultimate Line, who had taken refuge more than ten kilometers up, felt an incredible shock reach them.
The stone floor that had formed the entirety of the boss floor failed to withstand the metal mass and heaved, split, and cracked like waves caught in a storm.
The tremendous energy forced the crust upward.
The entire land rose as if rippling like water, sending out waves, while flames erupted from the impact.
“Whoa...... Wh-what the hell are we even looking at...?”
“...This is power a human can produce...?”
“J-just what is the Clan Leader......”
Soon, the shattered ground created a dust storm that filled the area below, and with everything obscured by a thick layer of dust, it was impossible to see what was happening down there.
Just like with Ignis, it seemed it would be difficult this time as well to find any trace of the boss—or any spoils.