Chapter 3
Rex.
A 30-year-old bachelor.
A commoner with exceptional abilities and decent looks, but no family worth boasting about.
Rex's memories began with those of an ordinary gamer from the Republic of Korea, born in 2178.
<Hell n' Cry: Eternal Conquest - Online>
Abbreviated as <Hell Online>.
It was a strategy simulation game that rose to prominence shortly after VR full-dive games were created.
Having supported full-dive devices through their transitional period and ultimately carried them into their heyday, this game was widely considered a legend among old-school gamers.
Rex was one of those old-school gamers.
By day, he suppressed his individuality and lived as a cog in society; by night, he slept in a capsule and awoke in the world of the game.
The day he transmigrated into this world was no different from any other.
He set his capsule to sleep mode, went to sleep, and opened his eyes in Hell Online as a new character.
The only difference from usual was that he couldn't log out.
“Huh? My dream's unusually long today.”
Full-dive technology was based on lucid dreaming.
Because of that, on very rare occasions, someone might press logout and immediately transition from the game into a dream, making it feel as though they couldn't log out.
In such cases, all they had to do was wake up naturally without panicking.
But after pinching his cheek to see whether it was a dream and checking the time,
Rex only realized it after somehow getting beaten half to death by street thugs in an alley.
“Ah.”
That he had transmigrated.
Bewildered at first, Rex adapted quickly.
Ironically, he was more respected in the game than in reality, where every individual's uniqueness had been eradicated in the name of equality.
Naturally, someone like Rex loved games.
Therefore, he decided to live in this world without the slightest regret.
According to the information he gathered after transmigrating, the world he'd transmigrated into wasn't the game world.
The world's rules and laws of physics were certainly similar to those in the game, but its terrain, place names, history, and so on were entirely different.
It was disappointing, but not enough to call it a problem.
Because he'd brought along the game system—the perk of transmigration—intact.
The ability to open an interface in front of his eyes like in a simulation game, appraise heroes and other people, and issue commands directly into their minds.
As long as he had that system, there was nothing Rex had to fear—not even the future.
He was happy immediately after transmigrating.
The simulation game's system—an ability he called the interface for convenience—was useful in many ways.
He was the youngest ever admitted to the Department of Military Science at the Royal Academy of the Kingdom of Esirik,
shortened the curriculum designed to take twenty years to twelve through successive grade skips,
never once relinquished the top spot until the moment he graduated,
and, recognized for his command ability, graduated at the youngest age ever and was immediately hired by a city as a staff officer.
Having followed the elite of the elite career path, he had no doubt he'd live a happy life.
‘I’ll get a house in my own name, and maybe indulge myself with two wives? Three at most. Then I'll have children and live happily ever after.’
Rex was an ambitious man of modest means.
With abilities like these, a slow life would be a waste.
But that didn't mean he wanted a bloody, tumultuous life, either.
‘With great power comes great responsibility.’
He knew he had the ability to serve as a staff officer in the royal palace, but that position came with commensurate responsibility.
Responsibility far too heavy for an ambitious man of modest means like Rex.
So he chose a staff officer position in a city.
For the thoroughly materialistic reason that it would make him reasonably wealthy while still allowing him to maintain a reasonably peaceful daily life.
He had no desire to wave a baton in the middle of hellfire.
‘Now I can distinguish myself in the city by doing this and that...’
But his happy dilemma did not last long.
‘I should've kept a lower profile!!’
It was because a commoner with no backers had rubbed people the wrong way by wiping the floor with the noble scions and taking the titles of top student and youngest graduate.
Of course, he was still a little immature back then,
and he had wanted to show off a little with his cheat ability,
but above all, he had enjoyed the admiring gazes of the female students far too much.
The problem was that he hadn't thought things through.
On the way to his assigned post after graduation, his carriage was attacked and a sack was pulled over his head.
When he came to, he had been dragged to the laboratory of a scientist who introduced himself as Retort.
A staff officer disappears on the way to his post, and the mayor of that city doesn't even look for him?
This was a world where it wouldn't be strange for an officer or staff officer crossing a mountain on the way to his post to be carried off by a tiger... no, an orc.
No mayor would dispatch the army just because some faceless commoner with no backers had disappeared.
Besides, there was a very good chance the mayor was in on it.
And so, Rex's otherworldly adventure began in a mad scientist's laboratory.
‘What happened to my happy cheat harem life!!’
Forget a harem—he was going to become a multi-sex Frankenstein.
‘I have cheat skills and a handsome face for once in my life, so how can this be fair!’
In fact, he had ended up in this predicament because of his cheat skills and handsome face, but there was no one around to point that out.
‘If I'd known I was going to transmigrate, I wouldn't have picked the bad-luck penalty during character creation!!!’
He regretted choosing one of the harsher penalties to raise his potential stat.
‘Oh, God.’
Rex had no religion and didn't believe in God, but he tried calling out anyway.
Naturally, there was no response, and in the end he accepted reality.
‘Sigh. I should've kept a lower profile.’
At the very least, he should have raised his martial strength or engaged in political maneuvering.
He hadn't understood why his classmates at the academy studied nothing and did nothing but play politics, but now he realized there had been a deeper meaning to it.
‘No wonder the twenty-year curriculum only had morning classes.’
He'd been so absorbed in studying strategy and tactics that he never paid attention to the people around him, and this was the karma that had come back to bite him.
Or perhaps he had simply overestimated the average character of this world.
*
Smack!
While Rex was recalling the past and regretting his choices, a jolt of electricity shot through the crown of his head with a dull thud.
“Ugh!”
Rex glared at the being who had brought a club down on his crown.
‘Ow, you barbaric bastard! This is why demi-humans are no good. What if you damage this precious brain of mine?’
The one who had struck Rex's head was a large ‘goblin’ about his height.
The goblin's amber eyes met Rex's.
“Get a grip, useless human!”
Rex found it irritating that a mere goblin would speak to him that way, but he couldn't pick a fight with this goblin.
Level 48
Which meant it was a monster capable of defeating even a trusted knight of an average lord.
Dr. Retort assigned the experimental subjects ranks based on their experimental results, and as its level showed, this goblin was one of Dr. Retort's ‘moderately successful test subjects.’
Rex, by contrast, was a complete failure.
No matter what experiment was performed on him, no improvement in his realm was observed, and so he was branded a failure.
Normally, he would have been discarded as is, but thanks to his all-out flattery and political maneuvering, Rex had managed to secure a job as an errand boy.
“Return to your room, failure! Keh-reuk!”
Being looked down on even by a goblin made Rex's last shred of pride as a human rear its head, but
“What are you staring at? Keh-reuk. Wanna die?”
When the goblin pointed its spear at him, his head bowed automatically.
Unlike the goblin, he was a highly rational and reasonable human, so he could swallow his pride as much as necessary.
Thus Rex obediently returned to his room.
Being an errand boy didn't mean he had been given a good room.
His room was still the same single cell he'd used since becoming a test subject.
A roughly ten-square-meter room containing only a desk and a bed.
Upon returning to his room, Rex immediately lay down on the bed.
Ignoring the goblin watching him from beyond the door, he opened a translucent window.
Since no one but Rex could see the window and he could operate it with nothing more than a glance, there was no problem with using it openly.
‘Fool.’
Rex sneered at the goblin glaring at him through the bars.
He also mocked Dr. Retort, who considered him a failure.
In truth, he wasn't a failure.
On the contrary, he was an overwhelming success.
‘Should I be grateful for this...’
Thanks to Dr. Retort's experiments, his interface had evolved.
The ability it had gained was none other than perfect memory.
More precisely, the interface had gained annotation, memo, and search functions, but that was no different from having perfect memory.
He had once considered reporting this to the scientist.
But he didn't want to fulfill the doctor's dream, so he was hiding the truth by deliberately pretending to be a failure.
‘Just a little longer...’
Rex had no intention of spending the rest of his life in this cesspit.
Someday, he would escape—
“Keh-reuk! Get up, maggot! It's morning!”
The shrill goblin voice was irritating enough to make him angry just by hearing it, and Rex jolted awake.
‘What? When did I fall asleep?’
Rex lived through another day.
*
After finishing his daily work, Rex returned to his room.
As usual, he lay on the bed and manipulated the interface, then checked the time.
10:00
He didn't know how it worked, but the interface also had a clock function.
After checking the time, Rex got up from the bed and pressed his ear to the door.
‘The guard is... asleep.’
No matter how high a goblin's level rose, its nature never changed.
After confirming the guard was asleep, Rex sat on the bed and carefully laid a sheet of paper on the creaking desk.
Rex wrote that day's note, using coal he'd pilfered while running errands to scratch it onto the paper.
After finishing the note, Rex felt along the wall of his cell and found a hole.
Then he gently pushed the note into the hole.
This had been Rex's daily routine for the past several months.
Whenever he obtained coal and paper, he exchanged notes with the test subject in the room next door.
He couldn't write long sentences.
- [A? I ate meat today.]
Although it had only been a lump of meat scraps, it was still a meal worthy of being called special.
Rex waited for A's reply.
He knew nothing about them—not their name, gender, voice, or appearance.
Even so, there was a bond between them.
But no reply came.
“Sigh...”
Rex sighed without realizing it.
He recalled the rumor from a week earlier that A had been sold to another slave trader.
He had suspected as much ever since the replies stopped coming.
And he knew full well that, realistically, no reply would ever come.
He also knew that continuing to slip notes into an empty room would greatly increase the risk of being discovered when a new test subject moved in.
But for a human being, loneliness hurt more than a beating with a club.
For that reason, he couldn't stop this irrational behavior.
“Sigh...”
Rex turned his head from the left wall and began feeling along the right.
There was another tiny hole there.
Rex slipped a note into that hole.
- [D, are you alive?]
D was another neighbor he'd grown close to, like A.
A reply came immediately.
- [I'm still holding on, R]
Fortunately, D was still there, though Rex didn't even know whether D was male.
As he looked at D's reply, Rex thought of the experiment D was undergoing.
D's experiment was intended to allow a person to survive without food.
Because of it, Rex had heard that D hadn't been able to drink even water, let alone eat, for over half a year.
Thinking of that, Rex measured the size of the hole.
The hole began wide enough for three fingers and ended in a gap just wide enough for a single sheet of paper to pass through.
After confirming this, Rex carefully wrote another sentence on the desk.
- [Wait just a little longer. I think it'll break through soon.]
After that, Rex began digging at the hole with a fork as usual, using it like a pickaxe.
Another half month passed.
At last, the gap became a hole.
It meant he had broken all the way through to the other side.
Rex began writing a letter in excitement.
- [Drink, D]
Then, without waiting for a reply, he rolled up the paper into a straw and inserted it into the hole.
After sending the straw through to the other side, Rex attached a water bottle he'd secretly pilfered to its end.
Sluuuurp—
The water began to dwindle.
Eventually, when the water had disappeared completely, the straw vanished toward D's side.
A moment later, the note that had gone through before the straw returned with D's reply written on the back.
- [Would you like to see sunlight, R?]
Rex considered it for a moment.
In these circumstances, bringing that up most likely meant D had a way out.
Rex had an escape plan of his own, but decided to hear D's method out first.
- [What method?]
But D's next action was completely different from what he expected.
Boom!
Kreeeek!!
The door to the room where D had been burst off its hinges, followed by the death cries of two goblins.
This was followed by the sound of meat being pulverized.
An emergency alarm rang throughout the laboratory.
- Bullek! Code Bulleeeek!!! Everyone to your positions!
A troll shouted at the top of its lungs.
As events suddenly took a turn, Rex stood dumbfounded, and then his door was torn off.
Beyond the vanished door, Rex could see D's face.
He was a shabby wild man with a massive body nearly two meters tall, a bushy beard, and unkempt hair hanging limply.
The wild man—D—smiled faintly.
“R. I've never seen you before. Do you happen to have anything to eat?”
Overwhelmed by his imposing presence, Rex nodded and held out bread.
D—Duke—tossed the bread into his mouth and made no attempt to hide his smile.
‘It’s finally beginning.’
This was the moment two hundred years of effort bore fruit.