Chapter 103
On the bus back.
Seeing the stock market on my phone, I squeezed my eyes shut.
‘This is crazy……. What the hell is with today?’
Most of the stocks were falling.
I usually didn’t check stock market forums, but today my fingers somehow kept drifting toward them.
It was much the same there.
The content was too brutal to describe. Suffice it to say, things were so chaotic that I wondered if the apocalypse had broken out.
‘Forget it. I’m not looking anymore.’
If there are days when things go down, there will be days when they go back up.
But for now, I decided not to believe in God. I’d checked because I thought He might give me something for doing a good deed, but what the hell had He given me?
‘Jesus Christ.’
After getting off the bus, I headed for a PC café. I’d seen a text message saying the card had been used there.
It seemed they’d eaten with the kids and then gone to a PC café. An unexpectedly decent choice for a 1,902-year-old grandmother.
The children had grown up in Cyber City, so they were used to computers, too.
The PC café was bustling when I entered. Children carried bowls of ramen around, curses flew at teammates, and chaotic game sounds echoed everywhere.
There were probably so many people because rush hour overlapped with the time school let out.
The PC café was small, so it wasn’t difficult to find them. The children and Renea were sitting in a neat row, enjoying their games.
Each seat even had a big can of soda, so it looked like they were having a proper time.
“Ah, aagh! What are you doing!?”
“Wait! I told you not to do that!”
“We’re screwed!”
“That lady’s gone crazy!”
“Hehe, hehehe.”
I quietly watched from behind to see what game they were having so much fun playing with the children. It was a survival game.
I’d assumed they would play something casual, like an arcade game, so I was impressed that they were playing something unexpectedly difficult.
“The forest I wanted to burn was this one.”
She was setting fire to a forest in a survival game. It was already blazing, and she kept setting more fires.
A sliver of madness could be felt from Renea’s back as she set the forest ablaze.
Her pupils had widened, and it looked like drool might fall from her open mouth.
“Burn it all down. Hehehe, burn the World Tree down to the last branch, too.”
“Ms. Renea.”
“Hweot!?”
Renea jumped in surprise and quickly turned her head. She looked around nervously, like a child caught playing with fire.
“Oh! You’ve arrived? I’m quite exhausted from entertaining the children.”
“……Yes. It seems you entertained them quite thoroughly.”
“Mister! That lady destroyed everything we made!”
“The tree house, the wooden table, and the wooden chairs! She burned them all away!”
“Then why did we make them in the first place?!”
She scratched her cheek and began making excuses in response to the children’s reproach.
“It was all meaningless. I made all those things once upon a time, too, but—.”
* * *
“Let’s play again, lady!”
“But don’t do that next time!”
“If we start over, let’s lock her up first.”
“Goodbye!”
Renea and the children waved their hands so vigorously they nearly wore them out. The scene I’d witnessed had been pretty shocking, but apparently she really had entertained them, because smiles appeared on everyone’s faces.
‘Leaving them with Renea was the right choice.’
I figured it was one of two things.
Either she was old enough to be good at taking care of children, or her mental age was close enough to theirs that she played well with them.
It seemed to be the latter.
As I felt relieved at seeing the children’s smiles for the first time in a while, Renea looked at me and smiled.
“Ah! Entertaining children is truly exhausting. Boss, hurry up and buy me dinner. Something expensive.”
“Dinner, my ass. We’re in a situation where we need to buy cup noodles on the way home.”
“Hwe?”
Renea was startled, rolled her lips inward, and began to whine.
“Why?! I worked hard!”
“You really took advantage of the fact that the kids don’t know any better, didn’t you? Do you realize there’s about a 1,890-year age gap between you and them?”
“Don’t mention the age difference in such detail!”
She grumbled, snorting through her nose.
I’d taken a taxi when I brought the kids over, but when I headed for the bus stop to go back, Renea let out a hollow laugh.
“What? Were you just pretending to be tough in front of the kids? I thought you’d take a taxi home, too!”
“Taxis don’t have priority seats for the elderly.”
“Changing the subject, are we? Huh? Huh?”
Her incessant snickering made me want to give her a knuckle sandwich. She started poking me with her elbow, continuing to get on my nerves.
“So? Who are those children? From what I saw, they seemed to be your customer’s children.”
“Haa…… There’s someone. A customer I made a mistake with a long time ago.”
“A mistake?”
“When I think about it now, it wasn’t anything major. I just failed while trying too hard to make a match.”
I was full of enthusiasm back then.
You can definitely get married.
Shouldn’t you find someone who will take responsibility for your children?
Don’t worry, and so on.
By the time I realized that the things I’d said to offer comfort and hope had begun acting as poison to them, it was already too late.
No one would accept a woman with five children.
It seemed obvious now, but at the time, I thought it was because I didn’t understand the world very well.
Well, on the Seventh Floor, if you were told to get married, getting married was simply the norm.
I looked up at the sunset sky and let out a short sigh.
Two years ago.
‘I’m sorry. I failed.’ The sky had looked exactly like this when I said those words to the children.
“Tsk, that’s why I just treat them well. They were the Sixth Floor’s first customers, after all.”
“……”
“These days, people say I’m being pathetic, asking why I help when there’s nothing in it for me, but—.”
“Hey, don’t say things like that.”
Standing at the bus stop, Renea replied while checking the route map.
Even though she wasn’t looking this way, there was a weight to her voice unlike usual.
“This place is truly strange. It calls those who help others out of kindness pathetic. It points at people who commit minor sins and says they should die.”
“……”
“In fact, I sometimes think those very words are what make the world even more chaotic.”
An elf who had lived in the forest for 1,900 years.
How did the world we lived in now look to someone who had saved it so many times?
“I have seen countless people. Among them were a few who possessed such brilliant light that I could feel envious of them.”
“……”
“There is no profit or loss in doing good. That is precisely why it has even greater value.”
“Hah—these days, if you say something like that, people curse you out as a sucker.”
When I answered with a shrug, she spun around and smiled brightly.
“So what if people curse you out as a sucker! It’s incredibly cool!”
“Cool?”
“Yes! Of all the humans I saw after leaving the forest, you were the coolest, Boss!”
“……Yeah.”
It was unexpected.
I was from the Seventh Floor and ran a marriage agency, but I’d never thought I particularly cared about what other people thought.
Yet when something like this happened, I found myself looking for a reason why I wasn’t the sucker this world called me.
Even if I looked a little stupid, so what?
‘Is there really a reason to help children?’
You just help them.
Isn’t that what adults are supposed to do?
“Heh.”
A small laugh escaped me.
They say you can sense the wisdom of life when talking with the elderly.
Maybe it was because she had lived for 1,900 years, but she certainly made me feel something.
“Boss! The bus is coming!”
“Let me ask you one thing.”
“Huh?”
Renea unnecessarily waved at the bus, and I asked with a smile.
“Are you cooler than Park Bugyeom?”
“How dare you cross the line.”
“……”
“Seriously, I’m so dumbfounded.”
I was seriously fucking annoyed.
* * *
An alley in Cyber City.
Mosco Vichakos, the white-haired woman who had barely managed to hide herself, caught her breath and slowly closed her eyes.
She was in a situation where she couldn’t even breathe too loudly.
Biting down hard on her lip, Vichakos replayed what had just happened.
‘What was that all of a sudden?’
She had arrived at the Tower while concealing her identity.
There had been quite a few obstacles, but she had finally done it. She had no doubt about that.
The gap left by the disappearance of the AI.
The distrust toward AI caused by Axis had kept surveillance from being too strict, and she had exploited that opening perfectly.
Mosco Vichakos’s preparations had been flawless.
All she had to do was pay for a ticket to the Third Floor and descend.
She had even boarded the elevator, but—
The Tower refused her.
[A passenger who is prohibited from traveling is on board.]
It was a phrase she had never seen before.
Even the employees working there were bewildered, since they had never encountered a situation like this before.
There was no room for misunderstanding.
The Tower was merely there.
All immigration inspections and screenings were handled by people and Cyber City.
Put simply, the Tower merely existed, while humans had made the rules.
It was the first time the Tower had ever refused someone as if it possessed a will of its own.
And it had singled out one specific individual.
As a result, Mosco Vichakos’s plan had fallen through.
The employees, suspicious of the situation, began checking people’s identities one by one. Vichakos, a wanted fugitive, had barely escaped with her life.
‘Prohibited from traveling…….’
After roughly catching her breath, Vichakos began to think.
‘Could this be connected to the restrictions on passage to the Sixth Floor?’
It was similar to when Axis had blocked anyone from other floors from entering the Sixth Floor.
The one difference was that only Vichakos had been singled out.
If things had come to this, then the promise she’d made to descend to the Third Floor and meet the children—
Srrk!
“……?!”
A terminal slid across the alley floor and came to rest at her feet.
She immediately drew her gun and aimed at the end of the alley. A skinhead man covered in prosthetics stood there.
Normally, if someone had a shaved head, you could assume they had mechanical syndrome and had replaced even the area around their skull with prosthetics.
People like that wouldn’t die even if you put a bullet in their head.
A pursuer?
She was about to pull the trigger, but the man turned around without hesitation.
Bang!
She shot him simply because he gave her a bad feeling.
The man walked away with nothing more than smoke rising from the head the bullet had struck, without leaving so much as a scratch.
In the end, the only thing he left behind was a greenish terminal.
‘Did he come to deliver this?’
She left it on the ground and merely lowered her head to check the screen. A message appeared as if it had been waiting for her.
- Villansi: Mosco Vichakos.
- Villansi: I didn’t expect you to try to leave Cyber City so soon.
Villansi?
She had never heard the name before.
It wasn’t a fixer operating under a codename, nor one of the clients who frequently placed contracts.
Noticing the microphone on the terminal, Vichakos opened her mouth.
“Was it you who prevented me from taking the elevator?”
An answer came in real time.
- Villansi: You’re perceptive.
- Villansi: This should be fun.
“How did you do it?”
- Villansi: No one can do it.
- Villansi: I’m the only one who can.
“You’re the only one? Then the isolation of the Sixth Floor last time was also—.”
- Villansi: Yes, that was me.
Her grip tightened around the gun.
She realized for certain that someone beyond anything she had expected was watching her.
“What do you want?”
- Villansi: The only two humans who made a deal with Axis.
- Villansi: You and me.
- Villansi: I was curious about what you did with the money you received from Axis, so I did a little digging.
- Villansi: Prosthetics for orphans?
- Villansi: How boring.
Vichakos was overcome with anger, and the urge to shoot the terminal immediately surged up inside her, but—
She knew it would be meaningless.
‘He knows about the children.’
He even knew about the children she had hidden so desperately, and he knew far too easily.
“What…… do you want?”
- Villansi: Fun?
- Villansi: Or perhaps a thrill?
- Villansi: Either way, it’s fun, right?
- Villansi: If you clear the missions I give you one by one from now on, I’ll reopen the elevator so you can descend to the Third Floor.
“What happens if I fail?”
People of this sort naturally had penalties for failure prepared, too.
- Villansi: Simple.
- Villansi: You only got those prosthetics recently, so it would be a waste.
- Villansi: I’ll pull out the ones that aren’t the children’s prosthetics, one by one.
“You fucking bastard—!”
- Villansi: Nice reaction.
- Villansi: Let’s go.
[Mission registered!]
All-Cash cash-in-transit vehicle hijacking!
- Reward: The children’s health.
The story continues off the page
Floaties for Everyone
Swim lesson at the water park, and she's demonstrating on you