Chapter 137
There was a man who had led an unremarkable school life.
His family was happy, he had enough wealth to live on for the rest of his life, and he got along well with his friends.
Like everyone else, he graduated from elementary school, then middle school.
Now that all he had left was to take the KGSAT and graduate high school like any other examinee, a great ordeal was thrust upon him.
[This is the scene of the Banghwa Bridge bombing. In this unprecedented bombing disaster in the Republic of Korea, the death toll so far stands at 57, while around 480 people have been injured. The injured are receiving treatment at 38 hospitals throughout Seoul, distributed among them-]
The man cast a lifeless glance at the framed photographs of his family hanging in the funeral hall.
Father, mother, older brother, younger sister.
And there was no photograph of him among theirs.
The unreal situation still felt like a dream. Strangely, he couldn't cry.
Many guests and reporters had come to the funeral hall, but not a single one registered in the man's eyes.
When evening came, he headed to the study room as he always did.
He picked up a pen and worked through Korean questions.
Choose the speaker's feelings appropriate to the situation.
Grief-stricken, sorrowful, anguished. None of the choices was the answer.
So he opened the next workbook. Math.
Find the length of the following catenary.
Banghwa Bridge is 2,559 meters long, and a car's speed is 60 kilometers per hour, so if it had crossed 150 seconds earlier or later, it would not have been caught up in the accident. Once again, there was no answer among the choices.
Rage welled up inside him, and he flung all the workbooks out the window.
Only then did the man realize that those workbooks had been freed from their narrow confines.
So, as if possessed, he headed for the Han River. Any bridge would do.
By coincidence, his footsteps carried him to Mapo Bridge, famous as a suicide spot.
The man gripped the railing tightly with both hands.
Just as he lifted one leg over it, he heard a cat's cry: Meow-.
“Ahaha... Am I interrupting...?”
A woman holding a silver cat in her arms.
She scratched her head awkwardly, then blurted out the first thing that came to mind.
“Um... so... would you like to go see a late-night movie with me?”
Only then did the man begin sobbing like a lost little child.
The woman's hand patting his back was as gentle as his mother's.
The man had had many friends.
But it didn't take long for him to become even closer to the woman than he had been to any of them.
Going to the movies together became part of their daily routine, and they even napped together on a campus where cherry blossoms bloomed in profusion, feeling the soft breeze.
The cat she raised eventually gave birth to five kittens.
They spent fun and happy days together, crying and laughing like a family and relying on one another, the sort of days everyone would envy.
And then, to the man who had thought it would last forever, the woman burst into tears and confessed.
“I’m actually terminally ill...”
The woman who had saved the man at the Han River confessed that she, too, had gone there to end her life.
In a trembling voice, she thanked him for giving her unforgettable memories and apologized for giving him an unforgettable wound.
“Carry in your heart the fact that I existed in this world. I hope you’ll continue to be happy even without me.”
Another life was extinguished in vain.
When the supporting beam that had barely held up the tower he had built over his entire life collapsed, his life fell along with it.
He shut himself in his room and lived like a wreck.
He cried all day and laughed all day.
He went days without eating, and at other times ate until he vomited.
And what caught his eye was an outdoor advertisement for a virtual-reality game.
The woman had truly loved a game called WoA.
The man, who hated games, had never understood her hobby until the very end.
Lamenting that he had only started playing the game after she died, the man began playing.
There was no particularly special story on the way to clearing it.
He immediately entered ranked matches and beat people to death indiscriminately.
For that moment, his heart felt a little lighter, but that was all.
He paid no attention to wins or losses and only killed his enemies, yet his rank kept rising.
Before long, feeling the limits of his account, he naturally turned his attention to Nightmare as well.
And what greeted the man there was a cat beastkin.
He couldn't help imagining whether combining half the silver cat the woman had raised with half the woman herself would produce someone like that.
Adella's prim expression kindled a fire in the man's chest.
If he couldn't save her in reality, he wanted to save her at least in the game.
After hundreds of attempts, he thought he would finally bring Part 1 to a close with Adella, but...
All that ever awaited him was Adella's suicide.
By some cruel joke of fate, Adella's last words resembled the words the woman had left him while she was alive.
There must be a way to save her. No, he had to save her no matter what.
The man clenched his teeth, thinking that if he couldn't save even a single game character, then his existence was no different from having no value at all.
But as the rounds continued, he realized that Adella was structured so that she would inevitably meet her death, and that suspicion became certainty in the VIP viewing room.
The man's obsession with Adella, born from his feelings for his lover, had now reached the point of madness, but he no longer even had the strength to vent his anger.
As he remembered the lover he had lost day after day and spent his usual rough-and-tumble time with Adella, a savior appeared one day.
[I want to save Adella.]
There were already countless people all over the world who had tried to save her.
That was why he couldn't believe the streamer's declaration at first.
Thanks to all sorts of attempts, he only knew that satisfying certain conditions allowed various interactions with Adella; it was obvious that even NoName would not be able to save her.
That should have been the case...
[‘Catster Call’ donated 100,000 won!]
-Adella, can you hear my voice...?
“Eek! You startled me! I... I can hear you? Do you know who I am, nyang?”
-Is this a dream or reality?
-It can interact with a streaming service? An NPC?
-Did you torture aliens to make this, Waresoft!!!!!
-Fucking insane tech...
-Look at the donation queueㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ Everyone's donating to try to talk to Adellaㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ This is the final boss fight!!!!!!!
-The stock price is going to rebound again?
└ It's amazing that you're thinking about stocks even now.
└ There was some bastard who said he shorted earlier. Serves him rightㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
Catster Call turned off the capsule's power and struggled to raise himself from the floor, where he had collapsed as though his body had melted.
Meow-
Before long, the kittens were scratching furiously at the door and begging for food.
The man tenderly hugged the silver cats and let out a faint smile.
“I cursed the heavens countless times, asking why the people I loved all left my side. I thought several times a day that no one in the world could be more unfortunate than me.”
Although he couldn't touch Adella himself as a viewer, seeing the cat-eared girl looking around in confusion overwhelmed him with emotion.
“I carry you in my heart, so how could I be happy at the same time? Back then, I didn't understand what you meant at all... but I think I understand a little now...”
He didn't need to watch NoName's stream anymore.
Because if it was her, she would surely defeat Mephistopheles and save Adella.
Catster Call, Lee Hyeon-seo, climbed out of the capsule and called his cousin first.
He was the grateful person who had rushed over first and worried about him when his entire family was in the accident. There had been calls from him recently as well, but the man had ignored them all, and he felt sorry.
He had been cooped up in his room for so long that there were far too many other people he hadn't been able to tell how he was doing.
It was his first step back into society.
[Ymir – 010-XXXX-XXXX]
* * *
Though Adella had become a popular star overnight, this was no time for a fan meeting.
The black mist slowly cleared, and Mephistopheles appeared.
“It seems you're finally ready to place your wager?”
Mephisto's appearance was reminiscent of a cold, northern aristocrat.
He had a strongly defined, angular jaw and a sharply prominent nose.
His silver hair fell to his waist, and when he brushed one side behind his ear, his softly gleaming purple eyes were razor-sharp.
Wearing black shoes, black suit trousers, and black gloves, he loosened the top button of his white shirt—the only contrasting color—and murmured in a low voice.
“Human history has been a continuous chain of struggle. Humans fight, seize, and ultimately kill to obtain what they want. There are no eternal victors or eternal losers in struggle, so what a waste are the lives squandered without cultivating meaning?”
All the ominous mist vanished, revealing a blue sky.
Yet whenever the demon took a step, the vegetation withered and eventually crumbled away.
“I will become your god. I will grant eternal peace and rest to the world. So give me Yggdrasil.”
Mephisto extended his hand politely.
His eerie gaze was directed precisely at the laurel crown on my head and the ring and necklace woven from laurel.
Meanwhile, a bracelet glowing ominously black was clasped around the wrist of the hand he held out.
[Select the laurel to hand to Mephistopheles:]
[▶Laurel of Reincarnation – MP +5,000]
[▶Laurel of Life – HP +10,000]
[▶Laurel of Diligence – AD +750]
[▶Laurel of Creation – AP +1,000]
Here, at least, handing over all the laurels did not cause me to lose the growth stats stored in each one. Instead, it was a gimmick that granted bonus stats.
In other words, the system granted additional stat adjustments equal to the number of laurels handed over. Naturally, handing over all of them caused an immediate game over, so I had to be careful.
Giving the laurels to Mephisto strengthened him by that amount, but for those who wanted to finish with greater combat power, it was a kind of challenge.
However, being unable to use mid-circle magic was devastating for someone like me, who had reached this point through a combat style closer to a mage's than a healer's.
[▶I did not hand over the laurels.]
Therefore, I substituted the gift by taking his hand and giving it a light shake up and down.
The demon was dumbfounded and made a foolish expression.
“What is this...?”
Mephisto opened his fist and inspected the object I had handed him through the handshake, then frowned.
-What is that?
-Why is it a chunk of rock?
-Is he telling him to eat shit?ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Honestly, I don't need the growth stats. I'm plenty strong already.
What he picked up was not the lush green leaves he had expected, but a dull gray lump of metal.
Just as disappointment began to show on his face,
[Cast: Coulomb Explosion (Na)]
Fwoooom-!
“Guhk!”
The demon's entire right hand flew off, scattering white smoke.
“It's sodium, but not an ion, so it won't taste salty.”
After all, isn't it a time-honored tradition in the North that combat begins the moment our bodies touch?
At any rate, checking whether an enemy could regenerate was always an important step.