Chapter 207
“No. Inside, there might be some dangerous…”
“Protecting my own body isn’t difficult. Have you forgotten that I am an officer sent by the top brass?”
It was a cold, arrogant, high-pitched voice. The officer was unexpectedly a woman.
However, just because she was a woman didn’t mean she would be easy to subdue.
There had to be a reason for it, seeing her so confident when a vicious criminal from Glitch Hall might have broken into her office.
She either received high-level body modification, or she possessed a powerful weapon…
Either way, there seemed to be no chance of winning in a head-on clash. Samsao, whose specialty was [Close combat], was also absent right now.
That was why Cheonchilbaek wondered what on earth Paradox was thinking when he clenched his fists.
In his mind, there was no way out of this current crisis. None at all.
Paradox flashed his eyes like a lunatic and shouted.
“Osai! You clean up the mess you made. You’re the only one who can resolve this situation!”
It was a situation where he had even thrown away the act of stubbornly calling others by their Character Name for the sake of immersion.
Osai shrieked.
“What am I supposed to do? Try hacking here again? Like that would work, fuck!”
It was a complete mess of a situation with abusive language flying back and forth. Paradox grabbed Osai by the collar, contorting his face into a demonic expression.
“What are you going to use that head for, huh? If hacking were all you could do, would I have let you make such a stupid character? Think, what is your character concept!”
Even at Paradox’s sharp rebuke, Osai had a look of incomprehension. Cheonchilbaek was the same.
When it came to Osai’s character concept, nothing else came to mind other than his being a hacker with only one eyeball.
The murmuring sounds drew closer. The officer seemed about to open the door.
In this hair-trigger situation, Paradox spat as he shouted.
“Your character is a womanizer, and that officer is a woman! Do you understand now?”
Could it be?
Cheonchilbaek looked shocked. Osai did the same.
“Seduce the officer and somehow find a way for us to survive! Other than that, there is no way. None!”
What kind of Mad Cow was this!
Cheonchilbaek felt his mind growing faint. Osai also tried to retort with a look that said, “Has this old man gone crazy?”, but there was no time for that.
Paradox hastily grabbed Cheonchilbaek and threw himself behind the furniture. Almost simultaneously, the entrance to the office opened with a whir.
The officer stepped in. She had a pistol in her hand. From this point on, resisting was already hopeless.
Paradox kicked Osai’s ass to urge him on.
Osai wore a conflicted “Is this right?” expression, but eventually knelt in front of the officer, who stood out with her sharp gaze and prominent nose bridge.
Since there was nothing else he could do anyway, he had no choice but to try a last resort gamble.
“Officer, please listen to my story just once. There is a reason for all this.”
“What kind of trick is this?”
Even when yelled at, he did not yield, met her gaze deeply, his face reflecting the story-filled persona of the womanizer One-Eyed Jack he had crafted, and spoke.
“I fell in love at first sight.”
“…What?”
The officer also seemed dumbfounded, as if she hadn’t expected this situation. Taking advantage of that brief gap, Osai continued speaking.
“I apologize for stealing glances at your beautiful figure without permission. However, I fell in love the very first day I saw you come here. Because of that, I have suffered heartache until now. Unable to hold it in any longer, I even broke into your office! Please accept my feelings!!!”
Cheonchilbaek frowned as he listened to the story while hiding in the back.
Osai had ultimately followed Paradox’s orders and attempted an absurd seduction.
In an unexpected situation, that could be considered the best attempt in its own way, but whether it would work was another matter.
Just looking at the icy sneer that surfaced on the officer’s lips right now…
“”
GM
: At the player’s request, a
[Social skills]
check will proceed. Please roll the dice. However, the difficulty of this check is high.”
Still, fortunately, there were dice.
The problem was the difficulty. It was certainly an extremely difficult situation worthy of a high difficulty.
To overcome this with social skills, one would truly need a silver tongue that had reached god-tier!
Unlike before, Osai threw the dice very carefully.
⚂
⚅
⚄
.
.
.
⚅
Up to the third roll, it felt like, “Huh? Could it be?”
And the moment the final die, which had been spinning exceptionally fast, stopped and revealed six pips, Cheonchilbaek almost screamed.
“Osai, this fucking amazing bastard!”
3 6 5 6.
It came out ridiculously well. He couldn’t roll them well at all earlier, but this time he rolled the dice amazingly.
He was truly a man with the Talent/Skill to play with people’s hearts.
“”
GM
:
[Social skills]
stat 3 plus modifiers <0 + + +> makes a total of
6(Superhuman)
, so the result is…
Success
! One-Eyed Jack’s oratory gains tremendous persuasiveness and charm.”
As Osai’s Talent/Skill to play with people’s hearts affected not only his companions but also the officer, the officer’s cool gaze suddenly loosened dreamily, as if she had been hypnotized.
The rosy flush rising on her cheeks made the situation obvious to anyone.
“It worked!”
“Officer! Are you alright?”
When quite some time had passed and the officer only maintained sticky eye contact with Osai without coming out or responding, the model prisoners shouted.
Interrupted during such a crucial moment, the officer expressed her annoyance with a displeased air.
“I’m fine, so shut up and stay out! It’s nothing. It’s a system malfunction!”
Cheonchilbaek and Paradox made eye contact.
They had taken a massive detour… but this ultimately meant operation success.
* * *
It wasn’t just a success; it was a massive success.
They didn’t just use the HR Officer; they completely won her over to their side.
Unexpectedly, unlike her cold impression, she must have been pure-hearted, as the officer had fallen for Osai’s fatal charm and couldn’t pull herself out.
Thanks to that, they were able to obtain not only various useful pieces of information but also clues for the prison break.
In the end, Osai’s trolling had returned as tremendous luck.
Perhaps because of that, the lucky person Osai was extremely majestic and confident.
He had unexpectedly gained the additional income of enjoying a secret romance with a beautiful woman officer, so he was even more so.
Paradox, who had given the ridiculous order to “seduce the officer” at the critical moment, also seemed proud that his bizarre instruction had worked.
Forgetting when they had been hurling curses at each other, while Osai and Paradox exuded a very harmonious atmosphere, Samsao muttered as if something was unsatisfactory.
“In the end, we were just lucky. I don’t quite like this. We succeeded this time because we were lucky, but there’s no guarantee we’ll be lucky next time, is there? This is just my opinion, but… I don’t think we should rely too much on these dice.”
Cheonchilbaek thought it was a valid argument. How much had their joys and sorrows fluctuated in an instant because of those damn dice?
However, Osai, the biggest beneficiary of the dice at present, snorted, calling it nonsense.
“What are you talking about? That’s the only means to utilize a character’s abilities in this game. It’s not like we can play with our abilities sealed away. It’s not like we can’t gather honey because we’re afraid of bees.”
Osai’s words weren’t wrong either.
As always at times like this, Paradox stepped in to offer his perspective.
“Relying on luck… it’s not wrong. But isn’t it ultimately the same in reality, not just here? Man proposes, God disposes; man throws the dice, and Yahweh makes the decision, as they say.”
We do our best, and then we leave the rest to luck. Our operation was the best possible choice in that situation. A person cannot possibly gauge the outcome of the dice.”
It was something he had felt before. In Cheonchilbaek’s mind, Paradox didn’t seem to be from the lower-level people.
Out of consideration for his companions, he usually spoke as simply as possible, but sometimes he would say things that those uneducated bastards like Cheonchilbaek found hard to understand, like this. Look at him now.
“Rather, I feel that the influence of luck is less here than in reality. In reality, no matter how much you do your best, there are countless cases where things are ruined by external influence and actions you don’t even know about. On the other hand, it’s not like that here.”
It’s the exact opposite. Things were almost completely ruined, but if it’s a game, a path toward clearing it is in some way bound to exist. If it were reality, we would never have been able to overturn the results like this.”
It was incredibly hard to understand.
So Cheonchilbaek just roughly nodded, pretending to listen, while thinking about something else inside.
Before weighing whether to use the dice or not, or whether to rely on luck or not, something else came to mind first.
It was fear.
In his mind, the world inside this simulation game was far too real.
Glitch Hall’s simulations were originally like that, but it was even more so in this case.
The people, the structure, the system… everything was chillingly similar to the Glitch Hall outside.
If it weren’t for the existence of his companions along with the alien device called “supernatural ability”, it might have been hard to distinguish reality from virtuality.
And in a simulation so close to reality, hacking a mechanical device by rolling a single die, conquering a woman he had never even met before… what should he call this ability?
Right. Wasn’t it practically akin to the divine power of manipulating reality?
It was a relief that this wasn’t true reality.
And at the same time, a question arose.
“What is the proof that the world outside is true reality?”
What if there were something similar to dice in the world outside too…?