Chapter 1
Have you ever regretted a choice you made?
I have.
Quite a lot, too.
Like when, back in elementary school, I fell for the girl sitting beside me and deliberately acted mean to her just to beg for her attention,
or when I quit studying and focused on games, following the Internet saying, “Heroes don’t study,” and achieved Master rank in a game instead of getting a good CSAT score,
or when I desperately regretted deciding to get my military service over with quickly, volunteering as an 81mm mortar gunner and ending up serving in freezing-cold Cheorwon.
After that, I made a firm decision.
Never do anything I’d regret again.
It was absolutely not because I had almost rolled down a hill while marching half-asleep with a mortar on my back.
Anyway.
Unfortunately, my firm resolve eventually went unkept and became nothing more than an empty promise.
Because a regret far greater and more horrific than the ones I’d mentioned earlier had come looking for me.
But what could I do?
It wasn’t as if I’d done it knowingly.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little regretful.
…….
Right.
I should’ve just played Animal Crossing.
* * *
I bought a game.
Of course, where would a broke job seeker get the money?
Naturally, I bought it at a 75% discount.
【RISK CITY : HOLIDAY】
Today, a public holiday when even a job seeker living on everyone else’s goodwill could proudly take the day off, the game I was about to play also had a subtitle that suited the occasion.
While waiting for the installation bar to slowly creep upward, I searched the community on my secondary monitor.
─ Newbie Guide for Starting the Game [99+]
─ Collection of All Kinds of Risk City Information [99+]
─ (NSFW) My OC’s About-to-Burst Milk Jugs [99+]
After checking the announcement post pinned to the community’s featured posts and hesitating for a moment, I clicked the title I needed most right then.
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Title: (NSFW) My OC’s About-to-Burst Milk Jugs
(Screenshot of a dark-skinned muscular male character emphasizing his pectorals)
He wasn’t lying.
If you saw it, hit Recommend and disappear.
─ It blew up late—where’d it go?
─ Fuck, why is this an announcement? Is the mod dead?
└ (OP) I dunno;;
─ It’s chocolate milk, ehehe.
─ Guys who level male characters instead of female ones really are all screwed in the head, huh.
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“What the fuck.”
The graphics were ridiculously good.
Not that there are many games with bad graphics these days, apart from indie games.
Having lost my eye health in an instant, I sighed and closed the Internet window.
Whatever. Since when did I ever look up information posts?
‘What could go wrong?’
I’d just wing it.
A game was still just a game, after all.
Instead, I began reading the brief description of the game listed on the distribution platform.
[
This is an open-world action-adventure RPG set in the metropolis of ‘Risk City,’ a city filled with chaos.
]
The game’s genre was cyberpunk.
But perhaps that alone wasn’t enough, because the setting combined cyberpunk with strange elements like biopunk and arcanepunk, making it, in a word, closer to a fusion-punk world.
‘It’s still better to have tasty jjamppong than bland jjajangmyeon.’
In the end, what mattered was how the game tasted.
As long as it was fun, wouldn’t that solve everything?
I had considered buying an AAA-quality game set in a medieval-fantasy world in the same RPG genre, but
in the end, I chose the slightly cheaper jjamppong game.
‘Mm, a pretty dependable flavor.’
After spending a few minutes watching a blinding game trailer that looked like it might trigger a photosensitive seizure,
just as the game finished installing,
Flash.
A sudden bright light burst from the monitor I had been staring blankly at.
For a moment.
“…Ugh!”
A dizzying vertigo engulfed my entire body.
I didn’t even have time to finish the mutter that had slipped out of me,
as a loud ringing pounded violently inside my head.
The flow of my consciousness was sucked away somewhere.
It took less than a few seconds for me to completely lose consciousness.
* * *
It was noisy around me.
Beeeep─.
A shrill ringing, as loud as a computer’s beep, battered my ears.
My consciousness was still buried in darkness.
Down.
Further down.
My consciousness sank heavily.
Beeeep──.
But the ringing, like an alarm, seized my consciousness as it sank into the depths and dragged it back up to the surface.
“Hey, hey. Hurry up and cut it up. It’s a nice, clean corpse—the first one we’ve seen in ages.”
“Tsk, let’s focus. I can’t concentrate because your mouth keeps smelling like a rotten nutrient tube.”
“That’s because we’re in such a hurry! What if the others smell it and come looking?”
“Then shut your damn mouth!!”
Or perhaps I came to because of the voices of two people I didn’t know having a conversation.
Before I could open my eyes and look around, an unpleasantly bright female voice reached my ears.
【Random Encounter Occurred!】
It was a bright voice, the sort you might expect to hear in Everybody’s Marble, a board game famous for its expensive microtransactions.
And that voice wasn’t done yet.
【The player’s health is low!】
So what?
The noisy voice pounding at my head left me no choice but to come to my senses.
I was also curious about what was happening around me.
I slowly opened my eyes.
My eyelids felt incredibly heavy, as if I had been asleep for a very long time.
Or maybe I just had a thick layer of sleep in my eyes.
“Huh? This guy’s eyes are open.”
“Bullshit. You’d think Megacorps were handing out food. I scanned his biological signals earlier, and he looked like a corpse that had been dead for ages.”
Unlike the woman’s voice I had heard in my head moments ago, the men’s voices I heard now felt remarkably real.
Just as I was about to direct my gaze toward the men whose voices came from directly above me,
I realized that the range of my vision had narrowed considerably.
‘…Something’s wrong.’
Would this be what it felt like if half the world had been cleanly split away?
I wasn’t even closing one eye, yet the sky, dyed black like an unlit monitor screen, was visible on exactly one half.
‘Is this a dream?’
Hadn’t I been sitting in front of my computer desk just moments ago?
A breeze blowing in from outside felt wonderfully refreshing.
Cold, even.
And what about the two filthy, shabbily dressed men chattering above my face?
In other words, this was a situation that would be hard to explain unless it was a dream.
As if I’d been anesthetized, the sensations in my body were dull as well.
“No, look! His eyes are open!”
“…He really is.”
I looked up at the two men chatting in such a relaxed manner,
and suddenly noticed something very strange.
A filthy man who hadn’t even shaved properly was looking down at me.
“Hey, is this a biological eye?”
In his hand was an eyeball, plump and springy, staring down at me with a vivid, lifelike appearance.
“I couldn’t pick up any mechanical signal at all, so I thought it was some new cybernetic body the corporations had just released.”
Thump. A heavy sensation landed on my chest.
Half my field of vision had disappeared.
An eyeball of a familiar shape in the hand of someone who might have been a thug or a lunatic.
And the sensation of moisture around one eye.
“Don’t feel too aggrieved. Who told you to nap in a dump?”
“Pfft, who naps here? He must’ve gotten jumped while drinking somewhere.”
“…You don’t understand jokes either?”
Only then did I understand what “The player’s health is low” meant.
I was slowly becoming afraid to turn my head.
Half my field of vision had already disappeared.
There was no need to look to know what condition the rest of my body was in.
I already felt like I was becoming anemic.
The man must have been squatting for quite some time, because he grabbed his stiff lower back and rose to his feet.
In his other hand, he held a metal blade slick with red.
“I went through all that trouble for nothing. I thought I was finally going to make a decent haul for once. If it had been a new corporate cybernetic body, do you know how much it would’ve been worth?”
“You’re just going to leave him like this?”
“Then what?”
The other man looked down at me.
“It’s pitiful. Emergency services don’t come this far anyway.”
Despite his sympathetic tone, the other man’s gaze was just as utterly indifferent as his companion’s.
“Tch, fine. I’ve already cut him once. What’s one more?”
The filthy blade in his hand gleamed.
Drip. Drip.
Blood dripping from the blade’s tip sounded horribly cruel.
But I had no room to focus on their carefree conversation.
Putting the threat to my life aside, I was dumbfounded by the voice that had begun speaking inside my head again.
【The player’s health is low!】
【Increased chance of a random encounter!】
‘Is this Everybody’s Marble or something?’
The voice was incredibly loud, as if there were no way to adjust its volume.
【A new random encounter has occurred!】
At that moment.
The blade that had been slowly approaching me suddenly shot up into the air.
Ting!
The crisp, refreshing sound of a spinning blade.
And then.
Thunk, thunk, thunk-thunk…… Kaboom!
Along with a rhythmic sound, like skipping stones across water,
the two men who had been near me disappeared.
What now?
Before I could make sense of the situation, the shadow of someone new appeared and covered my face.
It was difficult to make out their face with the light behind them, but I could clearly tell that they had saved me.
“You alive?”
A husky woman’s voice reached me.
At the same time, there was a vicious cloud of cigarette smoke.
Only after smelling the smoke did I realize that the woman had a cigarette between her lips.
‘…I still hate secondhand smoke, even in a situation like this.’
When my expression briefly twisted at the harsh cigarette smoke, a quiet chuckle came from above my head.
That little laugh was all it took.
I felt the tension drain from my entire body.
Even if it hadn’t shown, I must have been extremely tense.
It hadn’t been long since I regained consciousness, either.
“Hey, if you close your eyes here, you’re really gonna die, you know?”
“…Feels like I’m going to die even if I don’t.”
“Well… yeah, I guess it does look that way.”
The woman lifted me up in one swift motion.
The sensation of floating was surprisingly cozy.
Cozy enough that I could fall asleep again just like this.
* * *
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Title: What the Fuck Is This Shitty Game?
How do I survive getting knifed by the character Scavenger right after starting??
Is the development company actually insane?
─ Ah, this is what they call a roguelike.
└ It’s roguelite, though.
└ 🖕🖕🖕
─ You must’ve selected the wrong option at the start. There’s an option that randomizes the character’s entire background, and that happens if you pick wrong.
└ (OP) Why the hell does this stupid setting even exist?
└ If you’re lucky, you’re born in a single-digit sector instead, which makes the starting difficulty incredibly easy.
└ (OP) Ah, got it. Thanks. Time to reroll.
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