Chapter 2
My head was spinning terribly.
It felt exactly like drinking about three bottles of whiskey on an empty stomach, then bungee-jumping while drunk, only for the cord to suddenly snap.
In other words, it felt as though someone were violently shaking my semicircular canals.
In that hazy state of consciousness.
【The player’s condition is critical─】
【A special item has been used─】
The noisy voices rang out, but I usually let them go in one ear and out the other.
I couldn’t help it. I was completely out of it.
How much time passed like that?
Just as I was thinking this must be what it felt like to be a hibernating brown bear with a sleeping sickness,
I had spent all day suffering from a high fever, body aches, and severe motion sickness when a pain as though my insides were shrinking snapped me wide awake.
‘I’m gonna fucking die from the pain.’
My back was damp with sweat.
But there was an even bigger problem.
“Mm.”
A sudden wave of nausea surged up.
My entire body had gone limp, leaving me too weak to move even a finger, but the single thought that I couldn’t vomit on the bed while asleep made me struggle to sit up.
“Ugh…!”
It was closer to a reflexive action.
I had to protect the bed and my clothes!
Do you know how much of a pain it is to wash a mattress?!
It was an extremely, extremely, extremely urgent situation, so I barely managed to grab the trash can beside the mattress.
After emptying my stomach once,
“……Blegh.”
I rubbed my burning stomach as best I could and shoved the sloshing trash can far to one side.
Whew, I finally feel like I’m going to live.
Even the dull muscle aches seemed to have eased a little.
I looked around blankly.
“…….”
Where is this place?
‘…This is a room I’ve never seen before.’
A fairly large spider had taken up residence as my roommate in a corner of the mattress I’d been lying on, apparently untouched by human hands for quite some time.
I forcibly tore my gaze away from the spider.
It was a good thing the electricity was still on, at least.
If the light hadn’t been flickering from the half-broken lamp, the place looked enough like an abandoned house that I could have mistaken it for one.
‘For now, setting aside where this place is.’
After checking my intact limbs and left field of vision, I realized that I had woken up from an extremely vile nightmare.
‘That was one insanely realistic dream.’
I hadn’t known it in the dream, but after waking up, I still seemed to feel a strange sense of alienation in my limbs.
I’d thought all my tendons had been cut out.
Like pork hanging from a meat hook.
‘…But were my arms always this thick?’
My muscles were quite sturdy. Damn, look at those tendons.
Had I done some weight training in my sleepwalking state while unconscious?
Just as I was about to investigate the questions surrounding my body,
the closed door flew open.
“Oh, I was wondering when you’d start waking up.”
I blinked stupidly up at the woman who entered the room.
It wasn’t that the biker suit, which clearly revealed the lines of her body, had made me feel embarrassed to look at a woman like a pubescent boy.
It was because cigarette smoke with the exact same scent as the one I’d smelled in my dream had begun to fill the room.
I instinctively frowned and pointed at the cigarette between her lips.
“That cigarette….”
“Just put up with it, even if it’s strong.”
Her firm voice stirred up my contrarian streak, but I slowly nodded at what she said next.
“It’s not an ordinary commercial cigarette. It’s a special blend I made myself by mixing medicinal herbs.”
Sssssss, whoo.
Thick smoke, dark as a storm cloud, lightly filled the room before fading away.
“It helps with lung disease. If you’re going to complain, you can be a patient too.”
Well, if it was medicinal, I suppose it couldn’t be helped.
Anyway.
The woman sauntered over and stopped in front of me.
A pitch-black biker suit and thick boots.
Her faded red hair glimmered softly in the lamplight.
She lightly leaned her upper body toward me, then
held up her index finger straight.
“One month.”
“…?”
I tilted my head at the time period that had suddenly come out of nowhere.
Eventually, when I heard the woman’s follow-up, I let out a hollow laugh.
“That’s how long you’ve been asleep since that day. To be exact, about 718 hours.”
A strange ring of light passed through the woman’s eyes.
It was a fascinating sight, as though machinery had been implanted along her irises.
One month….
I rubbed my aching stomach.
‘No wonder my stomach felt empty.’
Of course, that was a stupid impression made possible only because it felt utterly unreal.
“It also means I spent all of a rare vacation I’d gotten in ages taking care of you. And now I have less than a few hours left.”
“…Th-thank you?”
“At least you’ve got the basics down.”
I still had no idea what situation I was in, though.
‘…Let’s sort things out one step at a time.’
I definitely remembered installing the game.
And then light burst forth.
Dark clouds, a garbage dump overflowing with refuse, two men looking down at me, and a blade drenched in blood.
“Hmm.”
It was a truly absurd possibility, but
I boldly directed a question at the woman standing before me.
“…By any chance, what’s the name of the area we’re in right now? Or the city, perhaps.”
Whether I had truly gone insane and been committed to a mental hospital, or had been kidnapped by a lunatic,
the appropriate answer from her would have been ‘Earth, South Korea, and Seoul.’
However, the woman’s answer differed from my expectations.
The woman lightly shrugged.
“You really don’t know? I did find it strange that you didn’t have a single mechanical prosthetic in your body. …Looks like you escaped from somewhere.”
Her narrow, elongated eyes looked at me.
“This city is called Risk City. If you were asking about the location, it’s Sector 49. To put it simply, it’s the bottom of the bottom.”
Risk City.
That was clearly both the name of the game I had installed and the name of the city that appeared in it.
Then….
‘Could it really not have been a dream?’
I pinched my forearm hard without realizing it.
A prickling pain spread through it.
Not a single split scar was visible.
If she really had healed all those wounds in only a month, the scientific prowess of cyberpunk could be called the greatest in the world.
(Germany from a bizarre world exists as a point of comparison.)
The woman watching my reaction tilted her head.
“You must be some kind of purist, huh?”
The woman, apparently unfazed by the hot ember, clenched the nearly burned-out cigarette—if I was to believe her, a bundle of medicinal herbs—in her fist.
She then glanced at the trash can in the room, checked what it contained, and frowned.
“……”
I mean, I couldn’t vomit on the mattress.
Eventually, she pulled a portable ashtray from inside her clothes and shook the ash into it.
“If I’d used cybernetic prosthetics to treat your body, you probably would’ve slept several times worse from neuralgia.”
“That means….”
While I examined my perfectly healthy body with wonder,
“Don’t ask how I treated you. As long as no one finds out, you won’t get arrested.”
“…What if they find out?”
She casually ignored my awkward question and continued saying what she wanted to say.
“You don’t have any religious beliefs you actually follow anyway, so I’m saying don’t worry about the little things.”
“…I probably don’t.”
“Why did that sound like a question?”
It’s not as though I didn’t know the saying that one’s body is bestowed by one’s parents.
I don’t know either.
She seemed to realize my words were a joke, because she straightened up from where she had been leaning over.
“Still, it’s a relief I didn’t save someone completely useless.”
She then tossed a card the size of a business card onto my thigh.
“Here, take it.”
I checked the card the woman had given me.
[
Abel Anderson
/ RCMMA00041
]
The card looked like a kind of ID.
“If you tried to get one separately outside, you’d have to pay $30,000 to have it made, so don’t lose it.”
“But even the name is different….”
Hearing my mutter, she naturally curled up the corners of her mouth.
“You don’t have any separate ID or ID chip, so who’s going to vouch for that? If you don’t want to be arrested as an illegal immigrant, just keep it.”
From now on, your name is Chunsik….
That was how I interpreted the woman’s words.
‘An ID card….’
Reading through the personal information written on the card, I couldn’t hold back a sarcastic comment.
“Not a single thing matches.”
Starting with the listed height, age, and place of origin.
The pièce de résistance was the blurry photograph of the face.
Other than being Asian like me, it was practically a completely different person’s face.
“As long as it’s roughly similar, it doesn’t matter. In the end, what matters is that you have an ID.”
“…No, more than anything, what am I supposed to do about the height? It says 190 cm here.”
For reference, I’m about 176 cm tall, slightly above the South Korean average.
Even if men often round their height up, fifteen centimeters was well beyond the line.
The woman took a step back at my question.
“Stand up and let me take a look.”
She’d said I’d been lying down for a month, so I wondered whether I’d even be able to put strength into my body properly.
But contrary to my worries, I was able to stand up lightly from the mattress.
However.
‘…Why does it feel like my line of sight got higher?’
I hadn’t noticed while sitting on the mattress, but once I stood up, the world looked a level taller.
To the point that I could see the crown of the standing woman’s head.
The red hair must have been dyed, because the black hair growing out at the roots stood out.
“I’m about 170 cm, so, hmm… With this much difference, 190 cm sounds about right.”
“…Does this make any sense?”
“There’s no reason it can’t.”
Somehow, whatever treatment she had given me had left me considerably taller after only a month.
Rather than making me happy, the fact simply left me dumbfounded.
The woman looked me over from various angles and voiced a slight complaint.
“Can’t you make your eyes look a little kinder?”
“…….”
“Now that I take a close look at your eyes, the difference from the ID photo is pretty drastic. Tsk. Well, there’s nothing we can do about this much.”
My delicate, glasslike heart was cracking.
I’d often been told since childhood that I had sharp eyes.
It was on par with Pokémon trainers who got into a fight just by making eye contact.
It wasn’t like this was the first or second time I’d heard it.
“Come to think of it, if you’re awake now, you must be pretty hungry. Wait here a moment.”
The woman left me where I was and slowly walked toward the open door.
“…Wait a second.”
“What.”
I stopped the woman as she was walking away.
Because I had something I wanted to know.
“But why are you treating me so kindly? What do you stand to gain from this…?”
You treated me, got me a fake ID, and now you’re even planning to feed me.
It was enough to call her my honorary mother. Mommy.
The woman scratched her chin at my question, then chuckled just as she had when we first met.
“You don’t need to be so suspicious. I saved you because I had business with you anyway. The timing happened to be unbelievably good, too.”
The timing was good?
The woman answered my question and added,
“And my name is Christine, not ‘you,’ you know?”
“Oh, then….”
“Just call me Boss.”
“…??”
It was only after some time that I learned why she’d told me to call her “Boss.”
Her.
The reason Christine had needed me, too.
* * *
“From now on, you’re the manager of this grocery store.”
“Huh?”