Seventeen Years Old (1)
Over the past six years, the changes in the Cola Area had not been especially dramatic.
Shin Eun-jo stayed a few more days before quietly returning to her own zone. On her way out she mentioned that if I held the Meteorite Pistol I could communicate with Home Protector, but I never bothered contacting him.
The moment I did, Home Protector would know the pistol was in my hands—that was one problem. More importantly, I had no intention of going to rescue him, and no intention of returning the pistol either.
Besides, an empty house is easier to rob.
While Home Protector remained detained in the Love Area, I planned to clean out the Tobacco Area. He had claimed he had never seen another player there besides himself, but the guy was sharp enough that I could not take his word at face value. And since the condition for Logout required every single player to open their system, I could not afford to miss even one. Thorough confirmation was mandatory.
In any case, once Shin Eun-jo left, life settled into a steady rhythm of managing the academy cadets and heading out on the annual subjugation campaigns.
Meursault and Max were promoted to colonel on schedule, and Platon made major last year. At last a rank was bestowed on me as well. Apparently they realized that giving me some half-baked title would only invite insubordination, so they shattered the long-standing dual-colonel system and granted me the rank of colonel too. Even so, Meursault and Max still addressed me with formal respect; in practice I was the colonel above the colonels.
All of it progressed swiftly thanks to Anton’s active support behind the scenes.
Ah—and both Shut-in Darling and Taejeong received their commissions as second lieutenants this past spring. Shut-in Darling had already jumped two ranks for his achievements in the very first subjugation, and the rumor mill claimed he had used that rank to bully every cadet in the academy he could get his hands on.
As for the next major change…
It was the existence of the “Players.”
I took a portion of the cadets I had enrolled six years earlier and formed an entirely new organization. That organization was called the Players. When I told the Commander the name was meant to honor the former players Luna Moon and Daphne, he accepted it without the slightest hesitation.
"You're really a bastard who stops at nothing, aren't you."
Luna was thoroughly fed up with me, yet the shock of being left under Shin Eun-jo’s CCTV surveillance must have been severe; she no longer wanted to leave my side for even a moment.
At any rate, the word “Player” now meant something entirely different inside our zone. It no longer referred to beings who had crossed over from another world and possessed bodies. It referred to the elite group I, Heydam Goodman, had personally trained. So even if outsiders from other zones arrived and started shouting that I was a Player, the word would never land the way they intended.
Disappointingly, though, no other players had reached my zone since Shin Eun-jo.
Whether it was because of the Unicorn Area player or something else, the others seemed to be proceeding with extreme caution. The public chat was practically shut down; the only messages that ever arrived were Ssapasuble’s occasional frantic rants accusing the land-dwellers of conspiring among themselves. Tibalom used to send regular supply requests until about three years ago, but lately contact had grown sparse—perhaps he had finally achieved self-sufficiency inside the Knife Zone. Player highlight videos no longer arrived either, so if I wanted to know what the other zones were doing I would have to leave and see for myself.
That was why this year’s subjugation mattered so much.
This was the graduation year of the cadets I had raised—outsourced in large part to Shut-in Darling. Sending the Player cadets, already regarded as an elite unit, into a subjugation that had long since become a small-elite affair was the natural next step. If they completed the campaign with distinction, the Commander would finally feel secure enough to let me leave the zone.
I had already requested permission several times to broaden my horizons outside the walls, only to be blocked every single time at the Commander’s level.
A full usurpation would make moving around a lot easier…
But it was still too early to execute the usurpation route. Once this subjugation ended I would be gone for a long stretch, traveling through the other zones.
“So then…”
Inside the subjugation tent, I had sent every other cadet out on reconnaissance and kept only Shut-in Darling and Taejeong behind. The moment the others left, Shut-in Darling flopped onto the folding sofa; Taejeong sat opposite him with perfect posture.
“Now that we’re seventeen, let’s revise the plan.”
Seventeen years old—yet outwardly we already looked nearly adult. By Korean reckoning we would have been nineteen. Shut-in Darling had grown so much that his legs dangled off the end of the sofa, but Taejeong… Taejeong had grown to a truly astonishing size. Whatever time Shut-in Darling had poured into his looks, Taejeong had poured into pure mass. Where Shut-in Darling drew admiring glances from women, Taejeong drew respectful stares from men. The fact that this body had been built with no title bonuses and no player corrections—just raw training—never ceased to amaze me.
By comparison Shut-in Darling’s muscles remained relatively scrawny; only his face had turned handsome. Still, once someone crossed a certain threshold of good looks he became useful, so lately I had been urging him to manage his appearance properly.
I had grown a good deal myself, of course. I was still smaller than either of them—both of whom had already broken 180 cm—but I was only seventeen. There was still time.
Shut-in Darling kept glancing at me and deliberately hunching lower whenever he stood in front of me; that irritated me more than anything. Compared with a ten-year-old body, mobility was already plenty comfortable. I was satisfied.
Beyond that, not much about me had changed. Not long ago Meursault had remarked with a faintly mournful face that the angelic look of my childhood still lingered, yet my eyes now looked far more unhinged than they used to. It hardly mattered. There was not a single NPC left in this zone who would fall for my smile anymore.
Except the Commander. Every year he only ever said I looked more and more like Luna Moon, and my smile still worked on him.
"To me you're still just a kid."
Luna whispered it from her perch on my shoulder, yet she herself had not grown an inch in six years and still looked exactly like a baby kitten. The people of the zone, who had never seen any cat except monsters, simply assumed cats were supposed to be that size.
“We’re finally heading out of the zone, then.”
Shut-in Darling’s voice carried a clear note of excitement.
“I am kind of curious what Shin Eun-jo’s been up to.”
They had not seemed particularly close; that was unexpected. Maybe they had grown fond of each other in that short time after all. Taejeong looked equally surprised, glanced at Shut-in Darling once, then asked me,
“Where will we go first, hyung?”
“I was thinking of prioritizing the Candy Zone… what do you two think?”
Shut-in Darling pushed himself up on the sofa.
“What’s there to think about? If you want to go first, we go.”
“If that is what you wish, hyung, the order does not matter to me either.”
“Taejeong’s one thing, but… whoa, you too?”
Shut-in Darling shot me a brief glare.
“I’ve got my own reasons for needing Logout, so I’ll cooperate as much as I can. And that Dentist guy from the Candy Zone is a newbie, right? I want to see a newbie too.”
Taejeong looked just as curious about the newbie.
“I still never expected someone who never even played Safety Zone would get possessed.”
“Right? No wonder that bastard became a dopamine addict. If what he said is true, that newbie’s probably a real piece of work too. I’m fucking curious.”
I had actually tried showing them the Dentist’s highlight video. Because it was my system, they saw nothing even when I played it. Attempting to transfer the file through chat only produced a system message saying sharing was impossible, so I gave up and summarized the contents instead. Both of them had been thoroughly intrigued.
Thus there was no disagreement about picking up the Dentist first.
“The problem is how we get to the Candy Zone.”
The zones closest to Cola were Cocaine and Unicorn. Next came Love and Tobacco; Knife was a bit farther; Chicken and Candy were as distant from each other as the two ends of the Korean Peninsula. By car every one of them could be reached in a single day, but this world swarmed with alien monsters and lay buried under snow, so vehicle travel had hard limits. That was why both Omoknun and Shin had taken days to reach us. Reaching Candy could easily take weeks.
The fastest option remaining was the hoverboard I had shaken down from Ttopamine Addict—skipping monsters and snowfields entirely by flying. But strapping two extra people to a single hoverboard and flying off was beyond even my dopamine threshold.
Maybe I should have shaken him down for two or three more…
I looked at the other two.
“On the way, want to stop by the Unicorn Area and shake them down for an airship?”
“……What?”
“Where the hell do you get the confidence to shake another zone down for their airship?”
“I’m kidding.”
“No, that just now was absolutely not a joke. You think I haven’t watched you for years?”
Hm. Just as I had come to know them well, they had come to know me far too well. Shut-in Darling was right; I had been completely serious.
Unicorn was close, and Ttopamine Addict would appear on a hoverboard the instant I so much as approached, as if he could smell me. There was no guarantee he would still be friendly now that I was seventeen, but if he really was another Dopamine Addict he would leave me alone at least until the Second Apocalypse. It would be more entertaining that way.
Then again… solving everything the easy way does tend to kill the fun.
He might hand over a hoverboard, but marching up and demanding an airship as if he had been safekeeping it for me would definitely sour things. I neatly shelved the plan of shaking Unicorn down for an airship.
“Even if it takes time, we’ll just have to go.”
“Or we could hit the closest ones first?”
Not a bad idea. Clearing them in order of distance would be more efficient for the route. But—
“We should start with the lowest-difficulty zones. We still don’t know how far the three of us can actually clear.”
And starting easy and working up to hard would be more fun. Shut-in Darling did not look entirely convinced.
“With you here, is that even a problem?”
I appreciated the faith, but—
“We need the newbie, so Candy has to come first.”
“Why?”
“If we start cleaning out zones and the players start sharing information, the newbie might get wary of us.”
“True. So Candy first, then work our way up from the nearest ones after that?”
“That sounds better.”
“Then the order is Candy, Chicken, Knife, Tobacco, Love, Cocaine, Unicorn…?”
I was just thinking that Shut-in Darling’s intelligence seemed to have grown over the past six years when Taejeong asked,
“You said we would bring Tibalom from Knife as well, correct?”
“Yeah. Though he might try to kill me on sight, so be careful.”
“What? Did he catch you impersonating him early on?”
“No. He just suffered a lot in the Knife Zone.”
“When I met him at the convenience store he seemed like a fairly refined gentleman…”
The reason I had decided to bring Tibalom in addition to the Dentist was that he knew my mother. I had no idea how old he really was, but if he was her senior… he might know something more about my father, or about this game itself. And I did not want the Meteorite Knife he carried falling into the hands of the Unicorn Area player. Even if I was not going to take the item from him immediately, I wanted it inside my field of vision.
“So the only players we’re bringing are the Dentist and Tibalom—two of them?”
“Right.”
“What about the players in the other zones?”
“If they cooperate with Logout, I’ll tell them about the additional openings…”
“And if they refuse?”
“I’ll eliminate every player in that zone who has not opened the system.”
At that moment a tremendous roar slammed into our ears. Wind whipped the tent so hard the canvas flapped wildly.
“What now?!”
Shut-in Darling, Taejeong, and I scrambled out of the tent—and came face to face with the enormous shadow of an airship hanging over our entire camp.