Who Are You?
As I turned back toward Taejeongtaese, a message floated up before my eyes.
A friend request has arrived from Home Protector.
Would you like to accept?
That bastard Home Protector had the sheer nerve to send a friend request like nothing was wrong.
I closed the system window without accepting it right away.
I'll deal with you later.
Taejeongtaese approached me dressed in children's clothes that looked more like something the manor servants might wear.
"They said you weren't in your room, Hyungnim, so I came to escort you."
After announcing that he had come to "escort" me, Taejeongtaese went on to say that one of the servants had told him he was welcome to keep living here if he wanted.
"But in return, I have to help you. They even said that if I do a good job I might get an allowance every month. Looks like they're planning to hire me as your attendant, Hyungnim."
"Hmm."
From the commander's perspective, silencing Taejeongtaese and tossing him out of the manor would have been far simpler. Maybe it was because I had said yesterday that I wanted to share a meal with other children his age—he had decided to leave the boy, who was roughly my age, inside the manor after all.
Works out well for me.
No matter how thoroughly I had cleared every zone in the previous life, this body was still only ten years old. I needed an ally who could help me inside the manor. As the commander's son, the servants would walk on eggshells around me—but an orphan like Taejeongtaese could get close to them much faster.
The fact that the commander had even assigned Taejeongtaese to wait on me was unexpected, yet…
That man would have noticed something between me, Taejeongtaese, and Anjeon8yeok.
He had seen us speaking in a language he didn't know; realizing that the three of us already knew one another would have been trivial. And the way Taejeongtaese treated me—calling me "Hyungnim" and keeping himself low rather than acting like a peer—would have told the commander at a glance that the boy wasn't going to harm me.
Even so, keeping him as a close attendant suggested the commander intended to give me backup, just carefully enough not to draw too much attention.
"But why were you out in the back garden?"
"Meursault called me out."
"Ah… he did the same thing yesterday…"
So he and Anjeon8yeok had been summoned together yesterday morning.
"That creepy guy—you're going to poison him, right? You always killed him every single run."
"…"
When I didn't answer, Taejeongtaese's eyes went wide.
"Y-you're not seriously planning to keep him alive, are you?"
"We're short on talent. Games and reality aren't the same. The only reason we could dominate a zone inside the game was because it was a game. Reading the situation on the ground and actually running an army is a completely different story."
"I get that, but… still, he's the one targeting your stepmother, Hyungnim."
"Children don't meddle in adults' business."
"That's… a pretty cold thing to say."
I understood what he was worried about. But Daphne was no soft target either. She was the previous commander's daughter and Hayden's wife. At least the Daphne I had known in the game was not the type to be led around by someone like Meursault.
If someone had only ever followed my guides and poisoned Meursault and Daphne early on, of course they wouldn't know what kind of woman she really was.
"Anyway, you need a proper name too."
"Ah, just call me Taejeong. My dead hyungnim always just called me Mr. Taejeong."
I wished he would stop calling Anjeon8yeok his "dead hyungnim." Dropping Beyoncé from the nickname TaejeongtaeseBeyonce and keeping only Taejeong felt a little disappointing, but a name wasn't that important.
"Anyway… I finished talking things over with Meursault. He'll be favorably disposed toward me for a while. So you don't need to treat him as an enemy. Of course, since you're my person too, you don't need to bow and scrape to him either."
"Understood."
"Not just Meursault—inside the manor at least, I don't want any NPCs feeling resistant to the fact that I'm the commander's son. We also need to figure out whether any of them belong to Meursault or Daphne."
"I'll look into it. Being the kid who ended up staying here by accident makes me a lot freer than you, Hyungnim. Just this morning they even asked me to go fetch you."
He clearly understood exactly what position he needed to maintain. Multiplayer with a veteran player wasn't half bad.
"Oh, and the commander and I made a promise."
"A promise?"
"Every month he's going to gather kids my age for a meal."
"Ah, so then…"
"Right. Starting around the beginning of next month, if there are any other players in this zone, I'll get to meet them. Let's introduce you to RoomCornerHoney then too—he's already working with me."
"Yes, sir! I hope RoomCornerHoney hyungnim likes me."
RoomCornerHoney… hyungnim?
Just what were Taejeong's standards for calling someone hyungnim? Looking at his nickname, the kid didn't seem that young…
That afternoon I received word that the commander had decided to officially announce me as his son.
I would have to appear in public the very next day, so Meursault had to cram etiquette and essential knowledge into me at high speed. Memorizing more than a century of Goodman family history and the tangled web of military organizational relationships was a finicky job.
Of course, for a veteran of this game, it was nothing difficult.
"…You memorized all of it? After looking at it once?"
I hadn't memorized it—I already knew it because I remembered. Meursault, who must have suffered plenty from the dismal intelligence of Cola Area NPCs, looked downright moved.
So this was why everyone preferred experienced new hires.
"I already thought you were no ordinary person, but… you're far beyond what I expected."
Once he decided I was better than anticipated, Meursault started teaching me other things in the remaining time. Most of it was useless TMI about Daphne, but one thing proved useful.
He took me to the commander's shooting range—the same place I had been called to that morning—and put me through marksmanship training.
Handling firearms wasn't particularly hard for anyone who had completed military service in Korea. On top of that, while I shot I equipped the Magic Marksman title to boost my accuracy, so none of my bullets missed the targets. Meursault could not stop admiring me.
"I can hardly believe my own eyes… You truly never held a gun before?"
"Yeah."
I lied without even wetting my lips. It was the first time this body had held one, so technically it wasn't a lie.
"This… can only be explained as natural talent."
Even after the lesson ended, Meursault kept muttering in shock while staring at my target sheets. He must have reported it straight to the commander, because that night when the commander came to see me, the first thing he brought up was shooting.
It made sense—marksmanship was a genuinely vital skill in this world. To kill the alien monsters you had to shatter the tiny gem embedded somewhere in their bodies.
"You really hit every target?"
"Yes…"
"Have you ever handled a firearm before?"
"No."
Of course that was a complete lie, Father.
Wanting to leave a deeper impression on the commander, I decided to pile on a little more acting.
"But is that really such a big deal? Can't everyone do that much? It seemed easy…"
"…"
Father looked at me for a long moment, clearly turning something over seriously in his mind.
He's probably debating whether he can take me on a subjugation campaign.
The commander of the Cola Area was a dictator, yet he always stood at the vanguard of every subjugation. Failure meant the end of the zone. Those campaigns already included child soldiers my age, and for the sake of the army's morale and cohesion the commander's own son would have to participate as well.
Even so, the commander must have been hesitating. No ruler who had finally found his real child would want to shove that child onto a battlefield. But now that he knew I had talent with a gun, he might take me on the next subjugation.
How moved would the soldiers be if he brought me along right after announcing me as his son? That was exactly why I had pretended to possess outstanding marksmanship talent in the first place.
I need to join a subjugation campaign as soon as possible.
There were things I could only obtain through the subjugation event.
"Um, Father?"
"Hm?"
The moment I called him "Father," even the tone of his answer changed…
"I heard I have a stepmother. Lady Daphne."
"Meursault must have told you."
"Yes. Rather than having other people tell her about me, I thought it would be more polite if I went to greet her myself first."
When I brought the subject up first, the commander looked at me with a mixture of pride and bitterness.
"Yes… your mother is Luna Moon, but from now on you'll have to live with Daphne as well. You won't be able to meet her right away, though. I already asked her if she would see you, but she said her health has been poor lately and she doesn't feel up to meeting a young child. Once she recovers, you'll be able to meet."
Daphne's health was poor?
That can't be…
She was a cautious woman; she was probably just waiting until she had thoroughly investigated what kind of child I was before agreeing to a meeting. The commander surely knew that as well, and although he seemed reluctant to talk about Daphne rather than Luna Moon in front of me, he didn't appear to doubt the story about her health.
Strange…
Commander Hayden had married Daphne without love because of the previous commander's orders and his own hunger for power. At least from everything I had seen while playing the game, the two had never hated each other, but they had been indifferent. When I poisoned Daphne, the commander hadn't even grieved.
Yet when the man in front of me spoke of Daphne, there was something… not quite marital affection, but something like the bond of comrades-in-arms.
Luna Moon's Ring is the same… this world doesn't seem completely identical to the game. Why?
In truth, when the commander had come to see me earlier today, I had sensed that Luna Moon's Ring held some secret. The moment he appeared, the ring had grown strangely warm. Last night I had been too distracted to notice, but the ring was clearly reacting to the commander. As proof, the instant he finished speaking and left, the ring rapidly lost its warmth.
Oddly enough, it felt almost as if the ring were disappointed that it could not stay with him longer. This was the same ring that had previously been affected by the title Luna Moon's Friend. Titles influenced many things and could affect items, yet Luna Moon's Friend was a title that only affected NPCs. The only items influenced by that kind of title were ego-swords—items that contained a sense of self.
That allowed me to form a single hypothesis.
This ring contains an NPC's ego.
Someone who knew both Luna Moon and Hayden.