Overwhelming Victory
A friend request has arrived from T-balnom.
Would you like to accept?
A friend request from T-balnom.
Honestly, it was a little ridiculous.
He flat-out rejected my friend request, and now this?
What kind of change of heart had him sending me one of his own?
Well… it's obvious. He's on the verge of dying.
He'd held out better than I expected, but it was only natural that T-balnom would eventually reach out. The strategy he was running was none other than mine. And since one of the steps in that guide was cannibalism, the odds of him clearing it were always slim.
It was my guide, sure—but it had been written under the assumption of a game. Even I wouldn't actually eat people.
…Why are my ears itching?
Anyway, I accepted T-balnom's friend request and sent him a message.
I'd expected him to rain curses on me even while dying, but T-balnom sent back a surprisingly calm reply.
Stuck on the cannibalism, just as I thought.
That was why he'd been spamming friend requests so relentlessly. If he hadn't rejected mine in the first place, his life wouldn't have been swinging by a thread.
Because—
Request an item trade with T-balnom?
Please place the item you wish to trade into the trade window.
Players who were mutual friends could trade items through their inventories. That was exactly why I'd been trying so hard to get T-balnom to accept my friend request in the first place.
That he would run out of food was so obvious even a total shut-in could have figured it out.
I pushed a tin of leftover cookies into the trade window floating in front of me.
I waited for him to accept—only for a message to arrive first instead of a confirmation.
This guy wants a lot for someone in his position.
T-balnom went quiet for a moment, then sent another message.
I needed the meteorite item he was holding. If he died here, I'd have to go all the way to the Knife Zone to recover it.
Him getting soft on me here would be a problem.
I'd only meant to put him slightly in my debt—not to make him drop his murderous intent. Even I would feel guilty later when I took his item if he actually started liking me.
Time to scratch him a little.
T-balnom has accepted the item trade.
What a high-maintenance bastard.
Taking this long just to accept a single item…
I'd expected him to go dark the second he got the item, but to my surprise T-balnom had a question for me.
He wanted to know what I would have done if I'd been in his shoes?
This bastard ghosted me again.
Still, he didn't seem like the type to die out of sheer stubborn pride, so I supposed I should be grateful for that. He'd contact me again the next time he was about to drop dead. I decided to leave T-balnom alone for now…
Come to think of it, I never accepted anyone else's friend requests either.
I'd only accepted Home Protector's. Everyone else's was still sitting there untouched. I had considered helping the Dentist, at least—he was a complete newbie—but if he couldn't even clear the Candy Zone, the lowest difficulty of them all, on his own, I didn't have much interest in raising him.
If he actually came looking for me during the Second Apocalypse, I'd be happy to carry him.
As for the other players… I'll watch a little longer.
Ever since that last conversation, the public chat had been terrifyingly quiet. Everyone was probably sticking to one-on-one messages now. Information lost all its value the moment you shared it with everyone.
I could have accepted their friend requests and kept things friendly… but I didn't want anything from them. I had no interest in playing at being comrades or living in peace with those people.
If this is a game too, then I want to win it—overwhelmingly.
They'd better figure out that this is how I'm going to play. Only then would I treat them as players on the same level.
Love Area. Safe Zone.
The player nicknamed Shin stared at the status window that still refused to deliver an acceptance notification.
Dopamine Addict showed no sign of accepting her friend request. She had approached him warmly, calling herself a fan—but she was enough of a fan that she knew him far too well. Which meant she had a pretty good idea of what he was thinking right now.
Dopamine Addict is a hedonist at his core. Ignoring friend requests like this… he has zero intention of clearing this peacefully.
The one silver lining was that he hadn't dropped into his home turf of Unicorn, but into the Cola Area instead. If Dopamine Addict's zone had been Unicorn, no player alive could have flipped the board on him.
That was why Shin had felt such profound relief when she realized she had possessed into the Love Area. It was the perfect environment for her particular talents.
What you needed to clear the Love Area was love.
Depending on the strategy, that could mean romantic love between a man and a woman, familial love, the fanatical devotion of an idol's fanbase, or reverence for a god.
Among Dopamine Addict's Love Area guides, the one Shin had referenced was the cult strategy. The other players who had possessed into the Love Area with her also knew that guide, so none of them had followed it to the letter.
The moment she saw the status window open after acquiring a meteorite item by pure chance, she had been certain: with just a little application of her original profession, she could turn the other players into her hands and feet without much difficulty.
"Great Shaman, what does the god say?"
Shin smiled sweetly at the other player who asked.
Her original profession had been that of a shaman. Not a real manshin—not even one who had received a true spirit-calling. A fraud. But not just anyone could pull off a con.
Shin had been sharp since she was a child. Reading people's psychology and anxieties, feeding them exactly the words they needed to hear—it was as easy as rolling her tongue around the inside of her mouth.
And by sheer luck, she had been the first in the Love Area to get her hands on a meteorite item and open a status window. She had hidden that fact from the others, then used the window to recite their situations back to them and pull items from her inventory, successfully convincing them that she was receiving revelations from the god of this world.
Those players believed, ironclad, that she was the true Great Shaman of this world—and yet they remained constantly uneasy because of the existence of Dopamine Addict. So after declaring that she would receive a revelation about him, she had sent him a friend request.
One of the players asked again, restless.
"Did he say Dopamine Addict would help us?"
Their anxiety stemmed from the fact that Dopamine Addict had possessed into this world alongside them. The thought that they couldn't beat an all-zone clearer in a survival scenario made them desperate for some guarantee that he wouldn't harm the possessed.
But Dopamine Addict had ignored Shin's friend request. And as far as she was concerned, that was absolutely not a good sign.
Dopamine Addict was never an altruist to begin with. That hedonist will live however he pleases here, too.
They wouldn't meet him for another ten years. She could easily have lied and told them Dopamine Addict had agreed to help, just to calm them down—but Shin did not.
"Dopamine Addict will not help us. The god sent a revelation, and he ignored it."
When most of the players already acknowledged his skill, letting them pin their hopes on his help would only backfire. They needed to believe he wouldn't save them—so they would move that much more desperately to survive.
One player who harbored no particular goodwill toward Dopamine Addict snapped irritably.
"That damn Dopamine Addict. He's just another player like us now. Why do we even have to care about him?"
"Are you stupid? The Great Shaman already told us. Dopamine Addict possessed with special privileges as an all-zone clearer!"
The claim that Dopamine Addict had possessed with all-zone clearer privileges was, of course, purely Shin's conjecture.
But he definitely has all-zone privileges.
She didn't know what they were, but the fact that he'd been able to open a status window first was probably because of them. Hoping to learn something, she had even befriended the player who seemed closest to him—Home Protector—and tried talking to him.
That guy was a pathetic creature whose only plan was to cling to Dopamine Addict the moment the Second Apocalypse hit.
Idiot. What would Dopamine Addict possibly gain by taking in trash like that?
Dopamine Addict would not leave the other players alone. Players who held meteorite items were especially at risk. Now that he knew those items held secrets, he would try to collect every last one of them. He was the kind of person who would harm other players for no deeper reason than simple curiosity about what would happen if he gathered them all.
"Dopamine Addict will not save you. So you, too, must prepare. Understood?"
Shin stood before the other players, her meteorite earrings chiming, and declared:
"Go among the people of the zone and spread the rumor that in ten years, the messenger of god will descend to punish the unbelievers."
The rumor campaign was lifted straight from Dopamine Addict's cult strategy—which meant its effectiveness was already proven. The players disappointed that he wouldn't help them, and the ones who already disliked him, showed no objection to her taking the lead on the cult approach.
Shin smiled with satisfaction and continued.
"I don't care if they point at us for ten years and call us crazy cult shamans. Because for every hour of humiliation we endure—when the Second Apocalypse comes and monsters pour over the zone walls—every last one of them will be crawling at our feet."