Realization
After the barbecue party, I started Taejeong off with basic drills.
Unlike Shut-in Honey, who was already grinding through fundamentals with the military, Taejeong was only a mansion servant and probably wouldn't have free time to train on his own—so I dragged him into it with me.
"…How the hell are you this good?"
Taejeong's marksmanship was garbage.
His body skills, though, were no joke.
He was still young, but his fundamentals weren't just solid—they were almost at athlete level.
At my words, Taejeong gave an embarrassed little smile.
"I used to work out a little…"
A little? That was more than a little.
"You're more surprising than I am, hyung. Did you work out before the possession?"
"Not a chance. I was a total NEET."
The reason my fundamentals looked polished was the Titles I'd inherited as a privilege for clearing previous zones.
Of course, a title didn't raise my physical abilities themselves.
Titles could boost an NPC's favorability or raise proficiency, but building raw physical power still required actual training.
Even the Magic Marksman title I'd used while taking down medium monsters didn't improve my body.
It was a title you earned by landing ten or more consecutive single-shot hits on a monster's gem. With Magic Marksman equipped, the first six bullets would never miss—but the seventh was guaranteed to strike the person most precious to the player. A curse, basically.
In other words, it didn't touch physical stats. It hijacked a player's luck.
Inside the game, though, "the person most precious to the player" just meant whichever NPC you'd maxed favorability with the hardest, so the downside barely mattered.
I would deliberately raise favorability with whatever NPC I didn't need at the time and feed them to Magic Marksman as the sacrifice.
Plenty of comments called it a strategy that would make the devil weep, but the people who wrote those comments would have done the same thing I did.
But this isn't the game anymore.
If the rule still worked the way it did in the game—if the NPC with the highest favorability toward me was the one who died—then Commander Hayden was the most likely candidate for that seventh bullet right now.
If other players counted, though, the story changed.
Shut-in Honey was one thing, but Taejeong already had a strong fondness for me.
And the reverse was possible too: the target might not be someone I'd farmed favorability with, but someone I genuinely cared about.
In that case, it would be Commander Hayden or Meursault who died.
Sorry, Taejeong, but right now those two were more necessary to me than any other players.
I'd used Magic Marksman despite the risk because I needed to show Meursault what my shooting looked like.
Three shots at the target paper, one into the hippo-pig… so two left?
Truthfully, my baseline marksmanship wasn't bad enough that I needed the title. You only earned Magic Marksman by landing ten consecutive hits on a gem the size of a fingertip embedded in a monster's body, after all.
On a stationary target paper, only the first shot had been title-assisted. The rest had been pure skill.
I'd burned two more when they told me to try moving targets.
The safest approach would be to grow my shooting and physical ability through personal training until I never needed Magic Marksman again…
But I'm curious who the seventh bullet would actually hit.
I knew I couldn't test it by killing someone on purpose. Hitting someone didn't guarantee death, though, so the urge to try it was hard to kill.
Maybe I should craft Magic Marksman for Taejeong and see whether the seventh bullet comes flying at me or not.
Even if it really did come for me, I at least knew how to avoid a fatal wound.
Anyway—that problem could wait.
The important point was that titles alone couldn't cover physical ability, especially stamina.
Auxiliary titles like SSS-rank Trainee could make physical growth rocket with minimal effort, but I still couldn't afford to slack on the basics.
"You were a total NEET and you still move like that… Hyung really can do anything, can't you."
…Somehow Taejeong's respect for me seemed to have deepened even further. We wrapped up the morning session after that.
In the afternoon I ran a few experiments, stuffing myself with this and that to grow the healing ability players possessed.
The result: meat worked better than cookies, and compressed foods like canned goods or jerky worked far better than plain meat.
Do I need to start making something like the wall-grain pills from martial arts novels?
The fact that denser food was more effective was good news.
I had an inventory, so as long as the inventory allowed it I could haul huge amounts of food, and anything I put inside didn't seem to spoil.
But Taejeong and Shut-in Honey still couldn't open a status window, which meant there was a hard limit on how much food they could carry.
The risk of their rations spoiling was another problem… I still hadn't checked whether spoiled food could still trigger healing.
The idea alone turned my stomach, so I'd test it on Shut-in Honey at the next regular meal.
If even spoiled food counts as healing…
Just how far would the system recognize something as "food"?
I tried self-hypnosis—telling myself a pebble was food—and brought it to my lips, but it never dissolved into blue particles the way real food did.
Which meant the system had its own clear definition of food…
I'll dig into that later. First priority is securing portable rations.
This world had combat rations too.
They were only issued to soldiers, though, and since I still wasn't formally enlisted, I had never actually seen this world's combat rations with my own eyes.
The mansion servants were servants, not soldiers, and Cola Area combat rations were managed by a separate agency—so getting any through the staff would be difficult.
Time to use the NPCs I already had.
Fortunately, I had Meursault, currently under disciplinary confinement.
"Meursault, do you have any combat rations on you?"
Despite the confinement order, manpower shortages meant he was still buried in paperwork. When I tracked him down and asked, he stared at me like I'd lost my mind.
"What's with that face?"
"You're the first person who's ever come to shake me down for combat rations, young master."
Ever since I'd dragged him hunting, his way of talking had been getting rougher by the day.
I needed to get out on a subjugation mission, rack up some merit, and pin a rank on myself so Meursault would start speaking to me with proper respect again.
"I don't have any combat rations, though."
"Why not? Because you're not a front-line soldier?"
"I don't go to the battlefield, for one. And they taste terrible. I think the last time I ate combat rations was as a private."
Meursault said it flatly, then studied me for a long moment.
"I have no idea why a young master who, like me, has no reason to go to the battlefield is suddenly hunting for combat rations…"
He seemed to turn something over in his mind, then nodded.
"There are a few things I need to check as well. Would you care to come to the research institute with me?"
The research institute.
The place Meursault meant was formally called the Zone Security Research Institute—a facility full of research contracts that developed everything military except weapons: combat rations, combat uniforms, the works.
I'd only wanted to test the effect of combat rations, but swinging by the institute to see whether they had the tech to make player-grade wall-grain pills didn't sound like a bad idea either.
Why was Meursault making an offer like this, though?
"I was planning to go once my confinement was lifted… but if I accompany you as your escort, I can get it done faster."
So he'd needed a pretext to visit the institute while still confined.
I still didn't know what Meursault's "business" was, but the moment we hit the checkpoint military police before entering the institute, I froze solid.
The blank-faced MP snapped a salute the second he saw Meursault—while tears streamed steadily from one eye.
I wasn't shocked by the tears themselves, though.
I knew this NPC.
The dead Lieutenant General Batom's son.
This NPC hadn't originally been an institute MP, as far as I remembered.
Had his post been reassigned after Batom died?
"I'm sorry about your father."
I'd always thought Meursault was a genuine psychopath, but Batom's son answered evenly.
"No, sir. I'm the one who should apologize for the disgraceful display. Your identities are confirmed—please go inside."
I already knew NPCs had families.
But watching a family member cry after I'd killed the NPC—that was a first.
And this wasn't a game. This was the possessed reality.
Even after we passed the checkpoint and went inside, silence hung for a long time. Meursault was the one who broke it.
"This may be none of my business…"
What kind of lead-in was that.
"If it brings you even a little peace of mind—Batom abandoned that boy the moment he was born."
I stopped walking and turned to look at him.
Meursault stopped as well and continued.
"He wasn't a lieutenant general yet when that soldier was born. So the boy was discarded and raised as an orphan. As far as I know, he only learned Batom was his father relatively recently. Still… I suppose a father is a father. The tears came out."
Batom's abandoned son… had that been in the lore?
Well, I knew every NPC's name and post, but not every scrap of history between them.
What surprised me more than the abandoned-son setting was that Meursault had stuck his nose into my business at all.
It was information I didn't need to know either way.
And that Daphne-obsessed maniac had gone out of his way to say something unnecessary just so I'd feel better.
"There's one more fortunate thing."
"What?"
"I was ordered to dispose of him if he showed even the slightest grudge toward you, young master. All I saw on that soldier's face was resignation. So a harmless young man doesn't have to die. That's a relief."
His "business" was executing potential dissidents?
…I'd thought Commander Hayden was the Northern Grand Duke.
Was I role-playing the son of some northern dictator?