Dopamine Addict
Right after the training simulation ended, a letter arrived from the Commander.
In neat, careful handwriting, it read as follows:
Heydam Goodman's participation in the subjugation campaign is hereby authorized.
Judging by how dry the ink is, he wrote this ahead of time.
So the Commander had expected me to pass the test all along. It wasn't that he refused to believe my confession about being a regressor — he simply wanted to verify my abilities for himself.
Once the training wrapped up, the cadets wouldn't even meet my eyes, a far cry from earlier. Only Platon still stared at me with that fervent gaze.
Platon's strategy itself hadn't been bad.
At the very least, he had correctly predicted that I would slip into their formation. An ordinary ten-year-old would have fallen for it.
The problem was that I was a player.
This training ground was more familiar to me than it was to the cadets. Back when I was clearing the Cola Area in the game, I had torn this place apart and rebuilt it from the ground up more than once.
What else would cadets on the verge of graduating from the military academy have done here besides mock battles?
In other words, our understanding of this training ground existed on completely different levels. And from the start, I had never planned to plant a flag in the enemy camp and claim victory that way — because there was a high chance they would plant one in mine while I was gone. So my only real option had been the total annihilation route…
I just hadn't expected those idiots to have no intention of planting a flag either.
Thanks to that miscalculation, Platon had hung back in the rear, thinning their combat strength and making them far easier to clean up. Truth be told, I had memorized every NPC habit, weakness, and combat pattern, so I wouldn't lose a straight fight against any of them — but Platon was the one NPC I still had to watch carefully.
For a soldier, the kid was a hardheaded zealot who followed his convictions, yet his talent was exceptional. A walking potential coup waiting to explode — you never knew which way he would jump. Originally, with Meursault already serving as his superior upgrade, I had planned to treat Platon as a disposable piece. But after watching him predict my route and dodge an ambush on pure instinct, I decided he was worth recruiting.
That was why I trusted the sandbags I usually wore for training and chose a frontal clash with Platon, while running the 3B operation on everyone else.
The Three B's: Base, Beastly, and Brutal.
Anyway, it had been a genuinely enjoyable time. The military academy route was a strategy I only used in the very early loops, something nobody bothered with anymore, so I had never run into cadet-era Platon. Coming back to my roots like this felt oddly satisfying. I hoped the cadets got something useful out of the lesson too.
After the training simulation ended in Heydam's victory, Meursault summoned the cadets who had participated one by one and ordered them to give an honest evaluation of Heydam.
Their assessments split into polar extremes.
One of the cadets who had been caught by Heydam's ambush spoke through clenched teeth, trembling with rage.
"I've never seen a ten-year-old child that underhanded!"
Meursault's brow furrowed slightly at that.
"Isn't an ambush supposed to be underhanded by nature?"
"Hiding and striking from cover — that much was fine. No, when the two cadets at the very rear went down helplessly to paint rounds in the first ambush, I was actually impressed. But."
"But?"
"Do you know what Lord Heydam did after that?"
"What did he do?"
"He lowered his gun."
"Hm?"
"Then he walked right up saying he had a secret message from the Commander to deliver."
"Ah…"
"Yes. Of course it was a trick to lower our guard. The second we got close, he opened fire."
"Hah."
"I managed to survive until the end and tried to run, but Lord Heydam, who was chasing me, went down hard with a loud crash."
"Lord Heydam… fell? Don't tell me…"
"Yes. That was an act too. I panicked thinking he might be hurt, and the moment I approached, he stabbed me."
"Mmm."
"How can anyone exploit a cadet's good nature like that? A child who just turned ten, and he's that despicable! I fear for the future!"
If they wanted to talk about underhanded behavior, Meursault thought, eight cadets on the verge of graduation ganging up on a single ten-year-old in a mock battle was already grounds for criticism — but he kept that to himself.
Another cadet offered a completely different assessment.
"He felt like a seasoned soldier."
"Hmm?"
The evaluation was so different from the previous one that Meursault asked with genuine interest.
"Why did you think that?"
"It wasn't just that he circled wide and approached from the rear when he saw us coming… it was how he used the line about having a message to deliver to confuse the enemy after the ambush. Since he'd attacked from behind, if he'd left us alone, the cadets at the front would have scattered and taken cover in the terrain. That would have put Lord Heydam at a disadvantage with his position already exposed. So he tricked us into staying put so we couldn't run. That kind of thinking… felt like a veteran soldier."
The cadet hesitated, as if debating whether to continue, then added quietly:
"It sounds strange, but it was as if Lord Heydam had already run mock battles here countless times. The training ground looked familiar to him. No… familiar isn't enough. It looked comfortable."
"Hmm."
Some cadets seemed left with nothing but spite and the humiliation of being toyed with by a ten-year-old, but there were also no small number who, like this one, delivered a cold and accurate evaluation of Heydam.
In truth, Meursault understood the cadets who had given harsh reviews as well.
Heydam has a basic tendency to look down on people…
He simply made no effort to be liked. Meursault figured that on a first meeting, people might fear Heydam, but developing any fondness for him would be difficult.
Of course, there was also one cadet who delivered a truly bizarre evaluation.
Anton the general's son — Platon.
"Lord Heydam is a god."
What the hell is wrong with this kid?
Naturally, Platon was the only one who went that far off the rails — the only cadet who had fought Heydam to the very end.
Meursault compiled all the evaluations, including Platon's, into a comprehensive report and submitted it to the Commander. At that point, he still had no idea there was any ulterior motive behind suddenly putting Heydam through a training simulation and ordering the evaluations organized for review.
Meursault had half-assumed the Commander just wanted material to brag about his son somewhere — until the Commander's bombshell of a statement, delivered after reading the report, left him stunned.
"I am entrusting the operational command of this subjugation campaign to Heydam."
"What?!"
This Commander was out of his mind too.
"Does crushing a few cadets in a training simulation normally get you handed real operational command? Honestly, Father."
"This is no time to be speaking of His Excellency that way."
Meursault looked at me with a face that said his head ached beyond description.
"Why didn't you refuse, Lord Heydam?"
"Well, if he's offering to hand it over, why would I bother turning it down?"
Of course, if they publicly announced that a ten-year-old was in charge, even the officers of the pro-Heyden faction would push back. On the surface, the operational officer for this campaign was Major General Meursault — which was why he was here with me now. To everyone else, the story was that I had been sent along to learn from Meursault.
In other words, if the plan I drew up went to hell, Meursault was the one who would take the blame.
"Haa…"
Meursault stood there for a moment, pressing his fingers to his brow, then asked me:
"Are you confident?"
"Confident?"
"Mock training and real combat are completely different. Mock training is combat against people. Real combat is war against monsters. Of course, Lord Heydam did drop a hippo-pig with a single shot, but other soldiers can't do that. That's the part that worries me most."
"You're worried I'll draw up a plan assuming everyone else can perform at my level?"
"You understand perfectly."
"You don't have to worry about that."
"Don't tell me you plan to scale the operation down to other people's level? You, Lord Heydam?"
What? What exactly did this guy think of me?
"Of course not. I'm only taking people who can keep up with me."
"…That's so exactly the answer I expected that I have nothing left to say. But…"
Meursault murmured as he looked down at the subjugation route I had laid out.
"What the cadets said was true. You look far too familiar with this."
"Do I?"
"Yes. And this route… it's not something you could possibly know just from stepping outside the zone a few times on hunts. You can read all of this from a map alone?"
I still had no intention of telling Meursault I was a regressor. There was nothing to gain from more people believing I was one. Even deceiving the Commander had taken a serious leap of resolve. If another player later reported to the Commander that I was a player, the whole thing would unravel in an instant.
Revealing to the Commander that I was a player would only happen after our bond was deep enough that there was no turning back — or after my power base had grown so large that even the Commander couldn't do anything about it.
Suddenly, the ring grew hot. As if protesting the deception of the Commander.
Settle down. I'm doing all of this to keep the Commander alive.
I muttered it inwardly without thinking, and as if it had understood, the heat in the ring faded at once.
What the hell is this ring, anyway?
For now, better to brush Meursault off with something plausible. I deliberately answered in a tone that said he shouldn't make a fuss over nothing.
"Meursault, you already overreacted when I memorized people's names in one go. Is it really that shocking that I know how to read a map?"
"But…"
"If I couldn't even do this much, Father wouldn't have entrusted the operation to me in the first place."
"Mmm…"
The subjugation campaign.
Beyond the zone lived all kinds of alien monsters. Ideally, you would drive them as far away as possible on a single outing — but that only meant the displaced monsters would head toward other zones. Then the people from those zones would either flee into ours or come after us, so subjugations always advanced only to a reasonable line and then turned back.
Well, there were barrier walls between zones that prevented players from crossing in the first place anyway.
Regardless, just the knowledge that we conducted regular subjugations was enough to keep the alien monsters from approaching the zone carelessly. Mid- and small-sized monsters like antlered rabbits and hippo-pigs were sometimes left alive even when spotted, but large monsters were killed on sight — so large monsters nested as far from the zone as possible. Unlike the mid- and small-sized ones that circled nearby hunting corpses and byproducts from the zone, large monsters also fed on other monsters, so they had no need to come close.
The only time large monsters approached the zone was when food ran short. That was exactly why we conducted periodic subjugations. Large monsters driven far from the zone eventually hit a wall in their hunting, and that was what brought them near. As for why they came when snow was falling on the mountain peaks — alien monsters were strong against cold and weak against heat. When the weather warmed, they reduced their activity to the absolute minimum and buried themselves in the snow. That thinned out the visible prey population, and large monsters struggling to find food drifted closer to the zone.
In short, a subjugation campaign meant combat against large monsters.
"Until now, the method has been to bring the monster down first, then find and destroy the jewel, correct?"
"That's right."
"Destroying only the jewel would be easier. Taking down a large monster costs that many more resources, and you also end up with less edible meat."
"You've only seen mid- and small-sized monsters, so you wouldn't know. Originally, the jewel's location differs for every monster. Mid- and small-sized ones simply don't vary much because their bodies are small. With large monsters, even members of the same species can have jewels in different places."
I let out a short laugh at Meursault's explanation.
"You think I don't know that?"
"If you know and still say we only need to destroy the jewel…"
"No. I mean I actually know. I know where the jewels are."
"What?"
"The core of this operation is going to be maximum efficiency."
Why were players able to ignore the monsters added for the Second Apocalypse and run survival contests against each other instead? Because they knew how to exploit the jewels — the monsters' cores.
The jewels might all sit in different places, but there were patterns that let you narrow it down: left side or right, inside the body or outside. For example, if a monster had a wound on its body, the jewel was on the opposite side. If a monster had a horn, the jewel was embedded near that horn. The common thread was that these patterns existed to protect the jewel — the weak point.
That much could be shared with other NPCs. There was an even more precise way to pinpoint a jewel's location, but that one couldn't be shared. Not because only players were supposed to know it — it was a matter of instinct.
The accumulation of experience from multi-loop play. From a monster's cry, from the way it approached, you could just know: Ah, that one's got the jewel on its navel. It was a hard-to-explain intuition born from experience repeated countless times — an ability only multi-loop players could possess.
And I was the player with the sharpest instincts of all. Being able to tame the flying monsters that appeared in the Second Apocalypse had partly been thanks to that ability. The veteran players in other zones might not match me, but they were surviving on that same instinct too.
…Everyone except the dentist from the Candy Zone, a complete newbie who wasn't multi-loop and was playing the game for the first time.
Come to think of it, is everyone even still alive?
Tibalom was the type who only answered when he felt like it to begin with, but the other players had gone quiet — far too quiet. Thinking that, I opened the chat window and flinched.
What?
New messages had piled up in the public chat.
Why didn't I notice the chat coming in?
I checked the settings and found message notifications had been turned off. I must have disabled them because having messages pop up right in front of my face every time was annoying.
I opened the chat window and checked the most recent message.
…What the hell was that supposed to mean?