Why Are You Dopamine Addict?
Shaggy white hair and dead black codfish eyes.
A complexion as pale as the white lab coat he wore.
A face any player who'd spent much time with my AI after the Second Apocalypse would recognize at once.
"Dopamine Addict! You're Dopamine Addict, right?"
Shut-In Honey's face lit up with color as he took a step toward the hoverboard, clearly overjoyed—but knowing full well that this was not Dopamine Addict, Taejeong and I reflexively stepped back.
"Don't get close."
When I warned him, Shut-In Honey turned to me with a puzzled look.
"What? Weren't you a Dopamine Addict fan?"
Still thinks I'm a Dopamine Addict follower, huh.
Without taking my eyes off "him," I said,
"That thing isn't Dopamine Addict."
"I'm not Dopamine Addict?"
It wasn't Shut-In Honey who answered—it was the guy himself.
He laughed out loud, then slowly lowered the hoverboard's altitude.
"Whether I'm the real Dopamine Addict or not, you'd know right away if you just 'Inspected' me."
Inspect.
Right. Using Character Inspection would reveal his real name and information immediately.
But I hesitated a little.
Once he'd landed, stepped off the hoverboard, and stood on solid ground on two legs, the closer look made him resemble the custom avatar I used so often even more.
It wasn't unheard of for custom avatars to overlap… but the fact that someone with that exact avatar had possessed into the Unicorn Area was already unsettling enough.
That's an adult appearance…
Without exception, all of us had possessed into this world in the form of ten-year-olds.
Yet this guy already looked like a young man of twenty.
Given that he knew about Inspection, he was clearly a Unicorn player who'd unlocked the system.
So why had only this guy possessed as an adult?
"Hey, you recognize me?"
While I hesitated, Shut-In Honey spoke to him.
The guy looked Shut-In Honey up and down.
"Shut-In Honey?"
"You know me?!"
"Hmm… I think there was a player with a nickname like that."
"You punk, what's with the act of not knowing?"
It seemed the guy had read Shut-In Honey's nickname via Character Inspection, but Shut-In Honey smiled, pleased that "Dopamine Addict" had recognized him.
"So you really are Dopamine Addict. But why is everyone pointing guns at you?"
"……."
Shut-In Honey's head seemed to be full of flowers rather than brains.
Taejeong and I still had our muzzles trained on him, and Meursault, though he looked completely lost as to what was going on, had followed my lead and belatedly pointed his gun at the guy as well.
Meursault asked me tensely,
"Lee Dam, do you know this person?"
"If I know him, I know him. If I don't, I don't."
"What kind of irresponsible answer is that……."
Even with guns aimed, we couldn't fire preemptively without knowing his intentions for approaching us.
If he truly was from the Unicorn Area, our outdated guns wouldn't even leave a scratch.
The guy just smirked at the three muzzles pointed at him.
Staring blankly at us, Shut-In Honey suddenly seemed to remember something and asked him,
"Hey, but why do you have an adult avatar? We all started as ten-year-olds?"
Now he was curious about that?
The guy glanced at Shut-In Honey once.
"…A bit too stupid to take as a partner, don't you think?"
he said.
"What?!"
"Aren't you going to Inspect me? Scared?"
Whether Shut-In Honey got mad or not, the guy looked at me and asked that.
I shook my head shortly.
"I'm not scared. I just don't want to move according to your intentions."
"I didn't come here to hurt you. At least not right now."
"Yeah, right……."
I wasn't naive enough to believe he hadn't come to hurt me.
But even I didn't know why I was hesitating to look at his character information.
I slowly opened his Character Inspection.
And what floated up before my eyes was—
Name:Dopamine Addict
Title:Dopamine Addict
Affiliated Area:Unicorn
Relationship:Friendly toward you.
"……."
As expected, his area was Unicorn.
This bastard… his name really is "Dopamine Addict."
But what caught my eye more than the name was something else.
Title: Dopamine Addict
The title is… also Dopamine Addict?
I'd never seen this title before.
Even though I'd collected pretty much every title you could get in the Safety Zone.
"Well?"
Noticing that I was inspecting his information, the guy grinned and asked.
"Will you believe me now?"
"How did you do it?"
"How did I do what?"
"How are you 'Dopamine Addict'?"
"It's still too early to tell you that."
Still too early?
It sounded as if there would come a "time" when he could tell me.
His words continued without stopping there.
"Why are you hanging around with Meursault? If I were starting in the Cola Area, I figured I'd poison him right from the beginning."
I?
This guy's pronouns are weird.
What the hell is his identity?
Some lunatic who got too immersed in role-playing as Dopamine Addict?
Or else…….
"Hey!"
Unable to wait any longer, Shut-In Honey impatiently cut between the two of us.
"Are you two just going to talk among yourselves? How are you in an adult form, you!"
"……."
The guy and I sighed at the same time.
Then he muttered,
"Noisy."
The moment I saw him reach into his coat, I pulled the trigger and fired.
Bang!
Bang bang!
The two successive gunshots that followed were Taejeong and Meursault shooting him after me.
Shut-In Honey jumped in place and yanked on my gun.
"Hey! What the hell are you doing? Why are you shooting a player?!"
"If I hadn't shot, you would've been the one hit by the gun."
At my words, Shut-In Honey startled and only then looked at the guy.
He looked far too unscathed for someone who'd taken three bullets.
As a Unicorn Area player, he must have a magnetic field shield around his body.
In that guy's hand was a single pistol.
If I hadn't fired first, he probably would have shot Shut-In Honey with that.
He just hadn't fired because the aim was shaken when he got hit.
So him not intending to hurt me was real?
When his aim shook, the guy had hesitated to pull the trigger.
From the way his gaze had swept over me first in that instant, he had clearly hesitated for fear of accidentally hitting me.
Confirming the other party was fine, Meursault asked me again,
"What should we do?"
"Don't shoot."
I ordered them not to shoot for now and looked at the guy.
With a pistol in one hand, he was laughing as he poked his fingers into the two bullet holes in his white lab coat with the other.
"Why are you laughing?"
"There were three gunshots but only two holes."
"……."
It was Taejeong whose face turned red at that.
His marksmanship was a mess, but missing even from this close…
"You just shoot without warning?"
"Because the first strike wins."
At my answer, the guy smiled with a satisfaction that made it hard to believe he'd just been shot by me.
"Yeah, I would've shot too. Good. At this level, there shouldn't be a problem."
"What are you muttering about alone, you lunatic. Who are you?"
"You already saw who I am."
"And I'm supposed to believe that?"
At my retort, the guy smirked and continued.
"I can't answer more than that. I only came today for a simple check."
"Check? What check?"
"Whether you're growing up well."
"What?"
"You seem to be growing fine, so I'll be heading back now."
Heading back?
The guy had tried to shoot Shut-In Honey just for being noisy.
A fellow player.
He was too dangerous to let live and leave.
Killing him here would be the right call… but with our current forces, we couldn't even wound him, let alone kill him.
Thinking about it now, the guy had come all the way here with nothing but a pistol for arms, riding only a hoverboard.
Owning overtechnology from the Unicorn Area, and an adult form.
I should be glad that someone with such overwhelmingly advantageous conditions hadn't come to fight.
Why does a guy like that hold goodwill toward me?
I didn't know the reason, but thanks to his goodwill I'd basically saved my life.
Not a situation I particularly liked.
Wasn't it like a veteran player coming to raise a newbie?
"Ah, right."
As he climbed onto the hoverboard, the guy looked back our way as if he'd forgotten something.
"I still have to give the gift."
"Gift?"
Before I could even ask back, the guy's pistol pointed at Shut-In Honey.
Crazy bastard.
He was determined to kill Shut-In Honey before leaving after all.
The moment the guy pulled the trigger, I didn't hesitate to step in front of Shut-In Honey.
With a thwack, something hot and sharp pierced through my shoulder.
Shut-In Honey cried out in shock.
"Hey!"
"Hyung!"
"Lee Dam!"
As I collapsed, Shut-In Honey supported me, while the other two still kept their muzzles on the guy and looked at me in panic.
And the guy—
"……!"
For the first time, surprise colored that leisurely expression, then I saw it calmly settle.
"Different from me, huh……."
What was he muttering?
When I stemmed the bleeding on my shoulder with one hand and raised my middle finger with the other, the guy smirked.
"You know how to treat that much, right? Then I'll look forward to the day you come to my Area."
With that, the hoverboard he rode soared into the air.
Taejeong raised his muzzle to follow the hoverboard upward.
"I'll shoot it down."
"Don't shoot."
I said, frowning at the searing pain in my shoulder.
"You can't take that down with outdated guns. It's a waste of bullets. Just let him go. We already know where he went anyway."
"Lee Dam!"
Only after the guy on the hoverboard started disappearing from view did Meursault lower his muzzle and hurry over to me, pulling a clean handkerchief from his pocket and pressing it to my shoulder.
"Please keep pressure on it. If they saw the signal flare, the soldiers should be on their way. I'll go bring them."
Unlike Shut-In Honey, who'd looked ready to cry this whole time, Meursault showed no agitation at my injury—proving his major's experience wasn't for nothing—and instead went to do what he could.
Taejeong left to patrol the surroundings, worried monsters might gather from the earlier commotion.
In contrast, Shut-In Honey…….
"Isn't that Dopamine Addict bastard a complete psycho?!"
How should I describe this feeling of getting cursed at when I was the one who got shot for something that wasn't even my fault.
"Hey, do the first aid properly."
"Why the hell would you take a bullet to protect a guy like me……."
"Why do you think."
I poked the combat rations hanging at Shut-In Honey's waist and said,
"Heal me."
At that, Shut-In Honey stared at me with his mouth hanging open for a moment, then asked in a tone as if he wanted to grab me by the collar right now but was holding back.
"…Don't tell me you got hit on purpose to test the performance?"
"If you got hurt, I couldn't test the heal performance."
"You crazy bastard… you're a real crazy bastard."
Even so, Shut-In Honey took out the combat rations and started treating me.
Fortunately the bullet had gone clean through the shoulder, so it was just a matter of healing it closed.
His claim that he'd practiced enough to treat just by contact wasn't a lie—even with just his hand on me, the pain in the gunshot wound felt noticeably better.
Receiving treatment quietly, once I felt the wound had closed up to a certain degree, I opened my mouth and said,
"Darling Outsider."
"…Why are you calling me by my full name so ominously?"
"Since I saved your life, there's one thing I should confess."
"What confession all of a sudden? That's a death flag."
Ignoring Shut-In Honey's retort, I finished the rest of my words.
"I'm Dopamine Addict."