Fire Across the River
Druggy seemed to already know the player called Shin.
The fact that Shin didn't push back against the claim that this wasn't his usual way of talking suggested the current vibe was, in fact, an act.
I actually agreed with Druggy that anyone who crossed into my Area was an enemy… but the sheer intensity of his reaction made it clear he was genuinely afraid of the other players.
Well, if you'd suddenly been possessed into a game and the other people who got possessed with you turned out to be social misfits, a little paranoia was only natural.
After a stretch of silence, Shin finally sent a message.
Sharp of him.
Ssapasuble, who had seemed content to just watch the situation unfold, finally spoke up.
Sink the submarine…?
Ssapasuble's messages kept coming.
Even Shin, who'd been the one proposing a meetup, seemed rattled by how extreme Ssapasuble was being.
Huh.
I didn't particularly agree with Ssapasuble's theory… but the other veterans seemed to see it differently.
A brief silence settled over the chat room before Shin finished his thought.
Ssapasuble… I was pretty sure he hadn't always been this extreme.
Being stuck underwater ever since the possession must have done a number on his mental state.
The other players seemed to find real credibility in the idea that collecting every meteorite item would let them go home.
Me? I was skeptical.
I was planning to collect the meteorite items myself, but only to clear this world. The idea that gathering them all would somehow send us home didn't sit right with me.
Separate from whether I even wanted to go home… I just had this feeling that this world wouldn't let us go that easily.
And then it happened.
He sent a message.
I stared at the screen, doubting my own eyes.
The chat had gone up under my nickname — but I hadn't sent it.
The Unicorn Area player!
Another message followed immediately.
This bastard?
He'd said he had no intention of causing me trouble, but every message he sent looked designed specifically to screw me over.
Jumping in myself would only make things messier, so I decided to sit back and watch for a moment.
Sure enough, the other players completely lost it at the sudden appearance of Dopamine Addict.
The players stirred for a moment, and then the Chicken Area player carefully asked:
I watched to see how the impostor would answer.
He sent nothing but a single smiling emoticon.
Was this bastard seriously trying to pass as me?
He figured it out from that?
But the other players seemed to have reached the same conclusion — that the messages weren't from me — and they hurried to shut the conversation down.
That was the last of it. The Unicorn Area player stopped sending messages, and the public chat room fell quiet almost immediately.
The second a second Dopamine Addict showed up, everyone scattered.
His mere existence was clearly a massive source of anxiety for the other players.
Sure, he'd told them there was no barrier, and he hadn't caused any real harm yet… but just knowing he was out there felt ominous somehow.
Like he was going to ruin everything someday.
That was when a chat came in from T-balnom.
Fair point. But still.
So that meant my normal way of talking was already pretty annoying?
At my question, T-balnom went quiet for a while — as if he'd gone back to check the chat logs from that day — and only reappeared once I'd started getting bored of waiting.
Before T-balnom and I had become friends, he had sent me death threats through the public chat, yeah.
Don't tell me… he was in that room from the very beginning? Before T-balnom and I even entered the public chat…?
It had taken me a full day just to open the System.
If he'd landed in the Unicorn Area, the odds that he'd opened the System before me were high.
The Unicorn Area's meteorite… was the floating island that made up the Unicorn Area itself.
But how did he know that T-balnom kept threatening to kill me even after that?
T-balnom had declared he was going to kill me in the public chat, sure. But after that he never showed up in public chat again, and I'd even been the one to message him first.
A player who didn't know about our relationship would have looked at that message and assumed things between T-balnom and me weren't that bad.
So an answer like "You keep saying you're going to kill me, and now you're asking me this?" wasn't something you could pull off with a simple guess.
Did he hack the System with Unicorn's science tech or something?
No — if that were the case, he wouldn't have needed to come check on me in person.
If he could already see the conversations I was having, there would have been no reason to confirm anything.
He can't see our conversations.
But he knows T-balnom wants me dead.
…What the hell is he, really?
Even if he were some remnant of an AI, or a version of myself that had solidified into an NPC… that would still only be "past me."
The conversations I'd had with T-balnom were ones I'd only had after arriving here.
The only people who should know about those were the real me and maybe a future version of me.
I seriously have no idea what this guy is…
Instant rejection?
On the surface it sounded like a realistic decision to dig in and wait…
This guy… he's wary of me, isn't he?
If he actually wanted to come to my Area, the first thing he would have asked was whether I could come rescue him.
Instead he'd said he was going to get stronger first and then come out.
He'd probably caught a vague sense that I was after his items, and he wanted to meet me on equal footing after building up his power.
Well… I figured meeting him after he got stronger would be more fun anyway, so I might as well leave him be.
Normally when I asked him something like this he'd go dark and vanish, but today he didn't disappear right away and kept dithering — so he must have actually needed something.
So… ap?
This bastard was a real piece of work too.
"Damn."
After closing the public chat room, Shin of the Love Area let out a long, disappointed sigh.
"I didn't expect the Beer Area player to dig in that hard… What's Dopamine Addict thinking, not saying a single word?"
Truthfully, he'd assumed that if he arranged a player meetup, Dopamine Addict would definitely show up.
To rob the other players who came of their meteorite items, of course.
He'd been planning the meetup for that exact same reason himself.
Don't tell me… he doesn't need the meteorites? That can't be right…
Shin thought it over for a moment, then shook his head firmly.
"Doesn't matter. I need them. Every Area's meteorite."
For that, he couldn't afford to provoke the Beer Area player.
If the guy really did sink the thing to the seafloor, there would be nothing left to salvage.
"So for now… I have to keep the fact that I've already met another player a secret… Ah, but this isn't cooperating or pooling our strength, so it should be fine, right?"
After muttering to himself for a while, Shin turned to look at the "player" tied to the chair.
He smiled at him and asked, voice soft and gentle:
"What do you think, Home Protector?"