Love Area Player
I folded my arms and looked down, slowly opening my mouth.
"So..."
The white-haired kid kneeling before me had both hands bound, his eyes trembling with unease. His lips twitched as if he wanted to protest some injustice, but he soon pressed them firmly shut.
I lifted my head and asked Lucas and Bones,
"You brought him because he was flopped out in the snowfield and looked suspicious?"
"...Yes."
The situation, once sorted out, went like this.
Lucas and Bones had gone searching a little farther out to get away from me. This area was close enough to the zone that large monsters wouldn't approach, so they hadn't found anything special—until they spotted something small wriggling in the snowfield. When they got close enough to see with the naked eye, a young child was collapsed there, clutching his knee.
Ordinarily the two of them would have rushed over at once to check the child's condition. But because of me, both had developed a full-blown phobia of children collapsed in snowfields, so they observed the kid with extreme caution. As a result, they realized the child was deliberately faking an injury. There were no traces of a frantic chase or of anyone having fallen—his footprints remained neat and orderly. And when they simply stood there staring without approaching any closer, the kid began to panic. That sealed it as suspicious.
So the two of them carefully bound the little kid and dragged him before me.
The early education paid off.
They'd handled it well, yet both still wore uneasy expressions. Their training had made them bring him in, but their faces said they weren't sure whether this was actually okay. There was no chance, however, that they had simply mistaken an innocent child—because I could see it clearly with my own eyes.
Name:LongtailedTit
Title:Evader of Strong Enemies
Affiliation:Love Area
A Love Area player, huh.
Then had Shin sent him?
The title "Evader of Strong Enemies" was something you earned by successfully shaking off mid-to-large-class monsters more than ten times in a row. Seeing him wearing that title meant he had run into quite a few monsters on the way here—yet he had somehow made it all the way from the Love Area in one piece.
It's been about three months since possession started. Players with titles are starting to show up now, I guess.
I still had no idea what purpose had driven a Love Area player all the way to the Cola Area just to try luring an NPC. But my adorable cadets had long since finished their mental reconditioning, so this guy's little act hadn't worked on them at all.
I raised both hands and clapped twice for Lucas and Bones.
"Well done."
Lucas flinched at my casual speech—he still wasn't used to it—but Bones, who had already seen my true nature during the last training simulation, kept a blank face.
"But, sir..."
Lucas glanced down at the child he had forced to kneel, clearly still bothered, and spoke up.
"No matter how I look at him, he's just an ordinary little kid. Weren't we being too harsh?"
"No. Not approaching him carelessly was genuinely good judgment."
I strode over to the Love Area player, yanked up the hem of his bound pant leg, and exposed the knife hidden in the heel of his shoe.
"Ah—wait—!"
The moment the weapon appeared, Lucas panicked and fumbled the knife free from the heel. Sunlight spilling across the snowfield caught the blade and made it flash.
"The edge is properly sharpened. Kids carrying things like this isn't exactly surprising in our area, but..."
Truthfully, a child carrying a knife wasn't enough reason for suspicion—at least not in our zone. This particular knife, however, had something worth noting.
"It looks a little different from the knives issued to child soldiers."
Exactly. It was shaped differently from the knives used in our area. Even in the game, the weapon details of each zone had been distinct; weapons made by different people under different conditions inevitably came out a little different.
"Probably an item from another area."
"From another area... Then you're saying this child came from a different zone?"
"I've never seen his face at any of the charity parties either, so he almost certainly crossed over from somewhere else."
The discovery of a knife on the child—and the possibility that he was a resident of another area—set the team murmuring. Unlike the newly commissioned officers who were seeing a resident of another zone for the first time, Meursault, who had been through this kind of situation more than once, asked me with relative calm.
"What do you intend to do?"
"Well... we'll pause the search for now and interrogate him."
"Interrogate him?"
Meursault's brows drew slightly together; he sounded less than pleased.
"Surely... you aren't planning to do it yourself, Heydam?"
"Wouldn't it be easier if someone his own age talked to him?"
At that, the team members began exchanging glances.
...I was offering to handle a little kid because I was a little kid myself. Why were they trading those blasphemous looks?
Meursault studied me for a moment, then murmured quietly,
"So there is something you need to hear from that child."
Meursault, you little—now you could read me at a glance. I could have simply taken the kid back to base camp, yet I was insisting on an interrogation; he had already figured out that I needed something from him.
Meursault spoke in a tone that almost sounded like he was coaxing me.
"Very well, Heydam. We'll put up a temporary tent for you."
"Thanks."
"Just don't go too hard on him. He's still only a child."
What?
"I... am also a child, you know."
"Heydam... do you have any conscience?"
"You'll still treat him like a kid even though he was carrying a weapon, but you won't treat me like one?"
I looked around to see whether the others felt the same way; every last one of them avoided my eyes.
Ha. These bastards.
Once we got back, I was definitely putting them through the training simulator again.
Inside the hastily erected tent sat only me and the Love Area player, LongtailedTit. Everyone else had gone out to stand guard. Once the others were out of sight, the very first thing I did was use the confiscated knife to cut the ropes binding him. Leaving him free and lowering his guard seemed better than keeping him tied. Even if he tried to run across this snowfield, he would be caught again within seconds.
"......"
Even freed from his bonds, LongtailedTit stayed flattened on the ground as if frozen, rolling his eyes around to gauge the situation. I gave him plenty of time to think, then settled onto a folding chair a short distance away.
"You can speak freely now. No one else is here."
Even though I had deliberately made space for conversation, he hesitated and would not open his mouth easily. Looking at how thoroughly terrified he was, I doubted he had come to this zone with any good intentions...
"I have no intention of harming a fellow player. So you can talk comfortably."
The shameless show of false goodwill made him hesitate a little longer before he finally spoke in a voice so small it almost disappeared.
"Are you... Dopamine Addict?"
He recognized me right away.
I had already confirmed moments earlier that the system had not opened for him. Shin must have told the players in his own zone quite a bit about me. If he had heard from Shin that Dopamine Addict was in the Cola Area, then the moment Meursault called me "Heydam" earlier, he would have easily realized I was Dopamine Addict.
The only person who had directly told him I was currently running the illegitimate-child route was Home Protector... but even without hearing it from me, any player could have deduced that much. Since he seemed to know who I was, I could speak a little more freely.
"What business does a Love Area player have coming all the way to the Cola Area?"
"......!"
His eyes went round.
"H-how did you know I was a Love Area player?"
"What? How did I know?"
I almost added that I had simply looked it up on the system, then closed my mouth.
Something feels off...
I had assumed that if he had heard about me, he would naturally know about the system as well. Yet he genuinely seemed astonished that I had identified his zone so quickly.
Shin, you bastard.
He hadn't told his own people about the system's existence. The system only opened for those who possessed a meteorite fragment; anyone else would never learn of it unless a player who had one explained it to them. Now that I thought about it, Shin had said something odd once before.
—There are quite a few players in our zone too. But they all decided to serve me.
At the time I hadn't understood what that meant... Was he actually playing god without ever mentioning the system? It looked more and more as though Shin was running a scam based on my cult-leader route—targeting not only NPCs but players as well.
But if that's the case, something still doesn't add up.
If Shin was hiding the system from his zone's players and using it as if it were some kind of divine authority, why send this player named LongtailedTit to me at all? If I told this guy about the system, the whole con would fall apart.
While I stayed silent, turning those thoughts over, LongtailedTit seemed to find an answer in my silence. His face brightened as he asked,
"Just as Manshin said—you received a divine revelation too, didn't you?!"
Divine... revelation?
What is with that middle-schooler naming sense.
The fact that he used "divine revelation" instead of "system" made it clear Shin truly had never mentioned the system.
And... Manshin?
That was a word for a shaman, wasn't it? Well... "cult leader" or "shaman"—same difference. Shin had founded a cult in his own zone and cast himself as the shaman who received the god's revelations. Judging by the way this LongtailedTit used extreme honorifics like "Manshin," he had clearly been taken in as well.
Telling a guy like this that he's being scammed would only backfire.
If Shin had ordered him to drag this child's body all the way to the Cola Area, his faith had to be fanatical. In any case, of all the zones he could have started in, this one had begun in the Love Area—which meant that even if he looked scared right now, he was still a lunatic.
Shin had carefully planted the idea that I, too, had received a "divine revelation." So even if I pulled something from my inventory or rattled off other people's information using character inspection, it would never serve as proof of the system. And even if I did tell him the truth about the system, there was no guarantee he would take it well. I would be lucky if he didn't simply dismiss it as an attempt to slander Shin...
To people who could be fooled by something as flimsy as a "Manshin," what mattered was not "truth" but "something to lean on." Shin had sent his player to me so readily precisely because he was certain that even if I denied the divine revelation and started talking about the system, this kid would never easily believe me. The picture Shin wanted was probably me rejecting their religion—and thereby riling his followers into treating me as an enemy.
But there was one thing Shin had overlooked.
I had no intention of rejecting the cult he had built. The cult-leader route was a strategy I myself had created. Someone else's carefully crafted cult? I would just use it.
Shin, I'll make good use of the believer you sent me.
"Um... Dopamine Addict? You... really did receive a divine revelation, right?"
When I stayed silent for a long while, LongtailedTit grew a little uneasy and asked carefully. I looked at him and answered with a gentle smile.
"Exactly as you said. I, too, am a messenger of God who has received revelation."