Player Dialogue (2)
This happened before I called those people together.
After deciding not to open the game developer's message, I immediately messaged T-balnom.
He had been sending the occasional deranged-sounding message, but ever since I'd sent him toiletries he seemed to have settled down—aside from requesting the supplies that had run out, he hadn't messaged me at all.
The reply came the second I sent it.
This bastard still had zero manners, even after everything I'd carefully provided for him.
Still, the fact that he answered promptly these days suggested he at least knew he ought to be grateful.
I asked him outright, knowing he had no intention of dealing with any player besides me anyway.
The answer that came back was rather deflating.
So he doesn't know.
No connection for this guy, then?
But Shin Eun-jo had also seemed ignorant of the Salvation Project, so I didn't give up and pressed on.
This time the reply didn't come right away.
Even I would have been baffled if someone I hadn't heard from in weeks suddenly started going on about silver foxes, so fair enough.
Still, I really thought this bastard might know something…
T-balnom had, of all places, ended up in Knife—the last hidden zone I had cleared.
Judging by the fact that some bizarre player had also transmigrated into my home base, the Unicorn Area, I'd wondered whether T-balnom, like Shin Eun-jo, had been dropped into a hidden zone because he already knew something.
But given how completely unhinged he was the first time he opened the system, maybe he's different from Shin Eun-jo after all.
Shin Eun-jo had chosen the Love Area from the start, fully aware she would transmigrate. That was why she could found a cult without panicking much.
If T-balnom had known he was going to transmigrate the way Shin Eun-jo had, he never would have picked Knife.
If he had transmigrated knowing nothing at all, then he was simply a player with spectacularly rotten luck.
I'd expected him to write me off as a crank and lose interest, but he was more curious than I thought.
Should be fine to tell him.
That the Salvation Project was the game company that first created the Safety Zone series wasn't a secret only I knew. And even if I said a game titled something like Silver Fox Romance Simulation was connected to the transmigration, no one would take it seriously.
What? They plastered that logo across the whole screen and he didn't even remember that?
The fact that T-balnom also had no idea what an otome game was gave me a strange sense of kinship.
While I was at it, I asked one more thing.
He'd noticed I was only telling him exactly as much as I needed to.
I smoothly changed the subject.
The word Organization was still sitting there, clear as day, in the chat log.
Didn't seem like he was doing some kind of bit, either…
This guy was plenty weird in his own right.
It was already amazing that a twenty-first-century person who didn't even know the T-balnom meme had played Safety Zone and gotten transmigrated—but the junior who had casually recommended the game and told him to set his nickname to T-balnom was something else entirely.
Thankfully he wasn't a complete illiterate.
I had no choice but to tell T-balnom the cruel truth.
The chat went quiet for a moment. Then, after a pause, T-balnom's reply came back.
Even after I told him it couldn't be changed, T-balnom went quiet for a while—probably off trying to rename himself anyway.
He came back about five minutes later.
"……."
From the context, Jo Man-wol had to be the junior who had recommended the game and given him the nickname.
Still, I asked T-balnom to confirm.
T-balnom was wrong about that.
Whoever Jo Man-wol was, she wasn't transmigrated here now.
She had already been transmigrated into this game more than a decade ago—and had been buried in a grave for a long time since.
Jo Man-wol.
That was my mother's name.
The thought that it might be a coincidence never even crossed my mind.
The one who had gotten T-balnom to play this game was my mother.
Maybe…
The one who had sent me that message.
The one who had made us all transmigrate.
It might all be my mother.
I have to log out and check after all.
Even if it meant opening every other player's system.
That was why, today, I opened CornerHoney's and Taejeong's systems without hesitation as well.
But that didn't mean I intended to help every other player for free.
The condition for Logout was, after all, "opening every player's system."
I doubted "every player" would count the ones who were already dead.
So my plan was this: bind the systems of anyone who cooperated with me to myself, and exclude everyone who refused from this world entirely.
If I could further open the systems of the players bound to me, those players could also gather points and open other players' systems even faster.
That was why I had proposed that Shin Eun-jo bind herself to me—and why she had drawn a pistol from her coat and aimed it at me.
It was a familiar pistol.
Probably the meteorite item she had squeezed out of Home Protector.
But maybe it was because of last time, when she had taken a bullet for me—
"Are you insane!"
The moment Shin Eun-jo pointed the pistol at me, CornerHoney stepped in front of me.
That's actually pretty admirable.
I appreciated the gesture, but Shin Eun-jo hadn't drawn the pistol with any intention of shooting me in the first place.
"Good job. Now move."
"What? Hey—!"
I shoved CornerHoney aside. Shin Eun-jo, who had been staring me down over the barrel, turned the pistol around and offered me the grip.
"I'd like to take only this much information and leave it at that. Would that be all right?"
Instead of binding herself to me and hearing everything, she wanted to hand over Home Protector's meteorite item and hear only as much as that was worth.
"I thought you didn't want to make an enemy of me."
"That's true. But I have people depending on me in my own zone. I can't choose you right this second."
So when she said she would eventually go back to her zone, it hadn't been empty talk.
The ones she brought with her herself—so she does feel some sense of responsibility for them.
It was a shame I couldn't bind Shin Eun-jo to me right away and test further system openings, but I had succeeded in getting the meteorite item, so I decided to settle for this much.
I took the pistol she was holding out.
The moment I received it I tried to stash it in my inventory, but nothing happened.
So it won't go into the inventory.
Probably because the real owner was still registered as Home Protector.
The reason Shin Eun-jo could hand me Home Protector's pistol so readily was that it wasn't hers to begin with.
If she went back to her zone and killed Home Protector, ownership would transfer to her, but…
She's kept him alive this long because of the restriction Ssapasuble put on her, so the odds of her killing him for the ownership when she gets back are low.
Well, I didn't actually need the ownership.
I was planning to claim the meteorite item's ownership after dealing with the Unicorn Area player anyway.
Fortunately, Luna had said she could draw on her main body's power just by having the meteorite item nearby, even without ownership—so for now I decided to give only as much information as the pistol was worth, as Shin Eun-jo had proposed.
I tucked the pistol into my coat and asked her,
"By the way, was Home Protector behaving himself?"
"He seemed to believe you were going to come rescue him."
The fact that she didn't so much as flinch when I brought up Home Protector told me she had already assumed I knew she had him in her grip.
That was why she could so brazenly draw the pistol and show it off.
Still—believing I was going to come save him.
What an optimist.
Well, now that the meteorite pistol was in my hands, I would have to go see Home Protector eventually.
Once the entrance exam was over, I'd head to the Love Area and pick him up.
"Then it's time to pay up."
I pulled CornerHoney—whom I had shoved aside a moment ago—back in front of me and said,
"This one here will fill you in on the Unicorn Area player."
"What? I thought you were going to explain."
"What? Why do I have to explain anything!"
I ignored CornerHoney's protest and gave Shin Eun-jo a pleasant smile.
"You didn't seriously expect a full briefing after handing over a meteorite item that isn't even yours, did you?"
"……."
Judging by her face, she had been hoping I wouldn't bring up the ownership issue at all.
"In exchange, I'll allow you to take the entrance exam."
"If permission for the entrance exam is part of the deal, then…"
"You're free to ask CornerHoney all sorts of things from now on."
"That… I'll decline."
She'd already figured out, in less than thirty minutes of knowing him, that CornerHoney was completely useless.
The business between the players seemed more or less settled…
Now it was time to hold the Military Academy's first entrance exam.