Entrance Exam (4)
My feelings toward the man called Father were never particularly good.
Beyond mere indifference toward me, he seemed like someone who couldn't understand my thoughts or feelings at all.
Just look at how, when I asked where my real father was, he only laughed and said there was no other father.
If his own son had asked him that, he should at least have wondered why the boy thought he wasn't his real father. Even I, who care so little about other people, would have known something was wrong if a young son asked me a question like that.
But that man just laughed, as if he'd heard something amusing.
In other words, he was someone with something seriously missing.
So when people told me I seemed like a sociopath, all I felt was wronged. I was only acting the way I'd grown up watching. How was someone raised by a person like that ever supposed to learn which behavior, in which situation, would keep him from being treated as strange?
Even my mother never told me anything but that weird line about how parents and children are programmed to grieve if the other is unhappy.
That said—do I resent him as much as I resent my mother? Not really.
It isn't that I resent him less because he looked after me in Mother's place. I simply don't like that man very much. I don't believe he's my real father. That's the only reason I don't resent him.
So I figured he wouldn't like me much either, and since I wasn't his real child, he wouldn't care even if I'd possessed this damn game and vanished.
"You're saying… Father is the one who made me possess this game?"
I asked, but Ttopamine Addict only stared at me with a terrifying expression. Calculating, suspicious, afraid. At last he opened his mouth.
"You… you didn't know everything after all."
What did he mean, I didn't know everything?
"You talk as if you know everything yourself. Ever consider you might be wrong?"
"How did you do the Additional Opening?"
"I don't know either!"
Instead of answering my questions again, he only asked what he wanted to know. My voice rose in frustration.
"What do you mean it was Father, not Mother?"
"……"
He only stared straight through me without answering, as if gauging how much he could safely tell me.
Fine then.
"I've already checked with other players. Everyone I asked was connected to Mother. No player ever talked about Father. And you're still saying it wasn't Mother?"
"…So you're still at that stage."
"What?"
He forced his mouth open and spat out a short line.
"It wouldn't have been all of them."
"What?"
"The players. The ones who said they knew about Mother—there's no way that was all of them. Think carefully. You definitely heard something about Father. Otherwise you never could have done the Additional Opening."
"……"
I already heard about Father, huh…
I retraced everything that had happened so far. Who had ever told me about my father, and when? This place—the Cola Area—was overflowing with Mother's traces. And now, suddenly, Father?
Honestly, whether Father or Mother had been the one to possess me into the game didn't really matter. I didn't have any complaints about the possession itself. But if Father truly was involved… then what the hell had Mother's grave that I'd dug up, and that portrait I'd faced at a critical moment, even been for?
No matter how hard I think, there was nothing about Father…
At best, Luna asking if I didn't want to see my real-world father was about it.
He claimed not every player was connected to Mother, but all I'd heard from players was that RoomCornerDarling's older sister had worked at the Salvation Project, that Tibalom had started the game at my mother's recommendation, and what I'd heard from Shin Eun-jo—
I stopped thinking right there.
"The Cthulhu Games representative…"
Just one person. Someone who said they'd met someone other than my mother.
Shin Eun-jo.
Who Shin Eun-jo had met wasn't my mother, but the representative of Cthulhu Games. Hearing that story, I'd thought the start of all this wasn't my mother but the Cthulhu Games representative. Even if Mother had been the one to possess us into the Safe Zone, the one who'd possessed Mother into the otome game would have been that person.
Right after that conversation, the Additional Opening had triggered for no reason I understood. And… strangely enough, after that I hadn't thought deeply about the Cthulhu Games representative at all.
Why?
Looking back, Shin Eun-jo had also shouted that she hadn't been able to remember the company name Cthulhu Games until then. I thought I understood what that meant. Now that I was recalling the Cthulhu Games representative again, I remembered the conversation with Shin Eun-jo vividly—but until now it had only lingered hazily in my mind.
The representative of Cthulhu Games…
I'd figured that person couldn't be unrelated to my mother. Otherwise Mother never could have developed a game modeled on that one. But that the company's representative might be my father—I'd never considered it. Because the father in my memories always wore an apron and cooked meals; he never seemed like someone who went to an office.
"That person… is Father?"
The moment I said it—
A crackling sound came from behind me.
I spun around in shock. The pattern was flashing and thrashing, and something like golden electric current rippled over the design, lighting up the cave.
"W-what the hell?!"
As I stumbled backward in panic, a force yanked me. Ttopamine Addict had pulled me behind him.
But the light strands thrashing in the air like countless tentacles—as if something was about to burst out—flickered a few times and then faded weakly away.
Only after the pattern had gone completely still did I hear Ttopamine Addict murmur softly.
"…Good thing I erased it in advance."
I looked up at him. When I'd first found the pattern, I'd thought there were traces of artificial damage in places… so this guy had been the one who erased them?
Was this place unsafe because of that pattern? What even was that pattern? What had almost happened just now?
But instead of explaining the pattern, he said this to me.
"This place is dangerous, so go back now. And don't ever come back."
That wasn't what I wanted to hear.
"Answer my question."
Ttopamine Addict reflexively started to scowl, then realized he was looking at himself and made a face like he had no choice. If he was me, he knew how stubborn I was. He knew that if he didn't properly convince me here, I wouldn't quietly leave the way he wanted.
"Do you even need my answer? You already seem certain."
"Let's say I'm right about the Cthulhu representative. Then what about Mother? Why did she create the Safe Zone?"
This time he looked at me with his brow fully furrowed.
"I know because I'm you too…"
He peeled my hand off his collar as he spoke.
"What we've talked about already is enough. You can guess how it went."
"Guess? What guess? Didn't you just say my guess was wrong?"
I deliberately needled him, but instead of taking the bait he answered in a cold tone.
"Why Mother had to create the Safe Zone. Why our name is 'Lee Dam.' You know now, don't you."
"……"
Actually, he was right. I knew now too. Why Mother had created the Safe Zone. Why my name was Lee Dam.
Assuming Mother had created the Safe Zone after returning from the otome game world to reality—I'd already figured it out then. Mother had wanted to reclaim the child she'd lost in the other world. So she'd named the child she bore in reality Lee Dam, but that alone hadn't been enough. She'd created a game called the Safe Zone that was an exact replica of that world, intending to possess it once more. Maybe even her disappearance in front of me had been because she'd possessed the game.
But how was I supposed to accept that? Was I supposed to accept that I'd been a substitute for the child she'd lost in a game?
And—
"If my thinking is right, the only conclusion is that Mother is still the one who made us possess the game."
"Think again."
Ttopamine Addict said in a gentle voice.
"If it was Mother, why would she set the possession point ten years later? If she wanted to return to the other world, why would she need to possess so many people? And why drag even me—the one she abandoned—into it?"
"……"
Right… I'd gotten so worked up I'd forgotten a few important facts.
When I possessed, Luna Moon had already been dead for ten years. If Mother had created the game to return to the other world, there was no way to explain why the game story started after Luna Moon and Haydam had died. Even if she knew the real Haydam dwelled in the ring and wanted to possess it to awaken him, ten years was far too late. There was no reason to possess that late. And the possessed players were in ten-year-old bodies… There were far too many extra settings for it to simply be about wanting to return to another world.
And what the hell was that convenience store? Would my mother really have had a reason to set up a convenience store like that and possess alongside other players just to return to another world? And would the mother who'd stressed until the moment she vanished that I had to be happy have just left my possession alone?
"…You're right about that too."
When I reluctantly accepted the premise that Mother hadn't been the one to possess us, he whispered softly.
"Don't doubt Mother. She's more… pitiful than you think."
Yeah, probably. If a child she'd named Lee Dam dug up her grave, played at being her son, and then named her real son Luna—how could she not be pitiful?
He glanced once toward the pattern, then said,
"As you saw… this place really is dangerous. Go back now."
Still not explaining what that thing earlier was until the end. Did this guy have some kind of restriction on him too?
Not that I plan to believe everything this bastard says anyway.
I believed now that he was me. He'd shown me proof. But ultimately, I couldn't trust me.
If it were me, I'd treat even myself as a competitor.
Even if everything he'd said so far was pure truth, he had a reason for telling me those facts. Even if he and I were the same person, as long as we were separate individuals we were different players.
I looked at him for a moment, then opened my mouth.
"Fine. I'll go back."
When I said I'd leave obediently, he looked surprised.
"On one condition."
Only after I added that did he look at me with a figured as much expression.
"If it's something I can do."
Right—you'd do it if it was something you could grant first?
I held out my hand to him.
"Just give me one hoverboard."
"…What?"
"I'm going to ride it back, so give me one hoverboard. You've got a few more stashed in your inventory, right? If you're me, yours is mine and mine is mine, no?"
"……"
Ttopamine Addict made a face like this wasn't quite right, but he obediently pulled a hoverboard from his inventory and handed it to me.
Whatever this guy was hiding, I was going to take what I could get and leave.