Waking After Three Days
"So," Mom asked, tightening her arms around me the moment I said I loved her. "Is there any part of your personality you'd like me to give back?"
"Yes! There is."
The one thing I had been desperately hoping for. The change that had put me through the most misery since my personality shifted. Even now, just thinking about that footage made me want to kick the blankets in sheer secondhand embarrassment.
"Please just make me stop crying so easily."
These damn tear ducts went off at the slightest thing, manufacturing dark history whether I wanted it or not. The horror game stream had been the absolute peak. At this rate, the cringe compilation would only keep growing.
"Isn't that a good thing? Even you would enjoy watching a cute, pretty girl cry over something scary, Dan-woo."
"Well, yeah, but... not when that girl is me."
I was still a man who had lived on the old Earth. The women of this world might get a kick out of a guy crying, but I sure as hell did not.
"All right. I'll restore the parts of your personality that became more feminine by the standards of the world you came from."
"Thank you! Thank you so much!"
For once, I would not have minded crying. I didn't, though.
"Of course, if you changed overnight people would get suspicious, so it'll happen gradually. It should be done within a month at the latest, so don't worry."
"A month? I could wait two."
If I was getting my old self back, what was a month?
"In exchange, would you do one little favor for Mom?"
"A favor...?"
She had called it a gift. Why the sudden request? I decided to at least hear her out.
"Could you talk to me casually, like you just did? Drop the formal speech."
"Uh... yeah, I can do that. That's all, Mom?"
Calling her Mom had already started to feel natural. Even I had to admit my adaptability was impressive. And talking casually was a plus for me too. Goddess or not, she looked like she was in her late twenties.
"Hehehe. Yes. That's all."
She rose from her seat with a satisfied smile, set me down on the floor, and took a step back.
"You'll be sinking underwater soon. Don't resist. Just let it happen."
"I have to go back already?"
She nodded without a word.
At first she had felt strange in every possible way — claiming to be a goddess, acting like a pervert, suddenly telling me to call her Mom. But now that it was time to part, I felt a pang of reluctance.
"We'll meet again, so don't be too sad."
Mom's face looked just as reluctant, so I simply nodded without saying anything.
"Ohh."
The water level began to rise, slowly filling the space.
No, wait. Am I the one sinking?
Either way, the pace picked up, and before I knew it the water had reached my chest.
"One last thing — time moves very slowly in the dream world. Several days will have passed in reality."
"Huh? Wait, hold on— pffh!?"
Mom had just dropped a bomb. I tried to ask why she was telling me this now, but the sinking accelerated so sharply I never got the words out. I swallowed a mouthful of water for nothing, sank all the way down to the deep sea where I had first opened my eyes, and lost consciousness.
I pried open my locked, crusted-over eyes. Even through the sliver of a gap, the light stabbed into them hard.
"Nngh..."
"D-Dan-woo!"
Someone bolted upright beside me, and Se-ah's voice filled the room. The pain in my eyes was too sharp to open them. I groped in the direction of her voice, and she caught my hand in both of hers.
"Uh... khhm!"
"Ah — I'll get you some water!"
I had been about to ask how long I had been out, but no words came. The moment my vocal cords vibrated, a tearing pain ripped through my throat. Se-ah let go of my hand in a hurry and brought me water.
"Ah."
I opened my mouth at her prompting, and a thin tube slipped between my lips. I sucked slowly, and water traveled up the straw. She must have figured I would have trouble sitting up, so she had stuck a straw in for me.
"Hahh... thanks, noona."
"Don't be silly. This is nothing."
I took my time and drained the whole bottle. When I tested my throat afterward, it was a little raw, but nothing serious. My eyes had adjusted to the light enough that I could crack them open, at least a little.
"Does anything feel off? Anywhere that hurts?"
"Mm... I think I'm fine?"
With her help I sat up on the bed and checked myself over, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The scrapes I had gotten from rolling across the ground had healed without a single scar, and there did not appear to be any lingering aftereffects.
"Thank goodness. The healer said there was nothing wrong, honestly, but you didn't wake up for three days, so I was worried sick."
"Th-three days!?"
She had told me a lot of time would have passed in the real world, but I had not expected this much. In the dream, it had only been a few hours.
"I'll call the healer again just in case. Noona's still worried."
"I'm really fine, though... wait, what's a healer?"
Was that some kind of game class?
"It's what we call an Awakened with healing abilities. The one I'm calling now is a healer from the Hunter Association."
She pressed the call button on the table beside the bed. While we waited, I took a quick look around the room. It looked less like a hospital ward and more like a slightly nicer private room. The bed was an ordinary one, not a hospital bed, and there was a fridge, a desk, a sofa, even a TV. Everything you could want, really.
"May I come in?"
"Come in."
A knock, a voice from the other side of the door, and Se-ah answering. The woman who entered was wearing a white coat.
"Would you mind if I examined you for a moment?"
"Yeah. That's fine."
This time the question was directed at me, so I answered. With permission granted, she began carefully checking me over from head to toe. Se-ah was watching her with a razor-sharp glare from the side, and the healer looked extremely tense because of it. I tried to shoot Se-ah a look telling her to knock it off, and she would ease up for a second — then go right back to staring the woman down.
"The examination is complete. As I told you a few days ago, there are no physical problems. That said, given what he went through, I would recommend a period of emotional rest."
"Thank you."
The healer jumped when I thanked her. Man, how long had it been since a simple greeting got a reaction that fresh?
After the healer left, Se-ah reached over and stroked my hair. I let my head rest under that gentle hand, and she spoke.
"You can take it easy until this afternoon, so if you're tired, sleep a little more."
"And after that?"
"Ability verification, and it sounds like the Association has something they want to discuss about this whole incident. If you don't want to, you can refuse."
The Association still did not know what my ability was, so whatever they wanted to talk about, it was not that. When I asked Se-ah if she knew the details, she filled me in.
"The truth is, we can detect a Dungeon Break at least three minutes before it happens. There's something called a Gate Outbreak Detector."
Through a machine known as the Gate Outbreak Detector — GOD for short — they could pick up on a gate forming. The principle was that it read the atmospheric mana turbulence that appeared before a gate opened. The degree of that turbulence told them whether it was an ordinary gate or a Dungeon Break.
"But this time, they shut the power off while they were servicing the GOD."
"They're allowed to do that?"
"Of course not. I don't know the details either, but they're supposed to keep it running around the clock on backup batteries and auxiliary power."
And the ones in charge of that maintenance were the Hunter Association — or more precisely, the organization above them, the Dungeon Management Agency.
"And of all times, a Dungeon Break happened right in the middle of it."
"And of all people, you were there — a Grade 1 male. If the public finds out about this, it could become a massive problem."
That was why they wanted a conversation with me. To keep it from getting out.
"Hmm... all right. Doesn't look like there's any downside for me."
"You sure you're okay with it?"
"I'm fine. If it goes south, I'll just walk out."
I was not the one who needed this meeting. The Association was.
"Yeah. Let's just walk right out!"
That was the first time she had smiled since I woke up. The bed was wide enough and we had time to kill, so I caught her by the arm and pulled her up onto it with me.
"When did you get so bold? This isn't even home."
"What, you don't like it?"
"That's not what I—"
Watching her turn her head away, all bashful, I felt it land all over again: going back for her that day had been the right call. How was I supposed to live without someone this cute?
"I'm really glad."
"Hm? About what?"
"That I went back to save you. If I had just run away like that... ah."
The moment the words left my mouth, Se-ah's expression froze over like a sheet of ice. Why the hell had I brought that up, like an idiot? I should have just let it slide and kept things quiet. I had not thought it through.
"H-hey. Noona?"
"Come to think of it, Dan-woo. You ignored what I told you and came back to me, didn't you? You're alive because of it, sure, but if anything had gone even a little wrong..."
Hahh... I should have just kept lounging around in silence. Trapped in that regret, I sat through a lecture that showed no sign of ending.
Once the lecture finally wrapped up, we lazed around until my stomach growled, and then we ate. After three days of nothing, porridge was the only option on the menu, which was depressing. Now that the meal was done, I had brushed my teeth with a convenience-store toothbrush and toothpaste, and we were waiting in the verification room.
"What are you staring at that phone so hard for? You're going to fall into it."
Se-ah asked the question the moment we stepped inside, since I had not taken my eyes off the screen.
"I was out for three days. I have to keep an eye on the stream, so I got in touch with my manager and my editor."
"You're a streamer down to the bone now."
She had been sitting behind me in a back hug the whole time, and now she squeezed me tighter. As far as I was concerned, I had only talked with... well, with the goddess for a few hours and then woken up. Se-ah had spent those entire three days at my bedside, worrying. The rebound had her clinging even harder than usual. I felt a little guilty that I was the only one who had come out of it relatively comfortable — even relieved — so I let her have every last bit of her fussing.
"So what did the manager say?"
"Everyone's worried. We're trying to figure out how to word the announcement, because I don't think we should tell the yandere anything about the Dungeon Break."
After the ability verification, I was scheduled to sit down with the Association President and talk through the incident. If I went and posted an announcement online first, public opinion would swing in the worst possible direction for the Association. It would not be a lie, so they could not exactly come after me for it — but I had already agreed to hear them out.
"Just post it."
"If I post it, doesn't that put you in a bad spot too? The Association asked you to handle this."
What if they came after her over it?
"It's fine! Noona's with a different agency. We're basically rivals, so they can't touch me that easily!"
There was a distinctly cheerful note in her voice. "Rivals" meaning the two largest institutions that held Awakened under their banners: the Male Protection Bureau, and the Awakened Dungeon Integrated Management Bureau. Because both organizations dealt with Awakened, they were constantly being compared.
"And besides, behind noona there's—"
"Hm? What was that?"
"Nothing, never mind!"
She had trailed off at the end, so I missed it. Given that she said it was nothing, I figured it was not that important and let it go.
When the time came, a Hunter Association staffer led us in, and the ability verification began. The process itself was short. All I had to do was drip some blood into a special device. Plug that device into an analyzer, she explained, and it would read the mana composition in the sample and tell us the result.
"And analyzing that brings up the ability's name?"
"Yes, that's right. Are you interested?"
"Uh... more than a little?"
Even that half-hearted answer sent the staffer into a fit of giggles, like I had just told a great joke. She worked the display connected to the machine, then spoke in a careful, lowered voice.
"This is a secret, but since you seem so interested, Dan-woo, I'll tell you."
"Tell me what?"
The atmosphere suddenly felt like a movie scene where someone was about to reveal the secret of the case — or the secret of the world — and I leaned in without thinking.
"The official story is that this machine was built through a collaboration between scientists from every country and Awakened on the engineering side."
I glanced at Se-ah, and she nodded. Her eyes were sparkling. She was curious too.
"But the truth is a little different."
"How so? It wasn't a collaboration?"
"It was a collaboration. They just left out the most important fact."
She let the pause hang while she finished operating the machine and set it running. Then she turned her head and looked at us — at me, specifically.
"The Saintess...?"
It sounded like something out of a fantasy novel. Was it a class title, like Healer?
"She's an S-Class healing-type Awakened recognized as a Saintess by the Vatican."
"Whoa..."
So she really was a Saintess. But even if the Vatican recognized her, did that give her enough influence to move scientists all over the world?
"This is just a rumor too, but they say the Saintess can hear the voice of God."
"G-God?"
The word came out of nowhere and I flinched. In this world, too, God was treated as something that did not exist — or more precisely, as something unproven, and therefore a matter of religion. But I had met one. I could not write it off as just a rumor.
"Then the reason she had this machine built was also..."
"Yes. She had it made after receiving a divine revelation."
Of course.
"But how do you know all this? This doesn't seem like something a regular staffer would be in on."
At my question, she put on a slightly goofy smile and drew a single horizontal line in the air with her index finger. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean, and tilted my head.
"I rode the right line, that's all."
"Ah..."
Right. In any workplace, picking the right faction was everything.
We kept chatting about this and that, and before I knew it twenty minutes had passed and the mana analysis was finished. The time had come to learn the name of my ability.