Episode 22
Translator: RaidenTL
Episode 22
The man’s breathing grew ragged. He lifted his head and met the silver eyes that were fixed on him. He stammered, trying somehow to refute this person who knew everything.
“I don’t understand… If I’m really their creation, if they love me, shouldn’t they… want me to be happy?”
“Senior, when you play chess, do you wish for the happiness of your chess pieces?”
The quietly spoken words were a sentence.
“The people here are just a kind of trophy. They don’t mean much.”
A rustling sound came from outside the door, followed by two knocks. It seemed the laundry Evan had sent out had arrived. Elysia placed a hand on Evan’s shoulder, which had frozen like a statue, and helped him up.
Ah, this guy’s completely zoned out. Sighing lightly, she crouched down in front of him.
Evan’s green eyes were cast downward as he muttered weakly.
“…I wish you had just told me it was all God’s will, like reciting from a holy book.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why do the reasons have to be so… worldly and materialistic?”
The large-boned hand resting on his knee was trembling. With a soft groan, Elysia stood up and replied.
“They aren’t gods. They’re ordinary humans. So of course… they’re just as ordinarily materialistic.”
“They may be ordinary to you, but here, they are gods. They created and manage an entire world. If that’s not a god, what is?”
“Gods are omnipotent, but those humans aren’t. They make mistakes, and they get chewed out by their bosses for those mistakes.”
“Not omnipotent? Easy for you to say.”
Realizing too late the sharpness in his tone, Evan quickly covered his mouth with his hand.
I misspoke. I’m sorry. As he was trying to find the right words to say, Elysia, who had been watching him silently, strode forward. She took his chin in both her hands, forcing him to look at her.
She spotted the flame flickering within his wide, startled green eyes. A faint smile touched her lips as she asked.
“You’re pissed, aren’t you?”
“It’d be weirder if I wasn’t…!”
“Then I guess you have a self.”
“Of course I—”
Evan stopped mid-sentence, frozen. The realization hit him like a blow to the back of the head.
They are by no means omnipotent. The proof was the very anger he felt after learning everything. That rage, so hostile toward the designers, was his and his alone.
Noticing Evan’s turmoil, Elysia slowly turned and left his room. There was a hint of pleasure on her face, the face of someone who had casually broken one of the game’s rules.
The woman, holding the laundry that had been hanging on the doorknob in one hand, glanced back at him, turning only her head. And she smiled.
“Use that self of yours and think hard. Think about how you can screw over the people on the outside. How you can stop being their puppet.”
“…”
“The very act of thinking about it might be a form of resistance, don’t you think? I like that kind of thing.”
In Evan’s handsome, bewildered face, she saw a reflection of her past self.
Strangely, seeing his pained expression didn’t feel bad. No, it was actually gratifying. Perhaps she had been waiting for someone to ask her about reality.
Because she had been so terribly lonely.
“People will say I have a bad personality for saying this, but I’m actually a little happy. It feels like I’ve found a comrade.”
No answer came. He might have been too stunned to reply, or perhaps he was lost in thought. Elysia slowly closed Evan’s door. Just as the gap was about to disappear, the man’s voice came through.
“What was the path you chose?”
She pulled the door open again. Evan’s black hair shimmered in the sunlight.
The man sat on the edge of the bed; she stood in the doorway. The distance was great, yet at the same time, painfully close. Elysia leaned her head against the doorframe, lost in thought for a moment before answering.
“The effort to not cross the line.”
“…You?”
Hearing the disbelief in his voice, as if he’d heard something completely out of character, Elysia burst out laughing. Fiddling with her loose-fitting shirt, she answered.
“When you’re conscious of the fact that this place isn’t real, you start to unravel. You think, maybe doing drugs is fine. Then, murder doesn’t seem like a big deal either.
When I was first trapped in the game, I had thoughts like that a few times. They’re not real lives anyway, so what if I just kill them all? I’m so angry I could go crazy… But when I thought about it, I realized that would just be destroying myself.”
Evan’s expression hardened at her chilling words. Shaking her head with a troubled look, Elysia added.
“…Still, I do get mad. Insanely, uncontrollably mad. I guess that’s why my temper turned out like this.”
“…”
“Back where I was, every single person I met was a piece of trash. So getting angry first was usually the just thing to do. But here, it’s different…”
She hesitated for a moment, then confessed as if she’d made a great resolution.
“It’s a little hard to adjust. You can see it too, can’t you? I’m… still just endlessly angry.”
Evan couldn’t even look her in the eye. Her heart feeling a little heavy, she took a step outside and said.
“Get some rest. You’ve heard something more than just a little strange. You need to rest well.”
Elysia closed the door without another thought, leaving behind the man whose entire world she had just negated. Leaning crookedly against the closed door, she stared blankly into space. Through the wide-open window, she saw a flock of birds take flight with a flutter of wings.
She stood there for a long time, taking in the scenery—a world that remained indifferent, even vibrant and alive, despite one of its characters learning the truth. Finally, she muttered to herself.
“…I like it, even now.”
She had been abruptly moved here from a game filled with human garbage who would tear apart anyone who looked weak. Judging by the Target Initialization Key that had appeared in her inventory, there was clearly a scheme behind the move, but even so, she liked it here.
After so long living as if behind a wall, without any real communication, she was happy to have found this place. If asked whether she wanted to return to reality, the answer was no. She had given up on that desire a long, long time ago.
And if I can live in this world with people who have emotions and act like three-dimensional beings, what reason is there that this can’t become my reality?
The world of <You’ll Fall in Love> may have been virtual, but to her, it was no longer a simulation.
She ran her palm over Evan’s door once and murmured.
“So I hope you won’t be in too much pain, Senior.”
*
The gentle chime of a bell, signaling the time to wake up, echoed from outside the window. Elysia, who had been lying like a crumpled corpse at the edge of a massive bed, rustled and mumbled.
“Ugh… I’m a delinquent, I don’t do school…”
Muttering as she shifted under the thick covers, she realized something and her eyes shot open. Oh, right.
“…My suspension is over.”
After a week of lazing around, she didn’t want to get out of bed.
Ugh, I don’t want to, I really don’t. I’m too fragile to face that cold, harsh world. Of course I am. This body, more fragile than a sunfish that faints just from tripping, needs its rest, right?
…Huh, wait a minute.
“Whoops, I leveled up, didn’t I?”
The thought instantly lightened her mood. Elysia leaped energetically out from under the covers, which had grown cool overnight, and headed for the bathroom, humming a tune.
In the clear, well-maintained mirror, free of rust or grime but otherwise unadorned, she saw a woman with messy, brown, chin-length hair.
Her face was still creased with a disgruntled frown from being half-asleep. Elysia pressed her fingers into her cheeks to smooth it out, then stretched and yawned.
Leaning on the sink with both hands, she checked her HP window.
Elysia Hemming (LV.4): HP 2,800 | Defense 500 | Attack 4,500
Seeing her Defense, which had been a mere 0, now at 500, and her HP finally above 1,000, she felt so moved she could have cried.
Before, she would have fainted with her HP hitting 0 the moment she bumped into a handsome guy while running to avoid being late, like some shoujo manga cliché. But with this…
“Should I test it?”
With a crackle, Elysia tilted her head from side to side, then charged headfirst into the mirror. With a loud thud, she smashed her forehead against the glass.
SYSTEM: HP -800 (2,000 / 2,800)
Oh, fuck, thank you, God! Ah, right, no god here. In that case, to the members of the dev team, whose eyes are surely sunken from working day and night, every dog has its day! Thank you!
To lose only 800 HP despite hitting her head hard enough to leave a bruise! To not be in mortal danger!
Of course, in her previous life, a direct bullet wound only dealt about 100 damage, but for someone who used to teeter on the brink of death from a paper cut, this felt like monumental progress.
Lost in her joy, Elysia had the insane thought of checking her HP by cutting her arm with a shard of the broken mirror, but she quickly shook her head.
“No, no. Let’s not get cocky.”
Seeing her HP drop so much from just one headbutt was a reminder that she was still low-level. Still, this was enough that she wouldn’t faint just from falling on her butt, so she was satisfied.
Her left forehead was turning red, likely from internal bleeding. She rubbed it absently with her fingertips before splashing her face with cold water.
She carelessly cut a piece from a Band-Aid she had prepared and stuck it on her forehead, feeling her HP begin to regenerate. Dressed in her school uniform, she looked at her reflection and let out a wry chuckle.
The bandage Evan had put on her hadn’t looked like this. His had been much neater and cleaner.
She, who never cared if her buttons were misaligned or her shoes were covered in dust, found herself fiddling with the frayed gauze with a fingernail and muttering.
“I’ll just ask him to put on a new one.”
For her, who had been drying up in brittle loneliness for so long, Evan’s question had been a form of salvation. She had desperately wanted someone to share the truth with, someone to be angry alongside. So she had told him everything she knew, this person who could think and act like a real human.
Thinking about it now with a cool head, her reason had been terribly selfish. She hadn’t wanted to struggle alone in this cruel reality, and in her desperate search for someone who could understand, he had been the unlucky one to cross her path.
A belated sense of apology and guilt washed over her. She hurriedly opened her dorm room door to find Evan and knocked on the door to the next room.
“Senior, are you there?”