Chapter 23
Chapter 23
Sea King created an even greater sensation than Land of Adventure.
In particular, it received excellent reviews from people who had recently purchased computers. This was because Sea King fulfilled the desire for a new kind of experience that people had wanted when buying the unfamiliar new invention known as a computer.
Normally, unfamiliar things tended to create resistance, but in this game, that worked in a positive direction. The vast freedom granted upon the seas of the past spread beyond the monitor felt shockingly fresh.
And so, countless people became merchants or pirates and fell into the world Ras had created.
Meanwhile, unlike everyone else, Ras could not properly rest.
The other employees had gone on vacation, but he remained behind to review scenarios. Sea King’s development had taken longer than expected, and by the time the game barely managed to launch, there was not much time left until the submission deadline.
The number of submitted scenarios had increased even further, reaching a total of twenty-seven.
Looking at the thick stack piled before him, Ras let out a sigh, but it would not shrink on its own, so after hesitating for a moment, he reached out.
Since there was no objectively correct answer, Ras first began eliminating the ones that clearly fell below standard.
Stories that endlessly repeated meaningless battles, scenarios that drowned in setting exposition, and manuscripts that only described situations without any movement at all—anything that made him think, How am I supposed to turn this into a game?—was immediately pushed to the far edge of the desk.
No, things like this should just be published as novels.
Among them, there was a scenario titled Sword of Autumn that was genuinely entertaining as a novel, but it was filled with expressions, gestures, and emotional nuances that would be difficult to portray in a game. It was a shame, but he could not use it.
Maybe once computers advanced further and expressive technology improved, it would become possible. It felt like he had simply arrived in this world too early.
After filtering them for around four hours, the number had immediately dropped to twelve.
...No, let’s remove this one too.
Some of the ones he had initially left behind now seemed unsuitable after another glance, so he pushed aside two more, reducing the total to ten.
At first, he had thought these were acceptable enough to keep, but the later scenarios turned out better than expected.
Compared to a complete amateur like Ras, the people confident enough to actually submit entries clearly possessed far greater skill.
For now, Ras decided to keep the names and addresses of those writers on file.
This time, he only intended to hire one person. However, nobody knew what the future held, and even if he did not hire them permanently, there were other possibilities, like purchasing scenarios separately or seeking temporary assistance.
Before examining the remaining scenarios, he stood up and stretched.
He had already spent hours sitting there, leaving his body stiff, and since he would likely need to spend at least that much more time reviewing the rest, he needed to loosen himself up.
Since I’m already up, maybe I should go buy something to eat.
As he looked out the office window while debating whether to buy snacks or an actual meal, another thought suddenly crossed his mind.
Did he even need to stay at the office?
The employees were all on vacation, leaving Ras alone. No one would come looking for him at the office, and there was nothing here that specifically required being done in this location.
Ras immediately decided to leave work early, which instantly improved his mood.
Carrying a heavy backpack stuffed with scenarios, he descended the old, dirty staircase and stepped out onto the street.
Checking his wristwatch, he saw that more than three hours still remained before normal quitting time, yet the streets were not particularly deserted.
Although automobile ownership was not extremely rare anymore, cars were still a luxury for the low-income class that made up a large portion of the population.
And this neighborhood had once been a declining district populated heavily by Beastmen immigrants from Barum, one of the continents of the Old Continent. Since they were people who had traveled all the way to another continent searching for work, very few of them could actually afford cars.
Ras absentmindedly glanced over the unfamiliar-language signs and the many Beastmen filling the streets before beginning to walk toward home.
When he had first moved into this office, the visible differences in appearance combined with stories about poor immigrants had made him wary, thinking they might be rough or aggressive people.
But nothing had happened so far, and he had never even heard rumors about violent crime being especially common around here, so he had long since relaxed.
Nowadays, the only thing that occasionally drew his attention were cute Beastwoman girls with twitching animal ears atop their heads. Other than that, he barely noticed anymore.
He saw Beastmen so frequently near the office that even the cleaning lady and the people delivering lunch to the office were all Beastmen, so naturally he had grown used to it.
And the Beastmen were the same way.
At first, Ras had hurried through these streets by bus or taxi because he felt uneasy walking among so many Beastmen, but eventually he realized something.
An ordinary human boy was such a common sight that nobody paid attention to him.
So now he often walked around while sightseeing and buying food to refresh his mood. His home was not even particularly far away.
Actually, since he was not exercising separately, the walking probably was not enough.
Ras stopped by a grocery store along the way.
There was another grocery store closer to his house, but its product selection was limited, so he generally preferred using this one instead.
This world did not have convenience stores, marts, or even supermarkets, so if someone wanted industrially manufactured snacks, they had to visit stores like these grocery shops.
They sold ingredients as well as ready-to-eat foods, but since they were neither franchises nor standardized businesses, the inventory varied wildly from place to place.
Ras bought chocolate cookies wrapped in silver foil and paper packaging, a snack similar to Cheetos packed in a cardboard box, and a carbonated drink bottled in glass.
“I’ll take these.”
If there had been cans or plastic bottles, he would have chosen those instead, but since there were none, he had no choice.
Glass bottles were nice, but they were heavy. There was also the concern that empty bottles rolling around the house might break.
“Four Del and thirty Piece.”
The girl behind the counter had orange hair and a face covered in freckles. Despite her rather cute appearance, she was always expressionless.
Then again, thinking about it, convenience store clerks in Korea were not exactly friendly either.
After leaving the store, Ras briefly pulled the drink bottle from the paper bag.
The reddish-brown color unique to Zyle seemed to stimulate his thirst.
Zyle was a carbonated beverage with a status similar to cola on Earth. Its slightly bitter taste and indescribably distinctive aroma made it surprisingly delicious.
It was good enough that he did not particularly miss cola.
Of course, it was also packed with sugar, so the health drawbacks were not much different either.
The moment he arrived home and locked the door, he immediately took out a bottle opener from the kitchen drawer, popped open the Zyle, and drank directly from the bottle.
“Ahhh!”
There truly was nothing better than this after work.
He thought it would not feel as satisfying today since he had come home early midway through the day, but apparently that was not the case.
Afterward, he resealed the remaining drink with a rubber bottle cap and placed it inside the refrigerator.
Some time later, after finishing his shower, he turned on the television, threw himself onto the long sofa he had recently bought, opened the snacks he had purchased, and spent quite a while crunching away on them.
Now that he had plenty of money, he could easily afford expensive pastries from bakeries, but it was difficult to abandon the aggressively seasoned flavor unique to industrial snacks.
The taste itself probably played a role, but there was likely nostalgia for Earth mixed into it as well.
The fact that cheap artificial seasoning had become the flavor of homesickness was honestly a little funny.
After relieving his stress like that for a while, Ras casually wiped the crumbs and oil from his hands, then pulled his bag closer while still lying down and resumed reading the scenarios.
Aside from briefly stepping out for dinner at a nearby restaurant, he continued reading until it grew dark outside.
Even then, he still had not finished and had to continue into the next day.
Still, he eventually finished them all.
Although there was no overwhelmingly superior first-place entry, once he thought about what the most important ability for creating a role-playing game together would be, he finally managed to choose one.
The standard Ras selected was the ability to write dialogue.
Aside from graphics, dialogue was the most important tool for conveying characters, story, and setting to players in a game.
Of course, story, setting, and characters were important as well, but every remaining candidate had already met Ras’s standards in those areas, so it did not matter.
The title of the selected scenario was Sword of Trials.
It was exactly the sort of story suited for a role-playing game.
To summarize briefly, a corrupted wizard opened the gate to the Demon Realm, unleashing demons upon the world and beginning an age of suffering.
To overcome this crisis, humanity pleaded with the gods for salvation.
However, the gods turned away, declaring that this hardship had been brought upon the mortal world by its own inhabitants and citing the corruption of the world as justification for abandoning it.
Only one god promised salvation.
Yet due to interference from the other gods and the demons, this deity could not intervene directly, and instead secretly scattered divine relics across the world, leaving behind a prophecy that whoever gathered them would become a hero capable of defeating evil.
After enduring countless hardships and collecting the relics, the protagonist eventually forges them into a single sword.
In the process, they naturally come to realize that all the tragedies and trials they endured had actually been tests to determine whether the people of the mortal world deserved salvation and whether they were worthy of wielding such power.
Afterward, the protagonist defeats those corrupted individuals who obtained false divine relics and ultimately destroys the demons themselves, saving the world.
It was a classic story, but one with twists and a reasonable amount of depth.
Having selected the scenario, Ras immediately sprang to his feet and walked over to the newly purchased desk to begin writing the acceptance notice.
The reply to such a thick scenario manuscript was absurdly brief in comparison, which made it feel strangely unbalanced, but that was simply the privilege of being the employer.
Thinking that, he merely let out a faint chuckle.
And one week later, Ras waited for the new employee in the empty office while the other staff members were still on vacation.
He had considered meeting at a café or somewhere similar, but the person would eventually need to grow familiar with the office anyway, and wasting rent money seemed unnecessary, so he decided to meet here instead.
Is this because he’s the new guy?
The appointment time still had around thirty minutes remaining, but he could already hear someone climbing the stairs.
The floor above was vacant, so aside from the cleaning lady, the only possible visitor was the new scenario writer.
“Um, hello. I’m the person who passed the scenario contest.”
Just as Ras expected.
The man entering awkwardly matched the photograph exactly—a large, overweight man in his thirties with skin pale enough to look sickly, long narrow eyes, and a square jaw.
“Ah. Welcome.”
He did not seem like the type who needed intimidation, so Ras immediately stood up and greeted him warmly.
After briefly exchanging formal greetings, Ras handed him the employment contract.
The man initially looked confused, but his expression quickly brightened.
The man, whose name was Aspa, was already an author who had published several novels.
Unfortunately, none of them had achieved major success.
If there had been some obvious deficiency in his writing, he could have worked to improve it or simply given up on writing entirely, but that was not the case, so he had been unable to put down the pen for years.
Still, he needed to survive somehow, so he eventually began searching for work.
That was when he discovered the contest hosted by Ras.
He could not afford expensive machines like computers himself, but he had still been interested in them.
His colleague and friend Arnold owned one, so Aspa had touched it several times before, and he had also played Land of Adventure, which Arnold constantly praised with exaggerated excitement.
Although Aspa had not become as obsessed as his friend, the game still left a powerful impression on him.
He had even vaguely imagined that presenting his stories through this kind of medium might become more successful than publishing them as novels.
That was why, when he discovered the contest, he seriously viewed it as an opportunity and poured every remaining ounce of effort into writing and submitting an entry.