Party Formation
You have formed your first party. Each party receives 5 coins.
Party members' locations are now displayed on the map.
I pulled out my terminal and checked the map. Mother and I showed up as blue dots, while Seungpil and his sister appeared as green ones. Seungpil scrambled to follow my lead, yanking out his own device, but he couldn’t even find the map on the home screen. The way he kept sneaking glances at mine made it painfully obvious he hadn’t bothered to learn even the terminal’s most basic functions.
Inflicting injury on a party member will result in half of your held coins being confiscated and a three-day ban from the shop. Killing a party member will result in all coins being confiscated and a seven-day shop ban. Please take caution.
It was a penalty, sure. But it wasn’t nearly enough to stop someone who was truly determined. If you really wanted someone dead, you could just form a party, blow all their coins, then put a knife in the back of their skull. Still…
“Corporal Kang Changjae, sir? Where do you look at that map?”
Seungpil was staring at me with that same dumb, vacant expression. …This guy wouldn’t actually try to kill me, right? Without me around, he wouldn’t last a single day. Same went for his sister.
I let out a long sigh, pushing down the frustration rising from the pit of my stomach.
“Seungpil.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Could you kiss your sister?”
“…I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that?”
“Ah! Sexual harassment!”
Both Seungpil and his sister looked utterly bewildered. That reaction told me everything. Of course they couldn’t.
“Mother. Could you explain things to his sister? I’ll talk to Seungpil.”
“Ah… yes, that thing, right?”
“Exactly. Seungpil, come with me for a second.”
“Ah, yes, sir.”
I led Seungpil out of the cave. I left his sister with Mother. It would probably be better for another woman to explain it rather than me.
“Seungpil, did you even read the tutorial on your terminal?”
“The tutorial? No, sir. I skipped it.”
“…Yeah, I figured. You said you got a sudden mission, right?”
“Yes, sir. I received it when the weasels appeared.”
“How many?”
“Four of them.”
“And the reward?”
“Uh, what was it again… coins? They said they’d give me some. Twenty, I think?”
Four weasels for twenty coins. I got fifty for two hyenas. The rates were all over the place.
“Since you skipped the tutorial, I’m guessing you don’t know what the coins are even for?”
“No, sir. Not really.”
“Figures… Alright, I’ll only explain this once, so listen carefully. It’s not complicated. Just think of it like a game system.”
I walked him through everything—where to buy items with coins, what kinds of missions appeared and what rewards they gave—showing him the terminal screen as I went.
“If you buy an item with coins here, it pops out like this.”
I went ahead and bought the 15-coin axe I’d had my eye on earlier, figuring I might as well give Seungpil a weapon while I was at it.
“Whoa!”
Seungpil let out a loud gasp as the axe suddenly materialized in front of him. It was smaller than I expected. More of a hatchet than a proper axe. Cheap goods really were cheap for a reason. Still, if you swung it with real intent, it could easily take a life.
“Use this for now. And don’t miss any sudden missions that pop up. The coins and items you get as rewards are important.”
“Yes, sir! Understood!”
“Tone it down, dumbass. We’re not the only people here. You trying to announce our position to the whole neighborhood?”
“Yes, sir. Understood.”
“Good. And… about what we were talking about earlier.”
“Yes?”
It felt awkward as hell to actually say it out loud. How exactly do you tell someone they have to mess around with their own sister? But I had to. He’d find out soon enough anyway, and it wasn’t something we could hide.
“The way you earn those coins… is by doing sexual stuff with your partner.”
“Sexual stuff with your partner? Wait, if partner means…”
“Yours is your sister. Mine is my mother.”
“Uh… uhhhhh?!”
Seungpil jumped back in shock. The guy had great reactions, I’d give him that.
“Come on, sir! Don’t joke about something like that! It’s not even funny!”
“Do I look like I’m in the mood for jokes right now?”
“Wait… so you’ve already done it, Corporal? With your mother?”
-Thwack!
“Gah!”
I smacked him in the back of the head with my bamboo spear.
“Watch your fucking mouth. You keep talking like that and one day you’re really going to get stabbed, you know that?”
“Ugh… I-I’m sorry…”
Seungpil clutched the back of his head, trembling. He’d earned that hit, so I doubted he’d complain about it to the system. …Probably.
Warning. Continually inflicting even minor injuries will result in penalties. Please be careful.
Yeah, you shut up.
“I’m not saying you have to do it right this second, but looking at how things are on this island, you’ll die if you don’t. Both you and your sister.”
“Ugh… no matter how you look at it, how am I supposed to do that with my own sister?”
“Just do it, you idiot. You think I wanted to do it either?”
“Wait, so you really—ah, wait, wait just a second, sir!”
When I raised the bamboo spear again, Seungpil flinched, thinking he was about to get hit. But this time I wasn’t pointing it at him.
“Shut up and look over there.”
In the bushes I’d pointed at with my spear, a pair of bright yellow eyes glared back at us.
“Huh? Isn’t that a wild boar?”
“It’s a boar, alright. But not a normal one.”
Jet-black fur, sharp tusks. And it was huge. Bigger than the wild boars that showed up near our forward base. It looked larger than an adult human. The kind of size that could rule an entire mountain and no one would question it. It was also snorting angrily, like it was pissed off at us specifically.
“W-what do we do, Corporal Kang Changjae, sir?”
Seungpil was already backing away, clearly scared. I lowered my stance, spear still leveled, never taking my eyes off the boar.
“What do you mean, what do we do? We kill it.”
“You’re going to kill it, sir?”
“You too, dumbass!”
The moment I shouted, the boar charged.
-Kuuuuiiik! Kuik!
Shit! It was massive but insanely fast. And it was coming straight for me.
“You motherfucker!”
I threw myself sideways to dodge and drove my bamboo spear into the side of the charging boar’s neck at the same time.
Thunk.
-Kyiiiiiiiiiik—!!
At least a hand’s length of the spear sank in. The boar began thrashing wildly, twisting its entire body.
“Corporal Kang Changjae, sir!”
The thing was so strong that I got dragged along as it shook its head, still hanging onto the spear.
“Hey! Hit it in the head! Hurry!”
“Uwaaah!”
-Thud. Crack!
Following my order, Seungpil brought the hatchet down. The first swing glanced off the skull, but the second landed dead center on the crown. There was a sound like a watermelon splitting open.
-Kuuuuuiiiiiii——
It was dead. With a spear in its throat and an axe buried in its skull, the boar suddenly lifted its head high before toppling backward with a heavy crash. Its four legs stuck straight up in the air, twitching violently.
“Haa… haa… whoa.”
“Phew. I thought I was gonna die.”
Both Seungpil and I were covered in the boar’s blood from its death throes. But the blood gradually faded like it was evaporating, disappearing without a trace. The moment the boar died completely, even the blood it had spilled vanished along with the corpse.
“Huh? What? What the—?”
Seungpil, who was seeing an animal die on this island for the first time, gave another excellent reaction. It made sense. A boar the size of a small house had just vanished right before his eyes.
-Clatter.
The bamboo spear and hatchet that had been stuck in the boar fell to the ground. Where the carcass had been, a single bright red lump now floated in the air.
“Oppa?! What is that? What was just there?!”
“I don’t know either.”
Hearing the commotion, Seunghee and Mother came out of the cave.
“Changjae, are you hurt anywhere?”
“No, Mother. Did you finish explaining everything?”
“Yes, I explained it, but…”
Just from Mother’s gloomy expression, I could tell Seunghee hadn’t fully understood.
“Well, desperate people dig their own wells. Once they get hungry enough, they’ll figure it out on their own. Don’t worry about it too much.”
“…Okay.”
I hadn’t expected them to understand from words alone anyway. Maybe seeing the painful reality would change their minds? Even so, Mother was clearly worried. Worried that the siblings might stubbornly refuse and end up in danger. I personally thought it was better to make the decision quickly even if it hurt, but… if one of them actually died, Mother would be devastated. What a headache.
“Seungpil.”
“Yes, sir.”
“First, check how many coins you have.”
“Yes, sir.”
While giving him the order, I checked my own remaining coins. The last time I bought water I had 306 left. Then +20 from kissing Mother, +5 from forming the party, -15 for the axe. That should have left me with 316, but I currently had 324 coins.
“So that’s what it was…”
Where had the extra 8 coins come from? The only suspect was the boar we’d just killed. Come to think of it, the same thing had happened with the hyenas. I’d received more coins than my calculations accounted for. Which meant that, aside from the coins from sudden missions, there were additional coins gained from hunting beasts.
It looked like, just like how you got experience and items from killing monsters in games, you could earn coins by killing animals on this island.
“Corporal Kang Changjae, sir, I have 13 coins.”
“Five from forming the party, eight from the boar. Checks out.”
Considering he hadn’t done the tutorial and failed his first mission, that was the only way Seungpil could have gotten coins. Unlike Mother, who had been in thin pajamas, Seunghee had been wearing hospital clothes, so there was nothing to peek at anyway.
“Which means——”
——There was a way to gather coins without doing anything perverted. All we had to do was massacre every living thing on this uninhabited island.