The Chosen Girl
The protagonist’s name was Ire Haslen. The word “Ire” means “the prepared one” in the language of a certain Middle Eastern Arab country. In a religious sense, being prepared meant being chosen by a god. But of all possible gods, it had to be an Outer God? And not just one—roughly fifteen of them. That was far too many to house inside a single human body. At that level, it would have been perfectly normal for her to drop dead at any moment. The only upside was that her tolerance for Pron values was enormous: three hundred thousand. Was she even human anymore?
Carrying a dazzling stat of 290,000 out of 300,000 while still somehow keeping her sanity intact, the girl earned a silent standing ovation from me. The protagonist really had it rougher than in the novel. It was a lifelong regret that I hadn’t noticed sooner. For starters, her appearance alone was far from ordinary. You needed some kind of distinctive look to stand out as the main character, after all. Until I saw her name, I had assumed she was just a passing extra. Apparently she had thought the same about me.
The Rheinland family was famous for their amber eyes, but that trait wasn’t exclusive to them. Of course not. How many people even lived in this universe?
“Uwaaaaagh……”
The girl clutched her head and let out a groan. Was she the type to suffer even from a breeze rustling the leaves?
“It’s a psychotic episode! Restrain her!”
The guards swung their batons. But none of their strikes reached the girl. With agile movements, she closed the distance to me in an instant. She grabbed my collar.
“You—why the hell are you here?!”
Her eyes glowed crimson.
“After everything I went through! How much I struggled to change this insane world! Why do you only show me futures like this?! I’m exhausted! You fucking bastard…! At this point in time, you’re supposed to be rotting away in some trash heap, not standing here! So why… why the hell are you—!”
What is this? Why are you monologuing about things only you understand? She must be mentally fragile from hosting so many Outer Gods. I’ll accept that as a mitigating factor. But that’s as far as my mercy goes. I cannot forgive the rudeness of someone grabbing my collar!
I seized the hand clutching my collar and tried to pry it off with force. It didn’t budge. In that moment, I sensed I was screwed. In terms of raw strength alone, this girl was equal to—or possibly stronger than—Rustilla. Those delicate, slender fingers were deceptively powerful. This is insane.
The next instant, my body flew through the air. The girl, driven by pure rage, had slammed me down in a perfect suplex. The world spun in a full circle. I had never learned how to break a fall. If I hit the urethane floor like this, I’d definitely end up with a curved spine. Wait—my spine was already curved, wasn’t it? Anyway.
“Young master!”
Sonia caught me mid-air.
“What is the meaning of this?”
“Guards!”
Sonia’s fury and the warden’s aggro overlapped. Realizing the situation had grown dangerously serious, the guards drew something from their belts. Tasers. And that crazy protagonist dodged every single one.
“Is she even human…?”
“Prisoner 888888 is escaping! Everyone, after her!”
Suddenly, a sense of déjà vu washed over me. The number stitched on the girl’s prison uniform ended in eight. That was the exact inmate number I had been assigned upon arrival. A Maxwell-type Outer God must have split the world lines.
“……This loop is over.”
The girl sprinted toward the exit. Letting her go like this felt like it would cause a catastrophe. My intuition screamed as much.
“Tsk.”
I clicked my tongue and pulled out my caliper. Then—
“Where do you think you’re going!”
I hurled the A-rank caliper with all my strength. An A-rank tool had the special property of hitting its target with perfect accuracy even if thrown like a dog. The instrument traced a bizarre curve through the air and struck the girl squarely on the back of her head.
Clang!
A clear, ringing sound echoed down the corridor.
Caliber (A-rank) has struck the target with perfect accuracy.
Ire Haslen was a child chosen by the stars. From the Constellation Altair—the god of patience and resolve—she had received the power to stand against Outer Gods. But the young Ire did not yet understand that with great power came great responsibility. The nightmares began from that moment.
—That one doesn’t die easily, does she?
—We can extract the maximum amount of stellar energy from her.
—Let’s make use of her.
Even a stall set up in a back alley with sparse foot traffic could become a famous restaurant if the food was good enough. The girl named Ire Haslen was quickly exposed to the Outer Gods, and the ordeals began. Even the Outer Gods that should have attached themselves to others had crawled into her mind. Their goals were varied. Some stole the coins and stellar energy created by Constellations, while others simply enjoyed watching the girl break.
Even amid all that, Ire did not collapse. She could not collapse. Thanks to a skill called Indomitable. No matter how high her Pron value climbed, it could only approach the total capacity she could endure—it would never truly equal it. At the same time, she could suppress her psychosis for a limited number of hours each day. She had split her life into two: the time spent as a normal person, and the time spent as a lunatic. During the day she lived as a sane human; at night she lived as a madwoman.
This lifestyle pattern drew yet another Outer God.
—How interesting. Perfect for harvesting stellar energy as well. Yes… using you will greatly help me achieve my goal.
[— The Outer God ‘Steel Flowing Like Earth’ has arrived.]
Among the Maxwell-type Outer Gods, one of the highest-ranking named entities had come. Of course, the Ire of the first loop had no idea. She simply thought, Oh, another one that sees me as a toy has shown up. But it was different. ‘Steel Flowing Like Earth,’ Sapaul, was on another level.
He subjugated the Outer Gods already inside Ire’s mind one by one. He established a hierarchy and assigned shares. —Listen well, all of you. This world is survival of the strongest. No matter which faction you belong to, the strong Outer God has the right to rule the weak. If you don’t want to follow my opinion, feel free to challenge me.
No one could stand against Sapaul. Chaos became order, and Sapaul reigned at the pinnacle of that order. In this way, Sapaul became the landlord of Ire’s mind. He forced the other Outer Gods to pay rent and exploited the stellar energy.
[— You have received 1000 coins as sponsorship.]
[— ‘Steel Flowing Like Earth’ has stolen 1000 coins.]
[— Coins are being distributed among the Outer Gods.]
The intensity was so severe that the time Ire could maintain her sanity shrank dramatically. At one point she even thought about dying. —You must endure, Ire. Her patron deity faintly cried out. It struggled desperately to pass coins to her. But that became the pretext. Altair, who had been hiding in the corner of her unconscious, was finally captured by Sapaul.
A Constellation captured by an Outer God. The consequences were horrific. Altair was turned into a complete coin mining machine and squeezed dry by the Outer Gods. It was violated, subjected to terrible experiments, and its stellar body was shattered. As a result, Vega became the darkest star among the Summer Great Triangle. Ire, too, found it hard to endure. All day long she heard nothing but cackling laughter, and bizarre quests flooded in.
[— Murder your parents.]
📍 Reward: None
🎁 Failure: Death
[— Give birth to a child from your avatar body and then cannibalize it.]
📍 Reward: None
🎁 Failure: Death
[— Punch a hole in the Ether Belt.]
📍 Reward: None
🎁 Failure: Death
No matter what she did, death awaited her. If the world was this unfair, wouldn’t it be better to just end her own life? So she had committed suicide before. —Where do you think you’re going? Sapaul would not allow it. He was the first Maxwell-type Outer God to enter Ire’s brain. Every time she tried to die, time rewound. And then he would post another quest. The structure was the same: if she failed, time would rewind again.
—See? Doing it this way lets us permanently extract the stellar energy the girl produces. The energy gained exceeds the energy invested. This is true creation!
Please, just stop.
After roughly a hundred thousand regressions, in one particular loop, Ire began to grit her teeth. This couldn’t continue. She had to break the chains of eternity. So during the hours she remained sane, she poured in every ounce of effort. She trained relentlessly to become stronger, wrote down the locations of useful events and holy relics, and compiled them into notebooks. Those notebooks were stored in a sanctuary protected by a stellar blessing that Outer Gods could not detect. After seven hundred thousand regressions, she had produced eighty such notebooks. She titled them:
Surviving the Outer Deities
There was a limit to how strong one could become in a single loop. Once the quest time ended, she would be forced to die. Still, fragments of her memories and power carried over. At some point she realized that dying near the Ether Belt produced this effect. In what she believed would be her final—888,887th—loop, Ire entered Alcatraz Prison. She had learned that on this planet, which received the Ether Belt’s effects directly, the Outer Gods’ schemes would weaken. No quests appeared. Aside from having her stellar energy slowly siphoned, nothing else happened.
‘Now I’ve done everything I can. All that’s left is to watch the world move on its own.’
She had relocated every necessary holy relic and passed on opportunities to those she judged as “key figures.” Now she could only entrust the rest to them. And that prediction was spectacularly wrong from the very beginning.
Idel von Rheinland. The worst piece of cosmic trash in the universe—who should have died in the early stages—was still alive.
The mental landscape I read from the girl using the caliper’s unique function ended there. At a glance it felt like “I’m suffering, heeng heeng.” In other words, pure misfortune porn. Such melodramatic stories were common. But since Outer Gods loved watching others suffer, it couldn’t be helped.
“Hmm.”
I stroked my chin in thought. There were more than a few questions. First, after regressing that many times, why hadn’t she recognized my face? Second, if this girl wasn’t the one who had possessed me into this world, then who the hell was?
“I truly thank you, student Idel. It seems I owe you more than I expected.”
For now, none of that mattered. I spoke to the guards who were trying to drag the collapsed girl away.
“Just a moment.”
“What?”
“Could I take that child with me?”
“You’re talking nonsense again.”
But she really did catch my eye. I fiddled with the “Organize and Tidy” potion I had received as a reward for resolving the Celestine incident and fell into thought. Even so, a mental strength of three hundred thousand… She was exactly the kind of talent our lab desperately needed…….