IRL Duel (1)

The pursuit of Ggobongi began in earnest, but it ended almost immediately.

It wasn't as if he ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had orchestrated a calculated escape; rather, he had simply scampered all over the place in a frenzy of wild excitement. To someone who had spent his entire life gazing upon a blurry, indistinct world, having everything suddenly snap into crystal-clear focus was bound to be overwhelming. Having lived with congenital poor vision from birth, he was finally seeing reality with his own two eyes. If I were in his shoes, calling it a new world wouldn't even begin to cover it—it was practically a miracle.

"Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. How long has it even been since I gave you those glasses, and you've already managed to smash them?"

"……."

The decisive reason Ggobongi had been caught was, absurdly enough, because his glasses had broken. Even if he couldn't channel mana, a gorilla was still a gorilla—his raw physical strength vastly surpassed that of any human. Eyeglasses, by contrast, were fragile contraptions that would snap with the slightest excess force. Add a burst of manic excitement to the mix, and their untimely destruction was practically an inevitable conclusion.

Thank goodness only the frame snapped.

I glanced back and forth between the cleanly severed frames and the utterly dejected ape. Seeing a guy who usually spent his days scowling fiercely wear such a pitiful, crestfallen expression felt distinctly surreal. That was just how blissfully happy he must have been to regain his sight—even if that happiness had proved short-lived.

"Just wait here. I'll see if I can get them fixed up."

"……."

At those words, Ggobongi locked eyes with me. His gaze was brimming with desperate, pleading hope, silently asking if they truly could be repaired. I let out a soft chuckle at his expression, then promptly opened the Gallery interface.

Not long after I traded the broken frames over, Praise the Sun returned the fully repaired glasses. Naturally, he tacked on a joke about charging a repair fee next time. If Ggobongi managed to snap them again, I'd certainly have to pay him an honest price for the trouble.

"Here you go. If you break them again, I'm padlocking them to your face, got it?"

"Xie xie."

I took that as roughly meaning 'thank you.' Ggobongi slid the glasses onto his snout without missing a beat.

Perhaps because the lenses carried such an overwhelmingly strong prescription, his countenance looked considerably gentler than before. Whenever he took the glasses off, he resembled an ill-tempered, vicious gorilla looking for a brawl, but with them on, the exact opposite held true. His eyes appeared comically shrunk behind the thick lenses, emphasizing the goofy, harmless innocence typical of primates.

It's honestly amazing how well they fit him.

Gorillas practically had no nasal bridge to speak of, so I had worried the frame would slip down constantly, but that concern proved entirely unfounded. Because his skull was bizarrely massive, wearing the frames felt closer to strapping on a pair of tight goggles. Even through vigorous physical activity, they barely budged.

Earlier, he only broke them because he kept ripping them off and shoving them back on over and over.

Now that Ggobongi's eyesight was sorted, I reviewed my questionnaire one final time. There was another question I desperately wanted answered after the matter of Lyse Kraone—though it was quite possible this topic might prove deeply sensitive for him.

"Ggobongi. Would you take a look at this?"

"Ooh, ooh."

Perhaps because his vision was now crystal clear and his prized possession had been restored, Ggobongi didn't scowl as he began reading through the parchment.

"……."

I take that back. The moment he absorbed the text, his face contorted instantly.

His features curdled with intense displeasure. Truth be told, I had anticipated this reaction given how touchy the subject was.

If I were him, I'd be pissed off too.

The question inquired about the Chief Gorilla, who was presumed to be his brother—asking whether they had studied martial arts together under a man named Wi Ho-chang, and precisely why Ggobongi had been cast out of the troop. While the Chief Gorilla possessed a surprisingly gentle temperament for a beast, I still wanted to hear the full story from Ggobongi's perspective.

"……#%@!%"

After agonizing in silence for a long moment, Ggobongi finally parted his jaws. Given that I had just procured a pair of glasses for him, he seemed willing enough to indulge me this much. I recorded every sound he uttered and immediately forwarded the clip to the Heavenly Demon. My original instinct was to post it directly to the Gallery, but I held back, wary of sparking unnecessary pandemonium.

The phrases sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place them. Seeing even the unflappable Heavenly Demon react with overt shock suggested it had to be a stage of power unimaginably exalted.

The Heavenly Demon pressed repeatedly, demanding to know whether the Blood Demon had truly undergone Feathered Ascension. Though out of my depth, I posed the question back to Ggobongi just as she instructed.

Ggobongi didn't seem familiar with an esoteric term like 'Feathered Ascension'; he merely insisted that the man had flown up into the sky. To emphasize his point, he added the nuance of 'from time to time.'

Apparently, every time the Blood Demon drifted up toward the heavens, the panicked troop would leap up and desperately cling to the hems of his trousers to drag him back down.

Whether it was Feathered Ascension or something else entirely, one thing was clear: the Blood Demon, Wi Ho-chang, was no longer in this forest. While the full picture remained obscure, he seemed to have led a remarkably turbulent, colorful life before departing.

"#$%%!!"

The moment the topic shifted to what transpired after the Blood Demon ascended, Ggobongi erupted into incandescent rage. When I asked for a translation, the gist was that as soon as the Blood Demon vanished, he ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had been unceremoniously banished from the troop.

The backlash from the rest of the gorillas had been so overwhelming that his brother Wi Heuk—the Chief Gorilla—had been forced to make that painful choice against his will. Under such circumstances, Ggobongi couldn't help harboring deep resentment toward his kin.

From a pure survival standpoint, I suppose they had no choice, but still……

Ggobongi was an albino gorilla. A stark white silhouette stood out glaringly wherever he went. One wrong move could endanger the entire troop, making banishment a standard evolutionary response. Given how severe the hostility had been, he probably ought to have been driven out long before, but the Blood Demon had personally shielded him the entire time. In fact, the reason Wi Ho-chang had slain the former alpha was precisely because that leader had insisted on exiling Ggobongi despite the Blood Demon's explicit orders.

Was he someone who suffered trauma regarding that sort of thing?

Between the rumor that he had massacred a specific ethnicity out of vengeance and his fierce protection of the outcast Ggobongi, it wasn't a stretch to imagine. Perhaps Wi Ho-chang had belonged to a persecuted, ostracized minority himself, making him acutely sensitive to such discrimination.

Well, that was merely my personal hypothesis, so there was no verifying it. To glean the full truth, my only option would be to pay a visit to the Chief Gorilla, Wi Heuk. He might have penned journals over the years, or perhaps his master had left behind relics.

Right in the middle of our exchange, the Heavenly Demon floated an utterly bizarre proposition. Feathered Ascension meant becoming a transcendent immortal—in layman's terms, literal deification. Currently, the reason the Blood Cult had splintered into disorganized rabble causing chaos solely within the Gallery was due to the Blood Demon's disappearance. But if it turned out that their revered leader had actually achieved divine ascension? That would hand them retroactive legitimacy on a silver platter, giving them every excuse to canonize him as a holy martyr.

Even back on Earth, unhinged terrorists pulled all sorts of insane stunts, and this place is ten times worse.

Had the Heavenly Demon suggested this without realizing the ramifications? Highly doubtful. She had brought it up precisely because she had a scheme in mind.

The Gallery was plagued by countless malicious trolls, but among them, the foulest cesspool belonged to the Blood Cult. Not only did they zealously worship the mass-murdering Blood Demon, but they also routinely incited copycat atrocities whenever boredom struck. The sole reason related posts couldn't be found via the search bar was because the Juddak and the Heavenly Demon ruthlessly deleted them and handed out bans.

However, unless a user held a registered Fixed Nick, filtering anonymous Fluid Nicks was practically an exercise in futility. Unlike fixed users, fluid users would simply pop right back up under a new identity shortly after receiving a ban.

According to one user's theory, it had to do with the fluctuating mana they absorbed. Just as the water one drank each day wasn't made of the exact same molecules, the ambient mana absorbed was constantly shifting. Hence, banning a fluid nick carried little long-term weight.

Why were Fixed Nicks different, then? One might ask if fixed users didn't also absorb varying mana daily. The mechanics differed slightly: while fluid nicks were tethered to raw mana flow, fixed accounts were anchored to the user's permanent dantian. Naturally, while these theories sounded plausible, they were ultimately just unverified speculation, so it was best not to dwell on them too deeply.

Uh…… wait a minute, this is starting to ring a bell.

I had seen plenty of such types back on the internet—the kind of users that made you wonder, Is this guy legitimately suffering from severe mental illness? Some were mere role-players, but among them lurked the 'genuine' ones, brandishing spine-chilling rhetoric and warped logic that made your hairs stand on end.

Now, one might ask: is it really so strange to idolize a historical figure from decades ago?

When there are literally people on Earth who simp for Hitler, simping for the Blood Demon is practically par for the course.

The dawn of the internet accelerated information exchange, but it also rapidly disseminated rotten, toxic ideologies. Furthermore, because communication traveled so swiftly, disinformation could be woven with terrifying subtlety. Yet when you stripped away the mystique and examined the individuals behind the screens, the vast majority were pathetic nobodies.

Perhaps that was precisely what the Heavenly Demon was aiming for: luring out the roaches hidden in the woodwork to exterminate them in one fell swoop.

Baiting the cockroaches is fine and dandy, but……

Who was going to do the exterminating? That was an entirely different headache. Still, if the Heavenly Demon had brought it up herself, she had to have an angle.

To be completely blunt, I could just dump the post and wash my hands of it—pure pleasure without responsibility, as the saying went. Ever since the Undead King Incident, I had grown much more cautious, but historically, I had always found myself parked right in the eye of the storm anyway.

Was the Gallery alone insufficient to stave off her profound solitude and boredom? Hearing the Heavenly Demon's unwavering reassurance, I deliberated for a moment before arriving at a decision.

Getting banned over an impulsive upload would be an utter disaster. I immediately dispatched a message to the Head Admin.

Come to think of it, she wasn't wrong.

At any rate, with official moderator approval secured, I uploaded the recorded footage without altering a single frame.

The die was cast. I quietly closed out of the Gallery.

From here on out, the comments section and new board threads were bound to devolve into pure, unadulterated chaos. Since dinnertime was fast approaching anyway, I wrapped up my chores for the afternoon.

"Ggobongi. Come head up with me. You other guys too, let's go."

"Kyuu!"

"……."

I headed up toward the river alongside my animal companions to gather provisions for supper. Normally, I would have had to haul the fish traps out of the water all by myself, but now I had Ggobongi. Once I demonstrated the technique for hauling them in, he replicated the motions with effortless ease.

This is exactly why having hired muscle is such a blessing.

Gaining an extra pair of massive hands made life incomparably comfortable—even if delicate tasks like scaling, gutting, and cooking still had to be handled entirely by me.

"Ke-eeng!"

"What kind of herbs did you bring today?"

Father Raccoon had also dropped by, carrying a massive haul of herbs this time around. The plants were adorned with striking, pure-white blossoms, though I'd have to ask about their precise medicinal properties later.

Once dinner was devoured and the cleanup concluded, I logged back into the Gallery, anticipating that the Blood Cult zealots would be throwing a colossal tantrum by now.

Just as expected.

Right on cue, the Blood Cult and the rest of the forum users were engaged in a ferocious, mud-slinging flame war. Of course, given how fundamentally degenerate the Blood Cult was, their arguments held zero moral or logical weight, but the forum users' knack for getting under their skin was truly magnificent, unleashing an astonishing barrage of verbal firepower.

Naturally, that single line had sent the entire cult into an apoplectic frenzy. Because the attack was rooted in undeniable, recorded fact, not a single one of them could offer an effective rebuttal.

I wonder if the Heavenly Demon will really be able to handle them all?

Pondering that thought, I navigated over to the Hall of Fame board. Almost immediately, a post with a wildly eye-catching title arrested my attention, and I clicked on it as if possessed.

It was impossible to tell whether this was an elaborate roleplay post or completely genuine. If it had been posted by a Fluid Nick, I would have brushed it off, but the fact that they had registered a dedicated Fixed Nick gave it an unsettling veneer of credibility.

Well, with the sheer number of certifiable lunatics out there, anything's possible……

It didn't particularly rattle me. If they wanted to come, let them come. Just as I was about to leave a comment, I noticed the replies already pinned beneath it.

There it was, sitting proudly in plain view: the Heavenly Demon's definitive reply.

Wait…… is she actually arranging an IRL duel right now?

It felt like some truly spectacular entertainment was about to explode.