Chapter 12
Chapter 12
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 12
Chapter Title: System
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Dead?
No matter how I looked at it, this felt like way too pathetic a death.
I gently prodded the woman sprawled out on the desert sands with my toe.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Only after that did the realization slowly sink in that this might actually be real.
"...For real?"
I couldn't believe a human body could go this limp.
Her skin was like dried parchment, her muscles quivering like frayed threads, and there wasn't a speck of life anywhere on her.
No matter how I checked, she was dead.
No matter how I scanned her, there wasn't a single sign she might come back.
But just leaving her like this felt wrong...
And if she really was a Management Bureau agent, this was a pretty big deal.
Best to take her home first and check her out properly.
The problem was how to move her.
I briefly imagined picking her up.
Her skin would probably crumble, her bones creak... and above all...
Touching a dead body with my hands? Yeah, that was a hard no. A major nope.
So I thought of another option.
"Wind, you around?"
No answer came, but the air around me rippled faintly.
The being who always heard my call and came rushing over.
Invisible, but I could feel it listening intently to my words.
The wind seemed to understand what I wanted, hesitating a bit before tentatively asking if it should carry this body back to my house.
No voice, but grasping the intent was easy enough.
"Yeah, that's right. Do me a favor?"
The moment I spoke, the air felt clearer, fresher.
The wind accepted my request gladly, promising to bring the woman home.
Perfect.
Then I could head back first and wait.
I floated lightly into the sky and flew toward the house I'd made.
Slower than the wind, so by the time I arrived, the body should already be delivered to the front yard.
Lost in that thought, I suddenly found myself landing right in front of the house.
I touched down lightly just before the door.
"...Huh?"
No body anywhere—front, back, around the house. Nothing.
The wind should've been way faster than me.
I looked around, then tried calling out just in case.
"Wind. Not here yet?"
This time, the wind responded immediately, but the motion felt off.
Twisting, trembling, scattering in panic like it didn't know where to go.
This wasn't joy or playfulness... it felt like anxiety.
The wind conveyed its answer very, very carefully.
The body...
...had vanished.
"...What?"
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇ The System was humanity's most perfect artificial anomaly.
An anomaly created to understand anomalies.
A colossal computing engine built on the foundation of science, trained on every record and pattern of anomalies humanity had ever gathered.
No heart, no nerves, no emotions—but in their place, it thought and reached conclusions at speeds no human could match.
The Management Bureau's brain and core.
The absolute entity handling every stage of management, detection, and analysis.
Without the System?
Humanity would survive, but modern civilization wouldn't last.
Anomalies weakened the moment they were observed, lost power once understood.
And once fully analyzed, they could no longer exist as anomalies.
More precisely, they became phenomena—fading into 'science' that humanity could comprehend.
The System handled that analysis.
Humanity could sleep peacefully, sip coffee, and head to work because the System observed, dismantled, and neutralized anomalies across the globe 24 hours a day.
But right now...
That massive brain was in clear overload.
⚠️ OVERLOAD ALERT ⚠️ Processing Warning
Overheat Warning
Cognition Network Unstable
Internal logs were breaking format, jumbling together.
Warning messages cut off midway or looped endlessly; numbers overlapped in mismatched digits.
Overload alerts blared across multiple layers simultaneously, and parts of the computation network were unreadable.
Reality alteration detected: 12 instances.
Rationality alteration detected: 57 instances.
Record alteration detected: 153 instances.
The System could no longer distinguish real values from errors.
And it knew why.
At the center of every alteration was a single entity.
Yet the System couldn't even record its name.
The instant it tried to access, data blanked out. The moment it observed, its view crumpled like wadded paper.
Information on that entity erased itself before storage, blurred before analysis, scattered before tracking.
As if the world itself was shoving information in one direction.
Twisting every record system and perception structure to deliberately hide something.
One conclusion remained.
This world... was moving for someone.
The entire observer network was shaking—from the outside.
Not the planet, but the world itself.
No level 9 anomaly could intervene on this scale.
An indefinable existence.
An unpredictable existence.
So the System reached its verdict.
⚙ DISPATCH ORDER ⚙ IRE-001 Field Agents: 5 Mission: Identify Cause & Confirm Unknown Anomaly The agents had already deployed.
And the System had long prepared one safeguard for them.
Internal body cams and post-mortem transmission devices—implanted in every Management Bureau agent.
Activated by biometric signals, automatically saving and transmitting the final 5 seconds before death.
The System's ultimate insurance.
⚙ POST-MORTEM STORAGE ⚙ Entity Transfer: 5/5 Complete Subspace preservation tech was simple in principle.
Erase the target's existence info from reality, then shove it into the gaps between spaces.
Living beings couldn't be sent—their existence info kept updating.
So if an agent was deemed beyond saving in combat, the System force-terminated life signs and transmitted the corpse to subspace.
A cold measure to allow pristine investigation back on Earth.
Right now, that subspace held...
Five corpses, arriving one by one.
The System's monitoring first checked the latest arrival: Management Bureau Level 6 mental-specialized agent Lee Sangwon.
Corpse stable.
Time of death clear.
Transmission normal.
Next: her internal body cam.
The System ran its standard auto-check routine.
And in that instant, its entire network froze.
⚙ BODY CAM STATUS ⚙ [?]
Power: ON The body cam's power was on.
Designed to shut off automatically after death.
Normally, it should be off. Recordings sealed immediately post-transmission.
Yet now... power on.
Parts of the computation network overheated, flashing red warnings. Unused logs leaked from memory layers, tangling together.
The prediction module spat errors every minute; analysis that should take 0.01 seconds dragged past 3.
The System was a machine, but this was as close to shock as it got.
⚙ ANALYSIS ⚙ Status: Inexplicable Probability: 0.00000004% ERROR? NO. REAL.
The System reacted unconsciously, instinctively.
Like a human.
A gesture to recheck the body cam.
Access.
Verify.
Then every alarm screamed at once.
🚨 ANOMALY DETECTED! 🚨 ANOMALY CONFIRMED! EMERGENCY!
The System initiated a secondary diagnostic immediately.
Even knowing it was programmatically meaningless.
To check the body cam for mental contamination.
Mental contamination only affected living beings or artificial spirits.
A device without mind, consciousness, or senses like a body cam couldn't suffer 'mental' contamination—simple corruption, maybe, but not that.
Under normal circumstances.
But the System wasn't sure 'normal' applied anymore.
So it activated the mental contamination scanner: official name, NOX-Scan, 7th-stage resonance contamination meter.
Scan initiating.
The System half-expected the result.
Normal.
No contamination.
Measurement impossible.
Any of those would make sense.
But one value was absolutely impossible.
One the System hadn't even considered.
And there it was on the screen.
A single red dot.
Then a line shot upward, blasting past max danger levels.
The meter screamed warnings like it was in agony.
Just before the graph spiked off the screen, the System halted computations for a split second.
Self-diagnostic module rebooted twice; all other sensors went eerily quiet, as if listening.
The meter's panel flickered erratic white noise, meaningless light.
Then the red line burst through.
The graph pierced the display.
Soaring beyond the machine, transcending its tool-like role.
Afterward, in the empty air where nothing should be, a red line reappeared.
It curved slowly in midair, tracing a thick red heart.
[♥?]