The Next Dimensional Slip Target
My high-school friend of ten years had been abducted to another world.
And he never came back.
When? How? Why?
I knew nothing.
We had all entered the Tower together—the three of us—but in the end I called the friend who had thrown Molotov cocktails separately.
Nickname: BlueMarbleMasterToBe.
Name: Lee Seong-jun.
Highest Tower clear record: likewise the first floor.
Special notes: loved Blue Marble.
And he was good at it.
Even when I rolled the dice for him he still lost, as if he were cheating the other way around.
Now the same friend who had gone so far as to make a bracelet out of dice and wear it everywhere sat with me again, this time alongside people from the Hunter Management Agency who were also investigating the anomaly.
This round I heard the middle-aged hero uncle’s story in a little more detail.
Demon kings appear!
→ The continent is enormous, so there are just as many demon kings.
We need the goddess’s help!
→ Not just one goddess. They all compete like self-employed shopkeepers.
But faith? Jewels? Gems? Blue-glow stones? Cost? Not enough!
→ Okay. One-cost heroes. We’ll summon a bunch of the cheap ones.
“Sounds like some kind of game, doesn’t it? Expedition bonus exp or something?”
The funnier part was that, just as game-fantasy novels take their cues from MMORPGs, that world seemed to work the same way.
Players who hunted monsters far from town received extra experience—expedition bonus exp.
And those fantasy-world rules apparently applied to adventurers who came from far away… or rather, to heroes who crossed dimensions.
[You said you didn’t need the 1000× exp buff and got kicked out of the hero party. So how do you feel right now? WEB serial version.TXT (5.39 MB)]
…If my friend had just killed two or three slimes, hit max level on the spot, gone full UnparalleledHaremSlaveMarketBoughtMaidUniformMarriedPureLove, then casually cut off the demon king’s head and come home, I would have been jealous. I would have teased him for being an otherworld hitman. But I wouldn’t have felt this hollow.
The middle-aged hero’s story was… how to put it…
Is this for real?
The tutorial angel hadn’t even reincarnated him yet, but they still tossed him into practice stages—Goblin Forest, Orc Arena, a desert city with no water. Die twice there and, like the gambler villain from some weird adventure story, they turn your soul into a coin and “safely” store it until the demon king dies… and they actually do it.
“Uh… the more I listen, the more the genre starts to show…?”
This was dark fantasy, wasn’t it?
One little mistake and you were gone.
A game where a single slip-up through the heroine you control locked you into collecting those “and-then-she-got-hypnotized-and-brainwashed” bad-ending event flashbacks was still a god-tier game.
But if the goal was for a possessed player to TS into the heroine (hypnosis-brainwashing resistance 0 ★IMPORTANT★) and still make it safely back to the original world?
Wouldn’t that be a nightmare dark-fantasy world?
“…”
“Are you all right? HypnosisBrai— I mean, Mr. Kim Hyun-woo?”
“Ah. Sorry. My mind wandered for a second.”
Just thinking about it was terrifying.
Honestly, all the heroines I’d burned through… rephrase that?
If the game heroines whose bad endings I’d traded for had cursed me, and I’d been dropped into one of those games with the TS option already on, I would have hit the brainwashed-combatant bad ending of the hypnosis-villain organization ages ago, wouldn’t I?
(Visor and latex bodysuit included ★IMPORTANT★)
+Visor is purple acrylic and only covers the eyes.
+Latex bodysuit can be full-body or leotard, but never call it “high-gray.”
++Anyone who does call it that needs to be rounded up and killed (★IMPORTANT★)
“So… even if it isn’t that Yuseu… whatever continent? Floren Continent? It happens in other places too, right?”
Why was I thinking about all this while talking with the hero who had come all the way to Kim Hyun-woo’s house next to Cheonho Park just to keep a promise and deliver news of a friend’s death?
Obviously because of the Dimensional Slip phenomenon that had swallowed both this uncle and my friend.
There were continents where goddesses hired people to assassinate demon kings, and there were cases where people simply vanished into completely different worlds…
According to a reliable source—an agent of the Hunter Management Agency—there were also cases like novel-possession stories where people got isekai’d into the novel or game they had been reading.
Great. Time to uninstall every dark-fantasy game and cancel the TS-mode subscription.
And the strategy guides? For novels, memorize the hidden-piece locations; for games, install baby-cheat-user-scam mode…?
That was a strategy guide?
“While we’re at it, HypnosisBrainwashingComba— excuse me. The nickname stuck with me… I can also answer the part Mr. Kim Hyun-woo was curious about.”
“Answer…?”
“When you set the world record half a year ago and the Hunter Management Agency demanded an interview, you made quite a scene. You said this, didn’t you?”
“That you hadn’t won the hunter lottery—you’d just made Molotov cocktails at a convenience store and thrown them.”
…Had I?
Was that important right now…?
Well, he brought it up, so it must be related. I just listened.
“…Do you understand?”
“Yeah. Perfectly. …I mean, yes, I understand.”
Aha!
Sure, some people really did win the hunter lottery and suddenly get broken skills!
But the high-rank hunters had basically been kidnapped—or gone on something like a study-abroad trip—to fantasy worlds and come back stronger!
The Hunter Management Agency director who once proposed a National Assembly UFC match had already visited a fantasy continent and taken a demon king’s head!
No wonder their market value was completely different from the Rank D hunters who just farmed potions. It was their own private league!
As the one person who had refused to withdraw the complaint against the reserve-force commander who was the hero of Cheonho-dong?
I wanted to draft a plan in my head to report that high-and-mighty goddess to Gangdong Police Station for kidnapping and murder…
And I still thought that was the last thing I could do for the friend who hadn’t returned from a fantasy world where time flowed differently…
But after hearing how the world actually worked…
Not only the Rank C hunter walking past, but even the Hunter Management Agency employee sitting in my living room right now could be that goddess?
Or an Earth-born believer of a friend-goddess who knew that goddess—the probability wasn’t zero!
Hmm…
Earth was screwed.
Cheonho-dong was screwed as a bonus.
“Is it really okay to hide information like this? People don’t even know when or how their own family might get kidnapped in real time.”
“We’re not hiding it.”
“Excuse me?”
On a whim I searched the goddess’s name in an open chat room. There was already a group chat.
Namuwiki was the bare minimum; the green site even had an official café.
Ugh.
Was it because I spent too much time at home playing adult games?
At least the document creation date looked later than “HypnosisBrainwashingCombatantizationMasterToBe.”
Complainant: Kim Hyun-woo
Defendant: Stinia
Age: (estimated 1,600+ years) Occupation: Otherworld Goddess
The complaint plan I had been writing in my head crumbled before it could reach the end.
“Great. All done. We’re screwed.”
The living room after the middle-aged hero and the Korean Hunter Management Agency staff had all left…
Even though two of us were still there, it was extremely quiet.
The friend I had spoken with two weeks ago had been abducted to a fantasy world where time zones jumped around however they liked.
Meanwhile that Stinia or whatever goddess was living large on Earth-made faith without a single word of “regret.”
If I thought about the high-and-mighty goddess who exerted influence indirectly through her believers… and through that open chat room and the channel that already had a silver play button…
Was she considering the mere fact that she had even bothered to tell me a one-cost consumable had died as some kind of consideration?
Maybe she had already forgotten.
“I thought that fantasy world was dark fantasy, but it was the opposite.”
“…”
“This place is the dark-fantasy world, isn’t it…?”
You never know when or how you’ll get kidnapped.
And two weeks on Earth might be five years over there?
Time flows differently, and if you die, that’s just the end?
“Want to know what scares me the most right now?”
“The volunteer group that cleans our alley and the volunteer group that runs free meals every Thursday are the same organization.”
“And that… church is called the Stinia Church… Are you listening?”
“It used to be a senior-citizen job program. I don’t know when it changed.”
From the moment he sat on the floor until now, I had thrown about ten sentences at the friend who just kept fiddling with his dice in silence. All I got back was one line.
“It was pretty different from my world.”
Still, if you measured by sheer weight of words, everything I had said today put together probably weighed less than that single sentence.
Official Republic of Korea Hunter Management Agency climbing record: 25th floor.
America was roughly 35th.
Apparently only the first floor was a basic aptitude test; after that S-rank hunters formed parties and climbed together. I didn’t know the details past that.
Nickname: BlueMarbleMasterToBe.
Official personal Tower climbing record: 1st floor.
Unofficial personal Tower climbing record: 27th floor.
Experienced Dimensional Slip phenomenon:
Blue Marble World.
I couldn’t pin the exact day, but it was a little before the day I stuffed a Molotov under a first-floor goblin’s feet.
Famous people who floated in and out of the global wealth rankings started vanishing one by one.
About thirty of them were announced as “retired.”
That was the day my friend Seong-jun experienced the Dimensional Slip.
Blue Marble.
Villas red. Buildings yellow. Hotels blue.
Plus four airplanes. And golden keys.
Busan 500,000 won. Jeju 200,000. Most expensive Seoul 1,000,000—land on it and pay 2,000,000.
Cheapest Taipei 50,000.
Land there and the fine—or tourist fee—was 3,000 won.
That kind of Blue Marble World.
A world I named lazily because explaining it was a pain, but…
An Earth where the Tower never appeared.
So a world where a place called Jamsil still existed in a country called Korea.
There, for what felt like only a moment in my time—so short I hadn’t even realized he was gone—my friend went on a world tour.
In a Blue Marble World that had turned a board game recommended for four players into reality.
In a world that applied the classic rule: once a property was bought, no one else could buy it until the owner disappeared.
Out of the hundred prepared airplanes,
when they departed in order,
he boarded the 38th plane
and won.
In other words…
he survived.
Anyone who went bankrupt exploded on the spot, he said. Like a balloon.
“Next is you, Hyun-woo, isn’t it?”
“Good. That’s how you should say it. Reason?”
And then,
my friend who had returned alive from a death game that included thirty celebrities and maybe sixty-nine more who might have been famous,
said, “It’s a gut feeling.”
“It just feels that way, okay? Trust me.”
He named me
the next Dimensional Slip target.