By Chance, in My Childhood
Someone had once asked Lupin a question.
Lupin answered.
The short conversation the two of them held through comments ended there. The other person's reply came too late—Lupin couldn't sit still in the meantime, and had already gone off to open another treasure chest.
Anyway, to pick the story back up: the first time Lupin opened a treasure chest, it really was the reward inside that she coveted.
But that only holds for the first time, or the second.
After cycling through this game and that, after opening chests thousands of times over, even Lupin came to understand. Ah. It isn't the reward in the box anymore. I've gone mad for the act itself—of opening a chest with something rare inside.
And when she felt the unease that had clung to her ever since her transmigration into this other world dissolve as she opened a treasure chest, a thought even worse than that one occurred to her.
Holy shit. This is all-natural dopamine.
And so, when she looked upon this wretched result she had carved out with her own hands over five years, Lupin reflected. Deeply.
From now on, I'm going to live with my eyes on the world around me. That habit of sprinting the instant a treasure chest comes into view, no matter what's happening right in front of me—that has to go, too. I'll find a weapon that fits my hand, try enhancing it, take a real opponent apart...
But a sparrow can't pass a mill without stopping, and who was it that said people aren't made to be fixed?
"Bartender. One more bottle... one more, please."
"Guest. This is the last bottle."
"What? Already?"
"Yes. We close at six in the morning. The doors shut in thirty minutes."
The first day without a treasure chest.
Lupin wandered with no destination, clinging to the belief that somewhere in the world an undetected chest still remained. Late that first night she found this bar, and for a week now, the moment they opened, she would show up, pour liquor down her throat, and spend hours on end staring at nothing but the space behind the counter.
She had found an object shaped like a treasure chest.
"Ah... actually, there's one thing I'm curious about."
"Go ahead."
"Back there.... What's inside that treasure chest?"
The bartender answered with a troubled look.
"It isn't a treasure chest. It's an icebox that happens to look like one. Shall I put some ice in and set you up with a rocks glass?"
"May I open it?"
"Sorry?"
"May I open it myself? With my own hands?"
"Ah. Uh... well, that's..."
"Just once. I want to open it."
Lupin looked at the bartender with a desperate face. Please. Just once.
"We're not supposed to, but... you're the only customer left. This way."
"Thank you!"
Wham!
Lupin had bowed so deeply that her head met the bar with a crack. The startled bartender looked from the table to her forehead and back again, but somehow both were perfectly fine. Only Lupin's brow had gone a little red.
A moment later she stepped behind the counter without a shred of hesitation, crouched in front of the box, spread both arms wide, and pressed her palms flat to the lid. Now, if I ease it up nice and slow, the treasure inside will—hehehe.
"If I open it... like this..."
Fearing how badly the expectant Lupin was about to be disappointed, the bartender slipped in a quiet word.
"Um... there's really nothing in there but ice?"
"Hey now! It's different when I open it, you know?!"
A shout loud enough to make the whole bar ring. The bartender flinched for no good reason, fidgeted with the curled ends of her hair, and backed away.
Lupin apologized a beat too late, but the mood was already past saving.
"Ah. I... I'm sorry. You even went along with an unreasonable request..."
"Ah—no, it's fine! Go on, open it!"
This is the worst. Snapping at someone who didn't deserve it. There is no nightmare customer quite like this one.
"Anyway, thank you..."
Of course, what Lupin had told the bartender wasn't entirely a lie. A treasure chest that held nothing but garbage for an ordinary person became something precious once it passed through Lupin's hands. The glittering five-colored cluster of stars hidden beneath a magical beast's carapace as it crumbled away like sand. The holy blood stuck fast between the pages of old books where centipedes crawled. The martial soul that had sprouted like a new shoot among twisted, broken polearms. Had Lupin not found them, they would still be lying undiscovered somewhere in the world.
So she had a certain confidence of her own. She even nursed the hope that she might find the remains of an ice spirit, of all things. All right. Verification starts now. Ta-da-da-daaaaan.
"...Hm."
The lid came up, and the white interior of the icebox lay bare. Closing time was near, and the inside was as empty as the cold that struck her face. No ice. No treasure tucked between it, either. Just nothing.
When Lupin stayed frozen in that posture for a long while, the bartender asked, carefully.
"Is there... something?"
Right. It's a concept pub dressed up like a medieval tavern. Of course it wasn't a treasure chest. It wasn't even marked as an Abandoned Chest. Of course it wasn't.
...Of course it wasn't.
"Guest?"
She clutched at the thread of her consciousness with that stopgap called a mental victory, but five bottles of hard liquor and an overdose of red potions had left her in a state where not collapsing was the impressive part.
"Ah, fuck."
Crash.
"Guest. Guest?!"
That night, Lupin's bed was a snow-removal tool bin.
"Nngh."
Her arms and legs were numb. She was tangled through the snow pushers and brooms as if someone had knitted her into them, and she couldn't pull free.
Most likely she had mistaken the rust-browned thing for a treasure chest and squirmed her way inside.
"Nnnnghhhh."
If she smashed every tool in the bin, escape would be easy. But what crime had the innocent snow gear committed? Lupin let out a long sigh and muttered.
"To think there are no treasure chests..."
It was a world like a game, not a game. There had been no update, so the situation she was in now was no different from a future that had always been scheduled to arrive. If she had taken them slowly, it never would have come to this. She simply hadn't known the concept of chewing carefully before swallowing.
"Now there really isn't a single treasure chest left........"
As the drunkenness faded, her hands and feet began to tremble again, and the world in front of her went dark. I should have searched more slowly. I should have rationed them!
But regret came too late. A treasure chest, once opened, does not come back. From here on, Lupin would have to live in a bleak world without a single chest in it.
Cosmic horror. The SCP Foundation. None of that nonsense was as frightening as a reality with no chests. And what terrified her most of all was that this reality would not last a day, or two—it would go on for three days, four, all the way until she died.
No matter how far the road, no matter how brutal the mountain range, it had all been fun.
Ack! I was wrong. I won't complain, dragging dogs and shit and fuck into it, just because an appraisal turned up a single scrap of paper. I won't threaten to drill a hole through someone's skull with a coin just because a huge treasure chest had one worn-out fairy tale inside. I'll open whatever you give me, and I'll be grateful. Please, just put more chests out in the field. Even one a day would be enough, please!
Wow, creating a treasure chest. Easier than creating a world!
....
She had wished this fervently, and still there was no answer.
"God is fucking dead!"
Lupin wrenched her body with everything she had. A dull crack, and several snow tools snapped and went flying out of the bin. A few passersby on the road startled and glanced over, then met Lupin's eyes and immediately hurried on.
You mischievous god who hid the treasure chests. Stand up straight. Why didn't it occur to you that someone could find all 32,768 of them in five years? The idea that no such person exists in the world is prejudice. This is the fault of whoever hid the chests so carelessly. So what if I cleared an average of eighteen treasure chests a day—
"Hm?"
In that instant, something glittering fluttered off her body and fell. A hand shot out, traced an arc, and snatched the falling object on reflex.
It was a business card of pliant metal.
She had spent the entire week whining in that bar. Maybe the back carried a polite little request that she please, at last, stop coming. Considering what she'd done, Lupin figured it was a mercy they hadn't called a sheriff to throw her out, and she turned the card over.
"......Ha."
A scoff escaped her before she could stop it. It was obviously a lie. The treasure chest at the bar had turned out to be an ordinary icebox, hadn't it? Fool me once, and I won't be fooled twice.
"No. That's not right."
But she denied the thought almost at once, and suspicion bloomed. That damned possibility. The happiness circuit. She had thought the whole thing burned to ash over the course of a week, and yet it was still alive. Tenacious.
"I don't know yet..."
Thanks to having possessed the body of a Dimensional Wanderer (Phantom Thief), Lupin could mark every treasure chest within a certain range just by sweeping her eyes across it. That was why, even after finding more than thirty thousand chests over five years, she had never actually walked the entire map. True to form as a Korean, she had hell-optimized her route. No—optimized her pathing.
Besides, it still hadn't been confirmed whether 32,768 was the number of chests Lupin had detected, or the number of chests in the entire world.
One week into unemployment. The anxiety was real, and so was the urgency clawing at her, but this was exactly the moment she needed to be calm.
"...Right. First, I should just go and see."
If she did happen to find a treasure chest, she would thank the bartender who had handed her information this precious even after a full week of Lupin being a nightmare customer.
Twenty-one hours later.
A small inn tucked into a remote valley.
"Boss. You really think that woman's coming?"
Cigarette smoke filled the room, but it couldn't cover the raw smell of blood. The innkeeper, who had been excited to receive so many guests for the first time in ages, had his throat cut before he could even collect payment for the rooms and the food, and now lay abandoned on the kitchen floor.
"Vatslava said so herself. A woman who's done nothing but drink herself stupid and talk nonsense for a week. Sounded like she was on something, too. You think someone like that can tell sense from nonsense?"
"...Fair. The way she loses her mind over anything that looks like a treasure chest, she wasn't in her right mind."
The man with the cigarette was the boss of one branch of a human-trafficking ring, in the business of kidnapping young men and women and selling them on the underground slave market. On days when a valuable piece of goods turned up, at least ten members gathered. Today there were fifteen.
A face that was decent enough to look at. Rare, undyed pink hair. And on top of that, beautiful violet irises that flashed sky-blue when they caught the light. Premium goods. From experience, the boss was certain this target would sell to some noble or collector for a very high price.
But the subordinate who had raised the question was still green. So he only half believed it. Would a woman really come all the way out to a place this deserted just to look for a treasure chest? He had sold plenty of people before. That some crazy bitch would actually walk into a trap this absurd was something he simply could not—
Knock, knock.
As if to laugh at his doubts, a vigorous knock came with the voice of a woman bright with anticipation.
"Anyone in there? I came because I want to find some treasure~"
