Did You Think Before Digging the Trap?
Modern people are the weaklings civilization has produced.
They live convinced they stand above everything else, yet the moment they are thrown into the wild, intellect—the very emblem of their superiority—turns out to be an illusion, powerless before instinct.
What chance does an office worker who did nothing but commute and play games really have of surviving a fall into another world? Could he truly last longer than a wild beast's newborn cub?
Whenever the argument broke out on the gallery, Lupin's answer never changed, even when she ate a one-day ban for stirring the fight.
The position she clung to at the company was that of the hardworking, pitiful employee. Rather than chasing anything special, she made it her life's motto to pursue the ordinary, and to be content with the life she already had.
That was what an ordinary person looked like, to Lupin. A life that did not wish to become someone special. A life that only wanted to be a low weed growing along the ground.
To Lupin, raising hell in another world was forever a fictional story inside someone else's creation, and that stance hardly changed even right after the possession. It was why she had wasted her time holed up in a village, doing work she didn't even want, solely so she wouldn't drop dead.
But a person can't just hand their habits away. Do work you hate all you like—without the game that let her have any fun, and the treasure chests inside it, how was a person not supposed to waste away? She groaned and suffered like that until, miraculously, she discovered a treasure chest, and only then did her new life finally begin.
From dirt-spoon poverty to a star spoon, in a single breath. At the first-birthday grab, a lunatic treasure-butcher was born, seizing Brother Taechang in one hand and Destiny's Star in the other.
And because things had turned out that way, Lupin's worship of her status window and of Destiny's Star stayed fanatical for all five years. When she collapsed after eating a poisonous mushroom? A halo on her head, she spent the entire time she was unconscious cradled in her star-sister's arms, simply glad she wouldn't have to go meet parents she had never once laid eyes on.
Lupin had, plain and simple, stayed in treasure-chest mode the whole way through. Before she knew it, she had become the spoiled golden child who shoved anything troublesome off onto her older brother and sister. A single gold bar, packed as if it counted as travel money? She could skip a meal for being too busy chasing a treasure chest. She could never skip a treasure chest on account of a meal.
So she ate whatever she picked up. Collapse, and her poison resistance rose. She recovered on a regenerative power beyond any ordinary human's. Repeat that enough times, and this was what her poison resistance looked like now.
Cumulative Growth Values
…, Poison Resistance VIII, …
Which was why Lupin still could not have dreamed that an alarmingly dangerous poison, blended by the cult, was spreading through the air even now.
The boss, who wanted nothing more than for her to please get poisoned already, asked with care.
"You aren't tired, or anything of the sort?"
"I'm still perfectly fine, though?"
"True enough. That kick a moment ago showed no mercy either."
"The mayor who keeps jamming his dick into everything is way more dangerous."
"...What did you just say?"
"I said the mayor who keeps jamming his head into everything is way more dangerous."
"Ah, yes. Please, just don't hit the back of my head. I grew dizzy a moment ago and didn't quite catch you."
He put on an unbothered face, but the boss was on edge. The strongest of the women he had raped was Grade 5, and they had already walked more than twice as far as he had with that woman. One way or another, to the boss's eye, she was an elephant of a bitch. The time for a reaction had long since passed. So why? He had no way to gauge how much aura she had left, and it was driving him mad.
Whether she knew it or not, Lupin only prattled on with complaints.
"Is the way out still far?"
"My apologies. My legs are a little sore, you see. Finding the path is somewhat limited."
But Lupin, too, had finally hit her limit. Ugh, the no-fun vibes are creeping in. The limit of her patience. So when, exactly, was he going to tell her what was actually going on?
She consulted her belly-button watch, which informed her that barely fifteen minutes remained before the time she had promised to meet Yegor. A promise. A promise had to be kept....
Haaawn.
Lupin yawned wide, missed the pebble at her feet, and staggered just a little. To the anxious boss, that trivial slip became the decisive signal.
Finally...!
Her staggering pace slowed, followed by an eight-yawn combo. The blood pooled in his lower body relocated, of its own accord, the place where his consciousness was supposed to sit, and handed down judgment in place of the boss's brain. Not a spinal reflex. A crotch reflex. At that, the pain where he had been struck vanished without a trace, and a vitality all his own came surging up. His brain, stripped of reason, appointed itself spokesman for his lower half and declared it. Union. Yin and yang—let us become one!
"Oh. Found it. This is the place!"
"Whoa. Finaaally."
Unlike the boss, whose motivation was geysering, a truly limp exclamation popped out of Lupin's mouth.
"You need only open it like this."
Clunk. The massive stone door creaked open to the left and right, driven by some suspicious mechanism, and an eerie grind of iron came with it. Step through the fully opened door, and what awaited was a space shaped like a flat cylinder. The walls had a peculiar structure, as if iron bars had been laid over them.
While Lupin looked around this way and that, the boss spoke up in a voice bright with excitement, all too casual.
"Go on in ahead. If we don't want it known that we came this way, the door will have to be shut again."
Only then did the light return to Lupin's eyes. Was the twist finally about to be revealed? Was he planning to drop the act and come in with a full assault? And yet she couldn't see a single hidden emplacement or trap. Her eyes, sharp even in the dark, did pick out a bed-like object set dead in the center, but nothing else stood out. Her sensitive nose, however, caught one scent—the fragrance of a treasure chest. It was monstrously thick. Just how big was the thing?
Sniff, sniff, sniff. But the more she drew breath in through her nose, the stranger the feeling became. As if blood and rust had clotted together, sticky and thick. Lupin focused, trying to tell what was real from what was fake. Half the smell of blood, half the smell of rust. What on earth was this place?
The door the two of them had come through shut with a heavy boom. For a moment the locks rattled, clank, clank. Then, together with a vile little laugh, the boss finally showed his true colors.
"Keh heh heh."
The instant she heard the laugh, Lupin let out a hollow snort inside. Pretty quick on the big reveal, wasn't he. Even the variety shows from a certain country that aired the same scene five times over would have been faster than this.
Thunk! As if it had heard her complaint, the inner face of the barred wall suddenly dropped away, and oil lamps backed with crimson paper lit up one after another. For this single moment, even Lupin was impressed. What a shocking, astonishing twist. They really ought to have shown her something like this much sooner.
"No."
The view revealed behind the bars, once the wall fell away, was some butcher-shop concept of a brothel, and her brow furrowed all on its own. No, but seriously—what concept was this even supposed to be. Ten women, limbs caught in shackles, dangling in a row. And beside them, ten hulking men gripping rusted, blood-caked, brutishly huge cleavers.
"Aagh. My eyes."
And why, for the love of everything, were the hulks naked except for aprons? The bushy hair and the faint outline showing through the apron landed as a two-hit combo, and Lupin promptly lost her eyesight. As she thrashed in agony, the boss laughed, grand and hearty.
"Hahaha! Come along. Into the room you cannot leave unless we become one."
Deciding the boss, who at least still had his shorts on, was the better of the two views, Lupin turned her head—and a worse sight was waiting.
"Ha, fuck. I'm gonna lose it."
He had already flung his pants off as well. Dangle, dangle, times eleven. The naked bodies of the hanging women didn't even register.
"To think I waited all this time to look at garbage like this...."
People who enjoy a story usually like soaking themselves in buildup that stacks little by little, and in the dopamine, or the flood of feeling, that bursts at the end of it. Until a moment ago, Lupin had been sketching one twist in her head as well. The owner of a Secret Safe, impersonating a mayor. Why go to such troublesome lengths to lure her in? To set her at ease, and then strike the back of her head? Heart pounding, the tale of the Heavenly Mandate Cult, coming soon... that was how it was supposed to go.
Look at the finished product. Out of nowhere, an adult doujinshi plot. And Lupin was the protagonist! This sort of thing wasn't fun anymore. She had seen far too many bastards over these five years who put every man alive to shame.
Whether he knew it or not, the boss went on saying only what he meant to say.
"Now then. Choose. Will you strip off every stitch you're wearing, or will you stand there and watch the limbs of those pitiful souls hanging over there get hacked off raw?"
Lupin ground her teeth. Did these bastards have a single thought between them? What were they going to do if a Master or a Grand Master suddenly walked in? Was the mindset that they would enjoy themselves as much as they could, and die whenever they died? Compared with the ones who fled in a panic just because a few mafiosi died in Ryabolsk, it was, admittedly, a choice worthy of a real criminal.
Even so.
"Why are the people hanging over there like that?"
"They are females who cast off the mask of the Aura User in this place and awakened to true happiness and pleasure. Beneath me, they moaned and whimpered that it felt simply wonderful."
"You're a total scrub, mister."
"But right now, the advantage is mine. I can crush you with ease and make you beg for your life."
After he said it, something went rigid. Lupin rolled her eyes back, and the boss cackled, delighted.
"Afraid? Already overwhelmed by this body's manhood?"
Between the hips he swayed so bewitchingly and the monstrosity hanging beneath them, Lupin's inner rage was one breath short of its peak. Was his head made of flash memory? Where, exactly, had the memory of getting hit gone? Or had his lower half kicked his brain aside and pulled off a successful coup? This one was on the Minister of Defense and Army Headquarters.
Whether that was the case or not, the boss's preening did not stop.
"I'll give you ten seconds. Strip, or savor the sight of the first woman dying. Choose."
A twist that repaid none of the waiting, and held no fun in it. The emptiness of the time she had invested. The negatives multiplied, and hammered Lupin's rage gauge double.
Ah. So this was why everyone cursed the author so viciously when they tanked the story. No wonder the users set the gallery on fire every few versions, demanding the writer be swapped out—she had wondered what all the fuss was about.
Lupin made her decision. The boss had fooled around far too much.
"Very well. I'm being generous! Strip, bark like a dog, and piss yourself, and I'll spare three."
Pigeons of every color shot up through a cross-section of the space and slammed into the apron-nude hulks like missiles. A few of them tried swinging those enormous cleavers, but it had already been proven, back in Milwi's safehouse, that physical attacks did nothing. Only when the hulks broke into a run, screaming in shrill voices, did the boss finally startle and plant himself on his rear.
"Hurk! Wh-what!"
By then a frost-cold blade had come in and met his lower half. The owner of the sword driven hard into the stone floor spoke.
"That'd be me. I've met about fifteen bastards like you so far. What do you think happened to all of them? Guess right, and I'll let you live. On the house."
The boss had been invited onto a quiz show without warning, but he did have a talent for reading a room.
"Th... they died... right...?"
Lupin smiled brightly and cranked the Lightning Sword—standing upside down—into a hard right angle. The blade that had torn into his lower half bent in a flash and ripped back out. Blood gushed, clotting into lumps as it poured free together with the flesh.
