Have You Eaten Dinner?
The moment I stepped inside the house, a woman was already prostrating herself flat on the floor at the entrance.
Cheon Mari was bowing deeply in nothing but light indoor clothes. I stared at her, completely at a loss for words.
“……Have you eaten dinner?”
“How could this lady possibly eat alone?”
“Bullshit. That’s pure bullshit.”
I forcibly hauled Cheon Mari to her feet and smacked her back a few times. She flinched like it hurt, but if she was that upset she should’ve just eaten by herself. I immediately pulled two packs of ramen from the corner of the kitchen. Leaving her like this would obviously mean listening to her whine all night.
“Ah, make mine two packs.”
“You’re seriously gonna get fat at this rate.”
“For someone with my body type, eating two packs of ramen is just common sense.”
She planted both hands firmly on her chest as she spoke. It looked half like she was showing off her impressive figure, and half like she was asking why I was only eating one.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re so impressive.”
I grabbed one more pack, then started boiling water. Once I poured the hot water into each bowl, I picked up some wooden chopsticks and a small container of kimchi and headed outside.
Rain was pouring down in sheets. Cheon Mari, apparently bored, moved under the rain shield she’d installed on the roof. The roof sloped at an angle, but there was a flat section too. I set the kimchi down there and stared endlessly at the world below.
“How atmospheric and nice.”
Since the house sat on a hill, the entire cityscape unfolded before us in one glance. Even on this gloomy rainy day, buildings packed with neon and LED lights stood out. For a city built specifically for the academy, it felt overwhelmingly grand. At the same time, it was excessively commercial.
Sure enough, while I was blankly admiring the view, the massive display on the side of a skyscraper changed. One advertisement ended and another began.
“That’s our company’s ad.”
“Must’ve spent a fortune, huh?”
“Fortune? We spent an absolute shit-ton.”
Cheon Mari noisily slurped up her perfectly cooked ramen. Then she pointed into the air with her chopsticks.
“Two hundred and fifty billion. That’s how much Nartika invested in Puerto Rico this time.”
“Whoa, two hundred and fifty billion? Isn’t that way too much?”
“It is a lot. But given Nartika’s current state, it’s basically pocket change.”
If this were the Nartika from when I first met her, we would’ve trembled just thinking about investing that much. But things were different now from the days when we used to grovel before politicians. A few hundred billion was clearly chump change—money we could afford to lose without blinking.
Nartika was growing explosively every single month, even in the middle of a recession. It was impossible to predict just how massive it would become. If a regressor’s touch was added to the mix, the company could easily reach the absolute peak of the corporate world.
“Is this possible because the China project succeeded?”
“Succeeded… well, I guess you could say that.”
“Honestly, when you first said you were doing business in China, I was sure you’d crash and burn.”
“Crash and burn? From the very beginning I told you—there isn’t a single company that can compete with Nartika in China.”
For reference, the “competitive behavior” she was talking about was the kind of dynamic labor practices carried out in 19th-century Britain. One might ask how anyone could do something like that to people. But to our regressor, that wasn’t an issue at all. If people became a problem, you simply ignored human rights. Simple as that.
“……It looked like your competitive behavior went way beyond the line.”
“Business always comes with a few minor hiccups. Besides, the plan you came up with was so ridiculously successful—what was I supposed to do?”
It was perfectly reasonable for a foreign company to execute several hundred hunters by firing squad just to swallow up a local government. Naturally, it was also perfectly reasonable to recruit clueless Chinese citizens as participants in a “mysterious project.” Given the sheer scale of China, it was nothing more than a trivial loss—something easily overlooked. After all, this was a country where village brawls could kill a hundred thousand people.
“Ugh, always blaming others… Anyway, aside from China, how are the other sectors doing lately?”
“Finance, biotech, and cybernetics are all doing incredibly well.”
The potion shop was supposed to be the core business, yet it was growing the slowest while all these random side ventures were exploding. The saying about companies that lose sight of their roots came to mind, but then again, Korean companies had a long history of completely failing in their foundational fields.
“What about the potion side?”
“Same as always. That’s why we put up that advertisement.”
On the billboard, an ad was playing that claimed Nartika potions were both cheap and effective. Making a famous foreign hunter dance like a maniac under flashy lights was actually a pretty brilliant idea. I bet the ad would be taken down within a month, though.
“But even if you plaster ads everywhere like that, do people actually buy Nartika potions? I mean, is there even anywhere to buy them?”
“Of course. We’re gradually expanding the Puerto Rico branch, so there are no problems on the sales side.”
Lies. The last time I visited the branch, it was so dead you could hear flies buzzing, and sales were practically nonexistent. The only revenue they had came from me buying a few elixirs out of pity.
They needed more direct promotion than just flooding the area with ads. Only then would some crumbs actually fall my way. Some might say it was too greedy to expect that after already running a business with Cheon Mari, but greed was what made people who they were.
“And even if it doesn’t do well, we plan to keep it running at least while we’re attending the academy, so don’t worry.”
“That’s a relief, then.”
We sat on the roof together, nearly finished with our ramen, when Cheon Mari pushed the empty containers and kimchi dish to the side. She stood up and walked past the rain shield.
She spread her arms wide, letting the pouring rain drench her completely. With zero shame, her clothes quickly became soaked through. Soon, her bright red underwear was clearly visible.
“What are you doing? Hurry up and come here.”
Cheon Mari beckoned to me. Even though I knew it was pointless, I naturally walked over to her side. The moment I wondered what the hell she was up to, she wrapped her arm around my neck, pulled me into a back hug, and dragged me down to the floor.
The hard roof might have hurt, but since she fell first and became my cushion, it was fine. The result was her lying on the floor with me on top.
“Hehehe.”
Cheon Mari hugged me even tighter and rubbed her chest against me. It was an incredibly familiar sensation, but mixed with the rain it felt strangely new.
As we continued getting endlessly soaked by the rain, the strength slowly left her hands.
“Sian, I have one question.”
“What is it?”
“What do you plan to do from now on?”
“What do you mean, what do I plan to do?”
“I mean, like… what you’re going to do at the academy, how you’ll live after graduation, that sort of thing.”
I thought I’d already explained this once before. Or had I?
“I’m just going to live like a normal hunter. Catch some knights, take down hero candidates, beat the shit out of the World Tree……”
“In what universe is that a normal hunter’s life? There’s not even any monster hunting, which is supposed to be the foundation of the job.”
“When I think about the future you told me about, it seems like I’ll end up hunting people way more than monsters anyway.”
To be precise, even in the game, monster hunting still held significant importance. I had only exaggerated it without much thought. My current goal was simply to deal with the major bosses affiliated with the Hero Academy. Whether before or after graduation, I just had to kill the hero candidates early according to the strategy guide. If I managed even that much, the World Tree’s defeat would be all but guaranteed.
After that, I could leave everything to others. I’d just help out when needed, guide them a bit, and occasionally hunt as a hunter whenever I got bored. Becoming a basement-dwelling NEET and living off my family for generations—that would be the completion of my life plan.
“……Did I ever tell you that we lost?”
“Yeah. You told me we lost to the World Tree, tried to escape Earth, and failed.”
“It wasn’t necessarily always like that, you know? Surprisingly, there were times we won.”
“I see.”
She had dropped so many hints before that I didn’t feel much of anything. Even without that, since she had regressed so many times, it only made sense that she would have won at least once.
“The problem was that we won too late.”
Though winning didn’t really count as winning if it just sent her back to the beginning of the loop again. I roughly guessed why she had won so late.
“Either something happened on Earth and everything went to hell together, or you won but then did something stupid and died. One of the two, right?”
That was my analysis of the human known as Cheon Mari. She didn’t deny it. It seemed I was correct.
“The first one is right. The second isn’t.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Hmm. I didn’t quite believe her. No matter how I looked at it, she seemed to be denying it.
“You’ve played the game too, so you know how it is. Sometimes that kind of thing happens, right?”
“What kind of thing?”
“You get an ending, but you stepped on the wrong route midway and it turns into a bad ending.”
Ah, I think I get what she means. She was saying she had won, but it was twisted because she was short by about twenty percent instead of two.
“So that’s what winning looked like for you. But if you just fix that part, you wouldn’t have to regress anymore, right?”
“That’s… true. But when you actually live it, things rarely go exactly as planned.”
A small “hehe” laugh slipped out after her words. It sounded like a casual chuckle, but this was a habit Cheon Mari often showed when she was trying to hide her own mistakes. My guess was that she had lost control of her personality, caused an accident, and everything went to hell. It was completely natural. If I didn’t stop her, this girl would keep doing stupid things one after another.
“So what exactly are you trying to say? That we have to win, so you want me to help? I don’t really mind.”
To be exact, it didn’t really mean anything to me, so I didn’t mind. No matter how wildly she rampaged, the path to a happy ending was already set. Therefore, there was only one thing I wanted from Cheon Mari.
Like her grandfather often worried, I wanted her to live like a decent human being without causing any massive disasters. When I invested my own money to catch the hero candidates, I wanted her to share the burden. When it came time to push either Ines or herself forward to deal with the World Tree, I wanted her not to throw a tantrum. Her grandfather had secretly told me he’d found her a perfect fiancé—someone who matched her so well—and I wanted her not to reject the engagement or cause chaos at the wedding. And most importantly, something even more crucial than defeating the World Tree: I wanted her to quit that damn baseball obsession.
Wait. Thinking about it, that was more than one thing. Was this completely fucked?
Suddenly, I became more worried about what would happen after we defeated the World Tree than about defeating it in the first place. I had thought we were heading for a happy ending, but was this girl about to start a bad-ending drift?
“No, that’s not it. What I want to talk about now is a promise.”
“You never keep your promises.”
“This time it’s a promise I will definitely keep. I’m staking my face on it.”
“If I counted all the times you staked your face and still broke them, I could probably make several Exodias.”
“Anyway!”
Whether she knew about my worries or not, Cheon Mari casually moved her hand from my neck down to my stomach. Then, in an extremely serious and resolute voice, she continued.