Shannon of Waterville
If it weren’t for that golem I faced. If only I had arrived here a little sooner.
Eventually, clear droplets like beads of water dampened the corners of her eyes. The reason was obvious. It was rather pitiful. After all, she might have been able to score well. She was surely repeating those exact thoughts endlessly inside her head.
I was deeply pessimistic about that kind of thinking. Even at her current level, would she really have earned a good score back then? Once the antis showed up, it became unavoidable. There were few—or no—ways to dodge it, so the only option was to counter head-on. Though it hadn’t come up earlier, one of the things I had drilled into myself over the past few years was basic crisis response.
Actually, even setting the present aside, how did most gamers react when their character got knocked down or suppressed? Beginners frantically mashed buttons trying to escape the situation. Intermediates executed the escape command clumsily and slowly. Experts restored their posture instantly, as if they had never been hit at all. In short, when situation A occurred, you had to be able to deploy response B calmly and quickly. That was the road to becoming a good hunter, and the surest way to raise your own survival rate.
She won’t become a good hunter. That was my concise verdict on Shannon. Even ignoring her crisis response, the current scene said it all. Honestly, failing once or twice and bombing out was understandable. But it wasn’t even over yet, and throwing a fit after a single practical exam was basically a tantrum. If she worked as an active hunter she would run into similar things countless times. While operating under Nartika I had personally witnessed limbs and heads being severed. I had endured people twice my age flaunting pathetic skills while acting entitled. I had protected incompetent hunters alongside Cheon Mari. There had been missions where we swallowed our frustration and withdrew midway due to lack of resources. There had been times we handed out armfuls of mysterious mint chocolate and magical shooting stars from the ice-cream stand near the gate, grumbling about the hardship.
Shivering… I… am… like a crazy old man, but even if I was a geezer, that was my perspective. Throwing a tantrum in a place like this was simply revealing the size of your own vessel. And speaking of vessels, her identity finally floated up in my mind.
Shannon of Waterville.
One of the companions who stayed at the protagonist’s side from the very beginning. Yet also a villain who could betray depending on the choices made. Her modeling was slightly different from the game, but that glass-fragile personality made it unmistakable. She was definitely Shannon of Waterville, the water-school mage known as one of the few decently performing characters in her category.
It was quite the astonishing coincidence. At the same time, it felt too ambiguous to simply label it coincidence. The current situation was closer to accidentally bumping into a celebrity while walking down the street.
Sure enough, Shannon, swallowed by gloom, quietly slipped away. The connection had been brief, but it ended here. The odds of meeting again were probably slim.
She passed the academy, became friends with the protagonist, and that connection lasted until the game’s starting point—right? Even accounting for the butterfly effect, her in-game performance suggested she would at least scrape by. Well, we might run into each other once or twice on the street in the future. That didn’t mean we would become heavily entangled. I planned to act on my own terms, and I intended to leave her alone.
Whether Shannon succeeded in a passionate slug-and-snail yuri route with the protagonist, or got rejected and evolved into a crazy-hot lesbian who stormed the hill of tempests, was none of my business. What actually held my interest was the setting that Shannon and the protagonist were the same age and became friends at the academy. That meant the protagonist would also enter the academy next year.
The protagonist might get dragged into my affairs… No. I recalled the setting that she had been an ordinary cadet during her academy days. Even up to the game’s starting point, the protagonist was nothing more than an ordinary hunter—one so ordinary she worried about making ends meet. It was just needless concern. On the other hand, a waste of time. I let out a sigh at the empty thoughts that had burned calories for nothing.
Without further delay, I headed toward the next practical exam site as if nothing had happened.
Where there are partings, reunions follow. The only problem was that this reunion arrived far too soon.
“Kyaaaak!”
It was the next group’s turn. Shannon went first, I went second. I watched Shannon’s practical. Shannon watched mine. An interesting, continuous cycle. After ruining the test, losing her mind, then watching me perform only to lose her mind again—the same thing unfolding for the person who had already lost it. At least it was a relief that she hadn’t completely bombed it like before. Shannon finished the practical with decent results.
“Hic… Whyyyy…”
Yet there she was, crying even after doing reasonably well. No saving her. Please stop voyeuring other people’s practicals. And it wasn’t just once or twice—she did it every single time she took the test, so I was starting to feel self-conscious.
In the end, accepting the waste of time, I decided to kill a few minutes elsewhere. I headed for the rest area prepared inside the testing site. It sat somewhere between a modern library and a lounge. And it was packed with members so heterogeneous and chaotic they had no equal.
It wasn’t only pure-blooded Earthlings—Black, White, Asian. There were mixed Japanese with cat ears and tails, mixed British with demon horns and tails, mixed Americans sporting eagle wings on their backs, mixed South Africans with antelope horns like deer, mixed Irish with massive dragon-like horns and tails, mixed Koreans like me with white-toned hair and elf ears, and so on.
“What? Never seen an Englishman wearing a cross necklace before?”
“Hey, you insane Irish bastard! Fold that tail properly!”
“I’ll never understand why the white-eared ones get mad when you call them white elves.”
“Where the hell does all this fur from these damn cat bastards keep coming from?”
“Aren’t there any normal humans around?”
The First World’s animal farm, built by the products of countless possible bugs. I was genuinely curious what the classrooms would look like once I entered the academy. Probably at least one fight per week. Maybe the sense of alienation between them would produce casualties without fail.
“What a mess. What an absolute mess.”
Of course none of that was an immediate problem. I sat and let time trickle past in boredom. Around the time I figured Shannon must have finished, the noise started.
“What the f─$%#@#$$#@$”
“Nicht bewe─%#$%#$%#”
“Outside! Outs─@%#$@$%$%”
Some kind of commotion outside—various voices leaked in. At first the others besides me merely half-listened and ignored it. But the longer we waited, the louder and more chaotic the voices grew. One by one, people began glancing around, reading the room.
What on earth was happening? Had a fight broken out somewhere? The essence of a hunter was the pursuit of violence. It wouldn’t be strange for examinees aiming for that path to cause an incident. Still, the question remained: would a simple accident produce noises this complex? This was closer to the kind of bizarre roar you only heard during a gang fight or a group lynching.
Eventually a few of us, myself included, stood up. Carrying our mounting questions, we walked to the door and pulled the handle. With the ceiling’s brilliant lights at our backs, we stared into the corridor that had been perfectly normal moments ago.
And, briefly, we spat out.
“We’re fucked.”
“Hey you! Shut the fuck up!”
The translation buzz altered the incoming voice. It carried an archaic accent, and the atmosphere shifted in an instant.
“Nobody come near! If you approach, I’ll tear the scroll!”
A crowd of examinees had surrounded one examinee. Yet the initiative lay with the single test-taker covered in small scrolls and clutching a large one. Even from a distance the flashy explosion emblem was visible. Those were definitely top-grade explosive scrolls.
The blond man committing this madness had a fervent attitude that made his origin easy to guess.
“Calm down for a second and put the scroll—”
“Shut your mouth, infidel! Move again and I’ll blow this entire place sky-high!”
“No, fuck…”
“I said shut your mouth! No, that’s wrong. There’s no need to shut up! Everything that happens from now on will be the original sin you yourselves invited!”
“I haven’t sinned though.”
“Neither have I.”
“Do you bastards even know why I came here today? It was because of a command from Lord World Tree!”
World Tree Zealot. In the game they appeared whenever you forgot about them—the World Tree version of ISIS. Jihadis who committed terrorism to drive the story into ruin or simply spawned as field monsters.
Their sole purpose was to eradicate every organization and individual that rejected the World Tree. A mental patient straight out of the Middle East suddenly appearing here was the height of bewilderment. Even though unannounced terror was the basics of terror, I had never imagined the target would be me.
Mari never mentioned anything like this would happen? A regressor knew the future, so if something like today was coming she should have given me a heads-up. Yet I had heard nothing. What was going on? Had Cheon Mari betrayed me? Even with her bad personality, she wasn’t the type to do that. Something Mari didn’t know? She had regressed, so how could she not know? Something Mari had forgotten? Forgetting something this serious—did that even make sense? Still, when it came to a human being called Cheon Mari, anything was possible.
Just as I felt nausea rising at the reality that I had to entertain these thoughts in such a serious situation—
“Command?”
“That’s right! It was a command to punish the filthy demon race and realize justice!”
“Uh… we’re not demons, we’re just humans.”
“Lies! You follow cursed ideologies and reject Lord World Tree, yet you claim you’re not demons?! Such shamelessness has its limits! Just look at those sinister devices on your wrists—”
“No, that’s just a convenience tool and shield generator.”
“See! The very fact you use such things is proof you’re demons!”
“Is this guy brain-dead?”
A few of the smarter examinees kept throwing out questions and curses, trying to buy time. The zealot answered their questions as if he knew nothing, desperately prolonging the standoff. It was extremely precarious; security or hunters should have arrived by now.
Boom—!
What actually arrived was a tremendous roar from somewhere.