The Jutak’s Tower (2)
“Uh… so in the end, this was all thanks to the Irregular…?”
“Thanks to the Jutak.”
“N-no…! I didn’t really do anything right back then….”
“I’m telling you, it’s fine. Honestly, I’m glad you didn’t go back to your original world.”
“……”
I told the Jutak everything about the Irregular, the wiki, and all the other abilities I had.
I’d told her to use my name, so she did, but after a few tries she practically begged me to stop, so I went back to calling her Jutak.
Maybe it would get more familiar with time.
“I’m really sorry, Han Seol…. I don’t want to be apologizing like this now, either, but….”
The Jutak was still calling me by name.
“That sorry about it?”
“……Yes. Even if things ended up working out, it’s true that I made a mistake then….”
“If you’re sorry, then keep getting along with me from now on.”
“Huh?”
“Honestly, this is all new to me too, so I didn’t know, but talking with you is really fun. It’s not like there are that many people around here I can actually talk to.”
“F-f-f… first….”
I hadn’t brought it up because I wanted an apology or anything, but seeing her get all dejected for no reason, I gave a light smile.
This was really fun.
Even the small stuff, like exchanging simple greetings, or trading useless bits of chatter.
I still didn’t know whether it was because she was the Jutak, or whether it would’ve felt the same with anyone else….
“So, take care of me, Blanche.”
“Eek…!”
“Don’t feel bad about it. Let’s keep getting along from here on out. I’m planning to lean on you a lot, you know, in all kinds of ways.”
“Y-yes….”
Either way, I didn’t really care.
Things were only going to get more fun from here.
“Anything else you want to ask?”
“Ah…. Then, Han Seol, do you want to leave the tower…? What are you going to do with that ability…?”
“Right, I never told you that part.”
“No….”
I snorted at the Jutak’s words.
It was a little embarrassing to talk about it like I was bragging to someone else, but….
“Honestly, even I think it sounds like bullshit, but I’m going to try to get everyone out somehow.”
“Everyone…?”
“Yeah. Nobody in the gallery came here because they wanted to be here, right?”
“……”
“By some twist of fate, I ended up with the ability to send people back to their original world. Besides, I’m the only one who’s experiencing these weird anomalies, right? I figured there must be a reason for that. It’s kind of cheesy, but it feels like I was chosen.”
“Back to the original world….”
Maybe my mind would change later, but at least for now, that was what I believed.
I still didn’t know the truth of this tower, but it had to be better than dying unfairly.
“You don’t really want to be here either, do you, Jutak? You want to go back, right?”
“I….”
“Hm?”
“……I don’t want to go back.”
“……Huh.”
That was unexpected.
Are we similar… no, there’s no way we’re in a similar situation.
The Jutak wasn’t some shut-in basement rat, so there had to be another reason.
There were probably a few reasons she didn’t want to return.
For some people, the world they’d come from might have been more hellish than this tower.
“I-I’ll be honest… I like talking with Han Seol better….”
“……”
“I don’t have anywhere to go back to…. There’s no one waiting for me….”
…I see.
I listened quietly to the Jutak’s bitter smile.
What was I supposed to say?
What if the place she’d have to return to was something like the orphanage I’d grown up in?
What if it was a ruined world where she’d be the only survivor? What if it was a world trapped in some brutal war that had dragged on for hundreds of years?
Then she wouldn’t want to go back.
If it were me, I wouldn’t want to return either.
Unless it was someplace peaceful like Earth….
“……”
“……I’m sorry. You probably don’t want to hear this stuff, hehe….”
“Then want to come with me?”
“……Huh?”
“I don’t know what kind of world you came from, Jutak, but where I was is safe.”
“Ah….”
I wasn’t just saying it to sound nice. I meant it.
“Th-there’s no way that would be possible—”
“I think it’ll be possible.”
I couldn’t say for sure it would work.
I wasn’t certain it was possible, but… there was probably something in Starpang for it.
This tower kidnapped people from all kinds of worlds. Shifting someone somewhere other than where they’d originally lived ought to be possible.
It brought dead people back to life again and again. It had even succeeded at reconstructing a body with a hologram like it was nothing.
If it could do that much, there was no reason it couldn’t move someone to another world.
Whoosh—!
“There aren’t monsters suddenly showing up, and you don’t have to solve random problems either.”
“Huh…?”
“No ghosts jumping out either, and you don’t have to stake your life on luck!”
“Ahaha…. Doesn’t that apply to most places?”
Looking at the Jutak, who seemed oddly downcast, I spread both arms wide.
I exaggerated every word, grinning from ear to ear, and she let out a small laugh as she looked up at me.
“If it’s impossible, then I’ll stay here with you.”
“Huh?”
“Actually, I don’t think going back would be very fun for me either. Nobody would be waiting for me.”
“……”
“We can just live here together forever. It’s not like we age and die here, right?”
“Th-that’s true, but….”
It wasn’t that I was pledging my whole life to the Jutak or anything. It was just that the life I had now was more enjoyable than the one I’d come from.
I figured all the abilities I had now would disappear if I went back to Earth.
Magic, swords, all of it would probably vanish, and I’d go back to being a normal guy.
And even if, by some miracle, they didn’t disappear, there was still no reason for me to return there.
If I went back, I’d try to live hard… but still.
“My past wasn’t exactly bright, either.”
“Ah….”
“I’ll tell you later. There’s no need to talk about depressing stuff right now, is there? Today’s a happy day.”
“……Yes, you’re right. It is a happy day…!”
“You look better when you smile.”
I laughed out loud at the Jutak’s bright little smile. She turned away again almost immediately, but the mood still felt a lot lighter than before.
“Han Seol….”
“Yeah?”
“Do you not have anything you’re curious about with me…?”
“Ah.”
At the Jutak’s words, her fingers fussing with each other, I blinked.
Something I’m curious about….
What was there? Nothing sprang to mind right away.
For a moment, only boring questions and useless things drifted through my head.
Swish—
“Do you… not have anything at all…?”
“……”
Seeing her curl up with her knees hugged to her chest, turning her head just slightly, one question suddenly came back to me.
The thing I’d been wondering since the first time I got her photo.
I’d been curious about it for so long that it only now started to really bother me.
“Then… there is one thing I’m insanely curious about.”
“Ask me anything! I’ll answer everything…!”
“Why do you have a recommendation star stuck in your eye?”
“…………”
No, seriously.
Why was there a recommendation star stuck in her eye?
“Pfft… pfft, hahaha….”
“D-don’t laugh…!!”
“No, how am I supposed not to laugh? You really did have a recommendation star in your eye.”
“Ugh…!!”
To get to the point, the star mark engraved in the Jutak’s right eye was, in fact, a recommendation star.
No, not a metaphor. Literally a recommendation star.
“So your pupils changed the moment you became Jutak….”
“I didn’t know that would happen either…….”
Apparently, the instant she accepted the Jutak succession — that is, the role of gallery manager — her pupils changed.
It didn’t really affect her vision, and since there was nobody else she had to meet, she hadn’t paid much attention to it.
Besides, it had been a few hundred years already, so she said she couldn’t even remember what she’d originally looked like anymore.
“Jutak, want to copy me?”
“Huh…?”
I said it to the Jutak, who was puffing out her lips.
I’d thought of something I wanted her to do.
There was a pose I absolutely needed to make a white-haired, big-breasted beauty with a recommendation star in her eye do.
“Make a V with your hand and hold it over your right eye….”
“Like this…?”
“Then wink with your other eye and shout, ‘Recommendation star!’”
“……Do I really have to do this?”
“Yep. Absolutely.”
There wasn’t any real reason to see it.
I just wanted to.
“……Just once.”
“I know, I know.”
“R-recommendation star…!”
I’m losing it.
With her face bright red, she forced herself to wink and copy me, and it was adorable.
Adorable, but—
“Pff… pffft, hahaha!”
“D-don’t laugh…!!”
I just couldn’t hold it in.
“One more time… do it one more time. Ah, I want to see it again.”
“No…!!”
“Aw, why not? Hurry up and do it. Come on, after me— recommendation star!”
“I’m absolutely not doing it again─!!”
She was definitely cute and pretty, but the whole thing was just too funny.
How was I supposed not laugh when she was sitting there with a star in her eye, shouting “Recommendation star!”?
“Haa…. So that came from the Irregular?”
“Huh?”
After finally calming down, I caught my breath and asked casually.
“You have to get the Irregular to become Jutak, right?”
To become Jutak, you had to obtain the Irregular.
Maybe, in the process of becoming Jutak, the star from the Irregular was implanted in her eye… or something like that.
“Ah…. Well, that is… I….”
“Hm?”
“I’ve never seen the Irregular, Han Seol….”
“……Seriously?”
“Yes. I wasn’t trying to lie or anything… I’m sorry.”
“R-really?”
I’d thought she was some gallery addict who had obtained the Irregular and then devoted her life to the gallery instead of escaping.
I could feel the Jutak’s favorability rating in my head dropping just a little.
“Then how did you become Jutak?”
“……Could you call me administrator? Everyone calls me Jutak, but that’s not the official term!”
“Got it, so hurry up and tell me, Jutak.”
“Ugh…. The previous Jutak passed it on to me.”
…She’s calling herself Jutak too.
Administrator? Manager? Who even used those terms?
Jutak, Patak.
What could fit better in the mouth than that? Calling them anything else just felt wrong.
“When they handed it over to me, they told me to do it that way in case people got confused or tried to aim for the position themselves for no reason….”
“Well, I guess with power that huge, there’d be all kinds of problems.”
“If you usually get it, you’d use it to escape, after all. If I tell them they can only do that after getting the Irregular, they’ll probably just accept it without much reaction.”
“Honestly, that was what I was wondering…. So you can actually do it without the Irregular.”
“Yes, I was worried at first, but before I knew it I’d been doing it for a long, long time. I think it suits me pretty well, too…!”
Yeah, it did seem like a good fit.
Regardless of the Jutak’s personality or way of speaking, the fact that she could check every post in seconds, delete it, and ban people was the sign of a born office tyrant.
“Then all the stories floating around the gallery are fake?”
“The previous Jutak did create the gallery. They probably did use the Irregular for it.”
“Then why did you become Jutak… no, why did Blanche become Jutak?”
“From the moment I first entered the tower, that person helped me for a very long time. As time passed, trust began to build little by little. Then one day, that person happened to obtain another Irregular and handed it over to me before leaving.”
“So they dumped the job on you and ran.”
“Could you not put it like that…!!”
No, but that was exactly it.
They just gave the Jutak title to some likely-looking regular and bailed, didn’t they?
“Either way, that’s amazing. They obtained the Irregular twice, didn’t they?”
“……Yes, that’s true.”
“Just asking in case, but can you pass on Jutak too?”
“Blanch… yes, I don’t know whether the day will ever come, though….”
Did the original Jutak's abilities carry over intact?
I couldn’t be certain, since I still didn’t know exactly what the gallery’s structure was, or what the first Jutak had wished for.
Was it even true that they’d escaped with the Irregular in the first place?
The person who made the gallery with the first Irregular later escaped with the second one.
There was a chance they’d used it once without understanding, then escaped the second time while knowing what it was, but once I started to suspect that the Irregular might not simply be a star that granted wishes, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“Han Seol…?”
“……Then what about Patak?”
“Huh?”
“Is there, like, a sub-manager function or something?”
I shook off the voice from beside me and answered a beat too late.
This wasn’t the time to be debating the truth of the Irregular, so I forced the subject elsewhere.
“Ah…. Yes, there is, but how should I put this… it’s a little hard to hand that kind of thing over carelessly….”
“Fair enough.”
There were a lot of people in the gallery, but that didn’t mean a lot of posts actually went up.
Besides, it was a place where you couldn’t even create throwaway or alt accounts, so there was no way for trolls to even exist there.
And there’s even permanent banning.
If you asked whether Patak was really necessary, the answer was no, not really.
You needed the Irregular to become Jutak, so making Patak something completely separate would’ve felt weird too.
“Ah…!”
“Hm?”
“H-Han Seol, what about you doing it…?!”
“?”
I blinked blankly at the hopeful voice from beside me.
You want me to be Patak?
Honestly, it wouldn’t be that much of a problem if I did.
The first thought in my head was whether I’d even have anything to do.
Most of it would probably be handled by the Jutak, and it would be fine if I just wielded the authority from time to time.
That was certainly true, but….
For some reason, I hate it.
A kind of instinctive rejection rose up in me.
I wasn’t the type to wipe things away, I was the type to spread them around.
I’d promised to save everyone in the gallery… yes, I planned to send them all back to their original world.
“Sorry.”
“Huh…?! W-why….”
“What, am I supposed to moderate people?”
“……”
“I’m already having a great time messing around as a lurker behind the Jutak’s back.”
Still, I didn’t want to be a recommendation star eraser.
No, there was just something about it that I couldn’t quite put into words.
“You could call it pleasure without responsibility? Reactions from people who don’t know it’s me are kind of thrilling.”
“……You’re saying that right in front of me?”
“……Ah. Right.”
Swish.
The Jutak, frowning, tapped the watch-like thing strapped around her wrist.
When she waved her hand over what looked like a smartwatch, a monitor-sized window of hologram light sprang into the air.
Damn.
Was this what they called AR?
Augmented reality… or something like that?
So that was what she’d meant by a terminal.
Probably one of the things from the world she’d originally come from.
It was strangely fresh, running into a culture gap all of a sudden like this.
The Jutak, who didn’t even spare me a glance as I stood there gaping, went straight into the gallery and searched for my nickname—
[This ID has been blocked by the Infinite Regression Manager.]
[Block duration: Permanent] / [Reason: trolling.]
[Processed by: NotAnEraser]
—and as soon as I tapped into the gallery, the long-unseen window popped up, making me swallow a breath in silence.
“……Jutak?”
“Want to be Patak?”
“……”
“If you say yes, I’ll unban you!”
At that bright smile aimed at me, I shut my eyes tight.