A Curse to Someone (1)
In a world where the Ruin had not yet descended, there were no proper monsters to speak of.
I did cross paths with wild animals from time to time, but they were harmless herbivores — deer, rabbits, that sort of thing.
There was one detail worth noting, though.
Despite not having eaten a single meal since possessing this body, I never once felt hungry. It seemed the endless experience of dying had scrubbed the appetite clean out of my brain entirely.
And so I ran, ignoring rest, ignoring sleep, eyes fixed straight ahead for days on end.
Part of it was a borderline psychotic obsession — the hope that somewhere, somehow, a portal might open up and send me back to Earth.
Everything before my eyes rendered itself as data, and there were moments when, as a possessed transmigrator, I feared that I myself was nothing more than a lump of data too.
I wish I could have shown my situation to the philosophers of the past who tried to prove who they were. If they had beheld an existence like me, they might have gone mad on the spot and taken their own lives.
But I was a being who wasn't even granted the mercy of death.
So, to keep from going mad inside the infinite cycle that gnawed at my brain, I began going mad instead.
Running for three days straight without sleep, food, or rest is an act of madness that no sane person could even attempt, no matter how far gone they were.
My throat, which had been gulping down air in ragged gasps, was parched and cracked, spitting nothing but the fishy taste of blood. The soles of my bare feet, which had pounded across dirt floors littered with twigs and jutting stones, were scraped so raw the bone showed through.
Thud—
That was when my foot caught on a root I hadn't seen, and I pitched forward face-first.
"Ghkk!!"
Because I fell on a slope, my balance — once thrown — never came back.
I rolled. And rolled.
And rolled again.
I slammed into a tree, was stabbed by dead branches, and the skin on my back tore horribly as it snagged on jagged rocks. My body, tumbling uncontrollably down the steep incline in an unintended descent, rolled for another four minutes or so before it finally ground to a halt on gentler ground.
"…"
No groan escaped me, despite the fractures wracking my entire body.
Because the throat too dried out to produce one hurt far too much to try.
Death was clearly closing in on me, but I wasn't afraid anymore. What was the point? I would simply come back to life when I died, and dwelling on feelings like fear was beneath a vessel as bloated and misshapen as the thing called "me."
God, I envied those five NPCs who had inherited their memories and stats intact.
Unlike them, I had plummeted vertically from level 999 down to 10, and I hadn't possessed this body with even a single piece of the countless pieces of equipment I'd once owned.
In the 1st playthrough, no one could stand against me — and now that hierarchy had been flipped on its head, forcing me to live at the very bottom of the food chain. I ground my teeth at the damned reality of it.
"…"
Equipment.
If only I had equipment.
Even a single piece of gear — anything capable of blocking one measly strike — would have changed my fate entirely. I wouldn't be a leveling shuttle, killed on sight every time someone felt like it.
In that state, I quietly began recalling the gear that would actually serve me.
Having lived as a depraved murderer in the 1st playthrough and collected every piece of equipment there was, the right weapons for any situation came to me easily.
The Beast's Hammer for crowds of mobs… the Prodigal's Dagger for the fast ones.
I whittled the list down in my head, shortlisting only the weapons players had universally called broken.
But what I needed wasn't anti-monster gear. I needed a weapon with an overwhelming edge in combat against people.
…In a one-on-one duel…
There were so many solid anti-monster options that players could never even agree on which was best. But for duels against humans, everyone named the same weapon, no debate required.
Fer-de's Fang.
A dagger obtained by slaying the Giant Snake Fer-de that guarded the Rift Labyrinth.
Going by the name alone, you might ask how a mere dagger could dominate human combat. But Fer-de's Fang had one special gimmick.
Feed the weapon the player's own blood, and it would respond to its master's power, transforming from a fang into a long, segmented whip-sword.
Of course, that gimmick alone wasn't what made it overwhelmingly dominant in duels. The reason Fer-de's Fang sat as the undisputed number one for player-versus-player combat was the glitch-tier paralysis stat it gained after transformation.
A paralysis value so absurd that striking a humanoid enemy just two or three times would inflict the paralysis status — from the very day of release, it drew the covetous eyes of every PVP-focused player in the game.
Because of that, I remembered effortlessly paralyzing and killing more than a few troublesome NPCs with this very weapon in the 1st playthrough.
With Fer-de's Fang in hand, I wouldn't have to worry about dying anymore.
…How funny that I'm still thinking about killing NPCs, even now. Even though they were once nothing but data with graphics that never quite matched reality, and now they're living, breathing human beings.
"…Ha."
It was pathetic — lying here dying, and still thinking about killing people — so a hollow laugh slipped out of me.
"Khh… khhrrgh…"
It was ironic. This possession had thrown every conceivable suffering at me, and yet, paradoxically, I had to conform to this world if I ever wanted to escape it.
Eileen. Carmen. Maeve. Altair. Sigrun.
If I wanted to go home, I would have no choice but to kill these five who stood blocking my path.
Their sob stories were none of my concern. They were the ones who wouldn't even hear me out before trying to kill me, weren't they?
If, no matter how I saw myself, I would only ever appear as the villain in their eyes—
"…Fine. I'll give you exactly what you want."
Then I fully intended to live up to their expectations.
I lifted my head and looked at the sky. A vast, cloudless paradise stretched out above me — a sky so blue, so impossibly beautiful, that I had never once seen its like on Earth.
"…"
The damned message window announcing my resurrection — the one that should have appeared, since I had so obviously died — never showed up.
I opened my eyes in confusion and checked my body over. Most of the wounds I'd earned tumbling down the mountain had already been healed.
My arm, shattered into dozens of pieces, had knitted itself back together. My leg, which had bent in a direction legs are never meant to bend, was perfectly fine.
"…Who on earth…"
Someone had found me dying in the forest and treated me.
…If they were going to go to all this tedious trouble, letting me die would have been the far quicker cure.
"…Haa."
A chill ran through me at how far my thinking had drifted from anything a normal person would say, and I exhaled a sigh as I looked around.
A cabin.
A small wooden house, exactly the size of something you'd call a cabin and nothing more.
Beside the bed where I lay sat a single wooden chair, still holding the warmth of whoever had been sitting there mere moments ago.
There was nothing else inside the cabin worth noting.
…Someone with no connection to me, then.
The knowledge that this was a hiding place where I could finally breathe easy loosened the tension that had been wound tight inside me, if only a little.
I shifted my body carefully atop the bed — hard, but firm enough to properly support my injured frame.
Creeeak—
At that moment, the cabin door swung open, and I saw someone stepping inside holding a bowl of porridge.
"…!!"
Terror seized my entire body, and I convulsed backward against the wall like something in the grip of a seizure. My breathing, which had been flowing steadily, choked off all at once.
"Why… why are you here…?"
Light sky-blue hair cut in a bob.
And those distinctive eyes, faded to a cloudy white.
The one who had saved me was none other than Eileen.
The woman who had killed me, brutally and repeatedly, at that abandoned academy.
Why was she here?
Barely a heartbeat after the question formed, Eileen walked over to me without a care in the world and thrust the bowl of porridge in my face.
Had she poisoned it?
The instant the thought crossed my mind, I swatted the bowl away with my hand.
The still-warm bowl of porridge overturned and splattered across the floor, the soft splat echoing quietly through the cabin.
"…"
Eileen watched the bowl fall from her hand in silence. Then, at last, she looked at me — and began to freeze everything around her.
"…I felt sorry for you, dying there all alone, so I saved you."
"Who asked you to save me…?! Cough!!"
I had never once begged for my life.
What reason did I have to grovel for survival, when I'd simply come back to life anyway? It would be like strapping a spare pair of arms onto someone with all four limbs working perfectly — a gesture so pointless it defied sense.
Eileen's cold was spreading out from her, and the moment my breathing began to falter—
"Lick it up."
—she pointed at the overturned bowl of porridge on the floor.
She wanted me to… eat that?
"If you don't, I'll kill you."
"…Then just kill me."
No window announcing a checkpoint change had appeared, which meant that killing me now would only be a loss for her.
And so I smiled at her, viciously, and raised my middle finger.
"You and I… we're not so different anymore."
I was still sneering at Eileen — transformed into something barely distinguishable from who I'd been in the 1st playthrough — and reaching to close my eyes, when—
"No… no, no, no…"
The threatening cold receded, and Eileen clutched her head and began muttering to herself like a madwoman.
"Me, the same as you? Me!! There's no way!!"
"Khh!!"
She roared the words out, then shoved my shoulder and collapsed on top of me onto the bed.
"You're a murderer…! There's no way you and I are the same!!"
Straddling my stomach and pinning me down with monstrous strength, Eileen placed her hand against my face and pressed her thumb down hard on my left eyeball.
"Gyaaaaagh!!!"
Her nail, aimed with terrible precision at my pupil, began to tear the eye apart. I couldn't even resist — my left eye lost its function completely.
"Ha… hahahahah…!"
My entire left socket was a furnace of searing pain as I writhed and groaned beneath her, and watching me, Eileen laughed like something utterly deranged.
The Eileen I'd known hated the sight of blood — every time she killed me, she used to freeze me first, a gentler method of execution.
But the Eileen of now…
"Does it hurt…? Because of me?"
…Something about her had changed, and changed a great deal.
When she finished digging out my eyeball, she pulled her hand away and stared down at the sticky blood that had smeared across it.
As if to hide the fact that her hand was trembling, Eileen clenched it into a tight fist. Then, at last, she poured her cold over the socket where blood was welling up in thick, nauseating pulses.
"Ghhk!! Aaaaagh!!"
Every nerve cell that had been stretched taut seized up and froze at once, and I clutched at my left eye and screamed.
Perhaps my screaming grated on her ears, because Eileen drew the shattered dagger bound at her waist and pressed it against my throat.
"Shut up. You don't even have the right to scream."
"…Ghhk."
I bit down on my lip until it bled, strangling the scream by force. Only then did her breathing seem to ease; she lowered the dagger and settled her weight onto my stomach, resting there.