Goo Goo, It's Baby Ha-yul (3)
Goo Goo, It's Baby Ha-yul (3)
I couldn't say for certain whether my life had been unhappy up to now.
But I could say for certain that this moment was happy.
Several days had passed since I woke up. I could count on one hand the number of times I'd left the recovery room in that span.
That was how serious my condition had been, apparently.
While I was wrapped in Professor Atra's arms, I got the explanation from the healer.
What was it again... full-body compound fractures, circuit damage...
To summarize: every bone broken, muscles shredded, mana circuits obliterated, core damaged, internal organs ruptured...
And my left arm severed...
Anyway, the overall picture was apparently worse than a corpse.
When I heard that diagnosis, my head tilted on its own out of sheer bewilderment.
'How am I alive?'
I couldn't speak for anyone else, but I had definitely wanted to survive.
Hopes aside, realistically, I'd figured there was no way.
Even considering the state my body was reportedly in, it was the same conclusion. With injuries that severe, shouldn't I be dead as a matter of course?
At that point, calling it a corpse felt generous — wouldn't 'hunk of meat' be the more accurate description?
Because of my own stubbornness, I'd charged headlong at the monsters, and when I thought this might be the end, I threw everything aside and killed Aerus.
Right before I lost consciousness, I was certain I was going to die too.
I'd had a similar experience before.
Something about the same reckless bravado — throwing myself in front of a truck to save one person.
I'd thought I was going to die then, too.
But my eyes opened. As I blinked my blurry vision and sat there dumbfounded, the doctor made a big fuss, talking about miracles or strokes of fortune or whatever...
The short version was that, just like before, I should've died but I survived.
Similar experience.
While I was lost in those thoughts, a hand settled on my head.
'Aahhh...'
Then came a touch that stroked me as if handling something exceedingly precious, and my body melted into a puddle.
As I went limp and pliant, another arm wrapped around my waist and drew me in. I found myself tucked snugly into Professor Atra's embrace.
Warm and soft. Faced with a sensation that pushed every last worry away, the rationality I'd struggled to hold upright drooped again.
My head was being stroked, and a gentle patting rhythm thrummed across my back. My body was buried in something soft and warm, loosening into languid contentment...
A smile crept onto my lips without my say-so. My body wriggled forward on pure instinct. I burrowed deeper into Professor Atra's arms.
My right arm, now a little thinner and marginally easier to move, wrapped around Professor Atra's waist.
I clung tight. Our shared body heat made everything wonderfully warm.
I could hear her heartbeat, too.
I turned my head and pressed an ear against Professor Atra's chest, and her heartbeat came through even more clearly than before.
'Hehe...'
At our first meeting, Professor Atra had been terrifying.
She was so tall I had to crane my neck to meet her eyes, and the level of physical ability and the ferocity of her mana presence I sensed through Spatial Perception were overwhelming.
I'd genuinely thought a single flick to the forehead would leave nothing behind but dust.
Her demeanor was always firm and cold. The impression she gave was that one misstep would draw a booming reprimand or a freezing glare.
She was the picture of what I thought an adult was.
And yet here she was now, holding me in her arms like this, stroking and patting me.
- A soft laugh
She'd even chuckle from time to time, asking if it really felt that good.
A sense of security filled my body. I reached the point of baseless certainty that as long as I stayed in her arms, everything would be okay.
'Hehe...'
My thoughts stretched out long and lazy. I'm happy. That was what floated into my mind.
The rationality I'd fought to keep upright was subdued all over again.
They say people make themselves unhappy by thinking too hard about things.
The thought drifted in out of nowhere.
.
.
.
Over the past few days, the world had been in an uproar, I was told. The fire still hadn't gone out — it was burning as fiercely as ever.
Sipnaha... a chain dungeon outbreak in Scotland.
Commonly called the 'Sipnaha Dungeon Rampage' incident.
A catastrophe with hundreds dead and thousands more injured.
It was a dungeon rampage that had erupted during an otherwise quietly peaceful stretch, one that came with staggering casualties.
Naturally, investigations followed.
Everything from a national inquiry — its mandate now somewhat faded but still technically ongoing — to an investigation team dispatched by the Association got to work.
The results were fairly shocking.
Strictly speaking, the disaster at Sipnaha was a man-made calamity.
The 'Guardian of the Northern Mountain' clan was tangled up in it.
The Guardian of the Northern Mountain was a clan representing Sipnaha, built around a core of numerous mid-high-rank heroes.
Mid-high rank, whether hero or hunter, is by no means a level to be overlooked anywhere.
But with no top-rank heroes among them, the prevailing assessment was that they lacked the strength to enter higher-grade dungeons.
The head of a snake, in other words.
They earned like a snake near the top of the food chain, but with a dragon's tail always tantalizingly in sight — greed, apparently, got the better of them.
In the end, they'd made various preparations to become the dragon's tail, and one of those preparations was, supposedly, dungeon farming.
Dungeon farming.
Maintaining a dungeon without collapsing it, harvesting its resources and monster byproducts on a regular cycle.
It's not illegal. Dungeons come in all kinds, and some generate resources that could practically laugh at a gold mine.
In such cases, limited farming is permitted under stringent Association inspection and oversight.
The Guardian of the Northern Mountain had been operating illegal farms without Association review.
And not just one — multiple.
The results were horrific.
Whether due to poor farm management, or because the dungeon itself was anomalous with no warning signs before it went berserk...
The farms spectacularly rampaged, causing horrific loss of life.
And I got dragged straight into the middle of it.
'Shit.'
The moment that was explained to me, it was such a shock that the rationality I'd been letting float around snapped bolt upright.
No, shit.
Getting caught in a shitty natural disaster already feels like garbage. And now you're telling me it was a fucking accident caused by people?
If Professor Atra hadn't held me tight and restrained me, I might've thrashed around in a rage despite being in this state.
Even subdued by her embrace, I couldn't stop grinding my teeth.
And I did have teeth to grind.
For some reason, my teeth had grown back, too.
I distinctly remembered clenching so hard in sheer frustration that I'd wrecked my gums along with them, but those had been restored as well.
Restored.
My thoughts reached that point. The anger subsided.
I had another similar memory.
When my leg had been wrecked, it had eventually restored itself over time.
My leg had been severed. They said it was so mangled they had to amputate. I remember spending days not in my right mind, feeling that emptiness where my leg used to be.
After getting the compensation, I holed up in a new place. Months must have passed.
Then one day I saw a leg where there should've been nothing, thought it was a dream, and tried over and over to wake myself up.
When I realized it was real, I was too scared to tell anyone. I kept it tightly hidden, terrified I might get treated like some kind of test subject.
Not that it mattered — I wound up in this world not long after anyway.
That part I still don't understand. Given that abilities called Unique Abilities exist, maybe there's some special power I still don't know about.
And so even now, I could let myself run that tiny hopeful circuit. The one that goes: if I wait, maybe my arm will regrow too, just like my leg did.
Anyway.
The cause of the Sipnaha disaster and the horrific casualties left in its wake spread to every corner of the world.
The news ran footage about Sipnaha whenever there was a lull.
Experts from all over came forward, digging up records from past Chaos Periods to hammer home once more the dangers of dungeons and monsters.
Thanks to that, some reasonably correct voices were starting to emerge — that people mustn't grow too drunk on peace, that they must always stay prepared for dungeons and monsters.
The internet blazed for days.
News also came in about the Guardian of the Northern Mountain clan being investigated, along with anyone directly or indirectly connected who'd profited from it, all being arrested one after another.
Watching the general mess unfold, I couldn't help thinking that in the end, it's the same world of people wherever you go.
There were lunatics blinded by profit, people with a reasonable amount of greed, people living normal lives, and people who were decent enough.
It was a world made of all different kinds of people.
And so, wearing an expression caught somewhere between emotions, I scrolled through the internet.
Sometimes, whenever I saw the casualties from Sipnaha, a wave of self-reproach would surge up...
"Don't make that face. What you did deserves praise and respect — you have never once done anything that calls for looking so downcast."
- Nghh...
Every time, as if she could read my mood, Professor Atra would gently knead my cheek and tell me not to think such things.
Having my cheek squished and tugged sent the gloom plummeting, replaced by a single, simple thought: I just wanted my cheek to keep being touched.
I felt like an idiot.
I was at the point of idly listening to breaking news through the hologram floating in the air, just to kill time.
[I'll now read the article titled: 「City Turned Hellscape — The 'Cadet Hero' Who Shone Within It.」]
'?'
Did I mishear?
* * *
[Player Correction System: Pioneering Progress]
[Quest 「Rescue 1 Person」 Complete]
[Quest 「Rescue 5 People」 Complete]
...
[Quest 「Rescue 100 People」 Complete]
...
[Quest 「Rescue 500 People」 Complete]
...
[Quest 「Rescue 10,000 People」 Complete]
...
[Quest 「Grade 4 Dungeon Collapse」 Complete]
[Quest 「Mass Subjugation of 7th-Rank Monsters」 Complete]
...
[Quest 「5th-Rank Alpha Individual Subjugation」 Complete]
...
[Quest 「Beast of the Red Mist」 Complete]
...
[Surplus points accumulating]
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[Savior Correction System: Pioneering Progress]
[Quest 「First Trial」 Complete]
[Quest 「Savior's Qualification」 Complete]
[Massive points accumulating]