Intrusion
The first day had been fine.
Thanks to the success of the RX-series experiment, we no longer had to endure any of the stranger procedures. In that long-awaited stretch of rest, we were finally able to talk freely, without fear.
I was praised a great deal, and loved a great deal. Maybe it was the personality that had been rewritten in me — words that once would have made me cringe and shove them away now landed warm and welcome.
Among them, the one who doted on me especially was Sister Number One.
After that experiment, she had looked after me like a true sibling.
And because I had succeeded, none of the other RX-series brothers and sisters were discarded.
These were children into whom a year's worth of resources had been poured, who had been injected with countless drugs and remade until their bodies were all but rebuilt from the ground up. Because of that, we survived instead of being trained as child soldiers.
But from the second day on, something began to go wrong.
I could not rein in the senses that kept expanding of their own will. The scientists who had always treated the test subjects like objects did not give me proper treatment — they simply pumped me full of drugs.
Medicine refined from a madman's herb that drove people insane. A drug that shattered the mental workings of ordinary humans, and that began, little by little, to eat away at mine.
From the indiscriminate dosing, my dopamine receptors went dull. I became a body that could feel neither pride nor happiness from anything short of the extraordinary.
The hours I spent listless and medicated only grew longer.
So when my brothers and sisters were dying right in front of me at the hands of undead knights, the only thing the drug-addled me could do was nothing at all.
And so, kneeling blankly before the corpses of the family I loved, a blue window rose out of empty air.
Assimilation rate drop detected
Current player 'SwordTastyStar' assimilation rate: 45%
Safe range entry confirmed. Attempting forced mental recovery.
"Hhhup...!"
I drew a deep breath and tried to sit up — and cracked my head against the sealed ceiling of the capsule. Owww... Rubbing my skull, I dragged the images back into place.
What surfaced first, of course, was everything about the Usurpation Project and the Succession Rite. Thanks to that nameless Knight-King, I had recovered memories that mattered.
"The Usurpation Project... I get what that is. The Succession Rite, too."
To seize, into a human body, authority that should have gone to an S-rank gate. The project run for that purpose was the RX Project — and I had been the one who made it succeed.
The so-called Succession Rite wasn't much either, for all the grand name.
If a third party snatches the throne mid-succession, that is usurpation. Nothing particularly hard to grasp.
Looked at that way, it wasn't even strange that a dungeon had opened beneath the research institute. There must have been a mistake during the experiment.
"It's just..."
What had the Babel Tower been?
Wasn't the first SS-rank dungeon the Siberia Gate? Why was an SS-rank gate showing up in memories from eight years ago?
And tower-form gates were vanishingly rare. Dungeons usually took the shape of portals. A dungeon's "tower" was nothing more and nothing less than a colossal structure built to flaunt its own majesty.
But something like that had appeared twice?
Something was off.
If an SS-rank gate had manifested, there was no way no one would know. Those World Government bastards who even hid servers between the dimensions of the virtual world — and they hadn't noticed? I couldn't buy that for a second.
Which left only one possibility: for some reason, only the upper echelons of the World Government knew.
"...Haa. I don't know."
My head simply refused to turn over right now.
And even if I forced it, I doubted anything useful would come out.
Nothing for it. I wasn't a specialist in this sort of thing. Work like this was supposed to be left to the experts.
A story about an SS-rank gate the World Government was keeping buried. That kind of conspiracy-flavored business was something you took straight to an organization with an information network separate from the government. Like the Vatican's Holy See.
Fortunately, I happened to know a specialist of exactly that sort.
"Ah, for real... that woman is a little much, though."
The Saintess.
No — the girl surnamed Seong.
It wasn't that I disliked the woman who came running the moment she saw me, cooing about how cute I was. Someone like me, who wanted to be loved and paid attention to, had every reason to like that — none to hate it.
The Second Saintess herself wasn't a bad person. Her reputation wasn't bad either, and setting a few things aside, I honestly thought she suited the title.
The problem was that those few things were all about me. If she ever found out I was streaming, she was the type to throw a tantrum until she got herself onto the show.
And if the Saintess ever appeared on my broadcast...
"Ugh. My head."
I shook out the throbbing. That was a nightmare that could not be allowed to happen. The chemical reaction between my chaos-loving viewers and that Saintess was something I did not want to imagine.
So I decided to turn the subject of my thoughts elsewhere.
"Someone that perfect... what does she even see in me?"
Had saving her really been that big a deal? Enough to fall in love? For someone who still wasn't ready to love anyone, it was a sensibility I found awfully hard to understand.
"Haa. Whatever. I'll just call her first."
Muttering under my breath, I turned on my phone and, out of habit, tapped the gallery instead of my contacts. By the time I realized I'd opened the wrong app, I was already on the Recommended Posts tab.
"Uh..."
The gallery was on fire. Users running wild without a mod to rein them in, a Par-ttak who had given up control and gotten swept into the public mood, and a second Par-ttak completely wrecked.
Faced with a situation I had no idea how to fix, a line I'd once heard from a monk-turned-soldier floated up.
What you set in motion will, one day, come back to you.
"..."
It felt like that line had been written for exactly this.
The spark I'd thrown because I wanted to set Lee Seon-woo on fire had burned our gallery down with it.
Unfortunately, Lee Seon-woo had already settled his karmic debt on stream.
Now it was my turn to settle mine.
I had no idea what had happened while I was out cold... but of one thing I was certain.
"...I'm fucked."
That I was fucked.
First thing I did was check the clock.
The hour and minute hands pointed to nine. Relieved that at least I hadn't slept too long — and then I saw the light seeping in through the window.
"...Oh?"
It wasn't nine in the evening. It was nine in the morning.
In other words, I had been unconscious for over twelve hours.
Only then did I understand why the gallery was burning like this. Honestly, if a streamer I liked collapsed on someone else's broadcast, I'd be torching the place too.
"Ah. Come to think of it..."
My last memory was collapsing in front of the knight. Had I done that in front of the viewers? Before turning the stream on, I hurriedly opened the game's private messages.
"...Good. The thing I was worried about didn't happen."
Come to think of it, the map had been strange too.
The Northern Supernatural Research Institute Gate was a genuine classified matter. Class-3 confidential — so people who were supposed to know, knew — but it was definitely not something that should have been walking around freely inside a VR world.
No creator nickname had shown up, the boss's behavior had been off, and the way the boss's actions affected both the stream and the game had all been off.
"...I'll have to look into this separately too."
I murmured it under my breath as I climbed out of the VR gear. There was something I had to deal with first.
I rushed to turn on the computer, set up the stream, and dropped into the chair. I opened the broadcast software and sat waiting for the standby screen while I thought about a stream title.
"It's still fine, for now."
You're saying that even after seeing the gallery on fire?
It's fine because it's on fire. When things are truly not fine, every mod flees and the gallery gets terrorized for real.
So this was closer to WWE, honestly. The fact that they were already running NTR memes in the recommended posts meant it wasn't UFC yet.
From the start, the Swordsmanship Gallery users and I had always just been people who teased and got teased. A new angle to needle me with had appeared, and they'd bitten, so of course those posts started showing up.
The problem began with the fact that I hadn't answered any of it and had gone dark for twelve straight hours.
They'd been talking among themselves waiting for me to show, and when I didn't for twelve hours, the WWE started slowly mutating into UFC.
"Augh, damn it... I really need to do something about this body."
Once I met the Saintess this time, I was going to put some kind of plan in place.
With that resolution, I went live.
As expected, the moment the stream came on, chat started flooding up the screen.
I was not rattled in the slightest. This was me — the same me who hadn't flinched in front of an SS-rank gate. I was not the kind of person to fold under a trial this small.
So I deliberately decided to go out bold.
BANG—!
...That had been the plan.
"Ah— eh... uh?"
Until my personal physician kicked the door of my house open hard enough to smash it off its hinges.
Faced with something I had never once expected, my mind simply locked up solid.