1. Patron Anais (1)
1. Patron Anais (1)
"Well?"
"Same as yesterday. They said to just leave it out front."
The hulking figure, easily over two meters tall, scratched his head.
Bulbous red skin and thickly corded muscle.
Two sharp horns and tusks that reached below his chin.
He looked like a demon crawled up from hell.
The girl sitting across from him, legs crossed, didn't show the slightest trace of fear.
If anything, it was the lumbering monster who looked lost the moment he saw her expression harden.
"What is that man scheming? Holed up for days on end."
The girl propped her chin on one hand and drummed the table with the other.
The troupe leader had been acting strange lately.
Avoiding the members was one thing, but he wouldn't even come out of his wagon.
-Heh heh, what are you up to over here?
The leader who always popped up out of nowhere to startle everyone.
For him to suddenly turn so reclusive was unheard of.
Ella couldn't let it go.
'What kind of atrocity is he cooking up now?'
No one deserved the epithet "demon" more than him.
She could still see the people who dropped dead at a flick of his wrist.
Dozens of armored knights reduced to chopped meat and scattered across a field in seconds.
Shattered bone, spilled entrails, clotted lumps of flesh.
'Urgk, don't think about it... don't think about it...'
The absurd power was horrifying enough, but the smile he wore while doing it—casual, untroubled—was worse.
A devil in human skin.
A sharp sniff.
"Hm?"
The sound of breath rushing through nostrils.
The red-skinned monster was eyeing the food on the table, drool practically pooling in his mouth.
He clearly wanted to devour everything in front of him then and there, but was holding back, waiting for the girl's say-so.
"Sorry. Got lost in thought for a minute. Good work today. Sit. Eat."
"Okay."
A goofy "Heh heh" that didn't suit him at all, and the monster slid onto the bench opposite her.
He fell on the food like a starving beast.
Crunch. Gnash.
Serrated teeth flashed. Pork ribs shattered, bone and all.
The girl watched the grisly display without flinching.
She knew the truth.
The "monster" in front of her was still just a child, barely ten years old.
A soft-hearted kid who couldn't even hurt a bug.
Umon.
To her, he was simply the circus troupe's endearing youngest member.
"Sorry you get stuck with this every morning. I could do it myself. No reason to send you..."
Umon wiped the sauce off his mouth and grinned.
"It's fine. The youngest is supposed to do this stuff."
"And you weren't scared?"
"What's there to be scared of? I'm just bringing food."
Umon thumped his chest with a fist, brimming with confidence.
The girl glanced toward the other end of the campsite.
The table where the rest of the troupe ate.
A few members had been looking this way until their eyes met hers.
They glanced away, sheepish.
So they at least had the decency to be embarrassed about it.
Dumping every miserable chore on the kid.
Good thing he didn't seem to mind it himself, but still...
"That 'just bringing food' is exactly what the rest of them can't manage. They're so terrified of going anywhere near his wagon they practically shake apart. Pathetic older brothers and sisters, every one of them. Right?"
"Heh heh. Works for me. I get the good side dishes every meal."
Umon picked up a whole rack of ribs and bit down.
For the past few days, as compensation for running the leader's errands, he'd been eating every meal with the leader and the Deputy Leader.
Approaching the leader's wagon—the one he kept to himself.
Something everyone else would refuse even if you tripled their rations.
"Honestly, I don't get why the others are so scared of him. He's nice to us. Doesn't hit anybody. Makes sure we're fed."
Ella furrowed her brow as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing.
How could anyone be this naive?
"You've been here... what, about three weeks?"
"Two."
"Two... hmm. Nothing's happened yet. You've been lucky. You haven't seen that man do something insane. Don't trust him. Don't even think of him as human. The black rot he's got inside..."
Umon's eyes just rolled back and forth as Ella's voice rose with anger.
'Here she goes again...'
Everyone in the troupe knew the Deputy Leader hated the leader.
Defending the leader in front of her was like throwing oil on a house fire.
Attitudes toward the leader came in three varieties.
Ella, openly hostile.
Umon, genuinely unfazed.
And every last person besides those two was terrified of him.
Ella glared daggers at the leader's wagon.
She did hate him. That was the truth.
But that didn't mean she wasn't afraid.
She only ever put on a brave face because she'd rather die than let him see otherwise.
Frank Wonderstein.
Leader of the Monster Circus Troupe.
A demon wearing human hide.
"Haah."
She had no idea what he was plotting, shut up in that wagon, but she couldn't just let it slide.
Making sure he actually did his job as "troupe leader" was her responsibility as his deputy, after all.
Ella crossed the campsite to his wagon.
Since everyone preferred to keep as far away from the leader as possible, his wagon sat isolated in the farthest corner.
The nearer she drew, the more a clammy chill crawled up her spine.
There was no real temperature drop.
It was only her own aversion setting every nerve on edge.
Thump. Thump.
She knocked on the wagon door. A rustle of movement inside. No answer.
Ella leaned a hand against the door and let out a long sigh.
"Bergson's people will be sending someone soon. You haven't forgotten the arrangement with the viscountess, I hope?"
"Oh my, has it been four days already?"
A voice that sounded forced into cheerfulness.
Exactly the way the leader always sounded.
The laughter, the expressions—all clumsily imitated human reactions that fell straight into the uncanny valley.
The demon could master anything he touched, but that, apparently, was beyond him.
"Same as ever. I don't know what you're scheming in there, but get out here. Do your job as troupe leader. That's the 'contract,' isn't it?"
"Understood. I'll be out shortly."
"...Make it quick. The viscountess's man will be here any minute."
She left the wagon as if she couldn't bear to exchange another word.
***
I watched Ella's figure recede through the carriage window and let out a breath I'd been holding.
I've been bluffing as best I can, but how long can I keep this up?
I slumped back against the unyielding wooden seat.
I was inside the game "Tril Trillo."
The Tril Trillo series was an action RPG where a party of three characters tackled labyrinthine dungeons.
A knight, specialized for close combat and brute strength.
A thief, built for ranged attacks and nimble movement.
A mage who solved puzzles and created tactical variables.
A classic setup: each member leveraging their specialty to clear stages.
But its sheer scale and polish stood toe-to-toe with any blockbuster title.
Dozens of support characters, each with unique abilities.
Massive stages riddled with hidden secrets.
Enemies with inventive attack patterns, bosses with actual personality.
The series spanned a full trilogy and was commonly called the Tril Trillo Trilogy—TTT for short.
It was my favorite game. The backbone of my YouTube channel.
So when I heard Tril Trillo 4 was being released, I was practically jumping for joy.
But will I ever actually get back to play TT4?
Frank Wonderstein.
Leader of the Monster Circus Troupe.
The villain who served as the final boss through all of Tril Trillo 1, 2, and 3.
A man better known by his alias, the Black Magician.
I had become Wonderstein himself.
A soft electronic chime.
A window materialized in the empty air before me.
[Welcome to the world of Tril Trillo Zero! You are now playing the past of Frank Wonderstein, the final boss of the Tril Trillo series. The victory condition is simple. Survive until the starting point of Tril Trillo 1!]
A message I'd read over and over for the past four days.
I could recite it in my sleep by now.
*Main Quest - Prequel
: The prequel must connect to the main series.
Completion Condition
: Survive until the start of Tril Trillo 1
Reward
: Return to reality
Failure Penalty
: Death in reality
I'd been riding high on the TT4 trailer when the offer came in.
The developers invited me to play TT0.
It's common industry practice to release a prequel side-story ahead of a new launch.
I was the most famous Tril Trillo streamer out there.
I figured it was just a marketing gig and accepted right away.
And this is the result.
I had been dropped into the game.
But nothing about this felt like a game.
Everything I saw and touched was vividly real.
Horrifyingly so.
Take the monster who brings me food every day.
A terrifying bulk of red hide, serrated fangs, and jutting horns.
Unmistakably the stage 3 boss from TT1: the Red-Blood Ogre, Umon.
-Grrr! Fresh human!
With insane defense and health, he'd charge through every attack and swing a cleaver the size of a man, an absolute nightmare for anyone new to the series. Every TT player has a story about watching their party get flattened in seconds after rushing in without a strategy.
And his notoriety wasn't just about the difficulty spike.
Naked corpses—men and women—dangling from meat hooks.
Human flesh sizzling on griddles, boiling in cauldrons.
Apron and cleaver slick with blood.
TT1's stage 3 was a slasher horror film brought to life.
Plenty of players dropped the game entirely because the Red-Blood Ogre was too much.
I was scared of him too.
It was nothing like seeing him on a screen.
His glare, his every breath—it was all real, present, alive.
The rest of the members weren't as bad as the Red-Blood Ogre, but they were still fundamentally terrifying.
A Skeleton Clown who wore flayed human skin like a suit.
A Spider Woman who bound people in cocoons and drained their fluids.
Triplets who liked to tear a person into three pieces while they were still screaming.
Was it any wonder that TT1 had been categorized under the horror genre?
Still, after watching them the last few days, I realized that only their appearances matched the game.
None of the monstrous behavior from the original material was on display.
They talked like normal people. They acted like normal people.
Could I afford to relax?
Come to think of it, I had no reason to be scared of them.
If anything, they were scared of me.
-S-Sir!
-I-I'm sorry!
They'd startle and bolt the moment I drew near.
If I so much as looked at them, they'd drop their heads, sweat beading cold on their skin.
That told me everything about how Wonderstein had been treating them.
But I was only Wonderstein on the outside. Inside, I was just an ordinary person.
Afraid of giving myself away by acting wrong, I'd been hiding out in the wagon.
A few days of that, and my mind had settled. I'd gotten used to the new body, too.
I'd even come to accept my situation.
Right. I was in the world of TTT.
I didn't understand how, but it had already happened.
And I had my pride.
I was the top TTT streamer in the world.
I'd devoted myself entirely to Tril Trillo, built an audience of over a million subscribers.
So fine. I'd clear this game and make it look good.
First, let's reconfirm my abilities.
I looked at the empty air and called out with as much confidence as I could fake.
"Status Window."
Name: Frank Wonderstein
Age: 27
Class: BioMancer
-Devolut: (10/10)
-Muscle Strength: 1.0 (Weakling)
-Tissue Hardness: 1.0 (Naked)
-Cell Regeneration: 1.0 (Crawl)
Trait
: [The Smiling Man]
[BioMancer]
: A mage who specializes in modifying the body by manipulating genes. Absorb the genetic material of various organisms and gather Devolut to enhance your physical form.
Wonderstein's power matched what I knew from the game.
Manipulating his own flesh or that of others.
In the games, he used it to create monsters and was himself modified into one.
Right now, though, I had zero modifications.
No venom-tipped claws, no whip-lashing tentacles, no acidic breath, no superhuman regeneration, no steel-hard skin, no armored muscle.
An empty can. Literally no different from any normal human.
'Standard RPG logic.'
The knight, thief, and mage characters I'd played weren't any different at the start.
They all had impressive lore.
The ace of the knight order.
A kingpin of the underworld.
A generational genius.
But when you actually started playing, all that backstory aside, they began at Level 1 with only basic stats.
Even being the final boss didn't change that.
Going by how the troupe members acted, Wonderstein had clearly been throwing around demonic power until yesterday, but overnight he'd turned into a nobody.
-Devolut: (10/10)
That was the entirety of my starting capital.
Devolut: the resource a BioMancer needed to enhance a body.
In game terms, basic stat points.
What could I actually do with this?
I opened the Evolution Lab tab.
[Evolution Lab]
: Submit desired evolution conditions, and the required resources will be calculated.
I'd been experimenting for the past four days.
How much Devolut it cost to acquire a given ability.
I'd input conditions and calculated the resource demands.
The bottom line was...
A weary sigh.
Ten Devoluts didn't buy you much of anything.
At most, enough to stick an extra arm onto my back?
Trait: Extra Arm
Application Site: Shoulder blade
Effect: Adds one additional arm identical to your own. Lacks a ring finger, pinky, and fingerprints.
Required Resources: [Devolut 10]
And even that only fit the budget if I dropped two fingers and the fingerprints.
What possible use would that be?
Sure, someone missing an arm might be grateful, but practically speaking, it was worthless.
The powerful abilities from the original games I tested as a benchmark demanded several times as many resources.
The road ahead looked impossibly long.
Not that I started with nothing.
The Trait displayed in my Status Window: The Smiling Man.
Like the knight's Push,
the thief's Double Jump,
the mage's Barrier—
surely this would be a genuinely useful innate ability, wouldn't it?
I'd checked The Smiling Man's details with genuine anticipation, and the description was...
Appalling.
Trait: The Smiling Man
Application Site: Facial muscles
Effect: Face is perpetually fixed with a smile. Projects an air of unshakable composure regardless of terror, shock, or grief.
Cost: Innate Trait. Cannot be removed.
Smiling. That's the power.
Smiling is my unique trait!
Wow!
...Fuck.
To be fair, this was exactly the kind of freak the original Wonderstein was.
He smiled while his limbs were being severed. He smiled with a hole blown through his stomach. He smiled through every venomous remark and every act of cruelty.
But to hand it out as an ability...
Wasn't that a little much?
"Hey! The guest is here!"
Ella's voice cut through the wagon walls.
Well, one way or another, the game had already started.
I faced the mirror.
A handsome face framed by long, shoulder-length blonde hair.
He wore a dashing smile—and a hint of something thoroughly artificial.
The Smiling Man.
Frank Wonderstein.
So I'll be conquering you from a different angle now.
I smiled back at him—at myself—and put on my hat.