1. Tutorial

A character-collection defense game. Ardelphia Benefit.

A game I'd poured a full three thousand hours into without ever laying eyes on the ending. Its difficulty was vicious enough that even players who'd sunk more time into it than I had had never once witnessed the ending credits.

And just now, nearly two thousand hours of that long grind had come to nothing. Well — "two thousand hours" was the generous count. My actual playtime was probably somewhere around four hundred.

Call it inflated playtime, the natural product of a game that had gone and mixed idle mechanics into what was supposed to be a tower defense title.

Anyway, none of that mattered at the moment. The instant my long-drawn sigh tapped against the monitor, the tutorial — one I hadn't seen in quite some time — was there to greet me.

Deleting the default starter character as though it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠were the most obvious thing in the world, I paused before the gacha screen and sank into thought. Was this really the right choice?

Word was that Korea, of all places, had an outsized population of players who loved degenerate playstyles. Put simply: Concept Players. I belonged to that breed, too.

And an All-in one at that.

No buffers, no debuffers — just one single character, raised pure and planted on the field alone? It went without saying that this was madness. Reckless to the point where you'd wonder whether the player even intended to clear the game at all.

…And yet, inside that very recklessness, I'd found hope. This game placed no cap on character growth, so unlike every other defense game out there, the approach genuinely had potential behind it.

And not with a 6-Star unit — with a 1-Star.

Stumbling onto her exclusive hidden event by pure chance had been lucky enough, but I'd never once imagined that the 1-Star character I'd raised with such devotion would end up trading blows with Tier 1 units.

But with the clear within arm's reach, I'd somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Buried under work for a stretch, I'd barely logged in at all — and the run met its Game Over with the Shelter's supplies run completely dry.

No — to put it precisely, something had clearly thrown a variable into the mix. I'd monitored the game for nearly a full week, confirmed there was zero chance of a game over while idle, and only then put off logging back in.

Yet for some reason, the moment I finally returned, a Game ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Over screen was there to welcome me. Complete with a line declaring the Shelter destroyed. It was an ending far too suspicious to simply wave past — and understandably so, since the "no surviving characters" message was supposed to come first.

Unlike other players who raised entire rosters, I raised exactly one character, which meant I'd seen this ending more times than I could count.

Not that "all" ever amounted to more than the one. Still — the Shelter-destruction ending showing up first? Short of an actual glitch in the game, that was an ending that simply couldn't exist.

It wasn't the kind of game with save files to load, either, which left exactly one way to find out the truth.

Click.

Don't tell me it wants blood on my hands?

The gacha's dazzling effects showered the screen in light, but my lips refused to curl. A 6-Star at this of all moments — and Tier 1 on top of that. But even having pulled Evelyn, she was hardly the character I needed right now.

Skipping the early game entirely, I force-started the wave with not a shred of equipment stocked and no supplies whatsoever.

A red warning window swallowed the screen whole. Even with a 6-Star from the very first pull, torching a run like this stung a little… but well, what could I do?

I clicked Confirm and watched Evelyn — not so much as her basic gear equipped — get savagely ground to paste. For a moment I even found myself admiring it: so that's how much work went into 6-Star Semi-Destruction Modeling—

"…Mm."

The instant the foregone conclusion sparkled onto the monitor, I hit the restart button. But where the results window should have appeared as it always did, a blue notification had surfaced instead, for reasons I couldn't fathom.

Well, this was another first. Normally, the game paid out achievement rewards automatically the instant you completed them — having one dangled in front of me after the fact had never happened before. Maybe it was the game's way of consoling a player who'd pulled a 6-Star and then fumbled everything anyway.

I pressed Confirm without thinking much of it, and another window flickered to life.

"…Linea's wish?"

Hardly a name I was seeing for the first time — it was one I'd stared at until my eyes glazed over. The character who, across a full two thousand hours of my previous run, had never once left my party. The 1-Star I'd cherished with every ounce of care, who had held the Shelter single-handedly all the way to the brink of the final wave.

Linea Saddlerite.

But this was, without question, a system error. The game was built so that rewards never carried over into the next run — the mere existence of this window meant it was a bug.

That there was yet another hidden achievement tied to Linea was plenty intriguing on its own… but what on earth could its conditions have been?

Whatever the case, the only option left was to try again. With half a mind to reroll, if that was what it took, until Linea appeared, I pressed Confirm. I was curious about that hidden achievement's conditions and reward — and it was also true that I'd been standing right at the door of a clear.

I'd barely finished convincing myself that this run, at last, would be the one I cleared —

—when, for no reason I could name, my vision went black, and even the light of the monitor vanished without a trace.

'…What?'

I had definitely spoken out loud, yet not a single sound reached my ears. And it wasn't just the monitor — every light brightening the room had been snuffed out along with it.

Belatedly I tried to push myself up from my chair, but even a fingertip refused to obey. No — the sensation was so uncanny I couldn't even be sure my ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠body was whole.

Only then did it occur to me that something had gone terribly wrong, but by the time I understood it, it was already far too late. Even the faint consciousness left to me began sinking fast, and just as certainty closed in — the certainty that I was about to black out —

a familiar notification chime sounded from somewhere.

Ding—

"…"

The musty reek of rotting wood stabbed at my nose. The shabby wooden ceiling hanging over me was split with cracks from end to end, looking ready to give way at any moment.

For a heartbeat I wondered if I'd simply collapsed from overwork and was dreaming. But the sensations flooding in were so eerily, impossibly real — assailing every one of my five senses — that a hollow laugh, more bewilderment than amusement, slipped out of me.

Against how unreal the scene was, this place was achingly familiar. From the rotting wooden walls to the floor gaping open here and there — the Shelter in its initial form, the one every Ardelphia Benefit player would know at a glance.

I understood ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠full well that something had gone wrong. But that unease wasn't about to hand me any miracle for cutting through it, so I raised myself slowly and began piecing my scrambled thoughts together, one by one.

"…Ha."

The sigh that spilled out of me unbidden, the sensation rising through my fingertips, the groan of aged planks creaking under pressure—

Tap… tap…

…Footsteps?

My thoughts were still far from settled, yet the artificial sound boring into my ears drew my brows together on pure reflex. Praying this wasn't one of those hopeless openings where monsters come storming in the instant you wake up inside a game, I turned my head with care.

From a good distance away, a figure was unmistakably making its way toward me, its steps falling in a badly uneven rhythm. I couldn't say whether that counted as lucky, but it was no monster come for my life.

It was, in other words, the figure I knew better than anyone. It was Linea Saddlerite.

It was a face I had watched through a screen hundreds upon hundreds of times. Yet now, meeting it with my own two eyes, an uncanny disconnect washed over me — as though I were gazing at someone entirely different from the Linea in my memory.

She had been approaching with a lost, flustered expression, dressed in clothes worn nearly to rags, her face smeared with grime. It was the exact image of the moment I first summoned Linea in the game.

"…"

At some point our eyes had met, and her amber gaze — still failing to shake its confusion — shivered without pause.

But that, too, lasted only a breath. What I had taken for anxiety in her trembling eyes began, as the distance between us dwindled, to shift into something else entirely — anxiety dissolving into sorrow, sorrow hardening into fury.

At the corner of an eye gone knife-sharp, for some reason, a single clear tear had gathered. Her lips, pressed tightly together, could barely contain their trembling, and between her crumpled brows an emotion bled through untouched — resentment, or grief; I couldn't tell which.

Then Linea — who had spent all that time glaring holes through me — finally wrenched her trembling lips apart, as though the feelings she had held back to the very last were tearing free.

"…Why… why did you abandon me?"