A Name We'll Never Know
"Talk! Say something!"
Won Ji-an rattled the iron window bars, screaming like a man possessed — but the System was already gone. He kept shouting into the empty air that gave nothing back.
"Who is it, damn it? Who?!"
Afraid someone might see, I grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back.
"Cut it out. You're not some prisoner locked in a cell. You're going to freak people out."
Ji-an whipped his head around, his face twisting.
"You're cracking jokes? Right now?"
Then he took a step closer, looking ready to grab me by the collar.
"And what was that just now? That if we don't take first place, something terrible will happen. Did you make a bet with the System?"
I was at a loss for words. I'd never thought he would find out. I'd been planning to hide it until the very end.
"That's what happened."
"Ha. Hahaha."
A dry, hollow laugh scraped out of him.
"It's obvious. If you take first, the System said it'd save me. Right?"
"...Yeah."
In that instant, Ji-an brought his fist down on his own head.
Thud!
"W-wait!"
"What?"
"Don't do that."
"Why not? I'm the one who feels the pain anyway. I want to hit myself, so I'm hitting myself."
Ji-an, occupying my body, started pounding Do Won-woo's head with his fists.
"What the hell were you thinking, making a bet like that?!"
It wasn't until I caught both his arms that he finally stopped hitting himself.
"Okay. Let's just... calm down for a second."
"..."
The first thing I did was close the window. The last thing I needed was someone seeing us like this. Fortunately, it didn't look like anyone had. And so we sat side by side for a while, trying to get our thoughts in order.
...The System.
Quietly, I turned that existence over in my mind once more. Come to think of it, I'd never really given deep thought to where the System came from, or what it actually was. I'd just filed it away as a lunatic who existed to piss me off. I'd wondered, briefly, how it had come into being and what kind of entity it was — but I'd never considered it important. Back then, the only thing that mattered was debuting with Ji-an and surviving.
I'd missed it.
I'd missed it completely.
Why the System had given me that goal. Why it helped me one moment and shoved me into a pit the next.
In truth, the moment I learned the System was an entity trying to take over my body, everything started to fall into place.
For now, I should add this to the notebook too.
I pulled out my notebook for the first time in a while. The memorization notebook I'd started when I first dropped into this world, to commit the novel to memory. I opened it. There had been events during the survival show that followed the original plot, but there had also been a ridiculous number of variables, and the pages were covered in corrections and revisions.
"You wrote that kind of thing too?"
Ji-an, who had finally calmed down, showed interest in the notebook. The moment he saw it for the first time, his eyes went round. I shrugged, as if to say, what?
"You didn't write one?"
"...No."
"Huh."
"Who memorizes their entire life like they're cramming for an exam, the way you do?"
Ji-an flipped the notebook open.
"I'd actually forgotten you were first in your whole school. Looking at this, it's starting to hit me again."
The pages were packed dense with notes, as if I'd gone straight back to those days of studying like a man possessed. Flip past the table of contents, and you hit a section of character profiles.
"This was a huge help."
"Huh. I'm not in here."
Ji-an, who'd been looking for his own name, glanced over at me.
"Ah — this is the section where I organized the original novel's main characters."
Why was I making excuses? This wasn't even a situation that called for them.
"You were an extra in this novel. And besides, even if there had been a character profile, it wouldn't have meant anything. You're a possessor too."
"Right."
Apparently satisfied, Ji-an turned another page. Then something caught his eye, and he stopped.
"Hey, wait. What's this 'simulation'?"
I'd forgotten that was in there.
"You don't need to know about that."
I lunged to snatch it away, but he blocked my hand. Dodging every attempt to grab it, Ji-an started reading.
"What the hell. You wrote down everything you were going to say in case the conversation died?"
"Don't look at that."
I was so startled my voice cracked.
"I-I wrote that not long after I got here, when I didn't even know how to make friends."
"..."
"You — you get it! You didn't have friends in school either!"
I'd gotten worked up without realizing it.
"Even I wasn't this bad."
"Ugh..."
Ji-an shook his head and turned another page. And the moment he saw the next one, his face said he couldn't believe what he was looking at.
"So even meeting Hae-won for the first time was something you engineered to look like a coincidence? You already knew from the novel when everything would happen, so you tried to meet him earlier than you were supposed to..."
He clicked his tongue.
"Wow."
"...You didn't know?"
"No, I figured as much — but I didn't think you'd planned it down to this level of detail."
I pressed a hand to my forehead. Back then, I hadn't had a choice. My original fate was to be the villain. Every episode, I'd pick a fight with the protagonist and get beaten like a dog, and I had to survive that somehow. So I'd memorized everything about Lee Hae-won — his favorite foods, his hobbies, all of it — just to get close to him. And I'd mapped out entire conversations like simulations, planning exactly what to say.
"You know, I think you would've made a pretty good spy."
I couldn't tell if he was teasing me or being serious. I pressed my fingers into my temples, then looked up.
"You mean like the National Intelligence Service?"
"Okay, let's not take it that far. The NIS? That doesn't even fit. Some kid who just debuted as an idol, joining the—"
"You just told me to become a spy."
"I said you would've been good at it. I never said you should join the NIS."
I laughed. Thinking about it, this wasn't a situation to be laughing in.
...Still. This isn't so bad.
Throughout the survival show, our conversations had been nothing but grim talk of living and dying. Now we were in a place where we could throw around jokes like this. The situation hadn't actually gotten much better. If what the System said was true, there was still something out there trying to torment us and tear us apart.
"Anyway. I should add what the System just told us to the notebook too."
I flipped to a new page and started a new section. The additional information the System had given us: that the System had originally been human, and that they, too, had been given the same goal as us. And that when they failed to debut, their body was taken, and they became a System.
It was staggering. If that was true, I'd come close to the same fate. I would have had my body stolen, become a System, and been reduced to hunting someone else's body.
...Thinking about it that way sends a chill down my spine.
"But do you believe it?"
I paused mid-note at the question from beside me. Whether I believed the System.
"I don't know. I wouldn't say I trust it completely."
It wasn't strange to still have doubts, even after everything it had said. The System had pulled plenty of shitty pranks up to this point. For all we knew, everything it just told us was a lie, and it would come back to mess with us after pretending to disappear. I couldn't rule that out, but...
"It didn't feel like a lie to me."
I leaned against the wall, tapping the notebook with my pen, lost in thought. No matter how I looked at it, this was a different texture from the usual games it played.
"What would it even gain from lying about something like this? That thing would enjoy vanishing without a word and popping back up as a surprise, sure. But it's not the type to dump this much information on us and then go, 'Just kidding, it was all a lie.' That's not even a funny joke."
And more than anything, it wouldn't be any fun.
"So I think we can take this information at face value, but..."
Of course, that was me talking from a purely common-sense standpoint. That thing could well be operating on a level of logic that left common sense in the dust.
"So the System really was the same kind of being as us?"
"...It's possible."
Ji-an's face grew thoughtful for a moment, then he lowered his head.
"Then... I kind of feel sorry for it."
Sorry for it, huh. I'd felt the same way at first. It wasn't someone I wanted to feel pity for, but it was pitiable — that much was true. One wrong move, and I could have ended up in the same position.
"So the System is just... gone? For good?"
"...Probably."
Ji-an pulled his knees to his chest and asked, almost in a whisper.
"Now that I think about it... we don't even know its name."
"...Yeah."
Vanishing without anyone to remember you, without even leaving a name behind — that was a little sad.
"But it's a good thing."
As if there was no reason to be sad, Ji-an's expression shifted immediately.
"That thing was trying to take over your body. So good riddance. At least now it won't be handing you quests designed to screw you over."
I nodded. Toward the end, I hadn't even been able to tell if the System was giving me quests to help me or to destroy me. It had been confusing. But now that it was gone, at least I wouldn't have to deal with headaches on its account.
"Ji-an, your System never actually appeared in front of you, right?"
"Yeah."
That had been another question mark, but it seemed like each System had a different strategy. There were types like mine that showed themselves, and types like Ji-an's that stayed hidden, quietly guiding you through something like a status window.
"Thinking about it, it was weird."
Ji-an muttered.
"The System gave me that Misery Transfer Right so I could sacrifice myself for you. If its goal was to help me unconditionally, why would it set me up to make a choice like that?"
As he said it, he waved a hand through the empty air.
"It's not showing up for me anymore either, just like yours. I think my System's gone too."
Come to think of it, the title that used to float above my head had been gone for a while now. That ridiculous title. It had always made me feel like I'd been dropped into a video game.
"So that means we won't be jerked around by the System anymore?"
I felt relieved — and, in a different way, uneasy.
"But that unidentified thing that's trying to hurt us might still have a System, right?"
If that was the case, then with our Systems gone, we'd lost the ability to protect ourselves from that villain.
"Haha. Shit."
I hadn't thought everything would magically work out just because we debuted, but we still had unfinished business.
For a normal idol, the villains are supposed to be anti-fans, or a tone-deaf agency CEO, or a member who causes accidents every other day. Right?
A hollow laugh was all I could manage. Our villain was some bizarre human who'd stolen someone else's body and then tried to bungee-jump to their death in a body that wasn't even theirs. And we didn't even know their name, or what they were...