Episode 19
Because the story had started to run long, we changed locations. I climbed into the vehicle Kim Su-hyun had come in and headed for the Ability Management Bureau headquarters.
Now we were sitting in the sofa of a filthy, absurdly large room high up in some office tower, facing each other across a low table.
“The villain Eraser. Real name: Ma Hyung-seok. A Korean returnee, currently estimated at level 300. And Eraser was not a villain from the start. When he returned, he was a pretty ordinary middle-aged man, the sort you could find anywhere, with a somewhat short temper and a personality that was, at least, decent enough.”
“So why’s he a villain now?”
I’d just assumed he was a total bastard, but it sounded like there was a reason.
“The decisive trigger was the collapse of his family.”
I flinched. My hand trembled.
“As Cynthia knows, Earth is in terrible shape. Even twenty years later, it still is, but before the returnees came back, it was even worse.”
He added that it had been a bleak era of nonstop casualties, so many that they couldn’t even be properly counted.
“Once the returnees came back, things began to improve. But then other problems appeared.”
Family. Lovers. Friends.
As humanity began to recover, those who had fought their way home from another world naturally went looking for the people they had once known.
They had put out the immediate fire. That was the obvious next step.
But reality was merciless and cruel.
“By then, countless people had already died, including the very people the returnees had been desperately searching for. It was inevitable. Having a connection to them would not make danger simply look the other way.”
At that point, returnees split into several groups.
Some accepted the deaths of those close to them and sank into despair, or turned their grief into vengeance against the monsters. That was still manageable.
“The real problem was the ones who completely lost their minds.”
It was still better if they only destroyed themselves.
Self-destruction was tragic, but it kept the damage to everyone else at a minimum.
“The problem was the people who couldn’t even distinguish friend from foe and used their powers indiscriminately.”
“So Eraser was one of those guys.”
“Correct.”
Kim Su-hyun pushed his glasses up and continued his explanation.
“Before being transferred to another world, Eraser was an ordinary family man. He had a wife and a daughter.”
“They died?”
“Yes. But not among the early casualties I mentioned earlier. In fact, his wife was still alive when Eraser first returned.”
His wife, then? Which meant the daughter had died?
When I looked at him in curiosity, Kim Su-hyun cleared his throat and went on.
“This is a slightly different story, but around twelve years ago there was a period when human trafficking incidents were breaking out all over the country.”
“Human trafficking?”
“It mostly targeted minors and young children. The mastermind was another returnee villain. A necromancer who handled dark magic.”
At that, I clicked my tongue. I could already see what was coming next.
“He, too, was a returnee who had lost the person he loved.”
“So he went around trying to bring them back.”
“And he failed.”
Obviously.
If bringing the dead back meant a true, complete resurrection rather than some half-baked thing like a zombie or a puppet doll, then it was impossible.
It was a taboo that should never be attempted. The moment you tried, a door would open in the abyss, and something would come to collect the price.
I died that way once already.
For a human necromancer nobody, it was absurdly stupid to try touching that kind of thing.
There was a reason people said the ignorant were fearless.
“Back to the main story. Eraser’s wife was involved in that trafficking case. She sold off her own fourteen-year-old only daughter.”
“……”
“The reason was simple. She did it to survive.”
That was back before every city had been protected by a Wall.
His wife had endured that brutal era while raising a little girl alone, with no husband beside her, and in the end she had done something monstrous just to keep herself alive.
“When the trafficking cases exploded, the Guardian and the other Guardians moved in to handle them, but there was no room to breathe back then, so the response was delayed. Only a small number of the children were rescued.”
“And the villain’s daughter died?”
“Yes. She had already been used as a sacrifice for resurrection, so there wasn’t even a body left to recover.”
“And the wife?”
“She hid inside the city and lived like a dead thing until Eraser returned. After he came back and belatedly heard the truth, he slaughtered her with his own hands.”
Shin Hyun-ah had been there too, but apparently she couldn’t stop him.
“The Guardian judges good and evil by her own trait. She says that because she was cast down into Ragnarok and spent her whole life in a special environment, that was simply how she had to be. So she reacted to Eraser’s murder too late. From the Guardian’s point of view, he was a perfect good person. She hesitated for a moment.”
It was the moment when a good person committed evil and was born as evil in turn.
“On top of that, Eraser’s troublesome ability was another reason the killing couldn’t be stopped. He’s a space mage like me, but unlike me he mastered the eleventh circle.”
“That was enough?”
Space magic was annoying, sure, but wouldn’t a maid have been able to stop him?
The sword strike that had severed my own neck should have done it without much trouble.
“The combination of his traits produced an absurd synergy with the magic he had studied.”
He went on to explain that Eraser also possessed the trait Movement.
“You may not know this, but while Korea has a lot of high-level returnees, the total number is absurdly low.”
“Oh, right. I’d wondered about that. Why is that?”
“Because of the old Korean mindset. There was always a tendency to prioritize efficiency above all else. Games were no different.”
“……Wait. Don’t tell me.”
After thinking it through, I opened my mouth at the conclusion that came to mind.
“Yes, what you’re thinking is correct. They loaded up on penalty traits in order to get more high-grade traits. It was just a game, after all.”
“Crazy bastards.”
“Judging by that reaction, Cynthia must not have done the same.”
It wasn’t that I hadn’t considered it.
But back then, my mother had kept calling me in to eat, and besides, since it was just a game and a beta test, I’d chosen only Blindness so I could enjoy it lightly.
“Most of the Koreans who were saddled with far too many penalty traits because they treated it as nothing more than a game twenty years ago, naturally, never made it back. Only those with two or three at most, and even then only the ones who had chosen lighter penalties, managed to return.”
So that was why the balance of power had seemed so strange compared with other countries.
I hadn’t known there was such a backstory.
“The reason I brought this up all of a sudden is that Eraser is one of the few who didn’t belong to that ‘majority.’”
Eraser was given the penalty trait Disability and gained the high-grade trait Movement.
On top of that, he had fallen into another world with five confirmed penalty traits.
“How the hell did he survive?”
“Do you know the Rakuna race?”
“Those raccoon beastkin?”
They were a race that was already on the verge of extinction when I first joined the war.
Not long after, they had truly gone extinct.
“Yes. He was lucky. He said he landed in a peaceful age, on the land of a race that loved peace, and survived only because they took meticulous care of him.”
“Fuck.”
That was infuriatingly unfair.
Some people were thrown into the age of the Great War, and into the Demon King’s camp at that, where they went mad from their senses before they could even open their eyes and were dragged off as test subjects to suffer like dogs. And somebody else came back well-fed and comfortable, even with no limbs left?
That was the moment my earlier guess about returnees being transferred at different times proved true.
“The good news is that he returned to Earth after completing only the five achievements required for return, and the only trait he kept was Movement.”
Wait.
“Hey, what did you just say?”
“Why are you suddenly reacting like that?”
“What was the return condition again? Five achievements?”
Kim Su-hyun, who had shrunk back under my savage glare, answered with a sour look.
“Yes. When returnees go back to Earth, they undergo a process called ‘settlement.’ Depending on the achievements they completed in Ragnarok, the User Information they can preserve upon return changes.”
He watched my reaction and adjusted his glasses before continuing cautiously.
“They end up living in the same world as the characters they made themselves, but every returnee comes from a different era and a different environment. Since the structure of those worldlines makes communication impossible, sixty percent of returnees statistically only meet the five-achievement requirement and come back to Earth. That’s why most of the status window they earned in the other world is lost on return.”
He added that the knowledge they had accumulated at least remained intact, and that because they could still earn Karma Points by killing monsters on Earth, the shop had been used to full effect, which was why humanity had recovered so quickly.
But honestly, I could barely hear what he was saying.
My head was boiling from one thought alone, and it felt like I was about to go insane.
Five achievements? The return button appears after only five?
How many the hell did I complete?
I didn’t know the exact number, but I remembered clearly that it started with a two and had three digits total.
At the very least, that meant I had cleared more than 200 achievements.
My stomach seethed.
I had already met the return condition long ago, and I hadn’t even known it because I couldn’t see?
“Fuck.”
“C-Cynthia?”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuuuck—!!”
The grievance I thought I had mostly forgotten surged back like a fountain of blood.
I cracked my fingers, trying to force myself down, but it was hard to suppress the madness rising back up again.
Then it happened.
“Master.”
The familiar who had been silent beside me all this time finally spoke.
“Don’t do that.”
“……”
I flinched at that ugly voice.
Then I sucked in a breath at what came next.
“If you do that here, Lee Seo-ah will die.”
“……!”
Lee Seo-ah.
Right. That kid was here.
If I ran wild now because I was angry, what about her?
Was I really going to erase the meaning I had barely managed to find with my own hands?
Thrusting a finger into my ear, I tried to jam my thoughts into mush.
Don’t think.
Forget it.
Don’t let your feelings eat you alive.
There’s something I have to protect now.
Not again... like back then.
“Ugh. Uweeeek—!!”
I vomited up everything roiling in my stomach.
The blood that had been boiling inside me spilled out like a puddle, soaking the table and the carpet.
As the sizzling sound of it melting became clearer and clearer, my mind felt a little better.
“Goreuk. So it ended without you smashing your own head once. You’ve improved, Master.”
“Guh. Sh-shut up. You’re making my head ring.”
Even after managing it, I felt strangely amazed.
It seemed even someone as pathetic as me could still grow, after all.
“Cynthia. Are you all right?”
“……Why do you ask only after coming closer?”
When I lifted my bowed head, I saw Kim Su-hyun standing by the door, one hand on the handle.
The bastard was really scared, huh.
“Hey, come back and sit down.”
“There?”
“Fuck. We’re not leaving until we finish the rest of the conversation.”
I’d gone through all that trouble to hold myself back, and there was no way I was going to let Lee Seo-ah be taken from me by some villain bastard.
I didn’t care how unfortunate his story was; if he laid a hand on what gave my life meaning, I would kill him.
“Ahem. Understood.”
Kim Su-hyun carefully avoided the puddle of blood and sat back down on the sofa.
“I won’t ask why you suddenly acted that way. As I said at the beginning, I don’t want to be entangled with you any further.”
As he said that, he shot a glance at me and the familiar beside me.
It would have been natural for him to find a talking goblin in a Love and Peace shirt with a strange belt around his waist odd, but he still chose to ignore it completely.
That was, in fact, a wise attitude.
“Then back to the main point. Eraser killed his wife and lost his mind. Before dying, he saw a photograph of his daughter and started searching for girls of a similar age. Even when told that his daughter was already dead, he refused to believe it. He had seen his wife with his own eyes, but not his daughter.”
After taking a breath, he continued.
“Going mad and searching for his daughter was one thing, but he could not control my ability. You know Voidification, don’t you? The area around him is always wrapped in that magic, so anything that touches it just vanishes.”
“Don’t tell me he wandered around doing that to children?”
“Yes. He’d pick up any girl he saw and kill her on the spot.”
“What a crazy bastard. Why hasn’t somebody killed him yet?”
“Because of the Movement trait I mentioned earlier. Its synergy with space magic is so absurdly strong that he can teleport as easily as breathing. He’s also high-level and has plenty of mana. He doesn’t fight; he runs. That makes him hard to catch, and even when an attack does land, space magic prevents any meaningful damage.”
In the end, Eraser had left Korea.
“The whole world was in an uproar. Eraser couldn’t even distinguish races; he just blindly hunted and killed young girls.”
“So that’s why he’s an internationally wanted criminal.”
“Yes. A few years ago, at least America’s number one hero, Archangel, stepped in and reduced him to near death.”
“But they let him slip away, and now he’s shown up again.”
Kim Su-hyun nodded in agreement.
“It isn’t clear yet whether Korea is his destination or merely a stopover, but there’s no doubt he’s on his way here. We’ll do everything we can to kill Eraser ourselves, but the future is not something anyone can know, is it? So I arranged this meeting to prevent any situation that might arise beforehand.”
He finished speaking with a face stiff from the seriousness of it all.
“Fine, got it.”
I roughly understood how things were moving now.
I stood up and looked at my familiar.
“Gobra. You stay here and protect Seo-ah. If anything happens to that kid, you’re really dead.”
“Goreuk. Understood.”
“Now, hold on a second. What are you planning to do?”
As I headed for the window with my familiar, Kim Su-hyun sprang up in obvious panic.
I only turned my head back to look at him.
“I’m going to go blow off some stress by catching that villain bastard. Why?”
“No, what? We’ll handle that! The reason I told you was simply so you’d protect your child!”
“What are you talking about? You want me to sit around obediently and trust a bunch of amateurs like you? That’s hilarious. It’ll be easier if I just go snatch him up quickly myself.”
Crash!
I kicked through the glass and leapt out.
“Goreuk. See you later. Gobra will go ahead first.”
“Yeah. I’ll be back before morning school starts.”
Bang-!
My familiar, falling with me, kicked off the shattered glass and shot out ahead.
I watched his back vanish into the distance between flying white strands of hair, then raised my right hand toward the sky.
One breath in.
I let it out softly.
“Domain release.”
A huge surge of blood burst from my palm and shot into the sky.
Then it gathered into tiny grains and took the shape of swarming insects.
“Find him.”
The mosquito swarm that blanketed the night sky in red scattered in every direction with a low, churning hum.
My own body did the same.
It dissolved into blood and vanished.