Interrogation
"Hey, let go of me!"
I thrashed wildly, dangling from his grip like a caught fish. I understood why the protagonist had questions — I really did — but this was not the time.
...I was sleepy, damn it.
I'd been pushing myself for days, and bedtime had already come and gone ages ago. I had no energy left for a long conversation. My eyelids already felt like they weighed a ton.
"Answer me. Why do the monsters dispose of their slaves, and how were you able to appear this early?"
Unfortunately, His Highness the Protagonist showed no intention of letting me go anytime soon. I answered in a wounded tone.
"I don't know anything about slaves or disposing of them. Those guys picked a fight with me first. I just roughed them up because they were bad people."
"Wasn't it your hobby to lure trash like that and use them however you pleased?"
A fair point, honestly.
People whose wills all pointed in one direction — criminals, especially — were the easiest to handle. Greed, lust... even if the planet itself were ending, as long as you satisfied their immediate desires, they'd become loyal subordinates. Maintaining the hypnosis barely cost any mana, and when it came to fighting other people, they had more experience than your average hunter. The only reason they never banded together was that each of them had their own agenda. Bind them under a single system, though, and you'd have yourself an army — the perfect weapon for tearing human society apart.
But I'm not the original Pecia.
Of course the protagonist had no way of knowing that. Still, I answered with a faintly resentful edge.
"You know an awful lot of detail for someone... I haven't even done anything yet."
"You were going to."
"The situation's already gone completely off-script for that."
"What situation?"
"The reason you're standing in front of me right now. You showed up because I did something totally different from what you expected, didn't you? Because the future became unpredictable."
"……."
For all I knew, he might be thinking of killing me simply because he couldn't predict me. Gate Apocalypse was packed wall-to-wall with enemies that needed dealing with besides me. Honestly, if I'd been playing and this situation came up, I'd have yelled "Got you, you bastard!" and cut her down in one stroke without a second thought about the consequences.
But the protagonist I know...
He wasn't that reckless. He preferred to stay calm and work through situations methodically. So I decided to start by proving my value.
"First, to answer your earlier question — those guys from before aren't dead."
"Not dead? Why not?"
I cupped both cheeks with my hands, playing at bashfulness.
"Because I'm a moral and kindhearted young lady. If I just killed everyone who annoyed me, how would I survive in human society?"
"You kept them alive to use later."
"I said no. Want me to go kill them right now?"
I glared at him, a little heated. He glared right back, looking ready to devour me whole.
"Don't delude yourself into thinking I'll fall for your nonsense. You're planning to run off into a Gate like this, aren't you?"
"I am not. Fine, then come in with me!"
"I don't trust you."
Is this guy actually insane?!
"Then what do you even wa— whoa!"
My vision lurched, and suddenly Kim Seojun's face filled my entire field of view. He'd leaned in close, right up against me, trying to intimidate me.
"If those guys aren't dead yet, that's good enough. So tell me — how did you come out this early? Are you even really the Queen?"
"What are you talking about? Am I not allowed to come out?"
"Don't play dumb. There shouldn't be enough Mental Power or sacrifices yet. You're Royalty."
He was rattling off information no human at this point in time should know. Whether he had no intention of hiding that he was a regressor, or whether he was just trying to throw me off and seize the upper hand in the conversation, I couldn't tell.
Well, it's not like I have any power here. If he wants to talk, I talk.
I let out a long sigh and laid out what I knew first.
"First of all... you know that summoning Royalty requires a considerable amount of Mental Power, right?"
"……Go on."
"The more powerful and exalted a being is — like me — the harder it is to escape the Abyss. That's why you need 'sacrifices' to offer to the Abyss. And those sacrifices are Mental Power."
But I'd come out in a weakened state. When I first appeared, my physical level hadn't even reached D-class, and I had none of the amusement park's subordinates with me. I hadn't needed any special sacrifices. I'd gotten a tiny bit stronger since then, but I still fell far short of my original power.
Kim Seojun's brow furrowed.
"Which means other ones could be wandering around like this too."
"No. Impossible."
"Why."
"Because they're strong. They're already ridiculously powerful — how are they supposed to weaken themselves? Suck the power out with a robot vacuum or something?"
I'd just told him you needed Mental Power matching your strength to come out. People should think for themselves a little. Did he really need to ask about something this simple?
But Kim Seojun just looked at me with ice-cold eyes and said,
"I understand what you mean. But why were you weakened?"
"……."
I let my gaze wander for a moment before answering.
"I-I don't know."
His expression turned ugly.
"What?"
"I really don't know! I don't know either. I was just weak. Please believe meee."
I stretched both arms out to hug him, but he held me at arm's length like I was a garbage bag. Suddenly feeling sorry for myself, I put on a teary face. Getting dumped into a game world out of nowhere was already unfair enough — and now he wanted me to explain it?
Kim Seojun stared at my sniffling face for a long moment, then tilted his head. He tried not to show it, but he looked faintly surprised.
"……Something's off. The you I know isn't this sloppy or this stupid. Don't tell me the foresight was wrong."
"Foresight……?"
"None of your business."
Then don't mutter it out loud.
But looking at his face, I roughly got it. The protagonist wasn't in a normal "regression" state right now. He didn't have that certainty about the future a regressor should possess. It was more like he'd peeked at something rather than lived through it himself. I had no idea what the hell was going on.
Kim Seojun set me down and said,
"You said your goal was to make the world happy."
"You heard that from the Director?"
"At first I had no idea what you meant, but after watching you for a few days, I figured it out. What kind of world you were talking about."
He wasn't listening to a word I said.
Apparently Kim Seojun had been watching me from the start, and only appeared once he'd already formed his own conclusions. This whole intimidation routine had just been a confirmation check.
As expected, he didn't seem inclined to kill me on the spot. He summoned a small scroll into his right palm. With a pop, the scroll dissolved into a yellow cluster of light, which shifted and drew a magic circle about the size of a hand.
...This is—
"I'll keep an eye on you for now."
He pushed the magic circle forward with his palm. It drifted slowly ahead and sank into my chest.
Oh, so this is what it feels like to get location-tracked.
I'd used this item plenty of times myself. Since it was produced by monsters and completely non-threatening, other monsters never even registered that they'd been hit by it. It was handy against targets with high movement speed or teleportation abilities.
I looked down at my chest with mild curiosity and muttered,
"If you had something like this, why didn't you just use it earlier……"
"I already was. You just never noticed."
Apparently he'd been applying it periodically while I was dead asleep. Since it was an item-cast spell, the effect faded once the stored mana ran out.
Should I report this stalker?
Even so, barging into a refined young lady's bedroom without permission was pretty outrageous. Protagonist or not, a man was a man. How could he be so sure he wouldn't fall for my adorable sleeping face?
I stared at him pointedly. Kim Seojun jerked his chin in a command.
"Now open a Gate and bring them out."
"Huh?"
"Those pieces of trash from earlier need to be dealt with. I can't leave them in a monster's hands."
"Ah……."
Well, if he was taking them off my hands, that was convenient for me. I'd already been mildly annoyed about letting those scumbags into the amusement park — like staining a clean cloth with filth. It had made me sigh.
But as I cheerfully opened the Gate, something felt off. I turned back and asked,
"Hey."
"……?"
"When exactly did we get close enough for you to talk down to me?"
The criminals were officially recorded as having been captured by Black Serpent.
I'd blocked their memories of the amusement park with hypnosis, and fortunately Kim Seojun didn't seem interested in doing anything to me for the time being. He was the type who'd use even a monster if it meant reducing human casualties. That was definitely the protagonist I'd read about in the descriptions. I was genuinely relieved that the game and reality matched up.
I watched the Hunter Management Bureau vehicles drive off with the prisoners loaded inside, rubbing the bump on the crown of my head.
"So what are you going to do now?"
"About what?"
"The Academy. Things are about to go very wrong."
If the protagonist stepped in, I might not need to move at all. No need to go stirring up trouble by being a monster or whatever.
But Kim Seojun just furrowed his brow and stared at me blankly.
……?
What was that look? Like he was hearing this for the first time?
"……."
After a stretch of silence, Kim Seojun asked,
"What are you talking about?"
"You don't know?"
"I'm asking because I don't know."
"That doesn't make any sense. You don't know about the Academy, but somehow you knew what I was going to do?"
He knew the distant future but not the near one. I scrunched my face up at the absurdity of it, and Kim Seojun sighed.
"Just answer the question."
"No, I need to know how much you know before I can explain anything. Do you at least know the Academy gets destroyed?"
"I know."
"Then why are you reacting like that?"
"……."
Kim Seojun hesitated over how to respond to Pecia's question.
For some reason, Pecia was treating him as if he knew the entire future — but that wasn't the case at all.
One day, memories of the future had simply flooded into him upon waking. He'd always had sporadic flashes of foresight, but never anything like this — never such a massive deluge of memories crashing in all at once. And that future wasn't a single path, either. There were hundreds, thousands of them. Among them were no small number of endings where the original "Kim Seojun" made choices he would never have made and died for them.
That was the truth of it.
Kim Seojun was not a regressor, nor did he know the future with any precision. He had merely witnessed the failures that other worlds' Kim Seojuns had walked through.
Pecia von Chiffonside. What the hell are you?
That was why he was even more unsettled. Across those thousands of futures, there had never been a single case where Pecia behaved like this. She was far too conspicuous, far too careless. And yet she wasn't not Pecia, either. The her in his memories had also harbored bizarre ideologies about resetting the world and turning it into an amusement park. The nuance had just shifted slightly — "a happy world" instead of whatever it used to be. And she was still extremely lazy and loved to sleep. That much was identical.
"Um... should I just tell you everything?"
Pecia said carefully.
Kim Seojun blinked.
"What?"
"You seem like you don't really know."
"You're just going to tell me?"
By now she should have realized there were holes in his information. From Pecia's position, this was a situation she could exploit any number of ways. Volunteering information so freely made no sense.
But Pecia just shrugged, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
"If you don't know, you should learn. What, is your pride hurt at the idea of learning from a monster?"
"I could kill you once your information loses its value. If you tell me everything here, that is."
"......"
Pecia looked slightly flustered, then dropped her gaze. She worked her lips for a moment before speaking.
"Th-then I guess there's nothing I can do about that."
...Was she saying she was fine with dying?
That wasn't something a monster would say. It wasn't something Pecia would do, either.
Inwardly rattled, Kim Seojun watched as Pecia gave him a small smile.
"As long as the world becomes happy, I don't mind. You're more capable and stronger than I am, after all. You'll handle it."
In the end, Kim Seojun couldn't contain his curiosity.
"Why are you so obsessed with happiness? You're a monster."
Pecia answered in a bright, cheerful tone.
"Because then no one will want to die! Monsters and humans don't matter. As long as my little sister is happy!"