Slaughter
There was no mistaking it. I hadn't lost my mind enough to confuse a dream with reality.
This was real. A monster from Pangenia had truly appeared in the real world.
Bang! Baaang!
Police officers poured out of the station just ahead and opened fire with their pistols, but it didn't do a damn thing. Their bullets failed to so much as scratch the creature's armored hide before they became prey for the Giant Mantis.
"Help me— aagh!"
"Emergency! This is an emergency!"
Officers barked into their radios as they held their ground. Most civilians were already fleeing, but plenty more hadn't made it out. Some were trapped inside buildings, stomping their feet in place and watching the chaos unfold. A few still hadn't grasped how serious the situation was and were snapping photos and recording videos.
BEEEEEEEEEP—!
Air-raid sirens began to wail, climbing in decibels. Phones joined the chorus, blaring just as they would in any disaster, text flooding across every screen.
14:32 — Unidentified attacks reported across Seoul, Busan, Daegu, and the entire Gyeonggi region.
* Evacuate to the nearest underground shelter and monitor emergency broadcasts.
So it wasn't just here. Simultaneous attacks had broken out across the entire country — launched by unidentified life-forms.
But I knew exactly what that thing was.
A field boss monster every Pangenia player was guaranteed to encounter sooner or later.
A Level 4 Giant Mantis.
Those distinctive antennae, the vivid red flower blooming on its back — there was no mistaking it.
What the hell do I do?
My heart felt ready to burst. In the game I was a flexible, capable, all-purpose player — but in reality I was just an ordinary nobody. My head pounded. My pulse kept racing faster and faster with no end in sight.
"Waaaaah! Mommy! Mommyyy!"
A child's cry snapped me back to my senses. I whipped my head around.
I had brought every reward I'd earned in Pangenia into the real world. If monsters from the game could walk the streets of reality, then the things I'd obtained in the game should work here too, right?
Hydragon's Soul!
I gripped the rune-etched stone. Hydragon — a monster that made a field boss like the Giant Mantis look like a joke. I'd only taken it down easily because I knew the strategy. Under normal circumstances, it was a trial that required a full party of twelve.
Scritch, scritch, scritch!
"Why isn't this working?"
I scowled. In the game, a double-click was all it took. The character would pull out the stone, rub it with one hand, and the summon would complete. I scrubbed at it furiously, but nothing happened.
My eyes shifted.
The Broken Fragment of the Golden Rule.
It was supposed to synchronize reality with the game. I snatched up the Golden Rule coin the way a thief snatches a prize.
"On."
In an instant, a goddess appeared before my eyes — the twin goddess of Pangenia, the same one I always saw at login. She pressed her lips to my cheek.
Initiating synchronization with 'Randolph'.
Synchronization complete.
Remaining duration of the Broken Fragment of the Golden Rule: 24 hours.
The thunder of my heart quieted. The trembling in my body, the chaos in my head — all of it settled into clean, sharp clarity.
I opened my hand. A thick, powerful hand. I had become Randolph.
I took up Michela's blade. The heavy two-handed greatsword settled into my grip as if it belonged there. I seized Hydragon's Soul and strode to the window.
Thud!
I planted a foot on the sill and leapt to the ground below. An old five-story villa — high enough to kill an ordinary person on impact. I didn't care. Suspended in midair, feeling the drag of the wind, I rubbed Hydragon's Soul.
GROOOOAAAR!
The fully grown Hydragon materialized on the boulevard. I mounted its back and charged straight at the Mantis.
Scoop!
The moment the monster attacked, intern reporter Kim Hana thought of an exclusive. A giant praying mantis had stormed the heart of the city. If she could just capture this moment properly, this year's Pulitzer was as good as hers.
Click! Click!
She pushed in as close as she dared and raised her phone to shoot.
"Holy crap."
This wasn't a movie prop or CGI. It was a real monster, thick with the weight of reality. An exclusive. Her miserable internship was finally over. The second that thought crossed her mind—
"Waaaaah! Mommy! Mommyyy!"
Not far away, a child who looked no older than five was sobbing inconsolably. A shopping basket. A woman pinned beneath the rubble of a building. The giant mantis turned its eyes toward them.
A storm of emotions hit her all at once. Did she really have to film this merciless creature destroying a family? Was that what her seniors meant by true journalistic spirit?
Damn it. Kim Hana kicked off her heels, clenched her teeth, and ran.
She'd been on her way back from a blind date set up as a favor for a friend — what kind of disaster was this? — but there was no time to dwell on any of that. She practically bungee-jumped into the scene and wrapped her arms around the child.
"Are you okay? Are you all right?"
"Mommy…"
"Ah — miss, please, my child…"
The woman crushed under the debris had regained consciousness and forced the words out. A mother's plea to save her child. The living had to live.
But there was one thing Kim Hana had failed to account for: the monster's antennae were faster than she could have imagined. She turned her head, saw the tentacle rushing toward her, and shoved the child aside.
Ah.
For a moment she felt her body leave the ground. Then the giant mantis's face filled her vision. Her life flashed before her eyes. So this was how she died. In the flower of her youth, without ever having a real relationship.
—The young director at our hospital keeps begging me to introduce him to you. Could you just meet him once, Hana? Please?
—He's genuinely a great guy. He was the campus heartthrob in college, and he's insanely good-looking. Tall, face of a god. If you pass this up, you'll regret it.
Maybe she shouldn't have gone on that blind date. Her friend hadn't been wrong — he was a decent guy — but she hadn't been interested in dating to begin with. She'd planned to just kill time and head home.
How did it end up like this?
Kim Hana squeezed her eyes shut. She didn't have the courage to face the mantis's maw and the countless teeth jutting from it like spikes.
Slash!
In that split second, her body lifted again — and she felt someone's warmth. She cracked her eyes open.
"Who—"
"…"
A man radiating raw, wild intensity. He flung her away as if discarding her. With a grunt, Kim Hana found herself landing on the back of some unidentifiable monster.
Wh-what?
There was more than one monster? Was this a dragon? But it had too many heads for a dragon. Nine heads — a monster among monsters, something that made the giant mantis look insignificant.
"Hic!"
"Hold on tight."
Korean. Kim Hana clamped her arms around the creature's back with everything she had. The man with the massive greatsword leapt skyward.
KRAAAAK!
The nine-headed dragon tore into the mantis in a frenzy. The giant insect shrieked and howled. The scene looked like something torn from legend or myth. Kim Hana watched, utterly spellbound.
Every time the man swung that greatsword as if it were a toy, green blood cascaded like a waterfall. Pinched between nine jaws, the mantis couldn't so much as twitch. Violence. Kim Hana had never in her life witnessed violence this cruel, this raw. Anything she'd seen in movies or dramas was child's play by comparison.
Was this what a hero from myth looked like? A wildness she had never once felt before — pure, unfiltered, and absolute. Before that overwhelming spectacle, Kim Hana—
"Ah…"
—trembled. Her whole body shook. Not from fear, but from an encounter with something she could neither name nor describe.
Boom!
In the end, the giant mantis collapsed without mounting a single proper defense — claws severed, throat cut, eyes gone blank. Then its corpse crumbled into dust, turning gray before vanishing entirely. The nine-headed dragon disappeared the same way.
Kim Hana began to fall.
"S-save me—!"
She flailed her arms and legs — and then she was caught again. The man who had killed the monster gathered her out of the air and set her safely on the ground.
"Th-thank you."
"…"
Their eyes met. Without a word, the man turned his back and walked away. Watching him recede, Kim Hana raised her phone.
Click.
"Ah."
A moment later, as if something had just occurred to her, she turned. People were already working together to free the child's mother from the rubble. Kim Hana ran over and threw her strength into lifting the debris.
The world descended into chaos.
Not just Korea — monsters erupted simultaneously across the entire globe. The moment they appeared, they began slaughtering people and tearing down human civilization.
But monsters weren't the only ones who showed up.
Warriors who carved through creatures that bullets couldn't touch as easily as slicing vegetables. Clad in medieval armor, swords, spears, and bows, they butchered the monsters without mercy.
"Do not be afraid! I will protect your safety!"
"A world of monsters is upon us. We must all stand together!"
Some of them spoke in the local language, promising to keep people safe. Even more astonishing was their "transformation" — figures who had existed as warriors shifted back into ordinary people and delivered those very words.
Of course, not everyone did.
"At best, the duration lasts about an hour. Everyone's trying to conserve their time."
A man muttered to himself as he watched the flood of articles and videos. The warriors appearing now were all rankers capable of logging out. Clear a main quest high enough on the rankings, and logout became available.
The remaining time on a Broken Fragment of the Golden Rule has to be conserved as much as possible.
But the Broken Fragment of the Golden Rule — the item that synchronized a person's real body with their character — was a consumable. At shortest, a minute. At longest, maybe an hour. As a result, almost no one used synchronization in the real world.
The man was no exception. In Korea, there were currently eight known individuals capable of logging out. Among them, he was a powerhouse who held the ranker character Haksal.
Wanting to assess the situation, Haksal had sat this incident out. If he stepped forward carelessly and his Pangenia character's appearance became known, both his game life and his real life could come under threat. After all, Haksal was universally recognized as a toxic, no-manners player.
Still…
Haksal stroked his chin.
I expected Phantom to show. But there's no one who even looks like Phantom.
Phantom. Or Ghost. The undisputed number-one player in Pangenia. No one knew his real name, so everyone just called him that. Rumors claimed he held hundreds of characters, and speculation ran wild that the one who had recently launched the Demon Realm Grand Expedition was Phantom himself. But sabotage from every direction had doomed the expedition, and Phantom had died — his character deleted.
Is Phantom actually an admin? That would mean he was still playing it as a game.
Haksal himself had started as a pure game player. But two years ago, when his Haksal character died, he had been summoned into Pangenia. The same thing had happened to everyone else. Only Phantom — or whoever was presumed to be Phantom — had continued to treat it as a game. People had hunted him relentlessly to find out why. The moment someone looked like Phantom, they interfered, betrayed him, killed him, and deleted the character. For everyone else, character deletion meant being summoned into Pangenia.
No. He must have been summoned with that character. When your strongest character dies, you get summoned.
A five-star character equipped with eight Unique-grade items, armed with every treasure and talent imaginable. Past Level 10, fed five stars — an insurmountable wall. That had clearly been Phantom's most powerful character. Unless he was an admin, he would have been summoned for certain. And once summoned into Pangenia, you were reset — but you retained the talents of your strongest character intact. Your appearance changed, you became NPC-like, and every connection to other people vanished. But by progressing through the main quests, you could seize the chance to grow even stronger.
…Randolph. Is this bastard Phantom?
Since being summoned two years ago, Haksal had placed on the rankings of countless main quests. He was Level 10 — a ranker who, like the others, possessed Hidden Traits. And yet a ranking that had barely shifted in ages had recently changed. In the very first main quest, no less: Survival.
Two hundred and twenty points.
Was that even a possible number? Even if he went back two years and started over, Haksal had no confidence he could score 220. If something like that was possible, it was definitely Phantom. Every ranker would have noticed the same thing he had, which meant it was only a matter of time before Randolph became a target.
Competitors were to be eliminated. And if it really was Phantom, killing him would yield an enormous quantity of Broken Fragments of the Golden Rule. It had been confirmed that Pangenia and reality were beginning to properly "infiltrate" each other. Competition for Golden Rule fragments would only intensify from here. Eventually, Pangenia and reality might merge into one entirely — Pangenia's NPCs appearing in the real world… or a Demon King descending in truth.
He needed to secure his position before that. From now on, the stronger you were — the more Golden Rule fragments you held — the more certain it was that you would be the protagonist of this era.
"…Hydragon? Who the hell is this?"
Mid-thought, Haksal frowned at a particular video. Hydragon — a monster that had never been officially released, save for one solitary instance — and a warrior who had appeared alongside it. An appearance Haksal had never seen before.
He burned the warrior's form into his memory. He did the same for every other warrior character that had appeared in Korea. All of them were competitors. In the age of chaos about to unfold, the protagonist had to be him — and no one else.
"You want me to let you into the Sanctuary? Have you lost your mind?"
…Isabella, the Snake Princess, was stunned — and it was entirely because of my request. The Desert Sanctuary. I had asked her to send me inside.
If the first main quest is Survival…
I had no choice. I had to reach the Sanctuary.
The second main quest is obtaining a Class.
A Class. That was where the path to growing stronger while progressing through the main quests lay. And that wasn't all.
"There's a Star there."
"What…?"
Isabella's eyelids trembled. A Star. Of course she was shocked — a method of receiving a Star's Blessing, right there. It was something I had given up on long ago, only to rediscover it during my recent playthrough.
There was a Star in the Desert Sanctuary. A way to break the Queen's curse. It had simply been hidden.
A Star that rests in the lowest place, yet can shine brighter than any other.
And the Class I sought — I would be able to obtain that from the Star as well.