4. A New Strategy

"Here's to the bright futures that await each and every one of you—."

"..."

Watching the dean stand at the podium and deliver the entrance ceremony address—this was my fourth time doing exactly that.

I stared blankly at him for a good long while, then suddenly caught myself pressing and prodding at my own body, here and there. My breath wouldn't come properly. The crushing pain of the stampede wracking my whole body, the sound of things bursting apart, the eyes that watched it all and the applause that followed—none of it was something a person could endure without it turning into trauma.

"Hah, aagh—! Hnngh!"

That pins-and-needles echo of flesh being compressed sent goosebumps racing across my entire body.

While I was still struggling to breathe, a small voice drifted over from beside me.

"Um, e-excuse me. Are you okay?"

Clara Rose.

Some traitorous part of me wanted to vent the emotions surging up my throat. An impulse to smack the cheek of the girl who was, in part, the reason I'd gone through all of this came boiling to the surface.

"You're sweating an awful lot—"

A worried expression. An innocent, guileless face.

In the end, I couldn't hold back and tried to raise my fist—but the hand wouldn't lift.

Less than a minute had passed since I'd felt my senses get smashed to pieces. My brain refused the command outright: the hand cannot move. Against my will, my arm quivering like I'd come down with a sudden case of chuunibyou, I forced out as calm a reply as I could manage.

"It's nothing."

It was, in fact, a fucking catastrophe. I wasn't going to graduate. Got any spare underwear on you? I was honestly freaking out here.

Those laments were ready to come pouring out, but I had a feeling that if I let them, I'd be bawling my eyes out right there for the next three hours, so I swallowed every last one down.

And with that, the fourth entrance ceremony came to a close without incident.

The moment I stepped into my dorm room, my trembling legs gave out beneath me and I sank to the floor.

"Ugh, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck!"

I hammered the floor with my fist and clutched at my wildly pounding heart.

I collapsed onto the bed like a felled tree, then jerked right back up—the memory of being crushed to death by someone I couldn't even identify had come flooding back.

After spending a long while alone, waiting for the panic to ebb.

"Phew..."

Truthfully, my heart was still hammering. I wanted nothing more than to lie there and give up on it all.

Fifteen days. Exactly ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠fifteen days from now, the thing would come for me again.

An Immeasurable Defect. An unfathomably high existence.

I understood, intellectually, that I'd been killed by a mystery of a Defect slathered head to toe in grandiose titles. The problem was that a fifteen-day time limit had been hung around the neck of a guy who couldn't even recognize the thing.

"How the hell am I supposed to graduate?"

When it came down to it, the answer was simple. Just keep repeating the city's eternal fifteen days, over and over, forever. Because I happen to have this fucked-up infinite regression, that's why.

"So I just grind my Storyteller rank up ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠by looping these fifteen days infinitely?"

Storyteller rank. To detect higher-rank stories, I'd presumably just need to take down a few trash-rank Defects and level up... your standard-issue system, surely. Don't underestimate my gaming experience.

"The real problem is that I'm a supreme trash who gets rolled even by trash."

Clara Rose was legend-grade. In letters, that's D-rank—the kind of thing even mobile gacha games won't spare a second glance. And I'm the guy who hit a wall against something like that and ran.

"Ugh, my head. This is why facts are scary, I keep telling you. I could really use an escape from reality right about now."

This time, I gave a firm press to the bag slot on the right side of my vision—the one I had no idea when it had appeared. Inside, utterly empty except for a single object sitting all by itself. The thing gleaming like a golden ticket was, unmistakably, an item.

A reward earned through the feat of being stomped to death like an ant by an unfathomably high Defect.

"You've got to be kidding me. To find out what that thing even is, I have to die like that again?"

The world was being far too harsh to me.

I buried my face in my hands and stayed like that for a good while, then let out a sigh and nodded.

"Fuck it. What am I doing sitting around like this? At this rate I'll just end up flattened and dead again."

It wasn't that I'd conquered anything. But now that I had a goal, it felt like I could move, somehow or other. After tucking the Advance Reading Ticket into my item window, I got to my feet.

"There's one thing I need to do."

1. Complete a story, and the Defect is neutralized.

2. Neutralize Defects, and my Storyteller rank rises.

3. Keep raising that rank, so that when the fifteen days run out, I can hunt down the bastard who gleefully operates a human hydraulic press.

"Simple."

Laid out like that, it sounds simple. The problem is the batshit difficulty.

So then, first on the list was the Clara Rose strategy—her information was already fully unlocked, after all.

"...Let's just rest today."

I dove straight into bed, pulled the covers up, and closed my eyes. I was exhausted beyond all exhaustion.

I'm telling you, I'm not some Imagine Breaker of Academy City with nerves of steel. Just... just your average game addict, that's all.

"You're telling me regression doesn't even come with a mental compensation buff?"

Isn't this supposed to be a quality-of-life feature?!

The good thing about being able to regress is that what everyone else is learning for the first time, I get to review. What I realized while regressing, though, was that I'd paid far less attention in class than I'd thought.

It was day two since I'd returned from the loop. Even a dumpster academy like ours still ran a rank exam to sort its students internally. And as if to prove that even in a cesspool there's a pecking order, I went and landed dead last, just like that.

213/213 — 213th out of 213 freshmen. Last time I took this exam, I'd been at least 209th. So why had I dropped even further?

"This is exactly why review matters."

Solve it wrong, move on, and the next time you solve it, you get it wrong all over again. You could say my brain didn't regress so much as devolve...

But in truth, it was all part of the grand design. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠The grand design of sacrificing my grades as an offering in exchange for two allies to help resolve Clara Rose's story.

"A regressor always plays the long game."

"What's he on about?"

"Dunno. Kid seems a little off, honestly."

"Maybe we shouldn't have gotten chummy with him."

The burly guy reeking of the salty sea was Bruno. Cobi, who looked at a glance like his father had to be a merchant. The chubby one and the scrawny one.

I'd gotten close with the two guys who'd been crushed to death alongside me surprisingly fast. And now, freshly bonded, we were on our way to the library. Only the bottom of the class got saddled with a special fill-in-the-blank assignment, and we were heading off to work through it.

'No internet, and I can't even ask an AI. What an inconvenient world this is.'

Of course, I already knew all the answers. I'd nearly melted my brain hunting through books for them in the last loop, after all. The reason I was tagging along had nothing to do with friendship. I simply needed a quiet place to talk.

The library was deserted. Fitting for Grayton Academy, the Academy City's premier dumpster—not a single soul was studying.

"Not a single person in here."

"Nice and cool in here, though."

Bruno and Cobi marveled as they looked around. No time to waste—I decided to get straight to business.

"Hey, you two. Give me a hand with something."

"That's why we came to fill in the blanks together, isn't it?"

"I'll take questions one through three—"

"The answer to one is the Ellan Potion, the answer to two is the Dungkul root, and the answer to three is Beneath the Falling Cherry Blossoms."

"...?"

"That's the answer?"

The two of them just stared, dumbfounded. I immediately pulled the herbology book with the answer to question one off the shelf and showed it to them.

"What? Are you secretly a genius?!"

"He's actually right? How did you get these?"

"You idiots. You think I'm dead last for nothing? To get every single answer wrong on purpose, you have to know every single answer in the first place."

"Whoa, shit!"

"You absolute madman! That's so badass!"

Idiots, the both of them. Look at that—spout nonsense convincingly enough and they just swallow it whole. Backward medieval folk, through and through.

"So what do you need help with?"

Bruno fished a strip of jerky out of his pocket and chewed on it all by himself. When Cobi and I both held out our hands at the same time, he scowled but tore off small pieces and handed one to each of us.

"Mmph, 'kay so. What I mean is—"

"Swallow first, then talk. That's disgusting."

"...So, what I mean is. There's this girl I like, see? I want to confess to her, and I want you guys to help me out."

"No way."

"Wow, two days into school and you're already at it?"

Bruno and Cobi gawked at me like I was some being beyond their reach. Obviously, I had no intention of actually confessing. But there was no explaining the real situation, and even if I did, they'd scream 'too dangerous' and bolt—wasn't that a given?

'I'll just bait them, whatever.' If the mark never realizes he's been conned, then he was never really conned.

"So who's the lucky girl?"

"Clara Rose."

The reactions were night and day. Bruno just kept vacantly chewing his jerky, his face saying 'who's that?' Cobi, on the other hand, went white as a sheet and froze solid.

What was this? Now that was a reaction I hadn't seen coming.

"You know Clara? Then why's your face doing that?"

"Ashburn. Do you actually know who Clara is, and you're still saying this?"

"I asked first."

When I pressed them, irritation dripping from my voice, Cobi dragged a dry hand down his face, leaned forward, and dropped his voice to a whisper.

"She's from Deliz Village."

Deliz Village?

'Ah, right. I remember that.' The very first paragraph of Clara's story, from the moment it begins: 'Clara Rose—a girl who loves flowers, born in the small mountain village of Deliz.'

It wasn't information I'd heard from Clara herself. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer not to open a date with 'So, where's your hometown?' Tends to make it obvious you've run out of things to say.

"So? What's the problem with that?"

"Seriously. What's the problem? Quit dragging it out."

When Bruno and I got antsy, Cobi thumped his chest in frustration, then whispered in a voice that had dropped to barely a breath.

"Deliz Village was Baengnageumdang territory."

Baengnageumdang. The name might not ring any bells, but it was the one group every country bumpkin scraping by in some rural village needed to fear above all else. To put it simply: a cult. And not just any cult—think of them as the kind of lunatics who'd snatch up living, breathing people and feed them to the trees and beasts they raised.

"Because of them, the Kingdom sent a subjugation force and swept the whole place clean. Pretty recent, too. Everyone in that village is dead. She's the only one who made it out alive, they say."

"How do you even know all this stuff?"

"When I got into Grayton Academy, my dad bought a list of students to steer clear of and handed it to me."

I was just about to marvel—there's a list for that?

"......"

"Ashburn? Hey, Ashburn?"

"Kid's lost it."

"Well, to be fair, finding out your crush used to live with a pack of lunatics would do that. Naturally—"

Whatever Bruno and Cobi were chattering on about, I shot up from my seat and let out a cry.

"So there was a way to do it like this?!"