An Unintended Meeting

Anon (Admin) — Celebrating the Great Admin's Armband Inauguration: Event Open!

Interdimensional item transfer. An absurdly, terrifyingly powerful function. How monumental it was to be able to bring meaningful objects from other worlds hardly needed explaining—the hundreds of comments suddenly piling onto an admin whose public opinion had been in the toilet said it all.

I scrolled through the flood of comments. Very little stood out. Most of them looked like they were spinning complete bullshit, just as expected. On the internet you always get plenty of shit-stirrers peddling falsehoods, but one particular bastard was especially toxic.

killer. The nickname alone was Murderer. In the gallery for doomed novels you could set a fixed nickname instead of staying Anon, and this guy had chosen Killer. The posts that followed were something else. Every single day he wrote about who he'd killed, how guilty he felt, how he was being hunted, how he was seeing hallucinations.

Being possessed into a novel meant it wasn't impossible that those things were real, but looking at the sheer speed of his posting, he was nowhere near killer material.

I checked with admin privileges. killer's daily post count: 350. Comment count converging on a full thousand. Anyone who's tried knows that number is borderline impossible even if all you do is breathe and type.

Well. I could probably crank out another three hundred on top of that if I wanted.

Every one of killer's posts was just regret over his past or a laundry list of things he'd wanted to do back on Earth. Classic ragebaiter behavior. They lock onto one easy theme that doesn't require thought and then spam-excrete posts around it. In short: a concept-obsessed troll.

Think about it. What kind of psychotic killer sits in a community all day shitting out comments by the thousand?

Hmm...

More sob stories rolled in—people claiming they'd become kings, slaves, even eunuchs. Plenty of pure jokes mixed in, of course.

That one racked up a mountain of upvotes and mocking replies. I blocked it on the spot. Even seeing that kind of comment no longer stirred anything in me. Just another stale mother joke.

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But this shit-stirrer kept making throwaway accounts to mock me. Eventually I had to take extreme measures.

Surprisingly, even though I was cracking down on users this time, the reaction wasn't bad. Most of the chaos had come from unauthenticated throwaways with no verification history, and the users who had proudly revealed themselves already despised the throwaways.

I was a merciful god... no, a merciful admin. That was why I'd left the door wide open for throwaways to become verified users anytime they wanted. The opportunity was available to everyone.

In reality, among the countless users, those who knew which novel they had possessed into and who knew their own names began verifying one after another. Some of the new nicknames stood out.

As the throwaways began to vanish, the post regen slowed a little, and in that quieter stream one user stood out sharply. killer. Until just a moment ago he had been unauthenticated, but seeing him post now meant he had become a verified user.

I'd written him off as pure ragebait stock, but the fact that he verified the instant posting was locked was surprisingly unexpected.

I hit confirm and a simple user profile appeared.

"Oh, fuck..."

The moment I saw the information I let out a curse.

The fact that her in-novel name matched her real name was secondary. The instant I saw the title of the novel she had possessed into, I realized this bastard might not be a ragebaiter after all.

I had read that novel before.

As the name The Cruel City Where the Blood of Death Falls made clear, it was a place of constant power struggles and bloodshed. A world that forced the binary choice of kill or be killed. A truly fucked-up place where people felt neither guilt nor fear over murder.

Trustworthy companions did not exist. Every surrounding character was a personality-shattered psychopath.

What the hell is this bastard?

Knowing which novel ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠she had possessed into suddenly made her look impressive. From the way killer talked, she had been inside for at least a year. Surviving more than a year bare-handed in a novel crawling with assassins and zero allies was an astonishing feat in itself.

If I had possessed into that place, would I have lasted three months?

That world didn't have many hidden pieces or lucky opportunities. It wasn't like the novel I possessed into—The Talentless Mage Dreams of Becoming Archmage—where free wins were possible. Finding any hidden pieces required forced physical ability from the user. An ordinary person dropped in would get beaten like a dog and either die or end up crippled; those were the only options. While reading it I had begged over and over that if I ever got possessed, please, anywhere but there.

Hmm...

I went back through the posts and comments killer had written. Knowing the truth, they no longer looked like ragebait. They looked like the desperate screams of someone standing at the edge of death.

Life was this narrow. A few dozen characters of verification data and a person's entire image flipped. I immediately made a post.

The post immediately went nuclear. Because every last person in Doomed Novel Gallery had been dead certain that killer was a ragebaiter.

Right after that, a new post from killer went up.

The community reaction was ice-cold, but I didn't care much. Truthfully, this kind of event always got that reaction. Think of the lottery. Imagine someone around you won the lottery, and then imagine you could dump posts on an anonymous community. Wouldn't most people write at least one bitter rant about how even their eighth cousin winning was unfair? Or not. Whatever.

Once I actually ran the event the mood would settle, so I put Doomed Novel Gallery's reaction on the back burner. I activated the one-on-one chat function only available through admin privileges and connected directly to killer.

Having reached the realm of Archmage, I could proudly say there was almost nothing I didn't have—hidden pieces, weapons, consumables, the lot. I was certain I had weapons that would be useful to a bastard named killer on the brink of death.

Huh?

How the hell was I supposed to deliver a family photo of a complete stranger I'd never even met?

We went back and forth a few more times, but killer's stance was ironclad. If it wasn't a family photo, she would take nothing. The first event was already wrapped in the stench of total failure. If I ended it without delivering anything, admin face would be completely ruined. I could even get branded a liar.

I couldn't let the first event die like this, so I headed to the warehouse and started rummaging. In a world that had magic, items meant for an assassin on the brink of death were easy enough to find.

One bottle of Elixir... no, two bottles should be enough, right?

A miraculous potion said to bring even the dying back to life. It was absurdly valuable, but I could mass-produce it. With two bottles, maybe killer could claw her way out somehow. That was the thought as I started wrapping them neatly in a box.

Click!

I took a photo of the two bottles of Elixir nestled prettily in the box and uploaded it to the community.

Right after that I started reading the detailed description of Warp, one of the admin functions.

How the hell do you even use this?

An incredibly unhelpful and vague explanation.

Is the translation broken? "Transmit items in your possession together with yourself"? What does that even mean?

You transmit the item, period—what was this "together" nonsense? And why was the skill even called Warp? I decided to shelve that question for later. I needed to get the Elixir to killer before she died.

Hup!

After every ridiculous experiment imaginable, I finally figured it out. Focusing mana into the body and holding the word "Warp" in my mind was how you activated the admin function.

Without much thought I nodded. And then—

"Uh... uh...?"

While I was standing there going "uh-uh" like an idiot, light suddenly began to wrap around my entire body.

Warp "together" with the item.

I was about to confirm the meaning of those words with my own eyes.

A cold cave. A lovely girl, stained with blood, was gasping as she died. She lapped at the water pooled in the cave and stared blankly into empty air. When she waved her hand a few times, letters began to form.

After that the girl leaned her body against the wall, pressing a hand against her wound to stop the bleeding as she panted. Three days already. She had never been able to treat the serious injury, just stubbornly kept pressure on it, barely eating, surviving on water alone.

The girl let out a short, bitter laugh.

Knowing there was no hope, she found herself ridiculous—still lapping water like an idiot just to stay alive.

Surrounded by dozens of assassins. No escape route, and a critical wound on top of that. No matter what she did, she could not get out. Her death had only been delayed; it was already decided.

And then, right in front of her—

Fwaaaash!

White light erupted in an instant.

"Shit..."

The girl immediately staggered to her feet and gripped her knife. Cold sweat ran down her face as she prepared to attack—and that was when a man appeared together with a single box. He looked around, then offered an awkward smile.

"Nice to meet you, killer...?"