Entity Hunt (7)
"...Did I get it?"
No matter how I looked at it, the Entity had been blown to complete powder by the Cheonma Death Beam.
Unlikely as it was, I went ahead and chanted a resurrection incantation, just in case it somehow stirred back to life. Better safe than leaving loose ends—this was exactly the kind of thing you had to provoke with unnecessary, jinx-triggering words rather than quietly walk away from.
………….
"...It twitched! It's still alive! Cheonma Death Beam, output 100%!"
It didn't move.
Looking again, it had just been my imagination. I'd nearly panicked and started charging the Cheonma Death Beam on reflex, but thankfully I held back.
Well, honestly, it wasn't so much that I held back as that the Cheonma Death Beam made the judgment call on its own.
...And for some reason, I got the feeling that silent white sphere was staring at me like I was a complete idiot.
"Anyway, so... I guess that's one down for good."
#1 Entity Hunt (1/5)
The main quest progress bar floated up serenely, as if there was no room to argue with it.
Frankly, this alone would have been enough to confirm the thing was dead. If the Entity hadn't been quite so horrifying to look at, I'd have been raising my victory toast ages ago.
But this was the creature whose entire body had just turned to dust—so freshly dead it hadn't even earned a proper "did I get it?"—and it had already tried to come back to life once.
This was not the kind of enemy you could celebrate with an instant "it's dead, situation over, clap clap." Which, now that I've said it out loud... suddenly made me nervous again.
Determined to finish things off a little more thoroughly this time, I pulled water out of my inventory and churned it through the Entity's leftover ash. The water, dyed black for an instant, quickly turned clear again.
No more horrifying daydreams about the remaining ash regenerating into a body. Liberation from the nightmare, in the most complete sense of the word.
This was what true purification power was for. To the problem now perfectly solved, I finally raised my toast.
"Clear skies, blue waters—if only I had rivers and mountains, this would be a true paradise."
As I soaked in the healing sight of the black powder dissolving away, something floating on the surface of the water caught my eye. It vaguely held the shape of a sphere, yet looked lumpy and grimy, somehow sticky—like a bundle of rope made from congealed grease.
Why was that thing still floating there instead of disappearing? Even staring at it for a long, hard minute gave me no clue as to what it was. I obviously didn't have anything like an appraisal skill, so my options for identifying it were essentially nonexistent. Which left me with exactly one move.
"Inventory."
Since everything inside the Backrooms could be checked through the inventory, I opened the system right away.
No need for any agonizing deliberation—the answer was staring me right in the face, complete with a shiny NEW tag. So this floating thing was an Entity Core. Monsters dropping loot cores when hunted wasn't strange, I suppose... but I hadn't expected one from a gwae.
By common sense, a gwae dies and leaves nothing behind. Just powder, and...
My eyes drifted upward. There it sat: an ultra-high-tech, ultra-miniature railgun. Never mind that it barely qualified as a mere gun—it was named Cheonma Death Beam, a weapon whose sacred lineage the Heavenly Demon had carried down through the ages.
Yeah. Common sense is meaningless here. I'd need to open my heart and accept things a little more generously. Cores dropping from gwaes and whatnot >> ...You know what? Compared to the Cheonma Death Beam, that's nothing!
Just as I was nodding along to my own convenient rationalization, the black core bobbed across the water's surface and quietly drifted toward me. Loot, was it?
"Wall."
A cube-shaped wall popped out of my inventory and settled over the puddle. The moment it touched down, it fused with the ground as if it had always been there—no amount of shoving would budge it.
Good. Seal complete. Things like that are exactly the kind of item you don't want lugging around, only for it to interact with other Entities and cause some catastrophe. Since it apparently counted as Backrooms property and refused to be stored, walling it in like this was far and away the safer option.
A trace of the Entity lingers...
Besides, that description did absolutely nothing to inspire confidence. Even if a day ever came when I actually needed the thing, I could just retrieve it then. Backrooms property might refuse to be stored, but it came out smooth as butter.
And with that, it was truly over. The first of the tedious Entity hunts had come to a close.
"Whew... exhausting."
I let out a long sigh and sank down onto the floor, stretching to unknot muscles bunched tight with tension. Today's hunt had been anything but easy. Thanks to the teleportation device, even if the Entity had charged straight in and struck at me, it would never have landed a hit. But I couldn't call the terror I'd felt in that moment a lie—my hands were still trembling.
"And I have to do this four more times..."
It wouldn't be hard, exactly, but the road ahead felt a little hazy. The one silver lining was that I could use everything I'd learned from this hunt to plan the next one thoroughly. For instance, next time I could open some distance before teleporting and—
No. What if I fumbled and the Cheonma Death Beam missed? Sure, it had built-in AI targeting, but at that kind of range, against an Entity's speed, a miss became possible. Then how about sending the Cheonma Death Beam slightly ahead of me instead...
The thought flickered through my head before I immediately shook it off. No. That one is a genuine no. What if I sent it forward and it took a claw strike and shattered on the spot?
.........
Try as I might, coming up with some groundbreaking new way to use it just wasn't happening. The only real option was trading for an item that would generate a groundbreaking method for me. I'd look, sure—but finding something more useful than the Cheonma Death Beam or the teleport device was going to be a tall order.
Which meant the strategy, inevitably, came down to exactly one:
Cheonma Death Beam, fire!
Get hit? Teleport!
Simple is best, as always.
"Yeah, fine. Me, of all people, drafting 'plans.'"
The most perfect plan in the world is no plan at all. Because it can never go wrong.
"Cheonma Death Beam, how long until a full charge?"
"Approximately six hours."
Six hours per Entity, four to go. Factoring everything in, I could clear the main quest within thirty hours. I used the priority system to roughly check the remaining four's positions—aside from one having changed course toward me, nothing looked problematic. I ran through the last item on the list, a final safety check, and wrapped it all up quickly.
Now, then. Time to get my gallery on.
There it goes again. It's been posting pictures of its own hands over and over. What is this person even doing? Bragging about how slender and pretty their own fingers are?
I briefly considered blocking them, but sadly, this gallery had no individual block feature, so all I could do was scroll on by. Meanwhile, the gallery was overflowing with every flavor of flexing and info-dumping imaginable—which meant I was under zero obligation to check posts that were basically spam like this.
A post that, as far as flexing went, was honestly a little pitiful.
And that was the instant-nosebleed-tier flexing. As one discussion after another flowed past, a vague picture was starting to take shape around the figure standing at the center of it all. Water, air, pomegranates—perfectly ordinary things, each stamped with the adjective infinite. All of it had been dropped into the gallery just days ago, back when it was still peaceful. Presumably by a single person.
— Speculation threads on the Infinite User's true identity.
— That infinite water couldn't possibly come from just one world.
Scattered everywhere, theories about who they were swirled and collided. And then, the people throwing themselves at their feet, begging:
— Infinite Trader, please, I'm begging you, send some water to our world too (┬┬﹏┬┬)
— We're dying of oxygen deprivation right now. Please, let there be a miracle.
Infinite water, infinite air—those really were scam-level items, no way around it. If I were short on water or air, I'd have been spamming prayers until my fingers bled too. But what I lacked wasn't anything so simple. No mere infinity would be enough for what I needed—an absurd, impossible, scam-tier existence that shouldn't exist at all.
"Elixir... or failing that, could I at least get my hands on a healing potion?"
Dan Juna, survivor of a ruined world—Earth—stroked her own severed leg.
"At this rate, I'm going to end up as nothing but dead weight."