The Constellation's Game: [Laika]
The situation inside the store was far worse than I'd expected. We weren't talking about a little stale air here.
Sssssk―
Seriously, I'll admit it — I panicked. The steel shelves behind the display counter, around the health supplements section, were… sagging like melted candle wax.
What the hell is that? A monster?
I was thrown off balance. In the [Iron Grave] I knew, there were no monsters that threatened players like this — none at all. Had they completely overhauled the monster pool?
One look is enough to tell that stuff is poison.
My mind spun into high gear. Whatever lurked in there was an unknown entity I couldn't yet identify.
"Hmm."
But I couldn't stop here. There was something inside I absolutely had to grab, and if I failed to farm it now, I'd waste a serious chunk of time.
I'd have to find a drugstore at another station at minimum. That means burning at least twenty minutes.
And there was one more thing. Something I wanted to verify.
If a player created this toxic dead zone…
If my hunch was right, I had a rough idea what class that player — he, or she — might be. And the class that had just surfaced in my mind was one that, even across that endless stretch of beta testing, had never once been achieved by a single player. Which meant it was absolutely worth finding out who this was.
Swish—
Carefully skirting the floor tiles that had turned a searing violet, I crept toward the source of the disaster. And then, in the next moment—
Hm…!
Among the tiles stained so deep a purple they resembled a pool of blood, I spotted a woman slumped lifelessly on the ground.
My eyes went naturally to the participant's name tag on her chest. Kang So-hee?
Which raised one immediate problem: of all places, this player called Kang So-hee had collapsed right next to the cash register. In other words, unless I cleared that woman out of the way, I couldn't get my hands on 'that item.' A genuinely awkward position to be in.
First things first — figure out what's going on.
She seemed to be in bad shape; she apparently hadn't even noticed my presence yet. So I was able to take my time observing her.
Hair soaked through with cold sweat. Veins standing black and taut along the back of her neck. And… empty pill cases scattered carelessly across the floor.
This is…
That was all the confirmation I needed — my prediction had been right on the money. 'Kang So-hee's' class was, in all likelihood… Venom Blood. One of the rarest first-tier classes I knew of — rare enough to be on par with my own Therapist.
"……"
How did I know that, you ask? Because I happen to know a certain lunatic NPC who carries that class. Which also means I know exactly why this player was suffering so terribly right now.
Mana Reflux. That's got to hurt like hell.
At its core, Venom Blood is a mage-lineage class. A special hidden class in which every drop of mana in the body transforms into an extremely potent 'lethal toxin.' So the absurd levels of poison seeping out around this woman meant one thing: the mana inside her had slipped her control and was surging backward.
And mana reflux comes with pain intense enough to drive a person out of their mind. That was why she sat hunched over, chewing down painkillers like candy — or at least, that was surely the reason. But it wouldn't do her any good. The pain from a mana reflux simply isn't the kind that over-the-counter analgesics can touch.
Poison this thick… an ordinary person would melt the instant they got near it.
With the situation assessed, I decided to creep carefully up to her immediate vicinity. In her current state, this woman posed no threat to me whatsoever. Although… pushing her aside next to the cash register (?) might prove a bit of a challenge.
Step, step—
Around this point, Kang So-hee finally seemed to sense my approach. She flinched and lifted her head.
A face contorted with pain. Her eyes were slightly unfocused, but the light in them burned cold and sharp as a drawn blade.
"……Don't come any closer."
That cracked voice stopped me in my tracks. She dragged herself backward, glaring at me with all the strength she had left.
"One more step…… and you'll melt."
There was an edge to her voice, but this was no threat. It was a desperate warning — she was trying to keep her distance so her uncontrolled poison wouldn't swallow me up. The attitude was honestly kind of endearing. At the same time, it struck me as a little strange.
If a rival drops out… isn't that a good thing for you? PK is allowed in this dungeon.
Her tone was frosty enough, but she clearly wasn't a bad person at heart. The lunatic NPC I'd met back in beta had been a seriously volatile, unhinged personality — I only hoped she didn't take after him in that department too.
Still, how am I supposed to move her?
I'll be honest — at first, the thought of personally sending this woman out of the dungeon (?) with my own two hands did cross my mind. The rules of the entrance-exam mission explicitly permitted PK, so there'd be nothing wrong with it. But actually doing it in this situation… wouldn't that make me a socially maladjusted psycho? It wasn't even Heat Bead farming season yet, so PKing her wouldn't net me anything meaningful. All I had to do was walk into that cashier area, plain and simple.
Hmm.
But right as that train of thought reached its end, something I hadn't anticipated surfaced in my head.
Wait. Mana… reflux?
A flash of insight struck me: this woman might actually be a hidden card — for this mission, at least.
Think about it… in an environment where your body temperature keeps dropping, wouldn't triggering a mana reflux actually work in your favor?
My brain snapped taut and started firing on all cylinders. With just a little application of the knowledge I possessed… a way to turn this participant's peculiar circumstances to my advantage popped right into my head.
Tap—
Having made my judgment, I moved immediately. I nudged the fallen Tylenol packet with the toe of my shoe, and speaking in a low voice, addressed her.
"Chewing painkillers a hundred days straight won't help. That's a mana reflux, isn't it?"
Kang So-hee's eyes went wide.
"……How did you know?"
Hm…
That shut me up real quick, didn't it… Fine, I'd just improvise something plausible.
"One look and it's obvious. Your whole body's overheated, burning up with fever — no generic OTC medicine is going to do a thing for that."
Instead of backing away, I reached out toward the medicine shelf beside me. Thankfully, this place was a drugstore disguised as a convenience store. Useful ingredients were in plentiful supply.
Burn gauze. And lidocaine spray.
The items I picked up bore names identical to pharmaceuticals back on Earth. Of course, these weren't the real things. These were simply medicinal herbs circulating inside the Gates — ones with similar effects — disguised under the labels of Earth pharmaceuticals.
Good.
And that was actually a blessing in disguise. If these had been the genuine articles, the experiment I was about to attempt wouldn't have been possible at all.
Thunk—
With everything I needed gathered up, I drew the [Mana Coolant Pipe] slung at my waist. Kang So-hee stared at me with wary, suspicious eyes and asked — though apparently my antics didn't look particularly threatening, because a note of caution had softened out of her voice.
"What are you…… doing?"
"Wait a moment. Prescription in the works."
The principle behind mana reflux is simple. Overheating of the mana organ — the heart — caused by overload. To fix it, you don't need a nerve-deadening painkiller. You need something that physically drops the temperature. A coolant.
Of course, pour it on raw and that spot would just freeze solid.
The liquid inside this pipe was a high-performance chemical coolant developed to cool the engines of mechanical-type monsters. Effectiveness-wise, nothing else even came close. But for that very reason, contact with bare skin could cause the flesh to necrotize. Which was why a buffer was needed.
Sssssiiiik―!
I rolled the thick burn gauze into a tight bundle, popped the pipe's cap, and poured the coolant over it. White mist bloomed upward, and in the blink of an eye the gauze froze over, cold as a sheet of black ice.
Now, a generous dousing of spray laced with anesthetic — lidocaine — and that was about it. Done.
"Here."
I tossed the finished rapid-cooling patch (?) down at her feet. The poison in the air made getting any closer impossible.
"Put it on your heart. You've got to cool the engine first."
Kang So-hee stared blankly down at the patch lying on the floor. She had every right to be suspicious. A man she'd never seen before shows up, mixes what amounts to filthy drain water with this and that, sprays it over some gauze, and tosses it to her calling it medicine.
But she had no other options.
"Ugh…!"
As the pain crashed over her again, she clutched at her chest. In the end, with trembling fingers, she picked the patch up. Then she undid a single button of her shirt… and pressed the freezing gauze against the left side of her chest.
And at that very moment—
"……!"
Kang So-hee's pupils dilated violently. She was probably dumbfounded. There is no prescription on Earth — or anywhere else — that takes effect this fast.
Sssssiiiik—!
The fire raging through her blood vessels must have died down as if it had all been a lie. Like a ladle of cold water flung onto a screaming-hot frying pan — violently, almost instantly.
You're telling me just pressing something cold against it heals this easily? No way.
Of course not. The patch I'd handed over was crude, improvised — but it was steeped in compounds that resonate directly with mana. The cold rides the flow of mana itself, working its way into the body from the inside. That's what produces such a dramatic, immediate effect.
It was a method I'd learned thanks to that lunatic NPC, and one I'd relied on constantly back when I played caster classes myself. Even so, of course, it was no fundamental cure. But it had succeeded in forcibly freezing the mana circuits that had been running completely rampant.
"What on earth is this…"
"Haah… haah…"
Kang So-hee, still gulping down rough breaths, slowly raised her head. As she swept the sweat-damp hair back from her face, there was far more color in her features than before. Actually… her recovery seemed to be running even faster than I'd anticipated?
"……"
She tidied her rumpled clothes and rose to her feet with an awkward expression on her face. Now that her head was clear again, she was evidently embarrassed — hardly surprising, given she'd bared her most private shame in front of a complete stranger.
After a moment's hesitation, she opened her mouth, her voice small enough to be crawling along the floor.
"……Thank you."
Her gaze slid from the pipe at my hip to my face and back again, over and over. A complicated expression, tangled up with a dozen different feelings.
"So what is it you actually do?"
"I fixed a person just now, so wouldn't that make me a healer?"
"For a healer, your methods are pretty rough."
"Just a passing college student… maybe?"
I gave a careless little shrug. Even through all of this, my eyes kept drifting back to the cash register — I was doing my best not to make it obvious. I hadn't won her over yet, after all. If this woman started getting curious about 'that item,' I'd be in real trouble.
But while those thoughts were running through my head, Kang So-hee, who had been silent for a moment, spoke again — slowly. And incredibly, it was dialogue of exactly the kind I love most.
"In any case."
Kang So-hee's voice had steadied again.
"It won't be for free. What do you want?"
Wait, what? That mindset is exactly right, isn't it? Affection meter going up, and up—
"Hmm. Let's see. What I want…"
Got any spare LP?
No, no. Wrong move.
Whew.
The rice-farmer instinct lunged out of nowhere, but I barely managed to stuff it back down, deep. And then, slowly, I laid out my true objective.
"Want to party up with me?"