Long Time No See
Long time no see.
Screee.
The scrape of old casters dragging over the floor came first. Right on its heels, the seam of the chair back under him bent to its limit and screamed.
Sion opened his eyes.
Dark. And far too wide.
The ceiling was swallowed into the dark before he could find where it ended. Most of the walls were clad in black metal and something like raw stone, and between those surfaces red lines ran like veins. The light was unsteady. A few strands pulsed slowly, as if alive; others had died partway along their length and left only the scar.
The whole of the front wall was one enormous screen. The screen was off.
Beneath it a black console, longer than a man was tall, curved away in a semicircle, though most of its panels sat dark and dead. Only a scattered few buttons still proved they were alive, blinking a dull red.
To the right stood a great iron door. Above it, red lettering anyone could read hung large.
Below it, another door.
And beside that.
Not one thing in the place looked like it actually worked.
On the round dais at the center of the room, grains of blue light drifted through the air, built themselves into something like a city, and then tore it down again. The outline of a building rose and vanished. Roads and alleys formed, then shattered like static.
It looked like the model of a world that wasn't finished.
From somewhere in the ceiling a low vibration went on and on.
Wooong.
It might have been the breathing of a living machine. It might have been the groan of some vast creature in the middle of dying.
Sion looked slowly around. A massive screen. Sealed sectors. A dead console. An unfinished holographic map. Eerie enough that the room could have been called a villain's stronghold without shame — the stronghold of a villain about to go out of business.
All but one thing.
Sion looked down at what he was sitting on. A black leather swivel chair, its back rising past the top of his head. The shape of it, at least, belonged in the master's seat of a room like this. The problem was how old it was. The leather had split like a turtle's shell, and yellowed stuffing poked from the end of an armrest. One caster's axle must have bent; the slightest shift of his weight set it rattling.
And then the hand gripping that armrest caught his eye.
Black.
A hand as black and hard as if it had been carved from obsidian. Thick muscle stood out along the grain of every knuckle, and from the back of the hand a red vascular pattern climbed his forearm like a spider's web.
Sion closed it.
Crunch.
The steel frame inside the armrest crumpled in his grip like paper. He hadn't put any strength into it. He had only closed his fingers.
...This is.
This was the hand that used to buckle under a single twenty-liter drum of waste oil. That same hand had just crushed steel and hadn't even noticed it was holding anything.
Sion stood, slowly.
Thud.
The floor answered with a low boom from nothing more than the planting of his foot. His line of sight shot up, and the chair back that had towered over his head dropped to about his waist.
His shape surfaced on the dead black of the screen. It was not the outline of a man.
A skull drawn long toward the back. A face narrowing to a point below. Where a mouth ought to have been, the surface was sealed smooth, and only two eyes, slit thin, burned red in the dark. The shoulders were as broad as a door. The muscle running from chest to gut was not flesh. It was armor — black plates locked over one another, grinding and growling low with every breath.
From neck to shoulder, from chest to arm, the red pattern lit all at once.
Something boiled under the skin. Whatever had been caged for twenty-five years was knocking on the inside of his whole body, looking for a way out. He wanted to break something. Anything his hands could reach.
As if answering that pulse, the red lines in the room beat with him, one beat late.
No hair soaked in fryer oil. No bruised hollows under the eyes.
...I'm back.
"Ha..."
A laugh slipped out of him. It wasn't his voice. No — it was. Beneath Kwon Sion's voice lay another layer, low and heavy, and the two sounds rang as one.
"Haha... hahahaha!"
The laughter struck the wide room and came back at him.
Good. Now I get out of here, and that fucking bitch's izakaya first—
But.
The laugh cut off clean.
Wait... where is this?
Ding!
The screen came on.
In the middle of the black display, a round-faced icon popped up with a bonk. A palm-sized little demon's face, two red horns on its head.
"Long time no see!"
A speech bubble burst up with a pop.
Sion glared at the screen.
"...What are you."
"Aww, that hurts. You don't remember me? Well, it has been an awfully long time. First things first — congrats on waking up in one piece. That was seriously close!"
"Answer what I asked. Where is this, and what are you."
The doubled voice filled the room. The icon didn't so much as flinch. It only wagged itself left and right.
"I'm Redi! This is your base!"
"And out there..."
The picture slid aside, and red text rose a line at a time.
A game built in the image of the far side of Earth
Not reflected in reality
The further the Other World is conquered, the higher the Corruption Rate
Sion read the three lines twice.
A game?
Not... reflected in reality?
"...What is this."
His voice cracked. Both layers of the echo shook at once.
"What is this?! This isn't what I thought it was!"
Crrk.
The lower half of his face split open. Along the pointed line of the jaw a seam tore, and saw-blade teeth ranked themselves in the gap.
BANG!
His fist came down on the console. The black panel caved in, and cracks like a spiderweb shot out in every direction.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! Calm down! We've only got one of those!"
Sion's breathing sawed in and out. For the briefest moment, Redi's icon tipped toward the floor.
"...Sorry. That part really is on me."
"But with the power you've got right now, this was the best we could do. Even if you poured in everything you gathered, holding that body in reality is impossible. You wouldn't last a second."
"...Then this is."
"This is the Other World. A duplicate world, copied straight off reality at the exact moment you connected."
Sion didn't answer. The torn mouth closed again, slowly.
Seven years. Seven years of scraping it together a drop at a time in front of the oil drums and the food-waste bins, grinning and yes-ma'am-ing the whole way through. And the end of it was a game.
...Fuck. Fuck, seriously.
"But still!"
The icon bounced up with a bonk.
"Gather power here, and someday you'll be able to get back the strength you want. In reality, too. That body, just as it is."
"...Someday?"
"Yep! So think of this as a foothold. The first button on the coat!"
Sion looked down at his hand. The black fingers slowly curled, then opened. The pattern followed the motion and ran as far as his wrist. Solid. Real. At least in here.
A foothold.
The anger hadn't gone down. Something familiar had simply climbed up over it. One door shuts, you look for another. He had lived that way for all seven years.
"How do I gather power."
"Oh, there it is — straight to the point!"
Redi's icon sparkled.
"Everything on the other side is a resource. The feelings people give off when they're scared, when they despair, when they break — that's Magical Power. Buildings and cars you smash are Materials. Animals, plants, that sort of thing — Biomass!"
"Make subordinates with Magical Power, grow the base with Materials, modify things with Biomass. The bigger you get, the higher the Corruption Rate climbs!"
A small figure rose in the corner of the screen.
"The people on the other side."
"Copies of the real people! They don't know they're copies. So they get scared like the real thing, and they cry like the real thing."
Redi said it the way you'd mention the weather.
Scared like the real thing. Crying like the real thing.
Sion's red eyes narrowed.
If this were reality, the cops would show, it'd hit the news, and it'd be over in a week.
But here... nobody actually gets hurt.
Then there was no reason to hold back.
"Explain it in more detail."
"Yes, sir! Sion-nim!"
In one corner of the Command Room stood an old elevator.
The Summoning Room was the floor directly off the Command Room. Cylindrical incubation vats full of green amniotic fluid stood in a row along the wall, and now and then a bubble rose, glugging, inside glass tubes taller than Sion himself. Every tube was empty.
"This is where you make your subordinates! First summon's free! You know how it is — life's a gacha! Just no rerolling, got it!"
"...Garbage game."
"They're all like that at the start~"
It really is a game.
He went down to the next floor.
A folding iron door creaked open. The panel inside held only two buttons. A red light burned in one. The other was dead. He pressed the lit one, and the floor lurched downward — bound, more precisely, for the very bottom.
Wooong...
Steel cable wound, and the elevator sank, unhurried, into the dark.
The Underground Dungeon was a narrow corridor. Walls and ceiling alike were rusted iron plate bolted end to end, and moisture beaded and ran from the rivets at every seam. At the far end a single cell, barred in iron, gaped empty.
"This is the prison! Where you keep the people you bring in. They don't disappear even if you disconnect!"
"People I bring in. You mean prisoners?"
"Yep! We can kidnap them too. The Magical Power that comes off a person is the juiciest haul of all!"
Sion drew a fingertip once along the bars.
One. One at a time.
One way in. The corridor's a single path. Fine for keeping watch. Useless for holding anyone.
"...You just made an incredibly Administrator face."
"You can't even see my face."
"The vibe was the vibe!"
Back up, to the Summoning Room.
"All right — first summon!"
The instant Redi finished, the amniotic fluid in the nearest vat boiled up. Foam packed the tube until he could no longer see inside, and only after it died back, not long after, could he make out what was there.
A bulk of green-gray hide. Straighten that hunched back and it would clear a good seven feet, and two yellowed tusks jutted from either side of a thrusting lower jaw. The arms hung to the knees. Set against that huge body, the eyes were no bigger than beans, and there didn't seem to be much thought behind them.
D
E
E
Hiss.
The glass tube opened and amniotic fluid poured across the floor. The orc took one step—
Splat!
—and slid straight onto its face.
"..."
It lay there a long while, then lifted only its head to look up at Sion.
"Grrk?"
"Cute, right!"
Intelligence E.
Sion looked down at it. Thick arms. A thick neck. The strength, at least, looked real.
"Get up."
The orc heaved itself upright with a grunt.
"Sit."
It cocked its head, then flopped flat on its belly right where it stood.
I said sit. I didn't say lie down.
"First monsters are all like that~ Raise 'em and they get smarter!"
Sion let out a breath and moved on.
When he returned to the Command Room, Redi spun a circle inside the screen.
"Last thing! This one's the most important."
On the round dais at the center of the room, the drifting grains of blue light drew together all at once. A three-dimensional map. Alleys and rooftops, streetlights and signals rose one by one, each no bigger than a palm. A shop with its lights out. A twenty-four-hour convenience store. A four-story studio building with the tiles fallen off its outer wall. On the next block, even the Hamburger Joint, shutter rolled down.
"It's an exact lift of the outside, taken the moment you connected. Even at this hour, everyone's in there living the exact same lives."
Sion reached over the map. The instant his fingertip touched it, the image slid — down an alley, across a main road, toward the entertainment streets.
In front of the station. One izakaya, its lights burning brighter than anything around it.
...That's the izakaya in front of the station, isn't it.
He spread his fingers, and the view opened into the shop. A corner seat. Empty soju bottles and highball glasses stood in a mess across the table, and in front of them sat Park Hyejin, a white knit slipped off one shoulder.
She was leaned toward the younger man across from her, laughing bright and careless with a glass in her hand. Long pink nails tapped his forearm. Then she lifted her phone high, and the two of them pressed their cheeks together for a selfie.
"Found you."
"Oh — someone you know?"
Sion stared at that enlarged face for a long time.
Said she was stressed out of her mind.
Behind him the orc snorted, grrk. Sion dragged the old leather chair over and sat down in front of the map.
Screee.
The old chair screamed one more time.