Lunatic Hell
[You managed to land one good hit on him.]
Ryu Hwi had succeeded in shaking off Crowley by exploiting the game labyrinth and Conversion — but the very fact that he'd had to run left a sour taste in his mouth.
⟪Ryu Hwi, are you all right? What's your situation?⟫
A call came in from Arti Gracia. When he told her he'd slipped away from Crowley unscathed, she seemed to lose her words entirely.
⟪You broke away from an S.E.N alone? Before our department chief even got there? Are you seriously human? That's S.E.N we're talking about!⟫
One hundred percent pure human.
During the fight he'd sensed a strange presence approaching from afar, and it seemed that had been Midgard's department chief.
⟪Ah, the chief just contacted me. Looks like Crowley already fled the scene.⟫
So Crowley had bailed as well. Hardly surprising — the man wasn't the type to sit there and take his lumps.
⟪As long as S.E.N has you in their sights, we'll need to move fast and prepare countermeasures.⟫
He wasn't holding out much hope, but the more options, the better.
[A hard-earned day off, utterly ruined.]
"Tell me about it."
What a blazing, eventful holiday it had been. He'd been painfully reminded, once again, of how insufficient his strength was. Even rest felt like a waste of time.
Ryu Hwi decided to go finish clearing City of the Demon God.
[Weren't you supposed to be resting?]
"This is resting. A game labyrinth beats reality any day."
[That sounds like terminal game addiction. Besides, weren't you on restricted play over there because of spectator mode?]
"No. If I'm going up against S.E.N, I can't afford to coast like this. Let people flame me all they want — I'm clearing it at full power. No, actually, let's stream the whole thing too."
Lately, every video he uploaded drew the occasional comment — boring now, you've lost your edge. He'd thrown up the occasional clip of tearing through City of the Demon God on his bike, but that alone wasn't enough to set a crowd on fire anymore.
Lost your edge.
Because City of the Demon God had spectator mode, he'd been extra careful there, and it made for some genuinely dull gameplay. What had made people lose their minds over Ryu7017 was play that shattered convention and the game system itself.
"5555."
He called for 5555.
⟪What? I'm finally getting some decent sleep.⟫
"Can you switch to the Noel personality right now?"
⟪Don't tell me you're planning a stream?⟫
"I'm going to live-broadcast a full-power clear of City of the Demon God."
⟪I could see it on the old version, but doing that on 2.0 — as a developer, that'd make me want to tear my hair out in so many ways—⟫
5555 went quiet. Then—
⟪That fun-looking plan? I'm in! Let me do it! I want to!⟫
The personality flipped to Noel in an instant. The change was so abrupt that even Ryu Hwi was taken aback.
⟪I've been stacking up stress lately anyway. This is exactly the time to blow it all off, loud and proud!⟫
And so the final event of Ryu Hwi's holiday began — 'Operation: Conquer City of the Demon God with Unlimited Play!'
The moment the stream went live, people came swarming in. Many of the names were familiar faces that popped up under every Ryu Hwi post.
Confirming that a crowd had gathered on his channel, Ryu Hwi mounted his bike. The Air Road system kicked in at once, laying down a translucent highway stretching toward the far horizon.
The sight of Ryu Hwi blasting along on his bike, ignoring every piece of terrain City of the Demon God had to offer, set the chat instantly ablaze.
Flying monsters gave chase, but Ryu Hwi brushed them off with ease. Their top speed simply couldn't keep up with a bike on an Air Road.
⟪Rampaging freely across the field! The flying monsters are trying to attack Ryu Hwi, but it's utterly useless! Cowardly, absolutely cowardly play!⟫
Noel shrieked with excitement as she called his play — it looked very much like she was burning off 5555's stockpiled stress on his behalf.
⟪We've gotten a LOT of questions about how that bug is even possible! That's classified top-secret within Jucheongwang! Only one person alive knows the answer, and that's our CEO!⟫
"Gotta love the bike — ignores all terrain entirely."
[Then let us seal the Air Road at the very least. What is the point of it otherwise?]
He pulled up inside the castle proper and stopped the bike. From here, the Air Road was meaningless anyway. He stowed the bike in his inventory and pushed open the castle gates.
Countless monsters and traps greeted him the instant the doors parted — but at this point, not even a few hundred of these things swarming at once would have frightened him.
"Hm?"
Just as he was about to face the monsters with a bored expression, he noticed something strange. Their movements were oddly fast. Every single trash mob was moving like a speed-specialized boss.
A walking statue-monster raked at him with razor claws. He moved to parry the blow, but the moment Intuition screamed at him to dodge, he flung himself backward instead.
[Master, I have confirmed 'Spatial Slash' and 'Unguardable' effects on that monster's attack just now.]
"You're telling me THAT is a trash mob?"
The viewers were just as baffled. This was not the monster behavior any of them knew.
⟪They're strong! An anomalous situation! The monsters are abnormally powerful! Ryu Hwi is visibly rattled by this unexpected development! Has some kind of bug occurred?!⟫
Ryu Hwi hunted the monsters down one by one, squeezing every ounce of performance out of the Shuffle Gun and his other skills. They were so absurdly strong that it took time. City of the Demon God had always been brutal, yes — but not this brutal. At this difficulty, anyone who wasn't Ryu Hwi would struggle just to fight back against trash mobs.
Cursing under his breath, Ryu Hwi clawed his way forward. It was a grueling, bloody war of attrition. He hadn't fought this hard even against the monsters of World of Phantasm's 50th floor.
Then a trap suddenly triggered — an area-wide trap spanning an entire zone. Fire erupted from the ground, a mechanism designed to kill any gamer in a single strike. The instant it activated, Ryu Hwi slammed the Warp Gun and teleported to the far end of the corridor.
Barely a heartbeat after he warped, the entire zone was swallowed in flame. Only then did the viewers realize what they were looking at.
This was not a difficulty tuned for human beings to clear. What was strange here wasn't the difficulty — it was Ryu Hwi, somehow still alive in the middle of it. They couldn't decide whether to recoil from the insanity of the design or marvel at the superhuman play unfolding before them.
⟪What on earth is going on here? No gamer has even reached this final stage yet, so there's no way to know if this is the intended difficulty...⟫
⟪Ah, thank you for the donation, WineCapsule. Wait — hold on? An exclusive difficulty? For Ryu Hwi?! Did you all hear that, everyone?! A Ryu Hwi exclusive difficulty called Lunatic Hell?!⟫
The appearance of a Capsule director flooded the chat wall-to-wall with laughter. Naturally, all of it reached Ryu Hwi through Noel's broadcast. Barely alive after the trap, he moved his lips slowly.
"Oh, is that so? Exclusively for me? So in other words — you're saying this much is what it takes to stop me."
An exclusive difficulty. How absolutely delightful.
"Fine. Let's play, then."
Some faint corner of his conscience had once whispered — isn't it a bit much, smashing something people worked so hard to build with cheat-level play? That whisper was gone now.
"Try and stop me if you can."
From that point on, it was a blitzkrieg. Filthy, nightmarish trap patterns and monsters that made you wonder where exactly they got off calling themselves trash mobs blocked his path — but none of it could actually stop him.
⟪This monster has its defense stats set to absurd levels — basically taunting you, 'catch me if you dare'! But it's Ryu Hwi, folks! He shrugged off defense entirely and pounded it into the dirt! We're almost to the end of the stage!⟫
To be clear, Ryu Hwi was bare-handed apart from the gauntlets on his arms — yet his fists alone put down every monster in the way. Back in the day, you could at least make sense of his sword-and-Parrying combo; these days, figuring out his skill composition was a losing battle in itself. And just when you decided he was a fists-only fighter, he'd sweep aside enemies with magic. He stacked magic on top of magic, unleashing spells no one had ever seen before.
And it wasn't just fists and magic. The Shuffle Gun. Ryu Hwi put its functions to full use, toyed with the Lunatic Hell monsters like a cat with mice.
Before long, Ryu Hwi stood before the final boss's chamber. The chat had been thoroughly painted over with the word Paradise.
The doors opened, and City of the Demon God's final boss unveiled its terrifying majesty. Its entire body was sheathed in crimson scales; demon horns crowned its head, and grotesque, monstrous wings spread from its back.
⟪And there it is! City of the Demon God's final boss, revealed for the very first time! Its name is...⟫
Archdemon Lord.
The name materialized in his view the moment the boss appeared.
"This is more doable than I expected. You know what? Might as well make every other game labyrinth prepare a 'Ryu Hwi exclusive difficulty' too."
Playing with every ability unleashed felt far more comfortable than restricted play. Done right, it could become broadcast-exclusive content. Killing two birds with one stone.
Up until this very moment, Ryu Hwi was still being careless. He had yet to grasp the true, terrifying nature of Lunatic Hell mode.
Barely ten seconds into the fight, one curse escaped his lips.
"WHO MADE THIS THING?!"
Lunatic Hell mode's difficulty could be summed up in exactly one word: bullshit.
⟪Excuse me, WineCapsule? Was that difficulty actually tuned for a human to clear? I'm confident I'd be dead within three seconds in there.⟫
A beast ten times the size of a man moved fast enough to leave afterimages. Fire erupted with every movement to hamper the gamer's actions, and each attack bloomed into such a wide sea of flame that predicting where to dodge was impossible. Any ordinary gamer who'd tried this would have spat on the screen — I am never touching this game again!
⟪Why did the chat just turn into a game company convention?!⟫
Truthfully, the reason needed no explanation. They had all come to watch Ryu Hwi's play. Watching a man who casually disregarded the game system unleash his full power was something no developer could look away from. Their competitive spirits were surely burning — they could not simply let Ryu Hwi "clear the game" like this.
⟪Ah, Ryu Hwi! He's desperately holding on even in THIS situation! Why won't he die?! He's our CEO, but honestly, that is genuinely bizarre!⟫
You'd rather I died, is that it? Ryu Hwi fumed as he listened to the broadcast. The patterns were so contrived that just surviving them was agony. There was no earthly reason why a single swipe of the claw should spawn a wide-area instant-kill hitbox.
[Even fully geared in the finest equipment this labyrinth produces, one hit would kill you.]
So who would win? Ryu Hwi, famous for cheat-level play that shattered game systems? Or the final boss Capsule had built at full power for the sole purpose of taking him down?
The broadcast atmosphere boiled over completely.
"This really IS a difficulty built from the ground up to catch one specific man."
[Put another way — a difficulty no one but Master can clear.]
His competitive spirit ignited. A Ryu Hwi exclusive difficulty. He sent his sincere, heartfelt applause to Capsule for putting together such magnificent garbage — and began, at last, to prepare the finishing blow.
The Archdemon Lord was unquestionably powerful. But it suffered from the chronic weakness of bosses everywhere: it could not shed its predetermined patterns. Fighting the Archdemon Lord with Intuition pushed to its limits, Ryu Hwi dissected those patterns and their weaknesses — and found the opening for a single decisive strike.
From there, it was a straight downhill charge. If this difficulty existed for Ryu Hwi alone, then he would simply clear it in a way only Ryu Hwi could.
Since moments ago, his fist had been held at full charge of Heavenly Demon Divine Art — an attack whose damage overflowed the counter so badly it triggered bugs. Layered on top of it, Meteor Strike.
The Archdemon Lord spread its wings.
[Pattern, incoming.]
Full-field range. No defensive options. Cannot be canceled. One strike, certain death. A finishing pattern wrapped entirely in the will to kill.
But Ryu Hwi had already survived this pattern three times. By now, the crack was starting to show. In the instant the attack triggered, a gap of 0.1 to 0.5 seconds opened — a delay between the animation and the strike actually landing. Such an overwhelmingly powerful attack processed slowly.
A mere 0.1 to 0.5 seconds. But Ryu Hwi was not a man to let that slip away.
He fired the Warp Gun instantly, materializing directly beneath the Archdemon Lord. Faster than the attack could land, light from the Heavenly Demon bled into his fist — and it exploded.
──KUWAAAAAAAAGH?!
The Archdemon Lord's colossal body rocketed toward the ceiling with a shriek that shook the air. Watching the fiend king smash through the roof and soar into the sky, Ryu Hwi wore a deeply satisfied expression.
"Phew. Feels like all my stress evaporated in one go."
[To relieve Master's stress, another game labyrinth will now be down for several hours.]
⟪This is TOO much, even for you! One strike! The final boss fell in a SINGLE strike! And the damage exceeded the cap so hard the building collapsed!⟫
The chat was drowned beneath an endless tide of LOLOLOLOLOL. The broadcast, which had peaked at several hundred thousand concurrent viewers, drew its curtain in triumph.
"Ahh. That hit the spot."
The Noel personality didn't have 5555's crippling social anxiety, nor Wolya's eccentric old-man voice quirks. "Tonight's stream was the best. Ahaha!" She was perhaps a touch too energetic, but that was no great flaw.
Except that there was one other problem. A particularly annoying one.
"Don't cling to me. Sit on the other side."
"What's wrong with a little closeness between us?"
Unlike Wolya or 5555, Noel was aggressively, unreasonably friendly. Declaring it a celebration of the broadcast's success, she had barged in uninvited and forced Ryu Hwi into a little party. Even now she was pressed flush against his side, sipping from a can of beer.
"Is a prosthetic body even allowed to drink?"
"Special-spec model, so no problem at all. Can't get drunk anyway. Oh — would you have preferred the type that can?"
"I said sit on the other side."
What a colossal pain in the neck. Noel pouted in disappointment and took another sip.
"You know, 5555 and the other personalities — their psychological panic is pretty serious right now. Did you know that?"
"Hm?"
"They took a huge shock from part of that 'truth' you passed along."
Unexpected. He'd assumed the shock would be heavy, but he'd figured they'd shake it off quickly.
"We're something like a collection of multiple consciousnesses, so the others can patch over each other and 'act fine.' But that works both ways — it means we're just that unstable."
"......"
"We got tangled up in an experiment meant to erase a single being called 'Freyja,' and this is what we became. Some of the most fragile personalities vanished entirely because of it."
"......?!"
"We are... I am unstable. Souls torn apart, clumped together into the shape of one existence — that's all any of this is."
Noel laid out the staggering facts in a flat, matter-of-fact voice.
"A severe enough shock, and we start disappearing, one by one. Someday, even the core personalities — Zero, Wolya, 5555 — might vanish too."
When everything was gone, she said, she didn't know what — if anything — would remain.
"Can I ask you for just one thing?"
"If it isn't impossible."
"Bring S.E.N... bring Britra in front of me, someday."
She took another swallow of beer.
"You didn't need to ask for that."
The beer tasted bitter.