Anomalous Reaction
"An anomaly?"
YggON was incapable of a simple 'misreading'.
The ID number of individual Noir has fluctuated.
"ID number?"
It lasted only 0.01 seconds, but Noir was momentarily recognized as a different existence.
0.01 seconds. It could have been a simple recognition error — but would the one and only UR in existence ever make a mistake like that?
He studied Noir closely. Her complexion was a little off, sure, but nothing else about her seemed out of the ordinary. Even so, he equipped Intuition, just as YggON had said. It was cheating, but this was no time to worry about rules.
"I don't sense anything strange."
Either it had been YggON's mistake, or it was something even Intuition at Lv. 3 couldn't detect.
He contacted someone whose reception records lingered in his SEED. Multitasking in the middle of a duel was the kind of thing only a lunatic would attempt — but with Intuition active, the attacks from Bisque and Noir were no longer a threat.
"Oh! No! Don't tell me — you reached out to me first?"
The call connected instantly.
"What on earth is happening? I'm so moved I could die! May I come see you right now?"
A voice he could not stand to hear rattled through his skull.
"Hecate. Just the point. What did you do to Noir?"
"Noir? Ahh, the woman currently locked in that enviable, utterly outrageous duel with you, Ryu Hwi? No, neither I nor Mr. Crowley has laid a finger on her."
Hecate had deliberately limited herself to 'herself' and 'Crowley'.
"So others could have pulled something?"
"Well, I wouldn't know. I told you, didn't I? S.E.N is nothing but a gathering of selfish creatures who care only that they have a good time. We're bound by a category, nothing more — you could hardly call us the same 'group'."
"There's even a monkey like the Great Sage Equal to Heaven who interferes with other S.E.N members outright. Nobody announces what they're doing to the rest of us, one by one."
In other words, another member of S.E.N could well have done something to Noir.
"Oh, and don't worry — whenever I decide to do something, I always announce it in advance, right away."
He cut the call immediately.
This time he contacted Arti Gracia at the District 13 Administration Office, to check whether S.E.N had shown any strange movements lately.
"Quetzalcoatl and Tiamat's people have been making some curious moves recently, so we're keeping watch — but so far, it's been quiet."
Arti Gracia didn't seem to have anything useful either.
"Wait — aren't you in the middle of a stream right now? I'm watching the broadcast... don't tell me you called me while streaming?"
"I had something I needed to check in a hurry. Later."
He ended the call with Arti.
"'Fair play' looks like it's off the table."
He decided to keep Intuition equipped as a precaution. If it were up to him, he would have ended the Gacha King stream on the spot and checked on Noir's condition — but with no evidence beyond YggON sensing a 0.01-second anomaly, there was no way to justify it. And if S.E.N really had done something to Noir, he wanted to know what on earth they were after. He had already instructed 5555 to end the broadcast the instant anything happened.
It would be best if YggON had simply been mistaken, but still...
"Just to be sure — no Trucardia virus reaction, right?"
He suspected the virus that had turned Linfel and Asea into something no longer human.
No virus reaction detected.
Not the Trucardia virus, then. Relieved, if only for the moment, he settled in to keep watching Noir's condition, trying to figure out why the anomaly had registered at all.
Bomb tree. Bomb power increase. Bomb range increase.
Noir kept hurling bombs, one after another. Nothing about her current state registered as abnormal. Bisque cycled through a whole arsenal of weapons, while Noir seized every opening to lob explosives. Without Intuition reading the blast radius in advance, he would have been hit long ago.
"Why are you holding out so long?! There's such a thing as going too far, you know! Your whole rhythm is different from earlier! Did you equip some skill or not?!"
"I didn't! I didn't!"
Master, suspicious comments are beginning to pile up in the chat as well.
He stayed alert for any strange behavior from Noir, but she was competing in earnest, honestly. She didn't seem to be planning to pull anything here.
Should I just lose to her here — decently, but with style?
If he used the Random Orb Bullet while pretending to put up a fight and then got caught in one of Noir's bombs, he'd have a perfectly believable loss on his hands. It was while he was thinking this, pulling the trigger toward Bisque, that his breath caught.
He felt it in his gut.
In this instant, at this exact moment, he had pulled the one 'grand prize' he absolutely could not afford to win.
The sensation was different from the winning shot he'd landed earlier. He had no idea what effect that marble held, but he had a premonition — the moment it went off, he would definitely 'win'.
A jackpot, of all possible moments?
Now that people suspected him of using skills, the smart play was to stop dragging the match out and take a defeat so spectacularly ridiculous that no one could call it anything else. The instant he reached that conclusion — 'grand prize jackpot'.
Just like this, he'd eat the suspicion anyway and win a match with no fun in it and no emotion in it. That was the one ending he had to avoid at all costs.
He saw Bisque drawing her bow — clearly resolved to snipe the marble he'd fired out of the air. He saw Noir raising a bomb overhead, too.
So what did he need to do, right here and now, to stage a flashy defeat?
Right — a misfire!
He pulled the trigger with the handgun angled toward the ground. Fire the marble into the floor while disguised as an accident, then self-destruct — pretend to be swallowed whole by whatever effect it produced.
He squeezed the trigger, and realized.
Another 'jackpot'.
No — why?! What?!
Shockwave Round
The ground-fired marble detonated first. The shockwave rocked the earth as though an earthquake had struck.
Ngh — no... not yet. In this gap, one more round, straight into myself...
Flight Round
A violent whirlwind erupted, and in a single instant he was lifted high into the sky.
WHY!!
An earthquake-plus-flight combo, landing back-to-back as if someone had planned it to the frame? And then the 'grand prize' he'd fired first finally went off.
The single most powerful and widest-ranging round in the Random Orb Bullet's arsenal — a marble bomb that scours everything in its vicinity.
"Ryu—!"
"Kyaa!"
Flames swallowed Bisque and Noir whole, neither of them having braced properly against the shockwave. Game over. Game over.
"......"
Staring at the scene, he couldn't find a single word to say.
The chat window was a war zone. What on earth had to happen, in what order, for something like that to occur?
Master, if you had simply done nothing, and the first marble round had detonated on its own, all three of you would have shared a perfectly friendly game over.
Instead, the outcome of your frantic damage control. Truly magnificent, Master.
Damn it! Come out like that! Normally! When I WANT you to!!
He shouted it inwardly, wearing the expression of a man utterly hollowed out.
For the first time in ages, a Gacha King quest drew to a close with a victory for Ryu Hwi. And to the very end, Noir had done nothing out of the ordinary. It would have eased his mind if she'd done something suspicious, honestly.
"......?"
The moment he thought of Noir, for some reason a corner of his chest ached. He froze, briefly unsettled by the sensation — something vague and formless smearing through his mind, the color of bruised violet.
"An examination?"
Noir's face went round with surprise. "Why? Ah — is it because of my complexion? I'm fine, truly. Just a little tired, that's all."
"Looking after an employee's health is an obligation as well. Now then, a simple examination can be done at Jucheongwang, so come along."
Wolya waved off Noir's protests without a second's pause. "That's right, get yourself checked while we're at it. Your complexion is simply beyond the pale."
Bisque was all for Noir getting examined too, and Noir reluctantly gave in. Of course, her health was merely the pretext. The real purpose was to find out what, exactly, was happening inside Noir's body. If S.E.N had done something, something would show.
Through the whole procedure, Noir lay quietly inside the scanner, offering not the slightest resistance.
"Hmmm... I don't see anything particularly strange. SEED functions are normal, and there appear to be no issues with the body itself. A hospital would be better for anything more detailed, but..."
Wolya could turn up nothing else amiss.
"Setting aside for the moment how you managed to check an ID number in the middle of a duel — you said her ID number itself showed an anomaly?"
Ryu Hwi nodded. "That shouldn't be possible. There's exactly one way to change an ID number."
"And what would that be?"
"Crack open the skull, remove the SEED, and swap it for a different one."
"......"
Chilling, just to imagine.
"Unless there's some means of swapping SEEDs in real time, an ID number can't simply malfunction out of nowhere."
"Then what was the anomaly in Noir's ID number?"
"I haven't the faintest. Going by what you've said, her SEED was replaced for an instant. Ah — come to think of it, I did once hear that multiple SEEDs carrying the same ID number could be manufactured."
"Multiple copies of the same ID number? Why would anyone do that?"
"For illegal purposes, I'd wager — identity forgery and the like. The trouble was, having gone to all the effort of making SEEDs with copied ID numbers, to actually use one you had to crack open a skull, extract the original SEED, and graft the new one in."
"And?"
"When they experimented to see whether a SEED could be swapped in, nine out of ten died, and the tenth was left a vegetable."
A technology that was, in every sense, pointless.
"There's another story as well — of research into overlaying a different ID onto an existing SEED."
"And that would also be for illegal reasons, like identity forgery?"
"You do say the obvious."
"What were the results?"
"Experimented in every way imaginable, but apparently it's only feasible before the SEED is implanted into the body. Fools, it seems, choose only the most foolish of endeavors."
Copies and forgeries. Something about it all felt off — an itch behind the eyes.
"Say we assume some other ID was overlaid on top of hers. Could that be verified?"
"It would be, if the seed within the body could be extracted."
Such primitive technology leaves me without words. A fine example of the fallout from letting SEEDs remain first-generation hardware for decades on end.
YggON remarked, oozing disdain.
"Do you remember the ID number from the moment it changed? With that much, I could at least run a search."
SKN-2755002222.
YggON recalled the number with perfect precision, down to the 0.01-second window. Ending in 2222, it was a Unique Number — just like Wolya's.
"SKN-2755002222."
"You actually remembered it? One moment, please."
Wolya immediately ran a search for the individual carrying the Unique Number '2222'. She had barely begun when her expression turned strange.
"Are you certain that number is correct?"
He glanced over at YggON, and the answer came back without hesitation: [Certain.]
"Hmm. Strange things do happen. There is one person matching this number... but she died forty years ago, no?"
"Died?!"
Wolya transmitted the data to Ryu Hwi. The file belonging to SKN-2755002222 unfolded before him.
Reduced to a single phrase, it read: the purple woman. Purple hair, purple eyes. It was nothing more than a photograph in a data file, and yet it drew his gaze with a strangeness he couldn't explain.
"Her name is Eve Livid. Gold rank — but given there's no mention anywhere of a 'Livid' family, she must have been a Gold household that began and ended with her."
She had served as the head of an orphanage. Unmarried. Deceased at forty — a young age, as such things go. Beyond that, the data held nothing.
"As you can see, a person with no connection whatsoever to Noir. Was it truly nothing more than a simple misperception?"
Face and all, not a single thing about her resembled Noir. And YggON did not misperceive. Then what, in the world, had that anomaly signified?
Something was there. But what it was, he could not begin to see.
"Noir, Noir..."
Hecate, having received Ryu Hwi's contact, lightly skimmed the information on 'Noir'. By her very nature, she was interested in Ryu Hwi and no one else; other people didn't merit even a flicker of her attention.
"Her real name is Ishur Nimur... Nimur?"
The moment Hecate confirmed Noir's real name, her brow creased. It sounded strangely, uncomfortably familiar. She immediately pulled up a certain set of data and searched for the word 'Nimur'.
"Why did I overlook this? Was it planned from the very beginning? Or was it chance?"
There had been nothing remotely suspicious about Noir joining 'Jucheongwang'. She had simply followed her friend Bisque, nothing more. Which meant it was most likely 'coincidence'.
Did coincidence usually weave itself so neatly?
Hecate trembled with excitement at the fate flowing like water around 'Ryu Hwi' — and yet beneath it, an impatience gnawed at her, and she bit at her nails, ragged and restless.
"Ryu Hwi belongs to me. I claimed him first. LILITH!!"