The Identity of 5555
Ryu Hwi's head began to ache at the identity of 5555, which he had never seen coming.
"So *you're* '5555'?"
Wolya, the owner of Jucheongwang, walked around with a full-body prosthesis — banned by law — without even a thought of hiding it.
She swapped out the prosthesis parts every time, so her appearance changed with each visit. The first time he'd seen her, she was a young boy. The next, a vintage porcelain doll in a gothic dress.
Right now, she was an adorable teddy bear. Decorative mechanical parts dangled from her arms and legs, making it clear she was no ordinary plush.
And the voice was still that of a gruff middle-aged "uncle," which was deeply unsettling.
"Surprised? You must be, hmm? Yes, surely you're surprised. That's right — I am none other than '5555.'"
Ryu Hwi, without warning, seized the teddy-bear form of Wolya by the scruff of its neck and lifted it off the ground.
"Ughak?!"
"So it's you. You're 5555. You've been making a real fool of me, haven't you? Did I look that easy to you?"
"Khek— khek."
It was a bizarre tableau — a grown man gripping a teddy bear by the collar and hoisting it into the air — but Ryu Hwi didn't care one bit.
"Kehek, kehek... Ah, right. Since this is a prosthesis, choking doesn't actually work, does it."
Having faked her distress for a moment, Wolya quickly regained her composure.
"You're really 5555? You two are just... too different. Weren't you setting up a decoy to protect 5555's identity?"
"Hahahahaha."
Wolya laughed as though the very idea were absurd.
"If you're that curious, shall I give you the answer? Heh heh..."
In that instant, a strange light flickered in the teddy bear's eyes as they met Ryu Hwi's gaze.
"Put me down, would you? You're the one who called this meeting to make a deal."
Wolya's entire demeanor shifted in a heartbeat. The dignified uncle's voice vanished without a trace, replaced by the voice of 5555 he'd heard in the game labyrinth. Her attitude, her mannerisms — everything changed.
Startled by the abrupt transformation, Ryu Hwi let go of her collar. The airborne Wolya dropped straight onto her rear end.
She applies programming to her personality as well.
"What?"
The body is a full-body prosthesis, and she uses programs to control her emotions and personality. It doesn't mean her personality itself is an AI — but she appears to be able to regulate her own character at will.
"That's insane."
No one in their right mind would go so far as to tinker with their own personality. Only a madman would.
"Calling me insane out of nowhere? That's rather harsh. So you've figured out my secret? You saw straight through the full-body prosthesis at a glance, too..."
Wolya looked up at Ryu Hwi with apparent interest, her voice having somehow shifted back to the uncle's.
"Which one is real? 5555? Or the uncle-voiced Wolya right now?"
"You mean you wish to know my 'original'? Hmmm. Well, it hardly matters if I tell you..."
Wolya stopped mid-sentence and scanned the surroundings.
"We've grown a tail."
"You mean those Black Snake guys?"
"No."
Wolya snapped her fingers, and a hologram rose up in the center of the shop. It displayed the entire area within a hundred-meter radius of Jucheongwang in perfect detail.
"In my line of work, one must be thorough about security, you see. Fufu, well? Surprised?"
On the hologram, an endlessly varied scene played out moment by moment — passersby walking the streets, people pausing to chat, stray cats prowling the pavement.
And among them was a group that even a casual glance marked as suspicious. The Black Snake crew. They had taken up a position not far from Jucheongwang, watching the place.
"Those ones are mere stragglers. I'm sure they think they're hidden well enough, but they're far too sloppy. In other words — they're bait."
A new location appeared on the hologram. A fair distance from Jucheongwang, a cluster of suspicious figures in black suits had gathered.
"Hmm. I wondered if they were after me, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They're most likely after *you*. Consider it the price of your newfound fame."
Wolya looked up at him with a mocking lilt in her voice. Ryu Hwi glared at the suited figures reflected on the hologram. They were almost certainly the same bunch that had chased him before.
As I thought — the ones Linzea hired?
Ryu Hwi assumed those men in black suits had to be connected to Linzea Guild.
"For the record, they're not Linzea's."
Wolya shot down the assumption.
"The entertainment district is my own back garden. Those men are wearing Information Recognition Distortion Gear to hide their identities, but..."
Personal dossier data rose above the black suits' heads.
"Iron Blood. A crew belonging to the criminal syndicate operating in the entertainment district. Thugs, thieves, murderers — lawless men who commit every crime imaginable. The odds of them being tied to Linzea are slim."
"Why?"
"Iron Blood's boss is a man who used to be a 'Gamer' long ago..."
A former Gamer embedded in a violent crime syndicate. Ryu Hwi felt like he could see exactly where this story ended.
"A Gamer who got cast out because of Linzea?"
"Impressive. You read that like a book."
Wolya clapped in feigned astonishment.
"Iron Blood's boss was a Gamer from a previous era — the days when Gabriel Darius, Linpel Darius's senior by a generation, was in his prime. He retired after some kind of accident. And of course, Linzea was the cause."
A man forced out of the Gamer life by Linzea Guild would hardly turn around and join hands with them now.
"It'll be difficult to talk business here, so... shall we move somewhere better suited to a conversation?"
Jucheongwang had a secret passage leading into the entertainment district's sewers.
Wolya navigated the sewers as if they were her own bedroom. The distinct reek of the drains stung his nose, but she showed not the slightest sign of caring. With a full-body prosthesis, she could presumably adjust her sense of smell however she liked — and in the first place, she was a teddy bear right now, so it was doubtful she even had a nose worth mentioning.
"This way."
Partway down the sewer, there was a hidden door — concealed so skillfully that no one would ever guess a door existed there at all. Wolya opened it and headed inside.
No hostile reactions detected.
YggON had detected nothing out of the ordinary. Ryu Hwi stepped through the hidden door into the passage beyond.
"A warehouse?"
Up the ladder on the other side of the secret door lay a warehouse littered haphazardly with every manner of miscellaneous junk.
"This is where I keep my merchandise. Though nothing stored here is of particularly high importance."
To some people it might have looked like a treasure vault, but to Ryu Hwi it was nothing more than a junkyard full of worthless trinkets.
"I also keep a warehouse for my prosthetic bodies, if you'd like a look? I swap bodies to suit my mood, you see. There are quite a few over there as well."
"So you're filthy rich, huh."
Even prosthetic limbs and prosthetic eyes fetched a steep price; a full-body prosthesis must have been worth a fortune. And Wolya owned several of them.
"Building them myself doesn't cost all that much, you see."
"You *build*... them?"
Full-body prostheses?
"Full-body prostheses are illegal to begin with, so black marketeers are the only ones who deal in them. That drives the prices to absurd, lunatic heights. So the only real option is to make my own."
Ryu Hwi examined Wolya's other prosthetic bodies. Strip away the mechanical ornamentation, and they were indistinguishable from real human beings at a glance.
She'd built *these* herself?
By the current technological standards of humanity, these are without question the highest grade.
Ryu Hwi felt the need to revise his assessment of Wolya.
"Now then — shall we get to the deal? I do hope it proves a profitable one for us both."
The adorable teddy bear's smile felt unsettlingly sinister.
"Should I call you 5555? Or Wolya? Or is there yet another name?"
Ryu Hwi took a seat across from Wolya. Having a conversation face-to-face with a teddy bear was a profoundly strange experience.
"Wolya feels more natural to me these days, though I went by 5555 back in my hacking days. Each personality has a field it gravitates toward, you see."
An utterly bizarre human being. Though to be fair, being a full-body prosthesis had already made her strange enough.
"You said you wanted to see my original, did you not? There's no particular reason to hide it, so I could show you... but must you see it?"
Wolya seemed distinctly reluctant to reveal her original self.
"You expect me to just trust a teddy bear? This is a credibility issue."
"Tch. Very well, I suppose."
An "ALERT" indicator appeared in the lower right of Ryu Hwi's field of vision. The message contained Wolya's personal information.
"This is all the information I can disclose."
On its own, that much was enough to make anyone shout, Is this a joke?!
But the content below it was staggering.
The sole survivor of the Flight 707 Bombing Incident. The weapon used in the attack was a Yggdrasil Item, and the vast majority of passengers died instantly at the moment of detonation. The sole survivor was left entirely carbonized by the item's effects, rendering their identity unverifiable.
"Wait — don't tell me, this is..."
"Who knows what manner of bomb it was — the body itself mutated, you see. Communication was impossible; I was closer to a living corpse."
Yggdrasil Items. Among the items obtained in game labyrinths, some — magic stones included — could be brought out into reality. Their effects ran the entire gamut. There were things like the Magidrive Toothbrush, and there were genuinely dangerous things too. The item used in that bombing must have been among the very worst of them.
"Straight to the research lab I went~. After all, people remember that there *was* a 'survivor,' but they couldn't care less what became of that survivor afterward."
Humans are trash, no?
The robotic vacuum cleaner spat out its vitriol at the first opportunity.
"I was poked and prodded through one experiment after another, and just before they were set to scrap me, one researcher's conscience got the better of him. He smuggled the survivor out and built her a full-body prosthesis. That's the story."
It was a far darker story than he'd expected.
"Fine, communication was impossible right after the accident — but surely your identity could be established by now, one way or another?"
Ryu Hwi showed little interest in Wolya's life story itself. Perhaps her reaction caught her off guard, because a look of intrigue crossed her face.
"No particular thoughts on my tragic life story?"
"Haven't you already reached your own conclusion about it? Then there's nothing for me to say, is there? And I doubt you're looking for pity, anyway."
He did think it was tragic. But there was nothing Ryu Hwi could do about it.
"Fufu. I suppose you're right."
Wolya gave a light shrug, then tapped the top of her own head.
"On the matter of my 'identity,' all I can say is that I don't know. The explosion took more than my body. My mind went with it."
"Your mind?"
"Precisely that. Whether due to the bomb's influence, all of my memories became jumbled together. The minds — the souls? — of the victims caught in the accident, perhaps. It felt as though such things had mixed into me."
"That's straight-up occult."
A bomb that carbonized a body, fine, he could understand that. But once you crossed into souls and minds mingling together, you were in occult territory.
"And the Yggdrasil Item is what made it possible."
Ryu Hwi glanced sideways at YggON. YggON neither confirmed nor denied.
"Which is why I'm in a state where I can't know who I am. My memories are incomplete, all jumbled together. What you just saw is a guess based on the information left in my carbonized body."
"So the 'personality control' thing — is that..."
"It's the ability to control which of the personalities mixed within me comes to the surface. The personality itself doesn't change — it merely shifts my direction, so to speak. Well? Does that answer your question?"
He could roughly grasp who Wolya was. That is, assuming she had spoken nothing but the truth.
If she were lying, she wouldn't need to invent a story this elaborate. Maybe she's just trying to buy my sympathy...
Ryu Hwi decided to take Wolya's story at face value, for now.
"The personalities, fine. But one more thing before we move on. That voice — is that tied to the personalities too?"
"The voice?"
For a teddy bear to speak in such a deep, dignified middle-aged man's voice — he simply couldn't get used to it. If the personality Wolya presented leaned masculine, then he could sort of understand...
"It's a matter of taste."
"Then couldn't you at least make the prosthesis an adult man, or..."
"And what would be cute about that? Cuteness is the ultimate truth! I have a prosthetic body in the form of a lovely young girl, too, you know!"
"Ah. Well. Good for you."
Ryu Hwi resolved to stop caring what prosthesis Wolya wore or what voice she used. Caring only meant losing.
"Right. Then to the deal we agreed upon. Bring out every mod you've made."
"Hmm..."
"I'm not asking for them for free. I'll pay a price befitting the mods. I don't know what drove you to pour yourself into making them, but I'll put them to proper use. *I* can use them."
"What towering confidence. Well, I did watch you use my mods firsthand, so I can believe that. May I ask a few questions? First — what counts as a fitting price?"
Before Ryu Hwi could even answer, Wolya fired off her questions.
"Whatever price you name, obviously."
"I could very well gouge you, you realize?"
"A merchant would have their pride about such things. Unless you're nothing more than a mere merchant trinket, hmm?"
"A merchant trinket, that's me. A respectable merchant wouldn't stoop to black marketeering. Fine, whatever. It does feel strange pricing my own work... Next question. Who exactly are you?"
Ryu Hwi clamped his mouth shut and glared at Wolya. Even under that piercing stare, Wolya kept smiling.
"And what's the intent behind that question?"
"It's the obvious question, isn't it?"
Wolya had witnessed Ryu Hwi's battles firsthand. Combat that operated on a level beyond the game labyrinth's own system.
"Isn't it bad form for a merchant to dig too deeply into a customer's circumstances?"
"I simply wish for a deeper business relationship. As I said before, there's something I want to do. It's connected to Linzea as well — the Linzea you so despise."
"Did Linzea do something to you too?"
"No."
Wolya's gaze drifted toward something in the distance. Ryu Hwi followed her line of sight. In the corner of the warehouse stood an arcade machine that looked like it belonged a century in the past. Rusted-out old scrap; he doubted it even worked anymore.
"My target is the ones who maintain an intimate relationship with Linzea. To drag them out into the open, Linzea itself must be struck down first."
"An 'intimate relationship' with Linzea?"
"Hear this, and there's no going back. I intend to drag you in thoroughly, whether you like it or not."
"What's in it for me?"
Frankly, Ryu Hwi couldn't care less what Wolya's goal was. All that mattered was whether it profited him.
At his glacial response, Wolya couldn't help letting out a wry smile.
"Linzea's scandal — information that could deal them a devastating blow. I'll give it to you. What you do with it is your call."
"Ho."
A tempting offer. When it came to fighting Linzea, the more cards in his hand, the better.
"If it's true, we should have a pleasant deal ahead of us. If you're that confident, then tell me this scandal of yours first. If I like it, I'll work with you."
"My, isn't that quite the lofty vantage point you're looking down from? ...I'd love to say, but I suppose in this particular deal, I'm the one on the lower end. Fine. I'll tell you. Fufufu."
Wolya immediately transmitted "certain information" to Ryu Hwi.
"This is...!"