Settle the Score, Asea
Countless meteors fell in place of arrows. The difference between this and the Stardust Arrow he knew all too well was that these starlights glowed black as they descended. A Stardust Arrow warped by bugs. Each time a starlight touched the ground, the place it struck twisted and vanished.
“Aaaagh?!” “What the hell is this now—argh!” One by one, they were struck down by the corrupted arrows of the stars and disappeared. The bombardment lasted a mere five seconds. In those five seconds, the entire area was turned into a wasteland of scorched ruin.
“Agh, ugh, ghaaah!” Bisque was no exception. Caught in the bombardment, she could no longer stand. Her legs were numb — no, worse, she couldn't feel them at all. Bisque forced her head down and looked beneath her. “……?!” Her legs had warped into something grotesque. Zeros and ones flickered across them in patches, and the flesh sagged and swayed as though it had melted into slime. “What's happening to me? M-my legs! My character's legs!!” Bisque spiraled into confusion. The other gamers were in a state much like hers, or worse. Among them, those struck in a 'vital point' had their breath cut short and suffered instant game over.
Pokryeol Daedo lay collapsed, greatswords of corruption sprouting from every inch of his body. He had grown even more monstrous than before, but he seemed utterly incapable of so much as twitching now. Only Ryu Hwi, who had sensed the attack in advance, managed to dodge the black stars.
Ryu Hwi clicked his tongue as he scanned his surroundings. The sight of gamers eroded and mutated by the bugs reminded him of the Cheolhyeoldan, whose suffering had long since vanished along with their grief.
“My Intuition didn't pick it up properly. Which means…….” “Found you.” A voice drifted from beyond the ruin. Someone was approaching from the far side of the broken world, and that voice was brimming with hatred and fury. “I've been looking for you. This whole time. So very, very hard!” The moment Ryu Hwi laid eyes on the speaker, his expression twisted. “Long time no see. Been keeping well?” He spoke as if greeting an old friend, but his voice was impossibly cold. “Though isn't that a bit flashy for a welcome?” “You're the one who brought down Floor 50, aren't you?” It was less a question than a confirmation. The other party was absolutely certain that Ryu Hwi was the cause of all this. “That's right. Though it was even more of a mess than I expected.” “Because of you — because of YOU — everything we spent years preparing is in ruins! I should have erased you back then, with my own hands!” “Tch. If your plan could collapse over one man, it was doomed from the start.” “Ryu Hwi!!” His enemy screamed his name, choked with malice. Ryu Hwi found it absurd. What exactly was there to be so smug about? She had the audacity to act like the wronged party. “Honestly speaking.” His rare good mood was now a total wreck. So he deliberately broke into a bright smile. “Not my problem, Asea.”
“You're in the way. Get lost.” Ryu Hwi addressed Bisque without taking his eyes off Asea. “Ryu……7017.” Bisque trembled in pain as she looked up at him. “You can't move anymore on those legs anyway, can you? I'll let it slide this once. Just go.” Linzea was the enemy, and Bisque was Linzea. But the sight of her now overlapped with the Cheolhyeoldan of the past. He had no desire to treat her as an enemy at the moment.
“Why? Why…… did it turn out like this? Why! What was all that time I poured in for, then…….” A single tear fell. “What have I…… what have I even been fighting for…….” Unable to contain her grief, Bisque wept. She had been shaken to her core when she learned the truth of World of Phantasm, yet foolish lingering attachment had kept her from logging out. When Floor 50 collapsed and she saw the world meeting its end, she had thought — let me at least witness with my own eyes the moment this game labyrinth shatters. But now even that was beyond her reach.
“I don't care about your circumstances. I'm going to blow this pathetic world to pieces myself, so drop the sentimentality and get lost. Or should I kill you instead?” Bisque bit down hard on her lip. Wiping away her tears, she raised her head and spoke to Ryu Hwi. “I don't have any attachment left…… not anymore.” Bisque's body began to blur at the edges. “This pathetic world — blow it all to hell.” Logout. Bisque dissolved into particles and vanished. The other gamers around her disappeared one after another as well. The only one who remained was Pokryeol Daedo.
“Asea, you dare——!!” Pokryeol Daedo hurled curses at Asea, but she paid him no mind whatsoever, her glare fixed solely on Ryu Hwi. Ryu Hwi met her gaze in turn. Pokryeol Daedo clenched his teeth. The bug bombardment had jolted some of his senses back, and as he recalled what he had done, he trembled with humiliation. But it changed nothing. His body was reduced to this state — it wouldn't move at all. All because of that damned bug! The sheer pathetic absurdity of his situation made him want to scream.
“Not my problem, huh? Do you have any idea what you've done? What I…… what we spent years preparing…….” Ryu Hwi found her rage delightful. Just looking at her contorted face felt like a decade's worth of pent-up weight lifting off his chest. “Oh, no need to explain. I can guess the gist of it. You people possess some technology to control bugs to a degree, right? And you spread it to other gamers.” Bugs prowling freely through the collapsed Floor 50. And Asea seething with fury. The picture was painfully obvious. “Bugs are inherently unstable, of course. Every time a gamer used one, it must have put some strain on the game labyrinth.” A game labyrinth wouldn't waver over something as trivial as a bug — a normal one, anyway. That was the caveat. “But you people noticed something else, didn't you? How poorly made World of Phantasm really is.” The further up the Central Tower one climbed, the lower its polish sank. The gamers fighting on the front lines had felt it too, but no one had ever imagined that World of Phantasm itself was fundamentally 'incomplete'. But GA-ES was different. “You people must have caught on long ago to just how shoddy World of Phantasm is. So you figured that with bugs, you could bend the entire game to your will — am I close?” That had to have struck the bullseye. “Once you dominated World of Phantasm, you could do anything. And yet you were willing to risk burning down your own base of operations if things went wrong…… Could there be some other purpose behind it all?”
YggON chided him, but Ryu Hwi brushed it off without a second thought. “Say, for example — something even above Linzea. Were you preparing a plan to drag Latia Soft down from its throne?” “……!!” “Judging by that face, I hit the mark. So I was just a plaything in the little performance staged by a woman like you?” Ryu Hwi gloated openly, making sure she saw it. “If all your careful preparations to topple Latia got wrecked because of me, then that's really……” Ryu Hwi paused for dramatic effect, then enunciated each syllable with deliberate clarity. “Too bad.” Every single word ground against Asea's nerves like sandpaper. “So why did you come here? Planning to take your frustration out on the man who ruined your plan?” Asea's glare grew sharper still. “GA-ES is not so easily crushed. We have contingencies prepared for exactly this kind of situation. Right now, GA-ES is advancing toward the tower. We will take control of World of Phantasm.” “That plan is going to fail too, eventually.” “What?” “Gabriel seems to be cooking up something of his own, and you people are busy trying to seize World of Phantasm. Well, whatever Gabriel's intentions are, whatever yours are — none of it has anything to do with me.” Whatever schemes others hatched, whatever they aimed for — Ryu Hwi couldn't have cared less. “World of Phantasm will be destroyed by my hand.” “Delusional nonsense!” Black energy engulfed Asea's entire body. “Everything was proceeding exactly as planned, and then you appeared and ruined it all. I can't let you interfere with us any longer!” “Ruined? Interfered?” Ryu Hwi's smile faltered, just slightly. “Who exactly are you spouting that nonsense at, Cynthia?” “Gh—!” He had called her 'Cynthia' — deliberately, pointedly, not Asea. “You're the one who set me up, with Linpel Darius as your instrument. He shoved me into the gutter for no reason at all. Well, I've repaid that debt in full, so I couldn't care less what happens to him now…… but you're a different story.” As if to answer the black energy swirling around her, Ryu Hwi gripped the Peace Breaker in both hands. “From the very beginning, you approached me to use me, didn't you? Once you realized my strategy reports kept getting under Linpel Darius's skin, you started preparing to pin a false crime on me.” “That's……” “And then you egged Linpel Darius on and sold me out. The fool didn't know what you were really after, and he swallowed it whole. You curried favor with Linpel, wrangled his account out of him, then siphoned every scrap of Linzea's intel and bolted — that's about how the story goes, isn't it?” Linpel Darius had simply been too stupid to see he was being played. The true architect of Ryu Hwi's ruined life was standing right in front of him. The hatred that had settled like sediment over the years began to seethe and boil over. “How you ended up in GA-ES, I don't know. But one thing is certain.” He had waited, all this time, for the moment he could finally unleash this hatred. The beast seized by fury threw open the gate that had held back its overflowing malice. “No matter what happens — no matter what — I will end you with these hands.” “……!!” “Whatever audacity made you show your face in front of me again, I'll make you regret it.” No more words were needed. Feeling the killing intent radiating off Ryu Hwi, Asea hurled a black dagger. Ryu Hwi planted the Peace Breaker into the ground and drew his longsword. The longsword's blade crossed paths with the black dagger. In that instant, Asea allowed herself the faintest smile, as if victory were already hers. But that smile did not last long. “Why— why didn't the bug activate?!” “Because I got rid of it.” Ryu Hwi answered simply. “Got rid of it? Don't tell me you deleted the data?!” “You think I'd waste something that elaborate on dealing with this garbage?” GA-ES's bugs were a nuisance, but thanks to the debugging tool, he could stand against them. Can't I stop the corruption entirely, though? Ryu Hwi clicked his tongue lightly as he looked at the longsword, half-eaten by the bug. He'd get a few more uses out of it, at most. He had plenty of spare weapons, but there was no guarantee he could keep parrying bug attacks that were so hard to detect. It was far from a comfortable situation, but Ryu Hwi let none of it show. “I'm under no obligation to explain how I blocked it.” Ryu Hwi picked up the bisected dagger. With the bug gone, it was now just an ordinary knife. “From this moment on, all you have to do is watch — as your dream, as everything you are, comes crashing down.” Asea felt as though the ground beneath her own feet was caving in. “Ryu Hwi!!” As if to shake off that sensation, she charged at him blindly, heedless of anything else. Ryu Hwi drew a fresh longsword and stepped forward. The moment he had waited for, and waited for, had finally arrived. Three years buried in the trash, scraping by in the filth. Now was the time to pay it all back. “Let's settle this once and for all, Asea!”