The Secret Room in the Gap
The theme of District 13 was 'a bright spring day in a western city.'
The scenery recreated an old-world town, with canals crisscrossing the entire district like a maze, and crowds of people drifting along in gondolas, leisurely sightseeing.
It had been one week since Jucheongwang had settled into this place.
"I'll be in your care from today onward! I'm Ragna! My character name and my real name are the same!"
"Bisque. I don't like my real name, so just call me Bisque."
"Character name, Noir. My real name is Ishur Nimur. Please feel free to call me Noir as well. I look forward to working with you."
Fresh talent had joined Jucheongwang.
The world truly was full of surprises. This was the same Ryu Hwi who had ground his teeth at the very mention of 'Linzea' — and now three former Linzea members had come aboard his company.
After watching the three of them for a moment, he turned his eyes toward Wolya, sitting in the corner.
"Hey, you. Get over here for a sec."
"Hehehe, whatever is the matter? Why the fearsome face?"
Today's Wolya was the boy-type full-body prosthesis from their first meeting. Ignoring the gazes of the three newcomers, Ryu Hwi seized Wolya by the scruff of the neck and dragged her off into the corner.
"What is this stunt of yours? Why did you hire Linzea kids of all people?"
"You handed the company's management over to me, and yet this is how you treat me? Is that not so, dear CEO?"
"You little..."
"It's been how long since Linzea collapsed? Do you still hold such petty grudges? They never did you direct harm, so show a little generosity, won't you?"
"So now I'm the small-minded one?"
Perhaps Ryu Hwi had a lot piled up lately, because Wolya just kept grinning.
"Truth be told, it's your own fault if you think about it. The problem is that you so rashly handed your address to Ragna."
"No, that was because he got tangled up in trouble at the tournament. I planned to meet him in person later, keep his mouth shut, and offer compensation..."
"And that compensation turned out to be him saying 'I'd like to join Jucheongwang,' didn't it?"
"Does this company even have the capacity to take him on? What we need right now isn't gamers."
Ryu Hwi might be the CEO of Jucheongwang, but he had left the management side to Wolya. He'd been studying to build up the knowledge a CEO ought to have, but he was still at the stage of pissing into wet shoes to keep his feet warm, so the real day-to-day work fell to Wolya.
What Jucheongwang needed now was hands-on staff and specialists to lighten Wolya's load.
"I've conducted the interviews and checked their résumés. No problems, and their backgrounds were spotless. Ragna spent a long career as an analyst, so he's excellent at administrative work. And Noir is 'Gold' rank, which means a wide network of connections. A perfect fit for HR."
"Gold... come to think of it, there was that Nimur family name."
The employees ranked higher than the CEO. Was this company actually okay?
"Then what about Bisque? She looks competent as a gamer, but I doubt she has a talent for anything else."
"That young lady, it turns out, has a career in game development."
Game development? The Mad Dog? He wondered if he'd misheard.
"According to her résumé, she was originally a game developer, but her company went under and the CEO ran off with the money in the night. To add insult to injury, she was saddled with an enormous debt. She ground herself down working to survive, and then her talent as a gamer happened to bloom, which is how she ended up in Linzea Guild. A real tearjerker of a story."
Apparently she'd lived a surprisingly stormy life.
"Right now we've got the new Super Gemini update to prepare, new game labyrinth source to develop — there's no shortage of work, so I can't afford to let a talent with real development experience slip away. Am I understood?"
"Fine! Fine, I get it! Damn it."
After Super Gemini's hit, inquiries about joining Jucheongwang had come flooding in. But Wolya had said it wasn't yet the time to swell their ranks, and that new hires would be chosen carefully. These were the people Wolya herself had picked. His feelings were complicated in many ways, but he decided to respect her judgment.
[You've become quite docile, haven't you? Has reaching Silver rank given you some breathing room?]
"Shut up."
He scowled at YggON's mocking remark.
Wolya's assessment had been accurate. The three new hires at Jucheongwang wasted no time in showing off their abilities to the fullest.
Noir, leveraging her Gold rank and gentle image, worked wonders with key clients and partner companies from all quarters. Ragna's administrative skills were equally impressive — he reorganized the tangled paperwork system, created unified templates that were actually pleasant to use, and threw himself generously into every odd job that came his way. Lately he'd even taken an interest in 'game development,' quizzing Wolya about this and that as he studied.
The biggest surprise, of course, was Bisque.
He'd expected her development career to be nothing all that remarkable, but that expectation was completely off the mark. According to Wolya, she was good enough to throw straight into real work.
[Human appearance and talent so often fail to match, don't they.]
Tell me about it.
He clicked his tongue as he watched Bisque locked in a heated debate with '5555' over video call.
[Why a video call, might I ask?]
"5555 refuses to appear in front of other people, so what can I do."
[Isn't the gap between the personalities far too extreme? Don't the new employees find it confusing?]
"Surprisingly, it's a non-issue."
"Gamers tend to be a weird bunch, at least one or two of them. Ms. Wolya — or is it Ms. 5555? Anyway, she's not technically a gamer, but I've decided to think of her as roughly the same species."
Ragna, having dealt with countless gamers in his day, was immune. The other two were 'gamers' themselves, so they were used to strange people.
The newly reorganized Jucheongwang quickly found its footing. There were still shortcomings in plenty of areas, but those were problems to solve in due time.
For now, the plan was to cement Jucheongwang's position with Super Gemini, then prepare the next project. With such a small development team, the follow-up title would take some time to get ready. Other game developers would surely charge up the rankings in the meantime — nothing to be done about that.
He was about to polish up the next plan when a problem he'd never anticipated reared its head.
'5555's' abilities had blown clean past every expectation.
"With the arrival of Yggdrasil 2.0, the game development landscape has changed a great deal. I suppose we owe that to people all over the world obtaining gamer qualifications."
Ryu Hwi and Bisque followed behind Wolya. Today, she said, she would grant the two of them special access to the 'development room.'
"Come along now, this way. This is the development room — where we craft next-generation game labyrinth sources."
Wolya flung the door open with pride. Beyond it lay a dream of a workspace, perfectly appointed for doing nothing but eating and slacking off.
"Hey."
"Wait, there's a reason! There's a perfectly good reason, so don't go grabbing my collar out of nowhere!"
"Explain that reason in ten words or less."
"Look at that! Look at that thing!"
Where Wolya pointed sat a black box — a container for storing game sources.
"What is that?"
"Let go first. I'll show you right away."
Once Ryu Hwi released his grip, Wolya straightened her collar and approached the black box.
"Ryu Hwi, haven't you ever wondered where I connect to Yggdrasil from when I'm in my 5555 state? I wasn't logged into World of Phantasm, and yet I could link up with you freely, no?"
"Ah..."
Come to think of it, that was true. He hadn't given it much thought until now. Whatever Wolya was hiding, Ryu Hwi was hiding 'UR' himself, so it had been tit for tat.
"This is the answer. Care to convert into a game labyrinth from inside this?"
Ryu Hwi and Bisque did as Wolya instructed and converted into a game labyrinth. Since they'd logged out from Super Gemini, they assumed they'd be entering Super Gemini again.
But when they opened their eyes, what they saw was not Super Gemini. It was somewhere else entirely.
"What is this place?!"
Bisque glanced around in alarm. "I definitely converted into a game labyrinth..."
The snow-white room was packed with every manner of equipment. A bona fide 'development room.'
"This is Jucheongwang's development room."
It was 5555's voice. Up until a moment ago it had certainly been Wolya — but at some point, she had become 5555.
Ryu Hwi and Bisque turned toward the voice. The Wolya who had worn the 'boy-type prosthesis' until just now was gone; in her place stood a woman dressed like your classic 'shut-in slob,' or perhaps a NEET — a blue tracksuit hastily thrown on with a white lab coat draped over it. When their eyes met, she flinched and trembled as if caught off guard.
"H-h-hi. I'm 5, 5555... f-f-first time s-s-seeing you in per-per-person... r-right?"
Ryu Hwi and Bisque took several steps back.
"What is that thing? I heard Wolya had a separate personality, but she's way different from when we talk over comms."
"How would I know? This is my first time meeting 5555 in Yggdrasil too. No, wait — first things first, is this really a game labyrinth?"
No matter how he looked at it, it appeared to be an ordinary development room.
[It is, without question, a game labyrinth. It appears to have been carved out by exploiting loopholes in the older, laxer system. In other words, imagine someone secretly building themselves a little rented room inside a crack in the wall that nobody knows about.]
A rented room inside a crack in the wall.
Ryu Hwi was left speechless by the fact that this place was genuinely a 'game labyrinth.' Then what on earth were all these development rigs scattered around the room?
Ryu Hwi's and Bisque's gazes swung back to 5555. She shuffled awkwardly for a moment, then hurriedly pulled a paper bag over her head.
"Oops, pardon me. Meeting people face to face isn't really my thing."
The moment her face was covered, she snapped back into her usual 5555 self.
"This is a small-scale development lab I built experimentally, long ago. Back then I couldn't use saplings, so it existed in a half-baked state, hovering between reality and Yggdrasil — but now I've rebuilt it as a fully functional one. Since this room is the only place you can log in from, security is airtight too."
What on earth was this woman talking about right now?
His head was starting to ache. What could possibly be the purpose of building a game labyrinth like this? Bringing objects from the outside into a game labyrinth should have been impossible — and yet this room was crammed with machines that looked like nothing but outside-world equipment.
"Objects I designed and built myself. For the record, all of them work perfectly."
"What?"
"As long as the structural design is solid, the game labyrinth fills in the rest and materializes it for you. So you can outfit a place like this for a fraction of what it would cost in reality."
In other words, she had designed the structure of this cutting-edge equipment and implemented it as working game labyrinth objects.
[She single-handedly implemented technology an entire generation ahead. Seriously, what is this human?]
Even YggON was reacting with sheer disbelief.
"Hold on — I get that this is a real game labyrinth... but why go to all this trouble to build it?"
When Bisque asked, 5555 let out a sigh of genuine regret.
"A development lab usable inside a game labyrinth, where you can actually develop game labyrinth sources. And test them, no less. Do you not grasp what that means?"
"Huh? Uuuum... wait?!"
After a moment of thought, Bisque's eyes went wide with shock. Ryu Hwi, understanding it a beat later, felt his mind go numb.
Game development was possible inside Yggdrasil.
Which meant — development could run at 'ten times' the speed.
This woman was genuinely insane.
Ryu Hwi felt goosebumps rise on his skin.
"Nothing to be so shocked about. At this level, other game companies will surely catch on to the advantage soon enough and prepare for it. Didn't I tell you? The development landscape changed because people all over the world got gamer qualifications."
Someday, other developers would no doubt arrive at the idea of 'game development inside a game labyrinth' themselves. But one thing was certain: it wouldn't be today.
"Is the plan for the new title ready?"
"Still in the concept stage. That part needs the other employees' help. We'll get far more freedom of ideas than if I think it up alone."
"How long until the next game labyrinth is built?"
"Depends on the scale, but..."
5555 raised a single finger.
"By 'Human Realm' time, one month is plenty."
Ryu Hwi became certain of it.
Latia would have collapsed sooner or later even without Gabriel or Ryu Hwi ever stepping in. Because this woman had decided, in earnest, to tear Latia down.
I need to revise the plan.
He had underestimated 5555's abilities far too much. If she flexed her full power, there would be no need to pass the 'turn' to the enemy at all — she could simply declare 'my turn!' over and over, indefinitely.
I'll conquer the game labyrinth industry.
Jucheongwang had settled into a new place and welcomed new people. Morning had finally come after the long night; the light spilling over the mountains dyed the sky crimson.
But the world never ran that smoothly.
"B-b-big trouble!"
Ragna, who had barely just clocked in, came sprinting over in a flurry. Ryu Hwi could guess why he was so worked up — he'd just seen the community flooded wall-to-wall with a single piece of news.
GA-ES.
"Set in the Human Realm — in other words, the Yggdrasil version of AR, augmented reality games. That was all the rage ages ago, right?"
Bisque too read through the news with a shaken expression.
"First new feature introduced in Yggdrasil 2.0, right? I can't really picture what it's supposed to be..."
Noir seemed unable to grasp what it actually meant for a game labyrinth to be built on top of the Human Realm.
"We got played."
Wolya — today, for some reason, wearing the appearance of an utterly ordinary adult woman — muttered in an anxious tone.
"Just as Noir struggles to picture it, this feature still has a lot of unknowns. My plan was to build out several game labyrinths first, then take our time challenging it... and yet."
Wolya checked the article floating in her view. Tucked away in the corner was the name and face of the developer — 'John Doe.'
"I suppose geniuses really do turn up everywhere."
"Genius? Don't make me laugh."
He glared at John Doe's photo. That face alone was enough to make his stomach turn.
"That bastard is hopeless garbage. A wretched, insufferable piece of trash through and through."
Spitting out the curse, Ryu Hwi rose from his seat.
"Where might you be going?"
At Wolya's question, Ryu Hwi turned back around as if the answer were obvious.
"Might as well go take a look at this game labyrinth the trash bastard made."
A full-sensory ⟨Human Realm⟩ game labyrinth.
Rider-On.
GA-ES's ambitiously unveiled game labyrinth.
Now came a play session that would be equal parts delightful and infuriating.