Back From Break — Anomalies Included
That's right. I had finally made it back to reality.
No eyeball suddenly sprouting from a bus stop bench, blinking bloodshot pupils at me. No grotesque chain hurtling out of thin air to shred a human being like cuts of meat. No raving lunatic swinging a colossal greatsword that turned a person into mincemeat in a single blow, hot on my heels reeking of blood.
That, surely, was clear evidence that this place was no longer the stage of a brutal death game.
So then, was this some minor slip-up on the part of the death game's organizer, the Unspoken-It (short for "That Which Cannot Be Named")? Or was it a modest severance package for yours truly, who had crawled through the mud like a dog for so long, putting on one hell of a show for Its sadistic pleasure?
Even though I'd been booted out of that hellish death game like a banned player, the passive and active skills I had stacked up over tens of thousands of near-death experiences remained on my body, intact as ever.
'I actually tested it earlier on a whim — jumped off the third floor of a building, and the Cat's Footstep passive applied just like back there.'
And what if it hadn't applied? Would I have sprained an ankle or snapped a bone from a measly three-story drop like some fragile little weakling?
Those kinds of people lost their humanity and became wraiths a long time ago. In the death game, parkour and safe-falling technique were the most basic of basics — a passive of the soul, no different from a factory-installed implant.
In any case, if my passives were working fine, then it stood to reason my active skills were sleeping soundly inside me too — they simply hadn't triggered because no pursuer was around to satisfy their activation conditions.
"Aww... tsk tsk. If you're going to hand out a severance package anyway, you could've thrown in the items I hoarded in my cabin's storage shed."
The Master Key — the all-purpose key that would click open anything, anything, classified as "locked," in a mere 0.1 seconds. I had around 2,000 of them gathering dust in the corner of my shed. Using them made the game so easy it got boring, so I left them buried there.
Beyond those, I had roughly 5,000 First Aid Kits stockpiled — miraculous things that would have me fully patched up with a few loose loops of bandage, even after taking a fatal hit that left half my torso cleaved off by a giant greatsword and my entrails spilling out.
Of course, I let those rot in storage too — spamming them would have stripped the death game of its chewy, satisfying crunch.
If I could have brought those overpowered top-tier items into the real world, I could have put them to very shrewd use. What a crying shame.
"Well, a shame's a shame, but nothing to be done. At least I salvaged my skills."
But anyway.
While I'd been trapped inside the death game, both the clocks and the calendars had been stark raving mad, so I had no way of knowing exactly how long I'd been dragged off. According to a real-world calendar and clock, I'd apparently been gone for roughly ten years.
Which meant I needed to get up to speed, fast, on how the world had changed in my absence.
I wandered around for a bit, then walked into the first PC bang I laid eyes on.
I made a fresh account, sank into a plush gaming chair, and after twelve straight hours without rest absorbing the latest internet culture and the deranged ramblings of every community board out there, I...
I...
Confronted in real time with the absolute cesspit of memes forged from humanity's every twisted malice, I fell into full-blown qi deviation.
"GWAAAAH! WHAT THE HELL ARE THESE GODAWFUL MEMES?!"
"GWAAAAAH!!"
"HIEEEEK!!"
"TA-HUAAANG!"
And beyond those, every abyss steeped in human malice imaginable filled the monitor screen to bursting.
...
..
.
"Hmm... humanity's malice has developed into something even more horrific while I was gone. Truly worthy of the species that birthed me."
Legs trembling, I pushed open the PC bang door and shuffled out, utterly drained. The Republic of Korea I'd left behind had evolved into a terrifying den of iniquity — politically, socially, culturally, all of it.
Wait. Was the place I'd been living in actually the death game's true venue all along?
"Is it because I'm a veteran Survivor Devil with ten years under my belt? Why does watching this stuff suddenly sap the life right out of me...."
I had lived through tens of thousands of gore livestreams — flesh torn open, guts spilling out — and yet here I was, watching memes that tore directly into the human psyche, and my legs were still shaking and tears were still pricking at my eyes.
And so, having briefly lost my pride as a grizzled old-school veteran, I was dragging my deflated confidence around the corner into a smoke-hazed back alley when—
"....Wha—?!"
My confidence came surging back up out of nowhere, without a shred of justification, and before I knew it the corners of my mouth were curling into a wide, beaming grin.
At the same time, my five razor-sharp senses — honed across tens of thousands of life-or-death situations — began slicing through the pitch-black darkness of that back alley, parsing every last inch of it.
That's right. For my Survivor Devil instinct to awaken and burn this fiercely could only mean one thing. Somewhere in this gloomy, damp back alley...
...a supernatural (heh) pursuer, or some similarly eerie, murderous presence, was radiating a chill that seeped clear down to the bone!
"Heh heh heh... I knew it! So the real world had adorable little things like you living in it all along?"
Better hurry over and play together, then.
Sniffing at the air, turning my head this way and that, I strolled along giddily, hunting for the source of the ominous bloodlust drifting on the breeze.
"Snnniff... haaah... This smell... it's blood. Moldy blood, at that. This one hasn't killed anyone in quite a while, has it?"
It was definitely somewhere around here... I just couldn't pin down the exact location. Instinct isn't GPS, you know.
-Tap... tap...
I deliberately made my footsteps loud as I walked — announcing to the anomaly that a nice, fresh human had arrived on the scene.
-Tap... tap...
-...Tk-tk... tk-tk...
And sure enough, from somewhere behind me in the alley, a small set of footsteps began to sound — matching the rhythm of my own.
'Hmm, hmm. Mysterious footsteps echoing in sync with mine out of nowhere... how delightfully classic. As an entrance scene goes, not bad at all. The professor gives it a B-.'
-Tap... tap...
-Tk-tk... tk-tk...
Excited to have found a human and tailing me from behind, this thing was presumably waiting on one of two triggers.
'Either I start running away in terror... or I turn around to look back.'
Playing Running Man and giving it a proper chase would have been fun too, but suddenly I found myself curious — what did the anomalies of the real world actually look like?
The death game had dozens of wildly distinct supernatural killers. What kinds of characters was reality hiding?
'Curious? Then satisfy it right now.'
-Skrrt...!
I stopped mid-stride, turned on my heel, and stared straight at the spot where the footsteps had been following me from.
A woman in a white mourning dress, with long, jet-black hair hanging loose.
"Huh?"
[Huh?]
And unbelievably, I recognized her.
"You're... you're...."
[That rude little jerk from back then?]
The one who, ever since I'd tormented her just a bit too thoroughly, refused to accept my apologies and wouldn't so much as walk over to talk to me. She was on the weaker side among the pursuers, and she was the one I got matched with constantly back in my Newbie Survivor days.
"It's the Virgin Ghost, isn't it?"
[I—I am NOT a virgin?! I died right before my wedding, okay?! Call me Ghost Widow!!]
"And yet you never got to do the deed, on account of that premarital chastity of yours, huh?"
[Eeeeek...!!]
After she complained to the organizer — repeatedly — about how much she hated me teasing her, I hadn't run into her in a death game round for quite a while. Seeing her again like this stirred up all sorts of feelings.
[Haaah... whatever! Talking to you was my own mistake.]
"So what are you doing in Seoul, though? Shouldn't you be in the death game? Plenty of other people got dragged in there besides me — don't you have pursuer work to do?"
[Huh?]
Right — I'd been parked in there so long, and gotten so hopelessly washed, that lately the organizer just matched me one-on-one with a single pursuer every single day, so I never saw anyone else. But the death game I'd been trapped in had originally run on different rules: one pursuer like that Ghost Widow (virgin) over there, pitted against a whole squad of survivors.
The survivors' skill levels ran the entire gamut, and those who kept dying eventually lost their humanity and turned into wraiths. New survivors were constantly being abducted, though, so their numbers neither ballooned nor dwindled — steady equilibrium, as far as I knew.
Likewise, how long a given survivor lasted in the death game varied absurdly depending on the case. Some couldn't even hold out for a few weeks before becoming wraiths...
But back when I was still a newbie, there was a famous old-timer named Blodet — the one who taught me environmental camouflage, the art of melting into darkness and blending seamlessly into the surrounding terrain.
Even back then, she had been surviving in the death game for three straight years.
Blodet-Style Environmental Camouflage belonged purely to the realm of mundane technique — no supernatural energy, no active skill required — and yet it was a terrifying craft all the same; even the supernatural killers would lose track of Blodet the instant they let their guard slip for even a heartbeat.
Anyway — why was a Virgin Ghost who was supposed to be working hard as a pursuer out here, hunting people?
That was the part that mattered to me. And what the Virgin Ghost said next contained information I had not expected in the slightest.
[What are you talking about? The death game went under because you ate it all up. We're all unemployed now!]
"Huh?"
Wait — me?