What Are You Doing, Sis? (7)
What Are You Doing, Sis? (7)
Several days had passed since Vermel last saw the sun.
'He was dying over there.'
Without vitamin D synthesis, his bones seemed to be turning to mush. This was why seeing the light was important for living.
Fluorescent lights existed, but they weren't a fundamental solution. For Vermel, who had possessed an elf's body, this space felt rigid.
An area barely twenty pyeong wide.
It wasn't very spacious, and iron bars enclosed it on all sides. It looked like a bomb shelter straight out of an old nuclear apocalypse movie.
A person would go crazy living in such an eerie place for days on end. Even without claustrophobia, the drop in quality of life hit in real time. Vermel rubbed his sunken eyes and opened a can.
'A solo apocalypse run in a fantasy RPG.'
It was a clear genre drift. But now he just went with it.
Whatever. Being holed up in a place like this was better than dying. As the old saying went, a dunghill in this world was better than the next.
Vermel checked his schedule while eating the P-ration the Empire had personally developed.
'Act 1 is already in its latter half.'
<Darkest Academia> was divided into three parts.
Act 1 was Tillet Academy.
Act 2 was Iliad Academy.
Act 3 was the final battle with the Demon King.
There was the Beastman Academy DLC and the like, but that was a story set a hundred years later, so it was irrelevant for now.
The fact that a player felt their life threatened meant that the days spent at Tillet Academy were numbered. Hadn't Vermel himself dropped out after the first semester? Though he was hiding out in the Liberal Arts Building basement, thanks to the chairman's consideration.
Any other Veteran Player would have chosen the path to the elven country at this point. That Vermel didn't and endured here was solely because of a certain girl.
"Aether...."
He couldn't bear to watch a fellow from the same place fall into Corruption.
Sure, she sometimes went off the rails.... And while she seemed to live a rigid life, going on about contracts and all that....
To Vermel, who had spent over twenty years fighting alone, she was a welcome presence, like rain during a drought.
So he'd stayed here, determined not to let her fall into the Demon King's hands.
He knew it was a foolish thing to do. Even if he stayed like this, there wasn't much he could accomplish.
Maybe if it were the 'Easy' difficulty where the enemy AI turned into a moron, he could have tried something, but on the highest difficulty, which used erratic patterns, it was safer to assume he could do nothing.
"If only I had at least a contracted spirit......."
Vermel clicked his tongue as if regretful.
Were the heavens screwing him over? It was around then that he sensed a mysterious killing intent.
"......!"
Something out of the ordinary was approaching.
He didn't need to think long. The footsteps echoing from the far end of the corridor were Rosemary's.
Vermel had game knowledge, so he had expected up to this point. In fact, he had been wondering why she hadn't come until now.
Vermel hid inside the cabinet he had prepared in advance. Like the room itself, the cabinet was made of iron, so Rosemary's Scope couldn't detect it. He had also installed it against the wall to make it indistinguishable from it. Spotting it with the naked eye would be difficult, too.
Though there was one problem.
'It's cramped....'
Since it wasn't originally a place meant for a person to enter, moving his arms freely was out of the question.
- Thud, thud, thud.
- BOOOM─!!
Vermel calmed his pounding heart.
If he got caught here, it would be Game Over. He had to keep his wits about him and hold his breath. That was his only way out for now.
"......Found you."
For a moment, his heart nearly stopped.
Having ripped the door off with one hand, Rosemary looked around the room. She seemed ready to kill any living thing the moment it came into view.
"...Huh. No one's here?"
Rosemary giggled like a child, twirling a violin string around her finger.
"Is there really no one? I might be a little sad if there isn't.... I waited over five hours out there, you know."
Pretending to snivel, Rosemary rubbed her eyes.
"The lovely young lady is crying here. Still not coming out?"
Rosemary's speech went on for a little over five minutes. She was so talkative.
If she were an ordinary girl, the impression would have simply been that her chatter was cute. But the opponent was a monster. And the estimated difficulty of this game right now was 'highest.' That meant the enemy could display erratic patterns at any moment.
Just like right now.
- Bang! Bang! Bang!
As if about to give up and leave, she suddenly began slicing the walls with her staff.
Rosemary swung the violin string like a madwoman. The iron wall was sliced into small pieces as if planed down. In her own way, she seemed to call this a performance.
Heat rose from the wall surfaces, their cut edges as clean as paper cut by scissors. Vermel watched the spectacle from inside the cabinet, holding his breath. Soon, Rosemary's blade-work reached where he was.
The wire-like string repeatedly passed in and out between the gaps in the cabinet. He wanted to scream, but he bit his lip hard and endured.
Then he felt a hot, prickling sensation in his left arm. Something hot was flowing between his arms.
'A real shit-tier game.......'
Bang!
As the staff pierced through right next to his right eye, Vermel froze like a stone. If it had been just a little lower, his ear would have been severed clean off.
"Wow. Tell me not to throw a tantrum, seriously."
Seeing Rosemary grumble was absurd. Wasn't that line supposed to be mine?
"You're really not here? Where the hell did this elf bastard go?"
Even after twenty minutes of hacking and slashing, she didn't seem ready to give up. Rosemary burned another Mana Cigarette and summoned something resembling a camera. After that, she restored the slashed marks to their original state and began installing the cameras in the room's blind spots.
This was also a pattern that had barely appeared in the game.
The installation took another three hours. A rough calculation of time made it seem like four in the morning.
"Huaaam."
Vermel couldn't fall asleep until Rosemary yawned and put away her staff. No, even after she tidied the room and left, he couldn't sleep.
'Going outside right now means getting caught immediately.'
He didn't know exactly what kind of cameras they were, but they were items installed by the likes of Rosemary. They wouldn't be trivial at all.
- Clunk.
How much time had passed after that?
Being in the basement dulled his sense of time. He didn't know if it was morning or evening, dawn or the dead of night. When was it? Listening to the sounds outside, it seemed like lunchtime.
While he dozed off, trapped in the cabinet half-voluntarily and half-involuntarily, someone picked the lock and came in.
"......!"
It was a welcome face.
The girl looked around, then drew her staff from Subspace. She then proceeded to smash the cameras placed in the blind spots, one by one.
"You can come out now."
Only after the sound of lenses shattering rang out six times did the girl speak. Vermel kicked the cabinet door open and tumbled forward. His body was drenched in a cold sweat.
The Black Death outbreak had been barely bearable.
But now that the Magic Beasts' attention was on him in earnest, it was hell. At this rate, no number of lives would be enough. Gasping for breath, Vermel stared at Aether.
"...How did you know to come here?"
"Rosemary was dozing off all through class today. When I asked what she was doing up so late, she said she was studying? I figured it was a ridiculous excuse, so naturally, I realized it was because of you."
He couldn't help but marvel at her sharp insight.
"...Thanks. If it weren't for you, I'd almost certainly be dead."
"Save the thanks. I'm short on time as it is."
"Short on time?"
"It's lunchtime right now. I left Rosemary tied up with the others and slipped away. She can't turn on her Scope right now, so I need to get back fast to avoid suspicion."
Aether gave a brief farewell and left. Vermel's gaze simply followed her path, blankly.
"She figured that out?"
There was no reply.
He had used his game knowledge to face the future until now.
The first few years had matched up well. Every time he foresaw the future and saw his childhood friend's astonished face, he felt like a prophet.
But as time went on.
As the Magic Beasts began to intervene more and more in the story,
the world flowed in a direction entirely different from what he knew. Hadn't this mess just now happened because he couldn't foresee Rosemary installing surveillance cameras?
But that girl was different.
No, that Possessor was different.
Despite having no prior knowledge of this world, she flexibly handled the Magic Beasts' movements. Though the fact that she was of the Gold-Eye Tribe certainly played a part.
That friend was a genius. She had a natural gift not only for her major, physics, but also for reading other people's thoughts.
- I've never thought you were kind.
'Is that precisely why she has a hard time trusting others...?'
Vermel mulled over the conversation he'd had with Aether the day before.
He himself had assumed reality would be the same as the game, so he had prepared for a predetermined future, and when the prediction and reality differed, he panicked and could do nothing.
Aether, on the other hand, had recognized from the start that this world was real, and even when the prediction and reality differed, she quickly changed her strategy and flexibly handled every situation.
Only then did Vermel realize it. Up until then, he had never once had a proper thought of his own.
'I tried to coast by too much on knowledge alone.'
That kind of mindset couldn't clear the game. In his current mental state, a happy ending was a distant prospect.
If so, he had to change.
'Next, Aether will definitely go see Professor Kai Ruisak. She said she'd miniaturize the Flare, so asking that person for help would be the correct move.'
Not just using existing knowledge, but building something new based on it.
Perhaps this was the first real 'thought' he'd had since coming to this world.