Black Beetle (2)
"Look at this. Nutrients, experience, quests! Can’t you see how quickly the wealth is piling up? Can’t you see this map, so much larger than the one you started with? Your forces are doing exactly what they were made to do. They are chaos itself, bringing upheaval to the world."
"I’ll take that as a compliment."
Agares sounded unusually excited. As he said, the usable wealth was accumulating at a frightening pace, and the allied force that had turned most of the barony into a battlefield was ruthlessly hunting down anyone too slow to respond.
His troops were growing faster than they were being cut down, and more and more of them were evolving from Minion to Warrior.
And yet my own feelings were, oddly enough, calm. The self-defense I had repeated to myself so many times had hardened into something almost instinctive.
Heroic Tale is over.
Even when I saw Karin’s declaration printed out in text, I felt the same way. The knight Ian, the supposed seed of a hero, fought until the end and was finally pierced to death by dozens of the warriors’ tentacles.
His suitability score was 0%.
Just as Karin had said. When it came to mindset, the most important thing was a person’s own desire and conviction.
If those desires and beliefs aligned with our will, the compatibility score would be high. But someone who wanted to die a noble hero to the very end, even if it meant throwing away his life, would register at 0%.
"What a pity. If that nobility had been directed at us, he could have become exceptional talent."
"...So there wasn’t even an option to corrupt him?"
When Karin dealt with Ian, no options had appeared at all, and even when I forced the system to cycle through possibilities, the choice I wanted never came up.
So I found my own mouth turning bitter for no reason. I agreed, in a way, with the thoughts Karin had been streaming to me in text—that this was nothing more than the struggle for survival in nature—but seeing the ending actually play out made it feel as if we, as if I, had become the perfect villain.
"Don’t waver so much. You call him a hero, but is that really what he was? He was just a foolish man who never even considered winning the competition and instead threw his life away. Let him keep standing there with that delusional pride. All we need to do is break it in an instant."
"I’m not regretting it now."
Apparently Agares had mistaken my unease for hesitation.
But he was wrong. It was too late for regret now. It had been that way from the moment I first stepped into this thing that barely qualified as a game.
1. Attack the city of Forum, where refugees are gathering.
I chose the option that had surfaced once more. The allied assault that had turned the region into a wasteland drove people onto the road of evacuation, naturally herding that procession toward the city of Forum as if it were a hunt.
Then, once they were there—massed together in confusion, with countless refugees crowding the gates—we would strike. There would surely be a great many casualties, and along with them... a great deal of reward.
It was all my own decision. My soldiers merely obeyed my orders. But I didn’t care. Once things had reached this point, I would do whatever it took to make our wish come true.
"If anything unusual comes up, let me know right away, like you always do."
With that, I closed my phone and stood up. I needed to leave now if I wanted to make the appointed time. Today was the day of the test.
"You’ll pass it easily."
"...I should."
As I rose from my seat, an empty glass bottle slipped off the desk and rolled across the floor. It wasn’t just any bottle, either—it had held one of the drugs I’d bought with Mythic Essence.
And now there were more than a dozen of those bottles rolling around. A full-scale offensive across the entire domain. Nothing like the days when I’d only played around at the scale of a neighborhood. So many people, and so many stories they created.
Agares had said that as my level rose, the quests and events I could detect would become limited, but at least so far I hadn’t felt it.
Events and quests I could uncover by raising my Insight had piled up into the dozens, and the rewards tied to them had accumulated at a pace far beyond anything I’d seen before.
And I had stayed locked away in this room and turned all of it, every last bit, toward myself. I hadn’t even fully grasped just how much had changed.
"Damn it."
After about three days, I opened the door and headed outside. But the moment I came down the stairs and stepped out of the villa, I winced at the blinding warmth of the sunlight. My eyes, which had grown used to dark, shuttered days under blackout curtains, couldn’t tolerate this brilliant light.
"...!"
That was when I sensed something.
Something slicing through the wind, hurtling toward me at high speed.
It came straight for my head, while I still couldn’t even open my eyes properly.
"Aaah... sorry!"
The instant my hand moved on its own and snatched it out of the air, I finally saw a few boys rushing toward me from a distance, panic-stricken.
"D-did it hit you?"
One of the kids, a toy gun still in his hand, looked up at me nervously and asked.
Seeing the tremor in his eyes, I slowly opened my hand and looked at what I’d caught. It wasn’t a ball or a stone. It was a tiny plastic bullet fired from a toy gun.
"I’m fine. Go on and keep playing."
I answered dazedly and sent the children away with a small bow. Then I rolled the toy bullet around in my palm.
I hadn’t even known it was coming—was it really possible to catch something like that when I couldn’t even open my eyes?
"What the hell is going on?"
"Isn’t that obvious?"
When I turned my phone back on and called Agares, he tilted his ear as if the answer were self-evident.
"You’ve bought more than twenty bottles of reflex-enhancing drugs by now. If you still couldn’t notice the effect, they’d be meaningless. Or are you looking down on us?"
"This is... more than that."
His brazen, shameless tone left me with no real rebuttal. I’d wanted to argue that this was basically human modification, but in the first place I had been the one to make the choice to use whatever means necessary.
"There won’t be anything weird showing up later, right? Just tell me that much."
Still walking forward, I pressed Agares, who was dodging the question.
***
"I’m not sure this is a good idea, Coach. I know this is a tanking season and everything, but..."
"Still, I’ve been watching Kim, the team manager, for ten years since our playing days, and I’ve never once seen him talk nonsense. We’ve already discussed it enough and made the decision, so let’s wait and see. Seungcheol and Junu, the guys who hit the jackpot this time, were both Kim’s picks too, weren’t they? Players suddenly leaping in skill like that isn’t all that rare."
In the spotless new headquarters, Team Fluke’s first-team coach, Park Yong-bin, was waiting with his staff for someone to arrive.
It was still an hour before the appointment. In truth, waiting early wasn’t necessary, but right now they had nothing else to do. The entire first-team roster, which had actually posted respectable results—enough to make the playoffs—had refused to renew their contracts and left for better leagues and teams.
"He does have a wrist-injury issue, though."
"They said he’s recovered, so that’s all we need to see. Today isn’t a signing; it’s just a test."
That meant the coach and staff now had the duty of building a new roster with their own abilities. The problem was the team’s finances: this year’s budget wasn’t much to work with.
With a budget destined to fight for last place, recruiting good players was nearly impossible. The most realistic option was to bring in promising rookies desperate to debut, along with one ordinary veteran who could keep them in line.
"He’s one of only two active military-service players in the league, right? Maybe he’ll help with team chemistry or something! Honestly, I’m not even sure."
"Coach..."
Truthfully, even Park Yong-bin, whose coaching career was still fairly short, was in no state to remain calm with the team in such chaos. In the end, the only thing they could trust was the recommendation of veteran scout Kim Seok-ju.
He’s here.
And then, thirty minutes before the appointment, an unfamiliar man arrived at the headquarters.
"I’m Lee Hajin. I used to be with SRT."
"N-nice to meet you."
An awkward silence settled over them. Though they were in the same industry, they had rarely had cause to meet.
Park Yong-bin was a player who had made his name from the beginning, and a promising figure who, even after a flashy retirement, had continued building his career as a coach for a first-division team. Hajin, by contrast, had been a middling player who had never even set foot in the first division, let alone won anything.
"Manager Kim must have recommended you strongly. I hear you even hit number one this time."
"I can’t exactly say my skill improved with my own mouth, so I’d rather show you."
"Oh..."
From the beginning to the present, Hajin had been remarkably calm, without the slightest wavering. It was the kind of composure that might make someone blurt out, without thinking, what exactly a nobody like you was so confident about.
Park Yong-bin was a little surprised by that reaction and nodded.
"You may have heard this from Manager Kim, but the truth is, our team is planning to take a gamble this season. We want to build a fresh, aggressive team full of youthful spirit. But in-game, we’ll need someone who can keep that fire under control."
"I’ve heard as much."
"Can you do it?"
Park Yong-bin asked bluntly. He dressed it up with words like youth and spirit, but in practical terms it meant they were giving up on results and trying to survive a year by recruiting prospects.
In other words, if Hajin joined this team, he might spend the entire year losing, and losing, and losing again, suffering all the while and possibly wrecking his career in the process. It was obvious that not many mid-career players would be willing to accept that.
"I can do it. Anything. I’m already doing it."
...What in the world?
But when Park Yong-bin saw the look in Hajin’s eyes as they met his, he swallowed dryly without meaning to.