The Impossible Route
“There’s an elevator if you turn that corner over there.”
“You’ve gotta go down below the elevator.”
The two of them moved according to the viewers’ advice, trying to clear the boss with a shortcut mission.
“Huh? The elevator won’t move.”
Looking more carefully at the chat, Yeongho finally spotted a space that really did seem passable.
The problem was that it was so dark he couldn’t even see the floor, and there didn’t appear to be anywhere to place his feet.
“No way. How are you supposed to get down there?”
“Hmm... looks like about five floors’ worth of height?”
“Dad, you can see that!? I can’t see anything in this darkness.”
“I’m not really seeing it. It just feels about right.”
The chat was noisy again.
It was hard to explain Battle Sense in detail, so Yeongho just shook his head and gave up on defending himself.
It felt a little like trying to explain eyesight to a blind person.
From Yeongho’s point of view, it was just something that happened naturally; he didn’t have the confidence to make others understand it with some neat, concrete logic.
He had heard talk like “hyper-perception” and the like during counseling, but he wasn’t a professional, so it felt awkward to bring it up carelessly.
“I can do it... so just, you know, let it go.”
After watching the chat for a moment, Yeongho decided to get on with it and held out his hand to his daughter.
“I’m going down, so hang on tight.”
“Eh? Hugging Dad like this at my age is a little embarrassing, maybe?”
“Hmm. Then do you want to go down on your own? I’ll go first.”
“Ah! W-wait!”
She had just said it was embarrassing, but apparently didn’t have the nerve to go down alone. Sunhee jumped up and clung to him like a little koala.
Holding his daughter close with one arm, Yeongho then stepped onto the tiny ledges in the wall and dropped down the passage with catlike nimbleness.
After landing on the floor and setting Sunhee down, they passed the broken elevator door dangling uselessly at the side.
Then, for a moment, time seemed to stop as the boss cutscene began.
A massive lump that looked like it had been stitched together from corpses.
Several arms poked out from the mass, each one fused with all kinds of firearms as though they were part of the body itself.
In the center, a distorted middle-aged face glared at the intruder.
Then the corpses covered it over, and the swollen, twitching flesh finished forming.
The monster made of several bodies merged into one moved toward the protagonist.
Research Center Director Gilburton.
He was the boss of Ys City’s final chapter.
Ratatatatata-!
The instant the game returned to control, one of the boss’s arms sprayed bullets in their direction.
From the elevator to the boss’s position was nothing but a straight corridor barely five meters wide.
There was nowhere to hide from the incoming bullets.
“Damn it...!”
He moved to get out of the line of fire and reached out toward Sunhee, but...
Since his body had been out of his control during the cutscene, it didn’t move as quickly as he wanted.
The stage had been designed to start with you getting hit by the bullets.
Red flowers bloomed again and again over the small body, and Sunhee toppled backward helplessly.
The chat kept scrolling as if everyone already knew how this would end.
To make it through the corridor and reach the boss’s room, he needed a shield that could withstand gunfire.
On top of that, the powered exoskeleton that boosted strength—the so-called exosuit—had been established as a required farming item for the final boss fight.
He’d only be going down barehanded if he wanted to lose immediately.
All sorts of teasing remarks were flying around, but Yeongho had no time to watch the chat.
He was too busy carrying his fallen daughter and dodging the bullets while retreating back into the broken elevator.
Once they were out in the corridor, there’d been nowhere to hide, but this place, before the boss fight properly began, at least offered a little cover.
“Heheh, I knew something was off. These people are way too much, seriously.”
Sunhee, who still hadn’t hit game over, laughed weakly with a bloodless face.
Her life was down to a sliver, and a bleeding status effect was steadily eating away at her health.
Clutching his daughter’s body, Yeongho tried to use one of the first-aid kits he had picked up along the way to heal her.
But the wounds were so severe that he couldn’t patch them all up.
“A-are you okay? If it hurts too much...”
“Oh, come on, it’s just a game. What’s there to hurt? It just feels like somebody poking you with a finger.”
“Don’t you have any more recovery items? Maybe what I used wasn’t enough.”
“It’s fine~ They said we were never supposed to clear it anyway. Let’s just hurry, farm the normal route, come back, and get revenge!”
She said it like it was no big deal, smiling the whole time, and then, as her life finally ran out, she closed her eyes.
Yeongho stared blankly at his daughter’s limp body for a moment before carefully lowering the corpse to the floor and standing up.
Even though he knew it was only a game’s effect, it felt as if the blood in his body had gone cold.
There was no way his daughter would actually feel pain just because she’d been shot here.
He knew that. He knew it, but...
With his face set hard, Yeongho turned around and drew the pistol from his holster with his empty hand, the one opposite the machete.
Fwoop—!
With a cute little popping sound, a 40mm grenade fired from the grenade launcher came flying in.
It was a pattern meant to deal with players who just hid inside the elevator.
Yeongho stepped out from the dented door and pulled the trigger with a blank expression.
Crack! Boom!
The grenade collided with the bullet and exploded in midair.
White smoke billowed out, flooding the corridor.
Though Yeongho’s figure was hidden by the smoke, the boss didn’t care and started blasting away with the guns in its hands.
Tatataang! Tatataang!
Ratatatatat-!
Rifles fired three-round bursts, and submachine guns joined in with continuous fire, the boss laying down a broad, sweeping hail of bullets.
Everyone watching thought that without a shield, he would have no choice but to get turned into a human pincushion.
But when Yeongho burst out through the smoke, there wasn’t a single wound on him.
The boss spat fire again toward the revealed Yeongho, but...
Tatataang—! Kaang!
He seemed to dodge a few rounds with a slight shift of his body, and then, in a flash, sparks flew and vanished beside the machete he swung like lightning.
By now Yeongho had crossed the corridor and reached close to the boss. Dodging the curtain of bullets, he circled around and charged the monster’s side.
Battle Sense, sharpened to the extreme, swept across the boss’s body as if dissecting it whole.
Is that the weak point?
A giant form stitched together from dozens of corpses, with only an upper body to speak of.
Having caught the thudding sound of a heart beating inside it, Yeongho kept his face cold and expressionless, but his eyes burned as if they might burst as he swung his arm toward the target.
Slash. Kkkrrrk!
Two cuts.
But unlike the first blow, the second seemed to run into something solid.
Frowning slightly, he jumped back to avoid the boss’s slashing arm.
Inside the split wound, something metallic flashed into view.
Unlike the other corpses fused into the body, the one face in the center—the human who was apparently the research director—was the only place where he could clearly sense a heartbeat.
So that was the weak point, he had assumed and attacked, but apparently it was protected by something like armor.
He drew in a deep breath and aimed again at the boss’s heart.
He was certain that place was the weak point.
If he thought back to everything he had experienced on the way here, they wouldn’t have set up some meaningless weak spot you couldn’t even touch.
There had to be a way to break through that armor-like section.
Thud-thud-thud-!
Swish! Crack! Bang!
He moved here and there to dodge the gunfire, fired back with the pistol whenever he could, and kept diving into the boss’s body for a few slashes before retreating again.
It was a precarious tightrope act, a performance that would snap the instant he took even one hit.
The viewers, who had been watching all along, gradually stopped chatting and began focusing on Yeongho’s battle.
Kkik! Bang! Ting-!
Soaked in sweat from the violently repeated motions, panting hard, Yeongho turned his flashing eyes toward the spot he had attacked a moment ago.
The sound had changed just now.
His persistent stabbing at a single seam in the steel plate, along with the pistol shots, had actually paid off.
The repeated impact concentrated on one point had finally damaged the armor that had looked so solid.
With what little strength he had left, Yeongho threw himself at the boss once more.
He jabbed the damaged section of steel plate with the blade, and with a crackling sound, a hole opened up, letting the machete blade sink into the interior.
He twisted the handle hard and yanked downward, making the damaged section split wider and exposing the rotten-black skin of the dead inside.
At that moment.
A giant arm made of corpses slammed into Yeongho.
He had stayed latched on for a moment to wreck the armor, and that brief hesitation let the attack land.
He knew it was coming, but his body was too worn out to evade it.
“Ghk!”
Yeongho groaned and was sent flying backward.
But his eyes were still alive.
With his concentration pushed to its limit, the world around him seemed to slow until time itself nearly stopped.
One more hit and he’d die right there.
So what?
I’ve already accomplished what I came for.
He could see the boss’s arm coming down for the follow-up, but no matter how fast it was, it still couldn’t be faster than a finger pulling a trigger.
Bang!
The bullet he fired while twisting his body in midair drilled through the gap in the split steel plate.
To anyone else it was just a tiny opening, but to Yeongho it was a huge target that could never be missed.
He didn’t even need to look to know the round had buried itself in the heart he had been aiming at.
Graaah!?
The distorted face of the research director seemed to scream, and then the mass of corpses began to fall away in chunks.
The usual way to handle the final chapter boss, Research Center Director Gilburton, was to make use of the powerful gear gathered so far, destroy the parts with firearms attached first, and then chip away at the massive body, corpse by corpse, until the director’s true form was revealed.
That was the standard strategy.
While the viewers watched in a daze, sweat beading on their palms, Yeongho staggered upright and walked toward the research director, who was now nothing more than an ordinary zombie.
“...What the hell are you—”
The blade swept in a half-moon arc.
“—to touch my daughter.”
A single line was drawn, and the head, now stripped of the body that had supported it, dropped to the floor.
Yeongho looked down at the distorted head rolling on the ground for a moment, then snapped out of the rage that had pulled him too deeply in and turned his gaze to the chat window.
He had been so worked up that he’d even forgotten he was streaming.
He couldn’t help worrying that he might have been rude to the viewers.
“Uh...”
The moment he looked at the chat, Yeongho’s expression quickly filled with bewilderment.
Even with Battle Sense active, it was hard to take in all at once.
The chat and donation messages were surging upward like crazy.