That Woman C X
──────
* * *
The Cult was a band of Outer God followers who, unlike the usual frauds, never even put a name on their sign. Among its believers it went only by "the Cult," "Head Temple," or "Big House."
When they raised their prayers as one heart and one will, centered on the Cheon Yo-hwa twins, I'll record what happened across the whole of the earth.
"What's wrong? Tired?"
"Mmmm, sorry. I'm suddenly sleepy."
The report on that bad ending went as follows.
First, thirty seconds.
"Haaaaaaah. Ah, me too."
"Right? Is it the weather...? ..."
No matter the time zone, a severe sleeping sickness fell over all of humanity in every region.
"Huh? Hey! Look at that!"
"Wooooooooaaah!"
The soccer player showing off a brilliant dribble across the grass was thrown into total confusion when the three defenders blocking him all collapsed at once, one after another.
But the player was a pro. The striker slipped past all three in an instant and struck the ball, and when even the goalkeeper crumpled in some random spot, the net rippled.
"Wuaaaah!"
The soccer player who'd scored a goal for the ages sprinted off to celebrate.
It was a derby match, too. A performance more than worthy of hero treatment from the fans.
But something was wrong.
The roar of the crowd that should have welcomed his charge, the cheers of the fans, somehow grew quieter the closer he got.
"...?"
The soccer player turned around, bewildered.
Pft. Pft. His own teammates, who'd been chasing after him to join the celebration, were dropping one by one.
They had all fallen asleep.
"Huh?"
Slump.
Soon the one who'd scored collapsed in the corner of the pitch like a puppet with its strings cut.
The stadium packed with tens of thousands fell silent in an instant.
"What the... What is this? What?"
A home-team spectator who'd been filming the whole thing on his smartphone let his mouth fall open.
He couldn't believe what was happening before his eyes.
In barely a minute, the entire stadium, so frenzied moments ago, had stopped breathing.
"Crazy, crazy, crazy! Hey! Wake up!"
"..."
"Is it, is it terrorism? Poison gas? Damn it, what is this?"
And then a minute passed.
On the last spectator's recording smartphone screen, a jet of red sprayed up with a pshhk.
Pop, pop, pop.
The humans who'd fallen asleep soon sank into eternal rest. No one had touched them, yet their heads burst like watermelons, scattering bright red pulp in every direction.
It wasn't only the stands. The green grass, too, was stained here and there with red paint.
Heads blown clean off, only the away-team and home-team uniforms flapped limply, pressed flat under the red.
"...!"
The last spectator ran like a madman. He couldn't even scream.
He had no idea what was happening. He just had to escape, somehow.
Pop, pop! Shoving through the human heads bursting in real time, the blood soaking his whole body, he swallowed his screams and broke desperately out of the stadium.
"God! God!"
The smartphone screen he was clutching shook without pause.
His gasping breath, his groans, the red explosions, all of it was being recorded.
But even after he left the stadium, his despair didn't end.
The streets were already plastered all over in red, and at the sight he could only stop dead.
"No way... A, a dream?"
"Hey! Hey there!"
Far off, a survivor seemed to have spotted him and came running, shouting.
But there was no time even to feel relief. Before he could finish crossing the intersection, pop! The survivor collapsed onto the asphalt and his head went flying.
"Y, yeah. There's no way this is real. There's no way this is reality. It's a dream. Damn it, it's a dream!"
That was the last audio recorded on the smartphone.
At last the phone fell to the ground, the screen lurching wildly. Then a deep, deep red liquid washed over the camera lens, and nothing more could be recorded.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
At a crossroads with no pedestrians crossing and no cars passing through, the traffic light flashed red.
The Cult's prayer went on.
"..."
"..."
The Cheon Yo-hwa twins only pressed their foreheads together, gripping each other's hands tight.
In this very moment.
There was no denying it. The center of the earth lay between the twins' touching foreheads.
'I can feel it.'
Cheon Yo-hwa trembled at the overwhelming sense of omnipotence.
'My power is growing absurdly strong.'
'If before I could only borrow the believers' brains to run simulations... now it's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of times more.'
It was nothing short of gorging.
'This is the god-nim's authority... no.'
'It's my authority.'
Drip.
From the heads of the people who had died at the same instant all across the world, a single drop, then another, of greasy blood began to rise.
Each drop held that person's scream, their cry, their lament. Some moved at nearly the speed of light, others crept along sluggishly like snails, and all of them flowed somewhere.
Into Cheon Yo-hwa's grasp.
A storm of blood rose across the entire earth. The current the single drops made, the whirlpool, surged into Cheon Yo-hwa's hands, clasped tight in prayer.
The Cult's believers who witnessed this strange miracle fell into ecstasy. It was true. Truly, the Reverend was one chosen by heaven!
'...I can't get drunk on this power.'
The Reverend herself, Cheon Yo-hwa, kept her thoughts endlessly cold even as her heart pounded like mad.
'Not all of humanity has died yet. The Cult is still intact. Right now, while the god-nim hasn't fully devoured me, while there's still humanity left in [me], this is the only chance.'
'One at a time. One at a time. Calmly...'
'Run the simulation.'
Squirm, squirm.
The blood drops gathered together and began to take form. A small box.
The younger sister shaped the Baku[1] not as a fairy but in the form of a box.
The older sister was cramming blood drops, one after another, into the box her younger sister had shaped.
"..."
"..."
The two sisters' breathing locked together.
An exceedingly intricate task.
If even one of them got drunk on the god's authority and refused to cooperate with the other, she would instantly be reborn as the world's one and only absolute god.
But Cheon Yo-hwa did not betray Cheon Yo-hwa.
It was a moment when only a single step, no, barely half a step, remained to become the one true god.
In that half-step they did not take, the two sisters had entrusted their own humanity.
'Hold it. Preserve it. Record it. Remember it.'
Cheon Yo-hwa kept her eyes closed.
But what unfolded behind her eyelids was not darkness. Full-color simulations were running endlessly.
Dream was reality, and reality was dream.
Before she knew it, Cheon Yo-hwa was walking freely through the illusions.
Suppressing the god's authority as it raged out of control, putting her own will and purpose above all, Cheon Yo-hwa ran only the simulations she desired.
Blink.
"...Hm?"
Before her eyes, Noh Do-hwa, in a wedding dress, was frowning.
"Who are you...?"
Blink.
"Eh?"
Before her eyes, Sim Ah-ryeon, smeared with paint, gave a start.
"Uh, uh-uh? S... student council president? Why are you suddenly in my room? A, at least knock first."
Blink.
"...?"
Before her eyes, Jeong Ye-ji, who'd been pulling raw ramyeon and the like from the ceiling to prepare drinking snacks, tilted her head.
"Cheon Yo-hwa? No. That's strange. Right now I'm clearly stopping time."
Blink. Blink. Blink.
A kaleidoscope unfolded behind Cheon Yo-hwa's eyelids. In each mirrored facet that made up the kaleidoscope, the protagonist of a bad ending was reflected.
And 'outside' Cheon Yo-hwa's eyelids, meaning on the layer that until just now had formed this world's reality, more and more people's heads were bursting.
Pop!
The Cult was no longer a safe zone either. The outermost ring, formed by the Oechul, began to collapse first.
"There isn't much time," Cheon Yo-hwa said calmly to all those bad endings.
"Right now I've pushed the authority of the Endless and the puppet master to its peak, and I'm running your reality as a simulation."
The Endless. The puppet master. These were unfamiliar names to Cheon Yo-hwa too, yet she used them now as if it were nothing.
Cheon Yo-hwa was already crossing the boundary.
"In other words, your reality has already passed into my hands. What you feel. What you live. All of it is now nothing more than a fleeting spring dream spread out by my authority."
"..."
"..."
"..."
The bad endings fell silent.
Even so, the facets the kaleidoscope reflected kept multiplying, and the rings formed by the Cult's believers kept bursting and bursting.
"Let me put it bluntly. From the moment I interfered, the bad endings you met were already reduced to mere playthings."
"..."
"..."
"..."
In that instant, countless retorts poured out from many facets. Cheon Yo-hwa felt herself overloading, just slightly.
But she bit down hard on her lip. Without missing a single facet, a single bad ending, Cheon Yo-hwa split herself into countless pieces and answered every one.
"It's useless to voice your complaints to me. The fact that I could pull off something like this means the same thing can be repeated at any time. You understand, don't you?"
"..." "..." "..."
"If anything, I'd like you to thank me. At least I'm standing here not to make your reality a lie, but the exact opposite. To deliver all of your epilogues into reality. Hwaaaah. Really, my problem is that I'm just too kind."
A storm of blood rose.
At last the Cult's Naechul had their heads explode too. Like dominoes toppling, from the outer ring to the inner, the believers offered up their souls one by one.
There weren't many dominoes left.
"Please pray," Cheon Yo-hwa said, clasping her two hands together.
"Toward the final cycle that we, together with Mr. Go Yuir and the others, may someday reach. Earnestly recall the feelings, the memories, the love you want to leave there."
Shatter.
"Place it in Pandora's box."
Shatter. Shatter. Shatter.
The facets spread out like a kaleidoscope broke. Every broken facet was stained the red of blood.
When all the simulations shattered.
"Unni."
One last facet remained.
It was the facet once called 'reality.' But by now it was no different from the other simulation universes, reduced to a playground Cheon Yo-hwa could stir as she pleased.
There stood her younger sister.
"I saw it too. ...The Teacher and me."
"Yeah."
Blood gushed up behind her sister's shoulders.
The ring-shaped fortress wall formed by the Naechul caved in. Now even the ring of the Cult's elders, barely a few dozen surrounding them, was collapsing.
The storm of blood that explosion raised looked just like an evening glow, and her sister seemed to stand with a twilight made of flesh and blood at her back.
"I'm going to forget you, unni."
"Yeah."
"But once we open the time capsule, today's events too. And the things that happened in other places too. They'll all come flooding back, so we'll be able to play together like today again. Right?"
"...Yeah."
"I love you, unni."
Her sister smiled.
"Even in a world like this. Being born family with you, unni, made me so, so happy..."
And then her sister, too, was dyed by the glow.
"..."
Humanity had perished.
Every kaleidoscope she had spread out was broken, and there wasn't one facet that wasn't drowned in blood.
A world drowned in the twilight of a blood storm, worlds, and Cheon Yo-hwa walked through them as the last human left.
"...I'm sleepy."
She was tired.
She felt she might collapse at any second.
"I can't sleep. No, falling asleep here. Then everything would be for nothing."
But Cheon Yo-hwa didn't yield to the drowsiness and kept walking. She had a destination to reach.
It wasn't all that hard. By leaping from facet to facet, she could cross several regions in an instant.
Blink.
Still, even mid-walk, she couldn't stop her eyelids from opening and closing. Blink, blink. Utter exhaustion and helplessness wrung at her brows.
"Not sleepy-. Not sleeeepy-."
Every time she blinked, the scenery shifted in strange ways.
Now that all life had perished and belonged to Cheon Yo-hwa, the world could no longer hold its original form.
Just as she had once manipulated the dream scenery like a 'video' when she first learned how to use her authority.
Now the world took shape exactly as she gazed, exactly as she thought.
And the scenery that changed in this way was.
"Ahaha."
A vast laboratory.
Every human brain floated bobbing inside a glass jar. One brain ran one simulation, one bad ending.
"What is this... Bobbing brains. A lab where nothing but bad endings recording humanity's extinction keep running."
Cheon Yo-hwa let out a smile.
"Really. Someone who didn't know better would think it was a vision of hell itself..."
But it was a hell she had chosen.
Blink.
Cheon Yo-hwa connected herself to those countless simulation universes.
Carrying 'Pandora's box' carefully in both hands, to the same place each time.
Just as she'd arranged in advance with Go Yuir, she arrived at the campus of Stanford University.
"Hng, hng-hng-♪"
Humming. To keep herself awake.
There was no one around. Naturally. She had collected only perished worlds.
In worlds where even Go Yuir had died, Go Yuri was absent too. She could tell that Go Yuri had always taken her own life immediately after his death.
"Heave-ho. Now then, let's see-."
Cheon Yo-hwa set the box down for a moment and began digging the soil at the appointed spot.
She used both hands to dig. A shovel would have been far easier, but the feel of the earth crumbling at her fingertips worked better at chasing off the drowsiness.
"Well. This deep should keep it from washing away in the rain!"
Her fingernails were all broken. Along with grains of soil, blood ran down from her fingertips.
Beaming, Cheon Yo-hwa laid Pandora's box inside the pit, shallow but unmistakably the deepest hole in the universe.
She buried it. Carefully.
She covered it. A few tears fell.
"Sunbae."
"If you do all this and still don't come back here later to dig up the time capsule... I'll be angry, you know?"
"Ji-won too. If you suddenly give up your studies abroad and insist on staying by sunbae's side, throwing a tantrum like that, even gentle me would get angry."
A small burial mound rose.
Come to think of it, a grave might have been the very first structure humans built to leap across time.
"...Ah."
Right after.
Cheon Yo-hwa realized she'd made a mistake.
"Before burying it I should have asked sunbae to lay a [time seal] over the box. I forgot."
Such a ridiculous mistake.
But it couldn't be helped. No matter how perfect the plan, once it goes live the operation is bound to tangle.
She had been desperate, after all, not to be devoured by the god-nim, never to fall asleep until Pandora's box was buried.
"Ahaha... Oops, oops♪"
Wriggle, wriggle.
Around the grave where the heart of despair was buried, water drops were moving. The Outer God who'd lost the Miko named Yu Ji-won[2]. The trace of Leviathan.
"Mm. Well, if I'd kept sunbae alive, Go Yuri might have caught on. So for security's sake this is actually better."
-...
"Okay. There's no helping it! Leviathan! I'll bestow on you the honorable role of grave keeper."
-...
"Go Yuri of course, but also sunbae, or anyone connected to sunbae, the moment it seems they're crossing the Pacific, trigger the Great Deluge without fail. When they don't come near, stay quiet. Understand?"
-...
"Then I'll let you wound me in return."
-...
Cheon Yo-hwa touched a water drop with her fingertip. At that, a blood drop blended into the clear water.
"Contract sealed, then."
Cheon Yo-hwa felt a little relieved.
With a guard stationed like this, even the formidable Go Yuri wouldn't go meddling beyond the Pacific without good reason.
A matter of matchups. Thanks to an SSS-rank Miko who could assassinate a pro reincarnator without batting an eye.
"Yeah."
Thud.
Cheon Yo-hwa sat down hard.
"It's over..."
Her head went suddenly blank.
She was sleepy.
She was really, truly sleepy.
"...Maybe this is my limit."
Cheon Yo-hwa knew, of course, that this was no ordinary drowsiness.
It was a sign that the Outer God of Taeguk[3] and the puppet master's Outer God would no longer permit her any 'self-awareness.'
If she closed her eyes like this. If she sank into that sweetest of unconscious states, that was when she'd truly become one body and one self with the puppet master.
"..."
In this vision of hell, set a hand's breadth apart from all realities, all worldlines.
Endlessly repeating simulations forever.
Until someone came looking for her.
"..."
That, too, wasn't so bad.
After all, she was a villain of the worst kind.
'A world that would have been destroyed by other anomalies anyway if left alone,' 'better this way, devouring humanity's souls first,' 'better to send a time capsule to a happy ending,' 'and while we're at it, collect the other worldlines' bad endings too.'
No matter what cause or excuse she put forward, the fact that Cheon Yo-hwa herself had destroyed the world did not change.
The even worse fact was that, despite exterminating humanity, Cheon Yo-hwa felt no guilt at all.
"Ahaha..."
The worst kind of human.
Blink.
Without even noticing it herself, Cheon Yo-hwa let her eyelids fall closed.
When she opened her eyes again, she couldn't gauge how long she'd dozed.
'...Hm?'
But strangely, what spread before her was not the bleak laboratory of hell.
It was a playground.
A somewhat old playground, or one left to neglect.
The sun was just setting, so the children who'd been on the swings until moments ago all seemed to have gone home.
In the middle of that playground, a very small girl and a middle-school boy crouched, building a sandcastle.
There was no failing to recognize their faces.
Cheon Yo-hwa as a child.
Go Yuir in his middle-school days.
'...Huh?'
What on earth was this.
Cheon Yo-hwa, already eaten away by drowsiness, could only stare blankly at the playhouse going on in the playground. Her thoughts weren't turning well.
Only.
"I'm super super rich, you know!"
"Sure, sure. You're rich."
From a playground that felt so impossibly far away, only the conversation passing between the girl and the boy reached her faintly, mingled into the red glow.
"It's true! I've even got servants and everything!"
"Wow. Then I can't figure out why a rich young lady like that is sitting alone in our neighborhood playground."
"They say this is the neighborhood the Teacher lives in... So I lied to my father and snuck out here!"
...
Had she had a past like this?
'Five years old? Or four? Back then I... I'd met Go Yuir?'
Cheon Yo-hwa searched her memory hard.
But she failed.
'...It won't come back.'
The Outer God's authority no longer obeyed her will.
'More than that, so that's how I talked when I was a little kid.'
Cheon Yo-hwa gazed on and on at the sunlit playground.
Maybe the scene before her was a lie, an illusion the Outer God's authority had thrown together on its own in response to the Miko's desire, right before she closed her eyes for good.
Maybe it was the projection of the inferiority complex she'd secretly held toward Yu Ji-won, the greed to have met 'sunbae' even a little earlier, to have had a bond before Yu Ji-won did.
Maybe.
"Big brother, why are you playing with me?"
"A kid I've obviously never seen in our neighborhood is sitting on the swings alone in the playground. Of course I'd worry."
"Worry? You're worried about me?"
"Yep."
"Big brother, you're a pushover!"
"..."
Maybe a coincidence like this really had happened in the past.
'...Aah.'
A brief meeting, about an hour. A crossing.
Her four- or five-year-old self naturally didn't remember the face of the boy who'd played with her that day, and the boy, too, didn't remember the girl he'd looked after for that hour.
'Sunbae.'
The girl and the boy were building a sandcastle.
But neither had much talent for construction. The sandcastle the two made actually looked just like a sand grave.
'Sunbae...'
A tiny sand grave.
'It seems I'm the kind of person who can only prove her sincerity by offering something up.'
'A flaw. A lack.'
'I don't know how to love myself.'
Above that sand grave, the children's laughter rang out in bright peals.
'To love you...'
To become someone who could love wholly.
'I think I threw everything away.'
She had staked everything.
Even her humanity.
'...So, when that day comes.'
When everything has succeeded.
'When I get to confess my feelings to sunbae.'
When you come to dig up that smallest sand grave in all the world.
'I think I'll be able to... love myself a little, with confidence.'
It had been a life born riddled with flaws.
A world destined for a bad ending.
Even someone like her, even a world whose destruction was reserved, if they could become something at all.
'Sunbae.'
The glow was sinking.
Her eyes were closing.
Someone came to the playground, a servant who seemed to have come to fetch the girl, and seeing it, the girl shot up and ran over.
The girl seemed to wave, saying bye-bye. She couldn't hear what the boy answered, but surely he answered her properly.
'...I like you.'
And then.
Her eyelids closed.
An eternal instant of darkness took her in.
The girl who had lost her name decided to place her farewell in the sand grave.
'Please, let it reach.'
Pandora's box.
A time capsule.
Today's glow.
A single love letter.
-That Woman C. Fin.
Footnotes:
[1] The baku, here meaning a dream demon, is a creature of folklore said to devour nightmares and dreams, fitting Cheon Yo-hwa's dream-and-simulation powers.
[2] A miko is a shrine maiden or priestess who serves a deity; here it denotes the human vessel bound to an Outer God.
[3] The name Taeguk evokes the Korean yin-yang symbol, but here it refers to the anomaly worshiped by the Cult.
-x-X-x-
That Woman D I
──────
* * *
Dang Seo-rin was happy.
"So like, some Outer God spent more than millions of years pretending to be 'me,' and across tens of thousands of cycles it burned through its Lifespan and died every single day, but in the end those memories only stuck around as faint afterimages and we still reached the happy ending, so it's all gooood...!"
That was right.
Imagine, if you would, that you were Dang Seo-rin, specifically the eldest daughter of Busan's Dang Flower Garden who had finally reached the happy ending route.
All she had done was cooperate for a few weeks with LiteraryGirl, who claimed, "I've played this game before!"
And yet by the time she came to her senses, insane leveling and stat growth had come bundled with it.
Just listing the skills she had acquired gave you this: 'The mental strength to overcome the trauma of losing her family,' 'But since they were actually alive and well, family bonds that had become even deeper,' 'Political connections built through the mayor of Busan,' 'Business channels gained by exporting flowers all over the world,' 'A voluntary slave who came asking to please let her work part-time, saying it was fine to use her for free,' 'The nerve to face world annihilation without even blinking,' 'Reliable comrades who shared that nerve,' 'Lee Ha-yul's cuteness,' 'The courage to snort even if an anomaly appeared in the middle of the night'...
Every single one was an overwhelming life experience.
They were nourishment for life itself, and connections she could never obtain again even for a mountain of gold. In fact, it would be a bit of a problem if it ever became possible to get them again.
Most of all.
"Un-der-taaaker♪"
She had found love.
"What're you doing, what're you doing? You got time today?"
"My apologies. Wait just a little."
"Eeh, why? What're you doing?"
"I was making you an affogato."
"Kyaa!"
Love.
Dang Seo-rin could truly feel that love was the noblest miracle permitted in life, no, in the universe.
Love's greatest enemy was time. No one knew whether this love would last one year, ten years, or fifty years. Life was the real thing.
But Dang Seo-rin had beta-tested it for not fifty years, but for tens of thousands of years and more.
At this point, the game deserved to be called god-tier just because it had finally gotten an official release.
'This is fate. This is romance!'
Dang Seo-rin wanted to stomp and clap for her past self, the self from the fourth cycle who now existed only as the vaguest feeling.
Because back then, when the Undertaker had lost all his companions and was starring in the bleakest misery story imaginable, it had been Dang Seo-rin who took him in.
Thanks to that, Dang Seo-rin had succeeded in buying low on a premium stock that was about to ascend like mad.
Maybe some riffraff like What's-her-name Do-hwa or Who-even Yo-hwa would call her a coward, but.
'If you're mad, you should've gone and [saved] him yourselves, no?'
Ah...
Dang Seo-rin could look up to Hecate without a speck of shame.
In dating sims too, the most orthodox way to clear a route was to aim for the moment when the other person was at their lowest and then start flirting.
No one was allowed to call her trash for that. Dang Seo-rin did not have even the slightest intention of ending this romance with flirting alone.
"Undertaker. This is so good!"
"Hm. You still call me Undertaker quite often."
"Ah, yeah. It still doesn't quite stick in my mouth somehow."
It was half true and half false.
The current Dang Seo-rin was Super Account Dang Seo-rin, who had inherited only the choicest Experience Points built up over the previous cycles.
Where would the veteran chops of someone who had once built Busan's biggest guild from nothing, then commanded power across the entire Korean Peninsula, possibly go?
Awakeners were all crazy. Every last one of them. The very person who had gathered those lunatics, organized them into a single army, and commanded them with perfect discipline was none other than this tactical genius, Dang Seo-rin.
'Here, the title [Undertaker] works way better on me than [Go Yuir].'
Flash.
The strategic mind of the greatest witch in history, one who blasphemed even the gods, gave off a sinister gleam.
'There are... surprisingly a lot of people of interest who came into contact with this man while he still had the real name Go Yuir.'
To borrow the dating-sim metaphor again, how strong your bond with the target was came down to seniority.
In other words, how long ago you had met.
The earlier the point at which you met, the more frighteningly solid that bond became.
Did anyone really think those childhood-friend archetype characters who were always teased as the "losing heroine"[1] were actually destined to lose?
On the contrary, they were the strongest contenders, which was exactly why they got hit with concentrated fire and all sorts of sabotage.
In that sense, Dang Seo-rin had as many as three rivals she absolutely could not relax around.
Cheon Yo-hwa: "Huh? How long have we known each other? Ah, we started taking lessons from teacher around high school."
Yu Ji-won: "We lived in the same neighborhood from childhood. We formed a direct connection around middle school."
Go Yuri: "A bond from a past life. Siblings. Since birth."
...There did seem to be one pink-haired anomaly using a shameless cheat key, but anyway.
'No matter what anyone says, the person who saved [the Undertaker] from the pit of despair and raised him into a proper regressor was me, Dang Seo-rin.'
That was truly the case.
Go Yuir's university years? She did not know them. His childhood? She did not know that either. Siblings from a past life... What even is that, you otaku?
But if it was [the Undertaker] instead of [Go Yuir], the story flipped one hundred and eighty degrees.
'[The Undertaker] was the first president of my fan club, he opened a radio channel for me, and I taught him how to choose clothes, how to trim his hair and eyebrows, how to spray perfume, how not to give up even before absolute despair and defend human affection, how to manage an organization, and how to seize a city's public sentiment. You all should respect me...'
Literally.
Dang Seo-rin had turned the Undertaker into a person.
The reverse was also true. The Undertaker had turned Dang Seo-rin into a person as well.
So who would dare deny it?
'The two of us are tied together by a red thread[2]!'
The unmistakable route conqueror. The protagonist.
That was why Dang Seo-rin, confident and yet not careless, prepared the final strike to put an end to this long battle.
"Oh right. Undertaker. Shouldn't you start making good on that promise you made me soon?"
"Promise?"
"The trip around the world!"
"Ah."
"You're not telling me you forgot, right?"
"As if I would. It's just... Well."
The Undertaker smiled in a way that was hard to read.
"It suddenly feels new again, that I can really keep the promise I made with you."
"..."
Her heart pounded.
Whenever Dang Seo-rin saw that man's smile, which seemed to hold not decades but tens of thousands of years of wistfulness, she felt like she was going a little crazy.
If there were a world championship for men who looked best with that kind of smile, the Undertaker would win seventeen straight times, make the competition itself boring, and then retire in leisure...
There was no real need to hide it now, but Dang Seo-rin was looking at him through some rather thick rose-colored glasses.
If something as thick as battleship armor plating could still be expressed with a cute little phrase like rose-colored glasses.
'This isn't just a world tour.'
'This is a journey blessed with the most romantic name in the world, a honeymoon.'
The AI installed in Dang Seo-rin's brain spun up magnificently.
The question of whether she had ever actually gotten engaged to the man in front of her, or even officially started dating him, was cleanly filtered out by DangGPT.
AI always cared more about the user's star rating than about logical facts.
No, to put it bluntly, what did it matter that there had been no official engagement and no official relationship yet?
'Yeah. There will be from now on.'
A world tour. A world tour.
For at least the next two years, probably, days of the two of them traveling around together would unfold.
Time solved many things. Two years was more than enough time for the relationship-plus-engagement package, plus one extra product on top.
'Nobody can object to this world tour. Of course not. It's the most foundational promise of all, one that was planned all the way back in the fourth cycle.'
She would gently push aside the annoying Go Yuir family and go on a romantic, literally romantic, trip.
It was a truly perfect operation.
'Hehehehe.'
Dang Seo-rin was wearing a Great Witch-grade smile when the Undertaker casually checked his notebook.
"Ah. But before we properly set out on the world tour, there's somewhere we need to stop by first."
"Hm? Where?"
"America. Ji-won is planning to go study abroad at Stanford University."
"...?"
Yu Ji-won? Stanford? All of a sudden?
"Stanford... You mean that prison anomaly?"
"It certainly was an experiment that appeared as an anomaly in the past. That's right. It happened there."
The Undertaker gave a wry smile.
"But it's also a school that's fairly famous for classics related to ancient Greece. Yu Ji-won has been preparing to study abroad for a long time."
"Heeeh..."
Dang Seo-rin let it pass by like she was hearing about some foreign country, which, well, she literally was.
In truth, Dang Seo-rin had never had much interest in academics. Since childhood, she had only ever planned to inherit the family flower shop and expand it further.
She had once been interested in politics too, but not anymore, now that she had inherited the memories of regression, even if imperfectly.
Maybe it was because once she had actually tried it, she lost interest. She wanted to enjoy her private life more freely.
"But wouldn't studying in America cost a lot?"
"Yo-hwa said she'd help."
"Ah. Then there really won't be any problem."
"For reference, I hear Yo-hwa's family has been rolling their money lately as if they entrusted a fund to the Saintess herself."
"Eek..."
A fund manager? The Saintess, meaning Ye-ji?
When Dang Seo-rin pictured the Saintess, always shut up in a room operating a computer, her expression turned strange.
'Does that... fit her?'
But as soon as the Undertaker told her about the Saintess's fund-manager-level returns, Dang Seo-rin immediately decided to entrust her retirement planning to that person too.
'Ah, I've met a benefactor...!'
Returns like that without any regressor cheats like Bitcoin or the lottery?
The Saintess was a god, and she was invincible.
"Ji-won said she'd just go on her own. But even so, I think it would be right to go to California together and stay with her until the various little odds and ends are taken care of."
"Hmm."
Dang Seo-rin thought it over.
The AI started spinning furiously again.
Demon Seo-rin: "What are you thinking so hard about? One of the trickiest ones is volunteering to leave on her own."
Angel Seo-rin: "Still, if you're worried, go along when the Undertaker goes. There should be a lot of good restaurants there too. It'd be a nice chance to test how well you and the Undertaker travel together."
Demon Seo-rin: "Let's butt into the precious settling-in period of their study abroad life. Kihihi!"
Angel Seo-rin: "Ihihi!"
Hm.
The opinions from both sides were so logical that she had no choice but to take an integrated course of action...
"Then I'll go too!"
"You too?"
The Undertaker blinked.
"It probably won't be very fun, since there'll be a lot to deal with related to studying abroad..."
"Mhm. I'll just think of it as a personal vacation. And if it's California, aren't Los Angeles and Las Vegas nearby too? I'll look around all of them while I'm at it."
"Hm."
"What? Do you not want me coming along?"
"No. Not at all."
The Undertaker answered instantly.
In the end, Dang Seo-rin succeeded in squeezing herself into the party.
The Undertaker even handled the annoying ticketing for her, so Dang Seo-rin packed her suitcase all pretty, humming away without a care in the world.
And so, on the day of the trip, at Incheon Airport.
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
This was absolutely not some cheap trick to pad the page count, like the 'Level Up! Level Up!' parade technique from rental-shop-era fantasy novels.
From the top down, they were Yu Ji-won, Jeong Ye-ji, Sim Ah-ryeon, Cheon Yo-hwa, Cheon Yo-hwa, Oh Dok-seo, Lee Ha-yul, Noh Do-hwa, and Dang Seo-rin.
Where had the Undertaker gone, you asked? He had run off saying he would buy coffee.
"What the hell."
That was Dang Seo-rin.
"Why are you all here?!"
"Th-then what about you, Guild Leader of Samcheon World?"
"There's no Samcheon World, and I'm not the Guild Leader!"
"Hoah. B-by that logic, you're not the Undertaker anymore either..."
Damn it. Dang Seo-rin swallowed the curse. To think that, as someone born human, she had tried to mix words with that villain OldManGoryeo. She had been foolish.
At that moment, one of the two Cheon Yo-hwas raised a hand. Unlike the Undertaker, Dang Seo-rin had no mystical power to tell from appearances alone which one was older and which one was younger.
"Ah. Wait. I paid for all the plane tickets and hotel costs for this trip."
"..."
"They're all first class flights. And the hotels are all five-star, with really big rooms. I actually considered taking a private jet, but that felt like it'd stand out too much."
Damn it. Dang Seo-rin swallowed the curse. To think that, as an ordinary commoner, she had picked a fight with that titanium-spoon brat from a creepy cult. This lowly being had been foolish.
[I'm obviously going.]
Lee Ha-yul raised her sketchbook. There was a wildly overbearing confidence hanging around her chin that said no explanation should even be necessary.
Lee Ha-yul was acceptable.
"B-but if all of you are going... sniff. Then who's going to do my laundry and my meals and my cleaning...?"
Sim Ah-ryeon prattled on. A thoroughly filthy aura radiated from her whole body, the sort that made you not want to know any more.
Could you please just disappear?
No. Dang Seo-rin could understand everyone else. They had probably joined the trip for roughly the same reason she had.
"But Noh Do-hwa. Why are you..."
"Fuck. That bastard kept saying if everybody's going and I'm the only one left behind, isn't that just ostracizing me, and then he snatched my passport and booked the ticket anyway. I told him I don't give a shit about being ostracized, so I don't know what his problem is. Isn't this illegal...?"
Aha. So it was the Undertaker's meddlesome streak.
'Well. If it's a group trip like this, maybe it's not so bad after all?'
Come to think of it, the people gathered at the airport right now really were the hero party that had saved the world. They were comrades bound by ties spanning three lifetimes, thicker than blood.
They were fated to keep living together for the rest of their lives anyway, so what was one little group trip?
It absolutely was not because this was her first time enjoying the grandeur of first class for free.
'Right. Since it's come to this, let's enjoy it! As long as I'm not seated next to Sim Ah-ryeon, I don't care!'
Right after boarding, Dang Seo-rin saw, to her surprise, that the seats near Sim Ah-ryeon had been deliberately left empty, and she once again praised Cheon Yo-hwa's foresight.
Feeling utterly comfortable, she drifted off to sleep.
'Well. With this many people watching, what could possibly happen?'
But.
She should have thought a little harder.
About the final piece of foreshadowing.
About the prophecy that had still not been fully resolved even now, when the protagonists had reached the epilogue after the epilogue.
About the Prophets, who in every cycle died first of all, heads exploding, leaving dying messages behind for later generations, all the way until the happy ending was reached.
About the meaning of the dying message they wrote.
S U
The Prophets were wise.
The moment the Prophet sensed that there would not be much information left behind anyway, the Prophet left a message loaded with layered interpretations.
SU also meant the original name the reincarnator had first possessed. It was also the key that would later uncover the decisive Strategy Guide on SG Net.
Whether it also meant "beware Seo Gyu" was hard to say.
But above all.
Stanford University
Stanford University
It was also the destination of the journey they were currently heading toward, and the place where a girl who once held a one-sided love had buried a time capsule by sacrificing an entire world.
And finally.
S U R A J A N G
Surajang, a scene of carnage.
That was the word that would prove to be an eerily exact prophecy of the future that was about to unfold.
With only two letters of the alphabet, they had created a clue with this many layers of meaning, so how could anyone say the Prophets had not fully carried out the dignity and duty of their office?
But Dang Seo-rin knew absolutely none of that.
Not only Dang Seo-rin, but the vast majority of the people on that plane had no idea either, and simply enjoyed the excitement and flutter of travel.
Sadly...
Since ancient times, prophecy had never been all that useful in preventing future tragedies.
'This trip's gonna be fun!'
Surajang. Standby.
Only 25 hours remained.
Footnotes:
[1] "Losing heroine," or "make heroine," is anime, manga, and dating-sim fandom slang for a love-interest character, often the childhood friend, who is destined not to win the protagonist's affection.
[2] The red thread of fate is an East Asian belief that destined lovers are connected by an invisible red string no matter the distance or circumstances.
[3] The Prophets' dying message is layered wordplay. "S U" begins both "Stanford University," the trip's destination, and "S U R A J A N G," Surajang, meaning a scene of carnage or bloody chaos.
-x-X-x-
That Woman D II
──────
* * *
A rowdy clamor.
"Ohh. A splendid hotel."
"Yep. This place lets you book everything at once and connect the suites together. We've got way too many people, right? Nowhere else could handle us."
"B-bourgeois. Even during the apocalypse we stayed at pretty high-end places, you know. Hwaaa. The luxury of real civilization really is something else."
[It's like comparing the bedchamber of the most powerful great noble in the Middle Ages to the life of a modern middle-class family.]
"Then, as the financier who booked this place, I hereby declare the bed next to Ha-yul as mine."
"Ah, unni! No fair!"
Chatter, chatter.
"But unni. Why didn't you book separate lodgings for Sim Ah-ryeon? Doesn't she need to be quarantined?"
"Tr-treating a person like nuclear waste. That's really rude."
"Mm. But isn't the rudeness Ah-ryeon is committing against the very concept of humanity more criminal than the rudeness we've committed?"
"Hoo. Little sister. This great unni has a plan for everything."
"A plan? What kind of plan?"
"The person who shares a room with Sim Ah-ryeon and gets assigned the bed beside her will be decided, as of now, by drawing lots!"
"Kyaaaaaaaa!"
"...Th-this really is not a rudeness of this world."
"I see. A penalty contest no one can afford to lose. Allow me to remind you all: I cannot distinguish faces by sight, and I possess a highly developed sense of smell. Should my nose ever become paralyzed, I hereby give notice that there exists a risk you may, at any moment, be mistaken not for yourselves but for Sim Ah-ryeon."
"Shit, I hate to admit it, but that's a damn persuasive threat."
"Wasn't there something like that among the potions Uehara left behind? A drug that brings someone back to their senses. Or at least a drug that makes your whole body itch if you don't wash at least once a day."
[Not easy.]
Lee Ha-yul turned her head.
The head turn of Lee Ha-yul, reborn as the daughter of an undisputed presidential frontrunner, was captured beautifully by the camera lens.
The top-of-the-line camcorder bought just for this day was rolling.
Lee Ha-yul scribbled letters across her sketchbook.
Then she lifted the question sheet toward the "director of photography."
[What've you been doing since the flight out?]
[You're usually the one making the biggest fuss at times like this, so why so quiet?]
"Ahh."
At that the camcorder wobbled a little. The director of photography had waved a hand.
"You don't have to mind me! Don't mind, don't mind!"
[It's not "don't mind," "never mind" is more natural. You really are an otaku.]
"Aw, c'mon."
The voluntary director of photography for this trip.
Director Oh Dok-seo, who was also saving the camcorder footage to a "laptop" whenever she got the chance.
Behind the screen reflected in the lens, her bright, lively laughter was recorded.
"This group outing. It's the first trip where we've all gathered to enjoy ourselves without a care in the world, right? Who knows when an event like this'll come around again. I just want to record the precious memory of this moment, that's all!"
[Highly suspicious.]
"How do I put it. The calm within the typhoon? The eve of the storm? Like the last peace before hell. The peace of our era."
[ ? ]
"Anyway, this is a moment of historical value. Right now. Believe it or not, as a lowly scribbler who worships culture, I can't let a single second slip away in vain."
[Honestly no idea what you're babbling about.]
"Ah, you don't know? 'That.' Never mind. It's too early to tell you what 'that' is. But, I see. So that's how it is."
Lee Ha-yul's expression in the camcorder soured. Beautiful characters appeared across her sketchbook too. A character completed in five strokes. It was the convex character, the throwing-up-a-middle-finger one[1].
[Besides, if it's "all" of us gathered, isn't Mister Seo Gyu not even here?]
"Ah. I sent Mister Seo Gyu a private message and gave him the wrong itinerary on purpose."
[ ? ]
[Wait, the reason Mister Seo Gyu kept spamming that crying bogeyman-grandpa emoticon in the group chat was because of that??]
[You're actually insane?]
"Yeah. I'll admit it. Right about now Mister Seo Gyu is watching travel photos pour into the group chat one after another, realizing he got ditched. But, Ha-yul. Do you know? Just one more day, and Mister Seo Gyu will come to feel grateful to me. It'd be no exaggeration to call me the savior of his life."
[What are you actually scheming??]
"Me, author. Spoiler. No can do."
Just then Cheon Yo-hwa shouted.
"Ding! By forfeit in the draw, the bed next to Sim Ah-ryeon goes to Oh Dok-seo!"
"Hwuooooooork?! Heavens above!!"
"...Until every single person here has been assigned the spot beside her, one by one. I. I absolutely will not go to the pool or take a bath."
It was lively in every way.
The outcast group (Noh Do-hwa and Jeong Ye-ji), who proudly held a 0% share of the dialogue above, was, against all expectations, enjoying the trip too.
Hidden behind this was Cheon Yo-hwa's contribution.
To make this trip a success, she had brought out a "you don't have to lift a finger" concept from the very start.
The Eight Trigrams handmaidens and various attendants trailed everyone around, tending to the alliance members' comfort.
And not only that. The cultists living near San Francisco, and even those over in Los Angeles, were all mobilized.
The travel difficulty was, quite literally, zero.
Restaurant reservations? Already booked out in full. Communication? No problem at all, even speaking only Korean.
The alliance members didn't even need to drag their own luggage around.
They simply moved their bodies, and oh my, how remarkable, the contents of their suitcases had all been delivered to the rooms of the signature suite and laid out prettily on display.
There were even cosmetics and clothes added that they were certain they had no memory of packing.
The alliance members tasted, for the first time in their lives, the true face of power and wealth.
Until now they'd been laboring under the misconception that those two things were just for protecting humanity from annihilation.
Of course, from Cheon Yo-hwa's standpoint, she'd recently been enjoying a "left some money with an acquaintance and somehow the family fortune doubled" event, so luxury on this scale was nothing to her.
'Fun!'
Dang Seo-rin, too, was savoring the trip to rave reviews.
'Delicious!'
Nom. As she sat eating, one bite at a time, a dessert said to have been made at some famous shop and spirited to the hotel room all on its own, happiness recharged itself within her.
'What's this, what's this. I thought these girls were intruders butting into my trip, but, surprisingly, we get along?'
That sentiment had a few errors in it.
First, this was not "my trip," it was "Yu Ji-won's trip." Strictly speaking, the intruder was Dang Seo-rin.
Yu Ji-won had promised this trip to the Undertaker, just the two of them, ever since she was a middle schooler. That day had even been the very moment Yu Ji-won decided to give up on suicide.
Into this kind of first experience, intruders barged in en masse, and "juniors" at that, who had met the Undertaker far later than she had.
And yet, the fact that Yu Ji-won had brushed it off without so much as a blink, saying, "Ah, it doesn't particularly matter to me," made her an abnormally magnanimous person, the holder of a transcendent spirit. She really was not human.
But as for the rest.
On the point that the alliance members "meshed" better than expected, Dang Seo-rin's insight was correct.
'Hmm. ...But it's strange. Wasn't most of my memory of us getting together just fighting and bristling at each other?'
In truth, it wasn't strange at all.
It wasn't only Dang Seo-rin. The Cheon Yo-hwas, Jeong Ye-ji, and the rest who sat chatting around the tables and sofas happened to be harboring a similar impression at that very moment.
The impression of 'Huh? Aren't we closer than I thought?'
You might wonder how a gathering of humanity's strongest mental patients could be so cheerful and warm, but think it through and the reason wasn't hard to guess.
Because... the era was fucked!
Among the maxims floating around the internet, there's one that says if you want to learn someone's true character, put them through extreme hardship.
It was another case proving the truth that internet maxims are utterly useless. Just swap "hardship" for "battlefield" and anyone can feel that something's off.
Before reaching the happy ending, the world the Regression Alliance members had to live through was, quite literally, a battlefield every single day.
Not one of the people now sitting around the hotel, laughing and chattering away, had failed to stand on the front line of that battlefield.
The anomalies came at all hours, chased you even into your dreams as you slept, and the moment you let your guard down even a little, they grew lush within your heart and gave you a lesson in what "corruption" meant.
By any common sense, no sane mind could possibly survive it.
Wrapped in that much stress, a human's head explodes the instant their lover so much as brushes their forearm. So what of the frontline warriors of the anomaly apocalypse?
The one who, even in such circumstances, steadfastly took in their comrades' complaints and counseling sessions, calmly smiling and saying, "I see," "that must have been hard," "I have a coffee I researched and customized just for you over hundreds and thousands of years, and it's truly delicious," "want to drink it and ease your heart?", that certain regressor was the strange one. He really was not human.
In short, the alliance members' "mental illness" was exaggerated to a degree. No, to a large degree.
Anyone dropped into an era like that had no choice but to go mad. And when mad people jostle against mad people, friction is bound to arise.
And so, in the present day, you no longer had to suspect "an anomaly?" when a knock came at the door, nor wonder "an anomaly?" when dessert was delivered to your room all on its own.
"Then I will head to the university with Mr. Matiz. Thanks to the consideration of Her Excellency, Cheon Yo-hwa, the supreme young lady, I've been granted the honor of touring the campus freely."
"Ah! Me too, me too!"
Surprisingly, Dang Seo-rin raised her hand high... not out of any sense of duty along the lines of 'I can't leave Yu Ji-won and the Undertaker alone together,'
but simply from the thought, 'The hotel's comfy too, but it's boring,' and 'It'd be fun to move around with these guys, hehe.'
"Do-hwa unni, you come too!"
This line was Dang Seo-rin's as well. Yes, just now Dang Seo-rin had addressed "Noh Do-hwa," the "former Management Captain," as "unni."
It was a feat accomplished before even 24 hours had passed since the American trip began.
"Insane, fucking hell. If you're going, go among yourselves. Why do you keep trying to drag me in?"
"Aww. If not now, when are you ever gonna come here and see Stanford? They say the campus is super pretty!"
"I, I want to go too. Heh. Now that all the people have been cleared out, even if I tag graffiti on the school building's outer wall, I won't get caught, right?"
"No. Ah-ryeon. No matter how much money our Cult has thrown around, that crosses the line, so please spare us."
"Hieeng..."
The alliance members had, every one of them, broken through the hellish age of the latter law.
They were also among the very few who shared an understanding, the precious handful who got that the reality of 'this world where the laws of physics apply as though it were obvious' was by no means obvious.
"Let's all just go together. I called a limousine."
"Waaaaaa-!"
Comrades-in-arms.
"What? You're saying you made a YouTube channel, Ah-ryeon?!"
"Y-yes. The money I left with Ye-ji is enough to live off for a lifetime, but I do want to exhibit my work now and then. And yet I hate getting tangled up with real-world people. So I'll debut as a super-beautiful genius painter and rake in all the attention."
[Non-member comment: Sim Ah-ryeon < I heard this girl actually doesn't even wash her hair or bathe, is that true?]
"Goodness. L-look. The video isn't even up yet and there are already hate comments. Scary. As expected of the super-pretty genius painter who shakes the world."
[Big trouble. The damage isn't landing. She's even started calling herself not a beauty but a pretty little girl.]
"Ah, please don't release the anomaly pictures as videos or anything! Our Cult will just buy them at a high price."
Beautiful comradeship.
Slowly, in Dang Seo-rin's head, the deranged notions of 'Hmm, isn't traveling the world together with these guys way more fun than just playing alone with the Undertaker?', 'Let's ask for an ultra-luxury yacht! From Cheon Yo-hwa, obviously!', 'We'll travel by yacht!' were gradually gaining persuasive power.
"Hmm?"
"What is it, Ji-won?"
"That lawn over there. If it wasn't a trick of my eyes just now, a bubble... one of Leviathan's water bugs flickered for a moment, like a mirage."
"Huh?"
"I'll go closer and check. Everyone. It might be dangerous, so please wait behind me."
An ultra-luxury yacht world tour.
"...For now, there's nothing. Aside from the fact that this one spot is oddly damp and soaked with water, I detect no anomalous phenomena anywhere."
[How about digging it up?]
"A fine suggestion, Lady Lee Ha-yul, Your Excellency. Truly the insight befitting the real master of the presidential office that will rule the Korean Peninsula's power going forward."
"Hold on. I'll have one of our cultists go fetch a shovel! It'd be a shame if your clothes got dirty."
For reference, a yacht was a ship.
"Hm?"
"This is..."
"A box?"
"I-it's a box."
"Looks like there's nothing for it but to open it."
"No, are you insane? There's no regression or anything anymore, and you're going to just open something that so obviously reeks of bad omen? Do these people still think they're awakeners...?"
"That is precisely why we must open it, Noh Do-hwa. The fact that our awakenings have been neutralized means the Outer Gods have vanished too. Therefore, in the current situation, no anomaly capable of threatening us can exist."
"Wow. I'm a supreme-dignity young lady Excellency and Ha-yul's a young lady Excellency too, but with the National Road Management Corps gone and the era changed a little, over there it's just plain Noh Do-hwa now."
[Not easy.]
"Then, everyone, I will open the box."
And a ship was also a boat.
"...?"
"Eh?"
"Ah?"
"Eh?"
"Huh?"
"..."
"..."
"Ah...?"
That is.
"..." "..." "..." "..." "..." "..." "..." "..."
Nice Boat[2].
Footnotes:
[1] The character is the five-stroke "convex" character (read cheol in Korean), widely used in East Asian internet culture as an emoticon depicting a hand with the middle finger raised; drawing it is a silent "flipping the bird."
[2] "Nice Boat" is an anime-fandom meme from the 2007 broadcast of the visual-novel adaptation School Days, whose graphically violent finale was replaced by footage of a boat; fans now post it to mock-cheerfully defuse a sudden ominous or shocking reveal.
-x-X-x-
That Woman D III
──────
* * *
At the very moment everyone was gathered together, all chummy, taking part in the grand unboxing ceremony of Pandora's box.
The Undertaker, surprisingly, was not on the scene. It was a truly terrifying piece of evasive maneuvering.
Thanks to the sixth-sense instinct that had saved his life more times than he could count over his long career as a regressor... well, no. That wasn't it.
Honestly, even for the great Undertaker, dodging this particular bit of cosmic rigging would have been more than a little difficult.
After all, in a worldline from some other cycle, the completed body of the Endless-puppet master had gone "Hwahha, die" and fired off its ultimate technique.
The reason the Undertaker happened to skip the box-opening ceremony of all things was this.
"Aah. All of a sudden my throat is just so, so dry."
This, too, was a blessing courtesy of cinematographer Oh Dok-seo.
The Undertaker tilted his head at Oh Dok-seo, who was holding a camcorder and grumbling that her HP had run out.
"Hm? If you're thirsty, you can just ask Yo-hwa's secretaries over there anytime. The cooler's got every kind of drink and ice cream you could want."
"Haaa... My, my. Mister, you really are clueless. What my parched throat craves right now is not some cheap mass-produced junk. To be precise, very specifically, I want the coffee you make for me."
"Huh. Here?"
"Yep."
"No, I don't even have the tools, so how am I supposed to..."
"I saw earlier there's a cafe inside the campus, right? Go make some there and bring it back."
"You..."
"Ah, dunno, don't care! Coffee made by Mister! I want coffee with ice cubes bobbing in it, all nice and cold! I've been filming our trip on the camcorder all day, so you can grant me at least this much of a wish!"
There was no diva quite as diva as this.
But Oh Dok-seo knew.
No matter how much of a diva she played, in the end the Undertaker, even while heaving sigh after sigh, even while lamenting his fate and his whole life, would still indulge little Oh-doks-brat's whims.
In the Regression Alliance, exactly three people were granted that privilege. Lee Ha-yul, Sim Ah-ryeon, and Oh Dok-seo were the only ones allowed it.
Yet the privilege those three enjoyed only looked the same on the outside. Look closely, and the essence of it was quite different.
At least, that was how Oh Dok-seo saw it.
'The reason Ah-ryeon-unni and Ha-yul get all their unreasonable demands granted is... Well. In the end it's closer to Mister indulging them and being generous, isn't it?'
In short, charity.
By her reckoning, "Undertaker-Sim Ah-ryeon" or "Undertaker-Lee Ha-yul" could hardly be called equal relationships.
There was such a thing as power, even in the heart and the emotions. Weigh up the distribution of that power, and the relationship chart between those parties was, at the most generous estimate, maybe 7 to 3.
Whereas.
'Hmm. Mister and I are exactly 5 to 5.'
Neither of them had anything to be cowed about.
If the Undertaker had never existed, the savior LiteraryGirl could not have existed either, and the happy ending would have been impossible.
If Oh Dok-seo had never existed, the Go Yuir of today could not have existed either, and likewise the happy ending would have been impossible.
Therefore.
'I have no need to dress up an inequality with titles like 'Dad' or 'Guild Leader' just to define my relationship with Mister.'
Just, 'Mister.'
Some people might take it as rude, but it didn't matter. The Undertaker treated Oh Dok-seo just as rudely.
The two of them, even while treating each other rudely, harbored a respect that would never melt away, and because neither of them was an ice that would melt first, their fondness and gentleness had no need for the sunlight.
Carnal desire? From Oh Dok-seo's standpoint it was a feeling she could take or leave. Literally a "why bother" sort of sentiment.
'Aren't we already in a state of platonic love??'
Writers, by nature, tended to like ancient Greece a fair bit. And in ancient Greece, it had been a virtue for the elder to become the 'spiritual' pillar of the younger, embracing and nurturing them.
By Oh Dok-seo's reckoning, the only person who breathed at roughly the same level as herself was, at best, Yu Ji-won.
'But Ji-won-unni's relationship chart isn't 5 to 5 either. Mm-hm. More like 6 to 4?'
Dok-seo-chan, total victory!
What we can gather from this is that Oh Dok-seo was not merely a brat who thought of physical love and spiritual love in dichotomous terms, but also someone who, having declared victory in her own mind entirely on her own terms, then completed the whole process of self-justification and self-satisfaction as well. In a certain sense, a person with an astonishingly healthy way of thinking.
There were more than one or two things one could point out about this way of thinking.
Just imagine the case where the Undertaker came to favor someone other than her.
Oh Dok-seo's mental state would instantly be reexamined as a textbook case of shoddy construction, right alongside the Collapsed Apartments[1].
But what could you do? Treating other people like fools was a chronic affliction Oh Dok-seo had been born with.
The true endpoint of a connoisseur of misery porn. It was to walk the road of regret, obsession, and ruin onto oneself...
But however the future might flow, for now Oh Dok-seo had entered "the one who enjoys" mode, and.
"Oh right, while you're making mine, get the others' coffees too, pretty please!"
"I never imagined I'd come all this way to end up playing barista..."
Right before the box-opening ceremony began, they had succeeded in safely whisking away the single most important VIP, the Undertaker.
Thanks to that, Oh Dok-seo no longer needed to bustle the camcorder back and forth.
Had the Undertaker been present, she would surely have whirled the camera frantically in the order of alliance member, Undertaker, alliance member, Undertaker, all to capture his expression.
Thanks to that, she was able to catch the moment Pandora's box quietly opened, fully and completely on her lens.
Steam rose up curling like mist. The steam, in every color imaginable, crackled with static, a fuzz of noise.
Before the alliance members could even react, the mist split off into separate strands and seeped, whoosh, into their mouths and noses.
And so.
"Ahaha,"
The first masterpiece shot captured on the secret-weapon camcorder bought for this very day was.
"Ahahaha! Aha-ha, ha- ahahahaha!"
A burst of laughter.
It was Cheon Yo-hwa's laughter.
* * *
"U-unni?"
"Aah. Hngk, urk, haaaa... ahahat! Ahahaha, hng, hueaa... Haaa. Hm, mm-mm. Mm!"
Cheon Yo-hwa wiped away her tears.
A smile of the utmost refreshment hung on her lips.
"As expected, it's me. Cheon Yo-hwa. You really are a genius!"
"..."
"Mm-hm. This unni never gives up, not even on a world whose destruction is a foregone conclusion, not even on a love whose defeat is a foregone conclusion. The world's going to end? Then I just send a Spirit Bomb[2] over to a worldline that hasn't ended, right? Love's doomed to fail? Ah, then if it's going down, I just make everyone sign the love letter so we all go down together, right? Hyaaa. What a woman I am, how can I be so perfect! At this rate I have no choice but to love myself...!"
"..."
Silence followed.
It was only natural, since aside from the older-sister Cheon Yo-hwa, the eyelids of everyone seated here on the lawn were trembling faintly.
A moment ago they had opened a recollection room for "memories that could not possibly exist," that is to say, the so-called bad endings, ones that had not only met destruction but should have had their save files deleted for all eternity.
Among them, naturally, were heaps of bad endings that had never been observed in the main text. Of course the cycles in which the regressor had failed and then forgotten could hardly amount to a mere five or six.
For instance... the number of bad endings in which Saintess Jeong Ye-ji and the Undertaker had ended up together was absolutely not "just one."
There was even an ending where he'd ended up with the Cheon Yo-hwas and married into the family outright as the live-in son-in-law of the twin sisters.
Memories like that had all been downloaded directly into the alliance members' minds, "vividly," all at once.
The conversations shared with the Undertaker in the isolated bad-ending cycles, the whispers, fingers laced tightly together, believing without a shred of doubt that they were soulmates, in a world where only the two of them remained, doing this..., and that, and anyway every last one of those scenes! All of them!
All of them!
With this, their heads went momentarily paralyzed, stuttering as if infected by a virus, no way around it!
"..."
In the midst of a silence colder than death, only the deliberate culprit, Cheon Yo-hwa, was cheerfully laughing.
Barely a minute or so passed, perhaps.
"Th-that..."
Saintess Jeong Ye-ji parted her lips.
To be the first to gather her wits even in a situation like this. Truly fitting of the Yongsan control tower, who had observed every awakener's best and ugliest sides throughout the apocalypse.
"This is..., um. There's no guarantee this is all true, is there...?"
The Saintess, as the avatar of reason and rationality (BUT, who serves crushed raw ramyeon as drinking snacks), led off with a fact-check first.
"This box is a cursed object forged by the authority of the Endless and the puppet master... that is, the Outer God 'Taeguk.' There's a possibility... that the Outer God ran a false simulation and set a trap, is what I think."
"Ohh."
Cheon Yo-hwa laughed brightly.
"A trap! A trap, you say. Nice~. So, Ye-ji-unni. The Dang family's proud asset manager. What good would springing a trap like this do an Outer God?"
"Um... To sow discord between us, maybe...?"
"Heee. The Infinite Metagame has been reduced to nothing but a measly laptop, and this Outer God has nothing left but the box, and even that box just opened and will fulfill its purpose and soon vanish, so what radiant blessing does it hope to gain by going out of its way to drive us apart?"
"Revenge... or something."
"Well, revenge. That's possible. Though I do wonder whether an Outer God even has emotional motives like that."
The corners of Cheon Yo-hwa's mouth curled up.
"If you're that worried, then, Ye-ji-unni. Why don't you put the memory you just received back into the box?"
"..."
"Hurry. I can feel it. Just a little longer and this time capsule will melt and disappear. But right now there's still a chance! You can stow them away before they vanish completely."
Cheon Yo-hwa looked around at the others.
"Everyone else too! Don't hold back, by all means!"
"..."
"Come on, hurry, hurry! If you miss the last train now, you'll have to live your whole life carrying these memories, you know? Swept up in a filthy Outer God's scheme, tied to the ending of a cycle you didn't particularly want, with no choice but to live out a life where bad endings and happy endings are all mixed together, forever? Now then. Ten seconds. Nine seconds. Eight."
Even as Cheon Yo-hwa taunted in a tone that was plainly mocking and toying, the surroundings stayed silent.
It was all too obvious.
There was no way they could throw it away. This memory.
"Three seconds, two seconds... One! Ding! Ding-ding-ding!"
Tak.
Cheon Yo-hwa snatched the box from Yu Ji-won's hand and clapped the lid shut.
Wondrously, the moment the lid closed, "Pandora's box" slipped away, vanishing without form or trace.
"Oh my~?"
Cheon Yo-hwa smirked.
"Nobody put their memories back, did they, everyone~?"
"..."
"To decide what is true and what is false, that is precisely the right of a person. A moment ago, all of you decided to accept these memories as the truth... That's how I interpret it! Bang-bang! Verdict rendered!"
"..."
"So then, everyone! I can now look up at the heavens and honestly love even myself, and on top of that I've come to love Teacher too, so I'll be off to go propose to Teacher..."
Grab.
Someone seized Cheon Yo-hwa's shoulder.
The very party who had been raising rational objections just moments ago. Jeong Ye-ji.
"...So you were after this."
"Yeah?"
"This is all foreign soil, where none of us have a base. But you alone, Cheon Yo-hwa, summoned your congregants by your own power and even booked the hotel. In other words, Cheon Yo-hwa, the moment you decide to, you can confess to Go Yuir anytime in a 100% prepared situation."
"Ah- huh? Aha, does the story really come out that way~? How strange."
The bright, beaming smile never left Cheon Yo-hwa's face.
"I really, truly did not intend any of it! Maybe it's because I usually live such a virtuous life? It's like the heavens are helping me! Ahem. But, well, I'm not such a pushover that I'd turn down good fortune. Yep. I'll gladly take it."
"As of today, I resign from my post as your asset manager."
"Let's have a calm little chat, Ye-ji-unni."
The Saintess subdued the older-sister Cheon Yo-hwa, who was one step from running wild, in a single move. The younger sister thrown in as a bonus.
As a result.
While the Undertaker borrowed the campus cafe and worked hard at making coffee for everyone, a secret pact was forged in this place.
The contents of the agreement went roughly like this.
◇ For the time being, the fact that they had inherited the memories of bad endings through the time capsule shall be kept a 'secret' from Go Yuir.
◇ Should anyone break the secret, all the rest shall join forces to root out the traitor.
◇ Each person shall be granted a level of opportunity and freedom that is reasonable by common sense. However, this common-sense line of opportunity and freedom shall be decided only through the agreement of all.
◇ Should Go Yuir come to love someone while the 'secret' remains undisclosed, all shall accept it cleanly and bow out.
There were many objections regarding the final clause, but it somehow managed to pass.
The truth was, the overwhelming majority of the people gathered here had no confidence.
The 'confidence to lose,' that is.
In the memories injected into the alliance members, each of them was a victor.
Just how devotedly the Undertaker had whispered of love, ultra-high-definition video files of it were playing back in their heads.
That the Undertaker would fall for anyone other than oneself. Such a future could not exist.
There were even those who, on the inside, clenched their fists in resolve.
'It's genuinely bewildering, but now that it's come out that Sim Ah-ryeon holds the same kind of memories as me, she can no longer cling to Lee Ha-yul or Oh Dok-seo and push that trap clause demanding that she be accommodated too...!'
'Heavens! Thank you! Thank you, unni! Thank you, Taeguk! At last I can dodge the Sim-Ah-ryeon-cohabitation-clause!'
'This is actually better.'
'Th-the Guild Leader likes me so, so much, after all. So it doesn't really m-matter.'
An exchange of glances.
As each of them desperately prepared for battle, there was one figure whose expression was uniquely dazed.
"..."
It was Dang Seo-rin.
'Uh...'
Having absorbed every last memory down to the Utopia cycle, the Great Witch's pupils were trembling, at present, exactly as if an earthquake had struck.
'My world tour?'
She sensed a crisis of her very existence.
'Could it be, surely not...'
'If I lose here, does that mean I can never go off on a world tour, just the two of us, alone with the Undertaker forever??'
A battle that absolutely could not be lost.
Begin.
Footnotes:
[1] "Collapsed Apartments" is a Korean internet meme for shoddily built apartments that collapse at the slightest provocation, used as shorthand for anything flimsy and prone to total breakdown.
[2] The Spirit Bomb, or Genki-dama, is a signature attack from the manga/anime Dragon Ball, formed by gathering energy contributed from all living things. The joke is that she would gather power across worldlines.