That Woman D IV
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* * *
Whether you're delivering pizza or delivering coffee, when is the scariest moment for someone whose job is to deliver something?
"Yeees. Coffee delivery's here..."
It's the moment you get back from a run and find that the friends who were perfectly fine a little while ago have somehow ended up like this: one shot full of holes, another with his skull cracked open, blood pooling across the floor, and the whole scene even catching fire and blazing away.
"...here?"
Silence.
Nobody answered the Undertaker.
"?"
The Undertaker tilted his head, both hands clutching coffee carriers stacked one on top of another.
Of course, nothing was literally on fire. It was only a mental landscape.
'What was that?'
The Undertaker blinked.
And the scene in front of him snapped back to normal. The lawn wasn't burning. The slaughterhouse where people stabbed each other and blood sprayed everywhere had, naturally, never existed in the first place.
'Did I just hallucinate that?'
If the world were still in the middle of an anomaly-apocalypse, the Undertaker would have reacted at once: 'An anomaly?'
But these days were squarely an age of peace.
The era was so well-governed that even a reborn Cao Mengde would write "capable minister"[1] in the box for future aspirations, so no matter how professional a connoisseur of anomalies the Undertaker was, he couldn't help wavering, uncertain.
"Uh..., so. I made the coffee."
"Ah. Um, thanks. Mister."
Oh Dok-seo reacted first.
"Oh, yeah. Dok-seo. Here's your espresso."
"Mm..."
This part itself wasn't strange. The very person who'd pawned the coffee-delivery chore off onto the Undertaker was none other than Oh Dok-seo.
"Eep!"
"?"
But when their fingers brushed for just a second as she took the espresso, she gave a live demonstration of what the onomatopoeia 'flinch!' looks like as a physical action, and then her cheeks flushed faintly, which by any common sense was utterly impossible to understand.
The Undertaker barely managed to keep the coffee from spilling.
"What's gotten into you all of a sudden?"
"U-uhm..."
Oh Dok-seo twisted bashfully in place.
Forced to witness the whole display up close, the Undertaker had a single thought flash across his mind: 'What fresh nonsense is this?'
"Um. So, I really never knew this until now. The non-member reader who always left the first comment every time I uploaded a chapter... It, it was you, Mister."
"?!"
The Undertaker was startled.
'H-how did she figure it out?!'
The truth was, the Undertaker had felt sorry that LiteraryGirl was constantly getting beaten like a dog on SG Net over the hiatus issue.
But showing that pity directly would lead to an obvious future. Oh Dok-seo, already a mental wreck, would only end up leaning on him even harder.
So the Undertaker... had always been strict with Oh Dok-seo to her face, while on SG Net he operated as a mysterious legion of non-members, forever fighting for the honor of 'LiteraryGirl'!
To list out, from a vibes-based recollection, some of the comments the masked man Undertaker had secretly dropped:
-Anonymous: But honestly LiteraryGirl < there's just no author who whips up such a tasty whump-fest like this person does...lol...
-Anonymous: The upload schedule's wrecked, sure, but nobody can talk trash about the writing skill, yep yep
-Anonymous: A superstar who drives both haters and stans insane? Upvote, lolololol
-Anonymous: LiteraryGirl is like a legendary three-Michelin-star fine dining place. The chef only opens up when they feel like it, which makes it rarer.
And so on.
For the record, every comment was posted with the IP swapped using Administrator privileges. The phrasing and tone were subtly different each time.
What was there to hide?
The grumbling that occasionally went up on the board, that is, 'wait, why is this LiteraryGirl bastard, a vicious habitual hiatus-fiend, so damn popular?', that recurring SG Net mystery, was in large part...! down to this very masked-clone technique of the Undertaker's...!
The reason the Undertaker steadily seeded Romance of the Three Kingdoms bait under his real handle may well have been thanks to advice (feat. Infinite Metagame): that, while putting on these anonymous masked performances, the single act of not talking about the Three Kingdoms let him melt into the shadows of the crowd.
Of course, whether that advice had ever truly existed remained shrouded in a veil.
Just what did the Three Kingdoms mean to this man? A mystery the whole world wondered about.
Whether a grand foreshadowing built up across a full 476 chapters had finally been paid off, or whether a character setup stacked up over a long stretch had simply collapsed for the sake of convenience, also remained shrouded in a veil.
Either way, the veil, the anonymous mask the Undertaker so loved to wear, had shattered completely in that very moment.
'No, no. This can't be! I worked this out with Infinite Metagame too, made absolutely sure Dok-seo would never catch on?!'
The Undertaker was a master of imagination. To beat back anomalies, he had to wring out the very limits of imagination.
But even an Undertaker like that surely could not have imagined this one thing.
That in some bad-ending cycle he didn't remember, Yu Ji-won had cut down Go Yuri, and as a result the bond level between the Undertaker and Yu Ji-won had broken past 15, and seeing that, Cheon Yo-hwa had felt defeat and inferiority, but rather than despairing she had sent her own romantic feelings, despair, and hope into a time capsule, and the abbreviation for that time capsule's location was SU, meaning Stanford University, and this was that place, and fifteen minutes before the Undertaker arrived the time capsule had been dug up, and as Pandora's box opened every member of the alliance had been irradiated with the 'despair' of the bad endings, and among them, astonishingly, there even existed the bad ending of Madam LiteraryGirl, who'd been so cocky going 'I'll definitely be safe', and the condition for that ending was 'the Undertaker's masked-play act will be exposed', so the freshly despair-infected Oh Dok-seo had even come to realize that the Undertaker was her nameless devoted reader.
Truly, not even in his dreams could he have imagined it...!
"Mister, I. You know."
"Uh, uhh?"
"The truth is, for a long time now, Mister..."
KAWHUMP!
A human flew. Whoosh, just like that. That is, if there's a biologist generous enough to classify Oh Dok-seo as a subspecies of human.
Watching a person sail away like a sorghum stalk right in front of him, the Undertaker could not suppress his shock.
"My apologies."
The culprit was even more shocking. The one who'd sent Oh Dok-seo flying was Yu Ji-won.
True, by now the Outer God's authority had gone flat like a watermelon with the sweetness sucked out, but from the start Yu Ji-won had steadily trained her body in preparation for the apocalypse.
Her physical durability was on a wholly different level from an author with scoliosis whose birthplace and grave were both reserved at the spot in front of a computer keyboard. She could treat someone like Oh Dok-seo as a baseball anytime she felt like it.
That 'felt like it' part was exactly the source of the shock. Yu Ji-won was famous for a way of handling people that rarely made enemies. Why her, of all people? Why would she suddenly use Oh Dok-seo for home-run practice?
"I don't particularly care who Mr. Matiz shares love with."
"What?"
"Whether it's Jeong Ye-ji, the most-revered Cheon Yo-hwa twins, Her Excellency Lee Ha-yul, Noh Do-hwa, Dang Seo-rin, or even Sim Ah-ryeon, I don't care. Even if you build a household with all of them, it stirs no particular feeling in me."
"What??"
"But Oh Dok-seo is not allowed."
Yu Ji-won was expressionless.
"Even so, I believe Mr. Matiz is human, and humans ought to be joined with humans."
"What on earth are you talking about, Ji-won??"
"I am offering counsel that the tragedy must be avoided."
Yu Ji-won took the Undertaker's hand. The Undertaker, proving he was every bit the reader to match that author, likewise gave a 'flinch!' of surprise.
"J-Ji-won?"
The Undertaker's voice went timid.
Ji-won reaching out for skin contact like this was common enough in itself. Since she couldn't make out faces by sight, she often tried to recognize him by touch.
But like this, out in the open? Maybe back in middle school, when she hadn't yet gotten used to the perfume identification method, but now? Why?
"Ji-won. Sorry, but right now I'm extremely, intensely, tremendously confused, you understand? Couldn't you give me a reasonable explanation for what in the world is going on?"
"It's a very simple matter."
Yu Ji-won nodded.
"Tell me that you love me."
"???"
"That Mr. Matiz cherishes me, that he would not flinch even from throwing his life away for my sake, that he loves the human being that is me, beyond mere lust, is something I already know well. The process Mr. Matiz needs right now is simply to reconfirm an obvious truth as an obvious truth. Please."
"Ji-won, have you been drinking?"
"Or perhaps, do you not love me?"
"No. No, no. That, of course..."
KAWHUMP!
A human flew. Whoosh, just like that. That is, if there's a Confucian scholar generous enough to gladly classify as human a murder prodigy who, born with her emotions castrated, killed her parents and dumped them in a wooded hill.
"Teacher!"
"Sunbae! Run!"
The culprits were the Cheon Yo-hwa twins. If Yu Ji-won had trained her body since middle school, the two young ladies had simply leveled up their physical stats from the moment they were born.
If the two joined forces, sending someone like Yu Ji-won flying was no trouble at all.
Of course, it was an extremely rare sight, with the minor problem that the Undertaker's sanity, having witnessed the scene, flew off right along with her.
"Run, you say, but why..."
"Something like an anomaly phenomenon has gone off!"
"What."
"Just understand it roughly as a Valentine anomaly or something like that! These people aren't normal! Undertaker!"
"They're all trying to confess to Teacher! What was it, what was it, there was that Savior anomaly, right! It's similar to that!"
"If you accept these people's confessions, the Valentine anomaly gets locked in and the world will turn into eternal lovey-dovey chocolate!"
The sanity that had run away from the Undertaker's skull became a ghost, and even in ghost form it realized it could still reason.
'Valentine anomaly? But it's not even February? And what's lovey-dovey chocolate?'
Grab. Grab.
Both his hands were seized by the Cheon Yo-hwas.
And not just seized. The Cheon Yo-hwas ran with perfectly identical timing, like a seasoned ballet troupe, hauling the Undertaker along.
"So!"
"Right now you have to trust us sisters, the only, no, the two who escaped the Valentine anomaly! Sunbae!"
"We'll have the congregants hold those people back. We'll take the chance to flee to the hotel and figure out a plan for how to exterminate the anomaly..."
That was when it happened.
"Guild Leeeeaderrr! Th-these people! They got their memories of the old cycles baaaack!!"
A Lion's Roar erupted[2].
A jolt. Everyone stiffened all at once.
Eyes converged.
There stood the green-haired former Saintess, the one no expert, be they biologist, Confucian scholar, sociologist, jurist, or mathematician, could come and confidently swear was 'human', the one whose very existence threw down a gauntlet to humanity's scholarship and civilization, who in three syllables was, well, Sim Ah-ryeon.
Boldly letting loose a Lion's Roar.
"Uh... Ah-ryeon? Memories, you say..."
"Don't, Sunbae!"
"Teacher! Don't listen to her! That thing's an anomaly! You'll be bewitched!"
The Cheon Yo-hwa twins frantically covered the Undertaker's left ear and right ear. But, you know? Human hearing is unexpectedly well developed.
A shoddy little blockade like that couldn't possibly stop the Lion's Roar let loose by the plain-as-day 'enemy of humanity'.
"Bad endings! Th-the endings even you don't remember, Guild Leader! The ones caught in Udumbara[3] and wiped clean away! The memories of those endings were here, in this box, alllll of theeem!"
As expected of Sim Ah-ryeon. A summary worthy of the OldManGoryeo[4] villain.
It wasn't for nothing that she'd reigned as the most popular author on the novel-serialization board on SG Net, slapping LiteraryGirl across the face the whole time.
"Wh-what are you doing..."
"Stop her! Stop her, you commoners!"
At the Cheon Yo-hwa twins' command, the congregants who'd been standing by all around rushed in en masse, but Sim Ah-ryeon dodged this way and that.
It wasn't that Sim Ah-ryeon's lightness-skill had reached its peak. Line up the alliance members by physical ability and she'd put up a nice bottom-rung contest against Oh Dok-seo, so it couldn't possibly be that.
It was simply that her clothes and body were so slick with grease that no matter how the congregants tried to grab her, she slipped through like a loach, sliiide sliiide sliiide.
"N-no. That thing...!"
"Gross! So freaking gross!"
Whether those around her were horrified or not, Sim Ah-ryeon kept her Lion's Roar going.
"But in the bad endings, all of them, every single one! They say they got all lovey-dovey with you, Guild Leader! So now they all think you're theirs!"
"Kyaaaaaaah!"
Cheon Yo-hwa screamed.
"A-are you insane? You? Are you actually insane?! It's only been ten minutes since we promised to keep each other's secret! No matter how shameless you are, breaking the promise in literally ten minutes!"
"Hm? But I didn't break the promise, though?"
"Huh?"
"We spelled it out in the agreement..."
◇ If, in a situation where the 'secret' has not been disclosed, Go Yuir comes to love someone, all of us shall cleanly accept defeat.
"Th-that is. If the secret does get disclosed..."
Sim Ah-ryeon said.
"It means the exact same thing as: there's no need to cleanly accept defeat, doesn't it...?"
"..."
That's right.
Sim Ah-ryeon had run the thought experiment with all-too-honest rigor. The Cheon Yo-hwa twins trying to kidnap the Undertaker had caught her eye, and she'd judged that at this rate her physical odds were shrinking.
So... 'Then even if the Guild Leader accepts the Cheon Yo-hwas' confession, if I crack the secret open in advance right here and now, doesn't that mean I won't have to accept defeat later?', she'd derived this miracle of a conclusion.
"Insane."
Cheon Yo-hwa groaned. She'd known for ages that her opponent wasn't human, but who'd have thought it ran this deep.
That's right.
From the very start, Sim Ah-ryeon had not the slightest, not the truly tiniest speck of intention to accept her own defeat...!
There was a limit to cliché-breaking, too.
Normally, when this kind of chaotic free-for-all broke out in a romantic comedy, the gentlewomen's agreement struck among the parties was, by and large, thoroughly upheld.
It would pass through scenes roughly like 'so even if you end up with someone else, you'll understand, right?' 'Yeah! Because apart from love, we're friends!'.
No matter how agonizing the pain of heartbreak, no matter how hard it was to truly let that person go, even so, recalling the gentlewomen's agreement they'd pledged in the past, they would, with great difficulty, send their love off..., that sort of thing.
A truly beautiful tradition and culture (which can give the loser-faction supporters cancer) existed in the romantic comedy genre.
But Sim Ah-ryeon knew no such thing.
Earth's traditions, its culture, its romantic comedies were all still a bit too immature to take in an existence like Sim Ah-ryeon.
Gentlewomen's agreement, my foot. If it looks like things are turning against me, I'd better dump it faster than King Seonjo abandoned Hanyang[5].
The result. The pact had broken less than fifteen minutes after it was struck, setting a Guinness record that would forever live on in the annals of romantic comedy.
The Cheon Yo-hwa twins ground their teeth.
"Tch. Despicable!"
"If I'd known it'd come to this, I'd have kidnapped Teacher from the start, even at the cost of losing Ye-ji..."
'What the.'
The Undertaker's hair stood on end!
Footnotes:
[1] Cao Mengde is the courtesy name of Cao Cao, the warlord of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The line alludes to a famous prophecy told to him: that he would be "a capable minister in an age of peace, a treacherous hero in an age of chaos"; here, with the world at peace, even Cao Cao would aspire to be a loyal minister rather than a usurper.
[2] Lion's Roar (sajahu) is a term from Buddhism (the Buddha's authoritative teaching, Sanskrit simhanada) widely repurposed in wuxia and Korean martial-arts fiction as a devastating sonic shout that overwhelms or stuns those who hear it.
[3] The udumbara is a legendary Buddhist flower said to bloom only once every 3,000 years, a symbol of supremely rare events. Here it names a memory-erasing power/anomaly that wiped the cast's recollection of certain endings.
[4] Refers to goryeojang, the (apocryphal) Korean legend of abandoning elderly parents in the mountains to die once they became a burden. The handle casts Sim Ah-ryeon as a callously pragmatic "villain."
[5] An allusion to King Seonjo fleeing the capital Hanyang (old Seoul) when Japanese forces invaded during the 1592 Imjin War, a byword in Korea for a leader hastily abandoning his post to save himself.
-x-X-x-
That Woman D V
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They say a person summons superhuman strength when faced with the threat of death.
"Hwooooooough!"
The Undertaker was no exception.
The moment it came to light that the beloved disciples he had trusted with all his heart were in fact drift specialists[1] scheming to reshape this world's genre into kidnapping-confinement-conditioning fetish material, the Undertaker wrenched himself free from the two sisters' grip with everything he had.
"Ah."
"Teacher, we lost him."
He'd escaped the little devils, sure. And yet.
Cold sweat ran down the Undertaker's face as his head whipped this way and that, scanning his surroundings.
Gulp.
'Run away... w-where do I run?'
Normally, the most reliable refuge in a situation like this was, without a doubt, Noh Do-hwa. Noh Do-hwa and no one else.
Even in the cycle when Salvation Narrative Syndrome had broken out, hadn't Noh Do-hwa held onto a firm, unshakable will to the very end?
But.
"..."
Right now, Noh Do-hwa was staring at the Undertaker with eyes that promised to kill him.
There was no mistaking that glare. It was pure, undeniable killing intent.
As someone who'd racked up a +1 to his death count every single time he caught a look like that, he found it extremely hard to misread its meaning.
「Why?」
He hadn't done anything, so why the bloodlust? He looked at Noh Do-hwa with that question in his eyes, and Noh Do-hwa fired right back, wordlessly, with nothing but her own gaze.
「Don't get the wrong idea. Right now, I'm cutting you some slack.」
「Sorry, but how exactly is this cutting me slack?」
「I could kill you on the spot and die right after, and yet here I am holding back.」
「Why? Should I? Die?」
「You wouldn't know, but I just inherited some really shitty memories. In those memories I swore my love, and the instant you pick anyone here who isn't me, that vow is void.」
「Because you tried to keep your vow, but if I remember nothing and break the promise of love, that means I'm no longer the 'me' you made that promise with?」
「You catch on quick, you bastard.」
「I see... So the very fact that you're not killing me yet, that you're watching how I act instead, is, from your standpoint, a kind of mercy and a reprieve, and I should be grateful there isn't already a kitchen knife buried in me. That the gist of it?」
「Just get ready to croak.」
The Undertaker shuddered. What miracle of logic was this?
But the real miracle lay elsewhere.
The true miracle was that, just now, Noh Do-hwa and the Undertaker had gleaned every last detail of each other's circumstances without leaning on telepathy or any such occult sorcery, on nothing but a one-on-one exchange of glances.
This was on the level of listening to a piece of classical music and from it sensing the babble of a brook, the slickness of stone, the wriggle of an earthworm perched on that stone floor, and within that wriggle the greatness of life stirring into being. What was this if not the true height of a kindred spirit who understands the music of another's soul[2]?
In truth, such glance exchanges between the two of them happened all the time.
And they were alike in another way too: neither of them ever stopped to calculate how that wordless understanding looked to the people around them.
Naturally, the rest of the group, who weren't connected to the Undertaker through the Khala, got a little pissed off every time they had to watch that eyeball nonsense.
Most of them figured Noh Do-hwa was showing off the special bond she shared with the Undertaker in some sneaky, underhanded way, and thought it was kind of obnoxious.
So now you can objectively understand why Management Captain Noh Do-hwa didn't have a single drinking buddy in the entire Regression Alliance besides Lee Ha-yul.
As for why this objective fact had stayed beneath the surface all this time... well, obviously, because everyone had only ever been lit up through the regressor's first-person point of view. What would the Undertaker have known?
[Looks like I've got no choice but to step in here.]
Creak.
Lee Ha-yul rolled in, pushing her wheelchair.
[If I can't make everyone into a mom, then I'd rather not take in even a single mom.]
At that, Jeong Ye-ji, ever the devotee of reason and good sense, pointed something out.
"Um. Ha-yul. I've always gone back and forth on whether to bring this up, but isn't your birth mother, Lee So-yoon, alive and perfectly well right now?"
[Can't be helped. As the daughter, I'm the only one who can support my no-good Dad...]
Reason and good sense were brushed aside as lightly as ever. Then again, you shouldn't expect ordinary filial piety from Lee Ha-yul, a father slayer, in the first place.
'Th-that's it. I just have to live with Ha-yul.'
The Undertaker's eyes flashed with desperation.
'I just kick out Dok-seo and Ah-ryeon. No, if I try to kick them far away, those two will try to kill me. So roughly the house two doors down... If I declare I'll live with Ha-yul and only Ha-yul, who could possibly object...'
"No. Don't fall for it. Mister."
Someone shouted.
He turned his head, and it was Oh Dok-seo, sprawled out on the lawn with her arm trembling all over.
It was a sorry sight, more than worthy of the title of hack author, but the cry that burst from her mouth was impossible to ignore.
"Lee Ha-yul over there owns a bad ending too."
"What?"
The Undertaker was aghast. Had she lost her mind?
"Are you telling me I shared love with Ha-yul?"
If that were true, the Undertaker was prepared to take his own life right this instant. There were rules in this world that had to be upheld.
He ended up with Sim Ah-ryeon? That, he could understand. There are real people who marry animals or marry a 2D slab, so ending up with a bug, or Sim Ah-ryeon, was within reason. Oh Dok-seo? That, too, was statistically possible.
But Lee Ha-yul was a no. He could declare with certainty that his affection for Lee Ha-yul, boundless as it was, ran along the lines of parent and friend, with not one shred of romance beyond that.
"Uh, well. It's less love in that sense and more like possessiveness..."
Faced with the Undertaker's horror, Oh Dok-seo's voice shrank a little too.
"So, in a worldline where both Management Captain Noh Do-hwa and Sim Ah-ryeon were out of the picture, there was a cycle where Mister lost his limbs. But Ha-yul was around then. With all four limbs out of commission, Mister had Ha-yul supporting him like a sort of senior, and the two of them lived together, I guess... Anyway, she's a little off too. There's no way her heart was pure."
[This is slander.]
Lee Ha-yul didn't so much as twitch an eyelid.
[When a parent's mobility fails, personally tending to their care is, by any measure, orthodox filial piety. I simply fulfilled my role as a dutiful daughter.]
"Mister couldn't move on his own, so you operated his entire body with your puppetry from the puppet room and controlled his every movement. And after Mister died, you turned him into a puppet and casually played daddy-and-daughter dollhouse, moving his tongue and vocal cords and mouth yourself, delivering his lines for him, and you lived another two hundred years."
This time it wasn't just the Undertaker; every last person was aghast. Had she truly lost her mind?
Oh Dok-seo shrieked at the top of her lungs.
"I, huh? I just didn't write it up as a side story for the sake of your honor, Lee Ha-yul. Huh? You even puppeted the corpses of the other comrades, churning out lines like 'Ha-yul, you and Mr. Undertaker really are a perfect match,' and you turned a whole city into a Puppet State to play dollhouse... Damn. Aren't you even ashamed?"
[Hmm.]
"If I'd really wanted to, I could've sent your reputation straight to hell too. Be grateful to me. This effort of mine, protecting a friend's reputation to the very end. This kindness. This gentleness. Recognize it."
[I ask you this: what is death?]
Lee Ha-yul still hadn't blinked even once.
[If one lingers in memory even after death, then that soul carries on. Though my Dad's flesh died, in my memory he never died, so I never granted that death my permission.]
"..."
The Undertaker quietly took a few steps back from Lee Ha-yul, careful that no one would notice. His daughter's filial devotion was far too heavy.
He faced reality.
'Not a single person... to lean on?'
He'd felt wronged from the start.
'I've never even been in a relationship.'
Where dating begins is a matter experts would disagree on, and at the extreme there are types who'd insist holding hands once counts as dating, but at the very least it was clear the Undertaker had never reached any proper relationship stage.
'Why do I have to get dragged into this mess because of stuff pulled by other-cycle Undertakers I don't even remember... Huh. Is this how the people around me felt watching me, the regressor?'
He realized it.
'So there was a reason Management Captain Noh Do-hwa found me so insufferable.'
Of course, it was a realization that did nothing whatsoever to improve the present situation.
'Ugh. If only Seo Gyu were here.'
'I could've dumped it all on him and asked what he thought, so why, of all the crucial moments, is he off with a bodybuilding competition for an excuse? You bastard, you bastard, you bastard...'
Ah. For the record, the bodybuilding competition business was a pretext Oh Dok-seo had fabricated.
'Mister Seo Gyu says traveling will be tough since he's prepping for a competition. Trips make it hard to stick to your diet and keep up your workouts,' was the excuse Oh Dok-seo had prepared in advance.
On the off chance the lie got exposed, Oh Dok-seo had gone so far as to actually register Seo Gyu's name as an entrant in a real bodybuilding competition.
Every holiday from now on, Seo Gyu ought to perform the three-bows-and-nine-kowtows ritual[3] in Oh Dok-seo's direction. The holiday gift, naturally, was fixed at a premium Korean beef set worth no less than five hundred thousand won.
Crash.
That was when it happened. Everyone turned their heads toward the source of the shattering glass, and there stood Dang Seo-rin, gripping something in her trembling hands.
A kitchen knife.
"Seo-rin?"
Jeong Ye-ji, who back in the day had sliced up a person or two with an axe, asked in a bewildered tone.
"Where did the kitchen knife come from...?"
"E-everyone. Don't move."
It was very Jeong Ye-ji of her to lead with 'where' the kitchen knife came from rather than 'why' she'd grabbed it, but regardless of all that, Dang Seo-rin shouted.
"I, I just. Wanted. To travel the world happily with the Undertaker, that's all."
Sniff. Tears welled in Dang Seo-rin's eyes.
They weren't false tears. Dang Seo-rin truly felt aggrieved. Eighty percent of that grievance stemmed from the desperation that she might lose, just like this, the soulmate she'd already staked her claim to.
The remaining twenty percent came from something else.
"I got cl-close with all of you too. The truth is, I was wondering whether to suggest we all travel the world together."
"..."
"This is too cruel. I never wanted to abandon anyone. D-Do-hwa unni too. I was so thrilled that I finally got to call her unni today..."
"..."
"W-we can't hate each other. It's supposed to be a happy ending. It's supposed to be the route we barely managed to reach. And just because a little memory came back, we're fighting again. This is the Outer God's scheme..."
Her face brimming over with tears, Dang Seo-rin turned to look at the Undertaker.
"So."
She murmured.
"Let's cut it off, Undertaker..."
"?"
A dazed question slipped out from between the Undertaker's lips.
"Uh, uh. Sorry, Seo-rin. What was that?"
"Hrk."
Dang Seo-rin only wiped at her tears. Her emotions were surging violently.
"Just shut your eyes tight and... let's just cut it off."
"??"
"I, I can give it up. Yeah. Even if we, we cut that off. We can still kiss, right? A kiss is enough. Love can be expressed just fine through a kiss too..."
"???"
"You see, if you just get rid of the physical lust, even polyamory becomes possible. Yeah... It's completely normal. That's the root of all evil, the starting point of every problem... If we cut it off, everything gets solved, right?"
Dang Seo-rin's eyes blazed.
And so did the kitchen knife.
"I, I... liked the female Undertaker too."
Dang Seo-rin stepped closer.
"It's okay. We... can definitely find happiness."
The Undertaker.
Sensed he was screwed.
Footnotes:
[1] "Drift" is Korean web-novel/fandom slang, borrowed from racing terminology, for forcibly veering a story off its expected course into a wildly different genre or direction.
[2] An allusion to the Chinese idiom zhiyin, literally "one who knows the tone," from the legend of musician Bo Ya and woodcutter Zhong Ziqi: a bosom friend who understands one completely, the way Ziqi alone grasped the scenes Bo Ya played on his zither.
[3] The three-bows-and-nine-kowtows ritual, the Qing court's ritual of submission requiring three kneelings and nine head-knocks to the ground; in Korea it evokes the 1637 Samjeondo surrender of King Injo to the Qing emperor, so it connotes abject, humiliating obeisance.
-x-X-x-
That Woman D VI
──────
* * *
The Undertaker's parts down there had been severed.
Who could ever have predicted that, at the very end of the very end, after piling up nearly 500 chapters' worth of material, a physical gender swap would be the thing to cap it all off...
Mercifully, that didn't happen.
Nobody had seen a development like that coming. Not even Oh Dok-seo.
So the Undertaker had, at the very least, dodged the danger of going down in the history books as the byword for the worst drift of all time...
That said, it wasn't as if he'd broken through his current situation with any real flair, either.
"N-no! Seo-rin unni!"
"Let go of me...! I said let go!"
A crashing, banging uproar broke out.
"This, this is the one and only answer that leads to a happy ending!"
"Calm yourself, Dang Seo-rin. I, too, dote upon Mr. Matiz regardless of gender, but performing surgery outdoors without proper equipment is simply not the right way to go about it."
"Th-that's right. Stripping the Guild Leader of that... I mean, he's so good at it. Hehe. It'd be such a waste..."
"?"
"?"
As is usually the case whenever an uproar breaks out in the Regression Alliance, OldManGoryeo the villain drew all the aggro this time too, and thanks to a teammate's insane tanking ability, the support character Undertaker barely managed to flee.
The trouble was that where he'd fled, there was no paradise waiting, only a hotel.
The reserved rooms were different, that was all. The Undertaker's lodging was in the very same hotel as the rest of the party.
'Dangerous. This is genuinely dangerous...!'
Being the lone splash of male on this trip, the Undertaker had a suite all to himself, and for that exact same reason, there was no one he could consult.
Who in the world could he call up to this room to ask, 'What should I do?'
Really, who?
He ran a quick mental simulation.
He might not match Cheon Yo-hwa, but the Undertaker had personally lived through tens of thousands of life simulations himself, so he could picture it well enough.
The first consultation candidate the Undertaker thought of was, naturally, a comrade of tradition and trust.
1. The Management Captain.
「Noh Do-hwa. What should I do? At this rate everything's going to fall apart. You're the only person I can trust!」
「Hmm. Well. I'm not really sure what it is you're so worried about...」
「Pardon?」
「Does it really matter if it all falls apart...?」
「...」
「...」
They just stared at each other in silence for about six seconds, and yet somehow a suffocating mood welled up, and all at once Noh Do-hwa grabbed the Undertaker's necktie and twisted the corner of her mouth...
'Absolutely not!'
The Undertaker recoiled in horror. No matter how he tried to steer the conversation, the only future he could see was the two of them plunging straight down into hell together and reenacting Made in Abyss[1].
'This is a person who, far from solving the problem, would just pour gasoline on the fire!'
In that case, the Undertaker thought, moving on to the next candidate.
In truth, aside from Noh Do-hwa, there was one more consultant the Undertaker had traditionally relied on.
A comrade who, anytime, anywhere, could mimic any character at all, and was therefore, surprisingly, an SSS-rank conversation partner!
2. LiteraryGirl
「Dok-seo. From the way you were talking earlier, it sounded like you were scheming something! Explain just what the situation is, would you! Huh? I'm asking you what I should do here!」
「U-uh-huh. Sorry, Mister. The truth is, I just thought it'd be sad if you and the others were that heartbroken and then remembered nothing at all. A true happy ending has to be an autumn you greet after harvesting every last thing, leaving nothing behind. That's the only reason I wanted the time capsule to open... B-boy. Turned out the memories Cheon Yo-hwa stored away were a bit more than I expected!」
「You knew and left it alone! You little...!」
「No! I'm a victim here too! How was I supposed to know you were the angel reader who'd been cheering me on, front to back, every single day! And, and, on top of that, even something like...!」
「Like what?」
「...」
「...」
「I, I can't say it. More to the point, the one thing I do realize now is that I'd been misunderstanding something about you, Mister.」
「Misunderstanding? Misunderstanding what?」
「Mister... Your, your affection toward me was higher than I thought? So... like... that.」
「...」
「...」
They just avoided each other's gaze in silence for about twelve seconds, and yet astonishingly Oh Dok-seo, flinching, brushed the Undertaker's hand and looked at him with eyes clouded by unease...
"Let's die."
The Undertaker muttered it. Perched on the edge of the bed, head buried in both hands, he soliloquized with utterly genuine feeling.
"Yeah. Rather than witness that spectacle with my own naked eyes, I'd just, I'd sooner die."
Yu Ji-won's earnest advice had been right this time too. Oh Dok-seo? Ohhhhhhh Dok-seo? Oh Dok-seo, seriously?
Even if the whole world were wiped out and only two humans remained, the Undertaker firmly refused to be Adam and Eve. Only now could he truly understand the final line of the Evangelion theatrical cut[2]. It made him sick!
Who on earth would benefit if an Oh Dok-seo-Undertaker route actually came true? And who could possibly depict that situation? The Undertaker? No chance. Oh Dok-seo? Out of the question. Infinite Metagame? Even Infinite Metagame would balk at this one.
In the end, the last consultation partner left to the Undertaker was already decided.
"Seo Gyu. It's your hyung..."
-Huh? Hyung-nim? What's with a call at this hour of the morning? Oh, right. You're in the States. It must be afternoon over there by now.
"Yeah. Did you eat breakfast? Your hyung's got a little something on his mind and wants your opinion. That okay?"
-Uh... Me, hyung-nim? You're asking me? Uh, sure. Of course it's fine. I ate breakfast. But this is making me kind of nervous. What kind of worry could it be that you'd consult me about it?
Explanation skipped.
In dating-sim terms, [CTRL][3].
-Hmm.
On the other end of the phone, Seo Gyu took in the whole explanation and swallowed a deep groan.
It was the most peculiarly icky siren of silence.
"What should I do, Seo Gyu?"
-Hmmmmm...
As the silence stretched on, the Undertaker grew more impatient, but in truth Seo Gyu was simply offering up deep thanks in his heart.
The object of his gratitude was, of course, Oh Dok-seo.
Seo Gyu resolved that the moment Oh Dok-seo returned home, he'd hand her a lifetime free PT membership on the spot.
Considering that these days Seo Gyu was sweeping competitions and pulling in at least 200,000 won an hour, it was an enormous privilege. At least Seo Gyu himself thought so.
(Oh Dok-seo's opinion didn't matter.)
"Still, you spent your life as an SG Net Administrator dealing with all kinds of crazies and crazy situations. I'm begging you on the strength of your experience as an Administrator here."
-No, uh. The three troublemakers I had the hardest time with are all in your party right now, all three of them, so I'm not sure I'll be much help...
"Three? One's Ah-ryeon and another would be Dok-seo. Was there one more here who'd qualify as a troublemaker?"
-It's nothing.
Seo Gyu's tone turned oddly hurried.
-M-more importantly, hyung-nim. The most important thing at times like this is the heart, one on one. The hearts between two people, right?
"Mm."
-I really never thought the day would come when I'd be asking you something like this. So... hyung-nim, what kind of person do you like?
A blunt question.
And the Undertaker was neither lazy nor dull when it came to gauging his own heart. Naturally it was a question he'd thrown at himself plenty of times, so the answer flowed smoothly from his lips.
"I like them all! Obviously!"
-Sorry, but that statement just now was real garbage, hyung-nim.
"No. There's a part you need to understand and get past. My 'liking' is a little different from other people's. I'm just, you know, ready to accept all of them no matter how they live and pull them forward into the future? I like you too, Seo Gyu!"
It was an extraordinarily perilous statement.
Just looking at today alone, the Undertaker had come within a hair of swerving into drift twice already, but fortunately Seo Gyu understood perfectly well what he meant.
-Then is there someone you, uh... want to marry, say. Someone you wouldn't even glance at anyone else for, and would only want to share your body with. Isn't there a person like that?
"As if there would be."
-No, why not? It's a natural feeling.
"Think about it, Seo Gyu. Say there were someone I wanted to monopolize, and wanted to be monopolized by. Then would my life as a regressor have run normally? I'd have spent every day just laughing and playing around with that one person, living however I pleased whether the world ended or not."
-Ah.
"Mine wasn't a life where I could play favorites with any one person. Like them all, love them all, accepting as love only the love that means loving everyone. I had to insure my heart in as many ways as possible like that, so that no matter how hard the unfair garbage rained down, I wouldn't go bankrupt and could keep going as a regressor."
-That part I think I can understand. Hm? Uh, hold on. Hyung-nim.
"Yeah."
-There's some text coming in... Oh no.
The Undertaker sensed something ominous in the uneasy reaction.
"Why? What is it?"
-...No, it's nothing. Mm, no. Actually. Hyung-nim. It looks like they've found out you're on the phone with me right now.
"What?! H-how?!"
-Well, when someone calls your smartphone it shows up as busy, and if none of the members over there is on a call, then the person you're talking to is, at most, either me or Go Yuri noona. They must have figured out it isn't Go Yuri noona.
"..."
The Undertaker grew afraid.
He glanced around without meaning to, but all four sides were just walls. What sort of schemes were being spun right now, beyond the reach of his sight?
-They're basically texting me asking me to slip in some words to you in their favor, that kind of thing. Forget it. Whatever I pull from in the middle, would that really steer your heart?
"Seo Gyu..."
-If anything, this works out better. The way I see it, hyung-nim, you're, uh, kind of waiting around figuring that once a little more time passes the members will stop being attached to you, breeze off, and meet better people...
"Yeah! I just genuinely hope those kids become happy! And if, on top of happiness, their own abilities blossom and they build careers, all the better."
-The way I see it, that's the problem.
"What?"
-First of all, finding a better person than you is hard. Insanely hard.
Seo Gyu's voice came out evenly.
-Let's suppose I hit it off with one of the members and made it all the way to dating and even marriage. That'll never, ever happen, but let's just suppose.
"Uh-huh. And?"
-Then I'd... probably go crazy someday because of a being like you, hyung-nim.
"No, why's that?"
-Because from the member's standpoint, the moment one little thing goes wrong, they'd compare me to you.
"Compare?"
-Yes. 'Hyung-nim did it like this.' 'Hyung-nim never did it like that.' That kind of thinking happens all the time in life, so that much I could let slide... but your 'did it like this' is a bit much.
A low murmur of a voice.
-I mean, you 'saved my life,' you 'gave everything you had to pull me out of a failure ending,' you 'treated me, who was originally an anomaly boss, like a human being and let me fight alongside you on humanity's front line,' you 'pressed forward to victory together even in fights that looked hopeless.'
"Uh..."
-Damn, the standard for comparison is too brutal. The bar's set absurdly high. Specs and everything aside, this is just plain impossible, I'm telling you.
"..."
-No matter how hard you push us to go meet someone who fits better and live a happy life, it's impossible! Sure, you could force a meeting. But forcing it just makes it worse, I'm telling you. It's not only our member who ends up miserable. The person they meet ends up miserable too. Damn! What crime did the poor kid who suddenly gets compared to you commit in a past life? It's a nightmare for them!
Seo Gyu's cry.
Astonishingly... it reached the Undertaker's heart.
'I, I guess so.'
It was a perspective he'd never once considered.
'You mean I was on the verge of harming a total stranger too?!'
Even as the shock washed back and forth, Seo Gyu's words went on.
-Hyung-nim. Think it over carefully. The people around you. Our members... Are they people who'll live ordinary lives, meet ordinary people, and love in ordinary ways?
"..."
-They're not, are they. If they were that kind of person they'd never have awakened in the first place, or fallen into corruption. You wouldn't have had to help them to that extent either. The only lives you brought along were ones that were originally just unhappy or tangled up, lives on the verge of dying somewhere, right?
"...Right."
-The world going back to ordinary doesn't mean those people went back to ordinary too. And, uh... what was I trying to say? Ah. Right.
Maybe it was because he'd watched the Regression Alliance's circus up close, longer than anyone.
Seo Gyu seemed to have a lot to say.
-I know your heart's training is at a level the likes of me can't even imagine, hyung-nim. For you, clinging to someone or trying to monopolize them, even having a heart like that at all, must be something from the distant past.
"..."
-Be obsessed.
"What did you say?"
-I'm telling you to be obsessed. With the members, you know. Don't treat them like some enlightened sage, no, of course it's a fact that we leaned on you in our hearts a lot thanks to that. But in a case like this, in a case like right now, just be obsessed as hell.
Seo Gyu's voice was dead serious.
-Then they'll probably all love it, you know?
"...I really don't get it at all."
-A hundred percent, I'm telling you, a hundred percent. Show them you being obsessed and they'll buy it without question, every one of them. Hm. Or not? Is Ji-won somehow different again? I can never figure out what that one feels.
"..."
-Everyone's a child deep down. You'll surely be able to find a child inside your own heart too. Good luck, hyung-nim.
"Wait, wait, wait, wait! Don't hang up!"
-I'm hanging up. If I get any more tangled up in this I'm genuinely screwed. Bow your head and apologize like a man. Oh, right. I figure you probably know this already, but I've been rooting for the Saintess noona since way back.
Click.
The call ended.
"..."
It was already the top-grade suite of a five-star hotel. With the phone gone silent too, it turned deathly quiet in an instant.
'Be obsessed?'
In the middle of a room that had gone utterly silent, the advice Seo Gyu had just handed him spun round and round inside the Undertaker's head.
'Obsession. Obsession? Show them me being obsessed, and they'll all love it and buy it...?'
That was when it happened.
Ding-dong.
The Undertaker jolted in surprise.
You could call the reaction oversensitive, but a person tends to get a bit on edge after living through a crisis where his genitals were nearly cut off.
Going over to the front door, the Undertaker quietly spoke into the door speaker.
"Wh-who is it?"
-Me.
The moment he heard the voice, the Undertaker's complexion drained pale and his pupils contracted.
-It's me. Dang Seo-rin. Let's talk for a bit.
The master of the boat had graced him with her arrival.
Footnotes:
[1] Made in Abyss is a manga/anime by Akihito Tsukushi about explorers descending into a vast, beautiful, and horrifying chasm where the depths inflict escalating bodily curses; the deeper one goes, the worse the suffering. Hence the image of falling "straight down into hell."
[2] Refers to The End of Evangelion (1997), whose closing scene leaves Shinji and Asuka as the apparent last two humans; its famous final line, Asuka's "kimochi warui" ("I feel sick / how disgusting"), is the source of the Undertaker rejecting the "Adam and Eve" framing and feeling sick.
[3] In Korean dating-sim slang, "miyeonsi" abbreviates "beautiful-girl simulation"; holding CTRL in such games fast-forwards or skips dialogue, so the explanation is being skipped over.
-x-X-x-
That Woman D VII
──────
* * *
The back-alley surgery rampage that had nearly turned the Undertaker into a female Undertaker had happened only a few hours ago.
It would have been more than enough to add a new entry, [Phobia: Dang Seo-rin], to the Undertaker's character sheet, and yet he opened his door without a word of complaint.
The reason? Simple.
"Hey... I'm sorry, Undertaker. I got way too worked up earlier..."
Because, tens of thousands of years ago, [Precious Bond: Dang Seo-rin] had already been engraved on his sheet in red letters.
To put it bluntly, even if Dang Seo-rin had actually castrated him, it wouldn't have made the slightest dent in the Undertaker's affection.
This was a man prepared to accept even world annihilation for Dang Seo-rin's sake. Next to a whole world, that particular part of himself was worth precisely nothing.
"It's fine. I understand. When memories you couldn't even recall come flooding in like a tidal wave, keeping your composure isn't easy."
"Y-yeah. Now that I think about it, you went through something similar to us a long, long time ago, didn't you..."
The earlier experience Dang Seo-rin meant was, of course, the reincarnator, the incident with Go Yuri.
Recalling that, Dang Seo-rin let out a quiet sigh of relief inside.
'...So he's not just saying it's fine to be nice.'
People could afford to be generous with others about mistakes they'd lived through or committed themselves.
Astonishingly, the Undertaker had even taken in 'memories that never existed,' and beyond that had once been a person of a different gender from his own.
There were precious few situations on present-day Earth that the Undertaker couldn't understand. To genuinely surprise him, you had to be on Sim Ah-ryeon's level.
"...Mm. It's too quiet in here, so, um. Want to take a walk around the hotel and talk, just the two of us?"
"Sure."
The Undertaker instantly pulled up the layout of the area around the hotel in his head.
Thanks to having mapped it out in advance, on the off chance a walk like this might come up somewhere on the trip.
"There's the sea, if we walk a bit."
"Oh, the sea. Is it pretty?"
"Well. The water's so-so. It's not a beach, just a stretch of docks lined up one after another."
"Hmmm..."
"Still, you can watch the people wandering around. You'll be able to hear the waves too, so it's not a bad spot for a walk, is it?"
"Yeah! Let's go, let's go!"
Dang Seo-rin perked up at once. As if she'd never once paced anxiously outside the Undertaker's door, her mood lifted clean up, strangely enough.
Like a tiny bit of magic.
In truth, this whole process came very naturally to the Undertaker.
Scouting the area around wherever they were happened to be a habit of his, and on top of that, whenever he was out with Dang Seo-rin he always looked up good restaurants and the like to visit together with her.
Stepping out of the hotel and walking down the street...
Dang Seo-rin, too, suddenly...
"..."
Came to realize that very thing.
'It's always fun being with the Undertaker.'
It wasn't as though some grand event had taken place.
Dang Seo-rin loved the sea. She loved walking. She loved watching the streets where people came and went.
If she could duck into a café along the way and have a tasty coffee or dessert, that would be perfect, but even without it, even just getting to sit on some old bench now and then was enough.
'While he was prepping for the trip... in case he might end up walking with me.'
Quietly.
Strolling side by side down the harbor street, Dang Seo-rin stole a glance at her companion's profile.
'Wondering whether there might be a walking route I'd like... and just. Giving the map one more quick once-over, I bet.'
Just.
'It's not like he even needed to check the map, since Cheon Yo-hwa said she'd plan the whole itinerary and to leave it to her.'
Just.
"..."
Her heart was pounding.
Dang Seo-rin just, plain liked his profile.
She knew it well. In love, the word 'just' was not what you reached for when there truly was no reason at all.
A love that brushed past for a moment and then parted at an intersection, maybe. But not this.
A love that insisted on overlapping its path, that stopped together when the light blinked, that crossed together when a crosswalk came, that promised to sit on a bench together and gaze at the sea once they reached some shore where the road went no further.
'Just.'
If you came to have a love like that, then while walking the road, people had to step on a great many 'justs,' one by one by one.
And as you walked, stepping on them like that, the answer you'd so readily given, 'I just live,' to the question of why you were born and went on living, changed at some point without your even noticing.
'I live for you.'
In love, the blank painted over with the word [just] always had the word [you] hidden inside it.
'For your sake, I think I just... wouldn't mind getting up early.'
The sound of the waves passed by, brushing water across this man's profile.
'I'd even be glad to just go for a walk whenever it suits you.'
'I'll just stay up at night until you come back.'
'Even if everything I have now disappears. Even if it all falls apart. The truth is, as long as I can be with you, I can get back up anytime.'
'I just... feel like I could.'
Dang Seo-rin...
'You feel that way too, don't you?'
A firm squeeze.
Without thinking, she reached out and took the Undertaker's right hand.
"..."
At that, the Undertaker turned his head and looked at her. A little surprised, maybe. His eyes had widened slightly.
"..."
But before long, his gaze softened and settled gently.
And the touch with which Dang Seo-rin had caught only the tips of his fingers, the Undertaker answered with a larger motion, wrapping her whole hand in his.
"..."
"..."
Dang Seo-rin's face grew a little warm. So she walked with her head bowed a touch.
The words went quiet between them, and only the thickness of the fingers clasped tight and the warmth of his palm filled up her head.
The silence wasn't oppressive. It just felt like nothing at all. So she worked up a bit more courage and lifted her head, and her eyes met the Undertaker's.
Dang Seo-rin couldn't help laughing.
"Idiot."
"Why?"
"Dummy."
"That's an unforgivable slander."
"Want me to tell you one scary fact?"
"If it's a scarier story than the one where a certain body part nearly got cut off, sure."
"Sim Ah-ryeon, that girl, the second she got into the hotel she showered and took a bath..."
"That's insane."
"And she says that when you head off to play in the hotel pool, she's going to put on a swimsuit and go too..."
"That really is scary. I've got goosebumps..."
When it came to topics worth chatting about at a moment like this, nothing beat trash-talking Sim Ah-ryeon.
Isn't trash-talking a comrade going a bit far, you ask? Uh... you heartless elder-abandoner[1].
"Ugh. Forget it, forget it."
"Forget what?"
"Just forget all of it."
How to put it. Dang Seo-rin meant to stamp an official seal on this, just like this.
'Hide nothing from me. Treat me as the most precious thing of all. Whenever I want, go on a trip with me anytime.'
If those were the conditions, then the way Dang Seo-rin saw it, she could honestly accept being in 'a relationship that looks utterly bizarre to others.'
Of course, a person's heart isn't something even the person in question can know from the start, so once this side-splittingly absurd relationship raised anchor and set sail, her heart would probably shift here and there.
If it changed, she could just talk it out again when the time came, was what she figured.
'Sim Ah-ryeon, that girl... I don't get her either. Let's just decide she's not a person, but an alien wearing human skin.'
It was a superhuman tolerance only possible because she herself had once been devoured by an Outer God.
And so, the moment Dang Seo-rin opened her mouth to share her resolve...
"Wait a second."
"Hm?"
"Hold on."
Thunk.
The Undertaker cornered Dang Seo-rin. Saying he cornered her sounds like an odd way to put it, but to be more blunt, it was the so-called 'wall-slam' pose.
'Eh?'
Dang Seo-rin looked up at the Undertaker's face as it cast a shadow over her. Her back was against the wall of a big harbor building standing by the road.
An utterly serious expression was looking down at her at an angle.
"Wh... what is it?"
It was so sudden that, without meaning to, Dang Seo-rin's tongue tripped over itself.
But she couldn't help it.
Sure, she'd been the one to signal the hand-hold first, but the Undertaker had never initiated physical contact this intensely.
With Pandora's box opening today, the events from 'Utopia' had come back to her vividly, but even in that cycle he'd never pressed his face in this boldly, had he? Had he?
"Dang Seo-rin. I have some idea of what it is you're about to say."
"Eh, uh, uhm...?"
"But I'm not so foolish a man as to let you be the one to say it first. So, won't you wait just a few more days? I got some personal advice, and I'd like to test it out a little."
"Wait...? Wh-what for?"
"Whatever it may be."
And then came something jaw-dropping.
The shadow drew closer. Deepened. It came near enough for her to make out the other person's eyelids, and then something soft brushed Dang Seo-rin's left cheek.
'Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh?'
In short, once Dang Seo-rin's brain, fumbling belatedly, tried to make sense of it...
A moment ago the Undertaker had pinned her to the wall, bent at the waist, and lightly kissed her on the cheek.
'???'
It was moving way too fast.
Faced with the reality that, before she'd even officially declared anything one way or another, the Undertaker had fired off a cheek-kiss first, Dang Seo-rin could only spiral into chaos! Because, well, because...!
'Y-you. You fire off flirting like breathing, but you absolutely, absolutely never made this kind of physical contact first, did you?!'
The truth was, there had never been a man as walled-off as the Undertaker.
Trying to hold hands, it was always her first. Stretching out a foot under the café table to tangle them up playfully, her first too. First, first, first.
He'd handle everything else so easily and take care of it first, like planning the walking route today, and yet, uniquely! When it came to physical contact, absolutely never!
A case of him sending the first signal had never once existed in all of history.
Thanks to that, Dang Seo-rin had learned just how comfortable and easy to mess around with a 'man with no sex drive' was... and just how damnably frustrating!
Only after meeting the Undertaker had she been able to learn it.
A madman among madmen who truly believed in platonic love and practiced it.
That was the Undertaker for you.
For someone who, now and then, harbored the desire to hold hands and do this and that, it sometimes made her feel needlessly like the greedy one, and wondering whether she was the only one feeling this way, honestly she'd felt a little, no, a lot hurt.
"Will you wait for me?"
"Uh, uh, uh..."
For the first time in her life, the Undertaker had stepped forward and made the appeal himself, and Dang Seo-rin's head spun. She'd been caught in an unexpected ambush.
Maybe that was why.
"...Mm. I'll wait."
The Dang Seo-rin who answered like that was flushed with all the embarrassment in the world.
A little later.
The walk over, they came back, and she sent the Undertaker up, and sitting alone in the hotel lobby, Dang Seo-rin blankly looked up at the chandelier.
She thought, dazed.
'Wh-what on earth is happening?'
How could Dang Seo-rin ever have guessed.
That the puppet master behind this whole turn of events was Seo Gyu.
* * *
Obsession.
To the Undertaker, it was an utterly unfamiliar hwadu[3].
But he was a man who knew nothing of giving up, and above all, a person who knew how to take another's advice seriously.
The Undertaker resolved to 'try' and 'make an effort' so that he 'could obsess over other people.'
Considering that, statistically, his effort tended to flow in the exact opposite direction, it was a truly strange thing.
In any case, as the first step of that effort...
"Yo-hwa."
"Ah, Teacher!"
The Undertaker sought out Cheon Yo-hwa.
"You called me out by myself. My goodness! To think you'd approach me first, before I even got the chance to make a move on you. Of course I'm okay with it! There, there. Shall we head to the room I reserved just for us, then?"
"That's not it. There's something I need to ask of you."
"Hm? What is it? If it's a request from you, Teacher, I could even track down One Piece for you[2]."
"The time capsule. Pandora's box."
The Undertaker said.
"That thing didn't actually disappear, did it?"
"..."
"It's an authority that was passed to you, so you can probably control it however you like, to some degree."
Taking advantage of everyone falling into confusion, Cheon Yo-hwa had haphazardly called a timeout, but in reality no such time limit existed.
The Undertaker, more versed in the Outer Gods' cursed objects than anyone, saw through Cheon Yo-hwa's lie in no time.
"Give it to me."
"Wh-what?"
"The memories held in Pandora's box. Open it right here, right now, so I can have them injected into me too."
"Mem... ories, you mean. Um, whose memories? You can pick and choose however you like, Teacher."
"All of them."
"..."
That's right.
The solution the Undertaker's effort had arrived at was simple.
"Hand over every single one of the memories that 'I' went through across every bad ending, without leaving even one out."
Can't manage obsession?
Then he just had to summon every last one of the 'selves' who had each obsessed over someone, one by one.
──Super Giga Undertaker, combination complete.
Footnotes:
[1] The handle alludes to a legendary (likely apocryphal) old Korean custom of abandoning elderly parents in the mountains to die; the term is used colloquially for casting aside or disposing of someone who has become a burden.
[2] One Piece is the long-running Japanese manga/anime by Eiichiro Oda, whose central plot revolves around the search for a legendary treasure also called the "One Piece." The joke is that she would hunt down that fabled, never-found prize for him.
[3] Hwadu refers to a Korean Seon Buddhist meditation phrase or question used as the focus of contemplation.
-x-X-x-
That Woman D VIII
──────
* * *
All at once, memories beyond the capacity allotted to a human came surging in like the sea, and the Undertaker's head exploded.
That sort of thing did not happen.
An explosion ending, in this day and age. What else could you call that but the worst.
"Kraaaaaaagh!"
Still, even if it was not the worst, what the Undertaker was tasting right now was the runner-up, one infinitely close to the worst.
"Hhuuugh! Hhaaaaaagh!"
"T, Teacher! Are you all right?! Why do you suddenly sound exactly like someone screaming while a torture awl gets jammed between their bones and scrapes the nerves between their joints?!"
"Si..."
"Si?"
"Sim Ah-ryeeeeon...!"
The Undertaker was pouring out the bloodless half of tears of blood. The missing blood, incidentally, was spraying out of his mouth-hole.
"To Ah-ryeon! That I! Th-that I loved her!"
"..."
"Memories of whispering that I loved her! Memories of the two of us running away together to protect our love! Hhuuugh! Khaaaaaaagh!"
Looking down at the Undertaker as he lay face-first on the floor and thrashed about, Cheon Yo-hwa was impressed. With whom? None other than herself.
A display ugly enough to cool even a thousand-year love.
Even after witnessing that desperate bug-wriggling from point-blank range, the thought that rose in Cheon Yo-hwa's heart was simple.
Cute.
Maybe it was just arithmetic. A thousand years? Her own love had already blown past that shelf life by tens of thousands of years.
Beaming, she crouched down.
She rested her elbows on her knees, propped her chin in both hands, looked down at the Undertaker like a sunflower, and said:
"Wow! Sim Ah-ryeon's boyfriend!"
"Khuuuuugh!"
"Guy with the OldManGoryeo villain!"
"Hhuuuuuuuugh!"
"Wait, so that means...! Wow, that is basically hearing, 'There goes Sim Ah-ryeon's husband'...!?"
"Wha! Whaat! Whaaaaaaat...!"
"To still go on loving such a pathetic man..."
"..."
"Teacher. Um."
The mood sank in an instant.
Cheon Yo-hwa was fully prepared to use the occasion to ram in a confession too.
It might seem strange that, after going to all the trouble of showing off a lunatic design, she was setting up a proposal in such an utterly moodless spot, but Cheon Yo-hwa's nose thought otherwise.
Life was all about timing.
As Cheon Yo-hwa saw it, this world was made out of a dating sim. At the very least, there was clearly some kind of barrier like that spread around the Undertaker.
Otherwise, why would she ever have lost to Yu Ji-won?
Power? Wealth? Cheon Yo-hwa held an overwhelming advantage in both.
And yet that dirt-poor domestic-abuse victim, serial-killer girl breadwinner had ended the spar with a single click.
"So, did you meet Mr. Matiz before you met me?"
It was proof that, in this world, victory and defeat were decided solely by how early you had formed a connection with the Undertaker.
Cheon Yo-hwa had absolutely no intention of ignoring a life lesson like that.
Especially when it was a lesson her past self had literally fired at her like a Spirit Bomb while destroying the universe. Even if she had wanted to ignore it, that would have been harder.
'Right now, Teacher... he just got injected with the memories of the bad endings. He's basically the same as having his personality updated.'
'In other words, the affection he builds from now on matters more than the affection the members have piled up so far!'
This was the full truth behind the scheme genius strategist Cheon Yo-hwa had been plotting since her previous life.
She was late. So she would forcibly line everyone back up on the same starting line.
What mattered here was the fact that the authority to manipulate Pandora's box rested with her.
Because if the Undertaker wanted to regain his memories, he absolutely had to stay near Cheon Yo-hwa, the owner of the time capsule.
Just like now.
Ah, farewell to the days of being nothing but a cackling cheetah.
At last, Cheon Yo-hwa smiled the smile of a racing hound. There was no one around. If she dropped the confession and pushed straight on to the next step, who would dare stop her?
Well, plenty of people would try. But this time, they were the ones due to taste the cheetah's humiliation.
"For a long time now, Teacher, I..."
And so Cheon Yo-hwa tried to cast the Imperius-class finishing spell called 'I've loved you.'
But her ambitious incantation failed halfway through.
The reason was simple. At some point, the other party had already stretched out a hand and covered her lips with his palm.
"...?"
Cheon Yo-hwa blinked.
She now understood exactly how a combining robot or a magical girl felt when interrupted in the middle of a transformation scene. It was deeply bewildering.
"Yo-hwa."
What was even more bewildering was what the Undertaker did next.
"I know what you are trying to say."
"..."
"Those memories I just recalled, maybe they are reality, and maybe they are illusions created by the simulation."
"..."
"Either way, I think it is too soon for the me of now to accept your feelings."
Cheon Yo-hwa felt as if her heart had dropped.
'N, no way.'
The truth was, all this time she had only been consciously running her happy circuits.
Strictly speaking, even if Cheon Yo-hwa had escaped the cheetah position, there was no guarantee that meant automatic victory.
There was another possibility.
'Am I... getting rejected?'
Yes.
Even after inheriting all the bad endings, there was still the possibility that the Undertaker would pass over her and choose one single person instead.
That possibility definitely existed too.
'N, no. No!'
'After I, after I gave up being human and dragged this fight all the way here!'
Cheon Yo-hwa's pupils shook wildly.
She wanted to scream, but she could not, because his palm was blocking her mouth.
"If I only said, wait for me, that would be me blurting things out without thinking about you. Yo-hwa, you are smart. You always have the habit of considering the worst possibility first."
"..."
"So that you will not doubt my words."
The Undertaker's face drew near.
Naturally, so did his lips.
His lips came closer and closer, then stopped with a faint sound. They had caught on the back of his own hand, the very hand that was covering the corner of Cheon Yo-hwa's mouth.
'Ah.'
She could not feel the touch of his lips.
Only the vibration.
An endlessly gentle knock passed through his hand from his lips.
"..."
Cheon Yo-hwa closed her eyes without realizing it.
Among the bad endings the time capsule had passed down, there were routes where the Undertaker ended up with Cheon Yo-hwa. Naturally, there had also been countless kisses.
Those memories went fumbling after the lips hidden beyond the palm.
If she cracked her eyes open just a little, she could feel his breath right in front of her.
When the hand-kiss, brief if brief and eternal if long, finally ended,
the Undertaker moved away.
"I am sorry. We finally came on this trip together, but this teacher needs to shut himself in his room for a while and take some time to sort out these memories. Will that be all right?"
"...Yes."
Cheon Yo-hwa answered.
Of course, if one wanted to describe things as close to the truth as possible, that sentence above needed revision. Cheon Yo-hwa had by no means performed the act of answering of her own free and independent will.
The answer had simply flowed out on its own.
And while answering, Cheon Yo-hwa stared up at the Undertaker with her mouth half open, like someone who had sat in a hot bath too long and melted half to pieces.
"Um... I'm actually really, really good at waiting."
Had there ever been a time when the tongue inside your mouth felt too hot? Cheon Yo-hwa felt exactly like that.
Seeing her face, the Undertaker smiled faintly.
"I haven't sorted it all out yet. But the things you put in the time capsule and showed me, every one of them is a precious memory and treasured recollection to me."
"Ah..."
"The things we failed to gather and left behind, you picked them up and brought them back. Thank you very much, Yo-hwa."
"No... that was my own greed too."
"Even helping someone out of goodwill is difficult, and yet you help me even through greed. Meeting you was one of the blessings of my life."
"..."
Cheon Yo-hwa's face turned red. The springs of the brain that usually hummed along so energetically were, for now, on strike.
They seemed to exchange a few more words after that, but she could not remember them well.
Only after a long time had passed since the Undertaker left the room did Cheon Yo-hwa feel as if her internal cooling system had started working again.
Blaaank...
She stared up at the ceiling for ages, then suddenly muttered, dear god.
'...What kind of monster did I just wake up?'
That monster possessed the experience of staying together until death with the owners of especially twisted and warped hearts on this planet, Yu Ji-won, Jeong Ye-ji, Sim Ah-ryeon, Oh Dok-seo, Noh Do-hwa, and the rest.
It was the arrival of the most terrifying experienced rookie.
* * *
"A, ah! Guild Leader!"
They ran into each other in the hotel hallway.
"I just finished washing up! And a second ago I swear I heard somebody calling out for me from somewhere, and th, that was you too, Guild Leader, right? In my room... huh?"
"I'm glad you're alive, Ah-ryeon."
"Huh?"
A hug.
"When this trip is over and we go back, let us raise a puppy."
"Huh..."
Pat, pat.
"Did it hurt?"
"No! N, not at all!"
"I'm sorry."
"Hheh heh... if anything, I liked it. I've experienced real death now, right? There was even somebody who cut off an ear just to experience something sort of like that. And getting strangled by you felt surprisingly nice too..."
"You would get along well with Noh Do-hwa."
"Huh? N, Noh Do-hwa was not the one getting strangled, she was the one doing the strangling, was she not?"
"If you want to observe the abyss, you have to accept being observed by the abyss as well. That is the way of the world."
"Hhuuugh...! Inspiration is suddenly flooding me! I need to hurry up and write an adults-only short about a character named Ye Do-hwa who looks suspiciously like Management Captain Noh Do-hwa and post it on SG Net... Ah. Right. It is gone now."
"Sometimes I wonder whether Do-hwa wasn't the ruler who tolerated freedom of speech most generously in all of human history."
Noisy chatter.
"Right. This Guild Leader is going to shut himself in his room for a few days and sort through some memories. Will you wait for me?"
"Yes! I will hold back!"
Leaping over the iron wall called Sim Ah-ryeon, who had just come back from bathing and was even wearing a swimsuit, with absurd ease,
the Undertaker sat alone on the floor of the guest room.
That lofty cross-legged figure looked exactly like a supreme master entering Closed Retreat.
"Obsession."
He muttered to himself from time to time.
There was no one around to hear anyway, and he wanted to focus calmly and wholly on the hwadu.
"What is obsession?"
At present, countless streams of inner demon were mingling inside his heart.
If one judged by memory alone:
Just now, he had exchanged the proposal of a lifetime with Noh Do-hwa in a wedding dress.
Just now, he had personally strangled Sim Ah-ryeon to death while she stood on the verge of being annihilated by Go Yuri.
Just now, the Saintess who had said she would stop time and go buy some ice cream for a moment never came back, and he was killed by Go Yuri.
Just now, just now, just now, just now...
'Which one of those is me?'
His memories had twisted and clouded together. If the heart were compared to a stream, then his heart right now was undoubtedly closer to muddy water.
'All of this is me.'
If someone had a status window ability and looked into the Undertaker's heart right now, they would recoil in horror.
[affection - Noh Do-hwa: MAX], [affection - Sim Ah-ryeon: MAX], [affection - Jeong Ye-ji: MAX], [affection - Oh Dok-seo: MAX], and so on. The affection he held for every member had broken through its limit one after another.
Normally, something like this was impossible.
No matter how much a person talked about equal love with their whole body, how could there possibly be no tilt in the heart depending on time and place?
And yet that bizarre event had happened.
The Undertaker was a romantic madman. Whenever he loved, he loved with complete sincerity, and in every bad ending, flawlessly, he lived only for the one before his eyes.
When those separately divided bad endings were gathered together...
the result was that his love for the leads of every ending had reached a perfect apex.
"What is obsession?"
He reversed the direction of the hwadu and chose to swim through the raging torrent of murk.
In other words.
"When would I become obsessed?"
He imagined it.
Imagination and memory were, in essence, the same.
Therefore, the Undertaker was as outstanding at imagining as he was at remembering, and the things he imagined had a texture almost equal to reality.
'What if Ye-ji dated someone other than me?'
Until just a day ago,
even if he had heard the news that the other person was dating someone else, not the slightest dark shadow would have fallen over the Undertaker's heart.
What darkness? On the contrary, the Undertaker would have been happier than anyone and supported and blessed them in every possible way, thinking that the comrade he treasured had finally found a partner.
But now?
"..."
Now that he had absorbed all those memories, of Ye-ji rejoicing and blushing by herself because she thought Time Stop had worked, of struggling to bring over drinking snacks she had never once made before in her life, of the two of them pressing their lips together alone on the beach?
'I can't...'
The Undertaker of now,
'I don't think I can allow it.'
Squirm, squirm.
Inside his heart, something.
'I'm to be excluded from Ye-ji's life?'
'Instead of seeing her every day whenever I want, I'll only see her sometimes. Or maybe not even sometimes, maybe I won't get to see her at all?'
'There will come a moment when I no longer know what food Ye-ji likes, what movies she likes, or where she wants to travel?'
Squirm, squirm, squirm.
Something swirled violently inside his heart.
'No.'
Darkness.
It was overwhelming darkness.
'No. I hate it. I would hate it even if I died. No, truly. I would rather die.'
'My life needs her. Her life needs me too. Is there any need for doubt there?'
'And even if someone raised a doubt, it would not be my mouth saying it, nor Ye-ji's. So what possible difference would it make?'
The dark inner demon raged wildly.
'There is none. And even if there is, I will make it so there is not.'
'Even if the world is destroyed, it is not more important than Ye-ji alone.'
And it was hardly just the Saintess.
In his cross-legged posture, the Undertaker carefully immersed himself in imagining the members with whom he had shared love in the bad endings promising their whole lives to other people.
If this method of Closed Retreat needed a name, it could be called the so-called Adoption Mind Art. Or perhaps the NTR Mind Art.
Immersed in the Adoption Mind Art, he ran through every member's case one after another.
'No.' 'Absolutely not.' 'No matter what happens.' 'I can never allow it.'
Only then
was the Undertaker able to face the darkness lurking inside his heart.
"...I see."
Only after an entire night had passed did he open his eyes and mutter:
"As expected, Seo Gyu was right. Love is accompanied by obsession. I am the same. I acted lofty, as if I had become some transcendent immortal, but was there not such deep obsession within me all along?"
It was such a distorted enlightenment that if Seo Gyu heard it from across the Pacific, he would have blurted out, Me?
But sadly, Seo Gyu was not in America. That was how puppet masters were. Their plans sounded grand enough, but in the end they always failed.
"I can never give up...!"
The Undertaker rose.
Usually, for a one-to-many relationship to exist, it was normal for the many to cling to the one.
Otherwise, there was no way a one-to-many relationship could have formed in the first place.
But here, now, perhaps for the first time in history, a miracle had been born.
"Not a single one!"
A reversal of obsession, or obsession flowing both ways.
In the formula of 1:many, the 1 also obsessed over the many, and what was more, obsessed over every single one of them so equally that it made no difference at all...
A truly insane equation had been born.
Responsibility for creating such a monster could probably be laid at the feet of Oh Dok-seo, Infinite Metagame, Cheon Yo-hwa, big-sis version, and Go Yuri, but it would not help much.
They would probably just keep repeating the same answer.
"I didn't know it would turn out like this..."
Alas.
People often described a male character obsessed with love as an obsessive man.
But if one called the monster born here and now an obsessive man, it would be an insult to obsessive men across the country, across all dimensions.
Therefore.
'From now on, I will live for all of you.'
Not an obsessive psycho-top, but just a plain crazy obsessive man.
And off he went.