Chapter 133 - The Doomsayer V

7

When I opened my eyes, leaving one more death along the timeline of my memories, I was in the Busan Station waiting hall.

The familiar 399 survivors came into view... If only I could have said that.

Apparently, even the Busan Station waiting hall had not escaped the chilling winds of mass layoffs. This time, only one person welcomed me.

"Oh. Guild Leader. Are you awake?"

"... Mm."

"Here's some Ceylon tea. When you get up in a bit, have a sip."

Go Yori was sitting on a bench in the waiting hall. I was lying on that same bench.

I did not know it at the time, but there was such a thing as the grammar of genre.

[Same bench] [One person sitting] [One person lying down]. Combine these three concepts, and they invariably produce one inevitable result, transcending time and space.

In short, Go Yori was performing a lap pillow on me.

Pink hair hung before my eyes like clusters of acacia blossoms. A faint scent like bath salts drifted from her, a fruity fragrance like an apple briefly dipped in cold water and lifted out again.

"..."

I reflexively started to sit up, then stopped.

Was it because I had used the forbidden technique [Friend Shield] a moment ago? I felt a little guilty. Astonishingly, my heart apparently still had room for the emotion of "feeling sorry toward Go Yori."

Besides, I couldn't run away from the being before me anyway.

"Did I die?"

"Yes. And no."

Go Yori swept her hair back beneath her ear. It swayed gently like bellflowers.

"Yes, in the sense that you met your death at the hands of a [Bad Ending]. You died, Guild Leader. But it's difficult to call it a true death. People can't die in dreams."

"... I see."

Dying in this unconscious world would not trigger regression. In reality, I was still enjoying a sound sleep surrounded by tutorial fairies.

Useful information.

"How did you get out? There was practically no way to fight that enemy."

"Hmm. Well, trying to fight him like you did would certainly make things difficult. But I don't go out of my way to antagonize beings like that, you know? If I want to get away, I can do so quite easily."

Fair enough. All hail the brainwashing hypnosis beam.

I sighed.

"That old geezer was too powerful."

"..."

"You said this unconscious world shows us what we fear, didn't you? Yes. The truth is, I was afraid of that old geezer."

It wasn't that I shied away from Emit Schopenhauer as an individual. He was my comrade-in-arms.

It was just...

"What would have happened if he hadn't gone on vacation and had stayed by my side...? I've imagined that a few times."

IF. A what-if scenario.

The route where Old Man Scho never went on vacation.

"The old geezer has a tender heart. Even if he hadn't gone on vacation, his love for his wife and his despair would have remained coiled in a corner of his heart. If he'd forced himself to endure it, forced himself onto the battlefield, saying he ought to try to save the world with me anyway..."

Wouldn't he have broken someday?

There were so very many dangerous moments.

For example, when we defeated Gapless, the God of Alienation. Gapless shows people an illusion of their "most perfect worldline."

Naturally, Old Man Scho would have been drawn into days spent living happily with his wife.

I had managed to turn away from Dang Seorin, Noh Doha, and the Saintess and escape... But could Old Man Scho have escaped?

Might he instead have fallen to become Gapless's new apostle?

For example, when it was revealed that the tutorial fairies were actually dream demons. Negotiate with the dream demons, and you can manipulate your dreams however you please.

Wouldn't that, too, have been a temptation Old Man Scho could scarcely refuse?

For example, when the being before me began taking a serious "interest" in Old Man Scho.

Like the nightmare we'd just encountered, might he have succumbed to the illusion and delusion that he had reunited with his wife in reality, becoming a villain who acted solely for Go Yori?

Your greatest comrade becomes your worst enemy.

It was a common development.

"Thinking it over from all those angles, yes. Perhaps booking a vacation and leaving with his wife, as he has now, was actually a stroke of genius."

"..."

"A headache dead. A headache alive. Really, that old man hasn't been the slightest damn help in my life."

The waiting hall was quiet.

As though hundreds, thousands of years had passed in an instant, scrub trees sprouted here and there across its floor. Through the holes in the roof and ceiling, aged sunlight dripped like candle wax.

Go Yori did not answer.

She simply listened to me in silence, wearing a faintly troubled smile. As though this "quiet listening" were precisely the form of comfort I currently desired.

"Guild Leader."

After a stretch of silence, Go Yori whispered.

"You can feel good whenever you like, you know?"

Her whisper carried the scent of green apples.

"Life is like countless dreams anyway. People simply call the last dream they have reality. You are no different from a ghost wandering through dreams for eternity, seeking a reality you can accept. An undertaker who buries each of his dreams when it becomes a corpse, then moves on. This place is an interlude in which the corpses you buried come back to life and dance."

"Dreams within dreams, World After the Bad Ending, Parallel Worlds, the collective unconscious. Concepts along those lines turned into anomalies and unfolded into this void, I suppose."

"And you can become the master of that void."

"..."

"I'll help you, Guild Leader."

Go Yori's thumb stroked my cheekbone.

She gazed down into my eyes like a child peering from above into a very, very deep well.

"Help? You, help me?"

"Yes. This isn't only your unconscious, Guild Leader. It's the unconscious of all humanity. What do you think would become possible if you could wield it however you wished?"

She breathed out softly. Apple-scented breath settled on the corneas of my eyes.

My face tickled.

Each time Go Yori moved her lips, her breath came closer.

"You could force your dreams upon every other human being."

"..."

"That's right. Dreams already past, which no one else can experience. Scenes of destruction only you remember. You could share them with other people, with your precious people, with all humanity."

"..."

"Show them your life."

Suddenly, the fruity scent softened and decayed into the fragrance of alcohol. Wine brewed from apples.

Like petals blooming and spreading, the wine fragrance in Go Yori's breath spilled luxuriantly into our surroundings in an instant.

"How much you suffered, how hard you ran around for others, how wise and powerful you were."

"..."

"Make them suffer from your suffering, devote themselves to your devotion, marvel at your abilities."

From pink lips parted like petals, her voice flowed thick as honey.

"You can become everyone's dream. A dream everyone dreams. If we call that a myth, then you would become a single myth, blossoming like a miracle at the end of this age."

"Surely you aren't saying this because you think I'll nod in agreement?"

"No."

Go Yori smiled with her eyes.

"Not yet."

Her index finger pressed firmly against the tip of my chin.

"But the more your suffering matures, won't that head bow a little further?"

"..."

"Please don't grow sweet so carelessly, Guild Leader. If you keep becoming so delicious, I find myself wanting to tear a piece off before I know it."

Those words, murmured right before my face, seemed to have truly come from Go Yori—and also seemed to be nothing more than my own illusion whispering.

Whatever she said, it was impossible to gauge her sincerity.

She called me a ghost of dreams. But in truth, she was the mirage whose breath and flesh were composed entirely of dreams.

Perhaps that was the tragedy allotted to the being called Go Yori.

Looking up into her red wells, the thought suddenly came to me.

8

A week's worth of nights passed.

Offering up my neck to an old comrade had been quite a shock, but a few periods of rest fully restored my mental state.

I tossed back my Ceylon tea and farmed a silver bell from the souvenir shop. Go Yori watched me with amusement.

"What are you planning to do? As you said, Guild Leader, that bad ending is an enemy you can't fight."

"Bad endings have their uses."

JINGLE.

The silver bell wrapped around my wrist gave a soft ring. My personal item, engraved even into my unconscious (pre-apocalypse price: 9,900 won), felt particularly special today.

"The old geezer will return someday."

"Pardon?"

"More precisely, I'll make him return. The company's co-CEO ran off to be happy all by himself. I've got to drag him back, don't I? The problem was that even if I did drag him back, he'd have to be called an overhyped dud for the time being."

Old Man Scho's potential was tremendous.

Only his potential was tremendous.

When he was alive, the Korean Peninsula Awakened Federation still couldn't even defeat Meteor Strike.

Can you believe it? Meteor Strike. Even that anomaly, which now scarcely deserves to be called a midboss, would have prompted Old Man Scho to blurt out, "Wait, they actually made this thing beatable?"

Old Man Scho's time had stopped at the twenty-third run. From my perspective, that was a past over several thousand years old.

This was why, however successful or accomplished you were, you needed to keep adapting to new eras. Wouldn't it be awkward to bring out the Epic of Gilgamesh now and declare, "Everyone! This is the hottest genre fiction these days!"?

"Originally, once Old Man Scho returned, I intended to spend a while training that geezer and nothing else, like a man possessed. Well, his talent is real, so I figured a light two hundred years or so of training would let him more or less pull his own weight."

"Ohh."

"But hasn't this unconscious world given us such a wonderful answer key?"

Go Yori tilted her head.

"An answer key?"

Yes. An answer key.

I promptly finished preparing to face Old Man Scho's bad ending, his Fallen alter version, commonly known as the Sword Demon, again.

As before, the Sword Demon was wandering through devastated Seoul, dragging along a construction-site steel pipe without a scrap of style.

Really, wasn't this fellow single-handedly squandering all the style and dignity of the awakened?

To safeguard their dignity and character, I, the Undertaker, had no choice but to step forward.

I breathed in.

Then let it all out with every ounce of strength I had.

"Hey, you National Socialist German Workers' Party member bastard!"

"..."

He stopped short.

Racist hate speech that would send any normally educated German with common sense into a fit (excluding the 1930s) rang out thunderously.

For reference, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, commonly called the NSDAP, was rather like the awakened: its alias was better known than its real name. Nazi.

Also for reference, Old Man Scho was a man who had voted for the Social Democratic Party of Germany from the moment he was born until the day the world ended. His blood ran very red.

The German people had produced both Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. While bloody battles between fascists and commies were merely ideological struggles in other countries, in Germany, hatred of one's own kind entered the mix.

Even after falling to become an anomaly, a true revolutionary fighter would never betray his ideology.

"Take a look at this!"

FLAP.

I waved an old banner.

"...!"

At the sight of the symbol drawn proudly upon it, the Sword Demon's eyes wavered wildly.

卍.

In the East, it was simply a character symbolizing Buddhism, but a Westerner steeped in Occidentalism could hardly understand the Buddha's profound teachings.

The "Karl" DNA slumbering nobly in Old Man Scho's veins began to exhibit an allergic hypersensitive immune response to the sound "Hit."

"Uaaaaaaaagh!"

The German-made super-commie Swordmaster roared. If only his aura had been red, it would have been perfect.

Its power, however, was beyond question.

As befitted an ideology programmed from its birth to destroy the entire antiquated world, Old Man Scho's sword swings—no, steel-pipe swings—destroyed the city in an instant.

But the Sword Demon's hand, about to cut me down, was suddenly forced to slam on the brakes.

"...! ...!"

Clay sculptures stood in a row where his aura was headed.

Busts faithfully reproducing the faces of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg!

The Sword Demon hesitated like a bugged NPC. He wore the expression of a Japanese Kirishitan ordered to step on a wooden image of Jesus to prove he was not a Christian.

Indeed, to this German-made old man, those two sculptures were as good as sacred images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

Send sword aura left, and Mr. Marx would shatter; attack right, and Ms. Luxemburg would be smashed.

"U-uaaaaagh...!"

My preparations did not stop there.

Just in case, I had displayed busts of every German left-wing politician I knew: Kurt Schumacher, Willy Brandt, Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, and so on.

Whichever faction Old Man Scho supported (I had no interest in German politics, but the left unifying its factions was nothing more than a fantasy, an anomaly), one of them was bound to hit home!

That's right.

I, the Undertaker, had spent a whole week hanging around the Busan Station waiting hall just to show him this.

Thanks to a career of throwing myself wholeheartedly into pointless pursuits during every vacation run, my sculpting skills were quite impressive.

"You think you're the only one who can perform a Domain Expansion, old man? This is my Domain Expansion."

"Uuuuaaaagh..."

"I've hidden sculptures throughout this city like land mines. Welcome to my Reality Marble. The Revolutionary Space of Red Slaughter."

"Uaaaaaaaaagh...!"

Come on, you commie old geezer.

Cry and prove your (ideological) purity.