Chapter 149 - The Conqueror

1

At last, my 593rd run.

After dragging Oh Dokseo out of the Busan Station Tutorial Dungeon and forging an alliance with the Saintess, I immediately launched the operation.

The enemy in today's episode was none other than the God of Alienation.

There was no time to take things easy.

"I'm sorry, Dokseo. Normally, I'd put considerable effort into building a stronger rapport with you. But this time, we need to hurry a little."

"Oh, okay..."

Oh Dokseo sounded distinctly uncomfortable.

Naturally. Any normal person would feel a little frightened to discover that a regressor from a novel already knew them inside out, when they themselves had effectively transmigrated into that book.

A world ruined by anomalies. The knowledge that she had recently read about this situation in a novel. The confidence that knowledge gave her.

But I had shattered that confidence the moment the tutorial began. Oh Dokseo could no longer reap much of the advantage offered by <Omniscient Regressor's Viewpoint>.

How could she not feel anxious?

Oh Dokseo displayed leadership when dealing with people she regarded as complete strangers.

With acquaintances she considered close, however, she exposed her weaknesses to an almost excessive degree.

She was a girl who lived with an imbalance in her heart.

And on Oh Dokseo's warped scales, I occupied a position of exceedingly delicate weight.

A "character in a work of fiction" who was neither a complete stranger nor someone she had yet grown close to.

That was the consequence of all but forcibly dragging her out of the Busan Station dungeon instead of leisurely clearing the tutorial together and building a bond.

"So, um... Mr. Undertaker?"

"You can just call me Mister."

"No, calling you Mister when we've only just met is a little... You're not even old enough for that yet... sir. Anyway, why did you drag me here?"

My heart gave the faintest twinge.

It happened every time.

"Dokseo. Have you ever heard of something called speedrunning?"

"Huh? Speedrunning?"

Most people play games to enjoy them.

But plenty of people in this world love speed itself. The hurry-hurry mentality deeply embedded in Korean DNA is something you find all over the world when it comes to games.

-A little faster.

-Clear it faster than anyone else!

Speedrunning. Also known as RTA.

A style of play whose supreme objective is to clear a game as quickly as possible.

Some even use bugs in the game to shave off time.

To take an example from my own experience, making the hate potion and the Savior anomaly collide would qualify as a kind of glitch exploit.

Countless gamers fail over and over again to leave behind a single line in the speedrun records: the achievement of being "the fastest player in the world."

I was no different.

"Oh—"

Oh Dokseo looked up as though searching her memory.

"Now that you mention it, I think I've seen gameplay videos like that on YouTube. I think I watched some American finish the Community Center achievement in Stardew Valley in two hours... sir."

"That's right."

I took out a laptop.

"In this world, there's a God of Alienation-class anomaly called the Logout Game."

Then I explained.

As briefly as possible, but in enough detail for her to understand what sort of God of Alienation the Logout Game was, using only words and sentences tailored to Oh Dokseo.

This explanation, too, was the perfected result of several rounds of testing.

Every so often, Oh Dokseo exclaimed in horror, "What?" or "No—" or "How could an anomaly like that..." Nevertheless, in less than ten minutes, she had gained a reasonably clear understanding of the situation.

She looked down at the laptop on the table.

"Then this laptop...?"

"It's an item the God of Alienation left me. A special reward for a player who kept struggling right up until the server was about to shut down. And it's also the only clue to defeating the Logout Game."

CLICK

I opened Notepad, the only program installed on the laptop.

From the 135th run, when the [Operator of All Things at Play] first destroyed the world, to the current 593rd run, the sentence written in Notepad had never changed.

[ W h a t I s T h i s W o r l d ? ]

A simple sentence.

But not an easy question.

Oh Dokseo furrowed her brows.

"What is this world...? What is this supposed to be?"

"A battle over who gets to define our world."

"What?"

"Listen carefully. That God of Alienation defined this world as a 'game.' God of Alienation-class anomalies all try to define the world in their own way to begin with."

I spoke calmly.

"Defining the world requires power to match. To prove that this world was a game, the [Operator of All Things at Play] introduced all sorts of mechanisms: status windows, leveling up, a logout system, and so on."

"Oh... really?"

"Those mechanisms finally convince people to accept that 'this world is a game.' I describe that as 'being bewitched by an anomaly.'"

The Magical Girl Council called the same phenomenon kamikakushi—being spirited away.

"In other words, anomalies can never deny the mechanisms they themselves created. The moment they abandon those, they also lose the magic that bewitches people."

"Oh... I think I'm starting to get it...?"

"The [Operator of All Things at Play] defined itself as a game operator. That means it can only do things a game operator is allowed to do."

For example, why had Sim Aryeon alone been able to resist the Logout Game even a little?

While even people with extraordinary mental fortitude, like Noh Doha and the Saintess, were helplessly being "logged out," how had Sim Aryeon been the exception among us?

The reason was simple.

["R-reality? Fulfillllment? You're saying you don't need the internet because you're happy right nowww? Are you an idiot? Guild Leader, are you seriously an idiot?"]

["Here, inside this smartphone screen, is reality! It's the truth!"]

Sim Aryeon had not treated the Logout Game as merely a game.

Just as she freely projected her sense of self into her activities on SG Net, she had become wholeheartedly immersed in the Logout Game, which stained the world with void.

For Sim Aryeon, quitting SG Net was impossible. Even in the utopia Dang Seorin had created in Busan, she had kept participating in the community until the very end.

Likewise, once Sim Aryeon started a game, "quitting" that game was impossible, too.

To her, doing so was no different from dying in reality.

And so even the [Operator of All Things at Play] could not eliminate Sim Aryeon.

It could not forcibly delete the account of a user so deeply invested in its game without justification or cause.

Like every anomaly, even a God of Alienation always had a void spot.

"I was someone who denied that this world was a game until the very end."

"You, Mr. Undertaker?"

"... Yes. This isn't quite the right analogy, but from the [Operator of All Things at Play]'s perspective, I'm a nasty troll who keeps review-bombing its game, saying it's a boring-as-fuck piece of shit."

An enemy the God of Alienation was determined to eliminate.

So the anomaly had responded with something along the lines of, "Then let's see you make a game yourself."

That was what the text in the laptop's Notepad file meant.

"[If this world is not a game, then what is this world?] To put it precisely, that's what the God of Alienation is asking me."

"Ooooh..."

Oh Dokseo's eyes lit up.

I wanted to activate [Mind Reading] and read her thoughts, but I restrained myself. I had promised her before that I would never do it again.

"The contest between the God of Alienation and me is simple. If I type [This world is a game], I lose. It would be the same as raising a white flag and surrendering."

"And the win condition?"

"To give an answer even the God of Alienation can accept. No—an answer it has no choice but to accept."

And so far, I had repeatedly failed to type that "correct answer" into the laptop.

[This world is a material reality.]

[This world repeats forever.]

[This world contains no anomalies.]

And so on.

I had tried writing various answers, but the God of Alienation accepted none of them as correct. No change could be detected.

Simply forcing my wishes through with power was meaningless.

Just as I could resist the Logout Game, the God of Alienation could resist the regressor.

Neither of us was strong enough to impose ourselves on the other, but we were both strong enough to keep the other from unilaterally imposing their will on us.

A draw. A tie. A stalemate.

"But Dokseo, your appearance gave me hope."

"Huh?"

Oh Dokseo startled.

"M-me?"

"Yes. I'm a regressor, and you're something close to a transmigrator into a book. In fiction, both occupy a kind of 'exceptional position.' In other words, we're close to being protagonists. Even if we aren't the protagonists, we have enough narrative weight that we'd almost certainly be considered major characters."

"..."

"Which makes a trick like this possible."

TAP TAP

I tapped away at the laptop's keyboard.

A black wave of letters flowed from my fingertips across the pure white Notepad file.

[This world is a 'speedrun' gameplay stream.]

Oh Dokseo murmured blankly.

"A speedrun gameplay stream...?"

"Since you've seen something similar on YouTube, this should be easy to understand."

I pointed at Oh Dokseo.

"Dokseo. You're the 'protagonist' character of this game."

Then I pointed at myself.

"I'm the 'player' who controls you, the protagonist character, through a computer."

"..."

"Character and player. Sometimes they're regarded as one, but strictly speaking, they're always separate. What they do have in common is that both are treated as 'exceptional beings' within the game world."

"I'm the protagonist. And... you're the player controlling me, Mr. Undertaker."

"That's right."

I nodded.

"The God of Alienation defined this world as 'a world inside a game where only characters exist.' That's why people logged out so readily. They were bewitched by the anomaly into thinking they weren't dying as players—they were simply logging out of their characters."

"..."

"We need to refute that strategy head-on. You, Dokseo, the character, and I, the player, must exist simultaneously. In other words, this isn't a world populated solely by 'logged-in' characters—"

"... It's a world where players who can 'log out' at any time—real human beings, in other words—also exist. Characters and players coexist. That's how you're trying to define the world, Mr. Undertaker."

I smiled.

"You're quick to catch on. Exactly."

I showed her a drawing I had prepared beforehand.

"Whether you watch on a computer monitor or a smartphone screen, a 'gameplay stream' generally looks like this."

In short, the drawing looked like this:

[Game Screen]

[Game Screen] [Streamer's Face]

[Game Screen] [Streamer's Face]

A format commonly seen on YouTube.

"The streamer's face and upper body appear in the bottom-right or bottom-left corner, while the game plays out on the rest of the screen."

"Yeah."

"Naturally, the streamer is the player. The person inside the game screen is only a character. But the important point here is the very fact that 'characters and players coexist in the format of a gameplay stream.'"

"..."

"If we define this world as a game, as the God of Alienation does, there's no way to resist being logged out. But if we can successfully define it as a 'gameplay stream' rather than a 'game'... we can neutralize the God of Alienation."

I folded up the drawing.

"It should be a familiar format to you, too, even though you mostly read novels. 'Constellation fiction' takes this form."

"... Right. Omniscient Regressor's Viewpoint was constellation fiction, too."

"What do you say, Dokseo? Will you help me defeat the [Operator of All Things at Play]?"

I held out my hand.

Before Oh Dokseo could take it on reflex, I told her what needed to be said in advance.

"This won't be an easy fight."

"..."

"You'll have to follow my instructions as the player, Dokseo. And those instructions will be quite difficult. There will be plenty of frightening and revolting things along the way. Fighting a God of Alienation is truly, truly hard."

Oh Dokseo fell silent.

"But this is the best scenario you've come up with, Mr. Undertaker... Mm. Mister. Right?"

"... So far."

"Then I'll trust you."

Oh Dokseo took my hand.

"Let's clear this crappy game together."

"..."

I slowly nodded.

At that moment:

[The fastest speedrun in the world. Let's begin.]

Oh Dokseo flinched. Blinking, she looked around, going, "Huh? Huh?" But there was no one around us.

An utterly emotionless voice.

It was, of course, the Saintess's Telepathy.

[The game I'll be tackling this time is known as the Logout Game. It was made by a game developer with the strange name Operator of All Things at Play.]

But I had deliberately not arranged for Oh Dokseo to meet the Saintess.

In this, the 593rd run, the version of <Omniscient Regressor's Viewpoint> Oh Dokseo had read had not yet reached the run where she met the Saintess, either.

So to her, the voice in her ears would truly sound like "a constellation narrating a gameplay stream."

"Uh, uhh—Mister, what's this...?"

I smiled.

"Didn't I tell you?"

[The game has plenty of problems, but that certainly won't stop me from achieving the fastest clear.]

"We're streaming a game right now."

[Of the available characters, Oh Dokseo, who has the 'book transmigrator' trait, has excellent potential despite her unremarkable stats at present. She's the best choice for a speedrun.]

"Dokseo. I've made a great many preparations for this run."

The Saintess's voice drifted softly down.

[Logout Game speedrun.]

[Let's get going.]