Chapter 18 - The Companion I

1

Let us talk about Dang Seorin, guild leader of Three Thousand Worlds.

"There’s a vicious gleam in your eyes."

"..."

"You’re that person, aren’t you? Practically the only survivor of Busan Station. The eccentric who’s always going around asking people strange questions."

I first met Dang Seorin in my fourth run. Unfortunately, I had yet to acquire [Perfect Recall] back then. That came in my fifth run.

So there may be slight inaccuracies in my recollection of our first meeting. No, I simply hate to admit it—there are bound to be errors. It happened more than a thousand years ago, after all.

"Your name?"

"... Undertaker. It’s an alias."

"Someone who goes around burying people? Not bad. A person’s depth depends on how many corpses they’ve buried in their heart."

Perhaps Dang Seorin said there was a sharp gleam in my eyes, not a vicious one. Perhaps she addressed me with casual familiarity rather than polite distance. It might have rained that day, or it might not have. I think I heard running water, but that may only have been the water flowing through my heart.

Even so, I can clearly recall the atmosphere of that moment, the contours of the air. To live, we must breathe not only the oxygen drifting before our eyes, but also the air of a past that has already flowed away.

"What do you say? Want to join our guild?"

"What’s the guild called?"

"Three Thousand Worlds. Three Thousand for short. My personal ambition is to recruit three thousand awakened someday. Undertaker. Help me. I need your strength to defeat Tenlegs."

The person who accounted for some share of the air I breathed smiled and offered her hand. At the time, I had neither a reason nor the luxury to refuse it.

"Oh, but everyone who joins our guild has to wear a pointed hat, wherever they are."

"... A pointed hat?"

"Yes. You know the hats witches wear in fairy tales? That’s our guild’s symbol. You have to carry a broomstick, too. You haven’t had lunch yet, right? I know a great little place nobody else knows. I’ll take you there to celebrate your joining."

"I withdraw my membership."

I could not withdraw. The best I managed was to replace the broom with a sword cane later on.

Dang Seorin was shrewd and stubborn. She also knew the local dining scene inside out. People called her the Witch of the Train Station, the founder of Spell-Song Chanting, and the Solitary Gourmet. ... On second thought, I may have been the only one who used that last nickname.

Of course, there was another title I used far more often. Why hide it? Once, she was my guild leader.

2

It may sound like a joke now, but at the very beginning of my life as a regressor—before my tenth run—there was a boss monster that stood like a wall of lamentation in the path of Korea’s awakened.

"Wait. What’s that?"

"Uh, uhhh... It’s coming this way!"

Tenlegs. According to the anomaly classification system later established by a wiki collective called the Library Society, its threat level was city-class (Polis). Designation: ‘Crawling Baby Cthulhu.’

"Holy shit! How is it that fast?"

"It’s Cthulhu! Cthulhu!"

"What the fuck is... The alert! Sound the fucking alert first, asshole!"

Opinions differed on the origin of the name Tenlegs. The leading theory was that it got its name because, where its legs should have been, dozens upon hundreds of things resembling human arms writhed like tentacles instead.

Personally, however, I favor the theory that ‘that fucking piece of shit’ somehow got mangled into ‘Ten-fucking-legs.’ That was how much despair Tenlegs, the Korean Peninsula’s first boss monster, brought us.

"We have to kill that thing to reclaim the land south of the Han River and push our two divided fronts back up to the Military Demarcation Line."

Dang Seorin did not despair. More precisely, she rallied the despairing awakened, formed a guild alliance, and was elected its leader. You might call it the Anti-Tenlegs Coalition.

The difference between it and the Anti-Dong Zhuo Coalition in Romance of the Three Kingdoms was that, unlike Yuan Shao, courtesy name Benchu, Dang Seorin was an extremely capable leader.

"Undertaker. Lead the other guilds’ elites on the front line and keep Tenlegs pinned down for as long as you can."

"Understood."

Once we learned of Old Man Scho’s existence, he led the combat specialists. Until then, they had to make do with me on the foremost line. That should give you some idea of how pathetic the awakened were back then. Oh, and naturally, while I was a member of Three Thousand, I spoke respectfully to Dang Seorin.

"My adjutant died yesterday, so I’m feeling a bit shaky myself... But I’ll give it a try. How many minutes do you need me to hold out?"

"Find a way to give me thirty minutes. I’ll prepare a grand spell and back up the strike team."

"Understood." I nodded. "That should be easy."

It was not easy.

GR҉O҈҈҈҉O҉W҉҈҈R҈҉!

Tenlegs roared. Exactly two minutes after the battle began, one of its tentacles punched an extra hole through my fucking head. What could I do? Once the Gyeongbu Expressway has been laid through the middle of your brain, even a regressor has no choice but to fucking die quietly.

Lasting two minutes was an achievement in itself. The other awakened had their heads harvested in the blink of an eye. The creature’s skill with a scythe would have had autumn farmers salivating. At least I held out until the end before becoming another head of rice alongside Dang Seorin.

End of run four.

Start of run five.

"Undertaker. Lead the other guilds’ elites on the front line and keep Tenlegs pinned down for as long as you can."

"That’ll be fucking difficult."

Instead of putting on a brave face in front of my guild leader, I decided to be a little more honest. Dang Seorin’s eyes widened.

"Difficult?"

"Yes."

"I thought adding you to the alliance forces we’ve already assembled would give us enough strength to fight a delaying action. Is there something wrong with the data?"

"The data is correct. That bastard Tenlegs is hiding its strength."

What was the world coming to? Playing the secretly overpowered weakling was supposed to be my job as a regressor, not that goddamn boss mob’s.

"The legs it normally displays aren’t all it has. More legs can shoot out of its body like tentacles at any moment. Honestly, forget thirty minutes—we’d struggle to last five."

"... Deputy Guild Leader. If that’s true, we’d have to give up on the entire operation, wouldn’t we?"

"Yes. Let’s give up."

"All right. Let’s. Would Busan be a good place to flee to?"

"Sounds good. A time-honored, dependable refuge."

"Plenty of good restaurants, right?"

We withdrew to Busan. It offered more than enough to satisfy Dang Seorin, who sought out good restaurants first wherever she went. It was our guild’s home base to begin with, too.

The problem was that Tenlegs was not tied to its gate. It was a true free spirit, roaming the field wherever it pleased. Like Dang Seorin, the bastard toured the regions in search of good restaurants. Its menu, however, was limited to human flesh.

After devastating Seoul, Tenlegs zigzagged across the country, wiping it clean and demonstrating that it, too, had ample talent to appear in the Solitary Gourmet series. It only sought out densely populated areas to begin with. Apparently, it had some sixth sense for human life. As a result, the peninsula’s cities were annihilated, and Tenlegs achieved the decentralization that no politician had ever managed.

It took a mere five years.

GR҉O҉҈҈O҉҉W҉҈҈R҉O҉!

Tenlegs roared.

"Oh, fucking hell."

We established our final defensive line at the Nakdong River and became awakened skewers together. We learned that even if we abandoned the hunt, as long as Tenlegs remained alive, all of us were living on borrowed time.

End of run five.

Start of run six.

‘This... Is there actually no way out?’

My fifth run ended with Tenlegs wiping us out, but in the context of my entire life as a regressor, it held enormous significance. That was when I acquired [Perfect Recall]. From then on, I remembered exactly what had troubled me, when I had met whom, and what we had discussed.

"Deputy Guild Leader. Do you have a moment?"

"Hmm? What is it?"

Just as I was brooding over whether the world was unfairly screwing humanity over, the breakthrough I had been unable to find came from the world unfairly playing favorites.

"A visitor from outside has come to see you."

A guild member with lovely silver hair opened the door to the KTX train’s passageway and spoke to me. This was Yu Jiwon, a talented recruit I had picked out in my fifth run and put to work as my adjutant. An utterly bewildering psychopath, but more on that later.

"An outside visitor? Where are they?"

"They’ve reached our station platform."

"What? What was security doing?"

"They say they tried to stop the visitor, but couldn’t because the visitor was so strong. Keeping them waiting on the platform was the best they could manage."

"Hmm."

As for why we were talking on a KTX train, well... Three Thousand Worlds always made its headquarters on a train. It wasn’t because the members of Three Thousand, myself included, were railway nerds who found metaphysical beauty in heaps of scrap that could no longer move. This was entirely a matter of our boss, Her Excellency Dang Seorin’s tastes.

Whenever she took the guild to another region, Dang Seorin had the peculiar habit of making the finest train in the best condition there our base of operations. Her explanation was something like, ["Isn’t living on a train more romantic for a witch?"] As you might guess from the pointed hat she wore everywhere, her mind wasn’t exactly normal either.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

"So what’s the visitor’s name?"

"Yes, the name is... Emip... Schopenhawer? Oh, Schopenhauer."

KZZZT.

My adjutant tilted their head at the noise coming from the radio. "They say he seems to be German?"

3

Emit Schopenhauer. Swordmaster. Sword Star. An awakened who wore countless aliases and had sliced off slightly more monster heads than that. But to me, he was simply Old Man Scho.

"Um... Hello? What brings you here?"

"..."

Old Man Scho looked at me without a word. My honest first impression was, ‘He looks like a real nasty piece of work.’

This was still only my sixth run. The elderly German had followed his wife to Korea, only to be caught up in the gate crisis, and had not learned Korean. He tried to communicate with bits of English, body language, and a smartphone translator. If only my English had been good, we would have had no trouble communicating. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no talent for languages.

"Fucking monster."

"Fucking monster... You mean Tenlegs? Are you talking about Tenlegs? Lurker? Tentacles? All flailing around?"

"Yes."

"Uh. Sorry, I can’t speak English."

"..."

Old Man Scho frowned. He looked deeply frustrated.

"Different. Plan."

"...?"

"You died before. Here."

We were in the KTX dining car, which also served as the guild’s reception room. A map of South Korea lay spread across the table. Old Man Scho tapped a point near its center: the line running from Seoul to Gwacheon. In my fourth run, we had gone there to fuck Tenlegs up without knowing a damn thing, only to get fucked up ourselves.

"But did not die."

His finger slid down the map. His index finger stopped precisely on the Nakdong River.

"...!"

"Five years. Too big a difference."

Old Man Scho’s gray eyes fixed directly on me. Could he... No, surely not? My heart churned. Across the table, we stared into each other’s eyes for a long time. And we knew that the currents in our hearts flowed at exactly the same speed.

The old man’s mouth slowly opened. "Return?"

Poor as my listening comprehension was, I could not fail to understand what he meant. Without a word, I traced a number on the table with my finger.

6.

Only then did his expression relax into a broad grin. It was the number of times I had lived my life so far. Perhaps out of consideration for my inability to understand English, Old Man Scho kept his sentences short. The elderly German swordsman knew how to pack strong emotion into a brief utterance.

"My friend."

With Old Man Scho’s arrival, the battlefield changed completely. There was a reason I always named him when asked who had the greatest fighting strength of all the awakened. He wasn’t merely impressive by the low standards of the time. Even now, after more than a thousand runs, I would still rate his potential as absolutely insane.

"You want this man on the foremost line? Are you sure?"

"Yes, Guild Leader. I’m sure."

"Hmm. Judging by appearances alone, I’m not that convinced. But if my deputy guild leader is willing to say he’s sure, well... Still, we should test his abilities first, shouldn’t we?"

"Of course."

Fifty minutes later.

"I’m making this man the key asset in this operation immediately."

As I said, Dang Seorin was a capable alliance leader. Even amid the chaos of Three Thousand’s finest awakened being carried out on stretchers, she was utterly unperturbed. She even found an interpreter and stationed him beside Old Man Scho.

"Interpreter. Could you ask him what he thinks of pointed hats?"

The interpreter spoke with Old Man Scho, and before long his expression darkened.

"I’m very sorry, but he says he has no interest in joining the guild. He prefers traveling alone."

"Really? That’s a shame. But didn’t he just say Alohomora? Did I mishear him?"

"Oh, I think he was attempting some kind of joke, but I didn’t understand it. My apologies. Haha."

"That happens. Deputy Guild Leader, wasn’t there a good blood-sausage soup place around here? I wonder if Germans like soup with rice."

"As long as it’s not turnips, wouldn’t they eat just about anything?"

I saw it: the interpreter smiling faintly beside us. He was a wise man.

I didn’t know German at the time, so I let it pass. But what Old Man Scho had actually said was, ["What kind of idiotic bullshit is that? What, those knockoff Harry Potter hats you lot wear? Give it a little longer and you’ll be fucking telling me to raise an owl, too. Alohomora, you moron! Tell her even my dog wouldn’t wear that."]

For the record, I agree with him. That damned pointed hat played a substantial part in my decision, from my seventh run onward, not to join Three Thousand and to travel separately with Old Man Scho instead. That fashion... No, it wasn’t even fashion. Dang Seorin was about the only person who could pull off the witch cosplay.

Which was only natural, really. Dang Seorin wasn’t cosplaying a witch. She was a genuine archmage who called herself a witch, an awakened with multiple abilities.

"Undertaker. Sword Star. Do whatever it takes to hold out for twenty-five... No, thirty minutes."

South of the Han River. A cursed land where countless civilians had vanished in an instant without even knowing why. Fifteen hundred awakened gathered there, including Old Man Scho, me, and Dang Seorin, guild leader of Three Thousand. Counting the military units and civilian volunteers, there were even more. Almost every force Korea could muster had been concentrated on this battlefield, and we stood on its foremost line.

GR҉A҉A҉W҉R҉!

The now-familiar roar rang out. Far away, Tenlegs’ enormous body began to emerge. The horizon trembled. Unable to withstand its thrashing, ruined buildings snapped and collapsed like brittle stalks.

"Twenty-five minutes. Can you hold out?"

"It’ll be difficult," I said on behalf of the assault force. Unlike in the previous run, however, I could now add something to that answer.

"But it’s doable."

Dang Seorin nodded. "When this is over, let’s find a good restaurant. Oh, right. What’s Seoul’s signature dish? Something with a bit of local flavor."

"I’m not sure. I don’t think there’s anything particularly famous."

"Really?"

With a thoughtful hum, Dang Seorin looked toward the horizon. Countless tentacles resembling human arms writhed there.

"After today, it’ll be sliced octopus."

"Ah, blanched octopus. Not bad."

"Indeed. Everyone, battle stations. Today, we retake Seoul."

Battle commenced.