Chapter 5 - The Hero

1

This world holds plenty of mysteries I know nothing about, but quite a few of them are cases I have deliberately, intentionally left unsolved.

Today, I thought I might touch lightly on one such episode... Though it may seem a little out of the blue, I would like to begin with a question.

Do you happen to like fantasy?

I do. Opinions may vary, but I have always believed that if a fantasy story features a saintess, it tastes better with a “hero” class in the mix as well.

The two classes are like chocolate and mint. Only when they are observed together, at the same time and in the same place, do they constitute a proper dish.

... But what happens if the proportions of those two ingredients go wrong?

What if the chocolate-to-mint ratio collapses from 1:1 to 1:3? What if that collapse accelerates, reaching 1:81, then 1:729?

That is no longer anything you could call mint chocolate. It is simply mint.

For the record, I like mint chocolate well enough, but I cannot stand mint. In that sense, the world I live in could be described as a failed dish.

What I mean is—

There are too many heroes in this world.

2

“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Ugh...”

Suppose you are walking down the street and see people collapsed here and there. Suppose, rather than thinking, What a fucking jackpot, and lifting their wallets before slitting their throats while you are at it, you still have enough kindness left to tap their shoulders and urge them to wake up. And finally, suppose you are in the middle of some city on the Korean Peninsula, more than thirteen years after the gate crisis began.

Then, with a gacha pull rate of roughly 6%, you will encounter a reaction like this.

“Where am I...?”

“Oh, you're awake? Good grief, mister. You can't lie out on the street in weather this cold.”

“This is... Impossible. Is this... Earth?”

I know because I witnessed it myself.

The miracle of the last subway stop... No, the miracle of the plaza, in which a passerby who had been lying there in a stupor suddenly sprang up and looked around.

“Pardon?”

“S-sir. Do you happen to know what year it is?”

He asked, so I answered.

“Impossible. Twenty years definitely passed, but less than a year has gone by in reality...?”

And there he was, his eyes quivering out of focus, wearing a face that had lost every last shred of comprehension.

The man was holding a smartphone.

At this point, any normal person would naturally sense something was wrong and run away. Even if you have never encountered a lunatic in your life, lunatics are much like cow shit: one look is enough to impart the revelation, Ah, that is cow shit.

Unfortunately, after living as a regressor for far too long, my instincts were slightly broken.

Instead of entering “Run away right now” into the folds of my brain, they accidentally typed “Feel curious.”

“Wait. What's happened to you?”

“... Until just a moment ago, I was in a place called the continent of Sintra. It was a place where magic and aura truly existed.”

Those services had also been newly introduced to the Earth server after the gate crisis began, but I refrained from quibbling.

“Are you saying you traveled to another dimension?”

“Yes, exactly. I was summoned there and given the title of hero, then set out on a quest to defeat the Demon King with my precious... truly precious companions.”

A grave, bitter wistfulness lingered around his beard, too earnest to dismiss as mere bullshit.

Above all, though, something else had caught my attention.

“The Demon King? Did you defeat him?”

“Oh, yes. In the end... It took sacrifices from my companions and me, but we managed to slay him.”

“Well, now.”

If he really had fallen into another dimension and spent a full twenty years slogging through battlefields, even coordinating with his party members to defeat powerful enemies... that made him a veteran in every sense of the word.

And I, Undertaker, needed veteran awakened like that. Desperately.

“But when the priest and mage in our party saw that I was mortally wounded, they said the hero mustn't die here... Ghh. They said they would send me back to my original world before... before I breathed my last...”

Hot tears welled up in the man's eyes.

“If I had to die, I wanted to die with my companions. How am I supposed to live alone now... in a world without you...?”

His affection for his companions passed muster, too.

My heart thumped with a faint sense of anticipation. Had I stumbled upon an all-time great warrior candidate completely by chance?

“I see. I'm sorry to hear that. If you wouldn't mind, could you demonstrate your aura or magic here?”

“What? Oh, ah. Y-yes. Of course. I'm a swordsman... Ngh?!”

The man suddenly clutched his forehead. The smartphone he had been gripping tightly in his left hand fell to the ground.

“Ugggh...?”

“Wait. What's wrong? What's happening?”

“My mind... M-my memories. No! My twenty years on the continent of Sintra, the journey I shared with my companions, my... love... They're disappearing. Fading away... No, aaaaah!”

For the record, I am a plainspoken narrator who never mixes the slightest exaggeration into his stories. So the bearded man suddenly tearing at his head with both hands and recreating Munch's The Scream in 3D before my eyes was all part of a moving, true-life documentary.

Only at this point did the belated suspicion creep into my mind that the fellow might simply be a crazy fuck.

“Uh, sir?”

“...”

“Hello?”

I waved a hand in front of his eyes, but he stood there blankly for a long time.

Leaving him like that felt a little awkward, so I first picked up his fallen smartphone.

“Hm?”

The smartphone was still on. As it happened, it was open to an online community exclusively for awakened.

Let us discuss that community another time. What mattered now was the content of the post displayed on his phone.

──────────

Anonymous: [SYSTEM] Clicking This Post Will Transport You to 《Another World》.

Dear Hero.

If you are reading this now, it must mean you have returned safely to your homeland.

To protect our world—no, the world we all shared—you sacrificed yourself, knowing it would someday become a painful memory.

When we saw your anguish over losing your companions in the final battle against the Demon King, we decided to erase your memories and send you back to your original world.

You may condemn us as selfish.

But we... did not want to see you suffer.

And so, farewell.

-P.S. We are sorry, Hero. Our magic was imperfect, so you will still be left with the feeling that you have forgotten something.

──────────

“...”

I wore the expression of a college student living alone who went to the fridge late at night to heat up the frozen pizza he had been saving, only to realize he had accidentally left the fridge door open earlier that afternoon.

Just then, I heard a murmur beside me.

“... Huh?”

The man...

“Why am I crying?”

Was shedding tears...

In fact, he was sobbing, his lips strangely twisted, as though he could not control the tears despite not wanting to cry, as though he were doing everything he could to cover them up with a smile.

“Why am I crying...? No. It feels as though I've lost—some precious memory...”

“...”

I pressed the smartphone firmly into the man's hand and quietly left. Without a word. Without a footstep. Without looking back.

Such was the footwork of a seasoned regressor.

Thus, I safely distanced myself from the lunatic. Unfortunately, the lunatic had no wish to distance himself from me.

More precisely, the lunatics, plural, had no wish to keep their distance.

“Huh? Where am I...?”

“I'm not Kim Junyeong from Anyang! I am Namgung Muncheong, a first-generation disciple of the Namgung Clan!”

“Please send me back to that world, back... Huh? Why am I crying?”

Fucking hell.

I first witnessed this phenomenon in run 118.

In every run thereafter, I occasionally encountered these so-called “returnees” at a rate of 6%, and they always reacted the same way.

They had arrived in other worlds through all sorts of means. Some had regressed, some had possessed someone else's body, and others had reincarnated. A grand fucking shitshow of regression, possession, and reincarnation—the so-called “RPR” trio—had unfolded.

I, Undertaker, had lived a long life and seen everything worth seeing and everything not worth seeing, but this particular spectacle had a flavor all its own.

“Good heavens.”

Only after dozens of runs had passed—in other words, after I had collected enough data—did I finally realize this was not some bullshit hidden-camera trick show staged by a lunatic or two, but a serious social phenomenon.

The so-called “Hero Syndrome.”

It was a monster of the mind-manipulation variety.

3

“A monster?”

And so, run 161.

This time, I immediately began devising countermeasures. After hearing my explanation of Hero Syndrome, the Saintess, who had always served as my adviser, asked a question.

“Can a monster exist without a physical form, Mr. Undertaker?”

“Yes. It can.”

I nodded.

“In fact, the ones that aren't physical, or aren't subject to the laws of physics, are more dangerous. That's why it's actually more appropriate to call them anomalies—strange phenomena—rather than monsters, strange creatures.”

“I see. Hero Syndrome... A monster—no, an anomaly—that exists in the form of a mental illness.”

A faint hint of dismay infused the Saintess's emotionless voice like perfume.

For the record, this woman had pronounced shut-in tendencies and stayed holed up at home every day. For a while, the bubbling of aquarium water filled her living room as though it were part of the decor.

“... Then how are we supposed to slay this anomaly? If it has no physical body, we can't kill it.”

“Well, in cases like this, we have no choice but to abandon the proper path for the crooked one. In short, we need a workaround.”

In fact, we might not even need to slay it.

The Saintess tilted her head.

“A workaround?”

I turned on my smartphone.

“Do you see this post?”

“Hm? Yes. It says, ‘Clicking this post will...’ and so on.”

“Every Hero Syndrome patient found so far was lying unconscious after clicking that post. Presumably, the anomaly spreads its infection through this internet post.”

“... You mean infection over the internet? Good heavens. A joke from the COVID days has become reality.”

The Saintess sank into thought again, then raised her head with a “Wait.”

“Does that mean I've just been infected too?”

“No. This is a shitpost I uploaded anonymously to the community... In other words, it's only an imitation of the real post. Rest assured.”

“Oh.”

I smiled faintly at her relief.

“But this very shitpost contains the workaround for defeating a mental anomaly.”

“...?”

Starting that day, endlessly repeated posts began sprouting like mushrooms on the awakened-only community's message board.

-Anonymous: [SYSTEM] Clicking This Post Will Transport You to 《Another World》. (Views: 56)

-Anonymous: [SYSTEM] Clicking This Post Will Transport You to 《Another World》. (Views: 17)

-Anonymous: [SYSTEM] Clicking This Post Will Transport You to 《Another World》. (Views: 34)

-Anonymous: [SYSTEM] Clicking This Post Will Transport You to 《Another World》. (Views: 11)

Shitposts appeared with the exact same title, relentlessly, without pause, as though someone had planned it that way. Such was the power of a macro.

Naturally, the online members were bewildered.

-Anonymous: What's this?

-[Three Thousand]Chronicler: What's going on?

-Anonymous: Fuck, what kind of gimmick is this now?

At first, members clicked the posts just to see what all the fuss was about, so some even received over fifty views.

But with their content never changing and wave after wave of them pouring in, the repeated posts quickly became something everyone avoided.

-Literary Girl: Seriously, this is boring as fuck. Who keeps shitting out these posts? Not funny. Not moving.

-[Hundred Flowers]High School Sixth-Year: Waaaaah T_T)

-dolLHoUse: Childish.

-Anonymous: What are the constellations doing? Why aren't they deleting that crap?

└[Three Thousand]Witch Trial Judge: Maybe the constellations don't think it's something worth deleting? They're like that a lot.

└Anonymous: Ugh...

-ZERO_SUGAR: Why not just set up a keyword filter and block it yourselves...? I blocked it, and now I don't see any of it. It's lovely^^

-Anonymous: Blocked.

Ten views, six views, three views.

Finally, the repeated posts' view counts dropped to zero.

Very occasionally, a view count of one would appear. But I left the macro running so that the posts kept appearing without a break even beyond the thirteenth year, until every active member on the board had finally added 《Another World》 to their blocked keywords.

-Anonymous: [SYSTEM] Clicking This Post Will Transport You to 《Another World》. (Views: 0)

-Anonymous: [SYSTEM] Clicking This Post Will Transport You to 《Another World》. (Views: 0)

A beautiful procession of zeroes.

Watching the community alongside me, the Saintess spoke with a hint of admiration.

“I see. Without having to eradicate the anomaly itself, simply eliminating the people exposed to it produces the same effect as ‘slaying’ it.”

“Yes. Anomalies with physical power can approach us whenever they like, but bodiless anomalies lose their power simply when there is no one left to perceive them.”

“Indeed. It's an effective method. Just what one might expect of a regressor... A simple yet practiced way of handling it.”

“Thank you.”

Normally, only awakened could post in that community. Still, we had to account for the possibility that an anomaly might interfere with it through some bizarre trick.

And now, whatever means the anomaly used to post, it would have no effect on the members.

Well, a member might briefly unblock the keyword for fun and happen to click a post... But for every post the anomaly uploaded, the macro uploaded a hundred shitposts.

What were the odds that a member would happen to unblock the keyword, then happen to click one of hundreds of repeated posts, and then happen to beat the one-in-a-hundred odds of landing on the real post, the one genuinely infected with Hero Syndrome?

Even if a victim did appear by some remote chance, it would now be no different from boarding a plane for a trip and dying in a crash. In short, an unfortunate accident. Even a regressor like me cannot control every probability.

Besides, being infected did not cause much harm in the first place.

And thus, I, Undertaker, had happily sealed away another anomaly without incident.

“But... Mr. Undertaker.”

“Hm?”

“What if it isn't a mental illness, but real? What if the people who saw that post truly traveled to another dimension, faced some life-threatening danger, and all returned to reality thanks to their companions?”

“The odds of that are probably low.”

Low, I say.

I think they are infinitely close to 0%.

“Why?”

“It's simply a matter of personal experience. They all claim they spent only about twenty years on their journeys, defeated the Demon King, saved the world, and accomplished everything. I know from experience that twenty years is nowhere near enough to save a world.”

“Oh...”

“Above all, even if another dimension truly exists against all conceivable odds, it's not my concern. Don't we have our hands full just looking after our own world?”

Apparently satisfied by my answer, the Saintess nodded calmly.

“Indeed. You're right.”

Sipping my café au lait, I looked at the message board again.

-Anonymous: [SYSTEM] Clicking This Post Will Transport You to 《Another World》. (Views: 0)

The post that had just appeared on its own, even though I had not run the macro, displayed a view count of zero.

Probably forevermore.

- The Hero. End.