Chapter 79 - The Questioner I

1

Let me warn you now: today’s episode will feature quite a few questions and answers—in short, a Q&A format.

In that spirit, let me start by tossing you an easy first question.

Q) Among all the survivors on the Korean Peninsula, which anomaly do humans hate the most? (Difficulty: Very Easy)

I once conducted a poll on SG Net on this very subject.

The competition was fierce, but the top five candidates were as follows.

1. The solitary gourmet. “Tenlegs.”

2. This bastard wrecked every electronic device, computers and all, making life miserable. Also known as the “gremlin.”

3. No matter which road you take, this fucker pops up at every fork, asking whether you want to save the people on the right or the left. “Trolley Dilemma.”

4. I can’t disclose any specific characteristics, but suffice it to say, an unidentified, mysterious being with pink hair whose name begins with “Go” and ends with “ri.” (I bullied Seo Gyu into adding this candidate, then rigged the vote count.)

5. The “tutorial fairy.”

After a total of four days of polling, the results were announced.

A) “Tutorial fairy.” - 82.7%

Candidate No. 5 won by an overwhelming margin!

Overjoyed, its supporters threw their arms around one another’s shoulders and praised the winner with one voice and one heart.

-Anonymous: Fairies << absolute fucking bastards.

-[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYear6: Waaah... Don’t tell scary stories, pwease! T_T);;

-Anonymous: Fairy facts) You pass out, then when you first open your eyes, there’s a 95% chance some stuffed-toy-looking thing is floating around. Looks adorable on the outside. Who the hell could’ve known their hobby was harvesting human heads lol

└Anonymous: Ah lol. Fuck, three years ago my boyfriend’s head got blown off right in front of me lol

-[Contentment]CookingQueen: Interesting.

-Anonymous: In the void I was in, a fairy suddenly appeared and pulled the whole “Now kill one another” routine until there were only 30 survivors left.

-[Three Thousand]Historian: Other anomalies are dumb fucking beasts you can’t talk to, so at least I can try to understand them. Fairies seem like you can actually talk to them, which makes them even more infuriating. What the hell do they think humans are?

For reference, “Historian” is Yu Jiwon’s username on SG Net. No, well, just putting that out there.

The important point is that even a born psychopath like Yu Jiwon can’t contain her anger when it comes to tutorial fairies.

Perhaps some of you have question marks floating above your heads, thinking, Wait, fairies are that bad? After all, they’ve appeared as pretty cute little things in my stories so far.

But I need to take this opportunity to firmly correct your preconceptions. Fairies were indeed fucking bastards.

Just think back to how our SG Guy, Seo Gyu, died.

Until I saved him in run fifty, the tutorial fairy cut his head off every single time, remember?

Back when we were all still immature, clueless awakened—when we didn’t even have properly defined concepts of anomalies or the void—the fairies abruptly stamped a concentrated dose of hands-on trauma straight into our brains.

“Hweh! There are still too many survivors! My seniors will scold me for not shaking out any of the small fry... Oh, darn it, I don’t want a scolding, so I have no choice! Deploy fifty shadow wild dogs!”

“Your quest reward is rice! But since you used a sneaky trick to clear it, I have no choice but to use a sneaky trick to reward you... Here, have a sack of rice mixed with gravel and sand! Ahem. I studied history books before being dispatched here, so I know perfectly well this is a specialty of the Korean Peninsula!”

“Hwaaah! Th-there’s only one survivor left... I-I messed up the difficulty adjustment. There’s no avoiding a kick in the shins from my seniors now... B-but you’re worth a hundred men! A true elite soldier! Clap, clap, clap! I, Fairy No. 264, sincerely wish Mister Undertaker, Busan Station’s sole survivor, the best of luck...!”

No wonder people lost their fucking minds.

Who would enjoy being treated like a lab mouse? Even mice probably wouldn’t be particularly fond of it.

And Homo sapiens had been swaggering around as the lords of all creation until just recently. Unable to accept the instantaneous change in circumstances, people everywhere erupted into furious reactions and curses.

I, too, turned violent, like the protagonist of a violent video game.

“I’m going to kill every last one of you.”

“Hweh?”

Was that in my second run?

Back before I had [Perfect Recall], I once hurled a curse at a fairy, brimming with boundless hatred.

“For what you’ve done to us. Not just you, but your entire kind—and I’ll track down the fairy head honcho ruling over you, too. I swear, I will have my revenge, no matter what it takes.”

“Hwek... I don’t understand.”

My memory is probably wrong, and I likely said something else in reality.

But I’m certain the fairy would have tilted its head even then, wearing a blank look and the most harmless expression in the world.

“Naughty humans who ignore their guide and don’t listen get a smack!”

THUD

With that heavy sound, the vital signs of my consciousness flatlined.

That was when I learned that the fairy dictionary defined “smack” as [noun: the act of smashing another party’s skull and releasing its contents into the outside world].

Fucking fairy bastard.

2

And so the regressor caught the naughty fairies and taught them a lesson—

How nice it would be if I could sum things up like that. Unfortunately, tutorial fairies were viciously powerful. In RPG terms, they were like level-seventy guards.

And I sucked. Hmm. More precisely, I lacked combat skills.

I must confess... I, the Undertaker, was actually closer to a support than a damage dealer or a tank.

This should be obvious just from the abilities I’ve mentioned so far. [Perfect Recall], [Time Seal]—all I had were skills with little connection to combat, right?

Originally, this was intentional to a degree.

Because our party had Old Man Scho, an absurdly overpowered Swordmaster born with a Heaven-Gifted Martial Physique.

Leave the fighting to Old Man Scho while I handled all the shit work as support. That was our blueprint. A truly perfect plan.

Q) But your one and only damage dealer has deserted the party. What would be an appropriate line to describe this situation?

A) “Oh, fuck.”

I despaired.

My skill tree, packed with nothing but support abilities, suddenly became the mark of a ruined build, and the genre of my life swung into a spectacular drift toward a cliff bearing the warning tags #Regret #Misery #Obsession. In this corner of the web-novel industry, a hero’s party that suffered a member’s desertion was always headed for a miserable end.

Old Man Scho, you fucking bastard.

What did I have left now? A regressor’s exclusive privilege. Time to spare, more than anyone else. Nothing but an overflowing abundance of time.

And right there lay my escape route.

‘Internal energy!’

A brilliant ray of light shone upon me, the Bill Gates of time.

‘If I want to survive from now on, all I can do is pile up internal energy!’

That’s right.

Depending on the culture or the person, it went by various names—“aura,” “auric energy,” “demonic energy,” and so on—but they all had one thing in common: channel it into a kitchen knife, and people would shower you with praise about how beautifully you must be able to slice fruit.

This mysterious energy was like shit: the longer it stayed inside your body, the more potent it became.

Since ancient times, the martial arts genre had handed down the term “sixty years’ worth”—

It referred to a span of sixty years, and a martial artist who accumulated that much internal energy inside their body was duly respected as a master.

You could call it a convention richly reflecting East Asians’ commendable taste for ranking people by age.

And what sort of man was I, the Undertaker? Not to brag, but wasn’t I the man who, starting around run thirty, broke the record for human longevity day after day?

Above all, I even had an ability that preserved my muscles and internal energy through regression: the skill known as [Continue].

Meaning?

“Hey, fairy. I have a present for you.”

“Hweh? A present? What is it, drab human?”

“A smack.”

“Eh?”

THWACK!

WHOOOOSH!

The tutorial fairy’s head launched gloriously into the air, still tilted at the exact same inquisitive angle.

Had a certain missile enthusiast living in Pyongyang witnessed it, he would surely have clapped his hands and envied that thrust.

“Ah...”

On the day I finally defeated a fairy with a single stroke for the first time, I acted nothing like my age and shed streams of tears of joy.

What a long, long age of humiliation and persecution it had been!

Having evolved beyond a muscle pig into an internal-energy pig, the regressor was indeed powerful. Busan Station alone could no longer satisfy me, and I roamed voids in every corner of the country, diligently harvesting fairy heads.

“It’s the Undertaker! The Undertaker is here!”

“Hieeeek! The deranged fairy hunter!”

“Everyone, run! If that human bastard catches us, you and I will both lose our heads together!”

“Flee! Flee! Fleeee!”

Powerful combat skills? Flashy martial arts? Who needs that shit?

With three hundred, six hundred, or twelve hundred years’ worth of internal energy, there isn’t much you can’t do in this world. (Not nothing, mind you.)

As everyone knows, a sufficiently advanced basic attack is indistinguishable from a combat skill.

The tutorial fairies were helpless against my brute-force DPS meta: no particular finesse, just relentlessly cramming aura into my attacks.

“Wh-why are you tormenting us like this? Filthy human! Vicious human! What did we fairies ever do...?”

“Hmm. True, you haven’t done all that much. Let’s see, just discriminatory remarks, gaslighting, threats, imprisonment, torture, murder, and genocide?”

“I think we’d win if we sued you!”

In which country’s courts, exactly?

“Anyway, these are all malicious accusations! Slander! We merely followed the Monarch’s orders to help your inferior humanity adapt to the void as quickly as possible! You should be grateful...! That’s right! If anything, you ought to be thanking us!”

“Well, well. Why do imperialists all say the same things, regardless of era or species? Hmm? Wait, Monarch?”

I tilted my head as I brought the fairy broth to a rolling boil. This was big news.

“Hey, you guys have a monarch?”

“Hah! Of course we do!”

Bound tightly with rope above the cauldron, the fairy raised its chin high and declared:

“In any group, the members of society must rightfully surrender their natural rights, and this is the common will of all fairies! As the representative of our will, the Fairy Monarch is our one and only legitimate ruler! Not that ignorant humans could understand!”

“...?”

I didn’t know much about it at the time, but fairy society was actually divided between republicans and royalists. This fairy was a staunch monarchist.

But what did that matter? I was a cultured man who always held boundless respect for others’ political leanings.

Therefore, I blithely ignored the fairy’s political philosophy and smacked the little bastard across the face three or four times.

“Gyaah! Gyah! Gyaah!”

“Hey. Who do you think you’re shouting at? Listen, Mister Fairy. Can’t you see this cauldron boiling away here? Huh? I’m going to make stock out of you and serve a bowl to each of your buddies.”

“Hieeeek! What barbarity! Call the Fairy Rights Commission!”

“Unless you want to take a dip in the River Jordan, answer my questions nicely. Now. Is there or isn’t there some separate leader commanding you, some boss bastard who ordered you to put humans through these tutorials?”

“Hiek! Boss? Watch your mouth! Address the Monarch as Your Majesty, with all due reverence and worship, human!”

“Okay. Then that bastard must be the culprit who wrecked the world like this.”

“Hweh? What are you talking about...?”

“I’d like to get a look at this Fairy Monarch or whatever’s face. How do I do that?”

“How? Surely you don’t mean to seek an audience with the great Fairy Monarch with that vulgar face of yours, human? Hik, hik, hik!”

For reference, that bizarre sound was the fairies’ distinctive laugh. No, seriously. They laugh like “hik, hik.”

“Unfortunately for you, that’s impossible!”

“Hmm.”

“The Monarch is a transcendent! The one free will that unites us! There is no reason for such a being to descend to this wretched earth and get covered in dust...!”

“Really? Even if I turn you into fairy rice soup right now?”

“Hik, hik! Even if you kill this individual—even if you slaughter every other individual stationed on the Korean Peninsula! The Fairy Monarch will never, ever descend before the eyes of a lowly human!”

“Yeah? Then I’ll have to test that.”

“...?”

Time passed. I, the Undertaker, the apocalyptic internal-energy pig, went through repeated regressions and returned after increasing my internal energy by just another six hundred years’ worth, give or take. No more, no less.

Then I captured every tutorial fairy remaining on the Korean Peninsula alive—all 101 of them.