Chapter 99 - The Savior Α II

Just as I had declared to Noh Doha, I started acting like a loser that very day.

I gave fairies casual kicks for no reason and threw my weight around with shop clerks. Bad-mouthing other people whenever I got the chance was a given.

I even posted a series on SG Net called [Enjoying Luxury at the End of the World], subjecting every awakened on the Korean Peninsula to mass humblebragging. At first I posted as “Anonymous,” but I dropped subtle hints that the posts belonged to ZERO_SUGAR.

-Anonymous: Breaking news! Proof that ZERO_SUGAR=Mr. Luxury.jpg

-ZERO_SUGAR: Oh dear. I've been found out.

Finally, I put the finishing touch on it by pretending my identity had been exposed unintentionally.

I smiled triumphantly.

Surely anyone would call me a loser after all that...!

“Hmm... Six points.”

“...?”

Beside me, Sim Aryeon—arguably an expert in this field—gazed steadily at the monitor.

“I-if it were me, I wouldn't just anonymously speculate that you were the same person. I'd keep switching IP addresses to post praise for Mr. Luxury, both in posts and comments. Rigging the upvotes goes without saying...”

“...!”

“The pinnacle of cliquish behavior is flooding even your shitposts with upvotes until you monopolize the board's trending list...”

“...!”

“Yees. You need to create a signature shitpost of your own, Guild Leader. Honestly, too much effort went into your luxury series for it to count as shitposting... People can actually enjoy it vicariously. That won't do. It has to be utterly useless, so anyone can tell the upvotes are being rigged by your clique. Beatboxing, or a recording of you singing—post the same sort of thing over and over that nobody cares about...”

“...!”

Among three people walking together, one will surely be my teacher.

As the saying went, if three people traveled together, there would always be someone worth learning from among them. I revered Sim Aryeon as my teacher and was reborn as the apocalypse's resident loser.

-Goryeojang: ZERO_SUGAR << smash that upvote if you like this bastard lmao

└Goryeojang: I'll go first lol

└Anonymous: youbastarddidyoujustsaysmashthatupvote

└Anonymous: youbastarddidyoujustsaysmashthatupvote

The Goryeojang clique kept providing covering fire. Amazingly, a group of followers actually existed who worshipped Sim Aryeon as an SG Net celebrity.

For the world to remain in balance, likability had to be offset by unlikability. Normal SG Net users began to loathe me.

-[Three Thousand]WitchTrialJudge: What's wrong with ZERO_SUGAR lately? Has he gone nuts?

-BookishGirl: Why the fuck is half the trending list clique bullshit? SG Net is dead. Deleting my account, bye.

└Anonymous: See you tomorrow!

-dolLHoUse: Big brother...

-[National Roads]Historian: It isn't pleasant watching what amounts to a mere handful of people pollute the entire board.

-CookingQueen: Fascinating.

Truly a perfect result.

Now it was time for those infected with Salvation Narrative Syndrome to come to their senses—

-[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYearFour: smashed that upvote lol

That time never came.

Whenever Cheon Yohwa, the absolute leader of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School, pressed the upvote button, hundreds of Hundred Flowers guild members automatically followed suit.

[“Mr. Undertaker. I have little interest in SG Net activities myself.”]

[“However, you appear to wish to become a celebrity, so I apprehended four awakened attempting to slander you and disclosed their personal information.”]

[“Please continue your activities without worry.”]

Why?

I asked Cheon Yohwa, who was gradually evolving from a koala into a sloth.

“Yohwa. Don't you think I'm acting like a loser?”

“Huh? No. You damaged your brain by pushing yourself too hard when you saved us. Don't worry, Teacher! Even if everyone else in the world criticizes you, I never will!”

“...”

“We'll take care of you for the rest of your life!”

My eyes wavered. Take care of me? For life? Students taking care of their teacher? I was pretty sure there had been a gacha game along those lines before the end of the world.

The tragedy didn't end there.

“Undertaker! I heard!”

Dang Seorin burst through the door of my hideout.

“What?”

“I'm sorry! I didn't realize...!”

She rushed toward me like a character in a hot-blooded coming-of-age story and threw her arms tightly around my shoulders.

I was bewildered. Dang Seorin wasn't normally the physically affectionate type.

“Didn't realize? What are you suddenly...?”

“I heard your brain got injured fighting anomalies! And then you were infected by a mental anomaly called Attention Whore Syndrome...! Undertaker, why do you only care about others and never look after yourself?”

“... Fuck.”

“My goodness! An anger-management-disorder anomaly too. I'm sorry, Undertaker. I came too late, didn't I? Yes, but don't worry. Even if you burn down the entire world, I'll stay by your side until the end...”

I was fucked.

“Wait, Dang Seorin. You've got it wrong. Who on earth fed you that fake news?”

“Huh? The constellations told me.”

“... That's a lie. Use your common sense. Who's more trustworthy, the constellations or me?”

“Huh? The constellations, obviously.”

“... Actually, constellations don't exist. It's all a masquerade controlled by one person.”

“Oh.”

Dang Seorin's eyes softened. She rose onto her toes and stroked my bangs.

“I see. Yes, yes. You're right. The constellations are all lies... Don't worry. You don't have to worry about a thing...”

This was fucking insane.

A chill ran over the back of my head. Weren't Cheon Yohwa, the Saintess, and Dang Seorin the strongest lineup of awakened on the Korean Peninsula?

With all three contracting Salvation Narrative Syndrome at once, it was no exaggeration to say that half the peninsula's fighting strength had fallen to an anomaly.

Noh Doha and I, who accounted for the remaining half, held another emergency meeting.

“Commander. We're fucked.”

“This is insane...”

Noh Doha groaned, then suddenly widened her eyes.

“Wait, come to think of it, aren't you the only one who's fucked? I'm not having any problems...?”

“Hey.”

“Think about it rationally, Awakened Undertaker... What harm does this salvation-whatever anomaly virus actually do to us by spreading? Some powerful awakened are leaning on you emotionally, that's all. Haven't they always been doing that implicitly anyway? Does anyone die? Is there material damage? Does it tire me out? No. Hmm, the more I talk, the more I think I can safely bow out of this problem...”

“But if you catch it too, you'll cling to me, crying and wailing, ‘You truly were the savior of the world all along!’”

“What the fuck...?”

“You know I have [Perfect Recall], right? I swear right here, if you don't help me, someday I'll train my artistic skills until I can paint hyperrealistically. So realistically it might as well be a photograph.”

“Paint...?”

“Yes. I'm going to paint you clinging to me in fucking lifelike detail. [Noh Doha Worshipping the Savior] sounds like a good title. I'll render it in ultra-high resolution and immortalize it on SG Net for you. Forever. In every run.”

“No, fuck, what the hell, you son of a bitch...?”

BANG BANG BANG!

The meeting room door shook violently. For some reason, voices came through with startling clarity from beyond the steel door designed to withstand a nuclear explosion.

-“Teacher! Please open the door!”

-“Boss! Are you in there, Boss? It's me, Seo Gyu! I used my administrator privileges to put all your posts on the trending list!”

-“Wh-what do we do...? G-Guild Leader must be afraid to face the world. He's been hurt so much, pushed to the brink mentally... I-it was never a sacrifice one person could bear in the first place...”

-“Big brother. It's me, Lee Hayul. Sorry. When you asked me to install a security system that could never be breached from outside, I should have noticed. Deep regret.”

-“We were wrong, Undertaker. We're sorry. So please, won't you smile like you used to, just once more? Please?”

Goosebumps rose over my skin.

This was pure terror.

I sincerely confess: in the past several hundred years, no anomaly had frightened me this much. It was scarier than Gapless.

I muttered in earnest.

“Time to kill myself?”

“Oh. An excellent solution. I'd love to reply, ‘Please hurry up and do so.’ But can you guarantee Salvation Narrative Syndrome won't occur again in the next run? Are you going to kill yourself every time this anomaly appears...?”

“Using facts. How underhanded.”

“Come up with some kind of countermeasure. I don't want the run I'm currently living in to be destroyed by a moronic anomaly like this. You're an anomaly expert, aren't you...?”

BANG!

The steel door shook like a sheet of paper.

I spoke urgently.

“Commander, how about this?”

“Spit out whatever the fuck you've got...”

“We establish that I only helped those people because I had malicious, lustful motives. In short, I approached them with sinister intentions. If it's revealed that what they considered ‘salvation’ was merely a misunderstanding, and that it was actually all driven by my selfish desires, the very premise of Salvation Syndrome will be destroyed. What do you think? I just came up with it on the spot, but isn't it perfect?”

“Don't, you fucking prick...”

“...?”

“Just don't do it if I tell you not to. Fuck. Do you want a front-row seat to the peninsula's destruction? I said to spit out whatever you had, and you really started spewing whatever bullshit came to mind, you lunatic...”

If this had been run 555 or later, after I met Oh Dokseo and got into web novels, I could have analyzed the situation coolly.

... This anomaly had originally begun as nothing more than Salvation Syndrome. But by suddenly behaving strangely when I hadn't before, I triggered guilt in the people around me.

Hiding in Noh Doha's secret bunker was an especially disastrous move.

It activated the plot of “the emotionally wounded protagonist shutting himself away in a tiny room,” deepening everyone's guilt. The salvation narrative had ultimately deteriorated into the “regret, obsession, and misery” genre.

Choosing suicide at this point would have been worse still.

Perhaps this anomaly might even transcend my regression ability and evolve into a maximum-guilt plot: “The protagonist sacrificed himself for us until he died.” My life's genre would veer into misery fiction, giving birth to the worst anomaly in history, one even regression couldn't defeat...

In short, this anomaly's true identity wasn't “Salvation Syndrome.”

“Cliché.” That was its true identity.

Genre fiction had reached the point where even avoiding, twisting, and overturning clichés had become clichés themselves.

Even causing havoc in an attempt to change a salvation narrative was a cliché, making this anomaly far harder to overcome than I had first imagined.

Fortunately, thanks to Noh Doha stopping me from killing myself, I managed to avoid the very worst bad ending.

'What do I do? Is making myself look like a loser completely useless? But I can't actually kill innocent people or do evil things.'

For the record, even if I really had done something evil back then, it would only have worsened the side effects rather than improving the situation. That sort of development is prime material for misery fiction.

'What on earth am I supposed to do...?'

BAAANG!

At last, the steel door buckled. Familiar faces reached their hands through the cracks of the bottomless abyss.

“Teacher.” “Boss.” “Guild Leader...” “Big brother.” “Undertaker.”

Noh Doha recoiled in horror.

“Hurry up and do something. Anything except that bullshit you offered as a solution earlier...”

“Oh.”

At that moment, inspiration struck my brain like lightning.

It was a stroke of divine luck.

Something the protagonist of a salvation narrative would never do. Moreover, something no work in the world had established, and which therefore could never be considered a cliché.

Something inherently unlikable, yet wouldn't give those around me the impression that I had suddenly become a different person... One of the traits I had possessed all along.

I had exactly one such miraculous countermeasure available to me.

CRUNCH!

The steel door crumpled completely like a delicate cookie, leaving the exit wide open.

People shambled toward me like a horde of zombies. Yes. Even the underground bunker of the National Road Management Corps, the Korean Peninsula's final bastion, had fallen.

Even so, I didn't retreat. Like Zhang Fei at Changban, I stood tall before those salvation zombies.

And thundered:

“Who wants to talk about [Romance of the Three Kingdoms] with me?”

They stopped dead.

The salvation zombies faltered.

“What if Zhuge Liang had accepted Wei Yan's Ziwu Valley strategy? What if Ma Su hadn't climbed the mountain? What if Liu Bei hadn't lost the Battle of Yiling?”

“...”

“Were Jiang Wei's northern expeditions truly justified? Was Liu Shan really a foolish ruler? Surely none of you would defend Cao Cao? The Xuzhou Massacre was an utterly unforgivable crime!”

“...”

They hesitated. Wavered.

The salvation zombies stepped away from me, one step at a time. My eyes flew wide open.

It was working! It actually worked!

I advanced on the salvation zombies, shouting even more loudly.

“Bah! Shu Han alone was the Later Han, the government that inherited the Han dynasty's legitimate succession! Wei fanboys are psychopaths, and Wu fanboys are nothing but deranged attention whores!”

“...”

“Cao Cao slaughtered the people of Xuzhou for killing his father, yet at Wan, his lust for a widow caused the death of his own son! What hypocrisy is this! It brought the unprecedented sociopath Cao Pi to the throne and unleashed tragedy, so Cao Cao was the great enemy of all under heaven, a criminal whose skull deserved to be smashed with a rock! Dang Seorin!”

“Y-yes?”

“Let's talk about Romance of the Three Kingdoms!”

“Um... Sorry. Something serious has happened in our guild. Actually, that's why I came to see the commander. But she seems busy. I'll come back later.”

“Yohwa!”

“Y-yes?”

“Want to talk about Romance of the Three Kingdoms?”

“—Sorry, Senior! I've got a basketball date with the girls in a bit! I'll be going now!”

“Hayul! Seo Gyu! Aryeon! You all like Romance of the Three Kingdoms too, right? Let's go to Mount Qi this weekend for a Three Kingdoms history tour and find out firsthand why Ma Su tried to climb the mountain!”

“Aaaaaaah!”

They scattered. Starting with the shriek of Sim Aryeon, renowned for her top-quality screams since run one, the salvation zombies fled.

The salvation narrative anomaly had been vanquished.

Only Noh Doha and I remained in the meeting room.

“...”

“...”

I turned to look at her.

Her expression was... What was that? Words genuinely couldn't describe it.

Finding me pathetic. Relief. Contempt. Irritation. Disbelief. Sympathy. Exasperation. Pity. Hatred.

Noh Doha stared at me with such an exquisite, subtle mixture of emotions that I could only convey it to others by mastering hyperrealist painting and painting it for them.

“... Commander.”

“Yes...”

“Would you like to talk about Romance of the Three Kingdoms with me?”

Silence.

Noh Doha worked her lips.

“... Sure. Whatever.”

“...”

“I'll do that much for you...”

I confess, that answer honestly left a deeper wound than anything else. The end.

4

Afterward.

“—That happened in run 126, Commander Noh Doha. That's why I bring up Romance of the Three Kingdoms whenever I have the chance. It's certainly not because my tastes are old-fashioned. I bring up Three Kingdoms topics at every opportunity strictly as a preventative measure to preserve peace on the Korean Peninsula and safeguard the world. That's the only way to prevent Salvation Narrative Syndrome. Well? Will you acknowledge this noble spirit of self-sacrifice?”

“Bullshit.”

- The Savior A. End.