As Jeong Euijin sprinted at full speed toward the Special Supply Station that had supposedly been destroyed, one NPC’s voice kept playing on repeat inside his head.
— Hey, if you keep lying there like that, you’re going to die.
— There are a lot of Minotaurs around here. They’ll pick up the scent of blood and swarm over soon.
It was a memory from nearly two years ago, yet not a single moment of it had worn away in Jeong Euijin’s mind.
— Haah… if I just leave him like that, it’ll give me bad dreams… oh wait, I don’t dream anymore. Right.
— Hey, don’t lose consciousness. I’m serious — if you fall asleep right now, you’ll actually die.
He was clearly different from the average shop NPC that only moved according to assigned parameters.
He didn’t have the polite speech that should have come as standard, and his voice wasn’t stripped of emotion either.
That NPC had spoken like a human being in order to save a single Player beyond the safe zone — someone who, by all accounts, had nothing to do with him. Back then, Jeong Euijin had found it so strange that he’d crawled toward him on his exhausted body without even thinking.
— Try to reach your hand out a little more. Once you cross the boundary line, I’ll pull you in.
The NPC had grabbed Jeong Euijin’s hand the moment it crossed the golden boundary line, and pulled him all the way into his zone. Thanks to that, Jeong Euijin had barely survived the axe of the Minotaur that had been targeting him.
— Why did I save you? …It’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone alive.
— No, just think of it as an NPC’s whim or a bug. That’ll be easier for you.
What kind of NPC would save someone and then call it a whim or a bug with their own mouth?
And on top of that, he was a shop NPC with absolutely no relation to any quest. Normally shop NPCs stayed strictly faithful to their basic setting of conducting transactions — but his words and actions smelled overwhelmingly of something human.
— How to survive going forward?
— Players have a level-up system, don’t they? Then the answer is practically set in stone.
— If you want to live, level up. Hunt everything in sight, and clear every quest you come across.
— In a game where level governs everything, leveling up is the only way to survive.
To Jeong Euijin, who had been wandering in search of a way to live and had been on the verge of a complete mental breakdown, that NPC had given him an incredibly simple and clear-cut survival strategy. He could have just ignored every question — but despite his indifferent voice, he had responded with startling sincerity.
— There’s a survivor camp nearby, so go rest there and come back again soon.
— Taking down monsters alone would be tough, but I know a few quests where you can earn experience without combat. While you’re gone, I’ll map out a safe route for you to take to pick them up.
A shop NPC who tracked down and shared information about a survivor camp that had nothing to do with any transaction.
Was it even possible, for an NPC in this game-like world, to individually handpick quests for one person and map out a safe route for them?
— Just so you know, what we’ve talked about has to stay an absolute secret from everyone else.
An NPC was supposed to draw the line and say ‘you, the Player, and I’ — never ‘we.’
If there was an NPC who spoke that way, then that meant…
“Damn it!”
Jeong Euijin let out a low curse and drew one of the swords at his hip. Still sprinting, he swung the blade — and the monster that had moved to block his path was cut to pieces before it could even read the arc of the sword.
Did they find out? Did they determine it was a bug and dispose of him like this?
Even after recognizing that NPC’s clear anomalies, Jeong Euijin had kept the promise between them without fail, all this time.
If this world truly ran on a game system, then an NPC could be replaced or disposed of on the grounds of being a bug. In fact, there had been cases where an NPC that had begun to act erratically — as though caught in a glitch — was summarily executed by monsters acting on the system’s orders.
That NPC had likely worried about the same thing, because starting from the day after their agreement, he had acted like nothing more than a simple shop NPC. Jeong Euijin had found it frustrating, but had gone along with it without a word of complaint all this time.
Because simply being able to see that NPC face-to-face, the way he could now, was already something he was deeply grateful for.
To Jeong Euijin, that NPC was no different from the first friend he had made since the world fell apart. He was both the person who had pulled him back up when he had been ready to give up on everything, and his greatest source of emotional support.
The thought that such an NPC — no, such a person — might have disappeared in an instant was more than he could bear with a clear head.
“Get out of the way!”
Jeong Euijin cut down the monsters that leapt into his path without mercy and pushed himself faster. With his high stats in strength and agility, he moved as fast as a speeding vehicle, and a ferocious murderous intent swirled around him.
At last, he arrived at the site where the Special Supply Station had stood.
“Ah…”
A groan escaped him the moment he stopped.
The soft golden boundary line that had marked the safe zone was gone without a trace, and the convenience store building that had been the Special Supply Station was completely collapsed — its form unrecognizable. The large and small fragments that had once made up the building were scattered like shredded flesh, making it hard to look at.
The wavering in Jeong Euijin’s eyes went cold and still. His gaze locked onto a massive humanoid monster sitting atop a throne of rubble made from the collapsed building.
Hrrng —
The enormous monster — which appeared more than twice the size of a normal Minotaur — snorted as it looked down at Jeong Euijin. In its hands, a pair of giant double-headed axes the size of a person radiated a vicious, bloodthirsty edge.
Any ordinary Player would have taken a step back from that aura alone, but Jeong Euijin moved forward instead. The thought that the fragile NPC might be buried somewhere beneath the rubble the Minotaur Lord was sitting on made it impossible for him to stay still.
“Get down. Now.”
Jeong Euijin’s murderous command became the signal.
Jeong Euijin and the Minotaur Lord launched themselves at each other at nearly the same moment.
***
Heo Yunji arrived at the Special Supply Station with her combat team forty minutes later.
It might seem like it had taken a long time, but considering the distance from the villa and the fact that they had to fight through monsters blocking their path on the way here, it was actually quite fast.
“Ha…”
Heo Yunji stopped at the site and let out a hollow laugh. It wasn’t because the Special Supply Station, which had always been spotless, was now in ruins.
There wasn’t a single monster visible around the site.
No — to be precise, there were no living monsters.
The powerful Minotaurs that had always prowled around the Special Supply Station were scattered throughout the ruins in pieces, their bodies strewn across the wreckage. Mixed among them were Tauruses as well — monsters in the form of mutated bulls.
But there was something even more conspicuous than all of that.
One massive, muscular arm.
Its appearance resembled a Minotaur’s, but the arm was enormous — a full two and a half meters long. The colossal muscle mass, something no human could even begin to imitate, looked as though it might twitch and writhe at any moment.
Heo Yunji was not someone who would fail to notice what this single enormous arm meant, or why the new monster that should have been here was nowhere to be found.
It fled.
Knowing when to read the situation and retreat was a typical trait of highly intelligent monsters with herd-commanding abilities. It had likely rallied the surrounding Minotaurs and Tauruses into an army, fought with them — and then, when they were all wiped out and its own arm was severed, it had made a swift retreat.
Having rapidly assessed the situation, Heo Yunji signaled her bewildered companions to stand by, then made her way toward the rubble. At her feet, a piece of the convenience store’s sign lay tumbled in the dirt.
Thud, thud-thud —
From the center of the heap of rubble — so thoroughly shattered that the original shape of the building was impossible to guess — heavy chunks of stone kept flying out one after another. They shot through the air as though being tossed like crumpled scraps of paper, but the arc they traced carried a distinct sense of urgency.
“Jeong Euijin, what are you doing?”
Everything that had been inside the Special Supply Station would have vanished without a trace the moment the site was destroyed. The supply stations that had been destroyed from time to time in past quests had been the same way.
There would be nothing left to salvage except useless lumps of stone — yet for some reason, Jeong Euijin had even abandoned the pursuit of the Minotaur Lord and was tearing through the rubble instead.
As though whatever he needed to find inside the Special Supply Station was far more important than chasing after the descended Raid Boss.
“…It’s not here.”
Jeong Euijin finally straightened up from where he had been digging through the debris. As he walked out from the ruins, his appearance — soaked in blood and dust — looked, at a glance, like something out of a nightmare.
“Not here? What isn’t?”
“……”
Jeong Euijin stopped in front of Heo Yunji, who tilted her head, and spoke in a voice that mixed urgency with something like hope.
“What happens to an NPC when they die?”
“What happens? They turn to ash.”
Why is he asking something so obvious?
Euijin fell silent for a moment, his expression grave, then urgently grabbed Heo Yunji by the shoulders.
“Contact Zone 3 right now and find out what’s going on with the Special Supply Station over there.”
“What? Why? The notice said they were all destroyed. It’ll be the same situation as here.”
“Just contact them anyway! Hurry!”
Heo Yunji flinched at the sudden rise in his voice, then knocked his hands away.
“Fine. What exactly do you need me to ask?”
“What happened to the administrator NPC…”
Euijin trailed off mid-sentence and turned his head to look back at the rubble he had been tearing through.
“Ask them to check whether there was any ash residue left there.”
