The NPC of the Special Supply Station
One day, out of nowhere, a translucent hologram window appeared before every person’s eyes.
The screen, reminiscent of a system window from inside a game, bore a mysterious message.
The first cleansing begins.
An inexplicable message.
But it didn’t take long to understand what it meant.
The clear sky turned a deep, vivid red in an instant.
Thud—! Thud—!
Then, from high up in the sky, an enormous tree came crashing down like a bolt of lightning. Impossibly tall and wide, stretching beyond what the eye could follow, it drove itself deep into the earth — like a massive living serpent plummeting to the ground.
Rumble, rumble, rumble—!
The deeper the tree drove its roots, the more violent the earthquake that followed.
Countless buildings crumbled helplessly in its wake, and people scattered in blind panic before a disaster unlike anything they had ever seen.
At some point, the endlessly drilling tree went still, and the earth, which had been convulsing like a flood breaking its banks, fell silent.
That was precisely when the meteorites began to fall from the sky.
Thud—! Thud—! Crash—!
The meteorites varied wildly in size. Some were as small as a crouching person; others were so enormous it was as if an entire small island had come slamming down.
Crack, crack—!
The moment the rounded meteorites struck the ground, they split open.
And what burst out from inside them, shattering like glass——
ROOAAR—!
SHRIEEEK—!
——were monsters of every conceivable form, none of which had ever existed in this world before.
“Kyaaaah—!”
“W-what is that?!”
“Help me! Ahhh—!”
The grotesque monsters, as if ripped straight out of hell, were merciless.
They hurled themselves at every person in sight like starving beasts. They tore apart the humans they caught until nothing recognizable remained, shredding them to pieces, and some devoured them — chewing and crunching. Among them were particularly vicious individuals who seemed to take pleasure in ripping off limbs one by one while their victims were still alive.
Agonized screams broke out everywhere. The stomach-turning stench of blood spread alongside the monsters’ bone-chilling roars, and the screaming gradually faded into silence.
Exactly twenty-four hours after the massacre called the cleansing had begun.
Congratulations on your survival.
Survivors are hereby granted the qualification of ‘Players Who Stand Against Destruction.’
All new traits and possibilities for every Player have been unlocked.
Player.
A label just as game-like as the hologram window that had appeared before the survivors.
The scheduled tutorial will now begin.
As though completely indifferent to the confusion and despair of the people, the system window sent message after message.
Tutorial — Survive twelve cleansings.
Despair settled once again over the ruined city.
* * *
Honestly… that despair didn’t hit me all that hard.
Because what I was doing right before the world was cleansed, and what I was doing now, weren’t all that different.
Beep, beep—
I scanned a few food items, five cans of beer, and three packs of cigarettes in front of me with the golden-tinted barcode scanner. The white packaging wrapped around each item bore no brand name and not even a barcode, but the moment I held the device up to it, the scanner read it on its own and tallied the price on the monitor.
“Your total is 181 coins.”
The middle-aged man with an intimidating face standing in front of the counter screwed up his expression.
“Why the hell is it that much?!”
“We charge the listed price.”
“Listed price, my ass! One coin is basically a thousand won — how does a few snacks and three packs of cigarettes add up to over 180,000 won?!”
The one saying something unreasonable isn’t me — it’s this guy.
Calculating prices based on pre-cleansing currency values is what doesn’t make sense.
On top of that, this place was one of the very few Special Supply Stations.
Apparently, what you could buy at a regular supply station amounted to little more than flavorless preserved food, canned goods, and the most basic toiletries.
Here at this Special Supply Station, on the other hand, you could purchase everything that used to be sold at a convenience store, and there was a wide variety of survival-necessary items to browse as well.
A place like this naturally commanded different prices than what was sold at the rat-and-cockroach-infested regular supply stations. But judging by the way he’d gone ahead and cheerfully picked out only expensive late-night snacks like pork hock and grilled offal — things pricey for what you get — it seemed like he’d just momentarily lost his head without thinking about how much he had on him.
“Lower it right now!”
“I’m sorry, but we can only sell at the designated price——! Ugh!”
“Shut your mouth!”
The man grabbed my wrist as I was setting down the barcode scanner. To him it was probably just a firm grip, but I felt a pain sharp enough to snap my wrist in two.
I’m not a Player like you!
Even the lowest-level Player was on a completely different level compared to me — an NPC (Non-Player Character) with no stat boosts whatsoever. My body, which possessed nothing more than “human-level stats” both before and after the cleansing, was so fragile that a single punch from even a low-level Player could easily shatter my bones.
If this man’s level had been even a little higher, my wrist would’ve been reduced to a bloody pulp in an instant.
Do not harm the Administrator NPC.
Accumulated warning count: 1
Upon 2 accumulated warnings, immediate sanctions will be imposed.
A warning window that had appeared without fail — the man startled and released my wrist. From his reaction, it looked like he was seeing a warning window like this for the first time.
Unlike the NPCs at regular supply stations, NPCs at Special Supply Stations were classified not as simple employees but as “Administrators,” and were under protection accordingly. Which meant that trying to use violence on us the way people did on other NPCs would result in consequences they couldn’t handle.
To not even know that.
Guess this really is his first time at a Special Supply Station.
While I was rubbing my aching wrist, the now-tense man suddenly swept both arms around the items on the counter and bolted straight for the entrance. On his way out, he snatched a few of the expensive potions from the display shelf as well.
“Wait, sir!”
Caught off guard by a situation I hadn’t dealt with in a while, I called out to him in a rush — but he didn’t so much as look back as he shoved the glass door open with his body.
In that instant, the man flinched. Another red warning window had appeared before his eyes.
You are carrying Special Supply items for which no transaction has been completed.
Theft without consent is grounds for immediate sanctions.
Even so, the man paid no attention and ran out. Both his legs carried him toward the golden boundary line encircling the convenience store. Since NPCs like me couldn’t leave the designated safe zone, he probably figured that as long as he crossed the line, he’d be completely in the clear.
“Ah…. If you’d just stopped when I called.”
I clicked my tongue, picked up one of the baskets stacked near the store entrance, and headed out. By that point, the distance between the man and the boundary line was barely five meters.
Just as a sound I didn’t particularly want to hear escaped the man’s lips at the sight of the boundary line before him —
A jet-black figure, dark as an abyss, shot out directly in front of him. There was a sound like something slicing through the wind. At the same time, the man’s body came to a dead stop.
Thud.
A sound — slightly heavy.
The wide-eyed man’s head rolled across the ground and came to a stop. Then came the pattering sound of items falling, and belatedly, the man’s body crumpled.
A corpse with its head separated, without having put up even a moment’s resistance.
And looking at it, there was only one thing on my mind.
Great, now I have to clean this up too. What a pain.
They say that as long as a transaction isn’t completed, items can be thrown around all they like without getting damaged or dirty — but returning them to their original spots was very much my job. If I left them like that and a Player came along and picked one up without knowing, another head would go rolling.
I walked up to the man’s fallen corpse and looked down at the severed neck. Blood was still gushing heavily from the clean-cut surface.
I didn’t feel scared or horrified. That was thanks to one of the passive traits I’d been given at some point after being designated an NPC — “Mental Stability.”
Trait: Mental Stability — Actively guards against traumatic shock and increases the likelihood of maintaining reason at any moment. — For the preservation of smooth mental energy, a blackout occurs daily beginning at midnight.
With this trait, I’d been able to stay cold and composed — back when the cleansing happened, right now, always.
Though it might just be that I’ve grown immune to people dying around me.
I crouched down beside the still-warm corpse and picked up the items scattered across the ground. There were quite a lot of them, so it was a good call to have brought the basket.
While gathering items, a jet-black hem of clothing entered my field of vision. When I looked up, the jet-black humanoid monster that had just taken the man’s head without a second thought was standing there, holding an enormous scythe.
Grim Reaper Lv.???
It was the security monster that had been protecting this general-store convenience store — this Special Supply Station — for a long time. Impossibly powerful, the level displayed above its head was nothing but question marks. As in: immeasurable.
From within the deeply pulled-down hood, the Grim Reaper’s two red eyes stared down at me quietly.
“If you’re not going to help, move.”
All monsters have no access rights to items used by Players. The reason this indifferent executioner had just been standing there doing nothing after neatly severing the thieving Player’s head was probably exactly that.
At first I thought it was just a monster moving as it was programmed to…….
The Grim Reaper stepped back slightly and pointed somewhere with its long scythe. A single red potion that had rolled quite far in a different direction from the man’s head came into view. Stored in a palm-sized glass bottle, it was an expensive recovery potion worth 500 coins each.
“Urgh!”
I nearly dropped the potion as I picked it up. It was because I’d thoughtlessly grabbed it with the hand the man had seized earlier.
I switched to my other hand, tossed the potion into the basket, and straightened up.
Without knowing when it had moved, the Grim Reaper was now standing right beside me — I almost walked into it. Its gaze seemed somehow fixed on my reddened wrist. Was it worried about me?
Deciding it was probably just my imagination, I turned back toward the convenience store — and only then did the Grim Reaper move. It dragged the headless corpse with one hand and casually tossed it beyond the boundary.
Left alone, the body would have disappeared by tomorrow as though it had never existed, but after I’d mentioned once that it was unpleasant to look at, it had taken to cleaning up like this on its own at some point.
Ugh—!
From a crumbled building beyond the boundary, two monsters burst out as if they’d been waiting. They were Minotaurs — muscular bodies that resembled humans, with bull’s legs and a grotesque bull’s head.
The two Minotaurs began tearing apart the man’s body that had been discarded outside the safe zone and chewing away at it noisily. When his head came flying over belatedly, they caught it without missing a beat and ate it with great enthusiasm — as if it were some kind of snack.
The time for being nauseated by every brutal act the monsters committed had long since passed. Watching the Minotaurs tear the man apart that easily, I simply thought that his stats probably hadn’t been all that high.
The two Minotaurs, who had devoured the man’s body in no time at all, now turned their gaze in my direction. The Grim Reaper that had tossed the body beyond the boundary had already vanished.
“What are you looking at?”
It’s not like you can kill me anyway.
Even under my cold stare, the Minotaurs didn’t bare their teeth.
Not because I was inside the safe zone.
Because I’m an NPC.
Chaos Friendly — Receives an absolute Friendly designation from all chaos.
The “all chaos” in that description referred to every last one of the various monsters that had spread throughout the world.
The reason the Minotaurs beyond the boundary were blinking at me with what looked like puppy-dog eyes, and the reason the terrifying executioner Grim Reaper was — however passively — trying to help me retrieve the items, was all because I was an NPC bearing that title.
Leaving behind the two Minotaurs and their unconvincingly innocent stares, I picked up the basket to get back to work.
Better get this cleaned up fast and enjoy some well-deserved loafing around.
Today, too, the Special Supply Station in Zone 2 is remarkably peaceful.
…Probably.
