Chapter 77. Treasure (2)
[Error!]
[Your command cannot be executed!]
“Aaargh!”
The researcher yanked two fistfuls of his already wild, tall hair, which practically scraped the ceiling. He was absolutely losing it.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
He slammed his forehead into the desk over and over again. It wasn’t going to magically solve the problem, but if he didn’t do something, his head really would explode!
“Kill him! I said just kill him!”
His scream echoed across the huge lab that was as big as a school gymnasium. Blood vessels bulged at his neck, but it was wasted energy. His voice didn’t reach the Skeleton Soldiers who were supposed to obey him.
[Error!]
[Your command cannot be executed!]
“Y-you worthless clattering piles of bones!”
This was the ninety-ninth simulation he’d run. Each time, he’d alter variables, environment settings, start conditions—anything he could tweak. Still, they simply refused to carry out his command.
“What do you mean you can’t?! Rip out his heart! Stab him! Saw off his goddamn limbs if you have to!”
It made no sense. Sure, many of the Skeleton Soldiers were missing an arm or leg here and there as punishment for disobedience, but the kill order target was tied up! He was completely immobilized, unable to resist.
“How can I kill him... I can’t do that!”
“I cannot comply...”
The target was Subject Lee Eun-Ho, the very bastard these Skeletal Soldiers had sworn maximum loyalty to since the moment they were created.
“Reset it! Start again!”
The simulated shell version of Eun-Ho lay on a slab inside the lab. He was restrained so tightly that with a flick of a finger, they could tear his limbs in four directions.
[Your target is under control.]
[The environment setup has been completed.]
[The test will be initiated.]
[Trial number: 99.]
Even though it was just a dummy model inside the simulation, it should’ve been more than enough to test the Soldiers’ malfunction.
[Loading...]
At first, the researcher thought the target had pulled some trick. Surely, once he changed a few variables, it’d reveal itself. He’d also planned to gather data from each rerun and analyze it.
[The simulation is being rebooted.]
Clatter!
However, theidiotic Skeletons scraped off their own bones in refusal to lay a finger on him instead.
“Urgh...!”
“W-we can’t do that...”
“Why?! Why won’t you kill him? These replies aren’t even coded in your response options!” the researcher shouted.
“Captain...!”
“Stop calling him your captain!”
The researcher, Iro, shook violently with fury, seemingly ready to pounce the console. He wanted to crack their skulls open and pull out whatever code had infected them and interrogate the bone directly.
“Give me the failure log!”
When Iro demanded, the system responded mechanically with the same damn answer for all ninety-nine failed runs.
[Error code: 81]
[Reason: Loyalty insufficiency]
“What kind of bug refuses to be fixed?” Iro muttered.
As a genius researcher, he’d never encountered a problem he couldn’t solve until now.
Loyalty insufficiency? Seriously?
“Adjusting their parameters doesn’t work. Killing and reviving doesn’t reset anything. Then, the only thing left is...” Iro stopped, his eyes bulging. “There’s literally nothing.”
He realized that there was nothing left to try.
“Really?”
He didn’t want to believe it—no, he couldn’t believe it.
The Skeletal Soldiers were his creations, crafted down to the last servo-joint and micro-coded neuron! Every finger’s twitch, every decision tree, every line of logic was born from his own mind. There wasn’t a single algorithm, not one conditional statement, that hadn’t passed through his hands.
Yet, here they stood—silent, unyielding—defying him not out of malfunction, but out of loyalty to someone else entirely.
“They’re mine! I built them. How dare they swear their loyalty to someone besides their creator! T-that’s impossible!” His muttering grew manic. “All the other Soldiers work just fine, so why only the ones that encountered that man?!”
Everyone called it a miracle—how he pieced together an army from mere bones and scraps. It was the kind of miracle that frontline grunts could never reproduce. Furthermore, it was supposed to be the foundation on which his Center’s power would expand. Now, it was proving to be nothing but a glorified failure as a bug he couldn’t fix.
“Hahaha... This can’t be... I just don’t get it.” A dry, hollow laugh echoed once, then cut off. “What if the director finds out...”
His eyes went dead cold. Ninety-nine failed runs had forged a frigid, murderous anger inside him.
Then, he tore the last test results in half. “Open up that bastard’s channel.”
[You are attempting to access Subject Lee Eun-Ho’s channel...]
He pulled up a screen to observe the real Eun-Ho moving about on Earth.
[Your access has been denied.]
[The requested channel is not active.]
He was blocked, but that wasn’t a problem.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
[Searching for an indirect access route...]
Hacking the Eye was child’s play to Iro.
[Found!]
[A temporary channel has been opened.]
Whoosh—!
A massive screen lit up the white lab walls, and on it, Lee Eun-Ho appeared. Iro stared at it silently. It was the same face that was modeled in every simulation, except this one was real. The aura the real one exuded made the fake look laughable.
“Alive and well, huh.” While Iro was losing his mind here because of him, Eun-Ho was kicking. Iro reached up to grip the back of his neck then froze in disbelief. “W-what the hell.”
He found himself speechless.
“So he... He tore the arena apart for real?!”
Thousands of variations of “What the actual fuck” boiled inside his chest, but none of them made it to his mouth. Just like his own Skeleton Soldiers, he could only gape.
“That can’t be...” His throat dried up. He watched that manufactured sky split, shatter, and crumble under Eun-Ho’s blade. “The barrier didn’t get triggered?! It was supposed to counterattack instantly upon detecting an assault! How is he still alive?”
He whispered hoarsely, “I mean, even if the barrier failed due to some fluke, how the hell do you break the arena with just one sword? That’s impossible...”
Why did reality itself start to twist whenever this bastard was involved? That man was like a walking, breathing ball of bugs and contradictions.
“Hah...”
With shaking hands, Iro wiped his face and exhaled from deep in his gut.
This is enough.
He couldn’t take it anymore. He had to catch that man alive and put him on a lab table. Rip out his every hair, saw open his skull like a perfect circle, then press his lips to that brain and ask directly.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The mad researcher’s footsteps echoed through the hall, his heart pounding with boiling excitement.
***
“Huff... Huff...”
Each breath seared Eun-Ho nostrils on the way in and scorched his upper lip on the way out. He felt burned all over, as if the flames coursed through him instead of his sword.
“How’d he get in here?”
“Remember yesterday when the sky collapsed? He must’ve slipped through that gap.”
“What? Is that possible?”
His vision was fuzzy, maybe from the fever. Blurry shapes came into focus. A loose circle of strangers stood over him, whispering.
I see at least ten people.
Most of them were women, with only a handful of male voices mixed in. From the looks of it, they seemed to be in their early twenties at most.
“Who found him first?”
“Ji-Yoon did. She said she spotted him while she was on watch.”
They keep watch?
Eun-Ho thought that they were organized. He and his group only resorted to deploying sentries when things had truly gone south, like during the standoff with X.
“Shouldn’t we interrogate him and find out where he came from?”
“What if he’s from th—”
“Shh!”
They were also well-trained, cautious enough to guard their intel even with a half-dead captive before them.
“Ah, sorry.”
“Don’t let your guard down just in case. They might’ve sent in a spy to figure out our location.”
Hmm? So, someone’s trying to find their location?
He pricked up his ears, but before he could dig out more, one of the women cut the topic off entirely. “Sketchy or not, look how weak he is. What are we even supposed to do with him?”
“Seriously. He passed out after getting splashed with a few buckets of water? How pathetic.”
“What a wimp.”
These people thought Eun-Ho was delirious from a bit of cold water, not from lightning strikes and a ruined arena.
[You have reached a physical limit due to accumulated damage.]
[You’ve developed the status effect, overexertion.]
He felt both feverish and freezing, but he wasn’t worried.
[Due to the effects of your Stamina stat, the duration of the status effect overexertion has been reduced.]
[Remaining duration: 1 hour 47 minutes.]
It would pass. As long as they weren’t strong enough to stop him once he entered Acceleration, all he needed was an hour and forty-seven minutes of patience.
Thud!
Eun-Ho wanted to have an idea of what was going on first.
“He’s here!”
“Open the door for him!”
Fair enough, he was curious about them too. Besides, he needed to know where they had hidden his Flame Sky-Shattering Blade.
Creak.
With the sound of the door opening, the clustered crowd parted neatly like the Red Sea, and three people stepped through. There was a girl with catlike features, straight bangs, and wavy purple-streaked long hair. Beside her was another girl with a topknot bun and round glasses. There was also a tall, painfully skinny guy.
“This is the guy?”
“Yes, Unnie!”
“Good catch. If Ji-Yoon hadn’t spotted him, things might’ve gone badly.”
“So what about the lookout?” asked the purple-haired girl.
Someone from the group answered proudly, “They already switched with the next shift!”
“Okay good. Wait, but why does he look so worn?” the purple-hair girl asked, then looked puzzled as her eyes fell back to Eun-Ho.
“Well... We splashed water on him to wake him up, and now he’s like this.”
She frowned and reached over to place her palm on his forehead. “Ah! He’s burning!”
What a reckless girl. What if I’d chosen to attack in this instant? Eun-Ho thought.
Her finger barely brushed his skin thanks to all the bandages she had.
Tap!
The tall guy grabbed her shoulder, reprimanding her, “Are you nuts?! What if he’s infected?! Don’t touch him like that!”
She just gave him a cheeky smile, then turned to Eun-Ho again. “Are you sick with anything?”
“No,” Eun-Ho replied.
“He says he’s not,” she relayed it as-is.
“And you believe that? Ugh, just keep your distance. What if he lashes out?”
“If he could lash out, he would’ve by now. Don’t overreact.”
Hmm... He’s not overreacting at all, actually. It would take me five seconds to break the tie using Petrify, and another ten seconds to draw my dagger and stab the girl in front of me. Then, it would take fifteen seconds to cut the tie around my legs and run, Eun-Ho thought.
All of that was doable within thirty seconds of Acceleration.
But what intrigues me more is that they are so close-knit, Eun-Ho thought.
“We brought him back thinking we might put him to work, but he looks useless. What do we do?”
“Why are you asking? Just toss him. If he’s suspicious we sho—”
“Wait guys, hold on a sec.”
They didn’t need to spell things out. Instead, they just understood each other like the blonde and his friend back at the Noksapyeong Station, only on a bigger scale.
If they’d survived from Day 1 to now together, then these people must possess something special. Some ability or item, Eun-Ho thought.
They seemed like ordinary college kids, which made it even more likely they had something extraordinary. He watched them coolly through half-lidded eyes.
Purple-haire girl played with her bangs. “They said you were alone. How’d you get in here?”
She leaned close. Her eyes were round and big, as if she was wearing huge colored contact lenses.
“Why? Is this a place I’m not allowed to walk into alone?”
“You saw it yourself. Unless one of us pulls you up, it’s impossible. Absolutely impossible.”
She drew a big “X” with her fingers on the word “absolutely.”
So there’s either traps or walls? Maybe some kind of barrier? Eun-Ho thought.
“I guess it’d be possible if you flew in,” she said.
[Due to the effects of your Stamina stat, the duration of the status effect overexertion has been reduced.]
[Remaining duration: 1 hour 20 minutes.]
He still had one hour and twenty minutes, so there really was no point in picking a fight before then.
Besides, I don’t want to talk about the additional trial or status effect... Eun-Ho thought.
“What, flew in? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Why not? I can fly.”
“That’s different. Ah, whatever, let’s just get rid of him.”
Okay, maybe it was time to drag this out a bit more.
“You’re right,” Eun-Ho replied.
Purple-haired girl blinked so he said it again, calmly, like stating a fact, “You’re right. I flew here.”
A ripple ran through the crowd.
The tall guy snapped. “What the hell is this guy saying?!”
Meanwhile, the purple-haired girl’s cat-like eyes sparkled. “Really? You can fly?”