Chapter 35, The Company (7)
Their forces were weaker than I expected. Maybe they haven't noticed that we invaded?
Hwa-ryeon had wondered that when only a few robots were guarding the laboratory.
Where the hell is the security team?!
Kim Hyunwoo had desperately shouted for the security team even while we attacked.
Why did the 500th-floor button explode while the 499th remained? If that really was good fortune... there must have been a reason.
Lee Yeonhee had wondered why being unable to reach the 500th floor had counted as good luck.
All of those memories flashed through my mind in an instant.
I quickly reached the conclusion.
Move!
Our judgment was fast.
Our actions were even faster.
Lee Yeonhee released an enormous amount of divine power to prepare for the coming damage.
A small sun descended.
Arlin gathered all of her mana and cast a spell.
A storm erupted.
Thousands of bolts of lightning fell.
Hwa-ryeon filled her body with internal energy to its limit.
For one instant, she surpassed the limits of her body.
Her sword strike split the world.
All of it happened in an instant.
Our response had been more than fast enough.
Unfortunately...
The enemy's attack was even faster.
BOOOOM!
Red flashes.
Thousands of laser beams dyed the entire world crimson.
The overwhelming heat melted everything.
And that was only their first attack.
Immediately afterward, hundreds of armed humans threw explosives at the same time.
Hundreds of bombs detonated.
There was no huge explosion.
No blinding flash.
Those devices were called antimatter bombs.
With only a faint sound, they erased all mass within their effective range.
Then came the third attack.
Countless Mysteries were aimed at us.
More than ten miracles that casually ignored the laws of the world activated together.
The world was torn apart.
It regenerated.
It shattered.
It looped.
It returned.
Again.
And again.
Everything repeated endlessly.
The world changed from moment to moment like a computer suffering from an error.
I clenched my teeth.
Then I exploded the Flame of Human Sacrifice from my right hand.
I had thought sudden awakenings during dangerous moments only happened in fiction.
A privilege given to protagonists loved by the world.
I hadn't expected that kind of thing to happen to me.
Call it enlightenment.
Or say that the flame itself possessed intelligence and lent me its strength.
Either explanation was fine.
The Flame of Human Sacrifice spread from my hand and swallowed everything I could see.
The result was terrifying.
The more humans the flame consumed, the larger it became.
And the stronger it became, the more greedily it devoured people.
Thousands of people melted away along with the surrounding space.
The overwhelming heat distorted the air itself.
As the world around me melted like dough, blood surged up my throat.
I swallowed it back.
“Kh...!”
The flame tried to consume everything I could see under my control.
But it couldn't.
Even after swallowing hundreds of humans, it still couldn't melt the future alloy used by the Company.
The robots remained intact.
Arlin's lightning destroyed them.
Hwa-ryeon's flashing sword strikes cut them apart.
Lee Jinsung attacked them from the shadows.
But there were simply too many.
They had prepared.
We hadn't prepared enough.
That difference was decisive.
The Company had already been powerful.
Now, the military force of that entire Company had been gathered on one floor.
We had no chance of winning.
We had created countless unexpected variables.
The Flame of Human Sacrifice was something they hadn't expected.
The cat bringing us good fortune was another.
But even those weren't enough to completely overturn the battlefield.
Whirrrrr.
The robots activated again.
Red flashes reflected everywhere.
When another round of laser attacks came, unbearable pain struck me.
My vision flashed several times.
White.
Black.
White.
Black.
As though someone was rapidly switching a lamp on and off.
My leg disappeared.
No.
It melted.
Lee Yeonhee desperately poured divine power into me, but all she could do was slightly reduce the pain.
Even through the agony, I forced information into my eyes.
More than ten Mysteries were activating again in the distance.
We had survived the first wave of Mystery attacks entirely because of luck.
Now that we had already taken heavy damage, there was no way we could survive another.
There seemed to be no hope.
Death.
Failure.
Defeat.
Those words appeared inside my mind.
Do I really have to die like this?
Do I have to fail again and again, use those failures as nourishment, grow stronger, and only then finally win?
“...Haha.”
I hated that idea.
I didn't want to grow stronger by feeding on failure.
There were two possibilities.
Fail because I made a mistake.
Or make a mistake, overcome it anyway, and still seize victory.
The second would obviously feel far more satisfying.
So I simply wanted to win.
I didn't want to lose even once.
I'd already died twice.
That was more than enough death for me.
I decided to overturn the board.
There was one card I had kept hidden from the moment we decided to come to the Company.
Something I had been waiting to use at the decisive moment.
I grinned and took a piece of paper from my pocket.
It was small enough to hold in one hand.
Only one short word was written on it.
#Medieval
They gathered every single soldier here just to kill us?
Even better.
Now I don't have to waste time hunting them down one by one.
Without hesitation, I tore the paper.
And the board flipped.
The moment the paper tore...
The moment he used the single-use method he had preserved for a desperate situation...
He stopped being an actor.
He became a viewer.
His life was no longer the life of a single human.
It became a story.
Now, “I” was no longer “I.”
The one who had been “I” was no longer a character advancing the story.
He became a viewer standing beyond the wall and observing it.
He, Kim Yuhyeon, looked down upon a story that had once been his own life.
That alone gave him an overwhelming feeling of omnipotence.
It resembled the emotion a character from a book might feel after becoming the reader and devouring the story itself.
His life had become a story.
He had escaped the first-person perspective of the protagonist.
Now he could observe the world from a third-person perspective.
From the viewpoint of an observer, he consumed the story of his own life.
But the life of a single human was too insignificant for him to examine every detail.
Instead, what appeared before him were keywords summarizing his past, present, and future.
#Fantasy #Harem #Scq #Gallery #Community #Reincarnation
To the observer, they were keywords.
To the character, they were destiny.
Those keywords represented a future that would not change.
A script written by someone else.
An episode in a novel.
A scenario inside a game.
An unavoidable fate.
And now that fate changed.
A new destiny entered Kim Yuhyeon's life.
A new keyword.
The genre of his story was rewritten.
#Medieval
The world was now medieval.
At the same time, he awakened.
It was time to return to being a character.
The moment I regained consciousness, everything wrong within the range of my awareness was destroyed.
The robots collapsed and returned to raw ore.
The weapons held by the armed Company employees reverted to the materials they had been made from before being forged and assembled.
Clothes made using advanced technology transformed into crude rags.
And we were included in that effect.
I blinked while looking at the embarrassing appearance of my companions.
“...”
Lee Jinsung had already fainted.
The others were physically fine.
At least their bodies were.
Their minds weren't nearly as calm.
Lee Yeonhee cried while desperately stopping the bleeding from my leg.
Warm divine power poured onto my wound like a waterfall.
Arlin and Hwa-ryeon quickly finished off the remaining enemies.
Then they rushed over to check my condition.
Before the overwhelming power of the Mystery, the enemies had been wiped out like insects.
All of us had survived.
Sure, I had lost a leg.
But with Lee Yeonhee here, it could eventually be healed.
She was growing quickly, after all.
...I should have torn the paper earlier.
I had saved it because I hadn't expected the Company to be this dangerous.
But knowing this...
I should have used it immediately.
I admit it.
I had been stupid.
While regretting my missing leg, I looked at the more than ten Mysteries lying in the distance.
In this world that had temporarily become medieval, only Mysteries could still display their original power.
But those Mysteries could no longer threaten us.
The robots and humans required to activate them were gone.
Now they could do nothing except lie on the floor.
That meant only one thing.
The battle was over.
The fight had begun suddenly.
And it ended just as suddenly.
The winners were clearly us.
But my companions didn't look happy.
They looked sad.
The mood was gloomy.
Sniffling.
Tears falling.
All of it combined into an incredibly depressing scene.
Anyone watching would have thought I had died.
I forced a smile and gently pushed Lee Yeonhee away.
Everything wasn't over yet.
The battle was finished.
The war wasn't.
The Company's building was still standing.
Why hadn't the building collapsed even after I used the Medieval Tag?
Probably because the building belonged to the space created by the Mirror of the Other Side.
In other words, the building wasn't being judged as a technological structure.
It was being judged as a building created through a Mystery.
If that was the case, what we had to do next was obvious.
“Everyone, can you help me walk?”
Hwa-ryeon and Arlin rushed over, using internal energy and mana.
Unlike usual, the two didn't argue.
They quietly supported one of my arms each.
Lee Yeonhee kept sobbing as she held onto my leg.
Her face was so pale that she looked anemic.
I stopped her from using more divine power.
If she continued, she would damage her own body.
Still sniffling, Lee Yeonhee stopped using divine power and supported me from behind instead.
Three beautiful women carefully helping me walk.
Isn't this luxurious enough already?
Meow.
Flap!
The cat and the book joined in as well.
I smiled and walked forward.
I could see the end of this journey built upon revenge.
Together, we headed toward the end of the 500th floor.
