Chapter 73: Emergency
“Aaaagh! No! Stop! Please, just stop!!!”
A developer’s desperate scream echoed throughout the office, but the person who needed to hear it wasn’t even there.
Lee Baeseo, the chairman’s secretary, had just come down to the office after being summoned. Hearing the developer’s anguished cries, she quietly sighed.
Including her, there were only three people in the office. Yet it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that these three handled more work than anyone else at Super Real.
And now, another mountain of work was being added to their load.
On the small monitor Lee Baeseo was watching, Ingwang had finally discovered every waterway connected to the Underground Kingdom. A wicked smile spread across his face.
Her sigh grew even deeper.
“Isn’t this Underground Kingdom an important location? Didn’t you deliberately make it difficult for the NPCs to find?”
“Yes! That’s right! It’s an important place! We filled the area with nothing but pathetically weak goblins so that it would look unimportant!”
“Wasn’t Kim Ingwang the guy who liked goblins?”
“Aaaagh! What kind of lunatic would like goblins?!”
Perhaps they should have simply hidden the entrance.
However, if something that had never existed suddenly appeared later, the players would strongly sense the inconsistency and flood the company with complaints. That was why the entrance had intentionally been left visible.
Unfortunately, it had greatly stimulated the curiosity of one particular player.
They shuddered at the terrifying persistence of a man who had spent hundreds of hours trying to break and remove an indestructible object that could only be scratched.
And when that failed, he had descended into madness and decided to erase everything the object was protecting instead.
“What did the chairman say?”
“What do you think he said? Don’t you know that this man is the chairman’s favorite? He told us to leave him alone. He even said he liked how Ingwang was using Flow.”
“Aaaagh! That’s ridiculous! It makes no sense!”
Ever since his days as a tester, Ingwang had submitted more suggestions and pointed out more problems than anyone else. He had also personally demonstrated through his gameplay all the things that shouldn’t have been possible.
Even after the official launch, the chairman had issued special instructions to monitor every one of Ingwang’s actions inside the game.
And because of him, the developers were still being quietly ground into dust.
“When he was playing around with Flow, I thought it was understandable! It’s a technique we put our hearts and souls into creating! If he used it and discovered weaknesses, we could make it even more perfect! But this is completely different!”
“Ahhh... The story we spent months staying up all night to create... The designs! The settings! They’re all going to be submerged underwater!”
The Underground Kingdom played an extremely important role in the world of World Gate.
It was still far too difficult for the current players, so the time for its appearance had not yet come. No player had even reached the nearby storylines.
Yet an abnormal player had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and was now trying to drown everyone’s blood, sweat, tears, and hard work.
“Baeseo! Can’t you stop this? If this continues, all our guys are going to drown!”
“Ahhh! No! He can’t block that place! Aaaagh! Dynamite! Aaaagh! We never should’ve let players make that! We should’ve made it impossible!”
“You were the one who added it while laughing and saying it wasn’t impossible with the technology available inside the game.”
“I know! That’s why I’m panicking even more!!!”
Lee Baeseo began to think seriously.
If she entered the game and persuaded Ingwang to stop, they could avoid the worst possible outcome.
However, the chairman might reprimand her for interfering.
Judging from Ingwang’s behavior so far, he would certainly demand a reasonable explanation for why he had to stop. He would also demand compensation.
The problem was that doing so would reveal that the game company was observing its players. It would also mean that the company was personally giving a gift to one specific user.
Lee Baeseo knew that Ingwang felt uncomfortable around the chairman. Even if she tried to stop him by mentioning the chairman, there was no telling what he might do.
If he suddenly lost his temper and revealed everything to the public, she would have no way to avoid punishment.
“...What will happen if everyone down there is wiped out?”
“...First, a huge number of demons will pour out. Before long, the Seven Deadly Sins we designed as World Bosses will emerge as well.”
At the current players’ levels, even fighting a Greater Demon, the stage above an ordinary demon, alone would be difficult.
If the final bosses suddenly appeared, the game would descend into complete chaos.
Thanks to Ingwang’s Mallang, it had become popular for players to raise slimes and play with them.
If something like the Seven Deadly Sins suddenly emerged in a game like that, there could be no greater disaster.
“...I’ll go and try to stop him. He isn’t completely unreasonable.”
“Please. Please do that. I’m begging you.”
With heavy steps, Lee Baeseo headed toward the game masters’ room.
She had visited once before to introduce Dorfin and Jin to Ingwang, which made it somewhat uncomfortable for her to casually enter.
More importantly, it was a room filled with game masters tormented by malicious users.
They were the living dead, forced to endure an unimaginable workload.
“Excuse me...”
“Ah, Secretary Lee... What brings you here...?”
A mentally exhausted woman greeted Lee Baeseo with unfocused eyes. She usually spent her time checking posts on the suggestion board or investigating players who had been reported.
What exactly did game masters have to deal with every day?
Were the game masters at other companies like this too?
Silently wishing good luck to Super Real’s game masters, who seemed to suffer from exceptionally brutal working conditions, Lee Baeseo briefly explained the situation and received a device reserved for administrators.
“As you already know, if you use anything resembling a cheat where the players can see it, it’ll cause a controversy. Please be careful...”
“Understood.”
“If you use the system to create items that players can’t currently obtain and sell them for money, the company will immediately sue you. You could end up with a criminal record, so don’t let a moment of greed blind you.”
“O-Of course not!”
“And always watch what you say when speaking to players. If you make even the slightest verbal mistake, someone will upload it to YouTube, and it’ll become an article about another World Gate controversy. This isn’t text chat where you can think before typing. You’ll be speaking out loud, so you need to be even more careful. If you accidentally swear... Well... Yes. You understand.”
...So something like that has actually happened before?
Engraving the soulless woman’s warnings into her heart, Lee Baeseo quietly entered an empty room, equipped the device, and logged into the game.
She immediately went to find Ingwang, who was currently using the power of Flow to isolate the Underground Kingdom beneath the ground.
“Mister, are you sure it’s okay to do this?”
“Hmm. Now that we’ve come this far, even I’m starting to feel a little cautious... But let’s do it first and think about it afterward.”
“You can’t!”
The moment she arrived and heard that heart-wrenching exchange, Lee Baeseo shouted at the top of her lungs.
Although she had suddenly appeared, she had entered using an administrator device, so the NPCs didn’t react strongly to her presence.
