Chapter 22

Chapter 22 : What Counts as a Normal Route? (2)

The trip back to my lodgings was not made in a sane state of mind.

I bit at my nails and kept calling for the system in a disjointed rush, but since the shameless thing gave me no response at all, all it did was make my irritation flare higher.

The child’s laughter, which had been bursting out as though in a frenzy, stopped dead after the system’s warning.

That sudden silence only made the whole thing eerier by contrast with the noise outside, and I fled the office as though chased, running through the night streets.

The system had done something.

As though mocking all the time I had spent trying to bring out my Frame.

An abnormal route.

It felt as though it were threatening me that I could not do that now. As though the strange auditory hallucinations were what happened when I strayed from the designated route.

“What exactly do you want from me?”

And if I kept doing as it wanted, would I actually be able to go back to how things were?

Whether the ending turned out happy or bad, if I finished the story, would I return to being Iwon in my original world?

I asked question after question, and not a single answer came back.

So when I opened the door to my room with my anger boiling all the way to the tip of my jaw, laughing bitterly at myself like a madman, I found I already had a visitor waiting for me.

“Riwin? You’re quite late getting off work.”

It was Pering.

If he had already delivered the envelope, then he ought to have simply disappeared for good, so why in the world was he sitting around first in a room whose owner wasn’t even there?

I shoved the still-unopened envelope into my pocket and frowned.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to confirm whether you’d read the request. You’re quite late getting back. Have you been that busy?”

“I still haven’t looked at it. Is that enough for you?”

“Did something happen? You don’t look well.”

“If you can see that, then why don’t you just leave?”

“Hm, perhaps I should. I’ll deliver only the important part and go.”

Pering picked up the hat he had set aside, gave a small shrug, and came closer.

“If you arrive at the Immigration Gate two days from now, someone will be there to meet you. Follow them.”

And having said only that, Pering lightly patted my shoulder and walked back out.

“The Immigration Gate?”

The word stirred up a forgotten impulse.

The impulse to walk straight out and be free.

But my body had already grown used to good food and comfortable rest. Enduring life by stripping bark off trees again was a bit much.

“Life gets hard when you run away from home.”

The temptation flared only for a moment before dying just as quickly.

I slowly pulled the crumpled envelope back out of my pocket and carefully smoothed down its wrinkled parts.

The tree-shaped sealing wax had already half cracked and broken. I realized it was too late now to pretend I could keep holding out without opening it.

I dropped into a chair, opened the envelope all the way, and took out what was inside. Unlike how tense I had been, the small paper—only slightly smaller than a postcard—contained a very simple message.

It said that the commission would take place in the Black Forest, and that, because of that, someone with experience in the Black Forest was preferred.

“If merely surviving there by the skin of my teeth counts as experience, then that makes me feel awfully pathetic.”

So now I understood why I had to come to the Immigration Gate. Beyond that, the paper contained only the date, time, and location two days from now.

It was a remarkably simple, arrogant, and miserable excuse for a commission request.

“So refusal is refused, then.”

Pering really had come by a second time only to remind me that I had to follow instructions anyway.

“I’ll take the commission.”

It felt as though the next two days were going to be sleepless ones.

---

I sat in the Immigration Gate lounge with hollow eyes, chewing on my unease.

Unlike the first and second commissions, where quests had appeared, there was still nothing this time.

Since I had already been badly shaken once by the system’s outburst a few days ago, I couldn’t help worrying that my decision this time might once again count as an abnormal route.

It was only after confirming that the system wasn’t completely dead the way it had been during the Language patch—and that achievements and Original Work Loading were still functioning properly—that I could even bring myself to eat.

After the system’s warning, I had not returned to the fixer’s office even once. Instead, I shut myself up in my room and did nothing but watch the sun rise and set while repeatedly calling for the system.

I had spent those two days wide awake.

In a state that would have made anyone call me a lunatic.

I was pressing the tips of my fingernails into the rest of my fingers and palm to fight off the effects of sleep deprivation when a familiar silhouette came toward me in the distance.

He had said someone would come to meet me, but surprisingly, it was Hwipone.

Still looking as pale as ever, he strode over to me and tossed me an item.

“Put it on.”

It was a bracelet of simple design, woven with blue thread and green beads.

“What is this?”

“……You really do speak perfectly well now.”

“I learn fast. I do.”

“……It’s a barrier-interference bracelet. It’ll keep you from collapsing and coughing blood the way you did last time.”

“Ah. So it’s for the barrier.”

Perhaps because he still remembered how frustrating it had been when we couldn’t understand each other at all, Hwipone kept reacting to my words half a beat slower than normal.

I put the bracelet on without resistance.

The pain that barrier had caused back then was beyond imagination, and even now every cell in my body remembered it vividly from head to toe.

“Follow me.”

I followed behind Hwipone and shut my eyes tight as I passed once more through the place where that soap-bubble-like barrier had stood last time. There was no pain at all.

Unlike the first time, there wasn’t even that revolting sensation of something wrapping around my whole body.

I had only put on a single bracelet, and yet it felt strange and almost wondrous.

“You’re not going to give it to me only to take it back later, are you?”

“……Keep it. It’s not something we have any use for.”

Unlike the last time I came here with Hwipone, I was no longer bundled up in a knot of unfamiliar fear and the raw urge to survive, and because of that, the landscape around me finally came properly into view.

The moment we left the forest’s domain, even the vegetation had changed.

Everything within the domain had been large, abundant, relaxed, gently swaying.

Everything outside it was coarse, sharp, furtive, rough-edged.

That subtle difference was just starting to stir my curiosity when I reached out and tapped the arm Hwipone was using to freeze the ground again, just as he had before.

“When you freeze it, it gets slippery and hard to walk on.”

I lodged my protest while stuffing every bit of my old grievance into it. Unlike you, I’m not built for this.

“If it’s slippery, why does that make it difficult to walk?”

“Because it’s slippery?”

“Yes, but why?”

“Because I have to stay tense so I don’t fall.”

“Ah…… I understand. I won’t freeze it anymore. I was being overly considerate. For members of the Sky, it’s natural not to fall on ice, so I didn’t think about it.”

So that had been consideration, had it?

I shook my head and sighed. Had all those past suspicions of mine really been delusions?

If freezing the ground and knocking branches loose like that had been consideration rather than a threat, then what exactly was tossing me around like baggage just because I’d brushed the barrier the one time?

A results-based way of thinking?

“I thought you’d sold me off and gone back to the Sky.”

“I didn’t sell you. I reported you. It was the appropriate thing to do. And in the end, isn’t it a good thing that you survived just fine and are now participating in the same mission as I am?”

“And who compensates me for what I went through in the process?”

“Be grateful you didn’t die.”

It was an astonishing logic.

I shut my mouth and lost the will to continue the conversation any further.

It wasn’t as though we’d parted on particularly good terms last time, and there was no reason to keep talking only to end up feeling worse.

After walking for less than half a day, the gorge came into view, now with only a single lonely bridge.

They’d said the Underfolk had cut the bridge, and sure enough, the long hanging remains drooping down the cliffside looked grotesque.

On the opposite side, the place where Woldeer had died was now overgrown with weeds, without a trace left behind.

“I hope you won’t struggle.”

The moment Hwipone finished speaking, a hand caught me at the waist and hurled me into the air. Or rather, it didn’t throw me. We flew together.

At the edge of my vision, I could see the tips of Hwipone’s snowy white wings.

In the blink of an eye, the cliff on the other side filled my sight, and I tensed all over, afraid I was about to be thrown headfirst into it the way I had been before.

“You tensed up?”

“I did not.”

If you were capable of setting me down calmly and properly, then why in the world hadn’t you done it back then?

I let out a sigh and rubbed my abdomen where I’d been slammed that time for no reason. So that was why Hwipone had come to meet me. Because he had wings.

Then it hit me that there was now no way for me to cross back there under my own power, and the back of my neck prickled.

I was suddenly worried about the book and the earring I’d left behind in my room.

There was no way I could bring those with me in front of Pan after already knowing full well they belonged to someone named Sek.

Pan’s reaction had already been enough when it came to the book alone, so what if he saw the earring too? He might drag me off somewhere with no one around and shake everything out of me.

And since I still didn’t know the exact abilities it had, it would have been rather unfair if it were stolen from me before I’d even had a chance to try using it.

Pan’s party was not very far away once we crossed the gorge.

What left me feeling strangely hollow, though, was the sight of the snowman rock—those round boulders stacked vertically.

“What is that doing here?”

The map tucked into the book no longer deserved even the courtesy of being called a map. That thing had really been right next to the gorge bridge?! All I could do was laugh dryly.

“You look healthier now.”

When I turned at the hand that tapped my back, Pan stood there grinning his usual slippery grin.

The very person who had commissioned this whole thing.

“What exactly counts as healthy?”

“The last time I saw you, you were all bones. Now you’ve put on a bit of flesh and look like a person again.”

“My bones are just fine-boned, that’s all. I wasn’t that skinny to begin with…… There are plenty of more useful people here, so why call me too?”

There were more than enough people huddled in a cluster behind Pan, talking like they were in some kind of strategy meeting. Even with a rough glance, there had to be six or seven of them.

And besides those, there were over a dozen others deeper in the forest who had apparently been summoned here just like I had.

“I don’t look like I’m going to be of any use here.”

“I called you because you’re needed. It’s not as though you had anything to do anyway, right?”

“What do you mean, nothing to do?”

I’d been struggling and struggling with the fixer business he’d dumped on me, rolling around in hardship, working for free, and not even getting any sense of reward out of it.

Grinding my teeth, I glared at the source of all that misery.

“Have you already forgotten about the fixer work you shoved onto me?”

“Ah, that. I heard the reports, but it sounded like nothing much? Apparently you could do it while playing around.”

Ghost-hunting and babysitting might sound easy enough when you hear about them secondhand, but if he’d really received a proper report, he ought not to have been saying I was “playing around.”

The unfairness made my blood pressure rise.

“More importantly, I heard you obediently did everything I had Ru make you do…… khff, that was unexpected.”

You’re laughing?

“And I heard that absurd group was your idea.”

“Did you find the doll too? That was a limited-edition piece, hard to get. Since the model was perfect, it was very popular.”

So that ghastly pale ball-jointed model had been you?

The irritation hit so hard that the muscles in my face started trembling. How should I hit this bastard? I just wanted to sock him once.

“I really gave you those tasks without ever thinking you’d actually do them…… Ah! Was that your way of making Slave No. 1’s details feel more real?”

After that, I don’t remember anything. My last thread of reason snapped.

---

For a moment I stared at the safety rope tied around my waist and fell into thought.

‘Should I cut this and just run for it?’

Hanging there, supported only by one thick rope sloppily tied to a tree branch, I was reminded of the time I’d gone to fetch the doll during that ridiculous fear-of-heights support group.

So that was why Pan had laughed and brought that up.

How had I ended up in this sort of situation again?

No one had bothered telling a low-level grunt like me what the final objective of this whole thing was.

I’d been given only the bare minimum instructions to assess the situation.

After the incident where the Underfolk cut the gorge bridge, Pan’s group determined that the Black Forest boundary had become unstable, and they uncovered additional traces of Underfolk intrusion.

It had always been a line maintained across countless years of hostility, and the fact that it had now broken called the worst-case scenario to mind.

A racial war.

Coincidentally, rumors had recently begun to spread that the Underworld Lord had been replaced, so they had formed multiple teams in order to gather information and prepare in advance, and the operation I had been dragged into was only one of them.

Apparently I met the conditions for the task of reducing the number of Phantasmal Species in the Black Forest.

“Phantasmal Species don’t harm the Underfolk.”

“And after handing me a single dagger, what exactly do you expect me to do with that?”

“I suppose you can just hang there and scream.”

That was Pan for you. Perfectly calm while saying that if the Phantasmal Species fond of me came rushing over, they’d simply kill them all.

And so here I was.

Hanging by a single rope, I had become a living lure.