Have you ever heard a crow cry “kweeeek” instead of “caw”?
I don’t know about you, but it was my first time hearing it here.
Their appearance, flying around in flocks with rustling wings, was closer to winged monsters than birds—a size that left me utterly convinced they had seriously fucked up their diet no matter what they’d eaten. And when I asked, they said they were crows.
Bullshit. If they spread their wings, they’d be bigger than me, and they’re telling me they’re crows?
Ugh. I stared blankly out the window and let out a sigh.
Picking fights with a bunch of crows flying around like that, I started to feel a creeping sense of disillusionment with my life.
If I had to bother tracing exactly where things went wrong, the answer was simple. I’d only ever had the chance to see such bleak scenery inside a monitor, so I could tell without even needing to verify it. It was painfully obvious that this was because of that damn infuriating game.
I’m only saying this now, but I shouldn’t have played that game. I shouldn’t have touched it at all. Even if I generously conceded that I did play it, honestly, it wasn’t a game worth pouring several thousand hours into.
Although it was a legendary god-tier game that had perfectly blended life-or-death struggles and irresistible terror through its unique yet restrained cartoon-style graphics and distinctive, charming combat system design, earning extreme praise from critics and frenzy from consumers… looking back, maybe it wasn’t that good after all.
No, forget all that—if I hadn’t messed around with that damn mod from the start, none of this would have happened. I should have cleanly detached after I’d seen everything there was to see, instead of clinging on so pathetically.
“Huuu, hic! Ah… Lord, what are you doing over there again?”
“Shut up, seriously. I’m trying to think right now.”
Without turning around, I stopped the woman who was undoubtedly approaching me with a listless expression, swinging a bottle around.
She was indeed the only one I could properly hold a conversation with, but that was only true if you interpreted the category of “conversation” very, very broadly. Whether it was back when I’d first fallen into this world, screaming my lungs out denying reality and swearing I’d burn the whole world down, or now when I’d resigned myself to everything, that woman’s attitude toward me had never changed.
Despite my cool attempt to stop her, the butler completely ignored my warning and trudged right up to me.
“Heh, so the Lord can think too? Ever since you arrived, you spent days rolling around and screaming… I thought, hic, that you’d already been devoured by the Abyss, hic.”
As she spouted such nonsense and grinned lecherously before me, I whipped my head away as if reciting an actual haiku. It wasn’t because she was ugly or terrible to look at to the point of seeming insane. Rather… it was actually the opposite.
Her loosely disheveled platinum-blonde hair and golden eyes glazed with intoxication gazed languidly this way—a gaze far too captivating for a mere virgin gaming addict like me.
That was the problem.
How many times had those terrifying eyes caught me unawares and driven me to the brink of losing my mind? To begin with, I couldn’t even raise my head around pretty women. And here was a beauty who was exactly my ideal type, dead drunk, in scandalously provocative clothing—a crop top with a plunging neckline that fully exposed her cleavage, and hot pants revealing her sleek, straight legs.
And the very sight of her—the “Butler” I had just described while choking down my lustful thoughts—was the “second” most shocking disaster to befall me.
For the record, the first was, needless to say, the very fact that I was here.
—Here, there was a goddamn garbage game called *Tombstone*.
I used to wonder what indescribable charm voodoo held for black magicians in fantasy stories, that they would be so obsessed with killing people and putting them to such resourceful use. This game taught me that I was no different from those bastards. What an enlightening game.
I chewed that infuriating game up, tore it apart, savored it, and exhausted every bit of it until I had memorized every single stat down to the decimal, reaching a point where I knew it more intricately than the game planners themselves. If I compared it to a restaurant, it was like a regular customer who came in so often that he ended up a better cook than the chef.
Anyway, having become a Tombstone fiend, that day too I was deliberately eating obvious shit and shitting out guides like “How to Eat Shit Like Curry” on the gallery.
There was a reason for that: this game required no physical skill at all—unless you counted luck as physical—so becoming a veteran didn’t let you show off cool, technique-filled plays. If veterans of other games got “Whoa, they’re pulling that off,” Tomb veterans got “Whoa, they’re actually doing that.”
It was certainly a game packed with content like giant-sized dumplings, but by the time I’d tasted all the major mods and even written up guides for them, there was nothing left to do. After reaching that point, I was writhing in boredom doing things like a “Gratitude Blood Moon” difficulty-restricted concept play at 500%, and the final taboo I touched was exactly that problematic mod.
Even the most hardcore nerds would shake their heads at it: the mod that turned the deep-dark fantasy atmosphere of *Tombstone* into a crude, trashy porn game—commonly known as “X-Stone.”
So, armed with a pounding heart full of ineffable debauchery, I had walked willingly into the arms of “Sex-Xtone,” which I had fled from in the early days after sustaining severe mental damage. If you just swapped out one word for “voodoo,” you could say I was no different from that lunatic black magician I’d mentioned earlier.
Just as becoming too obsessed with voodoo causes problems, becoming too obsessed with *Tombstone* causes something to go wrong—as I realized in the worst possible way.
“Uh… Lord? Phew, where are you looking?”
“Could you please just go away?”
The fact that this butler pressed close with the unique lack of personal space of a drunk, asking such things, meant she wasn’t actually supposed to be this kind of woman.
A butler is a bald, middle-aged lunatic drunkard—also a device to tell players who just finished the tutorial, “This is the vibe of our game~” A terrifying amorphous evil slumbering beneath the territory of a great house. At first, he served the previous Lords with a perfectly sound mind, but after having his sanity ruthlessly stolen by those things that crept and devoured, he became so broken that maintaining his sanity without alcohol was too much to bear… or so his lore went.
I stiffened my neck even further to ensure I wouldn’t accidentally catch a glimpse of her pale skin. The butler is not supposed to be this kind of sex-appeal character, okay? It wasn’t that I was doing this because I found her burdensome—there was a reason.
“Hic, hehe… Just give up and lend me your body, Lord. Haven’t I held back for so long? Heh.”
I violently dodged away from the butler’s hand as she subtly clung to me, trying to stroke my shoulder. This was definitely the mod’s influence too. For some reason, this person kept trying to egg me on for a round.
If you’re asking whether I’m punking out and avoiding the fight that came my way, then yes. My brain is not attached to my lower half. If I fell for the butler’s seduction right here and now, it would only accelerate the speed at which the darkness of the Abyss devoured me.
It’s not nonsense; that’s actually the setting.
This mod took the original’s “irresistible terror” and swapped out just the “terror” for “s-sex.” So to speak, it became “irresistible s-sex.” In other words, while the skins might let you frolic and giggle with pretty girls, the game’s core nature and setting—which are essentially an “apocalypse simulator”—haven’t changed one bit. If you ignorantly sat down for some power-sex thinking it was great, it was no different from willingly stepping into the sphere of influence of the terror lurking beneath the territory.
Of course, I didn’t know much about this mod. It was just my instinct screaming at me to watch myself. And the living proof of that was this woman, the butler. The butler, who had originally gone mad from excessive terror, was now mad with lust, wasn’t he? Just look at those golden eyes gleaming with desire.
Having evaded the threat with cold judgment, I let out a sigh of relief. The weak Tomb noob who used to sit around sucking his thumb was already long dead.
That goddamn *Tombstone* is that kind of game. A delightful game that brutally teaches you that to survive, you must never waver in the face of temptation, no matter when or where.
“No. If you’re going to go mad, do it with some dignity. Why are you trying to drag a perfectly fine person into it?”
“Hee-hee, mad? I am perfectly… perfectly sane? …”
The butler blabbered such blatantly unbelievable words with utter shamelessness. She must have been too drunk to tell better.
Just as a sigh was about to escape me, she suddenly stopped laughing and spoke.
“I know how defiled this place is… The territory is cursed now. A mere breath of air, and no human can remain sane, hic.”
“You certainly don’t look sane.”
I threw in a snide remark for no reason, but she tilted the bottle in her hand again as if completely unharmed, then exhaled with a “Phew.” It was so strong that my brows furrowed even from a fair distance away. If you held a lighter to that breath, wouldn’t it shoot out a Fire Breath?
“Phew, do you know how many years I’ve been here? It’s incredible I haven’t turned into a beast already.”
“Wait, a beast?”
“Yes. Didn’t you see them on your way? When one completely loses their ego and is submerged in this miasma… hic, a human becomes like that.”
What.
Come to think of it, I think I remembered something like that. Around the time I had first possessed this body, I had seen something strange while rolling around everywhere, out of my mind. So, it was a person. At least. A woman wearing revealing clothes, barely covered. I figured that was probably the skin mod’s influence, but the important thing was that the way it moved was not human at all. A movement like a real zombie, worse than someone high on drugs. At the time, I had been too busy despairing over my own situation to pay it much mind, but thinking back, there had been something like that.
“Hic. Even if women stop at that level, men are far worse. Most of them, keuk, go mad and rampage until they drop dead. You might meet the same fate, Lord.”
“D-don’t say such ominous things.”
Are you trying to curse me? I glared at the butler with resentful eyes, and she let out an unpleasant giggling laugh.
“Aha… then would you like to see for yourself?”
At that, the butler spoke up. Following her gaze, I reflexively turned my head to see a bizarre sight. On the surface of the large mirror located on one side of the office, bubbles began to gurgle up.
Faced with this unprecedented paranormal phenomenon, I was turning pale when the butler explained from behind, reeking of alcohol.
“It seems someone is approaching the territory right now… hic, would you like to take a look?”
Wait, so they had CCTV after all.
Of course, it wasn’t real CCTV, but some kind of magic. Still, this being the Lord’s office, it seemed they had set things up so everything could be monitored from here. I was amazed it was still working despite the territory being in this state. Or perhaps they had defended this at all costs, even if they let everything else fall to ruin?
Anyway, I approached as the butler said, and a dark forest scenery unfolded right before my eyes.
“A person…?”
“You’ve just returned, so you wouldn’t know. Phew… We regularly post requests in the name of the manor to the Mercenary Guild in Ark City. They are probably mercenaries who heard about it there…”
“…I understand what you mean.”
In short, they were moths drawn to the flame.
I roughly understood—these were the characters I had controlled to death while playing *Tombstone* to death countless times.
Suddenly, my mind snapped into focus.
Like having cold water poured over my head.
Yes, no matter how full of strange events everything was, nothing had fundamentally changed.
I would explore the Abyss of *Tombstone* to its very end.
That was what I had been doing all this time, and in a way, this too was no different from the countless runs I had already played through.
Steeling my resolve, I sprang to my feet.
This was no time to be sitting around. I had to go greet those people myself. Go and—
“Hic, h-hic. Ah, you’ve arrived just as things are getting interesting, my lord.”
“What?”
But as if to make a mockery of my determination, the butler let out a hollow laugh and pointed at the mirror.
And within it, a scene of slaughter was unfolding—blood and entrails flying quite literally everywhere.
“That is what happens. Males cannot keep their sanity in this land.”
The sight of two people being brutally torn apart by another two. The ones doing the tearing were women, and the ones being torn apart were men.
As I stared blankly, my thoughts momentarily halted by the cruelty of the scene that exceeded anything I had imagined, the women who had instantly defeated those who had once walked beside them as companions began stripping the dead of their equipment.
“The males were the ones who went mad and charged first, but since they’d lost their reason, they couldn’t possibly hold out when their skills were otherwise equal. Hic. Besides, it seems the survivors were the ones who handled the front line…”
Just as she said, one of them was a warrior whose armor had been heavily reinforced with thick plates.
The other wasn’t dressed quite that heavily, but judging by how deftly she sliced through human flesh with her dagger, she was clearly a skilled blade-user.
The men were not particularly lacking in build either, but compared to the two in front, they did give off a somewhat weaker impression, so perhaps it was only natural things had ended this way.
“Women in the front line and men in the rear, huh. That’s an unusual combination.”
“Unusual? Well… hic. In any case, the only ones who’ll be able to act as explorers here are females, so it hardly matters…”
Tilting my head at her oddly awkward reaction, I quickly threw on my coat first.
There was no time to waste.
I had to hurry out and receive those people.
And there was something I needed to do as well.
Watching my urgency with a puzzled look while drinking straight from the bottle, the butler asked,
“Where are you going in such a hurry, hic?”
“To see those people.”
“There shouldn’t be any need for you to go out of your way… Well, do as you please.”
Then she flopped back down on the office sofa as she liked.
Perhaps the liquor was catching up with her, because she now seemed drowsy.
If she had been some old drunkard of a man, I really would have thrown her out the window together with the sofa, but since a pretty young lady was nodding off there, I didn’t quite feel like doing that. So I ignored her and stepped out the door.
At that moment, the butler’s voice came again from behind me.
“Ah, my lord… that.”
“Yes?”
When I turned around, she was lying there with one arm stretched out, pointing somewhere.
Following the direction of her fingertip, I turned my head and saw a large fireplace set into that wall.
What the hell? Since when was something like that there?
“Take a torch with you.”
Well, I suppose it’s nothing much.
I went over and held the end of a torch, conspicuously placed beside it, into the fire, and the flame leapt onto it as if it had been waiting.
“That will protect your mind.”
Though I felt a slight sense of incongruity at the butler’s unusually calm tone, I realized that the warmth given off by that fire was far from ordinary.
Having come this far, it wasn’t as if I had no idea what it was.
So this thing was an item that offset the mental corruption caused by the labyrinth to some degree—in other words, an “ember.”
It was regrettable that my incurable game-brain made me understand it in such an unromantic way, but I got the gist.
* The ember emits a faint light in your hand. *