[Title: Is This Game Fun?]
Content: (Frog meme pointing a gun)
Replies
ㄴ: ♚♚Academy ☆Great War♚♚Upon purchase,$$All users receive Hero Unit☜☜100%Free※ ♜Hello, nice to meet you♜Free greeting included￥Special conditions §§Battle with the Evil God§§★Combat with Humanity's Strongest★One-on-one chance@@Moveimmediatelyhttps://novelpia.com/novel/387092
ㄴ: It's a god-tier game.
ㄴ: What are you on about, it's a shit game.
ㄴ: Whether you praise it or trash it, you gotta admit it's well-made, but it's a game you want to see split in half. Yeah.
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* * *
I opened my eyes.
Ascension of consciousness, awakening, a new birth.
A change so clear had arrived that not a single descriptor you could attach to it would feel out of place.
‘………’
Yet I wanted to deny all of it and shut my eyes again immediately.
Because life is suffering, and a new birth is, in turn, new suffering.
The point is,
“My head... hurts...”
The headache was too severe.
‘Where is this? What am I?’
Whether due to the pain, thinking was difficult.
My memories were hazy, and my senses felt as though dissolved in water, scattered in every direction.
I was only barely aware that a terrible agony was wracking my entire body.
“What in the... what is...”
“The Young Master has opened his eyes!”
An unfamiliar voice rang in my ears.
The only thing I barely understood was that the “Young Master” he spoke of probably referred to me.
‘Young Master... me?’
Blurry vision and a head full of static made normal thought impossible.
“Are you alright? Can you see?”
“I feel like I'm going to vomit...”
“I shall call the attending physician. The head of the family will arrive soon, so you must stay conscious.”
Amid the static, one word reached my ears.
“The head of the family... Dad?”
It seemed to act as a switch.
From the word “head of the family,” other words automatically associated, like dominoes toppling outward.
Head of the family, dad, son, family, me, Unique Ability, and Spirit Descent.
When my mind was preoccupied by the chain of reacting keywords, I heard a voice.
“Yes, your father, Lord Heliont Hellisbot.”
“Heliont.”
Heliont Hellisbot, patriarch of the Empire's Count's house.
Age forty-one, with three children—two sons and one daughter.
No concubines; hobbies are gastronomy and magic.
His Unique Ability is...
“Ah...”
“Young Master?”
“I remember. Yes, it was Father.”
As soon as I recalled things about him, the static in my head and the nausea began to subside.
The more memories surfaced, the more I felt my self-awareness and ego, which had been drifting like duckweed, gradually being filled in.
And as my ego became clearer, things about me also began to surface.
“I am Helio... Hellisbot.”
“...That's correct. It seems fortunately there is no issue with your memory.”
“Eight years old, a boy, the youngest son of the Count's family.”
“...Young Master?”
“The protagonist of Academy Great War?”
I shook off the hand holding me.
The knowledge and memories rising in succession helped me grasp the current situation.
I looked around.
‘It feels awkward.’
The knowledge in my head told me many things.
It told me the grade and origin of the wood used for the desk, the artisan of the fabric on the floor, and the cloth used for the bedsheet I was lying on.
Even so, I felt awkward.
Even though knowledge is something that accumulates through long exposure.
‘Well, because the place I'm in isn't a three-pyeong room, but a space that feels like an antique.’
Everything was far removed from what someone living in modern Korea would know.
“Ah, I see. So that's what it was.”
“Young Master?”
In the end, the alien memory provided the answer.
I had possessed someone inside a game.
* * *
“Hahaha, did you hear that, my dear? This fellow, would you believe it, said we are characters inside a game!”
“Hoho, Nora and Rad were the same. Please don't tease him too much.”
“...So this isn't possession after all.”
It was all a misunderstanding.
At my parents', especially my father's, enthusiastic mockery, I hung my head deeply.
The shame of a chuunibyou sufferer who had come to their senses confronting their past came flooding in.
* * *
Academy Great War.
A god-tier game of the era with exceptional game quality, but unfortunately, it was a game whose evaluations were divided in many ways.
They said that if you split it in half, it would be a perfect game.
Did the developers not think this was strange?
Oscillating between GOAT and JOAT, and so on.
It was that year's superstar of the gaming world, accumulating countless nicknames and derogatory names.
Thanks to that, even people who hadn't played it directly knew of it; in other words, you could say it was a game famous for being famous.
What more needs to be said?
That was the game I had mistakenly believed I possessed.
“Hah, so, *chuckle*, my son. Has your mind cleared?”
“...Yes, it has.”
Father barely stopped laughing.
Naturally, I felt ashamed at having done something embarrassing, and annoyed that he was laughing so much, but that didn't last long either.
‘They said he rushed over as soon as I collapsed.’
In my hazy memory, he had been greeting quite an important guest.
That he had run out halfway through—well, as a son, I should endure at least this much.
“It must have been quite an aged soul. Just until yesterday, you were cutely clinging to me saying 'Daddy~.'”
“Just because my memories got hazy once, you go as far as fabricating things...”
“Right, you weren't clinging. Though you did call me Daddy.”
“......”
I had no rebuttal because it was the truth.
However, that simple remark implied the aftereffect of the ability was no simple faint.
“So, who was it that caused such a strong influence?”
Among the game's detailed settings, there was something called a Unique Ability.
From simple and light ones like Ignition to top-tier abilities like Regression, a diverse range of abilities existed, making the name “Unique Ability” seem almost inadequate.
However, rather than being a type of skill, it was a setting closer to a character concept.
Because broadly it ranged from class to detailed functions, traits, and ultimates—keywords that gave a certain directionality to them.
Now that it had become reality, whether to say it had changed slightly, or whether it had been in that form from the beginning.
The power called “Unique Ability” became a hereditary power, making the name seem inadequate.
The innate talent that makes nobles noble.
That was the family's Unique Ability.
Naturally, I had one too.
The Hellisbot family's Unique Ability is Spirit Descent.
It was a Unique Ability that allowed one to draw in another's soul and borrow their knowledge and abilities.
What Father was asking about now was the soul upon which I had performed Spirit Descent.
“If you fainted and even your memories became clouded, it must not have been an ordinary one.”
“Ah, that...”
“But seeing how you came to your senses right away, as expected of my son. You truly are the greatest genius in the Hellisbot family's 300-year history.”
“Hmm...”
“So it must have been an incredible soul, no? To see this world as a game, it might even be a soul from a higher dimension!”
“...Please stop teasing me.”
He snickered briefly at my reply, then waved his hand.
“First, there is no significant strain on your body or soul. The fainting and memory confusion were merely temporary due to shock.”
“Should I consider myself fortunate that I wasn't injured?”
“Of course, that is important. It's something to be grateful for that there are no aftereffects. Still, for a soul that would normally cause this much shock, it's common for the attempt to fail outright. Your talent really is something else.”
“...Thank you.”
I stared at Father blankly at the tedious talk of talent that came yet again.
Then, as if apologizing, he handed me more cookies and continued.
“Oh, you're sulking. So, how did you really end up calling such a soul? Who was it?”
“Um... that's...”
It wasn't simply because I had a cookie in my mouth that I was at a loss for words.
The explanation itself wasn't difficult, but honestly, it was a rather embarrassing story to tell others.
The cause was simple.
“It'd be nice to know the future, wouldn't it?”
This was the last thing the pure Helio (age eight) had said before collapsing.
It was an incredibly worldly thought for a child.
“Shall we try calling one?”
And I, unlike a child, had the ability to make that happen.
As a result, I attempted to draw my future self, and something did come.
“Uh, this is...”
The soul of an ordinary male named Ojio, age thirty-two, living on Earth.
Instead of a Regressor (self), I had become a Possessor (similar), so you could say it was half a success and half a failure.
“Guh... um...”
Neither able to answer this obediently nor confident enough to fabricate something new, I faltered before soon answering truthfully.
“...I attempted to perform Spirit Descent on my future self.”
“Well now, you really are a child of the Hellisbots.”
At my answer, Father smirked and ruffled my hair.
“It's a rite of passage that everyone in our family goes through at least once.”
“...I thought I was the only one?”
“Oh my, it seems I praised you too highly. Your older brother and sister have already walked that path.”
It seems human thoughts are all quite similar.
“But to think you believed only you would have such an idea—my, my, I didn't know I had praised you that highly, my son.”
“Ah.”
Afterward, Father teased me at length on the subject of “Helio, the greatest intellectual of all time, possessing an absolute intellect that thinks up ideas others could never conceive of as easily as breathing.”
“However, from today onward, refrain from doing so as much as possible. The Imperial Family dislikes having the future changed.”
As he said this, Father's expression stiffened firmly, making it clear that this was neither a joke nor something to be taken lightly.
“...Yes.”
To that, I meekly nodded.
Now that I possessed an adult's knowledge, I could tell what he was worried about.
“Good, it's a relief that you seem to have understood well.”
In a society where hierarchy exists, incurring the displeasure of a superior was an act that endangered not only oneself but one's family as well.
Moreover, if they possessed not just authority but also unusual abilities, all the more so.
“So while trying to see the future, you went awry and performed Spirit Descent on a soul from a world that sees this one as a game.”
Perhaps thinking he had finished his warning well, Father returned to the subject of Spirit Descent.
“...In a sense, you could say it was a success.”
“Well, I've heard that future precognition of that sort often proves accurate.”
Father nodded.
“To you it's a game, but there have also been those who saw it in the form of books or plays in their records.”
“That's fascinating too.”
It's no wonder there are book possessions if there are game possessions.
Having more or less accepted this, I nodded, and Father smirked and patted my head again.
“Now you're finally returning to being our son a bit. Seeing how long it took, you must have been more compatible than I thought.”
“The thing is... the one I performed Spirit Descent on was myself from another world.”
Ojio (thirty-two) was me from a parallel world.
‘It's a shame that, befitting a modern person, his martial arts and magical abilities converge on zero.’
But there was a merit that more than made up for that.
Ojio (thirty-two) was a user who had played Academy Great War.
As is the case with games that are famous for being famous, surprisingly few people had actually played it, so it was quite fortunate that my parallel self had played it.
‘Of course, it's a shame he wasn't a hardcore veteran, though.’
According to Ojio's memory, the standard in situations like this was for memories of having played ten thousand hours to come flooding in, but unfortunately, Ojio wasn't at that level.
However, that didn't mean he was a light user who played once and quit either.
Not only had he cleared the game six times, but he had also enthusiastically gathered information from related communities.
“Information obtained through Spirit Descent does not degrade... so that's what it meant.”
“I knew you had talent. Are you already examining detailed information?”
Father looked at me, seemingly surprised yet pleased.
His tone was the same teasing one as before, but pride shone in his eyes.
“Yes, so this is what it feels like to remember even the trivial details perfectly.”
If I had to describe it, rather than recalling memories, it felt closer to searching data.
Because it was different from my own memories, I couldn't recall them immediately, but conversely, because they weren't my memories, I could verify even the most trivial details that Ojio (thirty-two) had seen.
‘Story analysis, settings, item acquisition routes, progress, endings, high-score draws... even information I only skimmed through remains perfectly clear. Of course, recalling it at the appropriate time is another matter entirely...’
Anyway, thanks to that, I had succeeded in my initial goal of learning the future of this world.
“...However, the future I wanted to check first isn't a very good one.”
“Yes, I see you've learned of it too.”
Father smiled bitterly.
Judging by his reaction, Father seemed to know as well.
Because a game requires incidents to exist.
‘Academy Great War...’
In that respect, Academy Great War was notorious.
In the early and mid-game, it pretended to be an academy raising sim full of charming little events, but...
‘...Of all things, the fact that a war breaks out is a foregone conclusion.’
Because in the latter half, a Great War erupts and it turns into a strategy game.