The man did not move an inch, his forehead planted on the table.
The parrot slowly tilted its head.
“Director.”
“……I think it’s ruined.”
“Director.”
“……I don’t even know where it started going wrong.”
“It will be resolved once you get up and begin looking through the documents.”
“What a pain...”
“Director.”
He tried to keep his head buried there,
but in the end, he concluded that dealing with the parrot pecking away at him from the side would be even more of a hassle.
And so even he began to feel pathetic for sitting there with his head on the table like this.
“The similarity in firing structure. In other words, I have to look through all the projectile logic documents.”
“That is correct.”
The man—the Director—groaned without lifting his forehead from the table.
“……Just say something comforting.”
The parrot was silent for a moment.
“You may still rest easy for now.”
The Director slowly raised his head. The grain of the tabletop had imprinted itself beneath his eyes.
“……What?”
“I checked the expenditure records on the Constellations’ side currently sponsoring the dwarf workshops.”
The parrot continued, preening its feathers.
“The Constellations on the dwarf side did not spend a large amount this time. It was only at the level of small sponsorships.”
“……Really? Why?”
“To drag the flame cannon over to the elf side, they would have to cross at least two mountain ranges. It seems the Constellations know it would take a long time. They must have assumed it would be patched before a world war broke out.”
At the parrot’s analysis, the Director looked up at the ceiling.
“……Obvious.”
“Obvious. So hurry up and patch it.”
“Good thing they know it’s too broken and will get patched... If they’d whaled on it, we’d have been in serious trouble.”
“Constellations do not spend cash. They provide divine power.”
“Same difference.”
The Director fidgeted his fingers and let out a long breath.
‘Now that I think about it, that really is a relief. Seriously.’
If the Constellations on the dwarf side had poured in large-scale divine power, it would have been a different story. Divine power that flowed into the world like that could not be recovered until it was exhausted somehow.
Refunding it would be an enormous loss from an operations standpoint. Even if a patch blocked it, the power already accumulated would remain.
If a Constellation got sulky and ended up going through the refund procedure—
“If we’d had to process divine power refunds this time.”
The Director muttered.
“We would’ve had to patch the hole with some corner of the world, wouldn’t we?”
“That is correct.”
“Thank goodness.”
The man stretched once and pulled his chair in to sit. He pushed aside the scattered parchments with his feet and unfolded the copy of the patch notice again.
“Now, let’s identify the cause first.”
The cannonball had been judged as an arrow. He understood that the fuse mechanism was crossbow-type, so it had triggered the “similarity in firing structure” clause. However—
The Director’s eyes narrowed.
Strange.
A cannonball and an arrow. No matter how broadly the criteria were interpreted, for those two to receive the same judgment, the internal arrow classification logic had to be abnormally broad. For an entire cannon to become part of the “bow category” because of one crossbow trigger was—
He rummaged through the parchments that had been organized over the past two hours. Early world design records. Magic system blueprints. The original text of the physics judgment logic.
He found it.
“……Hey.”
The parrot raised its head.
“Who wrote this world’s arrow judgment logic like this?”
“The initial design team.”
“Why is it so broad? Should I be grateful that it’s such a complete mess it’s easy to find what the problem is?”
He picked up one parchment and compared it with another.
“And these are all linked together like this? One arrow has magic judgment, physics judgment, and projectile judgment all tied to it.”
“It was designed organically. The records state that it was for the implementation of various magic arrows.”
“What good is organic when the hole is this big?”
The Director closed his eyes for a moment and swept through the entire logic in his head. The cannonball had been caught because the arrow judgment was broad.
He just needed to narrow the arrow judgment itself. Simple.
It was simple.
And yet.
Something felt unpleasantly off.
When you touch logic that’s interwoven this organically, things go wrong—
“Mm... I’ll try modifying it for now.”
Shaking off his unease, the man shook his head. The priority was to stop the cannon problem immediately. Two hours had already passed; if he didn’t patch it, the Constellations would get excited and start spending.
He could put in the patch first and monitor the side effects afterward.
He pulled over an old notebook lying on one side of the table and opened it.
There were no decorations on the cover.
Just an old leather cover.
But the moment the Director placed his hand on it and opened it, a faint light rose from the surface of the paper. As if the world’s code were alive and breathing.
Glowing letters appeared on the cover.
The world’s patch notes, in the truest sense.
The Director picked up his pen.
======================================
■ ARCANA ONLINE ■
Emergency Patch Notes — Ver. 4.1.7a
“Adjustment to Arrow Judgment Range”
======================================
▶ Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue where certain projectiles were
abnormally granted the judgment of “arrow.”
The criteria for arrow judgment will be clearly limited
as follows.
[Before] Broad application including similarity in firing structure
[After] Limited to arrow-type projectiles fired
directly by a bowstring or by magical power
- This adjustment applies to artillery-type weapons,
and existing bow-type weapons will not be affected.
“Mm... Seems like there’s no problem? I’ll sign it?”
“Yes, please sign it.”
The parrot glanced over the notebook page he held out and bobbed its head.
The moment he wrote the final sentence in the notebook and signed it, the letters glowed faintly and then vanished.
- Applied.
The Director closed the notebook and leaned back against the chair. The thumping sounds from outside had noticeably died down.
He looked around the inside of the hut.
Creaking wooden walls. Cold wind seeping in through a hole in the ceiling. A pile of parchments carelessly stacked in one corner. And on top of the map, a piece of bread left uneaten from last night.
……In a way, it was the kind of space where the mastermind behind the world might reside.
But no matter how one looked at it, it was just a shabby hut.
The parrot adjusted its feet on the perch and asked,
“What about the cost of this patch?”
“Minimum rate for an emergency patch. I spent exactly that much.”
The Director looked at the ceiling and reassured himself.
“……I think we blocked it well. We stopped a cannon bug that would’ve become an enormous core element of the world later, and we did it cheaply and early. We didn’t have to go through the divine power refund process. The world didn’t evaporate. The Constellations didn’t make any large-scale expenditures.”
The parrot stared at him in silence.
“At this level, I think we handled it cheaply.”
“………….”
Watching him pretend to be optimistic in order to soothe his own anxiety, the parrot pondered how it should respond, then slowly nodded.
“You may think of it that way.”
With the patch notes on his lap, the Director closed his eyes.
“I’m sleeping for a bit.”
“Yes, sleep.”
Cold wind seeped in again through the hole in the ceiling.
The parrot sat quietly on its perch and watched its master fall asleep.
The Director fell asleep in that very position.
With the patch notes on his lap. In an uncomfortable chair. Curled up like a shrimp in the middle of the hut.
Cold wind came in through the hole in the ceiling all night, but he paid it no mind. There was a strange sense of pride in having wrapped something up well. He had blocked the cannon bug at minimum cost. The world evaporating? Didn’t happen. A Constellation refund incident? Didn’t happen.
At this level, it wasn’t a bad day.
The next morning.
“Director.”
“……Mm.”
“Director.”
“……Just a little longer.”
“Director.”
The parrot’s voice was one tone lower than usual.
The Director opened his eyes.
His neck was stiff. It was because he had slept in the chair. The patch notes that had been on his lap had fallen to the floor. Morning sunlight was slanting in through the hole in the ceiling.
“……What time is it?”
“It is six thirty in the morning.”
“Can’t I sleep a little more? What happened?”
“The Split Arrow function is not working.”
The Director blinked.
“……Huh?”
“As of last night, the Split Arrow skill has been disabled across the entire archer-type job group. A large number of adventurers carrying out missions overnight were affected.”
“Wait, wait a second.”
The man sprang up. He picked up the patch notes and opened the contents he had written last night.
- [After] Limited to arrow-type projectiles fired directly by a bowstring or by magical power -
“……Limited to arrow-type projectiles. Split Arrow is also an arrow-type projectile, isn’t it? There’s no problem.”
“Indeed.”
The parrot glared at him with impatient eyes that seemed to say, “Then why is it not working, contrary to what you said?”
“O-okay. I’ll look into it.”
Muttering, he dug through the world design logic again. This time, the Split Arrow entry. The skill’s operating structure.
He found it.
His eyes stopped.
“Split Arrow wasn’t actually splitting the arrow.”
The parrot nodded.
“That is correct.”
“It’s a method of additionally summoning new projectiles.”
“That is correct.”
The parrot answered in exactly the same way.
“Then the mass of the additionally summoned projectiles is being added. So that’s why it uses so much divine power.”
“The system automatically grants it. Through logic that newly generates projectiles.”
“……And that logic.”
“Was caught by the arrow judgment criteria that you narrowed last night, Director. The newly generated projectiles do not satisfy the ‘arrow-type projectile’ condition, so the summoning itself is being blocked.”
Silence.
The Director looked down at the design document for a long while.
The reason the cannonball had been judged as an arrow.
He had thought it was because of the similarity in firing structure. He had thought it was because of the crossbow-type trigger.
But the real reason was—
“The cannonball was judged as an arrow because of the Split Arrow logic from the very beginning?”
“That is the presumption. When the cannonball was fired, it appears the system processed the projectile generation caused by the gunpowder explosion the same way it processed Split Arrow’s additional projectile summoning logic.”
“In the sense that a new projectile is included... Though in the case of a cannonball, it wasn’t generated; it was already there?”
“It was the same logic.”
“So the cannonball became an arrow.”
“That is correct.”
“And I blocked that logic.”
“That is correct.”
“And Split Arrow was blocked with it.”
“That is correct.”
The Director slowly set the document down on the table.
He stared at the windowless wall.
Morning sunlight slanted in through the hole in the ceiling, brightly illuminating the piece of bread left uneaten from last night.
“……The kids who were on missions overnight.”
“There are many.”
“How many.”
“Seventeen teams raiding night dungeons. Around forty adventurers carrying out night subjugation requests. More than two hundred archers affiliated with the kingdom carrying out nighttime ranged guard duty. In addition—”
“Enough, enough.”
The Director raised a hand.
“We’ll have to hand out... freebies, won’t we?”
“Do you mean compensation?”
“Yeah. Especially the night dungeon teams. If Split Arrow didn’t go off in front of a boss, wouldn’t they have just been wiped?”
The parrot quietly watched him.
The Director opened the patch notes again and picked up his pen. His hand moved with familiarity. Emergency compensation details. Temporary buffs for affected job groups. A notice that the Split Arrow logic would be reviewed.
If he wrote it, it would be reflected in the world.
If he put it down, it came to pass.
In a way, it was a power close to omnipotence.
Though the person himself was tired from being woken at dawn.
======================================
■ ARCANA ONLINE ■
Emergency Notice — Compensation Distribution Guide
======================================
Hello, this is the Patch Director.
After the Ver. 4.1.7a update, an issue occurred
where Split Arrow-type skills were temporarily
disabled.
We deeply apologize to all adventurers who
experienced inconvenience due to this issue, and
we will be distributing compensation as follows.
▶ Eligible Recipients: All archer-type adventurers
who were carrying out missions during the relevant time period
▶ Compensation Details
- EXP Bonus 30% (48 hours)
- Emergency Recovery Potion ×10
- Compensation Gold 500
The Split Arrow logic is scheduled for a full review at a later date.
Thank you as always for your love of Arcana.
“The wording is too similar to the previous apology notice.”
“Is it? You do it.”
He added wording according to what the parrot told him.
“How can a person repeat himself more than a parrot... Tsk.”
“That does not feel very pleasant.”
When he wrote the final sentence, the letters glowed faintly and then vanished.
Applied.
The Director closed the notebook and leaned back against the chair.
He slowly looked around the inside of the hut. The pile of parchments was even more disheveled than last night. Footprints marked the floor. The corner of the map fluttered in the wind coming through the hole in the ceiling.
The space of the mastermind.
The dwelling of the one who operated the world.
No matter how one looked at it, it was just shabby.
“……Next time, should I understand the entire structure of the logic first before putting in a patch? It’s hard to look through all of it, though.”
Thinking he had luckily found the hole in the arrow logic, he had modified it immediately based on that.
The parrot nodded.
“That would be a wise judgment.”
“This time, well, still.”
The Director muttered while looking up at the ceiling.
“We blocked the cannon bug. The world didn’t evaporate. There was no refund incident. We did have to hand out some freebies, but.”
The parrot waited silently.
“……We blocked it well.”
“…….”
“Tell me we blocked it well.”
“...”
The parrot said nothing.
Whether that was affirmation or silence, only the Director himself knew.
With his eyes closed, the Director muttered.
“...I remember that if this game goes under, I die too, all right? It’s not like I forgot.”
“I know.”
“...Between me forgetting that I’m working with my life on the line, and things being this bad even though I’m working with my life on the line, which one is worse?”
“Do better next time.”
“Yeah.”
He nodded like an honor student who had received a teacher’s correction, then,
“Then that’s fine. I’m sleeping more.”
He lay down. He said nothing more.
With the patch notes on his lap, inside the shabby hut, the one who operated the world fell asleep.
It was still all right.
For now.