I didn’t like games. More precisely, I’d grown sick of the endless stream of mass-produced games.
“Ah, shit. What a mess. What a goddamn mess.”
The same control systems, cookie-cutter stories, and, finally, endless attempts to squeeze money out of players. But as they say, a thief sticks to the trade he knows. I went looking for another game yet again, and that was when I found this one.
WHACK—.
The character on-screen smashed his own skull with the hammer in his hand, then collapsed and died. The NPCs standing behind him screamed and wailed in horror.
[The Great Warrior on whom the ‘Grave Robber’ relied has succumbed to Madness.]
[The Resolve of the ‘Grave Robber’ decreases. The Trial of the Abyss begins.]
[Madness & Abyss] was a roguelike dungeon action RPG. Looking at it now, that was one hell of a title. Madness and Abyss. It had to be describing the state of mind of the people who played it.
Click. Click.
[You consume ‘Honey Tea’.]
[The sunsets I watched with him were always beautiful.]
[‘Honey Tea’ brings back a warm memory.]
It was a foreign indie game, and one of the rare titles in this day and age that still used pixel graphics.
[The Grave Robber rages at the Madness that stole the Great Warrior away.]
[Seething Rage]
[The damage of the Grave Robber’s next attack increases by 300%.]
“Oh, nice.”
To be completely honest, this game wasn’t remotely my kind of thing. The graphics were gory, and the story was unrelentingly bleak. Still, the beta version was free, so I started it thinking I’d just give it a quick try.
Not long after, I fried my computer. A pirated program crawling with viruses killed it for good. After raiding my emergency savings to buy a new computer, the first thing I installed was [Madness & Abyss].
Somehow, sheer stubbornness had taken hold of me, so I installed the game, and before long, I was pouring every spare minute I had into it.
Yeah, I’d gotten my head smashed in. Just like my Great Warrior sprawled out over there.
SLASH—.
The Grave Robber swung his sword. The monster guarding the door let out a shriek and collapsed.
“One-shot. So damn sweet.”
It was an unusual game in more ways than one. If a character died, you had to raise them again from scratch. NPC companions weren’t mandatory for progression, but without them, the difficulty rose exponentially. On top of that, the degree of freedom was enormous.
There were traits, but no restrictions, and the setting was compelling. Most importantly, the game’s unique random events kept me from walking away.
Tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap.
I dove deep into [Madness & Abyss]. It wasn’t easy. More precisely, it pissed me off. Combat in this game wasn’t simply a contest of health bars and attack patterns. Even after using an ultimate, the attack could still miss, and a single curse or item could send a character I’d spent months carefully building straight into the abyss.
“This lineup actually made it this far. The luck on this run was fucking unreal.”
After three years without making it past Chapter 3, I swallowed my pride and looked up a walkthrough.
There wasn’t one.
All I found were tips and item combinations shared by other players. The characters were always the problem.
The game was constantly going off the rails because the characters kept acting unpredictably.
“…I paid money to buy stress.”
That was something a YouTuber had said while playing [Madness & Abyss].
“It’ll all be gone when they die anyway. Might as well buff them to the max.”
Let’s see. I’ll use… ‘World Tree Sap’ and ‘Blessing of Nightlight.’ And finally, ‘Protection of the Ancient Beast God.’
At long last, after nine years, I was finally going to see the final boss. Given how this game worked, I wasn’t expecting to see the ending on this run. What method would it use this time to provoke some new bizarre behavior from my characters? As befitted a final boss, it would probably use something novel.
Even so, I wasn’t going to get greedy. This time, I planned to focus only on gathering information, such as its patterns and attributes.
That was why none of my main max-level characters built around the [Penance] concept were even in the current party.
“Ugh.”
Feeling stiff, I stretched. It wasn’t as though the fact that I was finally about to see the game’s ending filled me with some sudden sense of anticipation.
[Beyond the End]
The three surviving characters stood before the portal leading to the final boss room. This was probably the only time I’d ever come here with nobodies like these. I’d already spent a lifetime’s worth of luck getting this far, so expecting to see the ending on the first attempt was asking too much.
Clench.
Even so, I repeatedly clenched and opened my fist to loosen my stiff grip. When I looked again, my palms were sweating. I’d thought I felt nothing, but apparently, I’d been wrong.
“Who’s going to be the final boss……?”
During all my time playing this game, I’d imagined the identity of the last boss—the final boss monster—countless times. Could it be one of the nine Ancient Gods shown in the game’s opening? Or the Immortal King, who hadn’t shown so much as the tip of his nose the entire time I played?
This game was always smacking me in the back of the head and making either the dopamine or the stress inside my body explode. What kind of twist would it use to smack me in the back of the head at the very end?
When I moved my character up to the portal, a prompt appeared asking whether I wanted to enter.
‘Of course I’m going in. Why the hell wouldn’t I?’
[You have reached the Otherworld. Your journey…….]
I was just trying to enter the boss room, but captions full of pointless praise began scrolling through the game log.
“What’s this all of a sudden?”
Annoyed by the pointless presentation, I moved the mouse and hammered the skip button.
[……That was the truth thus far.]
“What the hell do you mean by truth now?”
The captions ended only after I’d hammered the skip button nearly twenty times.
[Thank you. We look forward to working with you.]
“What the hell are you asking me for?”
I grumbled to myself and waited for the screen to change.
BEEP.
The monitor went black. Finally, the loading screen.
One minute, two minutes, three minutes,……
“…I didn’t see this coming.”
My computer shut down.
No, this is fucking bullshit. Seriously!!!
***
Chapter 1: Initiation (1)
Patter, patter.
Did I fall asleep with rain playing ASMR last night? I kept hearing raindrops falling. Ah, but I think I picked the wrong track.
Rumble. Rumble.
What bastard puts thunder into a rain ASMR track?
Drip.
‘Cold.’
A cold drop of water landed on the crown of my head. Once it started, the water soon began pattering down and soaking my face. At this point, I was practically washing it.
‘What is this? Don’t tell me there’s a leak.’
Has it been a year since I moved in? It had only been about that long. No! The thought that water was leaking from the ceiling snapped my eyes open.
RUMBLE—!
A perfectly timed crash of thunder made my vision flash white.
‘Ah, shit, my eyes!’
Rubbing my eyes, I looked around. I was sitting somewhere I’d never seen before in my life. I was packed shoulder to shoulder with a group of complete foreigners inside a swaying wagon. The stench of sweat, strong enough to make me frown, brushed past my nose.
‘What is this?’
I moved only my eyes as I surveyed the area. Around ten people in the wagon? Beyond the shoulder of the driver holding the reins, I could see several wagons traveling ahead. Along with freight wagons piled high with goods, a small stagecoach was leading the procession.
Still dazed, I turned my head back toward the inside of the wagon. Everyone with me was dozing while crouched in their seats.
BOOM—!
Another bolt of thunder lit up the wagon. Everyone inside was dressed like background characters from some medieval European Netflix movie. Man or woman, every last one of them was carrying armor and weapons.
‘Is this a dream?’
Apparently, I was dreaming. Otherwise, there was no reason for me to be in a place like this. I pinched my cheek between two fingers.
“Ow.”
It hurt. The pain was vivid but shallow. This was a little troubling.
“…That damned rain is finally stopping.”
I heard the driver muttering as he held the reins. Just as he said, the sound of rain drumming against the wagon’s roof had stopped. The rain clouds were clearing, and far in the distance, the sun was peeking its head out.
As the surroundings gradually brightened, I could finally see the inside of the wagon properly. What was this? The people inside were dressed in all sorts of ways. There was even a beggar in rags clutching a wooden club, along with a female warrior who looked as though she’d just come from fighting as a gladiator in some colosseum.
“Driver, how much farther?”
One by one, the other mercenaries had begun opening their eyes.
‘What’s with those eyes?’
Every single person who woke had a murderous look in their eyes. One wrong word, and a fist might come flying. Maybe even a blade.
“We should arrive after one more day.”
“…I should’ve known when they offered so much money. Damn place is far as hell.”
A huge, middle-aged man with long hair and a long beard hanging loose muttered with a frown. Befitting his size, a massive mace rested by his feet.
“Boss, they aren’t selling us off to some tuna boat, are they?”
The one who spoke familiarly to the man called Boss was a skinny man armed in a mismatched style, as though he’d scavenged pieces of armor in every imaginable shape.
“Don’t talk nonsense. If that happens, we’ll beat them all to death and sell the ship.”
The two of them were talking to each other, but their words were clearly meant for the driver.
“Hoho.”
The driver merely laughed without saying anything.
“Don’t harass the poor man. We’re following those people anyway.”
The speaker was a striking blonde woman. Even seated, she looked unusually tall. She had to be around two meters when standing. Following her gaze, I saw a luxurious-looking black stagecoach rolling along in the distance.
Between that carriage and the shabby wagon we were riding, several freight wagons and wagons carrying soldiers trailed one after another.
‘No way. It can’t be, right?’
The stagecoach in sight looked painfully familiar. It was the same carriage I’d seen thousands of times in [Madness & Abyss]. My head suddenly began to throb.
‘Nothing happened, though.’
It had already been a month since I last played [Madness & Abyss]. Near the end of the game, I’d only wanted to see the final boss’s face, but it dumped an entire dissertation on me, so I skipped it without reading. Then, once it was finally over, my computer shut down.
‘And it never turned back on.’
No matter how much I thumped and smacked the tower, the computer refused to start again. Thanks to that, I spent an entire month without a computer, doing nothing but playing on my phone. I killed time with mobile games for the first time in ages, but their content was even more standardized than PC games, so I grew bored even faster.
To be honest, I’d indulged in some pointless fantasies. Wasn’t clearing a game that no one else had ever beaten the standard opening formula of some web novel? But nothing happened. My daily routine of forcing myself to commute to work just to make a living kept repeating.
‘I bought another computer this month.’
Unable to endure the boredom of everyday life, I bought another computer yesterday on a twelve-month installment plan. I hadn’t even had the chance to turn it on properly, yet here I was. No matter how hard I tried to puzzle out the situation, I couldn’t understand it. I wasn’t certain this was the game world, but if it was….
“…Fuck.”
The curse slipped out under my breath before I realized it. The people beside me glanced my way for a moment, then ignored me. If someone was going to dump me in a place like this, wasn’t the least they could do to explain the situation? I didn’t know who the bastard was, but he had no sense of professional courtesy.
JOLT.
The wagon wheel must have run over a stone, because my backside bounced off the seat. The jolt knocked over the bundle at my feet. It had been under my feet, so it had to be mine, right? But why did I have something like this? Wait, what the hell was with this hand?
The hand I reached out to gather the fallen objects looked unfamiliar. Unlike my original hand, it was huge and extremely rough. I followed it with my gaze and found that my body was different as well. My arms and legs were long. At least I didn’t seem to have any disabilities. That was a relief.
The objects that had spilled out of the bundle were small pieces of pottery. There were tiny, brightly colored ceramic pieces, as well as a fairly heavy jar. Only one character in [Madness & Abyss] carried junk like this around.
‘Ah, I’m fucked.’
I’d become the game’s ‘Jar Warrior.’ My only means of attack was ‘Jar Throw.’
***
As I said before, [Madness & Abyss] was a roguelike dungeon action RPG.
The gameplay was simple. You took your characters into dungeons and wiped out the monsters inside. That was it. The world and story had a dark-fantasy feel. It was certainly unique, but the further you progressed, the more troublesome incidents awaited you.
As if the game were saying, ‘You cleared that? Then try this,’ even harder quests would appear. Of course, from a gamer’s perspective, that provoked the desire for a challenge and became the driving force that made you play even harder.
‘This is where the problems begin.’
After playing the game for several years, I knew the broad outline of the story whether I liked it or not. The problem was that its world was utterly hopeless. This world ended no matter what. I didn’t know whether that was a feature of single-player RPGs or whether this game was simply unusual.
You could see an ending in this game without killing the final boss. More precisely, if the player gave up or stopped playing for a certain amount of time, the game decided they had quit and forced an ending.
I knew because I’d seen all dozens of them. There was no such thing as a happy ending in this world. Its conclusions ranged only from the worst to the second worst. The least terrible one was humanity abandoning Earth and living in another world.
“Ha, shit. Are you seriously screwing with me?”
From what I’d managed to learn over the past half day, I was currently heading toward ‘Parque,’ the territory where the game began. The driver pulling this wagon was a hired hand paid by the territory. We, packed into this shabby wagon, were mere tagalongs. The real prizes were the people riding in that black stagecoach.
‘Mercenaries always arrive in the game.’
Now that the game had become reality, it seemed the mercenaries who used to spawn at the inn every week were instead being recruited from far away. In any case, the mercenaries who were truly useful in this game were the Hero Grade NPCs riding in the stagecoach. The ones in this shabby wagon were Common Grade mercenary NPCs.
‘No, what the hell am I supposed to do as a Jar Warrior?’
Whenever a Jar Warrior appeared in the game, I dismissed it immediately. There were several reasons, but first and foremost, its attack power was weak. It did have a low chance of inflicting Stun, but the chance was truly abysmal. And because it was technically a ranged character, its defense was weak as well.
The ridiculous part was that if the monster was too far away, the jar would smash into the ground, which meant the character required a high Strength stat. On top of that, crafting jars required Mana, which meant raising Intelligence. In the game, Strength and Intelligence were two stats with absolutely no synergy.
It couldn’t equip any other melee weapons, either, so it simply became a bastard who was smart and strong but did nothing except throw jars. Jars were also expensive to make. Since each one was disposable, it was simply better to raise a mage and a warrior.
‘Now that I think about it, it was like someone had combined all the weaknesses of a warrior and a mage.’
No wonder it was mocked on the community forums every day.
“The territory.”
“I can see Parque.”
At someone’s words, everyone turned to look outside the wagon. At some point, the wagon had begun climbing a mountainside. Against a vast forest stretching across the landscape, I saw walls built from brown bricks in the distance. Before those walls, golden wheat fields bent their bodies this way and that with the wind.
It created the illusion of watching golden waves. The Jar Warrior’s healthy eyes could clearly see even things far in the distance. The lord’s castle, built atop a hill, was an elegant Gothic structure.
Below the castle, separated from the rest of the territory, I could see a harbor where ships lay at anchor. Workers loaded cargo unloaded from the ships onto carts, then hauled them up the road leading toward the territory. Behind them, sunlight shattered across the surface of the sea.
“Wow.”
I remembered the time I’d traveled to Europe. This place was more exotic and beautiful than any city I’d seen then.
Thump. Thump.
My heart raced at the unfamiliar scenery and the healthy new body I’d gained. For a moment, my fear vanished, replaced by a swelling emotion. Anyone would have felt the same after seeing this view.
Maybe, just maybe, I was mistaken. There was no way a world this beautiful could be that gutter of a game. This was… yes. An opportunity.
This had to be the second chance I’d been given. No matter how hard I worked or how many problems I solved, nothing in my life had ever improved. A transcendent being? A god? Whatever it was, some higher existence had clearly given me a chance to start my life over.
‘Right. Those guys will deal with the monsters anyway.’
The black stagecoach climbing the mountainside ahead of us—the Hero Grade mercenaries inside it would deal with the monsters that were about to appear. I meant the tutorial that began when we entered the forest road leading to the territory.
As long as they displayed even half the abilities they had in the game, there shouldn’t be a problem. Even if they didn’t, the mercenaries inside this wagon didn’t look ordinary, either. If these bastards joined the fight, then barring any unforeseen variables, there was no way we’d lose to the low-level monsters in the tutorial…….
RUMBLE, RUMBLE.
As though cutting off my thoughts, I heard something rolling down the slope. What was that sound?
CRASH—!
“NEEEIGH—!”
The deafening impact and the horses’ screams filled the mountainside. What had come rolling down the slope was an enormous boulder. With all its crushing mass, it slammed into the side of the stagecoach.
Unable to withstand the weight, the stagecoach went tumbling down the mountainside. The horses let out mournful death cries before becoming matching masses of bloody pulp and disappearing among the trees below.
“Kill them all-!”
“RAAAAAH!!!”
The bastards came charging down the slope.
‘Why the hell are you coming from there?’
They were the soldiers who were supposed to fight alongside us in Chapter 1.