—BANG.
My ears rang.
For a moment, I didn't understand what had happened.
The sound was too close.
Too sudden.
My body reacted before my mind did. I flinched backward, arms instinctively rising over my head as something heavy struck the floor.
Then silence.
Not complete silence.
The emergency broadcast was still talking behind me.
Cars were still moving somewhere below.
Sirens still echoed through Lincol.
The air conditioner continued humming as though absolutely nothing important had happened.
But inside my apartment—
"...Mira?"
She didn't answer.
My eyes refused to look down.
It was strange.
I'd spent the last few hours watching people get bitten. I'd seen bodies moving after they should have been dead. There was still a corpse covered beneath a bedsheet near my front door.
Yet somehow, looking down felt harder than all of that.
"Mira."
Nothing.
I forced myself.
"...No."
My legs moved.
I don't remember deciding to move.
One moment I was standing beside the window.
The next I was kneeling beside her.
"Mira."
I touched her shoulder.
Nothing.
"Mira!"
I knew.
Obviously I knew.
Knowing didn't stop me from checking.
Pulse.
Nothing.
Again.
Maybe I had the wrong spot.
Nothing.
I shifted my fingers.
Nothing.
My hands started shaking.
Some detached part of my brain was already telling me there was no point.
Another part kept trying anyway.
"Mira."
I didn't even know what I expected her to do.
Open her eyes?
Complain that I was touching her incorrectly?
Tell me I was panicking again?
Anything would have worked.
She had been standing there a few seconds ago.
Talking.
Asking questions.
Getting angry at me.
Now—
...
I sat back.
"Fuck."
That was all I could manage.
Then louder.
"Fuck!"
A translucent blue window appeared in front of me.
I almost slapped it away.
[Contracted Character Vital Signs Lost.]
I stared.
My breathing stopped for a moment.
A second notification followed.
[MIRA]
★★★
Status: Deceased
"No shit."
My voice sounded strange.
Angry.
Maybe because anger was easier. I didn't take the system warnings seriously.
"You think I can't see that?"
The system didn't respond.
Of course it didn't.
It was a fucking menu.
Another screen expanded beneath her portrait.
There were details I hadn't seen earlier.
Level: 5
Affinity: 0
Sanity: 0
I froze.
Affinity? Sanity?
Zero?
A red warning icon blinked beside the last line.
I focused on it.
The window expanded.
[Character Synchronisation Notice]
Recruited individuals retain personality, memories, relationships, motivations and psychological conditions established within Cyverse.
"...What?"
The next line appeared.
Recognition of the Doctor is automatically established upon recruitment.
I read that twice.
Automatically.
So that was why.
Her certainty.
The way she recognised my face.
My voice.
The title.
None of it had been something we'd actually shared.
The system had put it there.
Another line formed.
Doctor Recognition does not constitute established trust or Affinity.
My eyes moved toward the zero again.
Affinity: 0
"So she didn't..."
I stopped.
Didn't what?
Trust me?
She had.
At least enough to save me.
Enough to stand in my apartment listening while I dismantled everything she understood about herself.
World-origin. Memory authenticity. Existential continuity.
The system explained clinically.
"No."
I leaned forward.
There was more.
Risk is significantly elevated at low Affinity and Sanity.
Something cold spread through my chest.
Affinity and Sanity work together to strengthen emotional anchoring toward Doctor and increases adaptation to the current world.
"...You..."
My hands clenched.
The System knew. It fucking knew this could happen.
"FUCK!"
The high-school girl stirred behind me.
I'd forgotten she was still there.
A faint groan came from the kitchen.
I barely reacted.
The system continued displaying its message.
Calm.
Clean.
Helpful.
A few minutes too late.
"You could've shown me this before."
Another notification appeared.
As if mocking me.
[Tutorial information is progressively unlocked according to User interaction.]
I stared at it.
Then laughed derisively.
It wasn't because anything was funny.
"Progressively."
Of course.
I'd been playing games long enough to know how tutorials worked.
The game waited until you encountered a mechanic before explaining it.
Take damage.
Here's healing.
Receive an item.
Here's inventory management.
Meet an enemy.
Here's combat.
Apparently—
accidentally drive your first summoned character into an existential crisis—
here's why friendship is important.
"Fantastic."
I covered my face.
For a while, I simply stayed there.
There were excuses available.
Plenty.
I hadn't known.
The system hadn't warned me.
Mira had demanded answers.
She already remembered dying.
She was probably unstable before I'd even started talking.
All true.
None of them made me feel any better.
Because there was another truth beneath all of that.
I'd known something was wrong.
The warnings had appeared.
[Character Emotional Flux Detected.]
I'd seen them.
And I'd kept talking.
Because I thought honesty was better.
Because she deserved to know.
Because lying to someone I'd just established was a real person felt wrong.
Those were good reasons.
Responsible reasons.
The kind of reasons that sounded wonderful when nothing had gone wrong yet.
Mira had even asked me whether it would have been better if I'd lied.
At the time, I'd thought the answer was obvious.
Now she was dead.
I looked toward her.
"...Would it?"
The system obviously wasn't going to answer.
I didn't need it to.
Would she still be alive if I had said something else?
That we had both been displaced?
That the Gate had malfunctioned?
That I had lost parts of my memory during dimensional travel?
Anything except—
Your home was a game.
Your death was a story beat.
Millions of people watched.
I skipped most of it.
Jesus Christ.
Hearing it again inside my own head made me want to punch myself.
I didn't know.
That was the problem.
I didn't know anything anymore.
"...Mister?"
I turned.
The high-school girl had pushed herself partially upright.
One hand was pressed against the side of her head.
Her unfocused eyes moved around the apartment.
"What happened...?"
Then she saw me.
Then Mira.
Her face changed.
I moved quickly.
"Don't."
She froze.
"Don't get up yet. You hit your head."
"What..."
Her eyes drifted toward Mira again.
I stepped between them.
There were some things she didn't need to see.
Not because pretending it hadn't happened would somehow change reality. Just because there was no reason to make another person's night worse if I could avoid it.
Funny.
I was already learning.
"I need you to stay there for a minute."
"But she..."
"I know."
My voice cracked slightly.
I hated that.
"By the way, can you see this?"
"See... what?" She looked at me confused.
Ah, of course. Only I can see it.
"Just... give me a minute."
The girl stared at me, and to the zombie corpse by the doorstep.
She seemed to be mentally weighing her options of the lesser evil here.
Then, she slowly nodded.
I turned back toward the interface.
A new notification waited.
[BOND SYSTEM UNLOCKED]
Of course.
Now.
I opened it.
Mira's portrait was greyed out.
Beneath it sat an empty bar.
Affinity 0 / 100
There were several locked sections below.
Character Profile
Personal Episodes
Bond Perks
Private Communications
Most required higher Affinity.
I almost closed the whole thing.
Then another description caught my attention.
[Doctor's Authority — Emotional Resonance]
I frowned.
Interpersonal experiences involving Doctor receive increased emotional weight for contracted characters.
...What does that mean?
The system helpfully continued.
Trust, attachment and affection may develop at accelerated rates depending on individual compatibility and Doctor's actions.
There it was.
The kind of thing that would have sounded incredible approximately three hours ago.
A built-in relationship cheat.
I didn't feel particularly excited.
Not while Mira was lying beside me. And the stench of death filled the apartment.
"Affection..."
The word left a bad taste.
Did Mira recognise me because of this?
No.
The system had already separated those mechanics.
Doctor Recognition was automatic.
Affection wasn't. Whatever feelings came afterward would be influenced.
Accelerated. Not manufactured, supposedly. But influenced.
I scrolled, ignoring the strange look that the high schooler was giving me.
Emotional Resonance does not overwrite personality, free will, existing relationships or negative emotional responses.
That was something.
A woman could still hate me.
Wonderful.
Good to know I retained the possibility of being rejected by fictional women even after reality itself turned into a gacha game.
The joke formed automatically.
I didn't laugh.
My eyes returned to the warning.
Affinity and Sanity work together to strengthen emotional anchoring toward Doctor and increases adaptation to the current world.
That was the important part.
The closer they became to me, the easier they could reconcile being here.
Which meant Mira—
...I killed her.
I had taken whatever fragile explanation she still possessed and shattered it.
I closed my eyes.
...I'm sorry.
I wasn't sure how long I sat there before another system prompt appeared.
[Tutorial Recruitment Phase Complete.]
I looked up.
Basic System Functions are now available.
Icons materialised across my vision.
"Inventory" in the icon of a backpack caught my attention.
I opened it immediately.
Empty.
...Of course.
Not my old inventory. That would have been too convenient. Still, there were items inside, in the form of small icons.
Standard Issue PZ400 Ammunition × 120
Standard Issue PZ400 × 1
Smoke Grenade SGZ10 × 4
I stared at it for a second. And to the corpse by the window, and I got my answer.
I closed the menu. Not now.
Recruitment was locked. Well, at the very least, it quelled my immediate concerns about managing more people. There was still a dead woman, and a dead zombie in my apartment. And... a frightened teenager who had no idea what had just happened.
Zombies downstairs. A military mobilisation on standby. And somewhere outside, an entire fucking country, no... world was attempting to figure out whether it would still exist tomorrow.
There were still more immediate problems in front of me.
Two bodies.
One unconscious—or recently unconscious—high-school girl.
The apartment smelled faintly of gunpowder, blood and something else I didn't particularly want to identify.
The girl was still watching me.
Or rather, watching me stare at empty air.
I sighed, picked out some loose clothes and brought it to the bathroom.
"Clean up first before me. We'll talk after that."
The high schooler, still cautious, succumbed after sniffing at her own clothes.
Rattle, rattle...
I looked toward Mira.
That was harder.
There were practical things that needed to be done, and practical things were useful because they gave your brain somewhere to go when it was trying very hard to go somewhere else.
First, the bodies.
Opening the front door to dispose of them was out of the question.
Throwing them out the window was both morally questionable and likely to attract attention.
Leaving them where they were wasn't exactly sustainable either.
So for the moment, I wrapped the infected woman in whatever plastic sheets and rubbish bags I could find and moved her into my bomb shelter, which was refitted into a storage room.
Mira...
[Deceased character. Do you want to delete "Mira"?]
The prompt appeared as I held her lifeless body in my arms.
"...Yes."
In front of my eyes, her body disintegrated, along with her clothes.
"..."
The prompt disappeared.
...Only the pistol, ammunition and smoke grenades left behind in my inventory.
The bathroom door opened behind me.
The high-school girl stepped out wearing an oversized sweater and a pair of drawstring shorts I'd found buried in my wardrobe.
Both were obviously too big for her.
She had tied the shorts twice around the waist just to keep them from falling.
Her hair was still damp.
She stopped when she saw me standing alone.
"...Where did she go?"
I looked toward the empty floor.
There were several answers available.
None of them were good.
"She's gone."
The girl stared at me, but didn't continue the conversation.
For the first time tonight, I understood the appeal of not explaining everything you knew.
"She didn't make it."
Her expression fell.
"Oh."
That was enough.
Just a sad, understandable answer.
I disliked how relieved that made me feel.
"Come sit."
She did. Slowly, still wary of me. There was still dried blood along one side of her hairline despite the shower, but otherwise her complexion looked much better.
Less like someone who had almost been eaten. More like a normal student who'd been forced to wear an uncle's laundry. I thought of something dirty.
...
I pointed toward the couch.
"How's your head?"
"Hurts."
"Nauseous?"
"A little."
"Vision?"
"I think it's okay..."
"Do you know what day it is?"
She looked at me.
"...Seriously?"
"Answer."
She gave me the date.
Correct.
"Where are you?"
"Your apartment."
"My name?"
She paused.
"You never told me."
"..."
"Jun Tae-yoon. 27, I worked at K District."
"...Hana Mori."
She continued.
Seventeen. Student at Lincol East Academy.
Lived two floors above me. I'd seen the uniform enough times around the neighbourhood to recognise it, but we'd apparently managed to live inside the same building for years without ever speaking. Well, that wasn't particularly unusual. The sort of modern reclusiveness unique to the city life. You could sleep ten metres away from someone for five years and know less about them than a coworker who sat beside you for three months.
"Do you have family here?"
Her expression changed.
"My mum."
"Upstairs?"
"No."
She reached for her phone.
"She's working."
"Where?"
"Central General."
Hospital. Of course. I didn't say anything, recalling the news a few hours ago. She must've seen it too.
Hana looked at her phone, visibly tired.
"Did you call her?"
"...She's not picking up."
"The network's overloaded," I said.
"..."
It wasn't much comfort.
But sometimes there wasn't much useful to say.
"Your dad?"
"Overseas."
"For work?"
She nodded.
"Kyushu District."
"Any siblings?"
"You ask a lot of personal questions." She jerked back with squinted eyes.
"...You came to me for help. I just want to know your situation."
"...I'm the only child."
So she was alone. That explained some things.
"Why did you come down here?" Hana looked at me.
"Because you were here."
"...That's not an explanation."
"In the lift."
I remembered.
Her in the corner.
Me trying very hard not to panic.
"After you got off, I went home. Then I heard someone screaming outside."
She looked down.
"My neighbour opened the door."
My stomach tightened.
"Someone was injured?"
"Her husband."
Right.
"You know what happened next."
Unfortunately.
"I locked myself inside."
"That was smart."
"I called my boyfriend. He told me not to leave."
I could guess where this was going.
"But?"
"There was someone banging on my door."
Hana gripped her phone tighter.
"Then another person started screaming in the corridor. And I could hear something hitting the wall."
"So you ran."
"I waited."
She looked embarrassed.
"...Uhh... For a while."
"Good."
"...Good?" She tilted her head, as if she hadn't expected that reply.
"Waiting is good."
"...Why?"
"A lot of people treat running away like it's cowardly. That's stupid. Running without knowing where you're going is usually worse."
I stopped myself before it became a lecture.
"So how did you end up here?"
"The lift stopped working."
"Management probably disabled it."
"I used the stairs. But there were people below."
"Infected?"
"I don't know. I didn't wait to ask."
"That was a good decision."
She looked slightly happier at that.
"I remembered you got off on eleven."
"You remembered which way I walked?"
"The TV."
I blinked.
"What?"
"I could hear your TV from the corridor."
Ah.
That explained it. Well technically, I was playing a livestream on my PC, but that technicality didn't need to be corrected.
Just in case, I went to my PC and lowered the volume.
Zombies reacting to sound was one of the tropes.
"So you just knocked."
"I tried two other doors first."
"Nobody opened?"
She shook her head.
Fair.
I couldn't blame them.
If she'd knocked on my door before I'd seen her through the peephole, I might not have opened either.
"You were the only one who did."
I looked toward the entrance.
That decision had nearly gotten me killed.
Mira had died because of what happened after.
It would have been very easy to conclude that opening the door had been a mistake.
Yet Hana was alive.
For now.
Not every bad consequence meant the original decision had been wrong.
That was another irritating thing about life.
Outcomes were much easier to judge than choices.
"Well." I leaned back.
"You're here now."
"...Can I stay?" There was fear behind the question.
I glanced toward the windows.
Then the door.
Then her oversized clothes.
"You were hit in the head pretty badly."
She nodded.
"Your floor has infected."
"Yes."
"And you're seventeen."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"Nothing. I just wanted a third reason."
She stared at me.
"...For the record, I have a boyfriend, so don't try anything funny with me."
The world is going to shit. And she's worrying about this. ...No, on the contrary, wouldn't stuff like this become more common sooner or later?
I sighed, as if to dispel the looming dark thoughts in my head.
"Yes. Stay."
Her shoulders dropped.
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. I'm almost out of coffee. You're stuck drinking water for a good while."
That was probably the first joke either of us had attempted since the outbreak.
It wasn't particularly good.
Still, Hana smiled.
Just a little.
That helped.