One day, a translucent holographic window appeared before everyone’s eyes.
The screen resembled a game interface, and it displayed a cryptic message.
No one knew what it meant.
But it did not take long to understand.
The clear blue sky turned blood-red in an instant.
Boom! Boom!
Then, without warning, an enormous tree came crashing down from the heavens like lightning.
It was so vast and impossibly tall that it looked less like a tree than some colossal living serpent plunging into the earth. Its trunk burrowed deep underground.
Rumble—
The deeper it took root, the more violently the ground shook.
Buildings crumbled without resistance. Faced with a disaster unlike anything they had ever seen, people fled in panic.
At some point, the tree stopped sinking into the ground.
The earth, which had bucked and churned as though it might overflow, finally fell still.
That was when meteors began to fall from the sky.
Boom! Boom! Crash!
They came in every size. Some were no larger than a crouching person. Others were so massive that it felt as though an entire small island had dropped from the heavens.
Crack! Crack!
The round meteors split open the instant they struck the ground.
And from inside the shattered shells—
Roaaar!
Screech!
—emerged monsters in every shape imaginable, creatures no one had ever seen in this world before.
“Argh!”
“W-what the hell are those?!”
“Help! Somebody help me!”
The monsters looked like they had crawled straight out of hell.
They were merciless.
Like beasts starved for blood, they lunged at every human they could see. People caught in their claws were torn apart until they were no longer recognizable. Some were stuffed into snapping jaws and chewed to pieces. Others were pulled apart alive, their limbs ripped from their bodies for the monsters’ amusement.
Screams erupted everywhere.
The monsters’ chilling roars mixed with the stench of blood, and one by one, the screams began to fade.
Exactly twenty-four hours after the slaughter known as the Cleanup began—
Players.
It was a term as game-like as the holographic windows that had appeared before the survivors’ eyes.
As though humanity’s confusion and despair meant nothing, the system window continued to issue messages.
Despair settled over the ruined city once again.
To be honest, that despair did not affect me all that much.
The work I had done before the world’s Cleanup was not very different from the work I did now.
Beep. Beep.
Using a barcode scanner with a faint golden glow, I rang up several food items, five cans of beer, and three packs of cigarettes.
The white packaging had neither labels nor barcodes printed on it. Yet the moment I touched the scanner to each item, it recognized the product on its own and calculated the price on the monitor.
“That comes to 181 coins.”
The middle-aged man standing in front of the counter had a rough face to begin with, but now it twisted into a deep scowl.
“What kind of price is that?!”
“I’m charging the listed price.”
“Listed price, my ass! One coin is worth about a thousand won. How can some food and three packs of cigarettes cost over 180,000 won?!”
The one saying something ridiculous was not me.
It’s ridiculous to judge prices by the value of money from before the Cleanup.
Besides, this was one of the few Special Supply Stations.
At ordinary supply stations, all you could buy were bland preserved rations, canned food, and cheap daily necessities.
But this place was different.
As a Special Supply Station, it carried everything convenience stores used to sell, along with a wide range of supplies necessary for survival.
Naturally, the prices could not be compared to the goods sold at ordinary stations crawling with rats and cockroaches.
Judging by the pork hocks and grilled intestines he had eagerly loaded into his arms—late-night snacks that were expensive for their portion size—he had probably gotten carried away without considering how much money he actually had.
“Lower the price right now!”
“I’m sorry, but we can only sell items at their designated prices—ugh!”
The man grabbed my wrist just as I lowered the scanner.
He probably thought he had only squeezed a little too hard.
To me, it felt like my wrist was about to snap.
I’m not a Player like you.
Even a Player at an extremely low level was on a completely different level from me, an NPC—Non-Player Character—with no stat bonuses.
My body possessed only ordinary human-level stats, no different from before the Cleanup. It was fragile enough that a low-level Player could shatter my bones with a single punch.
If this man’s level had been any higher, my wrist would have turned to pulp on the spot.
<Warnings accumulated: 1>
<Immediate sanctions will be imposed upon accumulating 2 warnings.>
The man flinched at the warning window that appeared before him and immediately released me.
Judging by his reaction, it was probably the first time he had seen one.
Unlike NPCs at ordinary supply stations, NPCs at Special Supply Stations were classified as Administrators rather than simple employees.
They were protected.
Anyone who used violence against one the way they might against an ordinary NPC would face penalties severe enough to be unbearable.
So this really is his first time at a Special Supply Station.
As I rubbed my aching wrist, the tense man suddenly swept the items off the counter into his arms.
Then he bolted for the entrance.
On his way out, he even snatched several expensive potions from the shelves.
“Wait, sir!”
It had been a long time since I had seen something this absurd, so I called after him in a rush.
He did not even look back.
He shoved the glass door open with his body and ran outside.
Then he flinched.
Another red warning window appeared before his eyes.
Even so, he kept running.
He sprinted toward the golden boundary surrounding the convenience store.
NPCs like me could not leave the designated safe zone. He must have assumed that if he crossed the boundary, he could get away with the stolen goods for good.
“Ah… You should’ve stopped when I called.”
Clicking my tongue, I grabbed one of the baskets stacked near the entrance and stepped outside.
By then, less than five meters separated him from the boundary.
A nasty laugh escaped his lips as he drew near it.
Then—
A black figure, dark as the abyss, suddenly appeared in front of him.
Something sliced through the air.
At the same time, his body stopped dead.
Thud.
A heavy sound followed.
The man’s head rolled across the ground with his eyes wide open before finally coming to a stop.
Items clattered to the pavement.
A moment later, his body collapsed.
A corpse whose head had been severed before it could offer even the slightest resistance.
And the only thought that crossed my mind was—
Now I have to clean this up too. What a pain.
Items could not be damaged or dirtied no matter how violently they were thrown before a transaction was completed.
But returning them to their original places was still my job.
If I left them there and some unsuspecting Player picked one up, more heads would start rolling.
I approached the fallen corpse and looked down at the severed head.
Blood still pulsed from the cleanly cut neck.
I did not find it frightening or grotesque.
That was thanks to one of the passive Traits I had acquired after being designated an NPC.
<Trait: Mental Stability>
Thanks to that Trait, I had been able to remain calm and composed during the Cleanup, afterward, and even now.
Though maybe I’ve simply become numb to people dying.
I crouched beside the still-warm corpse and began picking up the items scattered across the ground.
There were quite a few of them, so bringing a basket had been the right decision.
As I collected the merchandise, a swath of black fabric entered my view.
When I looked up, the pitch-black humanoid monster that had mercilessly removed the man’s head was standing there with a massive scythe in hand.
<Grim Reaper Lv.???>
It was the guard monster that had protected this convenience store—no, this Special Supply Station—for a long time.
It was so powerful that even the level displayed above its head was nothing but question marks.
Its strength could not be measured.
From beneath its deeply drawn hood, the Grim Reaper’s red eyes rested on me.
“Move, if you’re not going to help.”
Monsters did not have access rights to the items used by Players.
That was probably why this indifferent executioner had done nothing but chop off the thief’s head before standing there blankly.
At first, I thought it was just another monster following its programming, but…
The Grim Reaper stepped back slightly and pointed with its long scythe.
A red potion lay some distance away, far from the severed head.
It was an expensive healing potion in a palm-sized glass vial, worth five hundred coins each.
“Ugh.”
I nearly dropped it when I picked it up with the hand the man had grabbed earlier.
Using my other hand, I tossed the potion into the basket and stood.
At some point, the Grim Reaper had moved right beside me.
I nearly bumped into it.
For some reason, it looked as though its gaze was fixed on my reddened wrist.
Was it worried about me?
Probably not.
Assuming I had imagined it, I turned toward the convenience store.
Only then did the Grim Reaper move.
With one hand, it dragged the headless corpse away and casually tossed it beyond the boundary.
The body would have vanished by tomorrow anyway, as though it had never existed.
Still, after I complained that leaving corpses around was an eyesore, it had started disposing of them itself.
Roaaar!
As if they had been waiting for it, two monsters burst from a ruined building beyond the boundary.
They had muscular humanlike bodies, bulls’ legs, and grotesque bovine heads.
Minotaurs.
The two Minotaurs tore apart the man’s body outside the safe zone and crunched through the flesh.
When the severed head came flying after it, they caught it with ease and devoured it like a snack.
The time when I found monsters’ brutality disgusting had long since passed.
All I thought was that, judging by how easily the Minotaurs tore him apart, his stats could not have been very high.
The two Minotaurs finished devouring the body in an instant, then turned to look at me.
The Grim Reaper had already disappeared.
“What are you looking at?”
It was not as though they could kill me anyway.
Despite my cold stare, the Minotaurs did not bare their teeth.
Not because I was inside the safe zone.
Because I’m an NPC.
The “all creatures of Chaos” mentioned in the description referred to every kind of monster scattered throughout the world.
The Minotaurs blinking innocently at me from beyond the boundary, the terrifying Grim Reaper quietly helping me retrieve the merchandise—it was all because I was an NPC who possessed that title.
Leaving the two Minotaurs and their innocent act behind, I picked up the basket and went back to work.
I should clean this up quickly, then relax without a care in the world.
Today, too, the Special Supply Station in District Two was very peaceful.
…Probably.