Today had been unusually lucky.
When he opened his eyes that morning, his head felt strangely clear. When he did his usual one-pull-a-day, rainbow light burst out.
The same went for his way home. For once, he got off work on time, and there was even a seat on the subway.
‘I wish every day could be like today.’
He closed his eyes with that idle thought.
Clatter, clatter—
***
Click.
It sounded like a tautly stretched line snapping. Kim Yi-hyeon slowly opened his eyelids.
‘......What?’
It was dark.
There was no light inside the subway car. All that seeped in through the window was an unknown blue fluorescent glow.
His eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. Had his night vision always been this sharp? Before he could even dwell on the sudden question, he saw them.
Fragments. Wreckage. Trash.
The window opposite him was horribly shattered. Fabric seats with their upholstery ripped open, an electronic display crushed and collapsed in pieces......
“Wh-what the hell?”
Kim Yi-hyeon jolted upright. His mind snapped fully awake. He had only dozed off for a moment, yet while he was unaware, the subway had been smashed to pieces.
A thought suddenly struck him. Kim Yi-hyeon hurriedly rummaged through the pockets of his coat.
“......There’s nothing.”
No phone, no wallet, no earphones. Even the glasses case he carried around every day despite never using it was gone.
His legs trembled. His breathing grew ragged. Kim Yi-hyeon stood frozen in place and looked around the car.
Nothing changed.
He did not wake from a dream even after his lungs began to ache...... and no one appeared to discover him.
There was no one.
‘Let’s get out first.’
He did not know how many minutes had passed, but only now did he finally make up his mind. He had to do something. If he went outside, surely he would be able to find people.
He walked carefully, making sure not to step on the shards of glass. One side of the car door was crushed inward, and the other side was nowhere to be seen.
Had it derailed and crashed? A subway? But if not, could a situation like this even happen?
“Hoo, hoo.”
He came out of the subway car. Before he could feel any sense of accomplishment from having done something, another sense sent him a signal.
A smell.
An unknown fishy stench brushed past his nose. Bright blue glowing water flowed across the platform floor. Marks were smeared on the walls as well.
That was the only light source.
For some reason, the light felt ominous. Still, it was better than being unable to see anything.
With a small sense of relief, Kim Yi-hyeon turned his head. At the end of his gaze, he saw a wall with the platform’s name written on it.
The language written there was neither Korean nor English. The strange letters looked like a mixture of the alphabet and hieroglyphs.
And yet, inside his brain, they were interpreted on their own.
[Tulavia]
A name that could never exist on the Korean subway map. However, it was not entirely unfamiliar.
Déjà vu.
Was it an instinct trying to escape from the sudden situation? Kim Yi-hyeon’s mind was sharper than usual. His thoughts dug through his memories and produced an answer.
‘Polaris.’
It was the name of a mobile game.
The genre was strategy. A game where you used currency to hire operatives needed to carry out operations. A collectible game, common if one wanted to call it common.
Kim Yi-hyeon also knew Polaris’s story inside and out. He had been captivated by its unusual worldbuilding and had played it ever since launch.
“No, but does this even make sense......?”
It was impossible to accept the situation. What kind of chain of events would have to happen for a person from reality to fall into the world of a mobile game?
Still......
Kim Yi-hyeon looked around the subway station again.
It differed in many ways from the Korean stations he used every day. Idiot. No matter how dark it was, he could not believe he was only realizing that now.
‘Assuming this place really is...... inside the game.’
The story of Polaris came to him on its own. Tulavia. It was a location that appeared at the very beginning of the early section, starting from the tutorial.
In that case.
There was something he had to confirm here.
Kim Yi-hyeon climbed down onto the tracks. His heart pounded at the action he had never once done in his life. He worried the subway car might suddenly move.
He looked back, and only then felt somewhat relieved.
The lead car looked like nothing but a lump of scrap metal. There was no way it could operate like that.
He walked along the tracks, trying to recall as much of the tutorial script as possible. His head was so terribly complicated that he did not even have time to feel bored.
How far had he walked like that?
‘......It really is here.’
The rails ended, and a side path appeared on the left. Deeper along the path was an open cavern.
It was not a particularly large space. Once he crossed the entrance, he could grasp the interior at a glance. The place looked like another world, completely detached from the subway.
Trees stretching their branches in disorder.
Ivy, strangely stained purple.
The vines were swollen inward like the belly of a pregnant woman.
His heart hammered for a different reason than before. The illustration that decorated the tutorial overlapped with the sight before his eyes.
Reality and fiction matched completely.
“No, but.”
He felt something off. Or perhaps he should call it a sense of alienation. The cavern looked exactly as it had in the game, but one thing bothered him.
As if bewitched, Kim Yi-hyeon approached the vines. The closer he came, the stronger his unease became. The plants had grown as if wrapping around something, or hiding it. He could not help but feel that it was artificial.
Clearing away the vines was not especially troublesome. They felt almost completely dry, rustling whenever they touched his body. The texture was similar to fallen leaves.
He did not need to clear all of them away.
When he checked inside, his lips trembled.
What had been hidden was a glass tube three meters tall.
A cylinder filled with an unknown green solution.
Ridiculously, he was reminded of the large liquor bottle he had seen at a friend’s house.
There was a person inside the glass tube. Like ginseng liquor.
“Ha.”
This was the player.
As with many other mobile games, a title was attached to the user’s chosen name. Traveler, Commander, Doctor, Teacher, Trailblazer, and so on. In Polaris, the title used was “Professor.”
The tutorial and prologue. Every story in Polaris began when the player sleeping here opened their eyes.
The player could be male or female. It depended on the user’s choice. Both versions were drawn with sharp and intelligent features, and their personalities were the same, so gender did not have much meaning.
Once chosen, it could not be changed. As an aside, the community often posted jokes mocking the “male Professor.” As was usually the case with collectible mobile games, the trend leaned heavily toward preferring female characters.
The player before his eyes was a woman.
But if so.
“Then what the fuck am I?”
If he was not the player. If there was a separate person carrying out the player’s “role.”
Did that mean Kim Yi-hyeon was simply a foreign substance?
That was when it happened.
Beep. Beep-beep-beep.
[Operative Record Updated]
[Displaying Operative Information.]
[Operative Name: Kim Yi-hyeon]
[Grade: ★]
[Talent: Unknown]
He was dumbfounded.
The letters that had appeared out of nowhere were already enough to bewilder Kim Yi-hyeon. But among them, there was one part he absolutely could not ignore.
“One staaar......?”
Because it was too pathetic? That, too, would be a problem if it was a problem. But the core issue lay elsewhere.
In Polaris, there were no 1-star operatives. He had become a character that did not exist in the game.
‘And what’s this Unknown Talent supposed to mean?’
Polaris was a collectible strategy game. In other words, gacha was its business model. There were various devices meant to emphasize how special high-grade operatives were.
Talent was a representative example. Operatives of 4 stars and above were each born with their own trait.
Below 4 stars? They had the tag [Talent: None] stuck to them. Sad as it was, it could not be helped. That was how the game company made money.
‘But my Talent is Unknown?’
It meant that even if it could not be identified, it did exist. Despite him being only a 1-star, far from even being 4 stars or higher.
And finally.
[Skill List]
[Special Armament Crafting]
Skill. Viewed through a display, it was a word so ordinary that it could not be more mundane.
But once it was mixed into reality, the feeling changed completely. Familiar, my ass. It only felt unnatural.
‘Was there even a skill like this in the first place?’
He had no memory of it at all.
Polaris’s playable characters were basically given one skill each. Only 6-star characters received one additional skill.
‘It’s not like I know every single skill, though.’
Was that not obvious? A user who memorized even the skill names of 3-star characters by heart? He doubted even one percent of them did that.
Even so, he could declare this with certainty.
[Special Armament Crafting]. This was a skill that no operative possessed.
‘Of course it is.’
Because “Special Armaments” were Polaris’s gacha system. In other words, they were equipment that could only be pulled with money.
To emphasize it again.
Polaris was a “collectible strategy game.” You had to pull operatives to deploy on operations. On top of that, you had to pull weapons and place them in their hands.
There was not even a pity ceiling. Whenever the so-called tier-one pickup period came around, the community filled with wails.
Title: My life as a Polaris loser is screwed....
How the hell does 300 weapon pulls all off-banner make sense lmao
This garbage is a strategy game??????
└ No, it’s a trash game.
└ No, it’s a slot machine.
└ You should’ve pulled strategically, Polaris loser.
└ Ast I love you Ast I love you Ast I love you
└ The Ast cult is everywhere, fuck;
Roughly like that. That was why it was cursed as a strategy (slot machine) game.
Then Kim Yi-hyeon focused on one word.
“......Crafting?”
In-game, the expression used was “Supply.” In contrast, the word used in the skill was “Crafting.”
What did this difference mean?
‘So, what? It’s not pulling through luck......’
The ability to directly create gacha weapons.
‘Isn’t that broken as hell?’
He had obtained a cheat code.
***
Ziiiiing!
At the stabbing headache, Kim Yi-hyeon’s face crumpled fiercely. This was already the sixth time. The previous five attempts had all ended in failure.
And failure was the mother of success. Only now had he obtained a meaningful result.
“It really got made.”
As he looked down at the dagger gripped in his hand, a hollow laugh came out on its own. Blue particles had gathered together and formed a blade.
It felt as if his feet were floating off the ground. Even the small amount of realism that had remained was blown clean away.
“It’s only a measly 1-star, though.”
The crafted dagger was the 1-star [Glitch Knife].
A moment ago, he had tried using the skill while vaguely imagining whatever weapons came to mind, from 6-star to 2-star. As stated earlier, the result had been miserable.
A headache struck, and the skill did not activate. It felt as if he was being rejected, or bounced away. The higher the grade of the weapon he tried to craft, the stronger the backlash was.
‘Is it because my operative grade is low?’
He did not have any trouble using the skill itself.
He could use it as naturally as moving his hands and feet. Just like how the language from the world of Polaris written on the platform wall had been interpreted.
‘And dismissing it works fine, too.’
The instant he willed it to be dismissed, the [Glitch Knife] vanished. It seemed the skill and his mind were connected far more deeply than he had expected.
It was beyond unsettling...... but it helped.
‘The worldbuilding is pretty bleak, after all.’
Even if it was not an extreme apocalypse, this was a world close to ruin. What if he was illiterate and powerless here? He was confident he would die on the street within a week.
“Right. Even 1-star is something.”
It was a little funny that a 1-star character would go around swinging a 6-star weapon. Unlike operatives, he was fortunate that 1 star was the lowest grade for equipment.
‘By the way.’
Kim Yi-hyeon shifted his gaze toward the glass tube asserting its presence among the vines. The player character had not yet awakened. Even though it must have been noisy beside her.
“What do I do with this?”
His head had cooled more than before. Was it because the game system had stripped away his sense of reality? Or, conversely, because he had accepted the situation in his own way?
Either was fine. The immediate goal was survival. He knew where this place was, but the exact point in time was unknown.
‘Assuming it matches the tutorial......’
It was nothing but dangerous.
Whatever else one might say, Polaris was a strategy game. The player was suddenly placed in a crisis situation, and combat began.
Two options came to mind right now.
“Either I get out alone, or I wait here quietly. One of the two.”
He wanted to avoid the former if at all possible. Tulavia was a region that had been closed off long ago. Even if there were people here, not a single one of them would be normal.
Vagrants. They might resemble modern homeless people or gangsters in nature, but the degree to which their heads had gone bad was different. This world was dozens of times harsher than the modern day.
And besides, it was not only people.
Monsters were everywhere.
‘I feel like I’d die within a day.’
He was not confident he could break through with only a 1-star weapon. Even assuming he somehow managed to deal with the monsters...... how was he going to solve food and lodging?
For now, he left that as the last option. There was also the plan of waking the player and traveling together, but then every development in the game would become twisted.
‘Even if things go according to schedule, it’s still a gutter.’
The world was already one that sank deeper into hell the further the story progressed. If even the player got killed off, there was a high chance it would truly end in ruin.
If the development became distorted, he could only hope it would change in a better direction.
The next method was to wait.
‘If it follows the game, Leila will come.’
A major character in Polaris. She was a character with as many foreshadowing crumbs scattered about her as the player.
Leila explored Tulavia with her colleagues from Selvlogics Lab. Then, they discovered this place. The story began when she woke the player from a long sleep.
The player was still here. In other words, this was before Leila arrived. If he waited, the people of Selvlogics Lab would come.
‘Am I going to meet the characters?’
As a user who had enjoyed the game, his heart fluttered. But more than that...... he wanted to meet people. Would that not make him feel a little more at ease?
‘......Let’s wait.’
He moved away from the player and sat near the cavern entrance. There were many things he had to think about until Leila arrived.
He could only hope that the time frame had not deviated too far from the tutorial.
***
He had thought wrong. There was a visitor who came one step earlier than Leila.
Skitter, skitter, skitter.
A sound came from outside the cavern.
Kim Yi-hyeon immediately lifted his backside from the ground. Before he even had time to wonder what the sound was, they entered his sight.
Simply put, spiders.
To describe them further, they were large spiders. Huge bodies that reached the waist of an adult man. Their bright red eyes were staring straight at Kim Yi-hyeon.
Speeders.
Commonly called trash mobs. Even after thinking it himself, he found it absurd.
That thing is a trash mob?