"Whaa? He was an administrator? The same rank as me? Is that camouflage or what?"
The guard's answer was to ignore the question of being an administrator.
Which is to say that, for someone who had come chased in a hurry, he merely tidied his greasy hair quietly and kept his mouth shut.
He must have charged in loaded with bewilderment and rage over the nest that had been nibbled away as Ichi severed the Other Side.
The way he was inching backward, word must have gone around the industry.
"Chamel, was it you?"
"Hmm?"
"The one going around talking about me among the administrators."
"Whaaat a frightening thing to say. More than me, well, Master did in somebody else before, didn't you."
Yes, right. So it was you.
Other Side Administrators did not always stay holed up in their Other Sides.
Take Chamel as an example; does he not scurry about reality quite freely?
That a community had formed in that industry was something the original work covered as well.
Though it came out fairly late in the story.
More to the point.
"Can't administrators recognize each other?"
"Dunno, dunno. Unless someone's stupid enough to go around saying it with his own mouth, we're complete strangers, strangers."
Talk about it outside and get eaten? I left Chamel to shake his head and chatter skeptically and turned toward the administrator.
Hm.
If he cannibalized one of his own kind, would Chamel's administrative powers recover quickly?
When I looked at him as though appraising a tempting elixir, the guard flinched and retreated further.
Making a mockery of the door he had flung open so fiercely, his heel caught on it and he tottered. The guard shook his head, apparently confused, then belatedly put on a fearsome expression.
Even without that expression, that mug is horror enough.
【I will make you confess what you have done.】
Said while drawing his body back as though to bolt at any second, it was a threat that did not hold up.
Beside me Chamel roared with laughter and looked at the guard, who might have been a colleague, with pitying eyes.
"Can't I just eat him?"
"Eat whatever you pick up and you'll get sick."
He has not finished transforming yet.
Judging by that still drawn-on-paper face, he had his true form as an administrator tucked away tight.
Right now he was merely a guard monster assigned the role suited to the seventh floor's CEO.
The Styx cruise ship's administrator had shed his skin from the form of an ordinary crew member and burst out.
Chamel, the administrator of the Room 404 Other Side, had hidden in a crack in space and split it open to burst out.
So how must you be cooked down to come out?
The ordinary Other Side Administrator tended to stay hidden and reveal itself only after whoever entered the Other Side had died or left.
Well, Chamel's appetite is so great that he stood out from going around eating every person hooked, so let us exclude him.
For drawing out this place's administrator, who never appeared in the original work either, the answer was of course―
"He doesn't seem to grasp the situation."
―beat the administrator bastards and they listen.
After telling Chamel to guard Smith, I strode over to the guard.
The guard, faltering backward, was finally pushed out of the CEO's office and all the way to the elevator.
Having become acting CEO, the guard had lost most of the power that had seemed absolute.
The CEO here was in fact close to a parachute appointment planted by the Styx Company, and his job was said to be leaving the work to the employees below and going out to play.
Perhaps because the real company's situation was projected straight into the Other Side's system, he was shabbier than expected.
Of course our matchup is crap.
Compared with the guard of the rooftop garden, it was a body with no real advantage besides being hard.
"Now, now? Where are you going? You've nowhere to go even if you run."
When I blocked the front of the elevator and grinned, the startled guard fled sideways and pulled business cards from his breast pocket to throw.
FWISH, FWIP, THOK, THKTHKTHK.
Sharp metal business cards flew in, sparing neither floor nor wall.
"Putting up a last struggle?"
I batted away the ones that came near, quickly closed the distance, and kicked the bastard.
Rolling and rolling, the guard was pushed, with fine timing, right up to the emergency stairwell door I had opened in advance.
"Now we have work to do."
There, the monster that had followed Smith from the fourth floor was dawdling, blocked by an invisible force.
The monster, a pitch-black mass congealed and sloshing like slime, had no eyes, yet I could feel it fixing on the guard who had flown up to its nose.
It had the look of something that, at the slightest touch, would cling thickly, shove you into its maw, and chew and melt you down.
This monster, congealed from the curses and pent-up rage of sales team employees toward difficult customers, was a predator that melted and ate everything that touched its body.
【What is this.......】
Do not all working people harbor great love for their CEO?
There is a rule that monsters cannot enter the seventh floor, but a monster does not have the judgment to deny food right in front of its eyes.
As for a thin membrane blocking it physically, its force had been dulled anyway thanks to Ichi nibbling away at the Other Side.
The mass filling the stairwell heaved once and began pouring inside in an instant.
The sticky jelly filled the corridor and swallowed the guard right in front of it.
A soundless scream flails inside the translucent mass.
Android or scrap heap, the monster, which had easily melted down the scissors I had poked in as a test, steadily melted the guard.
A foul smell wafted over.
Though he was a tin can that did not even bleed, an unidentifiable liquid mixed into the monster's mass.
"Master? Your taste in spectating is a bit......?"
Chamel, poking his head out from inside the CEO's office, screwed up his face.
"A bastard whose hobby is drying up people's blood before eating them is talking about taste?"
"Is he dead?"
"No."
I turned my head and tapped at the wall of water filling the entire corridor.
This played its part in letting me leisurely observe a monster close to a strong acid.
The slime monster, somewhere between liquid and solid, could not break through the wall of water I had made.
I slowly pushed the wall toward the emergency stairwell just as it was.
The dawdling monster, apparently unsatisfied with its meal, worked hard at splitting, stretching, and kneading its body, then gave up and was pushed out beyond the stairs as I pushed.
CLICK.
I shut the door at my leisure and checked the guard sprawled on the floor.
As I said, he was not a guard who would die from this much, so I could feel biological responses little by little.
"Stop being stubborn and come out."
【......】
"I'm not the one in a position to beg, am I? It's your Other Side that's collapsing."
【......】
"Ha, I suppose I'll just have to blow it all away......."
【Wait!】
The guard twitched his half-melted body and, apparently having given up entirely, crawled slowly over and buried his head.
【That is right. I am the administrator.......】
"Before that, shall we strip that face off and talk?"
The guard hesitated a moment, then fumbled the skins of his face off and presented an intact visage.
With the drawn-on epidermis gone, the administrator's form resembled a test dummy I had seen once.
Two lines running across the head, round cross-marked emblems left where the ears should be, smooth silver skin that looked as though a stab would not draw a single drop of blood, and a bundle of colorful wires joining head to neck that seemed to imitate muscle fiber.
Bright red eyes, unsuited to that bloodless, pale face, blinked and then quietly avoided my gaze.
As though embarrassed at having shown his true form.......
"Has he lost it?"
Unable to keep watching such an unbearable sight, I grabbed the administrator by the collar.
Melted away below the chest and unable even to walk properly, the thing could not resist and hung obediently wherever I dragged it.
I crumpled the thing onto the plush fine-leather sofa and jerked my chin at Chamel.
"You said you wanted to eat him?"
"Weeell, yes, but if I eat him here the Other Side will burst, won't it? Monsters pop! Reality pop! Aagh, squawk! Hm?"
So administrators eating each other does not transfer the Other Side?
Then how did that protagonist little shit eat Chamel and steal the Other Side's ability?
Was that the little shit's ability?
The protagonist's ability as revealed in the original work was close to a cheat key for interfering with Other Sides.
Blowing up every Other Side he entered, as he had collapsed Chamel's, was the baseline, and when needed he even deformed Other Sides to fight his enemies.
He opened doors to the Other Side at will to throw reality into chaos, and even observed the mess at his leisure.
The original author was not the sort to lay out settings in exhaustive detail but closer to the sort who throws them out and tells you to interpret them yourself, so various analyses circulated.
Still, the most prominent among those analyses was the theory of an ability of creation and destruction.
A protagonist who was a godlike being inside Other Sides and became something similar in reality as well.
If the powers that looked divine were in fact all just imitations made by plundering existing Other Sides.......
'No, that is a cheat in its own right, isn't it?'
He had taken Chamel's ability to open doors connecting spaces for now, but this world truly had Other Sides to the point of overflowing.
My head ached.
I really should have trampled the sprout before it even came up.
A cheat ability like that, and now a protagonist buff on top of it.
Good grief.
"Maaster?"
While I was lost in thought my expression must have slipped, because Chamel called out cautiously.
The administrator crumpled on the sofa was tense as well at the talk of eating or not eating.
"Eating is on hold."
If an Other Side bursts, monsters spill randomly into reality.
Fighting the things spat out while also getting Smith out alive was beyond me, and even if I got out, I had no suitable excuse for Ichi.
Well, Ichi would suffer a little, so I thought that might be fine in its own way, but being tormented by Ichi afterward was more of a bother.
"You've grasped the situation, haven't you?"
When I asked the administrator, he nodded quickly.
The structure of the building inside the Other Side world had already been deleted into a mess and was tracing only a pattern.
The administrator bastard had come rushing over to fix that and made me waste my strength for nothing; no, the more I think about it the more it pisses me off.
"I, I will let you out!"
Crossing both arms above his head with only his eyes peeking out, the administrator hurriedly offered.
Now that he had returned to his administrator identity, his voice was at least bearable.
When he was imitating a human he had a machine voice, and now, with a body anyone would call a machine, he sits there producing a human voice.
"You will let me out?"
"―I will let you out, sir!"
"That's a given. Is that all?"
"I-I will produce a strategy guide for you."
"Oh."
I had gained something to explain myself to Ichi with.
Beyond that I received as a gift the red fruit the administrator said he had raised with great care, and while at it had Smith's memory wiped as well.
Every one of these administrator bastards has a knack for messing with the mind.
The administrator, having turned obediently cooperative, even manufactured the employee badges Smith and I had lost and offered them up.
"Then have a safe journey."
The administrator bowed his head flat, hurriedly produced a ring of keys, and shook it.
With a clear jangling sound, I felt the Other Side's space twist and release us.
Instead of the metallic smell, I catch the cold air of winter.
"Now, how am I going to explain this......."
I had already committed three acts violating the rule of this place, which is to exit an Other Side faithfully by the walkthrough.
Is that not case enough that they might believe me if I lied that escaping Other Sides is my ability?
"As if I ever cleared anything by the book; it was all patchwork."
When I opened the closed window, the chill winter air rushed in.
Only then did the sense of having returned to reality properly land.
Far off, sunlight pushing back the dimness of dawn seeped through the open window.
"Day's broken."
Ha, I want to sleep.
Ah.
"Chamel, wait, and when that one comes out, eat him up."
With no telling when he might be eaten by the protagonist, clearing away everything within reach is better.