Chapter 6: A Situation That Causes Panic

"..." Nio opens the safe door, taking in the mountains of treasure and equipment scattered everywhere—an almost beautiful sight. But the treasure does nothing to calm her heart as she walks across the floor, which is so absurdly polished she can see her own reflection in it.

She moves through the enormous hall overflowing with riches until she reaches a small metal safe that looks almost pathetic compared to everything around it. The perfect disguise for something that seems "worthless" but represents her greatest enemy.

"It’s here... if that thing is inside this safe... then she’s alive and she’s in this world... and if she is, she’ll try to destroy everything I’ve built, a dangerous threat to everything I worked so hard to obtain..." Nio kneels down, entering the safe’s combination.

"..." When the combination clicks and the safe opens, Nio immediately slams her head against it with force.

"NOOOOOOO!!! SHE EXISTS!!" The headbutt dents the small metal safe, rattling the object inside. Her horns tear a hole through the metal as she shudders completely, her tail whipping the floor aggressively.

More than just Nio’s emotions, her very body—the body that obeys the Lore—feels pure existential dread toward her greatest enemy, thrashing about aggressively.

"..." Nio forces herself to calm down, struggling greatly as she takes the object out of the safe. A frame with a photo. In the photo, there are two people: Nio and a woman.

A beautiful girl standing 1.90 meters tall, far taller than Nio in the image. She has long, slightly pale emerald-green hair, eyes of deep navy blue verging on cyan, with vertical pupils like those of a reptile. She has large horns with branching antler-like forms, the horns themselves stark white.

Her physique is a mix of seductive—large breasts and perfect curves—and fearsome, with a serene expression but an unsettling aura that comes through even in a still image.

She has a long green tail with scales that carry a metallic sheen, and her skin is fair and pale yet faintly greenish, like pouring a few drops of green ink into a bucket of white paint.

In the image, she wears a wedding dress, while beside her Nio is also in a wedding dress, though her expression is one of sheer terror.

"My wife... the damn wife I wrote into Nio’s Lore. The insane yandere psychopath who wants to destroy everything Nio has ever built. The crazy culprit who drove Nio to go against Yggdrasil..."

"T-That monster actually exists!!! Why!? I never created her NPC!!" The photo isn’t the same one from the game. In the game, the photo in the safe had been symbolic, because Nio had only written a Lore entry and taken a picture of herself in a Valentine’s Day event bride costume.

Meaning, the photo should only have Nio in it, no one else. And Nio’s terrified expression in the photo was completely different from the one she’d worn when she took the picture.

"S-She exists!! She really exists!! She’s out there... what do I do?" Nio sinks down, her knees hitting the floor as her entire body registers the danger. Unlike an NPC that Nio knew inside and out,

her natural enemy had only existed in Lore. That meant Nio never created abilities, classes, powers, or anything for her. She simply stated she was as strong as Nio herself and defined her backstory.

"Typhon Apsu Jörmungandr Ouroboros... her name is the only thing I know that’s a power in itself... since her name is literally the incantation of a dangerous high-level spell. Beyond that specific magic, I have no idea what Typhon is capable of..." Nio had always loved Gap Moe.

Naturally, is there any Gap Moe greater than one that affects everything around it? To Nio, the answer was no. So she’d built an entire Lore of psychological, physical, and perilous abuse around her avatar’s spouse.

She wrote so many heavy things that, precisely because of that, she’d never created an NPC. The game didn’t allow some of the data she wanted to input, so she’d had to use a note-based data system to create this character without actually making her NPC.

Of course, it was only story, only role-play material. The idea of a being who represented perfect cycles and wanted to destroy everything Nio built was interesting.

Typhon truly loves Nio. But she loves only, exclusively, and absolutely Nio. Anything "extra" is something she detests. Servants? Constructions? Legends? Titles? Typhon hates all of it.

Typhon was created to be Nio’s nemesis. Someone who wanted to defile Nio’s moral, physical, and psychological image. Someone meant to destroy everything Nio built and erect her own foundations on top of it.

Like Ouroboros, the serpent that devours its own tail, the marriage is an unbreakable bond. Nio is Ouroboros’s tail—the part destined to be devoured.

"S-Shit... i-if she’s real, where is she? She wasn’t an NPC, so she was never described as appearing in my palace... but if she appeared in the image I made as a joke, that means she came to this world too..."

"Oh heavens... why!! Why did I have to be such a mythology fan... I really didn’t need to have made so many mythological associations in my Lore!!! Now I have a crazy woman who wants to destroy my life and ruin everything I’ve done just because she thinks we’re married..."

"Haa..." Nio gasps and sighs almost exaggeratedly.

"Yes... I’ve figured it out... my greatest enemy is myself. Me and my past, which created such absurd Lore... is this the price? The price of being a fan of a game? Devoting myself to it and then getting screwed over by the very game I dedicated a life to?"

"...30 years... 30 years playing, 30 years creating things, and now everything I created comes back to haunt me... I feel... like a teenager who posted something bad online and somehow years later it went viral and now everyone recognizes it..."

"I don’t know what’s worse—being in another world, having become Nio, finding out I’m married to an insane woman, or the fact that this insane woman is randomly somewhere out in the world looking for ways to drag me through the mud and never let me crawl out of it again..." Nio curls up on the floor. A small panic attack.

Normally, Nio’s rational mind would prevent her from having any kind of panic attack, but the existential dread her body feels toward her own wife has merged with the irrational fear in her mind, making her fall apart alone amid all this gold.

A wealth that means nothing in the face of the looming threat. And Nio’s one advantage—knowing everything about her NPCs—has become useless upon coming face to face with a creation of hers that was never perfectly specified.

’Haah... p-panic... I’m panicking... I-I should calm down...’ Nio tries to steady her racing heart. The sensation is suffocating. It’s like discovering a literal god wants to destroy your life, has the capacity to do so, and not only has the capacity but will try until she succeeds.