Never Die Extra

Prologue. Evan D. Sherden, Dream

One day in March, that first month of spring when the flowers are in bloom and the birds are putting everything into their song, 9-year-old Evan D. Sherden, second son of the Marquis, had a very vivid and strange dream.

In this dream, Evan was an ordinary youngster living in an imaginary world called the “Earth,” and he was involved in a “role-playing game” — a game that lasts hundreds, if not thousands of hours.

There were many characters in this game, each with their unique traits and abilities, but one of them in particular had the unique trait of dying very quickly.

Evan grew to have something of an obsession with this moribund character. Every time the character died, Evan would reset the game and try to prevent the character’s death by adopting different strategies. Still, no matter what he did, he was unable to stop his character from dying. To make matters worse, every time he reset the game it seemed like his character would die ever more miserably.

These deaths were hardly heroic: his character often died by accidentally stepping on a land mine or being hit by a poisoned arrow intended for someone else. He would even die from falling over on the street. Other deaths could be even more humiliating: he’d end up drinking poison, thinking it was something else. But merely drinking anything too fast would be lethal to him.

Evan’s character would walk into the path of an evil troupe and rapidly succumb to their manipulative dark magic. Their magic would be fatal to him, naturally.

Ever more calamitous were the times when Evan’s character would come across a dungeon treasure box. In his excitement, he would simply stare at the box and forget to open it. Then the box would punish his lack of haste by releasing poisonous gas that would surround him and send him to his deadly sleep.

The character was met with many a tragic fate: he often bore the brunt of unexpected counterattacks from better-equipped foes. He could be regularly observed being cruelly murdered by giant monsters as he ran towards them.

When he did catch up to the monsters, they would always punish him with their blades. There seemed to be nothing Evan could do to save his character from a swift mortal judgment.

One time the character’s girlfriend grew jealous, and proceeded to kill him in cold blood. Talk about terminal relationship.

The magic of King Yo-ma also had a particularly cruel tendency to end the character’s life.  Here then, Evan eventually realized, was a character who seemed to face an unfortunate death no matter what!

Where on Earth could all of this tragedy possibly happen to just one individual?

Evan knew the answer. So do many others. This role-playing game of boundless freedom and relentless possibility is a massive hit on Earth. It appears in “The Deep Darkness of Dungeon City” Episode 3. Still, regardless of which route the player takes, the character would always die in vain. It looked as though this was the only possible outcome, at least as far as Evan D. Sherden could see.

How many times did this character die in this game? There are only a few CGs for the main character and a few CGs for each boss, but Evan’s Death must have been favored by the production team. Starting with convincing analysis. It’s a game you can’t clear until Evan dies. “The whole world is hoping for Evan’s death.” It was public belief that Evan’s presence in the game was blocking the powers of King Yo-ma, making it impossible for anyone to enter the final battle until Evan died.

Evan was becoming something of a cult figure within the game, attracting venomous comments laden with schadenfreude. It was common to hear such sentiments as: ”I love Evan running straight for death anytime, anywhere!” There were malicious comments that reflected on the disconnect between Evan’s lively appearance and his uncanny tendency to drop dead in the most ugly of circumstances. “It’s so thrilling that a handsome young man always dies in vain”. People were not exactly shy to voice their sadistic ideas on the situation: “I love it so much that I want to save the dead Evan and kill him again.” Evan was certainly attracting cult popularity among a sinister group of players.

There were even a few perverted players who conspired to secure Evan’s terrible fates time and time again.

“NO, that’s my story! Ahhhhhhhhh!”

“Sir, what’s the matter!”

That day, Evan, the second son of Marquis Sherden, who rules the city of Dungeon, remembered all  of his 29 years of life as a rebel. He remembered that he was a Korean Yeo Ban-Min.

Evan remembered how he had always died in vain in that game world — the world of “The Great Battle 3: The Deep Darkness of Sherden, the Dungeon City.” These memories were fraught with despair.

*  *  *

“I can’t die.”

Evan opened his eyes in the middle of the night. The room was pitch black. Evan was sweating slightly after struggling on his bed for hours in an as-of-yet futile attempt to revive the memories of his past life. Now though, his efforts had paid off and the memories clicked into place.

“I can’t just sit still and die like this!” Evan shouted into the air, the perspiration dripping from his forehead.

Evan leapt up from his bed. His body, a body that hinted only at the passing of nine years of life, now felt utterly strange and somewhat fragile to Evan as his mind began to assimilate the memory of his previous life and reconcile it with his present reality.

But this now, this right here, this was the definitely the reality. He was Evan D. Sherden, not a Yeo Ban-Min, and this world was very similar to the world in the game of the Battle of Yo-ma 3. Noticing the incredible similarity for the first time, Evan realised that the inevitable must happen here as it did there. The day was on its way. That day of mortal fate put in motion. The day Evan dies in vain!

That this was certain was clear to Evan in the way the world was far too similar to the game. He didn’t stop to consider why this was the case; he just knew that his memories were real and that they would lead to his certain death in his present reality.

“I have to come up with a solution” he thought out loud.

But how? Thinking about the countless crises ahead of him just drew a blank. But at times like this, he must stay calm. The memory of 29 years weighed down on him, the despair of countless deaths replaying over and over in his mind. No longer was he an ordinary nine-year-old boy. “Right, I’ll just write down everything I know. Everything I remember about the game world will be valuable information.”

He ran to his desk and sat on his chair. He turned on a lamp that operates as a mana stone, an energy source mined in Dungeon. And an unassuming notebook lying on the desk. This wasn’t just any old notebook though. This was “Free records,” an artifact commonly unearthed in Dungeon. With this, Evan could freely write whatever he wanted, modify whatever he wanted, and it even had security features so that no one else besides him could examine its contents.

When he had used it before he had thought it to be an amazing tool. But now, with the addition of his other set of memories he saw the artifact’s similarity with a computer’s document function.

“First of all, first of all…Yeah” Evan readied himself mentally to start the task of recounting his memories.

Evan picked up his favorite quill pen, dipped it in an ink bottle (what better writing equipment for a marquis’ son?) and murmured in a lugubrious voice.

“Let’s record all my deaths.”

Yeo Ban-min, an ordinary young Korean man, first came across the “Yo-ma Great War” series when he was sixteen.

Although the first work of the “Yo-ma Great War” series, “Yo-ma great war 1,” wasn’t as graphically-rich as other games, the story’s charm was so great as to render the story’s graphical shortcomings irrelevant. Yeo Ban-min, a rather sensitive boy, fell in love with the “Yo-ma Great War.”

Having completed the game entirely in just three days, he played the game repeatedly and looked forward to the next series to get released.

“How could I have possibly died from a slime?” Evan thought. “That hadn’t been a good ending. It hadn’t been good at all.”

In the sequel to “Yo-ma Great War” many aspects of the game were changed. Yeo Ban-min enjoyed spotting all the changes, even the minor changes like the alteration to the heroine’s story in the post-game sequence.

Thanks to the success of “Yo-ma Great War 1,” the production team had been able to raise their budget to produce “Yo-ma Great War 2”. As a result, there was a huge improvement in combat convenience, especially in the graphics, that many players were thrilled to find out about.

Yeo Ban-min, of course, cleared Yo-ma Great War 2 in just one week.

“No, how could you have died in such a simple trap? That doesn’t even make sense.”

After the “Yo-ma Great war 2,” “Yo-ma Great War Zero” was released. This game depicted the story of an ancient Taoist playing against King Yo-ma. It kept the historical setting of the previous entries in the Yo-ma Great War series, but this new instalment allowed players to work cooperatively. There were grand dungeons and mystical magic, as before.

As you might have imagined, Yeo Ban-min cleared Zero in no time: just 10 days. Yeo Ban-min, ever the critic of these game’s stories, found it regrettable that they did not reveal the ancient Taoist’s identity, but everything else he found simply perfect.

“Oh, it’s good to be born handsome, but why do all these women turn out to be such psychos? Forty-six endings where I’m stabbed to death by a woman? Are you kidding me?”

A few years later, when Yeo Ban-min became a college student, Yo-ma Great War 3 was released. This had masterful graphics, loads of new abilities to use, plenty of scenarios to play through, and total freedom to users. Here was a masterpiece that improved on everything that had come before.

Those who had overlooked the previous Yo-ma Great War entry could not ignore this third instalment in the series. Depending on how the main character is nurtured, the ending was divided into hundreds of detailed scenarios, with three-dimensional personalities given to every supporting character. The supporting characters even had the agency to go about their own lives, and their own decisions would influence the outcome! Anyone who played the game referred to it as “God” without hesitation.

“Well, the succubus…this god was pretty good. It was all downhill after that but you know…”

Yeo Ban-min also indulged in Yo-ma Great War 3. Along with playing the main character’s quest, he traveled around the dungeon city of Sherden to complete every side-quest the game had to offer and really get to grips with everything the game had to offer.

Particularly in this third entry in the series, the ability to connect with multiple women was expanded, so Yeo Ban-min tried his best to achieve the so-called “Harem Route Condition.” He succeeded.

“How did he die? Oh, poison… That’s such a cliché.”

A secondary character who somehow ends up dying no matter how the main character advances the story… that must be Evan D. Sherden’s character’s role. The second son of Marquis, the owner of Dungeon city, reduced to just a pawn who needed to die for the game to finish.

“He must be the character who dies for the main character. That’s right, where’s no force like the main member, but he’s loyal, and he was quick to get over if he worked on it a little bit. Even five endings where you’re beaten to death. Why are you shoving a warrior on a wizard and getting hit by a knife instead, you little brat! No, this is me!”

Yeo Ban-min felt a kind of fate at that moment. It was in that moment that he realised his sense of duty as a gamer. If the game is this heavily dependent on its players, then there must be an ending for Evan! If the main character’s ability to overcome even King Yo-ma, the ultimate king, will undoubtedly save Evan! It doesn’t matter. It eventually becomes a happy ending. I’ll save Evan somehow! Now determined to carry out this mission, Yeo Ban-min began to play the game with abandon. If Evan dies: restart, restart. If he dies, just restart….

“Getting poisoned, being assassinated, dying from a sprained foot, meeting the final boss too soon,  dying from a dungeon curse…”

Although there was a moment when Yeo Ban-min yes turned to the newer “Yo-ma Great War 4: The Secret of the New Generation,” he ended up returning to “Yo-ma Great War 3.” He still had to save Evan.

Yo-ma Great War 4 was set five years after Yo-ma Great War 3, but Evan did not appear in this fourth instalment. Damn those producers!

“Death, Death, Death…Death. Dumped by my fiancée… suicide… what a way to go.”

But in the end, Yeo Ban-min found it impossible. It didn’t matter how much time he invested in it. He spent six years in Yo-ma Great War 3 trying to save Evan but never managed to do it.

His last memory as Yeo Ban-min was when Evan pushed the main character out of the final match and was killed by the curse of King Yo-ma instead.

As no gamer was high-levelled enough to take Evan into the final battle without killing him, Yeo Ban-min was perhaps the only one who knew the truth.

“There’s nothing I can do. He dies. That’s that.”

Evan can’t be saved.

The main character cannot save Evan.

“But I have to save him.”

I am Evan, no one else.

Evan D. Sherden.

“You have to live.”

Evan glanced through the notes of all his deaths and breathed deeply. He seemed to calm down a little now.

“Okay.”

I’ll never die. Never.

“Let’s get started.”

Evan had come to a conclusion. He tapped his cheeks as a way of signaling to himself that he had made up his mind.

He would become a character who never dies.