Chapter 386

Invasion (7)

-The Player Association's secret behind predicting monster locations?

-Michael Zetter's "leadership" hits the mark... "I simply did my best," he stated.

-Was the Player Association's training actually not ordinary training after all? Examining the Association's intelligence capabilities through the correlation between real monster locations and training locations.

Naturally enough, the Association, having blocked every monster without a single casualty, received tremendous praise. Anyone could see it was a great achievement, a remarkable accomplishment.

"Wow, the Association's really something."

"How did literally nobody die?"

"There were people who died from gunfire in the fighting, but nobody died from the monsters. Does that even make sense?"

"Superhumans are superhumans, I guess."

But had the scale of that praise actually grown bigger than what Michael Zetter received back before I regressed? That was... questionable. It didn't seem like it had.

"Watching them fight was seriously cool."

"Right? I should've recorded some footage myself."

"My friend was nearby, and the police went nuts trying to stop people from filming. So what's this footage, then?"

"I bet the cops filmed it themselves. Figured there was money in it and got twitchy about anyone else having it."

"Fair point."

For one thing, the Association's response had been "too" perfect. Monsters had erupted all over the world, and not a single person died? Rather than thinking there was a regressor behind the Association who'd easily blocked a genuine crisis, people simply had no reason to feel any sense of crisis at all.

Part of that came down to this being, quite literally, unprecedented. Since monsters bursting into reality was itself a first-time event, it felt natural to assume the Association handling it well was just as much a given. You couldn't really blame ordinary people for thinking that way.

"The problem is me."

The problem was that I was the one who now had to keep meeting these elevated expectations. Naturally, people would keep believing the Association would go on blocking monsters successfully from here on out. They handled it well the first time, with zero experience, so they'll keep handling it well going forward, right? A hasty assumption, sure, but they'll manage. We'll increase the budget and staffing. Let's just keep doing what we've been doing.

Meanwhile, the Association's actual staff would be left baffled. They'd only done what they were told from above, and they knew nothing at all about the Association's real "preemptive crisis response system."

Yeah, I had to keep playing prophet, indefinitely. I didn't need to divide up personnel as rigidly as I had the first time, but I'd fallen into a fate where I had to figure out where each monster would appear and roughly how strong it would be before regressing.

"Was that... a mistake?"

In the end, it was because I'd threaded the first button wrong. Because I never gave people the chance to overcome the crisis themselves, because I stepped in front and solved everything on my own.

This was always the problem. When I use regression to solve a problem, the outcome ends up the best it can possibly be. But other people never get to grow through the crisis. So does that mean other people need to grow, which means ordinary people need to be sacrificed? That's messed up too. "I want you all to grow stronger, so I'll let some people die"... that's basically psychopath logic.

What if I were an ordinary person who knew the truth? If I realized a regressor existed who was controlling everything, how would that feel?

Honestly... I think I'd probably say, "This is the mess you started, so see it through to the end."

Since I chose the path where everyone survives, without worrying about efficiency... I think I'd tell myself to go all the way. Because now this world has no choice but to depend on me.

If I'd actually cared about efficiency, not intervening would've been the right call. I'm not saying I wanted society to half-collapse the way Michael Zetter originally wanted, so a new "society of players" could rise up on the ruins. But it's obvious that letting the right amount of chaos unfold, letting distrust toward existing state power spread, and then having the players who resolve everything become the ones people genuinely trust... that kind of atmosphere would've made it far easier to exert influence over society down the road.

But how is that any different from a dictatorship? Just because I never stepped into the spotlight doesn't change the fact that, in the end, I'm the one controlling everything... controlling...

"..."

Come to think of it, wasn't I controlling everything right now too? The only difference was the direction happened to be good. What I was doing right now was still close to dictatorship. I was reshaping an entire planet called Earth into the form I wanted.

-Thanos's actions closely resemble the classic psychopath profile. "I have to do it, only I can do it," that kind of thinking is a hallmark trait of psychopaths and sociopaths.

What separated me from the Thanos in that Marvel movie? One of us wanted to erase half of all living things. The other wanted to save every single one of them.

Did I gather everyone's opinions before deciding to save people? No. Did people even ask me to save them? Aside from someone's dying scream of "save me," nobody had personally asked me to change this world.

I just... felt like it was the right thing to do. I was acting this way on my own, of my own volition. That was all.

If someone confronted me right now and asked, "Aren't you a dictator too?" could I answer with a clear conscience? Wasn't I just another kind of dictator myself?

"No."

No. I needed to pull myself together.

This was something someone had to do. Other people simply couldn't, so they didn't, that's all, and if they could, anyone would've acted the way I did. They'd have used their own abilities for the public good. I was acting according to universal morality.

Talking with Ji-won usually cleared my head in moments like this, but unfortunately, she'd been far too busy lately. Hunting down monsters, building up political influence, handling this and that.

I'm right. I'm justified. I'm not wrong. Enough with the pointless brooding. Think about the future ahead. This kind of leisurely soul-searching could wait until later, no harm done.

Well, if there was one silver lining, it was that this counted as an "honest" kind of worry. Both the problem and the solution were laid out clearly. All I had to do was steel my own resolve.

And the fact that I'm even saying that means there's another problem where nothing is clear at all.

"You didn't see it?"

"No..."

The disaster heading toward Earth. Because of me.

Back when I entered Floor 15.

I saw it with my own two eyes. The elder on Floor 15 pulling out a boulder the size of a house and tapping on it, again and again. The boulder was too massive, and the sound of the tapping too thunderous, for there to be any chance I'd misremembered it. There's no way I hallucinated it either.

That boulder existed. I'd confirmed its existence both with my eyes and through mana sense. Something that definitely, certainly existed.

"A giant boulder? I... never saw anything like that."

"A boulder? Ah, I saw the stone statues. Wait, are you saying the monsters showing up in reality are actually because of us...? What, that's not it? A giant stone? I'm not really sure what you mean."

But strangely enough, none of the other players seemed to have seen that stone statue. Even though I'd met at least ten other players who'd recently entered Floor 15 through Zetter or Ji-won.

"Really, there was nothing? Behind him?"

"Yeah... just some small stone statues, that's it."

"...It's not the kind of size you could just miss. Was there anything in the sky?"

"The sky? I mean, it was pitch black like space, and there was a sun. Stars floating around..."

"..."

Honestly speaking, it really wasn't the kind of size anyone could just fail to notice. Unless every single player collectively went stupid and missed it, there had to be some other explanation.

Looking at this hopefully, maybe that boulder had simply disappeared. Maybe the monster caused by me was so strong that the Tower flagged it as a bug, meaning nothing would happen even a month from now.

And looking at the less hopeful possibility...

Maybe the boulder had grown even bigger, big enough that other players simply couldn't see it anymore.

When we go to a mountain, we see the trees, but we can't see the mountain itself. To actually see the mountain, you have to step away from it. By the same logic, maybe the boulder had grown so massive that players couldn't even register it as "oh, that's a boulder" anymore.

Well, that might be taking it a little too far. Either way, one thing was certain: something about the situation had gotten tangled up.

An ordinary person might just steady their mind and wait quietly for D-Day to arrive, but not me. I was the type who only felt at ease when I had something, anything, prepared in advance.

I already had a few contingencies worked out for exactly this kind of situation. And the first one I planned to put into action was.

"Zetter-ssi. Could you send me the list of player traits? Yes, focused on the unusual abilities."

Combinations where player abilities create synergy.

Put in gaming terms: "gathering players with debuff skills."