At my words, I saw Lee Hyunsung’s shoulder flinch hard.

He must have been angry. I knew that could be an unpleasant thing to say.

Even so, it was something I had to say.

「Resolve the ‘problem’ of this world line.」

Because that was the “scenario” I’d been given.

The problem of the world line.

The moment I saw the tales Lee Hyunsung was shedding, I knew instinctively. The secret they were hiding was the “problem” I was looking for.

And in order to dig that problem out, I needed to pry at their sensitive spots as much as possible.

“What do you even know.”

A raging surge of lofty tales rose up from Lee Hyunsung’s entire body. Facing the tale of the man who had beaten back the “star scraps” directly, the pressure was truly tremendous. This was the power of the Steel Swordmaster who had reached the Final Scenario.

If I fought Lee Hyunsung one on one right now, could I beat him?

[A fable, ‘Successor of the Eternal Name’, growls.]

If you only looked at specs, I wasn’t exactly at a disadvantage either. I had a myth-grade fable, and even a “Great Fable” whose name still hadn’t been decided.

And yet I couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t simply because Lee Hyunsung’s tale was strong.

For some reason, the moment I faced his anger, I felt like I was facing an entire world. The emotions of that world felt so vivid it was like I could touch them with my hand. A world that was strong, lofty, sad, and for reasons I didn’t know, resented me.

This world was…….

“Okay.”

At the same time as Lee Seolhwa stopped him, the pressure of tales that had been crushing me vanished like it had been washed away.

“I’ll take you to the captain.”

“Seolhwa.”

As if telling him to stay still, Lee Seolhwa signaled to Lee Hyunsung with her eyes. Then Lee Hyunsung, who’d been anxiously biting his lips, finally stepped aside.

“Follow me.”

I followed behind Lee Seolhwa toward the base. We walked down the road with drizzle falling. Even though it was a road you could reach in ten seconds if you ran, Lee Seolhwa’s pace was leisurely.

As if she were deliberately trying to drag out time.

“How have you been these past two years?”

Was she asking to lighten the mood?

I let out a small laugh and asked back.

“Isn’t that a little late for checking in on me?”

“I’m sorry.”

Looking at Lee Seolhwa smiling brightly, I hesitated for a moment over what I should say.

First, I wasn’t “Kim Dokja who visited this place two years ago”.

Then as Kim Dokja’s acting substitute, what should I say?

A lot has happened to me too. I saw the end of the scenarios, I became the god of the universe, then my existence was torn to shreds, and now I’m one of those torn fragments standing in front of you……

I could express all that history, and yet in truth, I couldn’t explain anything—so I barely found a single sentence.

“A lot has happened.”

“We’re the same.”

I nodded at Lee Seolhwa’s words.

“Yes. It looks like it.”

Lee Seolhwa’s pace slowed even more.

Now the base was right in front of us.

“Have you not talked to the captain separately?”

“I asked her to let me see the ending of this world together.”

At my words, Lee Seolhwa paused slightly.

“The captain has been waiting for you the whole time.”

“For me?”

“Too long.”

She waited too long?

Lee Seolhwa stopped at the entrance of the base. The gaze she fixed blankly on the entrance was somehow lonely.

“I’ll ask one last time. Do you really want to meet the ‘real Han Sooyoung’?”

I let out a light sigh.

“I don’t know why you keep trying to stall for time. You’re part of Han Sooyoung anyway, aren’t you?”

“…….”

“Lee Hyunsung, Kim Namwoon, Lee Jihye too. I already know everyone is Han Sooyoung’s avatars.”

I had once seen Han Sooyoung recreate <Kim Dokja Company> with her avatars in the snowfield.

And if it was Han Sooyoung of the 1,863rd round, she could do something even beyond that.

In other words, inject different tales into each avatar and make them act like a single “existence”.

“Stop acting, Han Sooyoung.”

“I get why you’re saying that, but I’m not Han Sooyoung.”

“You’re Han Sooyoung’s avatar.”

At my assertion, Lee Seolhwa’s eyebrows twisted.

“Yes, that’s right. I’m her avatar.”

At the same time as Lee Seolhwa answered, a light spark jumped from the entrance of the base.

I watched that spark for a moment, then looked around at the incarnations and asked.

“Is there anyone here who isn’t an avatar?”

I didn’t think it was possible that everyone was an [Avatar].

No matter how much it was Han Sooyoung, could she operate this many avatars simultaneously?

Instead of asking, I could’ve checked directly. An avatar had the trait of “shedding tales instead of blood”.

But not all avatars were like that, and an avatar that had received a certain amount of memories could bleed as well.

In other words, with my current ability, there was no way to distinguish who was and wasn’t an avatar.

“Is that important?”

“It is. Because I need to know why Han Sooyoung did this.”

“If you find out, what will you do?”

“Pardon?”

“If you find out why the captain recreated us as avatars, are you going to take responsibility for this world with the captain or something?”

I couldn’t answer.

“Why did Han Sooyoung make you into avatars?”

“Just because you’re Kim Dokja’s avatar doesn’t mean you understand everything about Kim Dokja.”

“So you don’t know?”

“Who knows.”

“Call Han Sooyoung’s main body. If she wants, she should be able to manifest through you at any time.”

“It isn’t that simple. We aren’t that kind of simple [Avatar].”

Not a simple [Avatar]?

“Do you really want to know the truth of this world? The captain won’t want you to know.”

Lee Seolhwa’s voice as she said that was earnest.

“You can just pretend you don’t know and stay in this world. If the captain is hiding something, there must be a reason she’s hiding it.”

I shook my head.

“That isn’t my way.”

“Some secrets create responsibility just by knowing them. And you’re still curious?”

I nodded.

Lee Seolhwa, after letting out a deep sigh, said.

“From now on, keep your head on straight. This ‘base’ probably isn’t the place you thought it was.”

With those words, Lee Seolhwa grabbed my wrist and tugged.

“Don’t believe what you see. Don’t be fooled by the sentence right in front of you. Believe the ‘story’ you think, the ‘story’ you believe.”

Before I could even ask what she meant by that, my vision was swallowed by darkness. I wondered what in the world was happening.

“Seolhwa?”

I spoke to Lee Seolhwa. In the faint rays of light drifting in midair, I could see Lee Seolhwa’s hand. Leaving only the wrist holding me, Lee Seolhwa’s entire body was gone.

Seeing blood dripping down to the floor, I recoiled in shock. Instinctively, I thought I had to get out of here. But the moment I turned around, the entrance I’d just come through was nowhere to be seen.

“Seolhwa!”

My voice echoed hollowly in the darkness.

After a while, a voice came from within the darkness.

“Save me.”

It was Lee Seolhwa’s voice.

“Save me.”

At the same time, advice rose up in my mind.

Don’t believe what you see.

“Please save me.”

It felt like something grabbed my ankle. I could see hands filling the floor. Hands crawling like insects were clutching at my ankle.

“Please save me.”

More and more, I couldn’t tell whose voice it was. Even so, I knew the owners of those wrists.

“Please savemepleasesavemepleasesavemepleasesavemepleasesavemepleasesavemepleasesavemepleasesavemepleasesavemepleasesavemepleasesaveme.”

Some wrists were Kim Namwoon’s, and some wrists were Lee Jihye’s. There were wrists that looked like they belonged to an archangel or a Demon King as well.

If I stayed still like this, it felt like my mind would go wrong, so I started running. And the next moment—

“Dodge!”

A massive wave of magic power flying straight at me. I could feel someone wrap around my body as if covering it.

A huge man looked down at me.

“Lee Hyunsung?”

Lee Hyunsung, who rose while protecting me, was dripping blood from his mouth. The blood he shed gathered into the large hole in his chest.

“I’m sorry, captain.”

Lee Hyunsung’s head burst apart.

When I reached out my hand, Lee Hyunsung’s body scattered into tales.

And a sentence floated up in front of my eyes.

「Scenario 85. Hypothesis 9724. ‘Demon Realm Hell Map’ discarded.」

The scene in front of my eyes changed.

What I saw was the open sea.

From far away, I heard something exploding. A tsunami of the great sea was surging in.

“Uaaaaah! I can’t hold out anymore!”

“I told you not to mess with Poseidon!”

Voices resembling Lee Jihye and Kim Namwoon slapped like waves, and soon everything in front of my eyes was swept away by the sea.

「Scenario 44. Hypothesis 981. ‘Great Sea Subjugation’ discarded.」

Without even time to catch my breath, the scene changed again.

“Fuck, what is that.”

When I raised my head, I saw a gigantic meteor falling. Stars grinning beyond that meteor. And the voices of incarnations falling into despair.

“How the hell are we supposed to deal with something like th—”

Then the Earth shattered to pieces.

「Scenario 72. Hypothesis 9135. ‘Interstellar Hit-and-Run Murder’ discarded.」

I couldn’t come to my senses in the tragedies pouring down.

Why were things like this inside the base?

Every time I gasped for breath, the pain and screams of dying incarnations flowed into me.

With pain that felt like my head would burst, I muttered.

“I am Kim Dokja.”

[Exclusive skill, ‘Incite Lv.???’ is activated!]

A further strengthened [Fourth Wall] protected my mind.

Even so, the scenery in front of my eyes kept changing.

「Scenario 88. Hypothesis 9135. ‘Deep-Sea Sovereign’ discarded.」

A monster awakened in the deep sea attacked the Korean Peninsula.

「Scenario 89. Hypothesis 331. ‘Zeus Provocation’ discarded.」

<I>First Murim</I> collapsed under Zeus, who descended while ignoring plausibility.

「Scenario 90. Hypothesis 9135. ‘Otherworldly Divinity #61’ discarded.」

Trying to oppose a great nebula, they summoned an ‘Otherworldly Divinity’ wrong and all humanity died.

「Scenario 90. Hypothesis 911. ‘Nebula Spy’ discarded.」

They made a plan to overthrow a great nebula from the inside, only to be caught and subjected to horrific torture.

It was strange.

If all of this was Han Sooyoung’s memories, why did memories like this exist?

She wasn’t Yoo Joonghyuk.

「It isn’t only regressors who regress.」

In that instant, I felt like I vaguely knew the answer.

This was “regression” that only she could do.

「Scenario 90. Hypothesis 12454. ‘Black Cloud Extermination’ discarded.」
「Scenario 91. Hypothesis 1199. ‘Olympus Invasion’ discarded.」

…….

As I directly perceived the vivid destruction pouring down in front of my eyes, I thought about the origin of all this destruction.

These records were all records of “worlds that could have existed”. All of this destruction had happened wholly within her alone.

「Predicted Plagiarism」.

A “future prediction stigma” that surpassed Hermes’s “big data system” or Anna Croft’s [Foresight].

I knew that if you activated an ability like that, the price the user paid would definitely be enormous, but I’d never imagined the stigma would be realized in this way.

「Scenario 92. Hypothesis 10841. ‘The Nameless Mist’ discarded.」

I had completely overlooked how vivid a reenactment was needed to measure the future with nothing more than a “thought experiment”.

A phantom world where you couldn’t feel even a hair’s breadth of difference from reality.

Sitting in that winding tunnel inside her head, Han Sooyoung wrote and erased countless worlds in order to protect one single reality.

「Scenario 92. Hypothesis 12841. ‘Nirvana Reentry’ discarded.」

Over and over, she wrote people dying in front of her eyes. Wrote them, erased them, wrote them, erased them.

I couldn’t know how her mind changed as she did that. I couldn’t know what kind of life it was, sacrificing an unimaginably vast number of fictive stories in order to complete one single story.

「This ‘world of hypotheses’ does not exist.」

Leaning on that one and only psychological breakwater, the writer must have endlessly destroyed worlds, destroyed them, and destroyed them again.

One day, she might have thought this.

「Is this hypothesis really a ‘hypothesis’?」

How was this tragedy left in her memory any different from the 1,863 regressions Yoo Joonghyuk lived through? Any different from Ways of Survival, which was once a novel?

「Scenario 93. Hypothesis 12841. ‘Hermes Hacking’ discarded.」
「Scenario 93. Hypothesis 31145. ‘Asgard’s End’ discarded.」
「Scenario 94. Hypothesis 1912. ‘Korean Peninsula Unification’ discarded.」
「Scenario 94. Hypothesis 8754. ‘World Line Overthrow’ discarded.」

It was getting harder and harder to breathe.

I wanted to know what had pushed her this far.

I wanted to ask what “real ending” the real her had wanted to find at the end of this false curtain call.

At that moment—

「Scenario 95.」

The scenery unfolded. It was scenery where destruction hadn’t arrived yet.

「‘Return of the Apocalypse Dragon’.」

A rooftop of the base with a cool night breeze blowing. A ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) man was standing on the rooftop railing. The moment I saw the white coat fluttering, I realized.

This wasn’t a “hypothesis”.

“Han Sooyoung.”

Kim Dokja I remembered.

Kim Dokja from that day two years ago, when he crossed world lines like me and visited the 1,863rd round, was speaking.

“What kind of story do you want to write going forward?”

At those words, Han Sooyoung asked back.

“What kind of story do you want to read?”

Kim Dokja seemed to think for a moment.

Watching Kim Dokja wrapped in the desolate night scenery, I suddenly felt like I knew what he was going to say. Maybe there was no sin in that answer. And yet—

“I hope there’s a story where no one dies.”

Kim Dokja might not have said that answer.