The Villainous Director Is Raising a Child!

Gold Toad came at me, face flushing red and white by turns, snorting with rage.

"Hey! What the hell was that gun you just had? Hand it over, now! You son of a bitch, keeping an artifact all to yourself?!"

The bellow snapped me back to my senses.

The Mana Pistol in my coat could not, under any circumstances, be seen.

If time really had rolled back, there was no way he could know I'd fired the Mana Pistol in the first place.

I forced my dazed mind back to alert and snapped at him, rough.

"Mana Pistol? What Mana Pistol are you talking about? Were you dreaming? Where would I have something like that?!"

At that, Gold Toad reared up, veins bulging in his neck, incredulous.

"What? You— you piece of shit, you kidding me?! You had a Mana Pistol out, plain as day, you shot the thing, you saved those brats' parents…! Saved… huh?"

"What…? But I saw it… what…?"

Gold Toad's grip on my collar went slack, and he started muttering like a broken machine.

"I saw it… didn't I? What is this? He fired the damn thing…?"

Aftershock from time being rewound by force?

Sea-ah's strange déjà vu earlier, and now Gold Toad right here in front of me.

Clearly, forcing time back left some kind of residual memory in the people who made up this space.

But right now I didn't have the luxury of digging deeper into the flaws of this illusion.

I picked up the flamethrower left on the ground and walked over quietly to Sea-ah, slumped where she sat.

"Waaah, unnieee…"

"Noonaaaa…"

Se-min and Se-eun had clamped themselves onto Sea-ah — frozen stiff as stone — and were sobbing their hearts out.

I carefully pried the little ones — sobbing like small animals — off Sea-ah and tried to soothe them.

What do I do? What the hell am I supposed to do?

The forced reset I'd just been through.

What if the arc and the ending of this godforsaken space were written to be absolutely unchangeable?

If her parents' deaths were a compulsory tragedy, did that mean the centipede monster's attack was already a fixed ending too?

Was there really nothing I could do — no matter how I clawed — to change the children's deaths?

The moment my thoughts got that far, my heart dropped through the floor and my breath jammed in my throat.

No — snap out of it! You can't sit down and give up now!

Break here and it's over.

Was I going to leave Sea-ah alone forever in this hideous, brutal hell?

Think. For god's sake, think! There has to be a way out.

I had to find the decisive variable that would smash this wheel apart, whatever it took.

Holding my breath, I laid out, one by one in my head, the core events that had happened to Sea-ah in the past.

First — her parents' deaths, right in front of her.

Second — the betrayal by the preschool teacher and the adults she'd trusted.

Third — Sea-ah's awakening as a barrier user, underwater.

And last, fourth — the giant centipede's assault, the collapse of her barrier, and her siblings' deaths.

If the whole point of this illusion was to shatter Sea-ah's mind, chances were those four events were on a fixed track — non-negotiable.

So the main trunk can't be changed…?

Despair rose to my chin, but I bit down hard on my tongue and forced reason back into place.

Her parents' death has already happened. The next stop is the preschool teacher's betrayal.

By the original arc, when the fourth assault came, I was supposed to throw in with Gold Toad and betray the children.

Because that betrayal was the detonator that awakened Sea-ah.

Let's run a test.

Whether time really would rewind if I refused to follow the big events.

Nerves strung tight, holding my breath, I waited — and soon, along with an eardrum-shredding shriek, the fourth assault began.

The instant the carnage kicked off, Gold Toad — just like in the first cycle — grabbed Se-min and Se-eun by the scruff.

Ka-chak.

Without hesitation, I trained the Mana Pistol dead-center between his brows.

"Don't touch the kids."

"You— you did have one, you piece of shit! You had a Mana Pistol!!!"

Realizing the déjà vu he'd felt hadn't been imaginary, Gold Toad screamed himself hoarse, veins bulging.

"Are you out of your goddamn mind?! We're all about to get killed here and you're worried about a couple of brats?!"

I didn't even bother answering his flailing.

I only pressed him down with an ice-cold stare and, slowly, added pressure to the finger on the trigger.

"Say one more word and you're the one who eats a round. Let go of them and get out of my face."

He let out a strangled "hgh!" and plopped down on his ass, and I quickly tucked the dazed Sea-ah and her wailing siblings behind me.

Then, Mana Pistol in one hand and flamethrower in the other, I opened fire, no hesitation, on the monsters climbing up over the rooftop's edge.

Whoooosh—!!

Crack! Crack-crack!!

The savage storm of flame swallowed the front rank of lizards whole.

Crimson fire rose up like a wall, cutting down their sight and cutting off their charge — and, unable to bear the heat, some of them started leaping up over the pillar of flame.

I didn't miss those openings.

Crack! Crack!

Every one that broke through the fire and vaulted into the air took a precisely aimed mana round straight through the head and burst apart.

Thankfully, the lizards crawling up looked to be pretty low-rank.

Even with my modest skill, the overwhelming power of the high-grade artifacts was tearing them apart, helpless.

But the problem was the sheer, endless number pouring in.

The relentless fight burned through my stamina at a rate I couldn't rein in.

"Ngh…!"

The heat pouring off the flamethrower had my whole body burning, and the hand pumping the Mana Pistol trigger had already gone numb and was shaking uncontrollably.

At last my body hit its limit and swayed hard — and in that brief instant.

A lizard that had slipped clever into my blind spot punched through the flames, closed all the way up to my jaw, and slashed with razor claws.

Slash—!

"Ngh—!"

I twisted my head by a hair and just barely avoided a killing blow, but my shoulder tore open in a long gash and hot blood sprayed through the air.

Swallowing the scream, I forced everything I had into my legs.

If I go down here, the kids behind me get hurt.

I clenched my jaw and blew the head off the last monster charging me — clean and total.

At last the hellish struggle wound down and the whole thing was about to be over — and that was the very moment.

—Beeeeeeeeep!!!!

Along with the familiar ringing, the whole world once again froze into that grotesque tableau.

Oh…

Gold Toad, panting where he sat on the ground, had his neck begin to crank toward me — crick-crick-crick — with the ugly grinding of bone against bone.

"Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?Whywon'tyoubetraythem?"

The same grotesque intervention as when I'd saved Sea-ah's parents.

Soon a horrific dizziness stabbed into my brain, and along with the ominous feeling of my guts wrenching around, time started rewinding by force again.

—Kyaaaaaaak!!!

When I came back to myself, what tore into my ears was the vicious shrieking of the monsters overrunning the rooftop.

It hadn't even given me a second to breathe — the assault had started over, right away.

My hypothesis was right.

The small variables I could tweak, but the core events wouldn't bend — not ever.

Which meant, if I wanted to move on to the next stage, I would in the end have to team up with Gold Toad and betray those children.

My head understood it perfectly.

But…

My body just wouldn't do it.

Throw those children into a killing ground with my own hands?

For now… buy time to think.

Grinding my teeth, I tucked the children behind my back again and poured fire and mana rounds at the familiar swarm of monsters.

Even if another grotesque reset came down on me, I had to find some way to break this insane illusion.

Over and over — refusing the betrayal, cutting through the monsters by brute force.

So much time went by I couldn't even count how many times I'd looped through it.

"Hah, hah…"

Breath climbing to my chin, I stood on the heap of shattered monster carcasses.

…now it'll roll back again.

Bloodshot eyes fixed, I waited for the dizziness and Gold Toad's grotesque voice.

But…

…why isn't it rolling back?

The first time I'd saved her parents, and when I'd refused the betrayal, the world had snapped back the instant the monsters died — not even a beat's delay.

But this time was different.

Everything around me was quiet, and the soft breathing of the children behind me and the hard beat of my own heart went on uninterrupted.

One minute. Two. Three…

Time kept moving forward.

The more I thrashed, the more visibly the reset timing — which had been running like clockwork — was slowing down.

Only when a full ten minutes had gone by did the air finally start to ripple, unsteady.

—Beeee… iiii…… ick…

Even the eardrum-splitting tone had gone dull at the edges.

Even Gold Toad's grotesque voice, pouring at me from his cranked-around neck, had gone strangely warped.

"Whyyy… won't… you… beeetraaay… them… whyyy…"

The voice of an old cassette tape stretched slack with age.

Through a spinning field of vision, I stared, sharp and unblinking, at the world rewinding sluggishly.

Could it be…

In that instant, a single fact — one I'd forgotten because the illusion had been so exquisite — struck through my mind.

Right… this isn't the real world… it's just one Awakened's ability…

However vast and perfect it looked, as though a whole world had been created from scratch, in the end this space was nothing more than a virtual reality leeching off the Fox's mana.

Sustaining a massive illusion, forcibly patching over every variable that went off-track, running the lunatic stunt of rewinding time dozens of times over — that had to burn through a colossal amount of mana, no way around it.

He's running low…

Between dry, cracked lips, a hollow laugh finally slipped out.

His mana is bottoming out!!

Despair flipped over into a sharp thrill, and an elated cry split the rooftop.

Even this illusion that had looked untouchable had a clear ceiling — a total.

Every time I wrecked something in here, he'd been forced to rewind time inside the illusion — and because of that, his mana was slowly hitting the floor!

"Cough!"

At the same moment. The rooftop of a District Eight apartment building, in the real world.

Hot red drops of blood spattered across the Fox's ornately embroidered gold changpao.

"Haaah… Director. What in the world are you getting up to in there?"

The Fox wiped the blood at the corner of his mouth roughly with the back of a paled hand and screwed his brow up.

Clearly, the Director — sucked into Lee Sea-ah's barrier — was pulling some kind of trick in there.

Just running the same predetermined trauma illusion over and over couldn't possibly drain this much mana, this steadily.

This was plain proof that someone was tearing the fixed story apart by force.

How on earth did he interfere? The Director as a character isn't supposed to exist inside this illusion in the first place — interference should be impossible. Don't tell me… he really wasn't non-Awakened after all?

Questions piled one on top of another, but the Fox soon licked his blood-wet lips and curled them into a sly smile.

Another reason to abduct the Director had just been added to the list.

Whatever outlandish tricks he'd been pulling inside that sealed world, there seemed to be no end of secrets worth digging out of him — even if it meant flaying him alive to do it.

"Ha ha, our Witch is going to be delighted."

He was on the verge of a leisurely laugh — that was the moment.

"Cough, ngh…"

Once again, a dark red gush of blood came surging up from the pit of his chest.

The Fox steadied his swaying body and muttered, displeased.

"If I'd known it would come to this, I really should have packed a decent stash of support artifacts."

But the deep arrogance still lingered in the long, narrow slits of his captivating eyes.

"Even so… underestimating my mana reserves won't do, Director?"

The Fox slid his eyes shut again.

Then, to force the buckling, unraveling illusion back into place, he began pouring out his vast reservoir of mana without stinting.

Whoooosh—!!

A vast, spine-crawling storm of mana whipped up with the Fox at its center.

And at the same time.

From somewhere far off, someone was hurtling toward the rooftop at a beast's speed.

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