Chapter 23-Game Descent: I Am the Sole Player
[Player Charlie Anderson has accumulated 10,000 human player kills!]
[Congratulations, player Charlie Anderson has unlocked the achievement "Dance of Death"! You have received the blessing of the Death God!]
[Feature unlocked — Real-time global survivor count!]
[Congratulations, player has reached Level 20. Talent second skill unlocked — Heavy Artillery]
It was deep night on this part of the earth.
A tall man sat alone on a pile of rubble. He was kneading a toy — a stuffed animal so dirty its original colour was impossible to tell — in his hands. Behind him stood a building on the verge of collapse. What remained of its walls was riddled with bullet holes, chillingly desolate in the moonlight.
"The blessing of the Death God?"
He tapped open his panel with interest, and a rough-hewn face broke into an expression of wonder. He gave a string of delighted exclamations.
"How extraordinary! Today truly is a day of great harvest."
He scrambled up from the rubble with excitement. A military boot kicked aside a severed arm lying on the ground — still relatively intact, wrapped in the same military green as his own uniform — and it rolled into the ruins, coming to rest against a wrecked tank.
But his joy had no one to share it with. Charlie Anderson felt a flicker of regret.
This land had been sparse in population to begin with, ravaged by years of war — a wretched place cursed by God. Had he known sooner that the level cap was a real thing, he would have at least left those two refugee camps intact for use in the game's second phase.
The filthy stuffed animal was tossed aside without a second thought. It landed among scattered brass shell casings, the moonlight faintly tracing the shape of what had once been a cheerful, innocent rabbit.
"Ugh… save… save me…"
A faint moan drew the man's attention. Charlie Anderson followed the sound toward a slightly more open patch of ground, stepped across the dismembered limbs and bloodied torsos scattered across it without a second thought, and kept walking.
He crouched down and peered into an overturned vehicle — and found one lucky soldier inside.
Perhaps the man had happened to be in the vehicle when the arsenal went out of control, or perhaps the game had granted him some special defensive ability.
The soldier was pinned inside the wreck, his face visible through the shattered window, the world inverted in his field of vision. Whether his eyes were open or closed, whether the world was right-side up or upside down, the head of a comrade with wide, staring eyes was always there, staring back at him.
And now, at last, a living, breathing face had appeared in his line of sight.
The soldier's eyes blazed back to life. His hollow face recovered a trace of colour; a surge of excited sounds forced their way out of his throat.
He recognised him — he recognised him — this was their —
Charlie Anderson merely glanced at him, then stood and walked away.
He walked toward the moon. On a beautiful night like this, one easily drifted back to thoughts of happiness, of childhood, of a mother's goodnight kiss.
But he had no mother. The fabricated fantasy held no appeal. He gave a short laugh. Standing on the bodies of his own kind, he always thought of his father — his father had taken him hunting for wild rabbits, and they would skin them together. What a wonderful memory that was.
He remembered clearly — one time, on a whim, he had placed a live rabbit together with the skinned carcasses of several dead ones in the same bucket.
He had expected the live rabbit to tremble with fear, but it only stood rigid among the bodies of its companions, stiffer than the corpses themselves.
Seven-year-old Charlie Anderson had been disappointed by the rabbit's indifference. But thirty-seven-year-old Charlie Anderson had long since understood that it had been his first complete victory — he had killed the spirit of a living creature.
That young soldier was already dead. He had died the moment Charlie Anderson turned and walked away.
Charlie Anderson headed toward the storeroom. He couldn't remember if it had been blown up or not. If it was still standing, he wanted to open a bottle of something to celebrate yet another complete victory.
Two steps along, something made him stop. The pale blue glow of the game panel flared to life again.
A private message interface had appeared — something that had never happened before in the game. Charlie Anderson had received a voice message. He tapped it, and a cool, even voice sounded in his ear.
"Colonel Anderson, how goes your mission?"
The man held down the microphone icon in the corner of the message window and sent back his own voice. "My results have just been broadcast to the entire world by the game system. And by the way — I've reached level twenty. [Bloodshed Resonance] has unlocked its second skill."
"Level twenty is the cap for Phase One — and yet the all-knowing President failed to mention this to me."
A response came quickly, carrying a trace of dry sarcasm. "Oh, it seems I held you back. But thinking about it, the reason you won't be at the top of the player rankings in two days isn't because I didn't tell you about the cap."
"What — President, are your visions of the future truly one hundred percent accurate?"
Charlie Anderson's brow furrowed deeply. The intoxicated, self-satisfied expression fell away. He insisted: "Impossible. I'm not questioning you — but unless I'm dead, the number one spot on the rankings in two days will be mine and no one else's."
"Perhaps not, Anderson. After all, someone has already killed a level-twenty player — and on the second day of the game, no less."
The man thought of a name he hadn't paid much attention to.
"Tyrant?"
He asked — but the other side had already gone silent.
The private message interface closed unilaterally. The game panel returned to its default display: personal ability panel on the left, world channel on the right.
Only now, after tonight, a string of numbers appeared in the upper right corner of the game panel, shifting in real time. He leaned in close to look.
Numbers changing by four digits every second, flickering in a pair of eyes carrying the weight of killing intent.
883,739,173.
Bai Shan blinked.
883,737,238.
Every second, thousands of people were dying.
In just five days, the world's population had plummeted from eight billion to under eight hundred million.
Bai Shan had known things were bad — but when the data was laid out plainly before her eyes, a suffocating weight hit her full in the face. Even someone who had always stood apart from the crowd couldn't escape the instinct of grief for one's own kind.
Turning on the real-time count would only make the anxious more anxious, the numb more numb, the despairing more despairing. It was like a death knell delivered by the Death God himself.
"Charlie Anderson… the name sounds a little familiar."
This was the second name to be broadcast to the entire world. Bai Shan thought she might have come across it on the world channel — after all, foreign names had a high rate of overlap; the only thing that could distinguish one Charlie Anderson from countless others was the level prefix.
The global real-time count was within the range of what Bai Shan had anticipated. What she couldn't work out was how one person had managed to kill over ten thousand people in five days.
It wasn't as if only a select few had talent abilities — everyone did. In a world where every person was armed with abilities, how had he done it…
His ability must allow for large-scale attacks — something like Mayor Zhong Xile's ability to call down meteorites over a wide area. But to kill that many people, either this Charlie Anderson could push his range to extraordinary scale, or he was operating somewhere with extraordinarily dense population.
There was also the possibility that he hadn't relied on his talent at all — conventional weapons could achieve the same effect.
The one thing Bai Shan could say for certain: after killing ten thousand people, the other person's level had reached the same cap of twenty as hers.
If this person appeared in front of her, could she handle him? The thought crept in uninvited.
"Let's go — quickly, back to town…" The mayor snapped out of her daze and grabbed Bai Shan's arm, quickening her pace down the mountain.
She had no time to even rail against such savage brutality. How could news like this be broadcast to the entire world as though it were some kind of achievement? The game had actually rewarded this?
Zhong Xile thought back to the message at the start of the game, and a chill ran through her. What exactly was the purpose of this game called Tomorrow's Dominator?
World channel.
[Lv.1 Juan Perez: Am I reading this right — ten thousand people?!?!]
[Lv.2 Sophia Thompson: Oh my god, which region's people were that unlucky?]
[Lv.4 Ruan Miu: When will humans stop slaughtering each other?]
[Lv.1 Park Eunchae: Good people all died on the first day of the game. All that's left is a butcher with no humanity who just keeps growing stronger. This world has gone insane.]
[Lv.9 Hani Garcia: Where is this Charlie Anderson? I'll kill him myself!]
[Lv.7 Mike Jones: So cool, Charlie Anderson! I want to follow you!]
[Lv.3 James Thompson: You devils will all go to hell]
[Lv.3 Wu Xin: All you level-1s and level-2s trash-talking on the channel — you'd probably drop to your knees if you actually met him]
[Lv.4 Huang Yuci: I have to ask — what exactly does anyone get for being this guy's lapdog? And isn't this clown the same "item guy" I was ripping on before?]
[Lv.6 Kazama Shota: Why be surprised? This is the correct way to play. For domination — we fight!]
[Lv.1 Chen Mingming: Hate to say it, but he's probably the strongest human player right now]
[Lv.5 Irina Ivanova: The world has always been dominated by ruthless predators like him. In every era, humanity gets dragged along by this kind of scum. Maybe that's why the apocalypse came.]
[Lv.2 Nomsa Dlamini: Goodbye, friends. I can't hold on anymore. This world isn't worth living in]
[Lv.5 Peng Chun: "Strongest"? Don't forget the Tyrant who unlocked the world channel!]
[Lv.4 Rosa Waman: Thanks to the channel feature, my family has gotten a lot of information and avoided deadly creatures. My message will probably get buried, but I have to say it — thank you, Tyrant]
[Lv.6 Ye Qinqin: Right — I'd say without the channel feature, the real-time count would be at least a hundred million lower!]
[Lv.5 Emma Tremblay: Praise the Tyrant!]
[Lv.2 Kwon Minjun: Do you really think the Tyrant is some kind of good person? Any player who rises that fast definitely isn't good.]
[Lv.2 Koizumi Mei: Tyrant, please kill him! I'm begging you!]
[Lv.3 Sara Davis: My house is blocked by tumbleweeds, food is almost gone. Damn it — can anyone tell me what to do?]
Bai Shan and Lin Huijun had already returned to the RV. They were eating the hot meal the red-vest woman had sent over while watching the noisy world channel.
Bai Shan slurped her hot noodles. She noticed that the admirers of this Charlie fellow were multiplying like noodle strands, endlessly.
Had she missed some event where praise got you a free egg?
And people on the channel were actually dragging her name through the mud just to compliment this person?
Bai Shan felt vaguely irritated. Even her eating grew forceful. She turned abruptly to Lin Huijun. "We're getting up at six tomorrow morning."
Lin Huijun was staring at her game panel, expression heavy, too distracted to properly answer. "Ah — yeah, sure."
Since hearing the broadcast, Lin Huijun had been carrying a hot knot of anger with nowhere to put it. While some people still held the line of morality and civilisation, others were already raising a butcher's blade above everyone's heads.
"Bai Shan, is domination and slaughter really what this game is about?"
Lin Huijun asked suddenly, her downcast brows shadowing eyes full of reluctance.
Every second, thousands of people were dying meaningless deaths. The cold, ticking real-time numbers were a torture device for every heart that still had the capacity for empathy.
Bai Shan knew what Lin Huijun was angry and despairing about. She put down her chopsticks, blinked her dark eyes, and answered with quiet seriousness: "I don't know what the game's purpose is. I only know why I'm doing what I'm doing right now."
"The point is what I want to do — not what the game wants."
Bai Shan was certainly curious about why the game had descended. That curiosity was what had set her on this journey. It wasn't to dominate anyone or fight anyone — it was pure, simple curiosity.
To solve this riddle, she could get up early, train, and yes — kill people. Those were means to an end, not the end itself.
Bai Shan actually didn't quite understand — why was her talent called [Tyrant's Grip]?
Her own nature had nothing to do with tyranny, domination, or control. She had never wanted to dominate anyone. The only person she could truly dominate was herself.
Perhaps, Bai Shan thought, she was too focused on mastering herself — always disregarding the will and rules of the outside world. To others, that might well look like an unforgivable act of tyranny.
The thought settled something inside her, like a hand wiping a patch of foggy glass clean. The strength running faintly through her veins grew a little clearer.
Bai Shan gazed out the window, thoughtful. The night outside was soft and hazy when a sound of crying suddenly drifted in.
Lin Huijun quickly looked out, and saw that Shen Yang's group had returned.
Today Shen Yang, her dormmates, and their teacher — four of them — had joined a monster-hunting team to accumulate experience and level up. Lin Huijun looked carefully and counted only three people coming back.
She understood something bad had happened and moved to get out of the RV to offer comfort — but Bai Shan suddenly grabbed her.
"Lin Huijun. Look over there."
Bai Shan leaned to the window and pointed in a direction — toward the white van that had been unnervingly quiet the entire time.
Since they'd arrived in town, that van had lowered its window only once. Every other moment, the windows had been sealed shut.
Now, though, the van's door had opened.
Five people climbed out. They huddled together, each with their mouth stretched wide open. In the dim moonlight, something white appeared to be stuffed inside their mouths.
The crying was coming from inside their mouths — thin, sharp, high-pitched, enough to make the skin crawl.
Other people who heard the commotion came out to see. A drunk man with a bottle came staggering over, shouting: "What's all the crying about?! In a hurry to die?!"
From the RV, Bai Shan watched clearly as the white things lodged in their mouths began to writhe — moving in segments, wriggling.
"…They've been parasitised!"
Bai Shan was the first to react. She jumped out of the RV. The right hand bearing the dark green wristband swung forward — and two tonnes of white van were flung sideways by an invisible force.
Bang — the vehicle toppled onto its side, pinning the five people huddled together flat beneath it.
Bai Shan watched as several hands strained out from under the overturned white van, fingernails scraping and clawing at the concrete. The thin, shrill crying continued without pause.
The white van shuddered, again and again, as though it were the one weeping.
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