TEOCH 2

Could one dare to compare death in a virtual world to death in reality?

The moment the blade pierced my throat, the world collapsed. In an instant, my vision darkened. I struggled to blink, but doing so didn’t dispel the darkness. Only colorful particles, like fine sand, drifted around the edges of my vision; otherwise, everything was pitch black. It wasn’t as if I had been banished from the world—it felt more like the world had vanished, leaving me behind.

The blood gushing like a fountain from the wound, the searing pain spreading from the stabbed spot throughout my body, all seemed like a faint illusion compared to the dizzying sensation of the ground crumbling beneath me. Because this was a game.

Death in reality probably wouldn’t be like this. It would likely be far more painful, far uglier in its appearance.

[Your party has been annihilated. O creatures of the earth, unsaved, may you rest in peace.]

The ornate, flowing script embroidered in the air was far too decorative to adorn death. At first, it was merely terrifying, with a nauseating sense of rejection clawing up my throat, and sometimes I screamed in fierce frustration, but now it didn’t faze me. When you’ve seen the same message over 20,000 times, anyone would become numb to it.

“But the message is wrong, isn’t it?”

My comrades, who had fought alongside me, had already been wiped out before we could even defeat the Demon King. Besides, even if my party was annihilated, hadn’t the creatures of the earth already been saved? A hollow laugh escaped me.

Indeed, reality and the game are different. Whether I died fighting the Demon King or slit my throat in front of the king due to ugly obsession, all that would be recorded in the game data was a “Dead Ending.”

The number of monsters I’d killed, the number of fallen comrades, the equipment and enhancement items I’d collected, and my final score—numbers like these floated in the air, cluttering my vision. I waited for the numbers to sort themselves out. This shoddy game didn’t even have a skip function, so after dying, I had to waste at least ten minutes watching this nonsense. Considering I’d died about 28,000 times, that was an astronomical amount of time.

Twenty-eight thousand times. In a normal game, that would be more than enough to clear it countless times over, but this game wasn’t a “normal game.” I’m not saying this just because I was trapped in this game’s world, but because the game’s difficulty was utterly insane.

If I hadn’t been forced to clear this game while trapped inside it, I probably would’ve struggled for about a week before snapping a perfectly good keyboard in half and uninstalling the game. It was notorious for its impossible difficulty, even on SNS and gaming communities.

The game’s genre was roguelike. Every dungeon map was randomly generated, and upon death, everything reset to the beginning without even a save point—an absurd genre. They say that in this genre, it’s not the character’s level that increases but the player’s. Dying dozens of times was considered a rite of passage for beginners, not even a point of shame.

And this game? Its difficulty was jaw-dropping even compared to other roguelikes.

In the game’s setting, the monsters players faced couldn’t be killed by human strength. You could kill them using the protagonist’s unique “Purification Power,” but since the monsters didn’t exactly stand still and offer their necks, one wrong move could easily get you killed instead. The protagonist was just an ordinary human, after all—lose your head or have your stomach ripped open, and you’d die just the same. Even the lowliest monsters in this game had the strength to easily tear apart a dozen ordinary humans.

So, of course, playing properly was nearly impossible. The protagonist and their companions would face a game over from a single hit, while monsters required you to sever their limbs and plunge a sword imbued with purification energy into their hearts just to stop them.

Monsters were so strong that carelessly engaging them could lead to death. But if you didn’t kill them, you couldn’t level up or craft stronger equipment. As a result, playtime dragged on. You had to target lone monsters, ambush them in one swift strike, dismantle their corpses for equipment and food, and then flee immediately. Otherwise, other monsters would smell the corpse and come rushing in. It was less the behavior of a hero or warrior and more that of a beggar, but there was no surviving otherwise.

Thus, clearing even the tutorial dungeon, “The Entrance to the Demon Realm,” took at least two weeks, no matter how fast you were. If you were playing this game in reality, it might not have eaten up that much time, but in the game’s world, where everything happened in real-time, you had no choice but to spend that much actual time.

If the tutorial was like this, you can imagine what came after. In this playthrough, the only one where I managed to kill the Demon King and rescue the queen, it took a full year to break through from the Entrance to the Demon Realm to the Demon King’s castle.

“Playtime, 28,000 years?”

I shook my head. No, it wouldn’t be quite that much. It took about 3,000 deaths just to figure out how to conquer the tutorial, so the actual playtime was likely far less.

There was no way to accurately measure playtime. The numbers cluttering my vision only counted the number of deaths, not the time spent playing. But an excruciatingly long time had passed, that much was certain. It was a span of time no human could endure, wasn’t it?

“Maybe that’s why. I can barely remember my parents’ faces.”

I chuckled. It was such an obvious thing, yet I only realized it now—what an idiot. But there was no helping it. Humans weren’t designed to live through 28,000 deaths over such a vast stretch of time. A life and death that humans couldn’t endure completely broke the sense of time.

Memories of the past became distorted, the present’s reason grew numb, and assumptions about the future became meaningless. Layer tens of thousands of deaths and lives on top of that, and everything became a complete mess. I even started to doubt whether I was human—or a living being at all.

“Why do you wear such an empty expression? You look like someone who’s lived through eternity.”

So, I turned my gaze to my one and only light. Despite having lost his own partner, he tried to comfort the despair of a young man from another world, smiling with clear eyes that seemed to pierce through the human heart. In him, the young king, I saw the meaning of life. Otherwise, I couldn’t keep going. To endure an endlessly repeating eon of life, I needed someone to lean on.

At first, it was just a desire to rely on him, but after tens of thousands of deaths, all that remained was attachment and obsession. My original goal was surely to clear this absurd game and return to my world, but at some point, that goal vanished, leaving only my longing for the king in its place.

Before I knew it, that’s how it had become. There was no undoing it. A heart broken and distorted by thousands of years of repeated lives couldn’t erase the king, my only hope and light. I’d rather die than let him go. Returning to my original world had become so meaningless that it drove me mad. It drove me insane…

If I’d planned to kill myself, maybe I should’ve gone back to my original world to do it. The thought suddenly struck me, followed by a wave of belated regret. It was an impulsive decision driven by attachment, but now that I thought about it, there was no choice more foolish.

Would an emotion that didn’t fade after thousands of years of repetition vanish just because I chose to continue a few more times? It only prolonged the suffering. To defeat the Demon King again and see the ending, I’d need at least another year. Why in the world did I make such a foolish choice?

[Rank F. Total deaths: 28,632. Clears: 1.]

What if the next “clear” required tens of thousands more deaths? If I’d died in my original world, a single death would’ve wiped away all my anguish.

The continuing life was exhausting, and the only hope was that it would end. But, being the fool I am, I trampled on that hope myself. All because of a stupid obsession to see one man’s face again.

“I’ll probably regret this moment’s decision for a long time, won’t I?”

All sorts of thoughts clouded my mind, blurring my vision. Caught up in regret and rumination, I carelessly overlooked an unfamiliar message flashing before my eyes.

[Secret Ending No. 26, “Suicidal Thought.”]

[Achievement Unlocked: “I doN’t wAnt aNy hapPy End.”]

[New Achievement Unlocked: “Where is the True End?”]

[Second Playthrough Initiated. New monsters and companions added. New ending unlocked. Difficulty automatically changed from Easy to Hard.]

Wait, what did it say about the difficulty?!

The last sentence snapped me to attention, and I hurriedly tried to read the entire message, but a flood of bright light buried the text, making it unreadable. Only the words “Second Playthrough” barely lingered in my memory.

What does this mean? Did killing the Demon King mean I fulfilled the conditions for the first playthrough’s ending? But I chose to die instead of returning to my original world!

Before I could resolve my questions, the world was reconstructed in an instant. A comfortable shirt clothed my bare body, and the warmth of a blanket and the softness of a bed enveloped my back. I knew this sensation. I knew what kind of world awaited me when I opened my eyes. I knew who I’d see first the moment I did…

“You’re finally awake, huh? Are you feeling alright? Can you understand what I’m saying?”

Green eyes, a complex mix of worry and hope, entered my half-open vision. Golden hair, gleaming like it was coated in honey, sparkled in the sunlight, breathtakingly beautiful. I slowly opened my eyes and gazed quietly at King Tristan, his face full of concern.