The S-Classes That I Raised

Chapter 597: The Party’s Over (6)

“Gyeol, close your eyes.”

– It’s okay, Daddy! I wanna watch too!

I really shouldn’t be exposing a kid to this much violence. Then again, bringing him to the party in the first place was the problem…

As I walked over, Chatterbox scrambled to his feet. Before he could straighten up, I threw my fist with everything I had. Thwack! His head snapped to the side with a nice, clean sound. Ow, that stung. I brought my knee up right after, aiming for his solar plexus. He hurried to block with both arms. As his upper body folded naturally forward, I grabbed his head with both hands and slammed it down with my full weight.

His long body flailed, then toppled forward. I raised my leg, ready to axe–kick the back of his neck with my heel, but this time he rolled across the floor and dodged. My kick came down on empty air and I stomped to recover, then punted his rolling body from the other side.

“Ghk!”

“You’ve never actually fought with your body, have you?”

Look at him flail the second he loses his stats. Even if he had at some point, it was probably a few hundred years ago at best. After he became a Transcendent, I doubt he ever had to really fight. He could just twitch a finger and it was over.

As he tried to get back up, I kicked into the back of his knees. His legs buckled, and he dropped hard to a kneel. Perfect height. I drove my knee up into his jaw. Crack! With the sound of something snapping, he flopped backward.

“This kinda just looks like bullying a weak guy. Not a great look.”

“…We–weak…”

“Yeah, weak as hell, no matter how you spin it.”

I drew my gun. Maybe he’d bitten his tongue; Chatterbox spat blood. Bruises were already blooming on his battered face. His eyes were still wild, though.

“Han… Yujin.”

“Yup. Han Yujin.”

I pressed the muzzle against his forehead. His jaw trembled and a broken laugh leaked out. With his voice that twisted, it even sounded like he might be crying.

“After all this, I’m supposed to die… to the likes of you─!”

“Well, you’re the one who picked a fight with Han Yujin.”

Instead of pulling the trigger, I jabbed the barrel into his forehead. His brows furrowed deep.

“The King of Harmless’s funeral? Not anymore. This party was Han Yujin’s fight from beginning to end.”

I’d taken both the opening act and the finale. No King of Harmless, and now no Chatterbox either.

“Han Yujin’s party.”

It was a party for me. Anyone who watched it would have to admit that.

“That, that’s─!”

“And you even did us the favor of walking yourself offstage. Thanks so much for all your hard, pointless work~”

“No!!”

Mana gathered in the gun, and Chatterbox screamed. His eyes darted wildly as he searched for Ru Ga Pheya. He stared at her desperately where she floated a little off to the side, just watching.

“King of Harmless! Please, at least at the very end─!”

“Why would I?”

Ru Ga Pheya tilted her head. Chatterbox’s expression completely collapsed. His fingers scraped weakly at the ground as despair washed over him, dark and thick.

“The tea–time partner I knew is gone. I did get a few things out of you, so if he’d asked me, I might’ve thought about it~”

“You heard the lady?”

This was the result of a choice he’d made, one he’d made himself, not anyone else. His face, already pale, went corpse–white. Dirt crumbled between his fingers as he clawed at the ground. I doubted there’d ever been a Transcendent who went out this pathetically. Even when they were taken down by someone the same F–rank as me, Diarma and Ru Ga Pheya had still been themselves to the very end.

Chatterbox, on the other hand, had nothing left in his hands.

“You’re not leaving anything behind. Even if you drop a mana stone, I’m scrubbing it out as a support item.”

I had zero intention of preserving anything of his essence. I didn’t even know if it would record properly.

“…I, I…!”

There was nothing more to hear. It was just a meaningless death cry.

I raised my hand and covered Gyeol’s eyes where he sat on my shoulder, then pulled the trigger. Chatterbox’s head vanished. His body still twitched, so I fired again. The shredded corpse sagged and oozed together like a ghost.

[…Han Yujin]

“Persistent, aren’t you.”

[As one who was once a Transcendent, I curse you.]

Bang! The magic bullet tore through the ghost and snapped a tree behind it. From the way he was going on about curses, it sounded like he really did plan on dying.

[You too will vanish without meaning. Forgotten and abandoned by your world!]

“That all you got?”

The ghost flickered.

“Thanks for only cursing me.”

– Daddy! You can’t either, Daddy!

“Sorry, sorry. But I’ve got the highest Curse Resistance, remember.”

If he’d been calm, Chatterbox would’ve absolutely tried to go after Yuhyun or the people around me. Looked like he didn’t have the mental space to think that far.

“And I don’t really believe in that curse crap anyway.”

I fired again. The wind from the magic bullet blasted the ghost’s shape apart. Plunk, a single mana stone dropped to the ground. At least he did cough that much up.

Rumbleee!

“Urk!”

I barely had time to pick the stone up before everything started shaking. It wasn’t a simple earthquake. The space itself was collapsing.

“H–hey, wait! How are we supposed to get out of here? What about the others!”

Don’t tell me this was that curse at work! The shaking grew stronger. Trees toppled, the sky darkened, and long cracks split it open. Shards of cloud shattered and rained down like pieces of broken glass.

“This feels a little different from a dungeon reset~ Looks like the others already got sent out. I can’t sense anyone but you and that little one.”

It was a relief everyone else was safe, at least.

“Then what about us? Do we get auto–ejected too?”

“Mm~ probably not.”

Ru Ga Pheya floated close, peering right in my face.

“I don’t think so. You took down the dungeon’s owner. Usually that means you also take their authority.”

“Authority?”

“Yup. But you don’t have any dungeon manager abilities at all. That’s why things are collapsing like this. If you want to get out, you have to make the door yourself.”

“How!”

Am I supposed to just yell, ‘Open, sesame!’ or something? I’m not Myungwoo, I don’t know a damn thing about this stuff!

“Oh, since the authority moved over, you should be able to claim the party prizes too~”

“Really? Nice─ I mean, I gotta live long enough to collect them first!”

I hurriedly yanked out the King of Harmless’s drawer to at least use it as a shelter. But it wouldn’t activate.

“The space itself is a mess right now.”

Ru Ga Pheya drifted lazily around as she explained.

“You used it as an emergency shelter, sure, but the drawer isn’t all–purpose. It’s a type of spatial teleportation, so it can’t activate if the space effect is being interfered with. When the space is unstable like this, it won’t work either, for safety.”

“What? Damn it! Gyeol, stick real close to Daddy!”

– O–okay.

So much for trusting the drawer. I hugged Gyeol tight and looked around anxiously. Trees crashed down, the ground split open. Hairline fractures started creeping across the spot where I was standing.

Could Grace handle this? It wasn’t just simple impact; if I ended up underwater or the air itself disappeared, there’d be nothing I could do. There was no way it was really going to end here, right. Rookie or some other dungeon–managing Transcendent had to step in to help. The Unfilial Children were the ones who supplied this dungeon to begin with!

Rumble, crack–boom!

The sound of everything collapsing echoed nonstop from all sides. I forced myself to stay calm and checked my inventory. I had underwater gear. Grace was enough to handle falling… I should’ve stuffed an oxygen tank into Myungwoo’s pouch! Why the hell didn’t I think of that. I was about to empty a potion bottle and at least trap some air inside when—

“Maybe I’ll use this~”

Ru Ga Pheya kissed my forehead and reached her hand out in front of my eyes. I flinched and shut them reflexively. Her fingers brushed my eyelids, and when I opened them again—

“…Where is this.”

I was standing in some dark, unknown space. Ru Ga Pheya, now so translucent she looked like she could disappear any second, drifted around me like she was floating in water.

“Once that dungeon disappears completely, you’ll get moved somewhere in your world. The location’s random, though~”

So she did help me. Not sure what prompted the sudden bout of kindness, but.

“Thank you! I’ll set up a memorial feast so big the table legs break! What do you want on it, huh?”

I’ll never miss a year, I swear! …When’s your death anniversary, anyway. The first time was in the Japan dungeon, but she’d revived in a China dungeon and then here too. Ru Ga Pheya winked one eye and tapped her own eyelid.

“You still had this. That’s why.”

“Oh…”

Come to think of it, I’d never actually used that “I’ll help you” she’d given me back then. Thanks to that, she’d reappeared, but I hadn’t really spent it.

“You called it a message, right.”

“A message is still a memory. A shard of my power. I’ve used it all up now~ every last bit!”

Her form grew even fainter. Now that she was actually leaving, I felt a twinge of regret.

“…So with that gone too, this is really the end? Are you okay with that? Even if you’re not the ‘real’ you, still.”

“A fake can’t last long anyway. Or it changes. Better to end it cleanly than let that happen, right?”

“Changes?”

“Yup. I ran an experiment once. If you copy a body and transplant the memories perfectly, will you really get someone identical to the original~”

It was creepy, but very on–brand for the jellyfish.

“The clones looked exactly the same at first. But in no time, some of them just dropped dead out of nowhere, and some started drifting away from the original. The memories said they liked blue, but suddenly they liked red, or their eyesight got better, or worse. Some even had their sexual preferences change.”

In the end, the face and memories of the past stayed the same, but the person became someone completely different. Ru Ga Pheya shrugged.

“The people around them started to feel off too. Even though they’d been fooled perfectly at first, some of them showed a really strong sense of rejection.”

Her words made me think of the me and Yuhyun inside the dungeon.

“…Then, the people in the dungeon…”

“That’s different.”

Ru Ga Pheya shook her head.

“Beings born from the power of the Source can’t strictly be called copies. From the moment they step out of the respawn range where monsters reset and disappear, that’s when they become real. You and the you in that dungeon were both created by the same Source. It’s complicated to explain, but it’s closer to division than copying. You said twenty–nine, right? Think of it like your twenty–nine–year–old self splitting in two, one staying in that dungeon and the other becoming who you are now. From that point on, there are two separate people.”

“But that was my past from before regression.”

“What do you think the power that created this world can’t do. Even time probably comes from the Source~ Just take it like that.”

…Anyway, that guy and my little brother were probably living well. Then what about the current Yuhyun and pre–regression Yuhyun. Since I regressed at age twenty, from that point on, they’d gone down different paths… become two separate people. I’d already felt that. He’d changed a lot.

“Memories make up a person, but just having the same memories doesn’t make you that person. The past is the only part that’s fixed, the future keeps changing. So the me right now is different from the me who died.”

Because they were different, she had no lingering attachment, the King of Harmless said with a smile.

“Mm, should I say goodbye or something. I did get a tiiiny bit attached.”

“Why? I’m a memory~ and I’m spread all over this world. I might just fade, but there’s nothing that says I can’t pop up again.”

And then Ru Ga Pheya stroked my head lightly.

“You’re going to remember me too. You said you’d offer me memorial rites.”

“…You coming back to eat the offerings, huh.”

Wouldn’t be weird at all if she showed up like a ghost. Actually, I was pretty sure she would. Gyeol stuck one forepaw out toward her.

– Gyeol will bow twice too. We fought before, but this time you helped Daddy.

“Good. I’m really curious how you’ll turn out! Fairy dragons are heavily influenced by whoever raises them, so you’ll probably grow into a fairy dragon no one’s ever seen before.”

“Such a shame, such a shame,” Ru Ga Pheya muttered. Truly an unchanging Transcendent.

“Oh, before you disappear, can you maybe give me some tips on how to use the drawer? You said something about control level.”

“I originally gave it to you just to take the items. Hm.”

She circled around me in a lazy loop.

“I can’t really teach you, but if things stay as they are, the range of what you can handle naturally will get bigger. Your mana imprint’s mixed in a bit more too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yup. And take care of yourself~ be careful for a while.”

At her words, Gyeol drooped.

– …Daddy really did overdo it.

“Well, I mean, I had to survive first, right. I’ll rest a ton once we’re home. For real. The party’s over anyway.”

Time to grab the rewards and go home. He probably had a lot of assets too; could I claim those as well? It’d be Chatterbox’s “inheritance,” but really, it was my loot.

“Looks like it’s done!”

She said it lightly, and before I could even feel properly sad about it, Chatterbox’s image vanished. Then my consciousness wavered and went out.

“Give me a name.”

At an unfamiliar voice, my eyes flew open. A boy with black hair and red eyes was looking down at me, holding a small furry animal in his arms like it was precious. His face looked incredibly familiar.