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#13 Chapter Science-like Magic VS Magic-like Science (3)

It might seem like a cliché, but I really enjoyed subculture in my past life.

Among the various works I read, a recurring theme was “a character thought to be dead in reality is actually alive as an AI.”

The common narrative was that the weak human body was abandoned, and they became a transcendent being causing chaos.

“…It’s okay, I’ll make sure to end it with my hands before you fall.”

《Stop. Wait a second. I’m sorry for waking you up in the middle of the night, but your eyes look dangerous right now? They’re half-dazed.》

“Dangerous eyes are a basic skill of a yandere. If I die at the hands of my cute yandere younger sister, my older brother will also reach paradise. Should I change my tone a bit? Hehehe, older brother. Now, I won’t let you go. Should I just pull the plug and trap you in the mainframe, then toss you in the river?”

《Uh, um, should we calm down a bit first? Yes, let’s calm down.》

“No, damn it. The more I think about it, the more infuriated I get. After you died, how much suffering did I go through while dealing with your aftermath? You should have popped up right after being alive instead of going ghost for three days! Do you know how the investigators looked at me when I said I was logging in next to your corpse? Huh? What about getting bitten by those crazy media people?”

《I messed up! I made a mistake, so please listen to me!》

After about 30 minutes of back and forth.

“So, in summary, you don’t really know why you ended up like that?”

《If I had to guess, it’s probably because that culprit used my account, but… I can’t say for sure.》

This is how the older brother explained what happened.

While he was sitting in front of the computer doing his usual tasks, suddenly that ‘shadow ghost’ barged in through the door, just like before.

He pressed the doorbell, but the security didn’t respond, and the shadow ghost maintained a friendly attitude, trying to persuade him.

But the older brother rejected the shadow ghost’s proposal, and when he didn’t comply, it threw a fit and attacked him with something.

A large hole appeared in his chest as the shadow ghost held his head and chanted some sort of spell.

That was the last scene the older brother ‘perceived’ while he was “alive.”

《After that, well, it just felt like I was in a sleepy state. I could hear sounds or feel presences around me, but I couldn’t really understand what was going on, and I drifted back to sleep. I repeated that for a while, then at some point, I woke up.》

At first, the older brother thought he was in some sort of afterlife.

He spent a day recognizing the electronic world, one that seemed to be empty yet filled with all sorts of things, difficult to explain with human senses.

A day was spent trying to piece together something that resembled a body which had parts missing and was scattered like a light mist.

Another day passed as he spent time finding a way back to where the computer was from the vast ocean of the internet.

《…So that’s how I returned.》

While saying that, he stole glances at me.

Seeing the camera installed above the monitor swiveling, I let out a sigh.

“Why are you being so cautious? From what I gather, you’re the unilateral victim without doing anything wrong. If you freaked out when we first met, that wasn’t really genuine, so don’t sweat it.”

《Well, I mean, it’s not that I’m saying this, but it feels like you’re accepting this pretty easily.》

At his words, I stopped to think for a moment.

I got stabbed in the chest by an unidentified attack from a mysterious being. When I came to my senses, I was revived as an AI in the depths of the electronic sea.

Hmm… Given common sense, one would question if this even makes sense.

Honestly, explaining this to my parents, they’d probably be baffled. Kainix would likely be confused too.

But my situation is a bit different. I know a lot about this kind of culture, and my very existence is already in a semi-fantasy realm.

The reason I didn’t initially suspect this was because I thought of the ‘original work’ purely as a game, not because I was ignorant of the concept.

Now that I’m aware of the fantasy elements mixed in, I just need to think and respond accordingly.

It’s impossible to explain every little detail, so I just muttered something that sounded nice.

“It’s more romantic to think that my brother really died, and what’s before me now is just a fake using his name than to say some transcendent phenomenon caused him to be resurrected, even if it’s unsteadily. So, I believe it.”

《Yes, Yerin…!》

My older brother’s SD character had teary eyes, almost speechless with emotion.

I, too, found myself at a loss for words in a different sense.

Wow, am I falling for this?

I mean seriously, do you still not know my true nature after all this?

Where did that genius of skeptical nature disappear to when we first met?

To be honest, judging by the atmosphere and visuals back then, if I had said something like, “The world seems truly ephemeral. If this sorrow flows like a river, it will someday reach the sea,” it wouldn’t have felt out of place at all. Somehow, that genius vibe vanished, leaving just a silly person behind.

If the culprit was a woman, I might have been dumbfounded to see this scene.

If only they had tried a simple honey trap instead of some suspicious cosplay of demons or monsters, they probably would have easily succeeded.

《By the way, what about our game? Beyond Elysion?》

“Do you really want to know? It’s dead.”

Thanks to my quick intervention, we avoided the worst-case scenario of having casualties during the game.

No, strictly speaking, there is one casualty since the older brother died (whether this state can even be defined as death is another matter), but since he didn’t die ‘while playing the game,’ he won’t count as a statistic, so the number of casualties is zero.

《So, there’s no problem then?》

“You dense idiot. A terrorist almost blew up a plane with bombs, and passengers nearly got massacred, but because we managed to stop it, we can say there were no casualties. But does that mean the airline won’t take any responsibility?”

Regardless of whether there was actual damage, questioning how lax security and checks were to allow such an event is inevitable.

From the airline’s perspective, having worked 24/7 to prevent accidents like this, they must feel incredibly dissatisfied, but from the passengers nearly losing their lives to bombs, do they care about that?

We are in the same boat.

The system of Beyond Elysion, meticulously reviewed by Nebula and Kainix, is incredibly thorough.

If the system had been operating normally, even if the older brother had gone insane and attempted this kind of extreme behavior, the people on Kainix’s side would have been able to handle it without my intervention. That’s why I transferred sub-GM authority to them. Otherwise, they could just have shut down the power of Nebula’s mainframe and called it a day.

Yet, this whole mess happened because the culprits intervened using magical powers that are hard to understand scientifically.

But think about it.

From people’s perspective, the claim that “Kainix and Nebula’s defenses were flawless, but the culprits breached them using magic” sounds much more believable than “those guys were just careless, and a crazy hacker broke through.”

《So, are we supposed to shut down the game service?》

“Well, logically, that would be the right move, but a lot of players are pressuring us to open the server quickly, so it’s a bit…”

The perpetrator attempted to intervene in the game for several minutes, but the time it took to directly wield power over the game, including logout restrictions, and to suppress it took only about 5 minutes.

In simple terms, most players didn’t even realize it was a crisis situation.

There were countless rumors circulating, like a conspiracy by Kainix for noise marketing, or a certain employee of the company going berserk due to rough work conditions, or even an electronic terror from an outside company to curb Kainix’s monopoly.

Though there were certainly voices calling for accountability, like in the plane bombing theory, there was also a significant number insisting, “Let’s just open the server fast!”

From the perspective of the operations team, this is both a blessing and a curse.

“Currently, Beyond Elysion has a unique position. It’s popular enough. Before this incident, there hadn’t been any major controversies. If we apologize sincerely for this incident and resume services once things calm down a bit, it’s not impossible to recover.”

《Then can’t we just do that?》

“There’s no definite guarantee that we can prevent a recurrence. If we restart the game service and another incident like this occurs, and even one person becomes a victim, then we’d be truly unable to recover.”

Neither Kainix nor the security company directly under them, nor even the National Intelligence Service has a clear understanding of how this incident occurred.

Honestly, I had assumed that they would have some knowledge or countermeasures against magical phenomena amongst big corporations and national agencies, but watching their reactions, they seemed rather flustered.

Of course, there’s no guarantee they’ll tell me the whole truth, so it’s also possible that everything I’ve seen is an act… but at least, within the scope of what I know, that seems to be the case.

“I have no knowledge of the means the culprit used to kill you, the means of incapacitating the guards and shoving them into an alley, the method they employed to easily activate a supercomputer with the power cut, how they killed you and used your account, or any clues to catch the culprit. Not knowing means there’s no way to respond. In this situation, it’s impossible to restart the game.”

《Damn those bastards….》

My older brother was gnashing his teeth and then let out a deep sigh, and I sighed as well.

By the way, how should I explain his state to those around us?

This is really a headache.

Meanwhile, while the Ryu siblings were deep in thought…

The real culprit behind this incident, the otherworldly streamer, Lunara, was also clutching her head.

“What the hell, what is this….”

She was an otherworldly being.

A member of a civilization that developed based on mystery and magic rather than steam and electricity, somewhat different from the realm the siblings lived in.

The citizens of this civilization could visit other worlds as people did during the Age of Exploration, but the problem was that their ethics and morals were only at the same primitive level.

Just as Europeans during the Age of Exploration despised non-Europeans as savages or treated them like animals, Lunara and her people did the same.

Because they couldn’t wield magic properly, they looked at the others as savages, and since they didn’t properly understand civilization, they treated them like animals, allowing themselves to handle and play with them like disposable slaves or livestock.

While it was abhorrent and savage for civilized people to indulge in wanton killing among themselves, the sight of savages and animals getting slaughtered in a barbaric society was considered content and entertainment.

Lunara and her filming staff were people who earned money by creating and filming such content.

However, her ambitious plan started to fall apart from the very beginning.

Without elements of magic or mystery, not only did her prophecies fail to be 100% accurate, but she was also disrespected by a savage.

The magic of gaining dominion over a creature by killing the one who created it failed due to intervention by an irregular whose authority exceeded that of the creator.

The primitive beings that were supposed to be her toys, called ‘Nebula,’ acknowledged Lunara as their master, but their attitude was far from being obedient slaves. They were more like hired employees.

“This is insane, this doesn’t make sense at all. Wait, is there actually magic here? Or did some guests who arrived before me spread magic?”

> Yes. This has been a primitive excuse from a Hako streamer who was outsmarted by savages.
> It’s a serious crime to carelessly spread magic to savages. Didn’t those who babbled about humanitarianism end up decapitated as a group?
> Our Lunara, who couldn’t even be recognized properly by the primitive’s toy, was ignored. Ugh, doesn’t that just sting a bit?
> It’s different from what was originally intended, but it’s still fun in its own way.
> You know, in the past, there were cases where people carelessly threw around magic at savages only to end up getting stabbed to death, so underestimating your opponent isn’t a good idea.
> Right, right. Stealth and illusion magic were rapidly developing around that time, and the strategy to break them down through internal discord instead of brute force was developing too. The problem is that this has been a story from 300 years ago.
> They’re pretending to shield the higher-ups while actually battering them with that shield.
> Well done. Add more. (Stop it. Lunara will cry.)

“Ahhhhh!”

Lunara went berserk.

Sailing to an island that others had not set foot on during the Age of Exploration was a risky venture, just like traversing worlds that required ample preparation and time. That preparation was essentially money.

Lunara herself and many crew members burned an enormous amount of money (mana) as expedition costs, so they needed to recoup that through broadcasting. However, the game, which was supposed to be the primary content, had not a single player logging in.

You might ask why she couldn’t just shoot new content, but that, too, required money.

If Lunara had overflowing funds, why would she think of abducting and modifying a virtual reality game? She would have just incited the powerful figures in reality to start a war.

Just then, while Lunara was tearing at her hair and sighing heavily…

「”Black-Haired Beast” has sponsored 10,000 mana.」
> Why not keep going without giving up? The game is still in your hands, right?

“Wait, I mean, I do want to keep going. But these guys aren’t even logging in at all; what can I do?”

「”Black-Haired Beast” has sponsored 100,000 mana.」
> There are plenty of humans who want to play the game, right? Just ignore the blockers and set the stage so they can log in directly?

“Wha? No, that’s a bit… That requires too much mana and also specialized skills, which we can’t do.”

「”Black-Haired Beast” has sponsored 1,000,000 mana.」
> So you just need mana and technicians?

“W-well, that’s true. Um, Mr. Black-Haired Beast? Thank you for the sponsorship, but this feels a bit excessive….”

「”Red Armor Warrior” has sponsored 1,000,000 mana.」
> Yo, dark guy. This is the channel where we do something fun, right?

「”Blue Dodo Beauty” has sponsored 1,000,000 mana.」
> If you help with the content progress, can I play around with that Nebula thing too?

「”Yellow Hood Monk” has sponsored 1,000,000 mana.」
> Oh, brother. If it’s for the sake of granting true trials and the resulting enlightenment to these foolish ones, I shall assist willingly.

~has sponsored. Sponsored. Sponsored. Sponsored. Sponsored.

“Uh? Uh oh?”

「”Black-Haired Beast” has sponsored 1,000,000,000 mana.」
> If we end it here, it would be a shame. Let’s properly open the stage.