- **4-/_#! )4#41<4. How long are you going to keep this up?**  
- **You need to admit it soon. If you stay trapped in the past, you can't move forward.**  
- **4-/_#! )4#41<4. Even if you don’t want to, I can't just look the other way. I’ve told you.**  
- **This time, please end it. You must open the door yourself and break the cycle.**  
- **The protagonist of this world isn’t Choi Si-woo.**  

“Damn it. Shut up.”

Somehow, I must have dozed off.  
Looking outside, I noticed the sun had set behind the mountains.  
I still needed to sort out my thoughts. Huh?  
I didn’t sense any presence. Wasn’t there supposed to be a hunter from the association watching me?  
Maybe they had gone to protect the academy.

“Right. It seems that time has come.”

The words of the Akashic Record were right. In the end, I had tried hard to forget. But now I couldn’t. I had to cut this Möbius strip.  
And this event was crucial for me.  
Not for Choi Si-woo, but for me. It was an opportunity given to me by the author who conceived all of this.  
Instinctively, I dressed in my student uniform.  
I slashed at the now pale black-clad figure that had appeared moments before and ran towards the academy.

“Choi Si-woo has set things up, so the monsters that will emerge at this timing are quite limited.”

They wouldn’t send any typical evil creatures right away. They had no interest in overthrowing the academy. However, aside from Kim Seung-jun, there was another villain aiming for the Divine Sword beyond Hanseong.  
The first S-rank adversary for Choi Si-woo, and at the same time, the harbinger of the Korean Hunter Association's downfall.

“Hunter Kim Jae-soo.”

He was the main rival of the original protagonist, Yoo Jin-seok, and had survived the final battle thanks to Yoo Jin-seok, but he was plagued by feelings of inferiority for a long time.  
He had appeared, claiming he would catch the second Divine Sword.  
I had to protect Choi Si-woo from that man.

**[Objective: Protect Choi Si-woo]**  
**[Reward: Truth]**

If I protect Choi Si-woo, I will know everything.  
How long had I run? I had entered the academy grounds.  
Hunters sent from the association had been massacred.  
At that moment, the stench of blood made me almost buckle.  
And with every step I took forward, the smell of blood tickled my nose. The sensation of murderous intent could almost be felt on my skin,  
All of this engraved in my mind that this was reality.

After running for a while, I saw a man in the midst of immense dark magic, lifting Choi Si-woo by the throat.

“Oh dear. Is the second Divine Sword this weak?”  
*“Cough. I don't think a guy who has eaten the core can say that he will lose to the Divine Sword. Cough!”*  
“I want to humiliate you in other ways, but I don’t want to enjoy myself while Yoo Jin-seok is coming.”  
*“You coward. Cough.”*

The one being attacked was Choi Si-woo. The attacker was Kim Jae-soo, who had dyed his whole body black.  
S-rank spear user Kim Jae-soo. That man had turned into a monster and ambushed the academy.  
More specifically, he had appeared to obtain or kill the Divine Sword or to use him as a vessel.  
He must have been in contact with the Black Church around this time.  
If an S-rank spear user had turned into a monster, he would be equal to or slightly below SS-rank.  
There was no way that Choi Si-woo, who had not yet undergone the second awakening, could win.

Fortunately, it wasn’t too late.

“By the way. What kind of creature would the Divine Sword become if I embedded an SS core into him?”  
*“What do you mean?”*  
“With this, the Divine Sword and the Hunter Association will be finished.”  

Kim Jae-soo knocked Choi Si-woo down and thrust that ominous core toward him.

An SS core.  
A very familiar scene. And a scene that had repeated so often.  
Seeing that familiar sight, I jumped forward to save Choi Si-woo and to move forward.

*Crack!*

In an instant, I felt the core piercing through my chest.  
Kim Jae-soo, probably taken by surprise at an outsider suddenly intervening, wore a bewildered expression.

*“Yoo. Eun-ha?”*  
“I can’t save this world by just staying home.”  

Even as I said this, the core embedded in my body began to rapidly erode me.

*“Why on earth?”*

The core replaced my heart and reverted my body to fit the core.

*“I will end my fight. So you end yours.”*

As the immense dark magic flowing from the core began circulating through my body, I felt the pain of my flesh and bones being reconstructed.  
Soon, that pain started to erode my mind, and as in the original story, my body began to go berserk.  
In that moment, I activated the parallel circuit.  
I turned my ego and personality into a parallel circuit. To lessen the pain and stop my body from going berserk.  
To continue this damned story.  
As my rampaging body gradually stabilized, I felt the world growing terrifyingly dark.  
This was a scene I had seen many times before.

**[Mission Objective Achieved]**  
**[Reward: Truth]**

* * *

**Truth**

I repeated the same time countless times and died in different ways.  
At first, I was a coward like the original Yoo Eun-ha.  
It may be an excuse, but I was just an ordinary office worker who met death. I had every reason to be afraid.  
I was even sexually assaulted by Kim Seung-jun.  
So I hated frogs. I hated them so much.  
The one who could surpass Kim Seung-jun faced the next threat, which, following the original story, was being implanted with a core and dying by a monster.  
I had chosen to end my own life from the very beginning.

*“Yoo Eun-ha?”*  
“Now, I guess I’ll wake up from this damned dream.”  

Thus, in my first round, I was publicly pierced by a monster in front of Choi Si-woo and had a core implanted in me, leading to my death.  
However, even though I died, I found myself back on the day I entered the academy.  
The taste of death I experienced was the worst.  
Could it really be another repetition of the same time?  
And the impossible is the thing that traps people. I had to face the frog again, and this time I died trying to escape, ultimately meeting my end at the hands of the monster that came looking for me.  
It felt as if this was my destiny.  
The dark sky I saw in everyday life was the scene I glimpsed when I was dying, with my vision flickering.  
From some point on, I had started smoking, trying to forget that memory by any means necessary.  
I was a fool to think I could forget with something as trivial as cigarettes.

*“So this time, I intervened forcefully. I made the original Choi Si-woo regress and erased your memories.”*

The black-haired Yoo Eun-ha spoke confidently, puffing out her chest.  
Her demeanor was so infuriating that I slammed my hand on the desk sitting in front of her and glared.

*“...Damn it. Why are you only telling me this now? You could have said it sooner, that this is reality.”*  
“I did. Everyone told you. A world that’s too realistic to be a dream, a perfect sensory experience that’s hard to call a dream, a heroine and Choi Si-woo, both of whom have independent existences, all of it confirmed that your world is reality.”  

At those words, I couldn’t refute and lowered my head.  
Indeed, perhaps that was the case.  
I didn’t want to admit it. I just wanted to go back. I didn’t want to be in this terrifying world. It was too scary to acknowledge reality.  
Yeah. Let’s say I admit it; still, I can’t let this end.

*“Ha. Yeah. Keep going. The reward is truth. You’re not planning to settle for that, right?”*  
“There was a girl. That girl was a god who could create anything she desired. If there was the Egyptian sun god Ra in the past, then the god who suddenly appeared in this era was that girl. But she was in a human body and had no idea what powers she possessed.”*  
*“If a loser has power, it’ll ruin the world. Is that what you mean?”*  
*“Different, but, ah. You’re not wrong. In reality, the girl, who was an orphan of destiny, became the existence known as ‘Yoo Eun-ha’ by bringing the story she wrote into reality.”*

Was that the reason for Yoo Eun-ha's birth?  
I was a character perfectly suited

 for that role?  
That girl was probably the black-haired Yoo Eun-ha in front of me.

*“Since you’re going to play this game, say more.”*  
“But the girl was bored. So, she suddenly thought, why not create something interesting, and while reading myths, she learned about the evil dragon 4zh1 D4h4k4. Ah, excuse me. I had to use a retro for the sake of avoiding collisions in the repeated rounds. It’s Azidahaka. You know what a retro is, right? It’s like the puns in the English-speaking world.”*  

Ah, I think I get what that means.  
The problem is that this woman created Azidahaka. So, that means I’m standing in front of a mass murderer of 1 billion people.

*“So you created it?”*  
*“That, I did. But then the great catastrophe occurred. And as history dictated in this world, monsters appeared, and all sorts of villains and hunters came into existence. The world was thus broken, and because of that, I could only slightly shift the timeline of the protagonist, Yoo Jin-seok, and myself, Yoo Eun-ha. And I sent the evil dragon Azidahaka, who was harassing humanity, to another world.”*  
*“To another world?”*  
*“You know about Schrödinger’s cat, right? The cat in the box can be either alive or dead... Okay, I get it. Just call it a parallel universe and don’t glare at me. I just wanted to have a chat after so long... The world where the great catastrophe exists became a new parallel universe that coexists with the previous world, and I sent Azidahaka to that world without a catastrophe.”*  

In other words, she had banished an unanswerable brat to a completely different world, thus protecting the world.  
But if that’s the case, it’s strange.  
That is, the Azidahaka that had come to the Earth I lived on had never existed in the original world.  
If Azidahaka had existed, that Earth would have been destroyed.

*“But my Earth was just fine?”*  
*“Well, right. I did send it away, but I couldn’t cause trouble in that world, so I reincarnated it as a human. I just let the Azidahaka, who was fulfilling its duty as a monster without any purpose, live a human life and fix its self-identity. However, Azidahaka, which originally existed in this world, had to return. So I made it so that the story could be viewed as a web novel in that world. I intended for it to get accustomed to returning to this world slowly. And to add some malice, I kept making the ‘Yoo Eun-ha’ in the novel die. How funny it was to see you getting furious after reading it all.”*  

What? Wait a minute. That sounds like it’s talking about me.  

*“No, damn it. Wait a minute.”*  
*“The Azidahaka, in the process of being summoned, thought that it was a dream and resisted the painful reality. That’s not bad. After all, it’s impossible to accept that such a world truly exists. But because of that, it instinctively thought, ‘Even if I die, it’s a dream,’ and it kept getting game overs every time the prologue was about to end. After hundreds of rounds, it got scared and showed weak signs while hiding, and it seemed there was no sign of moving on.”*  

Why does she keep talking about my story?  
No. Stop it. I don’t want to hear this.  

*“Moreover, Azidahaka missed the days it lived as a company worker in the past and started hallucinating its own form as a company worker. It was a hallucination.”*  

It felt like something was pressing down on my shoulders.

*“So this time, I changed my method a bit. I mean it for the second time, but I returned the future Choi Si-woo who failed to clear the original story. I also reset Azidahaka’s head. After repeating hundreds of times, perhaps due to the accumulation, or perhaps because the causality was adjusted, he finally unlocked his powers through a parallel circuit and led a development where he wouldn’t die. It’s like in a game, where he died hundreds of times against an early mid-boss and figured out how to clear it.”*  
*“No, that’s impossible.”*

Studying the monster studies of this world, I learned about the characteristics of Azidahaka.  
Azidahaka is a pervert who delights in the chaos and division that humans experience and finds pleasure and worth in killing them.  
No matter how much I lived like an idiot, I would rather have sex than commit acts of slaughter.  
*“Don’t deny reality anymore.”*  

There’s no way I can accept that. From the start, I didn’t even have the memories of massacring people.

*“...Azidahaka.”*  

The moment I heard that name directed at me, it felt like everything inside me was crumbling down.