1.
A strange song drifted into the chicken-coop apartment.
It began with a grating sound, like someone deliberately scraping metal to irritate the soul, followed by music that echoed and rang through the air.
"—Good morning again, you idiots of Neon City! To the workers, the pillars that support our planet Punk Road: hurry up, grab your pickaxes and carts, and head to Scrap Mountain to gather scrap as soon as possible!"
"—Today’s selection is a song from that faraway frontier planet, ‘Ra, Ktulpa’!"
It was 6 a.m., the hour when most people were still deep in sleep.
But the moment that song played, my eyes snapped open.
“Ugh, I hate this...”
“Shit...”
If you wondered why such a song was blasting through the streets, there was a simple, obvious answer.
Some crazy hacker had edited reality for their own amusement, setting a loop of their top five shittiest songs to play every single morning.
It wasn’t even being played through a loudspeaker.
It was an ability created by editing reality; unless you were a hacker yourself, there was no way to stop it.
It even played on holidays. It triggered five times a week like some sadistic random box, and that lunatic hacker had rigged the odds so it would absolutely go off on weekends.
It was a ninety-minute loop, so even if you fought the urge to wake up, you were eventually forced out of bed.
“For the first time in my life, I’ve learned there is a sound more horrifying than a military bugle call.”
“So loud... let me sleep a little more.”
I was already awake, so it didn’t matter to me.
Silver Wolf covered her ears and endured it, only to be forcibly dragged out of bed five minutes later.
“Phew...”
I’d bought cigarettes with the money left over from selling ship parts last time.
A quick smoke in the morning coats the lungs in nicotine and provides a refreshing start to the day.
“Heh heh... come here!”
“Eek!”
I hugged Silver Wolf from behind while she was fixing her hair and tying it up.
“Ssshhh...!”
Was Silver Wolf kind of like a baby wolf?
Sometimes she gave off that clean, dog-like scent of fresh fur.
Somehow, the distance between us had vanished, though there was a reason for that too.
“This is my bed. Get lost.”
“...No.”
When I tried to forcibly drag Silver Wolf off the bed after she decided she was staying put, I lost.
How was a kid this strong?
So, the method I came up with was to simply lie down on the bed with her.
I figured if I just lay there and held out long enough, Silver Wolf would get embarrassed and leave on her own.
Huh, she’s not moving?
Is she really clenching her teeth and pretending not to notice while she games?
The bed was a single, so it was already cramped.
Trying to maintain even a sliver of distance while lying together made it even tighter.
So, I just turned Silver Wolf into my favorite body pillow.
“Ughhh...”
“Don’t like it? Then get up.”
“...Do you think I’m going to lose? I’m absolutely not moving.”
Silver Wolf remained there, trapped in my back hug.
Her ears were so red they looked like they were steaming, but she ignored it and tried to focus on her game.
It was unusual. She was clearly a filthy illegal orphan from Neon City, yet Silver Wolf’s scent was almost refreshing, like peaches. I ended up hugging her like a favorite stuffed toy and fell back asleep without a second thought.
“Ugh... aren’t you embarrassed? A grown man doing this.”
“Did my body pillow... just talk back?”
“I’m not a body pillow!”
She was soft and warm.
Soft enough to make me want to pet her incessantly.
To be honest, it wasn’t as if I had no impure thoughts at all.
Objectively speaking, she was beautiful. Over the past while, there had been homeless thugs and hunters who came after me because of Silver Wolf.
Of course, they were all in the cemetery now, tucked into corpse bags.
You can’t underestimate a gambler who spent his life in the trenches of Korea.
I was, after all, a local who had perfectly adapted to Neon City in just three months.
It was simple: I didn’t touch Silver Wolf because of my intuition.
Sure, if a man and a woman hit it off, they might spend the night together.
But whenever I looked at Silver Wolf smiling absentmindedly while playing games and eating something tasty, it felt different. Any impure thoughts vanished, replaced by the feeling that I was raising a daughter instead.
And if the choice I saw was real...
If the status window—which was certainly no hallucination—really did give me a choice...
Then Silver Wolf was special.
Otherwise, there was no reason for the status window to force a decision upon me.
How many life-or-death gambles had I taken? I’d flown a wingsuit with my life on the line more than a hundred times.
That kind of intuition wasn’t something to ignore. If I treated Silver Wolf as nothing more than a subordinate, things might be easier now, but I had a feeling something absolutely terrible would happen in the future.
“...All right, then. Let’s go.”
No more joking around.
I got dressed and headed out.
Silver Wolf had also thrown off the rag she’d been wearing and put on something that at least passed for proper clothing.
If someone checked her level, they might rush over thinking, What? That illegal orphan is wearing clothes like that? Not some shabby, filthy trash? But they couldn’t do a thing because I was standing right beside her.
The ones who knew me knew I was famous for all the wrong reasons.
“...Here again.”
“That’s the fourteenth time I’ve heard you say that. Don’t you have any other lines?”
With a hollow look in her eyes, Silver Wolf stared at the mountain piled high with scrap.
It wasn’t some ordinary junkyard like the ones I’d imagined back in Korea.
It was a mountain of scrap so massive you could literally call it a mountain.
The waste created on Punk Road, the boundary between reality and fiction.
There were three ways to make money in Neon City.
First, as I’d said before, work as a fixer and perform a slightly higher grade of labor.
Second, become a hunter who backstabs others and raids the workers or fixers in Scrap Mountain.
Third, if you had a little capital, pool your money and become self-employed.
Roaming around Scrap Mountain was something only the truly homeless, those living day to day, would do.
Originally, once I had enough money, I planned to return to fixer work, but Silver Wolf hated fixers more than necessary.
Illegal dumping.
Human trafficking.
Debt collection.
Contract killing.
They really did everything a fixer could do.
They did all kinds of dirty work, acting as underlings for anyone with a credit point.
She didn’t say it, but it seemed Silver Wolf had been burned by a fixer before. Whenever she saw fixers in their coats, she would grit her teeth and glare at them as if she intended to wipe them all out someday.
“Life is a trash game.”
“You just figured that out now?”
“No, I already knew. I’m just saying it because I want to complain.”
Silver Wolf grumbled while rummaging through the scrap.
Everyone knew life here was a trash game.
The reason it was truly fucked was because everyone knew it, yet still couldn’t escape.
“Damn it, it’s over. Completely over. There’s nothing here today.”
“...Sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing? Let’s just go home.”
The darkness that was already deep grew even deeper.
After searching for anything useful, we eventually went home empty-handed.
“...Haa.”
I smoked on the balcony.
Even this was expensive, so I couldn’t just light one up whenever I wanted.
Morning and evening. I saved them and smoked exactly two cigarettes a day.
There was something nice about smoking like this. It was perfect for spacing out and thinking about nothing.
Now that I’d made a little money, I was starting to crave the casino again, but Silver Wolf kept lingering in my mind.
I had a feeling that if I tried to go to the casino, she’d grab my ankle, beg me not to go, and trail after me crying all the way.
“Do you like that so much?”
“When did you get here? I thought you hated cigarette smoke.”
Halfway through the cigarette, while I was smoking absentmindedly, Silver Wolf appeared behind me.
“...I just, well. Wanted to talk a little.”
Huh.
If I suddenly said I was leaving, the soft-hearted Adrian might die on the spot.
Just kidding. This was student counseling time now.
“Why all of a sudden?”
“What are you going to do from here on out?”
“Keep making money, keep going to Scrap Mountain, keep gathering scrap. That’s the plan.”
“Not tomorrow. Your real future.”
My real future, huh...
My dream was to gamble with women on both sides of me.
“I’m going to work as a fixer. If I can get stronger, maybe I’ll even become a hacker.”
The ones holding power on Punk Road were the corporations.
And every single member of those corporations’ leadership was a hacker.
They were called hackers, but in practice, these bastards were no different from magicians. Some even possessed strange powers called the Path of Destiny, and when you saw hackers actually editing reality, they were unmistakably mages.
They had one thing in common: they made the impossible happen in reality.
“...A fixer.”
“If you hate it, there’s nothing I can do. Even if you say no, I’m planning to do it alone.”
That was the end of my boundless consideration.
Honestly, I was getting tired of scavenging scrap too.
I’d originally been a fixer.
I’d only been hanging around with Silver Wolf for a while.
“I, I...”
“Even if you don’t want to do it, you have to. There’s no human in this world who gets to live only doing what they want.”
Silver Wolf bit her lip.
I knew it, I knew. I wanted to do only what I wanted too.
What Silver Wolf was probably aiming for was becoming a hacker. She definitely had the talent. Even if her behavior was no different from some bratty kid, in other fields she showed an unnerving level of sharpness.
But the thing that held both of us back was simply our low levels.
LV.9, too low to even properly enter the middle class, and LV.0, whose very existence was considered unacceptable.
No matter what we dreamed, the world would laugh at us.
But so what?
Fuck all of it. That shitty level system, that world where your abilities were ignored because of one number—it was all outside my concern.
“I want to become a hacker.”
“Easy to say.”
“I know it’s hard. I still want to do it.”
An LV.0 dreaming of becoming a hacker.
Impossible. After all, Silver Wolf was branded with the slur "illegal orphan."
Even if she had talent, on Punk Road, a girl was always supposed to be looked down upon.
That was the rule of this planet.
“I want to reach it. Someday I want to rise up and trample everyone who looked down on me. The fixer who stole my money, my parents who abandoned me, all of them...”
The corners of her eyes turned red.
I quietly watched her.
“Can I do it?”
She wasn’t asking herself. She couldn’t even reach certainty, so she was begging me for an answer.
“I can’t answer that for you.”
“...What?”
“Asking other people for certainty when you don’t even have any about yourself isn’t a good habit.”
Think. And then be certain.
I’m going up. I’m going to trample the people who looked down on me. I’m definitely going to succeed and gamble with women on both sides of me.
Belief in self-certainty.
If you can’t even trust yourself and you hesitate, you’ll never succeed.
Because life is gambling.
Every moment is a choice, and every choice carries a chance of failure.
That’s what makes life fun.
“Be certain. Tell yourself: I can definitely do it. Even if I’m looked down on now as an LV.0 illegal orphan, someday that illegal orphan will be able to grab all of you by the throat and kill you.”
“...”
“Believe it. That’s the kind of life you have to live.”
Silver Wolf stared blankly into my eyes.
Ah, that was pretty cringey.
“I can do it.”
“Yeah. You definitely can.”
Silver Wolf’s gray eyes regained their light.
A goal had appeared. And once you had a goal, you had the drive to move forward.
“...Thank you.”
What a kid, getting embarrassed like that.
Was my line a clean hit? She turned her head away and started twisting her hair.
And then, at that moment.
- Checking choice...
The status window I’d thought I’d never see again revealed itself.
- [1. Pick up the illegal orphan]
- Choice verification complete. Quest clear successful.
- As a reward, a cartridge will be granted.
Shit, I knew it!!!
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