False Accusation (1)

My vision blurred. Heavy iron bars surrounded me on every side.

Clank-
A skin-crawling creak rang in my ears. The door I’d come through locked firmly shut behind me.

The underground prison held me fast, leaving me unable to move an inch.
I hadn’t even had a chance to resist. I’d been hurled inside by force and sent rolling across the floor.

“Ugh…”

My whole body ached.
I clutched my numb jaw and throbbing shoulder. When I raised my head, I saw people beyond the bars.

Maybe it was because I was behind bars, but I felt like a monkey at the zoo.
They all stood there watching me from above.

The atmosphere wasn’t exactly friendly. Different faces, different expressions.
Then one of them quietly approached me and spoke.

“You lost.”

Her tone was cold and detached.
It was only a few words, yet the hostility in them was blatant.
I knew her well.

Han Gyeong-ah.
One of the main story’s central characters, filling the role of both lead and supporting ally.

A model police officer, righteous and upright by nature, who had earned everyone’s trust.

Seeing her from the game standing before me in the flesh was surreal, but this wasn’t exactly the time to show it.

“I don’t care what you think of me. We’re getting out of here, no matter what.”

Han Gyeong-ah lowered her cold gaze. With that, she turned her head away coolly.

Soon, the others began leaving one by one. And through it all, there was nothing I could do.

All I could do was watch them trudge away.
Most of them treated me with the cold indifference you’d show someone already as good as dead.
They weren’t exactly wrong.
Even I could sense what fate had in store for me.

“…”

Silence settled over the place.
Before I knew it, everyone was gone, leaving me alone underground.
It didn’t take me long to figure out exactly what kind of situation I was in.

“You’ve got to be kidding me…”

「Tower Death Game」
My favorite game… No, the game that used to be my favorite.

I’d ended up inside it.
At the worst possible moment,
as the worst possible character.

Tower Death Game.
As the title suggested, it was an adventure game built around the death-game genre with a mix of several others.

Tower Death Game had been released to the public around May of last year, and it caused a huge stir right from the start.

-One day, I opened my eyes and found myself in an unfamiliar place.

Its opening resembled countless other games, but its distinctive world and setting gave it a character of its own.
It took online communities by storm. Unfortunately, things didn’t go nearly as well after that.

That was because the developer stopped working on it after Chapter 1.
I didn’t know the exact reason.

One day, the site got nuked with a notice saying development had been discontinued.
Just like that, a game that had been riding high was buried overnight.

It was branded a mediocre flash in the pan that had shone briefly before fading away. Even so, I liked ‘Tower Death Game.’

It took a death-game premise and mixed in just the right amount of several other genres…
It was exactly my kind of game.
That was why I’d eagerly waited for the day Chapter 2 would finally come out.

…Until yesterday.

Clank-
Both my arms felt heavy. Looking down, I saw iron cuffs around my wrists.
The kind police used when arresting criminals.
A cold, sinister chill stabbed into my sides.
The sensations were far too vivid to dismiss as a mere dream.
Even though I still couldn’t tell whether this might be some hallucination, my mind was perfectly clear.

Was this a side effect of ending up in someone else’s body?
I looked around. Black water had pooled across the floor.
Maybe it had dripped down one drop at a time from the pipes overhead.
The stench of rot hung thick in the air.
Light reflected off the surface of the water, revealing my face.

“This is me…?”

I turned my face this way and that, examining my appearance.
This was definitely my face. And yet, it wasn’t me.
It sounded like nonsense, but there was no other way to explain it.

Right now, the face and body I wore belonged to someone else.
No matter how many times I checked, there was no mistaking it. And I knew exactly who this person was.

“Kim Yohan.”

Anyone who had played Tower Death Game would know that name.
He was the main villain of Chapter 1.
That alone was probably enough of an explanation, but to add just a little more,

he was a piece-of-shit bastard who spent the early game getting in everyone’s way, raising hell, and committing every kind of evil imaginable.
A small fry who, by the end, got caught in his own scheme and fell flat on his face.
That about summed him up.

Your textbook Third-Rate Villain. Nothing more, nothing less.
My current location was an underground prison.
A cramped solitary cell barely seven square meters in size, completely cut off from the outside world.
I could also guess exactly where I was in the main story.

“The end of Chapter 1…”

Third-Rate Villain Kim Yohan is defeated by the protagonist’s party, left behind on B1, and imprisoned.

…That’s right.
It matched the situation I’d found myself in the moment I opened my eyes.
There was no need to ramble on about when in the story this was.
Kim Yohan had lost.

Just like in the original game.

The story had simply played out exactly as it had in the game. And of all possible moments, this was when I’d ended up in Kim Yohan’s body.

What did that mean?
Every scene I’d played through in the game was already over.
All the incidents had been wrapped up, and the story had already reached its original ending.
All that remained for Kim Yohan, already cast aside, was a lonely death.

“Fuck…”

The moment I faced reality, rage boiled up from deep inside me.
If they were going to do this, they could’ve at least put me here at the very start of the prologue…

It was like getting slapped with a bad ending the instant I started the game.
Worse, I didn’t even have anywhere to vent all this anger.

That only made the frustration burn hotter inside me. The future waiting for me was painfully obvious.
Whatever it was, it sure as hell wasn’t a happy ending.

Actually, it didn’t matter what happened.
No one cared what happened to a Third-Rate Villain after he’d served his role and exited the story.

That was how disposable villains worked. The story was too busy filling out the protagonist’s arc to spare them any room.

Kim Yohan’s role was nothing more than a stock extra who raised hell in Chapter 1 and then got taken out.

Like some thug who mouths off to the tutorial fairy and gets killed.
Maybe around Chapter 4, he’d show up in a flashback so everyone could go, ‘Oh yeah… there was a guy like that,’ and see his face again.

By then, I’d probably be nothing but a skeleton underground.
That was just how utterly tragic my situation was.
You could call it the miserable end of a penniless Third-Rate Villain.

“…No.”

I barely pulled myself together. I couldn’t just give up and die like this. It was too damn unfair.

Why should I pay for the shit that bastard did?
I wracked my brain for any way to claw myself out of this pit of despair.

“Like hell I’m giving up here…”

I took a closer look around.
Rows of iron bars, the damp, clammy floor…
The stale, musty air unique to a basement filled my lungs.

Just sitting there was so stifling I could barely breathe. It felt like my mental strength was draining in real time.
The first thing I did was grab the bars of my cell and pull.

Clank-

An interaction message like the ones I’d seen in the game appeared before my eyes.
It looked like a hologram rendered in CG. When I waved my hand through it, my fingers passed straight through and it disappeared.

‘So this really is a game…’

Once again, it hit me that I really was inside a game. Either way, the cell door was locked tight.

Clank-

Looking closer, I saw a padlock on it. There was no way I could open the door on my own like this.
Was there another way…?
I tried squeezing myself between the bars and kicking the latch with all my strength, doing whatever I could to break out.

“Huff, huff.”

An hour later, every method had failed, and I stopped to catch my breath.
None of it had worked in the slightest. Realistically, this was impossible.

The prison bars were surprisingly sturdy for how old they looked, and the padlocked latch wouldn’t budge.

BANG-!
I tried a few more times after that, but there wasn’t the slightest sign of it breaking.
All I was doing was kicking a hunk of metal, so naturally, the only thing getting hurt was my foot.

“Urgh…”

I rubbed my throbbing, aching leg. I felt like I was adrift at sea with my hands and feet bound.

One hour passed, then three, then several more… How long had it been?

At some point, the next day came.
Though honestly, I wasn’t even sure a full day had passed. I’d exhausted myself struggling and eventually fallen asleep.

Being trapped underground, everything was so dark that I couldn’t even tell whether it was day or night…

By then, anxiety was slowly starting to creep in. Was getting out of here really impossible?

“Isn’t this seriously too much?”

I stared blankly up at the ceiling. It was thick with dust and cobwebs.

Kim Yohan’s fate really was fucking miserable. Feeling the pathetic reality of my situation firsthand, I lamented my lot.

“Why did it have to be Kim Yohan…?”

Normally, when something like this happened, you were supposed to end up as the protagonist.
At the very least, if I’d started from the beginning, I would’ve had some kind of chance.

But I’d ended up as Kim Yohan at the end of Chapter 1, right after every incident had already been settled.
A disposable extra whose usefulness had already run out.

Grrrrr-
After being locked up without eating anything, I was starting to get hungry.
I’d only wasted what little energy I had on those pointless escape attempts.

“I’m hungry…”

Hunger gnawed at me as I rubbed my empty stomach. Food was the biggest problem when you were locked up like this.

Wasn’t it something like three weeks without food and three days without water…?
I had neither.

‘Games never had to deal with realistic problems like this…’

“Do I have to drink this…?”

I looked down at the stagnant water on the prison floor. A horrible stench strong enough to sting my nose wafted up from it.

No. Absolutely not.
There were even dead bugs floating in it. If I drank that, I’d get sick before I ever starved to death.

“God, seriously…”

Dragging my exhausted body along, I slowly leaned back against the wall. Even my determination to escape had taken a hit.
I was slumped there feeling lower than the floor itself when it happened.

Ding-!
A bright, cheerful chime pierced my ears from somewhere.

“What?”

I flinched, startled out of the daze I’d been lying in.
What was that?
Where had I heard something like that before? It sounded like the chime an elevator made when it arrived.

‘Wait. An elevator?’

I sprang up from where I’d been sprawled flat. Hurriedly grabbing the bars, I focused on what was outside.

It was too dark underground to see much. But the faint footsteps echoing from far away were unmistakable.

Clack, clack-
Someone was coming. I instantly snapped to attention.
This wasn’t some auditory hallucination brought on by physical and mental exhaustion.
Those really were footsteps. Instinctively, I held my breath.

‘Who is it…?’

All kinds of thoughts raced through my head. Then I reminded myself of the current situation, now that Chapter 1 was over.

The story on B1 ended with Kim Yohan’s defeat, and every other character had gone upstairs.
Who would willingly come back down now?

…No one.
No matter how I thought about it, there shouldn’t have been anyone. I had no clue who this mysterious person coming down to the basement could be.

Nerves taut, I focused on the footsteps. My heart pounded harder each time they drew closer.

A silhouette slowly emerged. At last, the footsteps came to an abrupt stop.
Someone stepped into view against the darkness of the basement.

“You seem to be doing well.”

A cold, merciless tone.

“Have you done any reflecting? Though someone like you probably doesn’t even have a sense of guilt.”

Her voice made no attempt to hide her disgust.
Surprisingly, I recognized the voice. I knew its owner well.

‘This voice…’

One of the main story’s central characters, filling the role of both lead and supporting ally.
Righteous and upright by nature, she had earned everyone’s trust.

“…Han Gyeong-ah?”

It was none other than Han Gyeong-ah who had come down to the basement. The name on the tag pinned to her police uniform was unmistakable.

For some reason, she’d come to see Kim Yohan. It was a meeting I never could have imagined.