Chapter 99: Doctor's Startup Cut Short... Switched Players?

“Ahem… rest assured, I will return.”

‘I can’t exactly tell her that the only reason I’m so confident is because the final boss promised me they already cleared the map and left a fairy tale behind for me.’ To the inhabitants of Terra, whose base intelligence stats often hovered around a solid two, that kind of blind gamer confidence was basically a death wish.

Kal’tsit remained entirely expressionless. “You did indeed return last time.”

‘And the moment I came back, I lost my mind and acted like a ghost.’

Damn it. He could not argue with that logic.

He rubbed his chin, feigning a sudden epiphany. “This time, I’ve actually recovered a tiny fragment of my past memories!”

Kal’tsit’s gaze grew even colder. “…You said the exact same thing back when your memory was fully intact.”

His confident facade wavered. A genuine beat of hesitation crossed his face.

Kal’tsit leaned in, her tone turning stern. “I understand your urgency to recover what you have lost, but we know absolutely nothing about the Sami region, Doctor. We must be responsible for this land…”

Before she could finish her lecture, he slammed his foot on the accelerator. The tactical rover roared out of the Rhodes Island landship’s hangar bay.

“I—am—not—him—”

His final words stretched into the distance as Kal’tsit’s remaining advice died in her throat. She stood in silence, watching the heavy vehicle execute a flawless, screeching drift across the barren wasteland, kicking up a massive cloud of dust before speeding off toward the frozen north.

“Rosmontis, hypothetical question. If we were playing a tower defense mode together, and you had three hundred and ninety-nine stacks of Laterano buffs, and I had twenty-eight stacks of Kjerag buffs in the protocol, what would I get if we combined them?”

The young Feline tilted her head in serious thought. “Three hundred and ninety-nine stacks of Laterano and twenty-eight stacks of Kjerag.”

He had no idea why Laterano was being measured in ‘stacks’, but whatever belonged to the little kitten could easily belong to the Doctor.

“Wrong! I would get an Elite Two Lemuen, hahahahahaha…”

He patted the Feline’s soft ears, laughing at a meta-joke only a gacha player would understand. Unsurprisingly, the punchline fell completely flat.

Rosmontis did not understand the humor in the slightest, but she could smell the subtle shift in his pheromones. The Doctor was relaxing. She offered a sweet, obedient smile in return.

“Doctor, please do not be nervous. I will protect you.” She pointed a small finger toward the window. Outside, several massive, rectangular tactical equipment blocks—looking suspiciously like flying refrigerators—were cruising alongside the rover, bobbing in the air like overly excited hounds. “My siblings all like you very much.”

He stared at the floating slabs of destruction and chose to remain silent.

From the back seat, Adnachiel—wait, no, Steward—finally gathered his courage to speak up. “She is right, Doctor. Rhodes Island has changed so much for the better since you arrived. It is not just her. We all believe in you.”

Yato had originally planned to ignore this sudden outpouring of team bonding, but under Steward’s expectant, shining gaze, she let out a quiet sigh. “…Fine. Rhodes Island Vanguard Operator Yato, always ready to execute your commands.”

The Doctor did not respond.

Just as Steward began to wonder if their brilliant tactician was simply feeling shy, the Doctor looked up and spread his hands in a gesture of utter defeat.

“I appreciate the blind trust, everyone… but it looks like we have driven straight into a collision mesh.”

He tapped the dashboard display, bringing up the rover’s dashcam logs. “Look at this. That is the exact same settlement we passed twenty-three minutes and twenty-two seconds ago. And that ruined fortress over there? We drove past it an hour and fifty-one minutes ago. Put them together.”

He hit the brakes. The rover skidded to a halt. His fingers flew across the terminal screen, copying and pasting the recorded terrain data into a composite map. He raised the semi-transparent holographic projection, aligning it perfectly with the village sitting dead ahead.

“This spatial anomaly is incredibly lazy. The architect did not even bother randomizing the assets. It is just a one-click copy-paste job.”

Rosmontis nodded in understanding. The rover’s reinforced trunk slowly popped open. The massive sword-shields that had been lazily hovering outside suddenly snapped to attention, their heavy metallic frames rising higher into the air.

The Doctor gave a sharp nod. “Alright, who cares about the lore implications. Hit it!”

Rosmontis raised her tiny hand. One of the monolithic sword-shields let out a deafening hum. It launched forward like a railgun slug, leaving a brilliant blue trail of kinetic energy in its wake as it slammed into the ‘texture’ of the fake village.

Normally, that strike would have shattered reinforced concrete and military-grade steel into dust. This time, it failed entirely. The air itself rippled violently, distorting like the surface of a disturbed lake, and violently repelled the massive weapon.

‘Pretty high defense stats, huh?’ He blinked, then gestured for the kitten to strike again.

The second impact triggered a much more violent reaction. A piercing, high-frequency vibration tore through the air, and the entire fake village began to warp and tear at the seams.

Before he could order a third strike, the phantom illusion completely shattered. The sky instantly darkened, bleeding into an ominous, suffocating crimson. The copy-pasted village vanished, replaced by the towering, oppressive silhouette of a magnificent Gothic castle. Its massive iron gates stood wide open. A decaying, blood-red carpet spilled out from the entrance, rolling over the grotesque stone reliefs and stopping right beneath the rover’s tires.

From the pitch-black depths of the castle, a faint, terrifying soprano voice echoed into the wasteland. Shadowy figures flickered just out of sight, setting the stage for a grand, macabre tragedy.

‘Why is the universe stopping me from farming the Sami roguelike?!”Phantom, your hometown is absolute garbage!’

Rosmontis hopped out of the vehicle first, immediately moving to shield him with her small body. “Doctor, I should be able to tear a hole in this space with brute force. The structural rules here are much more fragile than the ones recorded in Rhodes Island’s database.”

He shook his head, pulling up his PRTS interface. A glaring red hazard warning flashed across the screen: Ascension Level 9.

‘If my past self farmed this roguelike mode as much as I think he did, the difficulty should easily be Ascension 18, or mutated into some ungodly Ascension 20-plus nightmare. Does Ascension 9 mean the internal mechanics have been reset or altered?’

“Change of plans. Temporary mission objective updated. The Crimson Solitaire is… a bit of a grind, but it is playable.” He stepped forward, gently taking Rosmontis by the hand. Together, they stepped onto the decaying red carpet and walked toward the suffocating darkness of the castle gates.

“Forget it. Let’s just clear the stage.”

The moment he called the castle ‘a bit of a grind’, an antique chandelier hanging in the corridor flickered with eerie purple flames, as if insulted, before stabilizing.

Unlike the more refined spatial anomalies of the Sarkaz or other realms, this domain offered no alternate routes. There was no refreshing the map. The only way forward was through combat.

Due to the heavily distorted spatial physics, the castle’s interior was exponentially larger than its exterior suggested. The main corridor was wide enough to drive the tactical rover straight through—assuming one was not terrified of losing their only ride home to a random spatial glitch.

At the end of the grand hall stood a towering, dark red door. Rosmontis waved her free hand. Invisible telekinetic force gripped the heavy handles, ripping the doors wide open. A foul wind, thick with the metallic stench of old blood, washed over their faces.

Yato reacted purely on instinct. She drew her blade in a flash of steel, stepping half a pace ahead of the Doctor, and ruthlessly slashed a blurry, blood-soaked shadow out of the air!

Beyond the doorway lay a completely ruined, dead world.

Grotesque, mutated Originium crystals jutted from the earth in agonizing angles. There was zero trace of plant life, yet the barren wasteland was crawling with countless wandering abominations.

The Doctor reached out, mentally comparing this environment to the pure Originium he had personally cultivated in his memories. The difference was staggering.

Compared to his current, flawless methods of converting organic matter into pure data, the data structure of these mutated crystals was hopelessly corrupted. There was zero chance of restoration. The growth patterns had devolved from aesthetically pleasing, perfect geometric shapes into chaotic, cancerous tumors spreading mindlessly in random directions.

The most terrifying part was that the interiors of these crystals had been completely hollowed out. They were empty husks, yet they still retained a predatory instinct to expand.

‘Imagine a barrel of crude oil that cannot be burned for energy. By every physical metric, it is oil. But when you try to use it, it lacks every single characteristic of oil. It causes no chemical reactions. Its only defining trait is that it simply exists.’To a fundamentally materialistic gamer, this was pure psychological horror.’Is this why the past ‘me’ wrote in the logs that parallel worlds cannot be used as fuel?’

He kept his facial expression perfectly neutral, even as a minor earthquake of panic rattled his brain.

This was a world entirely devoid of value.

And yet, things still lived here. He refused to classify them as ‘people’.

Human heads grafted onto canine limbs. Torsos stitched together from unrecognizable biological scrap. They possessed zero sanity, driven only by a rabid aggression toward anything that breathed. Rosmontis casually crushed them into bloody paste one by one with her floating swords, but the horde felt no fear. They just kept pouring over the horizon.

“Rosmontis, fall back. Throttle your Originium Arts. Yato, take the vanguard.” He immediately stepped in to restrict the Feline’s power output.

As an AoE sniper archetype, Rosmontis was far less efficient than someone like Wis’adel in his roster—mostly because he deliberately handicapped her damage output. Letting other operators fight until they were exhausted was just standard tactical deployment. But with Rosmontis, he strictly capped her at seventy percent capacity.

The reason was simple. Shortly after returning to Rhodes Island, he had dragged her into the medical bay for a full physical. Her maximum Arts output could literally stop a moving mobile city in its tracks. But during the theoretical limit test, he had watched in horror as her maximum HP stat permanently dropped by over a dozen points.

HP! Her actual, permanent health pool!

‘Someone explain to me why a max-level Rosmontis in the game has 1944 HP, but the actual kitten standing in front of me has 2038!’

“Yato, I recall your new weapon system has an overload function. Conserve your stamina. We are shifting formation to bottleneck them at those ruins. You hold the line.”

“Your calculations are always flawless, Doctor.” Yato slowly drew her dual blades. The razor-sharp edges crackled with violent, leaping electricity.

“Steward, target the lacerations Yato opens up. Casting intensity at seventy-five percent. Adjust your spell trajectory by fifteen degrees. There is some kind of ancient ‘fission’ protocol buried in their biology. Let’s see if we can trigger a chain reaction.”

“Rosmontis, establish a perimeter blockade. Only strike the coordinates I ping on your visor!”

He fired off commands with terrifying speed, guiding the four of them into the tactical safety of the ruined walls.

Rosmontis, eager to protect him, prepared to ignore her physical limits and unleash a devastating, out-of-control wave of telekinesis. Before she could, he scooped her up under the arms and carried her backward, rubbing her ears to calm her down.

‘Hiss… she is so heavy!’

The kitten’s escalating Arts were instantly interrupted. Realizing she was being carried by a pre-civilization human with the physical strength of a wet noodle, she obediently diverted a fraction of her telekinesis to support her own body weight, making herself lighter in his arms.

Meanwhile, the four massive sword-shields acted as an impenetrable meat grinder. They rose and fell with rhythmic brutality, impaling the twisted abominations and filling the chokepoint with a sticky web of blood and gore.

Biologically speaking, apex predators usually evolved sleek, simplified forms. These sanity-draining flesh-golems looked terrifying, but fighting them required far less brainpower than dealing with the Reunion Movement. The Doctor simply found a highly defensible corner, aggroed the mob, and farmed them for experience.

In less than two hours, the wasteland was silent. Only two exceptionally massive abominations remained.

With their entire horde wiped out, the two giants actually stopped their advance. They stood three hundred meters away, howling in agony, their piercing shrieks carrying some kind of primitive, desperate syntax.

‘An alpha species? Or were they acting as shepherds for the lower-tier mobs?’

He gently pushed past Yato, whose Kirin blades were dripping with thick blood, and stepped out from behind the barricade. Rosmontis tensed, her four sword-shields hovering aggressively around him, ready to nail the two giants to the bedrock if they so much as twitched.

He took a slow, testing step forward and raised his hand.

The two giants shrieked even louder. Their massive, lidless eyes—bulging with hideous, bloodshot veins—snapped to attention, tracking the movement of his fingers with terrifying desperation.

‘What exactly are they waiting for?’He waved his hand to the left. Sure enough, their grotesque eyes tracked the motion perfectly.’Is there a trigger condition tied to my hand?’

He paused, glancing over his shoulder. Steward and Yato were positioned too far back to see his exact hand signs. Rosmontis, the only one who might be watching through her telekinetic sensory network, was a sweet, forgetful child who rarely questioned his methods.

He slowly peeled off his tactical glove. Spreading his bare fingers wide, he raised his hand toward the sky, curling his fingers slightly as if crushing an invisible heart.

It was like executing an admin override command.

The two giants let out one final, synchronized death rattle. Their massive, deformed bodies began to violently invert. Flesh, bone, and corrupted Originium collapsed inward, compressing into countless perfect hexagons. The two masses fused together, melting into a glowing, fluid state, before rapidly cooling.

When the blinding light faded, a single, flawless, blood-red diamond ring lay in the dirt.

‘Holy crap, what a gorgeous drop!’

He knew perfectly well that picking up strange loot in a cursed roguelike domain was a terrible idea. But… it was just so beautiful! The texture, the clarity, the crimson hue—it hit every single one of his collector aesthetics perfectly.

He could already picture how amazing it would look sitting in his personal display case back on the landship.

[Blood Ring of the Foreign Twilight]: Converts the physical damage of ammunition-based Operators into Arts damage, and applies a 5% True Damage modifier.

‘Damn, what an absolutely broken relic!’

Overcome by gamer greed, he leaned down, his bare fingertip brushing against the cold surface of the blood diamond.

The moment skin met stone, a catastrophic wave of vertigo slammed into his brain. It felt as though his very soul was being violently ripped from his flesh. The ruined wasteland instantly shattered into a blinding storm of rapidly flashing, colorful data lines.

When the sickening, spinning sensation finally stopped, he realized he could no longer feel his own limbs. He was paralyzed, drowning in a numb, suffocating darkness, like a man trapped at the bottom of the ocean.

‘Help! Griefer! Rosmontis, save me!’

“Doctor?”

A few paces away, Yato watched the cloaked figure freeze entirely after touching the ring. She stepped forward, her voice laced with sudden concern.

“…It is nothing. I was merely lost in thought for a moment.”

The Doctor slowly stood up. A gentle, chillingly elegant smile stretched across his face. When he spoke, his voice was entirely different—low, unhurried, and dripping with a dark, ancient grace.

“Let us proceed. It appears their biological structure suffered a catastrophic collapse, leaving behind this rather exquisite gemstone. It resembles a blooming rose. I am quite fond of it.”

He turned the blood-red ring in the dim light.

“It looks just like the dead heart of a civilization.”

“Oh…” Steward nodded slowly. A cold shiver ran down the caster’s spine. He could not explain why, but every instinct in his body screamed that something was terribly wrong. Muffled by unease, he quietly fell into step behind the man who was no longer their Doctor.

[Rhodes’s Note: The “Sami” and “Phantom” roguelikes refer to the Arknights game modes Expeditioner’s Joklumarkar and Phantom & Crimson Solitaire. The “layers” of Laterano and Kjerag refer to stacking faction-specific collectible buffs found within these modes.]

[Rhodes’s Note:

Enjoying the operation so far, Doctor?

(This daily grind literally pays the landship’s rent! 🙇‍♂️):

Massive thanks for reading and supporting the operation!]