Chapter 8

The Apocalypse Game I Created Became Reality Chapter 8

Last Protocol.

It was the game that got me cursed at, saddled with the blame, and ultimately made me quit the company.

‘The game I poured my youth into...’

Was about to end.

“Ha.”

A hollow laugh escaped through my teeth.

I felt strangely bittersweet.

Of course, separate from those feelings,

‘...They’re going to regret it.’

Last Protocol was undeniably a failed game.

But I knew.

That it was a blueprint for the world reality might soon follow.

Early events, infection rules, survival routes, base balance, death statistics, user logs.

All of that data would become a survival guide in the future.

‘Of course, no one thinks of it that way right now.’

Without even reading the announcement itself, I checked the comments first.

ㄴ Last Pro is shutting down??

ㄴ No way, is this for real??

ㄴ My memories T_T

ㄴ What memories lololol all you ever did was complain.

ㄴ I only complained because I loved it!

ㄴ Honestly, it was such a fucking dead game that it wouldn’t have been strange if they shut it down immediately lololol

ㄴ Still, this game really did have an amazing atmosphere...

ㄴ Failing to balance the difficulty was the biggest mistake. Honestly, it was way too hard for newbies to get into.

ㄴ For real, I’ll admit the background music and ruined-city vibe were great.

ㄴ I was replaying it from the tutorial just in case the game actually became reality. Ah...

ㄴ The comment above is fucking hilarious lolololol

ㄴ Hey, asshole CEO. Reopen it if an article about Arctic glaciers comes out.

ㄴ Looks like the operators migrated to the reality server, damn.

The atmosphere was strange.

Cursing, regret, nostalgia, jokes, anger, and the faintest trace of lingering attachment.

‘I suppose...’

I felt strange too.

Even if it was nothing more than a failed game to everyone else.

Last Pro was the world that had more of my fingerprints on it than anything else.

“...Still, they’ll leave the data I created at the company, right?”

After reading the comments for a long time, I muttered quietly.

Even if they ended the service, a company would at least preserve the data.

They might reuse the intellectual property later, or use it as reference for a similar project.

“...”

Thinking that way even gave me a strange sense of relief.

To be honest, something had been bothering me continuously over the past few days.

‘Is it really okay for me to be the only one who knows this?’

If the world truly changed like Last Protocol.

‘Shouldn’t I tell someone?’

Because that thought kept circling through my head.

The government, the media, or at the very least, the company.

‘Right, there’s no need for me to act like I’m some savior of humanity.’

Before that, what could I even do?

I was nothing more than a former lead planner who had been driven out of his company.

I had no money, no power, and no position that would make people trust me.

If someone like me went around saying the world was about to end, they would just treat me like a lunatic.

‘But the company is different.’

Even if they abandon the game, if the same omens occur, someone will eventually pull out the data and look at it.

So.

“I’ll just do what I need to do.”

Yeah.

Taking proper care of myself.

That was probably the most realistic preparation I could make right now.

ㄴ Anyone meeting at Ruined City Plaza on the last day?

ㄴ Go go go go go.

ㄴ Let’s go see Ghoul King too. We never managed to beat that bastard.

“...”

Once again, I felt strangely sentimental.

Even though the game had failed.

The memories of the people who had spent time inside it remained intact.

______________

The next day.

Today, I decided to do only a little organizing in the workshop.

Honestly, I wanted to do more, but I deliberately stopped myself.

‘At this rate, I really will spend the entire day doing nothing but organizing.’

If I kept at it, there would be no end.

It had been the same for players of the game.

Players who became obsessed with decorating their bases definitely survived for a long time, but after a certain point, they all started dying off.

‘It’s not like I made a game where you could survive just by building a good base.’

An apocalypse isn’t about interior decorating.

Survival itself is the top priority, just as the word implies.

‘I’ll only take care of what’s urgent right now, and use the remaining time to prepare for what comes next.’

For now, I decided to finish the organizing I had already started.

A 92-square-meter workshop.

It was more spacious than I expected, but once I started bringing in supplies, it would become cramped in an instant.

Beginners simply piled supplies inside their bases.

Then when something happened, they couldn’t find what they actually needed.

A fire started, but the extinguisher was buried behind supplies. They needed to escape, but boxes were piled in front of the door. They got hurt, but wandered around because they didn’t know where the first aid kit was.

And then they all died.

“A base isn’t a warehouse.”

I drew lines on the floor.

The front entrance and rear emergency exit.

The areas in front of them had to remain completely clear.

No matter how many supplies I had, if my escape route was blocked, it was over.

Beyond that, I clearly divided the space into zones by purpose: drinking water, food, tools, medical supplies, power, sleeping, work, waste, and so on.

‘Drinking water close to the floor. Food in the driest place possible. Tools between the entrance and workbench. Medical supplies beside the sleeping area. Power equipment away from the ventilation shaft and water pipes. Waste near the rear emergency exit.’

To make sure I wouldn’t forget, I even put different colored stickers on each zone.

“...Good, that’s enough for this.”

Next, I sat down at the desk.

‘What I need to pay just as much attention to as the environment in the early stages is...’

The infected.

Last Protocol had many things that were difficult to simply call zombies.

In fact, early-stage infected looked almost like ‘people.’

They staggered, stammered, stood blankly, and sometimes even asked for help.

Most newbies were deceived by that and died.

‘From a distance, you couldn’t even distinguish them from non-player characters.’

I immediately opened my laptop.

[InfectionRules_Draft]

The rules I created.

The malice I designed.

As I scrolled down, familiar sections immediately appeared.

[Common Traits of Early-Stage Infected]

- Difficult to distinguish from humans by appearance

- Retain language ability

- Exhibit repetitive behavior

- React to certain sensory stimuli

- Appear sporadically as individuals before clustering begins

Early-stage infected make people lower their guard.

Their in-game nickname was Half-Alive.

Players called them that because they were half alive.

They appeared in all sorts of forms: injured people, drunks, drug addicts, lost survivors, and more.

- Huh? Is this a quest?

Countless players approached infected like that and got bitten.

That was the first piece of malice I planted in Last Pro.

Because I believed the terror of the early apocalypse came from ‘an opponent you couldn’t distinguish.’

[Early-Stage Individuals to Be Wary Of]

- People standing unnaturally still

- People repeating the same words

- People whose voices sound normal but whose gaze is unfocused

- People approaching while asking for help

- Injured people with weak pain responses

‘...The memories are suddenly coming back.’

I worked hard to raise the difficulty like this, but veteran players were different.

Not once did they move the way I expected.

Maybe that was what made creating games fun for me back then.

“Those were the days.”

Back when I was designing Last Protocol.

There was one message board I hated the most, yet also monitored more carefully than any other.

『Strategy Board』

As the name suggested, it was where the bastards who tore the game apart gathered.

To give one example, during development, the infected were designed to react to certain smells.

The smell of food, blood, smoke, and so on.

The intention was to prevent players from carelessly letting smells escape.

But one user deliberately put rotten meat in barrels to lure infected.

‘Why the hell are they using it like that?’

I even remember the username.

RuinedCityRat.

A lunatic who always posted serious strategy guides on the board.

- The infected aren’t monsters. They’re resources.

- If you use them right, they’re more efficient than guard dogs!!

- I figured this out by observing them, but probably because of the difficulty balancing, once more than a certain number of Half-Alives gather, they automatically spread out. If you take advantage of that and scatter a few barrels of rotten meat around your base, nobody else can even approach!

The moment I read that post, I cursed.

“Is this guy insane?”

Using the anti-clustering system I added for difficulty balancing in that kind of way.

Naturally, I patched it all out in the next version.

So that infected reacted only to ‘smells produced by living things.’

Naturally, the community exploded.

ㄴ You fucking operators! Why did you nerf meat bait?

ㄴ The RuinedCityRat build is dead lololol

ㄴ Are you screwing over veteran players again??

ㄴ A god-tier game where neither newbies nor veterans are allowed to survive.

Thinking about it now, I felt a little sorry.

If the world really changed like Last Protocol.

Those insane builds might actually save someone.

___________

Creak.

I sat in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment.

Several usernames came to mind.

Naturally, the first people I thought of were the guild members I used to play with.

‘VegetableCracker, PeninsulaPrince. DemonKingLucifer.’

They didn’t know I was an employee of the game company.

We were simply people who raided together, cursed together, and joked around together.

‘What are those guys doing right now?’

Did they see the service termination announcement?

What about the Bermuda article?

What are they thinking right now?

“Hmm...”

I looked at the laptop again.

Since the service hadn’t ended yet, I read more of the announcement, wondering if they might at least hold some final login event.

Of course, there was nothing like that.

[Following service termination, certain payment and account information will be retained in accordance with relevant laws.]

[Game play data and character information will be destroyed sequentially after the service termination date.]

There were only plain informational notices.

“Game data will be sequentially destroyed...”

It was only natural.

When a game failed, deleting character data was standard procedure.

They needed to reduce server costs, and personal information was an issue too.

‘But they’ll leave the internal data intact.’

User logs, test simulations, development documents, artificial intelligence backups, things like that.

Ding!

At that moment, new comments appeared on the official community.

ㄴ Hey, on the last day, let’s meet at Ruined City Plaza and take a group screenshot.

ㄴ How about everyone wears their most ridiculous costume?

ㄴ I’m going with the Box Man setup.

ㄴ Box Man lololololol

ㄴ Does that still work? The thing that reduces the infected’s detection range?

ㄴ It used to, but it got nerfed. The bastard developer wouldn’t even let us mess around with joke builds.

ㄴ No shit they stopped you, you lunatic. You’re the guy who ran around naked with nothing but a box on like some trench-coat pervert, aren’t you? You freak.

ㄴ Teehee, get it right, oppa. Not a trench-coat man, a trench-coat girl.

ㄴ?? You’re a woman??

ㄴ Yeah.

ㄴ No proof means what?

ㄴ Where did this bastard go?

ㄴ Ran away without proving it, ah lolololol

ㄴ 185 cm/82 kg/20 cm. In-game name ‘KingEggplant.’ Make sure you whisper me, you.

Box Man.

Of course I remembered this bastard too.

Another nightmare of a villain.

Originally, boxes were props meant for stealth.

A feature that let players hide behind objects like boxes or tarps inside abandoned buildings to avoid the infected’s line of sight.

- Eureka!

But one user discovered something.

If you kept pushing a large box object around, the infected’s vision range became strangely distorted.

After that, the user simply put the box over himself and proudly walked around right through the middle of the city.

I still clearly remembered the title of that video.

『Last Pro-Style!Iron Body! Survival Method』

Naturally, I nerfed it in the very next patch.

So that infected would recognize players who moved together with the same object for longer than a certain period.

ㄴ Box Man is culture!

ㄴ The operators don’t understand romance.

ㄴ Why block us when we found a survival method in a survival game??

ㄴ Makes me want to give someone a finger jab.

“That’s just a bug, you lunatics.”

Walking through zombies in real life with a box over your head?

Of course you should die.

Snort.

As I thought about it, a laugh suddenly escaped through my teeth.

‘...Should I go one last time too?’

After thinking for a moment, I found my VR headset and took it out for the first time in a while.

‘Romance.’

For some reason, that word stirred something deep inside me.

Just as there are people who say they would plant an apple tree even if the world ended tomorrow.

‘Even if the world ends six months from now, I should at least witness the final moments of my youth.’

That, too, would be its own kind of romance.