Chapter 4

Tyrant at the Bottom of the Tank

I had inevitably learned quite a lot about the Team 1 Leader who skimmed off my wages.

First, that the fucker's name was Lee Yeonghyeon.

Second, that his nickname was One-Hand (because one of his hands really was a prosthetic).

Third, that said prosthetic was cyberware, and that he was a former soldier.

And lastly, that the bastard absolutely hated me.

Delivery work was one of the few decent ways to scrape by in Jeongmyeong City of Haedong Nation.

That was why I kept doing delivery work even when I was treated like cargo in freight compartments.

I had nowhere left to fall anyway.

So, except for the last fact, there was hardly a delivery rider in Jeongmyeong City who didn't know Lee Yeonghyeon.

The reason you had to know him was because he was one of those people you absolutely did not want to get on the bad side of.

He himself was a modified human equipped with cyberware, and having served as a team leader at the delivery company for a long time, higher-ups generally trusted his reports.

In other words, even if he roughly pinned his own mistakes on someone else, management would believe him.

After all, what company would bother listening to the grievances of some lowly delivery rider?

That was why Lee Yeonghyeon reigned almost like a local warlord.

A tiny Haedong Nation, within it an even tinier Jeongmyeong City, and within that, sectors fragmented into even smaller pieces.

He had lived as the tyrant at the bottom of that tank, where only a few tiny fish quietly swam.

"H-Hiiieek-! S-Save me!"

But the true nature of that tyrant was nothing more than a goldfish slightly larger than the others.

The bastard rolled around on the ground, doing nothing but begging for mercy.

"...Why should I?"

And I had no reason to grant him that mercy.

___________

"L-Listen. I never disliked you from the beginning..."

Lee Yeonghyeon crawled along the ground, desperately trying to plead his case.

I stayed silent and watched to see what he had to say, and apparently, he took that as an opportunity.

"You were polite from the very first day, weren't you? Yeah? If anything, I thought well of you. I never thought badly of you..."

I had been polite from the very first day.

Naturally, because delivery work, which at least guaranteed a reasonably stable period of employment, had been a lifeline I had no choice but to cling to if I wanted any chance of surviving.

The problem was that the bastard holding that lifeline was Lee Yeonghyeon.

"A-And. I was just about to give you a bonus, too. You worked hard this month, didn't you? It's only natural that you should be rewarded. Of course!"

Tremble tremble tremble-

He frantically rummaged through his pockets with shaking hands.

What he pulled out was a crumpled wad of bills worth several tens of thousands of hwan.

"Please... Please... I have children at home. If I die here, they'll all become orphans..."

Even after all that struggling, I remained silent, and now he started crawling on the ground and begging for forgiveness.

Of course, it was true that Lee Yeonghyeon had children.

I had even seen a few of the little bastards myself.

Because I'd run some personal errands for him a few times.

'Hey, mister, are you our dad's subordinate?'

'Eww. I think he smells~ Like a poor person.'

...Hm, I remembered them being incredibly rude.

So Lee Yeonghyeon's appeal using his own flesh and blood was having quite the opposite effect.

"Team Leader Lee."

"Y-Yes, sir!"

My naturally informal speech was followed just as naturally by his respectful answer.

Originally, it had been the other way around, but I suppose you couldn't ignore habits built up over a lifetime.

It was an impressively natural response.

"I've lived as an orphan twice, so I know from experience. It's really not that bad. I haven't actually tried this part, but if you succeed later in life, you could even write a killer autobiography starting with, I was abandoned by my mother and father and grew up alone─. And even when people insult your parents, it doesn't really bother you."

"...T-That's."

Lee Yeonghyeon seemed to ponder the meaning of my words for a moment.

And immediately afterward, his expression changed as he swung his fist.

Pupupupuck-!

However, his fist never reached me.

Spears made of wind pierced through every part of his body.

He stared blankly down at his body, which had been turned into a beehive, then spilled clotted blood from his mouth and collapsed to the ground.

...It was a fitting end.

"Was that a little too much? I don't really know how much mana it takes to kill a person..."

I muttered as I looked at what had become a lump of meat.

It was a rather serious problem.

Since I had decided to live as an ability user from now on, combat like this would be unavoidable.

Naturally, I couldn't become some idiot who shouted about 'a fair and honorable one-on-one duel' in those battles.

Which meant I needed to get used to killing people without wasting too much power.

"The bonus. You said you'd give it to me."

I searched through the belongings of what had once been a person and took everything he had.

Aside from the bills he'd pulled out while babbling about some bonus, there was about twice as much money in the wallet inside his jacket.

Had he still been trying to keep some money for himself even then? In a way, that was impressive persistence.

"Use this for your fare to the afterlife."

I left behind a single 1,000-hwan bill and took the rest.

Aside from that, there was an identification card, a pack of expensive cigarettes, and a sharpened karambit knife.

If I really wanted to take more, I could have taken his prosthetic arm too.

If I ripped it off and dismantled it, the parts inside would probably be usable.

But it wasn't worth doing something that disgusting just to carry it away, so I left it alone.

Looking at it this way, it was a little disappointing how sparse his belongings were.

"Where the hell did you spend all that money you extorted? Guess everything you earned went straight into your wife's pockets. No wonder the missus was kind of pretty."

I had taken him down this easily, but from my past perspective, he had been something like a final boss.

Normally, whether it was a mid-boss or the real boss, killing one was supposed to make at least one named item drop.

Lee Yeonghyeon had completely ignored the laws of that world.

─So I decided to just leave his corpse as it was.

For all the airs he had put on, Lee Yeonghyeon was still only a Grade 4 citizen by status.

Once they saw the traces of magic left on his body, the investigation would surely end right there.

Click-

I took out a cigarette and lit it.

In my previous life, I had been a notorious chain-smoker, but in this life, I had never once put one in my mouth.

Simply because cigarettes themselves were insanely expensive luxury goods.

"Fuu..."

Smoke that had passed through my lungs streamed out in a long plume.

It had been a very long time since I'd smoked, and especially the first time in this body, yet all I felt was joy, like meeting an old friend again.

Anyway, all those descriptions in novels where someone coughs their lungs out after smoking for the first time since reincarnating were complete bullshit.

As if those writers had ever lived two lives themselves.

The cigarette butt hissed beneath my shoe as I crushed it out.

Either way, this settled my three years in this place.

It wasn't as if I only had one or two people I held grudges against, but my time was too valuable to hunt every last one of them down and beat them to death.

And so, that day in Jeongmyeong City, two Grade 4 citizens were respectively declared dead and missing.

The investigation was closed on the very first day.

_____________

[ Where the hell did Oz go again, that bastard ]

[ He posted one thing and ran off, crazy ]

[ Did bringing Oz here even accomplish anything? ]

Complaints kept pouring into the Transcendent Gallery.

Because Oz, whom Wandering Merchant had brought in, had vanished immediately after making a single post.

Of course, only a few hours had passed.

In a Greater Heaven World where causality and even the flow of time were constantly twisted, that much time was no more than an instant.

Still, it was inevitable that they would wonder why someone who had been actively replying to comments suddenly disappeared.

Considering the positions held by the transcendents in the gallery, the odds of some unexpected mishap or urgent crisis occurring in their real lives were also low.

Wasn't that precisely why they had time to waste screwing around on a gallery like this...

Therefore, the atmosphere in the gallery was practically a riot.

They smashed shop windows visible beyond overturned stalls, ran away carrying looted food, and dismantled car wheels.

(Meaning that trash posts were being mass-produced.)

In the comment sections, the people searching for Oz were shooting and stabbing each other.

(Meaning they were having keyboard battles.)

[ Kill him! ]

[ Put him to death! ]

Eventually, a trial was opened for Wandering Merchant, who until just a few hours earlier had been regarded as a savior who had brought Oz back.

Naturally, the verdict was death.

[ Hey, you soul-erasing bastards... ] - Wandering Merchant

The final scream of a condemned prisoner standing on the execution platform was generally something like this.

And while Wandering Merchant, trapped on the gallows, was being subjected to divine annihilation by roughly thirteen hundred comments.

[ I killed a guy today ] - Oz

The reason was ridiculous.

He skimmed off my share.

Hm, now that I think about it, I guess he deserved to die.

A post from Oz suddenly appeared.

It was a post impossible to interpret in any meaningful way.

[ I killed a guy today ] [241] Upvotes 493

Yet it immediately drew everyone's attention and brought every war to a halt.

-Sun Picker) He ends the war the second he appears, the dignity of the gallery master hahahahahaha

└Oz) From today onward, call me Red-Haired

└Sun Picker) What the fuck are you talking about?

└Oz) It is the name of a certain man who does not exist in this world...

└Sun Picker)???

As always, there was some incomprehensible nonsense mixed in.

In any case, even a random trash post Oz had suddenly thrown out drew this much attention.

[ Isn't the prevailing theory that Oz is at least a High-Ranking Divinity? What kind of lunatic would screw with a High-Ranking Divinity hahahahaha ]

[ Basically means he beat some low-ranking god to death ]

[ My guess is one of the registered users who stops appearing from today onward got killed by Oz, yeah ]

Several theories followed, and they eventually settled on roughly the same conclusion.

Some transcendent being that had been screwing around got eliminated.

And before long, an issue far more important than something like that became the main topic.

[ So when is Oz making the next tier list and ranking? ]

The debates over Oz's tier lists had already become one of the Transcendent Gallery's regular sports.

Despite the countless imitators who had appeared in the gallery in the meantime, all of them had been dismissed as knockoffs and disappeared, leaving everyone asking when the original would return.

-Oz) Wait a little. I'll make one after I finish everything I'm busy with

└Faceless King) This king believed in you, Sir Oz

└Outside the Boundary) This is it hahahahahahahahaha

└Sun Picker) What the hell are you even busy with? Hurry up and come back already!!!!!!

A reply came immediately.

The true nature of the Transcendent Gallery was that of a mentally unstable gallery capable of transforming from a wartime state into a festival in an instant.

In reality, most transcendents had thought processes that were little different from what people called lunatics, so it wasn't exactly wrong.

└Broken Covenant) So what's the next topic?

└Oz) Final Battle Combat Power Rankings, Fighting with Eternal Annihilation on the Line (Fifth Dimension Edition)

└Outside the Boundary) Crazy hahahahahahahaha That bastard's gonna get triggered again

└Nonexistent) Shut up

└Outside the Boundary) Hey, there he is hahahahahahaha

Oz's next topic was revealed through the following comments.

At the same time, in the Void Region of the Fifth Dimension, a gathering place for transcendent lifeforms known as the Void.

Wooooooooong─!

A massive wave erupted from its center.