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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: Teottry
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“This isn’t the time to sit around.”
I stood up and hurriedly prepared to leave. Though it wasn’t early enough for a social call, time didn’t matter when meeting that person.
They’d be there even at midnight or the crack of dawn.
Saying this made it sound like I was meeting some grand, mystical, higher-dimensional being, but in reality, I was just going to see a shut-in.
“That person would know.”
I zipped up my hoodie and left my room.
The person I was going to meet was the world’s greatest hikikomori and the one who’d given me the hypnosis app.
“I’ll smack their ass and force them to explain why they did this…!”
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“E-Excuse me…”
I arrived at the headquarters of the Liar’s Trap guild, my workplace. The anger and thirst for revenge that had burned within me during the run here cooled to a lukewarm simmer the moment I reached the building.
Come to think of it, the only reason I’d survived in this cutthroat guild was because of that person.
They’d shown a runaway like me a new path, allowing me to live in a penthouse in the most expensive city in the country.
“Even if I did buy it with a loan…!”
I could pay off that debt after the S-rank dungeon raid in about three months, so it was practically my own home. Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The person I was about to confront was a great benefactor to me.
The very reason I was able to get such a massive loan, tens of millions of won, was because that person had awakened my potential.
Thinking about it that way, How could I rage at my life’s savior? Getting angry at someone who was practically a life-saver would make me a real jerk. Yeah. I wasn’t a jerk. I had to hold back.
Justifying my restraint, my anxiety eased. It definitely wasn’t because I was afraid of the consequences of confronting them.
While I was busy rationalizing, my feet had carried me to the door of their lab. Next to the large door was a red button with a skull symbol. To the uninitiated, it looked like a self-destruct button, but it was actually the doorbell.
“Okay. Getting angry and asking for an explanation are two different things. Faster, don’t be a coward. Be confident. You’re the victim here. They’re the villain.”
“Victim Of what?”
“Yipes!”
A languid voice came from behind me. Because I was mid pep talk, the sudden voice startled me even more. A little more, and I would have bolted.
“Hah… Hah… Y-You scared me…”
I steadied my pounding heart and turned. The voice’s owner was so short I had to tilt my head down.
“Hey, Bunny. What brings you here so late?”
Her eyes half-closed, gave me a small wave with a faint smile. However, her small hand was swallowed by an oversized lab coat, and all I could see was the sleeve dangling.
It was surreal seeing her outside the lab. Awkwardly, I bowed.
“H-Hello… Why are you out here, Doctor?”
“My little Bunny came to see me at this la~te hour. I had to come out and greet you.”
She’d been watching. The lab had CCTV only she could access.
I nodded, then suddenly realized she was using the wrong nickname.
“Doctor, please stop calling me Bunny. What about me looks like a Bunny?”
Objectively speaking, my image was far from Bunny like. I was above average height, and my body, honed from numerous dungeon raids, was fairly bulky. Lean muscle, sure, but still muscular.
(Though hidden under clothes.)
Regardless, I didn’t want to be called Bunny. As a man, I should at least be called Wolf, Cougar, or Jaguar, right?
But the Doctor ignored me, yawning cutely despite her tiny mouth.
“Yaaawn… Sleepy.”
“Sleepy? Did I wake you? I’m sorry if I did.”
“Mmm… No, my little Bunny came to see me. Why would I be sorry? I should be thanking you.”
“I’m not a Bunny.”
“Shall we go inside?”
Once again brushing off my words, the Doctor shuffled towards the skull-marked switch beside the door in her oversized slippers. With a rumbling shift, the thick lab door opened.
Made of a new material developed by the Doctor, “Bunny-Trapping Metal,” the lab was difficult for even S-rank Awakened to penetrate. Therefore, only those permitted by the Doctor could enter.
The number of people allowed inside, meaning those with a greater than 50% chance of receiving the Doctor’s permission, was less than ten in the entire Liar’s Trap guild.
‘Me? Here? Unbelievable.’
Whenever I stood before this door, I wondered if someone like me was worthy of entering. It was a place reserved for truly remarkable individuals.
Lost in thought as always, I noticed the Doctor, already inside, turn and look at me with a tilted head.
“Well? Come in?”
“Ah, yes. Excuse me…”
Snapping out of it, I entered the lab made of “Bunny-Trapping Metal.”
Bang!
“Yipes!”
The moment I stepped inside, the open door slammed shut. It happened every time I came here, so I should be used to it by now, but my heart refused to develop any immunity.
“Pfft.”
The Doctor smirked, watching me flinch in surprise. The smile, combined with her perpetually sleepy, languid eyes, looked rather sinister.
Resembling a mad scientist chuckling to herself, the smirking Doctor pointed at me as if to say, “See?”
“Even lions get startled by cucumbers!”
I didn’t actually know if that was true. I just blurted it out, remembering videos of cats backflipping in surprise after seeing cucumbers.
My retort didn’t change the Doctor’s smirk. Seeing that smile made me want to argue back, but I couldn’t. I hadn’t come here to bicker with the Doctor.
I can’t let this happen. I can’t get caught up in her pace. Faster, you’re the victim! The victim of the Doctor’s terrible misdeeds! Be confident. Ask her for an explanation.
“Bunny or not, that’s not important! This is what’s important, Doctor!”
Steeling my resolve, I pulled out my smartphone and opened the hypnosis app. Not the fake one, but the custom-made app from the Doctor that I had believed to be the real deal.
The screen appeared, flashing slowly with purple and pink, an assault on the eyes, along with the vulgar slogan. Showing it to the Doctor, I spoke confidently.
“Don’t you have anything to say after seeing this? Don’t you feel guilty?!”
“Huh? It’s the hypnosis app. The one I made for my little Bunny, the culmination of brain science that can turn even S-rank+ Awakened, far more dangerous than lions or tigers, into personal sex toys in one tap.”
Despite my accusation, the Doctor responded flat tone, her languid eyes showing no change in emotion. Her blatant shamelessness made me yell without thinking.
“Don’t lie, Eme! You just took a hypnosis play app from the internet and changed the text!”
“You just-” “You just-” “You just-”
The Bunny-Trapping Metal lab, while excellent at containing impacts, heat, and intrusions, had the unfortunate side effect of amplifying sound.
My outburst echoed through the lab, and I broke out in a cold sweat, realizing I had yelled at the Doctor, calling her by her name and using informal speech.
I was screwed. Royally screwed.
The Doctor hated, no, loathed being called by her name. There was a rumor that a researcher from another guild, ignorant of this fact, had called her Eme and subsequently disappeared. After that, a new jar containing a brain had supposedly appeared in the lab.
I cautiously gauged the Doctor’s reaction with trembling eyes. Perhaps startled by my outburst, she was staring intently at me, her usually half-lidded eyes fully open.
The silent stare was terrifying. She might be thinking, “I wonder what shape his brain is. Well, I’ll find out when I crack it open.”
What should I do? am I going to become a brain in a jar? No, wait, am I already a brain in a jar? Maybe I was reliving the last moments of my life through external electrical stimulation.
The thought of my life ending like this, without accomplishing anything, was suffocating. This was it, wasn’t it?
No, wait. I didn’t know for sure. Maybe I wasn’t a brain in a jar. Maybe I really was in the Doctor’s lab, having just yelled her name, and was now consumed by the fear of becoming a brain in a jar, leading to these morbid fantasies.
If that were the case, there was still a chance.
“Run.”
Just as I made up my mind and was about to bolt, the Doctor’s voice, laced with a panic I’d never heard before, stopped me.
“Whaaat! N-No!”
Her face was a mask of genuine panic. She reached out to me with her oversized sleeves, as if trying to grab me, all traces of her usual intellectual composure gone.
The Doctor’s unfamiliar behavior made me forget about escaping. As I stared at her, frozen in place with her arms outstretched, a blush crept up her cheeks.
“…”
“…”
Another suffocating silence followed.
“Uh, whoops. I’ve been caught. The hypnosis app was fake, tee-hee~.”
The situation ended with the Doctor lightly hitting her own head with her fist and sticking out her tongue in a clumsy attempt at acting cute.
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Is it fake? Is it real? Let us know bech!😭
“Blehh…”