I pushed my hair back as I walked through the city streets to my little deserted block of poor homes.

The rain had stopped, but I was still soaked. My every breath was cold, and I kept shivering, but the tight hold on the Zagros case did not loosen, and neither did the hand in my coat pockets.

Just moments ago, I had faced something absurd. Something absolutely absurd.

The blonde man and his camera drone were recording me. I was almost worried he would come to me with the cops and blame me for scamming.

But the man was overjoyed as he left as if he had made a killing.

Rain Rathound’s fang. A mutation that dropped when a Rathound’s blood and saliva mixed with natural rain and its mana-infused properties in a fang to create a unique material… or so he had explained it.

I had it. He wanted it.

He said 2000.

I said three.

And now I was going back home with four thousand Erid. The man said it was all worth it for a class quest.

All of this was enough to pay for all the hospital expenses and live comfortably for the month. I had hit the jackpot for beating things that didn’t even exist.

My sense of money had been greatly skewed these last few months. The four thousand that used to fill the whiskey of a section of Castellano in a day now felt like winning the lottery.

Even if inflation had hit hard, it maybe wasn’t as small a sum as being in the mafia led me to believe.

The smoking neighbor was not out now. After the rain had stopped, the surroundings of the apartment were usually left muddy. My thoughts when I passed through this gate the second time today were completely different from before.

The stairs creaked. The floorboards thumped.

I knocked on the door before pushing it open. Standing near was my red haired little sister.

“Y-you’re back…”

I took in a breath and clenched my fists.

“I apologize,” I said. “Even though you are the one suffering, I still ignored you and ran away like a child. Forgive me—”

“I made dinner.”

She said that as she walked to the back of the room and tossed me a towel.

“Be quick,” Emilia hummed, and I moved to the bathroom.

I guess I was forgiven?

***

Emilia and I sat down at the table again, dinner laid out before us. I wasn’t sure whether she had forgiven me; it was tough to judge. I had no experience with ever having to appease someone.

If I was ever offended, I broke the other person’s jaw. If I had ever offended, I broke the other person’s jaw.

That said.

“Can you at least tell me the names of the ones who did that?” I asked.

I could still break jaws. It was my specialty.

“Those scribbles were just that,” Emilia said, breaking the silence after a while. “It was from a while back when things had just started. No one goes against me or says anything to me anymore, I promise.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. So you don’t have to worry or apologize for something you did out of worry.”

I nodded lightly.

It seemed she had forgiven me.

No. Emilia seemed to be saying it was something that didn’t demand an apology.

“Also,” she continued. “I’ll be helping you from now on. You can’t say no—”

“Oh, no need.”

Emilia slammed the bowl down and glared at me.

“Then I don’t forgive you! How far are you planning to go? Do you think I don’t notice that you have only one meal a day?”

I ignored her words and reached into my pockets; then, I placed the envelope of cash I had received from the blonde pushover on the table.

“I found a way.”

Those were the only words I said.

Emilia’s jaw didn’t close over the night’s dinner.

***

The room was cramped and small, so we had little choice. We had bought some padded sheets and slept on them usually. When Emilia went to sleep, I slowly sneaked up to the desk computer that I had managed to retrieve and booted it up.

Items. Streaming. There was a lot to discover.

I quickly tapped some buttons on the holographic screen and manipulated it to different sites. The first and foremost was…

Rise of Babel.

I was reading up on the game.

Apparently, the game that is now played by half the world, five billion people, is based on a strict setting that it has followed since its release.

Babylonia, a world in a dimension different from ours, was slowly merging with Earth, creating two lands that everyone could explore.

Earth Meets Magic in the AR.

And Babylonia Meets Technology in VR.

According to the site, Babylonia was supposed to be a fantasy world based on medieval European stories. I had to check some images of what these typical fantasies were like, and I was met with images of grand grasslands and mountains streaming with dragons, orcs, elves, and whatnot.

Even the dwarf I had seen a while back was an inhabitant of Babylonia, and so were the Rat Hounds.

There were multiple quest lines in the game.

A side or mini quest, referred to as just quests due to their frequency, dealt with fates in small shops and towns and cities.

Then came personal quests, which could lead a person from being a bartender in the woods to becoming the commander of a large army.

Then the most important is World Quest.

It was a timeline that moved independently of the player, and each action of each player, NPC, and even monster affected things.

The first World Quest, which had been going on all this time, was finding a truce between Babylonia and Earth, and there was apparently even a war.

There were many things involved with the game.

There was a lot I didn’t know about, from stats to classes to items, but it was supposed to be common knowledge.

So I spent the night studying it, and when Emilia left for school, I spent the rest of the time exploring some more.

Since that was the only thing I was good at.

I studied and studied, and found the best way to make it through Rise of Babel.

A fuck.

Lot.

Of Money.