NOVPUBThe Mystery Exploration Club was the game that led me to this place.
While searching various game sites for something to play, I stumbled upon this RPG Maker horror game by chance.
Since my introduction to horror games had also been through a crude RPG Maker game, I didn’t hesitate to hit the install button.
I played, lost, strategized, and reached the endings.
That cycle repeated until one day, I fell into the game itself.
And then, I ended up swapping bodies with Ella, the tutorial boss.
I had no doubt that this world was inside the game.
At least, not until I stepped outside the horror-filled setting that served as the game’s main backdrop.
Haven’t we all wondered at least once?
If we were to enter a game set in a modern world, what would the areas that weren’t implemented in the game look like?
I thought it would resemble the real world that inspired it, with some added elements unique to the game’s lore.
Since the existence of the Organization was mentioned in Mystery Exploration Club, I accepted it without much question.
After all, denying what was already happening right in front of me was harder than just accepting it.
But that doesn’t mean I didn’t consider the possibility.
The possibility that this world wasn’t just a game.
When I asked James to investigate, we found that my identity, my home, and even the last game I played... none of them existed. So I had no choice but to accept it.
And yet...
“This game... it existed in reality, didn’t it?”
[Yes, yes! That’s right! So could you maybe ease up on that scary face? Oh, and while you’re at it, could you also do something about the tooth-shaped monster choking me?]
“Who’s the developer?”
[It’s only listed as M.P. That’s probably an abbreviation. Oh—now that I think about it, all the missing games were made by that person.]
“...”
“...Alice? Where are you going?”
“...Sorry. Something urgent just came up.”
I conjured a mirror.
In it, I saw myself—my reflection looking more anxious than I had realized.
Stepping forward, I moved between mirrors, jumping through the space between them. I had only one destination in mind.
Emerging from the mirror closest to my goal, I ran.
It wasn’t far, but I ran anyway.
A vast, empty clearing.
I had been here before. And once again, I found myself muttering, Of course. Then, I turned back the way I came.
“...”
Standing in the center of the clearing, I let my energy seep into the ground.
And then, what had been hidden was revealed.
“...You’ve got to be kidding me.”
A concealed grave.
I knelt down and traced the name carved into the stone with trembling fingers.
An eerie cemetery in the middle of a city packed with buildings.
Somehow, it suited him perfectly.
There were no other graves—only his, standing alone.
“...Why was this grave hidden? It’s as if you’re trying to announce to the world that you had something to do with what happened to me.”
My hand slowly stopped tracing the engraving. Then, I pulled a shovel out of the mirror.
What I was about to do was blasphemous.
I drove the shovel into the earth, leaned my weight on it, and began digging.
As I kept digging, the shovel struck something solid.
Wood. A coffin.
Brushing away the dirt as quickly as I could, I uncovered it completely.
I hesitated for a moment. Then, I opened the lid.
“...Ha.”
It was empty.
My grip weakened, and I let the coffin lid drop.
Then, speaking as if someone might hear, as if I wanted someone to hear, I muttered:
“It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one who did this to me. You called me back when I was about to rest behind the curtain.”
I had my doubts. But now, I was certain.
That voice—it had been his.
The voice that pulled me back just as Ella’s wish was fulfilled, just as my body vanished and I was about to fade into rest.
“You knew everything, didn’t you? I still don’t understand... what exactly happened to me. Why you put me in this game.”
My voice wavered. I noticed that my usual informal speech had disappeared.
Even when I had been speaking casually to everyone else, I had always used honorifics with him.
I bit my lip and forced myself to continue.
“And if you were alive... why didn’t you come find me?”
The air was heavy. Not just figuratively.
A heavy atmosphere meant rain was coming.
Dark clouds filled the sky—it was almost certain.
Drip. A raindrop fell.
...Or maybe it wasn’t a raindrop.
“You know... I can cry now. I don’t know if this was your intention, but if I have to say goodbye to a friend now, I can cry. I’m different from before, you see?”
Ella had said that my wish had been to prove myself.
Just like how she had wanted to prove to someone that she didn’t harm her friends...
Maybe I had wanted to prove my sincerity, too.
To prove that my friendships weren’t just the result of Ella’s influence—the way her nature as a mystery affected perception and thought.
That even though I hadn’t shed a single tear when my closest friend died, I had truly come to care for them.
That in the end, I had cried.
“Do you remember? When I used to make dumb jokes, you always said my reactions were the same every time. That you found it boring. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sincere back then. But now—”
I never finished the sentence.
What was I even saying?
Was my first friend really such an important person to me?
Even though he was now nothing short of a suspicious figure—the mastermind behind everything?
“...I’m such an idiot.”
And I was foolish, too.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
This translation is the intellectual property of Novelight.
The rain began to fall in earnest.
I simply stood there, letting it soak me. My clothes were drenched, and the cold seeped into my skin.
The occasional gusts of wind lowered the temperature even further, making my already turbulent emotions feel even more tangible.
“...It’s cold.”
As a child, getting caught in the rain hadn’t seemed so bad. But now, it just made my body feel heavy.
Had it always been this difficult to take a single step out of the rain?
“Are you okay?”
My eyes widened. I spun around.
“Ha-rim? What are you doing here?”
Ha-rim stood there, holding an umbrella.
Judging by her school bag, she must have been on her way home from school.
It seemed like our paths had accidentally overlapped.
She couldn’t see the grave, so I shouldn’t have looked strange to her.
And yet, she was gazing at me with a puzzled expression.
“Were you crying?”
“No way. It’s just the rain.”
“I see. But staying out in the rain like this isn’t good for you.”
Ha-rim held the umbrella over me and took my hand, leading me away.
“Where are we going?”
“My house! I have extra umbrellas, and the others are waiting there.”
For the first time, my unwilling heart wavered.
I let her lead me.
If the others were waiting, that meant school had ended early, and they’d decided to hang out together.
“You know, I just had this feeling, like someone was there. More like... connected to me, I guess? So after parting ways with the others, I took a different route home. And then—boom! There was Alice.”
“I see. Thanks for the umbrella.”
“We’re seatmates, after all!”
Ha-rim beamed, and before I knew it, the corners of my lips lifted slightly in response.
“Friends. Yeah, that’s right.”
Before long, we arrived at Ha-rim’s house.
It was no different from when I had visited as Ella.
After all, that world had been modeled after the real one.
The moment we stepped inside, the others greeted me warmly.
“Alice is here too!”
“You disappeared so suddenly!”
“Alice, you’re completely soaked. You’ll catch a cold!”
Looking at them, the heaviness in my heart vanished, washed away like it had never existed.
I had resolved to keep my distance from them, yet I was failing miserably at that.
“Let’s get you dried off first!”
“I wanna go in too!”
Eun-jung declared, and I promptly flicked her forehead in retaliation.
Then, with as much dignity as I could muster, I followed Ha-rim to the bathroom.
Since my clothes were completely drenched, I had to borrow something from Ha-rim.
For some reason, it felt strange.
I reached for the doorknob, ready to shower.
...Someone was behind me.
Assuming Eun-jung had snuck in, I raised my fist to flick her forehead again—
“?”
Instead, I found Ha-rim tilting her head at me.
Since we had shared an umbrella, she was also fairly wet.
This was a crisis.
Even if we looked the same age outwardly, there was no way I could bathe with her.
Immediately, I knelt down and pressed my forehead to the floor, begging her to go first.
Ha-rim, looking confused and slightly disappointed, relented and went in before me.
It seemed she had wanted to talk while we showered.
Only after she was done did I finally get my turn.
“That makes all of us! Now, let’s go over what happened today!”
She must have been referring to the VTuber incident.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t erased their memories.
“...”
James had mentioned that the Organization wasn’t strict about minor supernatural occurrences.
But that hadn’t been minor.
And it hadn’t even been a ghost.
Still, I understood what he meant.
If I didn’t erase it, they wouldn’t bother either.
So this time, the Organization was letting it slide.
No wonder James’s subordinates called him a lazy veteran.
Not that I was complaining.
“It was insane, wasn’t it? I never expected Kyung-min to just vanish like that!”
“I can barely remember °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° it, to be honest. It still doesn’t feel real... Anyway, thanks for saving me.”
“Alice went through a lot. Eun-jung helped too, though.”
“Hehe!”
Eun-jung had been helpful.
But the one who had suffered the most was me.
The way she puffed up her chest proudly was annoying.
“...If you ever make me do that again, I’m going to be mad.”
“Heh... heh...”
Come to think of it, Eun-jung really seemed to enjoy messing with me.
She glanced at me cautiously.
I wasn’t mad enough to make her nervous, so I lifted an arm, leaving space at my side.
Immediately, she scooted over and clung to me.
“Squishy~”
I patted her head.
This little gremlin. She was cute when she wasn’t being a menace.
“Your shampoo smells nice~”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Soo-ho stroked his chin thoughtfully.
“What do you think that was? We’ve been in this club for a while, but that was new.”
Apparently, when they checked back on the VTuber ghost, they found a notice on her YouTube channel announcing an indefinite hiatus.
Since Chika, my game’s anomaly, still hadn’t returned, it seemed she was still tracking the VTuber down somewhere on the internet.
If Lost got chased for too long, I’d feel bad for her.
Maybe tomorrow, I should call Chika back.
“There really are supernatural things in this world that we don’t understand.”
“...This is starting to feel way bigger than us.”
“But that’s what makes it fun.”
Ha-rim nodded. It was a gesture of agreement.
But she didn’t stop there.
“We also need to be more careful.”
She spoke as the club president.
“With things like this out there, we have to be cautious. Honestly, last time, we ended up doing something we weren’t supposed to during the summoning ritual without even realizing it.
If that had triggered a supernatural event, we could’ve been in real trouble.”
“That’s true. Let’s be more careful.”
Kyung-min agreed.
Ha-rim warned everyone to be more mindful of their actions.
But paradoxically, this also meant that the Mystery Exploration Club wasn’t going to stop their activities just because of this incident.
They would continue—just with more caution.
“So, this was our first officially witnessed ghost. Let’s record it.”
Ha-rim pulled out a pen and started writing in her notebook.
She mentioned that once they graduated, they would leave a copy of this record in the clubroom.
“Now, let’s talk about our next activity.”
“Our next activity? There’s already something new?”
“Of course! You know that junkyard past the intersection? People have been hearing strange noises there. It sounds mechanical, but... almost alive.”
The group sat together, chatting excitedly about their next adventure.
Their expressions were full of curiosity and anticipation.
I had erased their memories before, afraid they would get hurt, and I wasn’t considering restoring them.
...But maybe, if they could continue to enjoy these mildly dangerous experiences without real harm, I wouldn’t have to erase their memories anymore.
-----
“Now, let’s see. How’s the esper we captured last time?”
Carol asked while sorting through documents in her office.
The empty coffee cans stacked around her tumbled to the floor with a series of clatters.
“He didn’t seem particularly loyal to anyone, so he talked immediately. Just as expected, he was hired by Pinocchio of the Workshop.”
Carol let out a sigh.
“I thought so... Haah... Why are demons always so selfish? If they can’t negotiate a deal, they just try to steal instead. And all because someone made them and then abandoned them.”
“...?”
Her subordinate raised an eyebrow at the odd remark but didn’t question it too deeply.
Carol was known for making strange comments now and then.
“At least this one can be reasoned with.”
“...That’s true. Compared to Peter Pan, who doesn’t even seem capable of communication, this is much easier.
Honestly, it makes Alice look like an angel.”
“...Speaking of which, what happened to the place Peter Pan appeared last time?”
The subordinate went over to a filing cabinet labeled D. 𝚗ov𝚙𝚞𝚋.c𝚘m
Flipping through the files, he found one marked with P and read aloud:
“Peter Pan appeared in a conflict zone at approximately 17:26, accompanied by the sound of laughter.
He hovered in the sky for about three minutes before vanishing.
Simultaneously, around 12,000 soldiers and 700 civilians in the area also disappeared.
They all reappeared two hours later, but most of them showed symptoms of drug-induced psychosis.”
Carol clicked her tongue, annoyed at the sheer scale of the event.
She popped open a fresh can of coffee and gulped it down.
Her subordinate didn’t bother warning her about her health.
“It’s the same as last time. Keep researching ways to efficiently treat those affected using the anomalies we have in containment.
Our current methods are ineffective and expensive.”
“Understood.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Silence returned, filled only by the sound of typing.
After a few minutes, Carol rubbed her eyes, looking exhausted.
‘The anomalies in our branch are under control, the new administrators have finished their training...
I need to contact the committee about that criminal we caught. If we want to ensure containment, we’ll need harsher methods...
Ugh, I have so much work.
How did I even end up in this position...?
...Sigh. I miss Alice.’
Ding!
“What now...”
A message notification popped up—several, actually.
It was an official order from the higher-ups.
The usual security measures were in place: numeric codes, a simple riddle, biometric scans, even a life-sign recognition check.
They had crammed every authentication method imaginable into one message.
‘What kind of order is this...?’
Carol read through the document carefully.
Then, her expression hardened.
“...This is going to be a hassle. Merin, add one more task to your list.”
“Yes, just say the word.”
“Gather information on the research directors of the other branches. As much as you can.”
