Main Plane Space Station

In the vastness of the cosmos, countless stars drifted in silence. Amid the boundless sea of starlight floated a colossal space station that glimmered with the cold sheen of metal.

The station was a city, and it was called Central City.

Towering buildings crowded its streets in dense ranks.

And at the very heart of that city stood the Bureau of Plane Administration, perched atop its tallest skyscraper.

A tower rising hundreds of stories high, whose summit was the city’s forbidden ground. Inside its immense enclosed space were only three rooms.

From one of them, a faintly piercing alarm suddenly sounded, and the person resting with closed eyes opened them at once.

“What is it?”

“A collapse has just been detected in Plane M398.”

“M398.” The moment the words fell, the speaker vanished from where he stood and, in the blink of an eye, appeared in another room.

There, the door of a huge silver cocoon-like sleep pod sprang open. The man inside sat up, long black hair as smooth and lustrous as silk sliding over his shoulders. He stared blankly ahead without moving.

“What are you doing? You’ve gone and ruined the world.” He tapped the man’s sleep pod. “Had your fun yet? Clean up your own mess.”

The black-haired man seemed only just to have come back from a violent emotional upheaval. He pressed a hand to his fiercely pounding heart and slowly lifted his head, those dark-gold eyes with their double pupils fixing on him steadily.

“Oh no.”

“What now?”

“She found out, and this time I really made her angry.”

“……”

“Not talking to you anymore. I have to go soothe her.” With that, the man lay back down, and the sleep pod’s door sealed shut without a sound.

He had even activated full immersion mode. That meant no one could wake him unless the deepest purpose in his heart was perfectly achieved.

For them, that mode was dangerous enough to be fatal; there was a real chance he might never wake again.

The man standing beside the pod wore a cold expression, and in the next second he vanished from the room. “Madmen, both of you. I can’t be bothered.”

...

In Jiu's resting quarters at the transfer station, she had not spoken a word since returning.

The system did not dare speak either, and so it too remained mute.

The deadlock held for a long while. Then, the expressionless woman suddenly gave a laugh. “Damn it all. I meant to dig a pit for someone else, and in the end I buried myself in it.”

She had originally planned to fake her death.

The side mission had been completed several days earlier, but she had not chosen to leave immediately. She had intended to make a grand farewell before exiting.

Just so happened that the High Priest and that group from the Diana side were quietly making moves, so she played along.

She had expected herself to be killed, but she had not expected Xiu to dig out his own heart for her without even blinking.

Truthfully, that had shaken her more than a little.

It took half a day before she finally recovered.

The system could not make sense of her way of thinking, nor did it dare ask what she meant. It only said timidly, “T-the final settlement for the mission just came through. Do you want to hear it?”

“Mm.”

“Commencing mission settlement now. Third world cheat item delivery succeeded, mission completion rating: A, client satisfaction: none. Host performance evaluation: Professional employee rank: Bronze employee. Silver is waving at you from ahead; keep working hard.”

Jiu’s attention was drawn to the word “none” under client satisfaction.

“What does ‘none’ mean?”

“Sorry, authorization... uh...” The system inexplicably stalled for a full ten seconds before abruptly changing course. “Because that plane collapsed.”

“Did you just receive some notice from above, so you changed your wording?” Jiu’s gaze sharpened.

The system was suffering in silence. “No, my CPU overheated and I briefly went offline.”

Jiu looked at it as though saying, I believe you only if I’m an idiot. “How could a plane collapse?”

“...After you died, the male leads fell into grief and rage and self-destructed.”

Jiu fell silent for a moment.

“Perform emotional severance on me.”

“Ah! Wha—what? T-this... maybe you should think about it?” the system stammered.

“Weren’t you always urging me to do it before? Why the sudden reluctance now? Did someone give you some kind of order?

Come to think of it, ordinary people from a single world, even if they’re male leads, couldn’t possibly grow strong enough to break through one plane after another and keep following me, could they?

For plane traversal like that, the Bureau of Plane Administration should be the only place with the technology. No one else ought to have it.

So he’s from the Bureau?

And if he can even command you, then though you’re only a normal system for a newly hired employee, that’s enough to prove his status in the Bureau isn’t low.

Since he’s my fellow worker, the fact that I ran into him in a trainee plane means the reason he appeared there was either the same as mine, namely a mission, or that he was my examiner.

I lean toward the latter.

Now that the assessment is over and I’ve already been converted to full-time, yet he’s still chasing me relentlessly, it seems likely I went too far in provoking him during the mission.

He’s indignant, or unwilling to let it go, and wants to get even.”

The system was terrified. “Enough, enough. I’ll do it, I’ll do it. I’ll perform emotional severance for you.”

Please, stop. Stop free-associating. Why does your intelligence always leap straight into the wrong direction?

Jiu shut her mouth in satisfaction.

The system’s reaction said everything.

She had guessed right.

Or at least, mostly right.

As for “getting even,” that was something she had said on purpose as well.

That man’s fixation on her was clearly not due to such a “simple” reason.

“Begin. After the emotional severance is complete, start the next mission immediately.”

Jiu closed her eyes.