Chapter 1 (2/2)
Was it because he didn’t have coffee or was he so rusty after being discharged from the army and coming back to school only recently? In no time he felt sleepy as he could not concentrate on the lecture.
“…”
He heard the professor’s voice vaguely, and his eyelids were heavy. His shoulders felt stiff, but he blamed it for his hellish commute to school.
Right at that moment, he saw some strange letters floating in the air.
<What is the best job in the ruined world? Choose right now.>
“Ugh? What the heck?”
He felt he was hallucinating while dozing off. He blinked his eyes, then roughly rubbed them. But the hologram message before his eyes didn’t disappear.
Tik, tik, tik.
At that moment, the monitor that was printing out the class material flickered, then all the fluorescent lights went out.
Woowoong~
“Ugh? What the heck is this? Is it a blackout?”
“What? I don’t see anything!”
It was not a simple blackout. As if the sun had gone out or one was thrown into the cosmos, the whole world plunged into darkness.
Sungwoo curled up in an attempt to defend himself against the contingencies.
“Even my mobile phone is off. What the heck is going on?”
“By the way, what the heck is this? I can see myself only here!”
“Me too…”
One thing was clearly visible. It was the holographic message that Sungwoo mistakenly regarded as a hallucination. It seemed that all the students in the hall saw the same thing.
<You have only have 15 seconds left.>
“Oh my…what is this?”
“15 seconds of what?”
Bright light shined before their eyes, and then the ten cards began to spin.
Just like a spinning wheel or conveyor-belt sushi, the cards came so close as if they could touch them, then quickly moved away clockwise. The cards had all sorts of pictures with various colored backgrounds.
“You guys see these cards too?”
“Hey, guys, don’t touch them recklessly!”
“He is right! Don’t touch them! They’re dangerous!”
Nobody knew why it was dangerous to touch them. They just avoided the cards instinctively. But Sungwoo harbored another doubt.
‘Isn’t it more dangerous to not do anything now? Who knows what’ll happen after 15 seconds?’
<You’ve got only ten seconds!>
‘Does it mean we have to choose a card?’
One card had the drawing of a fighter with a sword and a shield, another one with a wizard holding a cane, and another one with an archer holding an arrow. These three cards each had a star on the white background.
Another one had two stars on a green background, which looked like a priest in Sungwoo’s eyes. Was he a castle knight drawn on the card with three stars on the pink background?
Sungwoo tried his best to understand this ridiculous situation. Only seven seconds were left. What was this countdown forcing him to do?
‘What the heck is this? Is it similar to poker? What am I supposed to decide within this timeframe?’
At that moment, one card with the drawing of a fighter, which was off in the distance, disappeared with a ‘Poof!’ And then…
Bump!
“Ugh? What the heck is this?”
A sword suddenly dropped onto Sungwoo’s friend’s desk, who was sitting in front of him.
‘I wonder if it was dropped by the fighter on the card…’