Game Director from Hell

Chapter 56: Hell of War

Is there a reason that can justify murder?

Is it possible for involuntary murder to be a valid proposition?

That question had haunted me throughout my time in that hellish place.

Moreover, it was the most primal and repulsive form of hell I had ever experienced.

To put it bluntly, it was like that.

Right before I embarked on the journey of the butterfly and the girl.

As a result, I had felt a sense of strangeness when I looked at the butterfly and the girl.

“Ah!”

A blood-red sky like raging flames, a gray sun, a crimson plain stretching below, and a ridge lined with countless corpses, like a river of blood.

Many people had died there, and they were born again only to die.

People of different races, genders, ages, and attire.

But they all had one thing in common.

Murder!

That place was a space where death could only be met at the hands of others, and where one could return to seek revenge. In other words, it was a battlefield.

Guns, knives, bows, clubs, and every tool imaginable was clutched in the hands of everyone, and they offered the lifeblood of others as a sacrifice to fulfil the purpose of their weapons with every moment.

Someone once said that those who had experienced a battlefield once would be haunted by that terror for the rest of their lives.

They would shudder at the horrors of the battlefield until they closed their eyes.

It was true.

Even I, who had become a translucent ghost and stood there in the distance, occasionally shuddered as I recalled that scene. How could those who had experienced it first-hand not feel the same?

At first, I thought, “Is it rational?”

After all, this was a hellish place that had gone beyond the laws of humanity, so it might be somewhat rational to punish murder here, as murder had long been considered one of the great sins even within human moral codes.

But that thought didn’t last long.

Hell was still hell.

I realized this when I saw not the forest, but the individual trees that made up the red plains.

To be clear, it was the moment when I saw the individuals who composed that hell, not the battlefield of the red plain.

“Ahhhh!”

The man who passed by me was a white man in a military uniform.

Covered in blood and dirt, it was difficult to identify him, but as far as I could remember, his military uniform was a tattered one worn during the early 20th century’s World War I.

I won’t go into detail about his bloodshot eyes and the screams that tore through his throat.

But I will say this: what caught my eye at that moment was not the man himself but the military uniform he was wearing.

“A medal.”

On the military uniform of the soldier, there were medals hanging faded and worn to the point of jingling.

Those medals represented the trajectory of his life and how many achievements he had accomplished as a guardian of the nation.

In an incongruously poetic sense, the worn-out lustre of those medals felt like a symbol that vividly represented this hell.

Because it seemed like hell was saying the same thing as me.

My sense of justice cannot be justice for others.

It’s just a symbol made from the blood of others.

At that moment, I raised a question.

Can murder be justified?

No, can the actions of soldiers who sacrificed themselves for the protection of the collective be demeaned with the word ‘murder’?

My doubts deepened significantly from the moment I observed others besides that man.

“Retreat!”

The one shouting at the top of his lungs was a knight adorned in chainmail.

A white cross was engraved on his Armor.

He looked like a holy knight, a warrior devoted to following the name of God.

“I’ll kill you!”

The one wielding the axe was a savage.

He wore animal skins like a cloak, and his wild, tangled hair billowed as he surveyed the battlefield.

The bone tooth necklace around his neck was larger and more ornate than those of the other savages.

He appeared to be their leader.

“Protect us!”

Those wielding round shields and spears evoked images of Spartans from a movie.

In the midst of them all, a man with a scarred face removed his red cloak. It now served to cover the body of a fallen soldier.

He seemed to be the commander of these soldiers.

Once again, he questioned.

“Sin?”

Could he really call them sinners?

Were they not heroes who held weapons in their hands to protect something, despite the differences in what they were protecting? The essence remained the same.

This question wasn’t unique to me alone.

In fact, the participants themselves felt it most deeply.

I witnessed this scene during a break in the ongoing war. As they all entered a makeshift tent, they looked up at the sky.

Eventually, they spoke.

“Behold.”

A soldier decorated with medals.

“You there.”

The savage who fought fiercely.

“In the name of heaven.”

The holy knight who called out the name of God.

“Oh, wretched one.”

The Spartan, busy tending to the fallen soldier’s body, stared at the sky with a contorted face, his long sigh filled with despair and resentment.

With just one sentence, he expressed it all:

“Why must I be condemned to hell?”

It was a statement laden with the thirst for someone to come back and answer, but, as in most cases in hell, communication was impossible.

Undoubtedly, killing was a sin.

However, when you considered the complexity of their actions, influenced by duties as soldiers, beliefs as religious individuals, responsibilities as leaders, and convictions as commanders, it was not so simple to condemn them as mere murderers.

Hell, in its terrible and straightforward manner, had simplified it.

But how could you just label it as murder?

In the end, all they could do was return to the battlefield and continue the unending cycle of war.

It was around that time that the difference between the perspective of observers and participants became stark.

I, witnessing their despair while they returned to the battlefield, couldn’t help but question:

“Why do they keep fighting?”

Wasn’t ending the war the obvious solution?

There were no external pressures like invaders, and there were no give-and-take relationships of conquest and loss between them. So why did they persistently repeat the war?

I couldn’t recall how long I had been observing this war.

Initially, I hadn’t realized that this hellish place was designed to erase the perception of time.

The realization of the structure of this hell came later.

Subjectively, quite a long time had passed, and their physical bodies were deteriorating.

“Ah…”

The soldier decorated with medals gasped for breath, struck by despair.

Even in that moment, his fading gaze remained fixed on the sky, filled with bitterness.

The only thing transparent in him was his tears, but even they soon became tainted with blood.

“Why… why…”

As his breath faded away, he too questioned.

That was when it happened.

Squish—

Blood oozed from the soldier’s body and began to solidify like jelly.

It started writhing and contorting, engulfing the soldier’s body like it was devouring him, then gradually compressing itself.

The red jelly took on an elliptical, gun-like shape.

Right after, where the jelly had melted away, lay a single, bright red gun.

No one cared to explain what the gun was.

No one showed any interest, and no one even glanced at it.

I stood there, looking at the gun, for a long time.

It was only later that I learned what it was.

“Ahhhh!”

During the war, a soldier lost his weapon.

He fumbled around with panicked eyes, until he spotted the gun that used to belong to a soldier.

In that moment, it happened.

Shuaaak!

A red tendril extended from the gun and pierced through the soldier.

Like a parasite burrowing into a host, the tendril consumed the soldier, transforming his body in writhing contortions.

Finally, something emerged.

“Ugh…”

20th-century military uniform, insignia from an era nearly impossible to identify, short blonde hair, and a wrinkled white face.

The soldier had transformed into a military officer.

He shivered for a moment, clutching the gun connected to him, and shouted with eyes devoid of reason.

“Why…”

As the 20th-century officer questioned, his body slowly started changing.

“Ugh…”

As the officer’s body convulsed, the others around him stood silent.

The officer’s transformation was complete.

Turn back!

Without asking for any reason, just move forward.

As if there is no doubt that this is the only way.

Others did the same.

Everyone died, became weapons, and resurrected, losing their will and shedding blood in the hands of others.

At some point, they regained their sanity, blamed the sky, and died again, becoming weapons once more.

It was like a scene that embodied the essence of what it means to be an army.

I watched it from a distance.

I captured the image of a vast crimson meadow under a crimson sky, with people screaming at each other, and then I abstracted the scene.

And there was something floating in the void.

It was madness.

A hell so intricately woven that you couldn’t even see the beginning and end of that thread.

A hell of those who continued to wage war as tools, with the same question in their minds for all eternity.

When you realize the overview, someone will engrave a name in your mind.

• Aaaaah!

This was the Hell of War.

… Yes, all the speculations that floated while hovering over that place were wrong.

The sin that hell asked about was not murder but war.

***

To put it simply, I felt bad.

It was disgusting and nauseating to the core.

The Hell of War provoked a strong sense of revulsion within me, more than any other hell I had seen, and left a lingering feeling of disgust somewhere deep inside me.

What I remember next is their actions.

Not as a passage of time but as episodes, changes began to occur from the point when I counted that I had seen them die more than a hundred times.

The four individuals I had observed carefully were them.

First, Spartan changed.

-Um…

Suddenly, he was born again and did not participate in the war.

He looked at the spear in his own hand and then at the sky, the earth, and the people.

I don’t know what he was thinking.

But with a twisted face, Spartan, who had been watching the scene, stopped participating in the war and began to fly far away.

Over a long period of time, he began to move towards the answer.

Afterward, the Holy Knight, the soldier, and finally the leader of the barbarians showed the same behaviour.

They met in front of a massive temple outside the battlefield.

I didn’t know that such a strange place existed.

From there, the story continued.

My game, Hellic 3, will recreate it.

“Journey of those seeking answers, or a pilgrimage.”

That’s the theme I will pursue.

Now, the background, characters, and narrative have been sorted out.

Next is to process this into a game.

I pulled up the data I had recorded immediately after the regression.

Then, I carefully refined it into the form of a proposal.

“The genre is action-adventure.”

It’s the same as Hellic 2.

However, this time, I will significantly increase the emphasis on action.

There’s nothing like fast-paced action to capture popularity.

Next is the system.

“Maintain the essence of the series.”

Therefore, the premise that growth is solely based on using items remains unchanged.

“The keyword is ‘Sinister Sword.'”

The sins of the sinners engraved on the weapons, rather than their physical bodies, are the playable characters.

Hellic 3 will feature four different weapons, a gun, a sword, an axe, and a spear, each functioning as a character.

The form and options of the sinister swords can be refined gradually.

Does it end there?

Absolutely not.

“It’s AAA. There’s no reason to stick to the same level of system as the indie days. We have the time, resources, and capital now.”

It’s time for depth.

Think about it.

So far, I’ve only used item builds as the driving force for growth.

I needed to add other elements that would aid growth without undermining that premise.

In other words, I needed to expand the choices for growth in the form of items.

“There is a way.”

There was a possible way to survive the Hell of War.

“Flesh.”

Their true essence is dark magic.

After enduring hell for a long time, they have become so intertwined with it that the physical body is nothing more than a replaceable battery to them.

What if I incorporate that concept into the game in a gamified way?

“Let’s create loot able corpses scattered throughout the map, each corpse… I mean, they provide traits that assist in the weapons you acquire for the build.”

Linking the weapons to the physical body and the abilities of dark magic to expand the options for growth.

Now, how should he express this?

“I need to be cautious.”

If he represent it as a split of playable characters, the game will become too chaotic.

In other words, it lacks intuitiveness.

Anyway, since the story will progress the same way no matter which character you use, is there really a meaning in dividing playable characters?

In that regard, I also considered a “J-RPG” style character swap, but that also poses difficulties in terms of concentration.

At the end of it all, I came to a conclusion.

“What if I put your characters into one body?”

This was also an extension of the concept of dark magic.

Giving each corpse four weapons.

Depending on the weapon they hold in their hand, the character transforms into the corresponding person.

I got the idea.

As I mentioned before, my goal is not to recreate hell but to reconstruct it in a game-like way.

Even if they travelled together using different bodies in reality, there’s no need to insist on that point.

As a way to express multiple souls merged into one body in the game… Yes, what if they have mouths protruding somewhere on the body during character interactions or the arms suddenly move independently to slap the face?

As a meme-like element.

The keywords are organized.

“Dark magic, Transformation, Action.”

The three core elements of the game that can be summarized.

And in that moment, I thought of it.

“This.”

A factor that a man can’t resist, it all came together.

There’s one undeniable fact.

Ta-da!

The sound of typing echoed cheerfully in the office.

First /RomanceMTL