My mind was completely blank. I couldn't think of what to say or do, so I just stood there with my mouth open as a ghastly figure stepped out of the darkness.
[WARNING!
DUE TO ANOMALIES F~\\D
STAbiLITY OF qUesT PARAME||RS HAVE REACHED A CRITICAL LOW.]
The Warning Window chimed again in my peripheral as I watched the stranger walk towards me.
He looked old. Incredibly old. Older than Obaa-san looked to keep up her guise, older than Saizo, older than what I remembered my parents were like. I didn't know anybody who would be comparable in age compared to this stranger.
He walked with a slight limp on his leg. It was only just noticeable to me because I was studying the old man closely. He wore what looked like a robe. It didn't look like any clothing I had ever seen before. It was like a sheet that he placed over his body, with a hole made to stick his head through.
He held a wooden staff on which he placed some of his weight to alleviate his limp. It looked solid, though it also looked incredibly old like the stranger. I was surprised at how sturdy the wood was.
As he got closer, it became more and more obvious that he was also a zombie. The System must have revived him to gather enough 'players' for the enemy team to have for the second task. If that's so, then why did he kill his teammate, Mirou?
He chuckled as he got closer and saw that I had tightened my grip on my hunting dagger attached to my belt on the side.
"I don't know what you've been through," the man said, "but I was telling the truth when I said that I wasn't here to harm you."
He sat down on a half-wall that was a few metres away from me and sighed.
"It's taken me a while to track you down," the man said as he chuckled lightly.
The Warning Window chimed again in my peripheral.
"That Window must be bothering you. Let me take care of that," the stranger casually mentioned. While he still held onto his staff with one hand, he waved his free hand in a circular motion, and the Warning Window disappeared as if he closed it. Only, this time, it didn't reappear in front of my face.
"How—?" I mumbled.
"If Paradigm didn't want anything out of the ordinary to happen, it probably shouldn't have revived me of all people." The man chuckled louder.
He turned to me and looked me up and down. A small Window popped up in front of me notifying me that I had been "scanned" as the man continued to mumble to himself, seemingly in appreciation.
He clapped and laughed, "Amazing! I've never seen an integration rate so high before. Even when I was alive!"
Integration? Isn't that what a Window said after I got the left arm in the Solo Dungeon? I looked down at my left arm.
"You really are well on your way to becoming a perfect vessel for the ██████—" He stopped abruptly and placed his free hand on his mouth, "Oh I see, Paradigm is still very particular about what information is freely revealed in its domain."
He stroked his long, white beard in contemplation as he chuckled softly to himself, "It's amusing that after however long it's been since I was alive last, Paradigm still acts as if it's a moody teen."
I hardened my will and spoke up. I had to stop and clear my throat since it was a little croaky, but as he looked at me with amusement I asked, "Who are you?"
"Ryuu?" Kat's voice called out in my head.
"What's happening Ryuu? Do you need help?" Saizo also said.
"Ah," the man mused, "I've always found eavesdroppers quite annoying. Let me do something about that," he raised his free hand once more and as he snapped his long, thin fingers, Kat's and Saizo's voice in my ears stopped.
It was deathly silent now.
A Window popped up in front of me.
[ATTENTION!
GREAT ANOMALY HAS BEEN FOUND. TAKING STEPS TO REMOVE THE ANOMALY.]
At the same time, the stranger doubled over in pain. As the man groaned pitifully, I was still stuck on the spot. I didn't know who this man was. I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know what I could do.
"Don't worry," the old man groaned as if he had read my mind, "there's nothing you can do to help me. Paradigm just hates it when I meddle with its domain. But at least now we'll have a little bit of privacy for the next little bit."
"Who are you?" I asked again, "How can you mess with the System as if you're its peer?"
The stranger straightened up, his face in a tight grimace for a few seconds before the old, somewhat rotting skin seemed to relax. He sighed a breath out in as slow and controlled a breath as he could.
"Wow, when Paradigm gets mad, it's quite powerful," the old man said quietly.
I started to get annoyed at the stranger and his attitude, "Answer me!"
I stepped back when I realised that that annoyance didn't all come from me. The warm swirling sensation had reappeared in my left arm. I squeezed my left wrist with my other arm in a futile effort and belief that if I constrained the flow of blood up and down my arm, the swirling sensation would subside.
"As I said," the stranger calmly noted, "you have the highest integration rate I've ever seen. I saw in my scan of you that you've nearly completed the Secret Quest, am I correct?"
I could feel the intensity of the swirling double. "How do you know about the Secret Quest?"
"I'll take that as a yes," the stranger sighed. He placed his free hand on top of his other hand and leaned forward as he placed more weight on the staff, "I am an existence out of its natural time, but since you asked me before, I'll introduce myself first. I was — and I guess still am — called Mer███—!"
The System's censorship over someone's words was a strange thing to witness and hear. I struggled to figure out a way to completely explain it. To me, it sounded like the second half of the name the stranger said sounded like garbled noise. I tried to even watch his lips to see if I could work out what he was trying to say, but it was like a block in my head had been placed and I couldn't remember what shapes the mouth had actually made. It caused a sharp, piercing headache to appear out of nowhere.
It looked like it was a strange sensation for the stranger as well, as once again he placed a hand on his mouth in shock.
The swirling in my arm started to intensify once more as I became more frustrated, but everything stopped and calmed down when I heard the stranger laugh so loudly and deeply.
He continued to laugh as he slapped his leg and he laughed so much that at one point, it almost seemed like he was going to double down and fall to the ground in laughter.
"What's so funny?" I barely managed to say. I even felt a little bit bad about interrupting his joyous laughter.
"Tell me, how long have Paradigm existed for you and your people?" the stranger said in between loud chuckles.
'Your people'? His usage of that language was odd to me. From what I could see about the stranger, he seemed to have been as human as Mirou was before they died and returned as a zombie by the System.
"Uh, since forever, they say," I struggled to say anything with confidence, "some people believe there was nothing before the System."
"So long enough that the true genesis of Paradigm had been lost to time?" the stranger laughed again, "so even after all that time, Paradigm still has a tantrum over little old me and my 'blasphemous' name!"
The stranger had gestured with both hands when he said the word blasphemous. He had straightened his second and middle fingers and brought them down twice when he said the word. It seemed to be a motion to add emphasis to the word, but I had never seen the action before.
"You'd think that after all these years, the old girl would have grown up a little bit!" roared the stranger as he fell into another fit of laughter.
Because I didn't know what to say or how to react, I stayed silent as the stranger slowly came down from his laughing fit.
"I'm sorry," he said as he calmed down, "it's been a really, really…really long time since I had such a good laugh. It's good to see that Paradigm hadn't changed as much as I feared it would."
"You talk about the System as if it's your friend…" I mumbled.
"Well, you asked me before how I could treat Paradigm as if I were its peer?" the stranger said, "Well, that's because I'm not just any old normal person. I was part of the Last Generation."
"The last generation?" I asked. I had never heard of it, and I've read pretty much every Paradigm Help Entries.
"Of course, it's been lost to time," the stranger said under his breath, "I was part of the Last Generation. The last generation of humanity that was alive before Paradigm started to exist."