This Game Is Too Realistic-Chapter 538.2: Countless Possibilities

Eberts didn’t bother explaining in detail. He continued in a calm voice, "Let’s just say it’s a hypothetical scenario. If I hadn’t intervened, if X-16 hadn’t stormed into your room in time, you would have died in that prison fight. And it wouldn’t have been quick or clean. That assassin wanted you both dead and alive, a special kind of twisted, which those fools somehow all agreed on."

"Then, when angry workers saw your mutilated body, they would’ve stormed the prison and held you up high. The workers would have rallied around you... They might have even taken over several key sites, like this prison. The warden wouldn’t resist. He might’ve even joined them in silence."

Spielberg’s throat bobbed. "And?"

He wanted to know what came next.

"Then, the same thing that has already happened countless times would happen..." said Eberts, shrugging as he pressed the ‘play’ button.

The images resumed.

Before the crowd crossed the security line, a commander gave the order to open fire. The weakest ones who were walking up front, died first. The rest tried to flee. The bravest got caught between corpses and cowards, and fell too.

The street ran red with blood. A child cried over their parent’s body, only to be dragged away like dangerous cargo. The cowards were terrified. They would rather kill an innocent than let one enemy escape. Hatred was invisible, and once the gunfire started, it wouldn’t stop.

The nobles quickly declared the union illegal. The gates of the inner and outer city slammed shut. Mercenaries were mobilized and bought as they formed search teams that raided the industrial zone looking for union members.

However, union members didn’t wear badges. One couldn’t spot them easily. That made the manhunts all the more brutal.

Some of the paid informants joined the raids too, settling old scores, robbing people, or just venting their pent-up desires. Everything usually forbidden was suddenly allowed. The nobles looked the other way. After all, between mad dogs and ghosts, ghosts were scarier.

Those who died first were the lucky ones. They died with honor. The cowards who fled would regret not choosing a cleaner death.

And from that point on, survival became hell.

Soon, the gates of the outer city would open again. New survivors would flood in, replacing the old ones. The bloody streets would be washed clean. The gates to the inner city might open too. No wastelander ever cared about a settlement’s past, just as few of them ever thought about the future.

After 70 or 80 years of silence, everything would reset. As if none of it had ever happened.

After all, most people in the wasteland didn’t live that long. Only the nobles lived longer, but even that wouldn’t last forever.

After witnessing the conclusion of Ending A, Spielberg’s lips trembled.

He couldn’t accept that it might have been his ending.

What horrified him even more was that it had already happened. Again and again, in endless cycles the same thing happened.

No one had ever told him things would turn out that way!

He had to stop them!

There had to be... There had to be a better way!

"... You’re very lucky. Thanks to my intervention, your comrades only believed you had died. Although the blood loss was enough to be fatal, they never saw your body."

"The warden tried to convince everyone to calm down, and then that killer with the story started shouting about taking down the nobles. But his comrades didn’t fully trust either of them. After all, they had their own factory floor. Right now, the young ones are still arguing whether to press the button that would destroy everything, to completely smash this rotten system."

Watching the change in his expression, Eberts suddenly said, "You think it’s possible that the killer was sent by the New Alliance’s administrator?"

"Absolutely not!" Spielberg replied with unshakable certainty, his eyes burning like torches.

Eberts didn’t deny his judgment and calmly continued, "Yet, in our simulations, that scenario wasn’t out of the question. He could have paid a small price to eliminate that problem in Boulder Town. Strange, isn’t it? Why did that possibility exist at all?"

"From your observations, it wasn’t like that man never tried to play tricks on us, but he isn’t that good at it. He’s better when it comes to huge schemes or straight up battles. According to logic, he wouldn’t try to assassinate you. There has to be something interfering with the calculations."

Spielberg stared at him and said seriously, "Machines aren't infallible. Maybe the machine that calculates these probabilities just broke."

Even an assembly line could get stuck.

Even if no one sabotaged it, machines could still break down from time to time.

Eberts suddenly grinned. "You're right. That possibility also exists. And there’s another one, the assassin wasn’t the administrator of the New Alliance, but someone else. After all, Boulder Town isn’t the only survivor settlement in the wasteland. Honestly, a lot of people still covet what you hold."

The Army, the Enterprise, the Academy. Even the little state Great Rift Valley that ran itself...

All the former children of the Post-War Reconstruction Committee still honored an ancient oath, not because they were noble, but because something gave that oath power and made it a binding contract.

Of course, after so many years, the deterrent force behind that contract had weakened. Maybe the old rulers just didn’t care about rats scrabbling in the wasteland. Deep down, they didn’t believe the order salvaged from the trash heap of history could amount to much...

Whatever it was, that was another story.

...

"We’ve simulated tens of thousands of scenarios. What you saw wasn’t just Ending A. There’s also what we’ll call Ending B." Eberts pressed a button on the remote.

The projection shifted and they stood in front of the bar.

Time had rewound to early in the month, right before Spielberg had been taken.

Spielberg looked at Yalek and Kent who were walking to bar, and both sides quickly erupted in a violent fight.

The whole place was like barrels of gunpowder ready to ignite. Every one of them was a fuse.

Two hundred furious workers charged the dozen or so guards.

Kent was beaten to death on the spot. Yalek ran off without saying a word. Phyllis opened fire... and Spielberg got unlucky again, his head burst from a bullet.

This time, however, the casualties were kept within a manageable range.

The sound of gunfire only traveled a few blocks. Workers mourned the deaths of a few of their braver comrades, even Vega shed a few crocodile tears, but that was all.

In Boulder Town, someone died every day. Their deaths were no different from any others. Later, Mr. House would say on the broadcast that they were rioters and had killed a loyal man named Kent. Soon enough, people started believing him.

Boulder Town survived that surface-level crisis. Just as marauders ate people to survive the winter, the city too consumed a few, but did so with the utensils of civilization. The detonation was only delayed. The bomb was buried deeper, and the number of bombs multiplied.

No one knew when the next crisis would come, but it would. When the time came, it would be worse.

The reckoning was inevitable.

"That time... Was it any different?" Spielberg swallowed.

He wasn’t sure that even counted as a good ending.

After all, he was slain. His comrades who banded together first were also killed.

But maybe because of their deaths, the rest of the outer city lived... At least the innocent ones didn’t have to die.

This settlement wasn’t just home to peasants doing cheap labor. There were many well-dressed gentlemen and their beautiful wives on the streets too. Many of them had no access to black cards, had never oppressed anyone, and had only quietly endured life’s cruelty in the twisted little place on the wasteland.

Spielberg didn’t love those innocent people, he had never loved himself either. He was willing to die for the administrator, not because he thought it was right, but because it felt less wrong.

But those people who looked clean everyday while dirtying their hands in the worst way while hiding in the inner city... Maybe they didn’t deserve it.

Still, even if he were ordered to kill them, he couldn’t do it. Because humans weren’t always rational creatures. Most of the time, they were ruled by the chaos inside them.

"Perhaps your don’t realize that the difference between Ending B and the nearly-real Ending A came down to just one foolish impulse."

"... What impulse?"

"That foolish whim of yours, ironically, saved you."

Seeing Spielberg’ confusion, Eberts chuckled and continued in the singsong tone of a bard "Drunk Bore undid his belt, not to humiliate Stephan’s family, but to tear up his Black Card and stand with those who had been bullied. In the possibility corresponding to Ending B, he wrote a completely different story, not about the Workers’ Union, but about Stephan’s wife and daughter falling into a pit of ‘pleasure’, and Stephan’s despair... This awakening didn’t just bring revenge, it brought admiration from the womenfolk."

"His comrades, as it turns out, preferred stories like that."

Spielberg blushed. He had considered writing it that way.

After all, it had just snowed, Vega had used IOUs to exploit them, and Kent had humiliated him on the way home.

He wasn’t a coward, but cowards weren’t made of stone either. He had to vent somehow.

What he hadn’t expected was that a version where hundreds of thousands died and one where only dozens did were separated by nothing more than a few pages of old newspapers.

"That’s it?!"