Humanity Protection Company

Illustrations: posted in discord

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Yeonwoo woke up flailing from his sleep and immediately turned the chair\'s backrest upright before sinking into thought.

The Dream Exchange, himself without a dream, and the shop owner.

The dream he had in broad daylight was definitely real, and that brief deviation was another side of Yeonwoo.

\'Right. If you don\'t particularly want to live long, you might live like that.\'

He had lost the dream of survival. It meant his caution had been removed. He might not hesitate to dance in a minefield or charge at monsters if it seemed fun.

The world was already like thin ice, wasn\'t it? When you might die at any moment, fun could take priority.

Of course, to Yeonwoo, who wanted to live a long life, it seemed like the behavior of a madman.

"How many crazy things did I do..."

Yeonwoo shivered, biting his nails.

He had rushed at the shop owner. Not even to get his dream back, but just because he felt bad. He rolled the dice recklessly. He wasn\'t even afraid of critical failures.

If things had gone wrong, what might have happened...

After being trapped in the past for a while, Yeonwoo finally came to his senses.

"Let\'s start with the report."

He placed his hands on the keyboard. As a company employee, he reported on the anomalous entity he had encountered.

Since he felt the company had been suspicious of him lately, he wrote everything without hiding or deceiving.

The story of going to the Dream Exchange while napping in the office. The story of Yeonwoo\'s dream and how it was taken from him. How he briefly lost his mind, but got his dream back.

\'My dream is to live safely for a long time. If they know this, the company should be reassured.\'

Click, click-

Only the sound of Yeonwoo typing on the keyboard echoed in the quiet office.

The report, which ended with the statement that the Dream Exchange owner had lost their dream, was registered as is, and Yeonwoo leisurely closed the company system.

\'There shouldn\'t be any big problems.\'

Since the dream peddler had many dreams, wouldn\'t they have replenished it somehow? Maybe they had become free from dreams as they said.

Yeonwoo regarded everything that had happened in the dream as a brief incident and returned to his daily life.

------

The world full of anomalous entities bustled along busily.

The company\'s researchers researched every day, the Special Forces fought anomalous entities, and the information agents were busy in their own way.

New anomalous entities were discovered too. A vengeful snowman, a Halloween latecomer, a third character, and so on.

Amidst all this busyness, one more task was thrown at the company. The transformed Dream Exchange.

"...A dream snatcher?"

"Yes. It\'s a bit odd to say Yeonwoo crea- well, anyway, there\'s an entity that was created because of the trouble he caused."

Reports came in that the Dream Exchange owner, who used to enjoy passing on dreams and watching people achieve them, had turned into a demon-like being.

"This used to be a safe entity."

Apparently, several artists had already fallen victim. They were in an uproar, saying they would cooperate with the company to catch and kill it immediately.

"Yeonwoo, he\'s really a troublemaker... The observatory\'s gone, the blessed child caused a containment breach, how many times has it been now?"

"Let\'s raise the hostility level of the dream snatcher for now, and start making plans for sealing or destruction."

In the end, a few artists and a Special Forces unit began to work together to form a plan.

Someone at headquarters was tearing their hair out while analyzing Yeonwoo\'s report.

The Club started moving to build a relationship with Yeonwoo.

"Send a request to Yeonwoo."

"What kind of request should we send?"

"Let\'s keep it simple, ask for luck to be bestowed. On several people. Regardless of our relationship with him, if it goes well, it could be an opportunity to fulfill our dream."

And so, an old man from the Korean branch of the Goldberg Club came to the investigation team\'s office.

------

"Are you alone? Where did all the investigators go?"

Tap, tap, the old man entered, tapping his cane on the floor, and looked around the empty office.

The newly renovated office was full of signs of life, with all sorts of odds and ends, scrap paper, and trash scattered about.

Yeonwoo greeted the old man with a slightly uncomfortable expression.

"They\'re all sick and resting."

"Sick? All the investigators? That doesn\'t make sense."

The old man\'s eyes widened in surprise. Investigators could get hurt, but it was rare for an entire investigation team to be paralyzed.

There were only 3 or 4 investigators, but still, they were masters of survival. All of them?

"Did some accident happen? This doesn\'t seem normal."

"They caught colds."

Yeonwoo answered honestly. The old man didn\'t believe it. He thought Yeonwoo was hiding the truth because he was from a hostile group.

\'Just a cold taking out all the investigators doesn\'t make sense.\'

In any case, there was no need to pry if Yeonwoo didn\'t want to talk about it.

The old man found a chair and sat down, tapping on the desk. The cheap desk made a plastic-like sound.

"Is the investigation team short on budget? How..."

"So, what brings you here?"

Yeonwoo handed over a bottle of water, and the old man looked at it with a sour expression before placing it in a corner of the desk.

"The information broker is liquidating assets, so I came to deliver that. And I have a request as well."

"Ah!"

He had completely forgotten. The information broker was supposed to give him various things.

Yeonwoo smiled broadly, but his expression soon turned strange. If he had come to give a reward, the old man\'s attire was very light. He only had a cane.

Noticing that look, the old man clicked his tongue.

"Did you think I\'d carry it all with this old body? Our kids are bringing it by truck now, so wait. Look at the list first. Let\'s talk about the request too."

He pulled out a few documents from his pocket.

Yeonwoo quickly took them and saw a long list of items.

\'Skipping the cash. Time-buying bills, real estate contract, Club-made pistol, gold bars.\'

There were many pieces of equipment, but those were the most important. Weapons and anomalous equipment.

The old man spoke proudly.

"Do you know what the real estate contract is?"

"Yes. Something that lets you exert force as the owner of some land? That\'s what I understand."

"You know your stuff. This is something we don\'t sell outside the Club, but we\'re giving it to you as a special gift."

Yeonwoo smiled happily.

\'With this, my house won\'t be destroyed.\'

An anomalous contract that lets you exert force as the owner of a house. If used well, it could be as good as any shelter. Kick out intruders, expel anomalous entities.

\'I need to find a house right away.\'

After that, the old man pulled out things like the information broker\'s confidentiality agreement, but Yeonwoo, lost in sweet dreams, glossed over them carelessly.

As the atmosphere improved...

The old man moved on to the main point.

"Ah, and there\'s a request I\'d like to make."

"A request? What kind of request?"

Yeonwoo snapped back to attention. As if he had never been in a good mood, he wore an uneasy expression. Warning words poured out.

"There\'s a chance of failure, and if a critical failure comes up, it could be unmanageable. Even if it succeeds, the result might be different from what you expect. Actually, it\'s best not to gamble with the dice at all."

Unless it was a situation where the Goldberg Club was really pushed to the brink and needed to gamble.

And in such a situation, it would clearly be dangerous, so Yeonwoo would reject the request.

The old man looked at Yeonwoo with some bewilderment. What kind of self-employed person tries not to sell their own product?

Ahem, the old man cleared his throat and pulled out a document.

"The Club is running a project, and we\'re thinking of using the dice for it. Take a look."

"This is...?"

A kind of proposal.

Yeonwoo quickly skimmed it and saw it was a document related to two-dimensional exploration and space development. Though the technology and words were grandiose, the purpose was simple.

Securing gold.

"The gold used in Golden Omnipotence is permanently consumed. Eventually, the gold on Earth is limited, and if we keep using it, won\'t it run out?"

"So, you\'re saying it\'s a project to mine gold?"

"That\'s right. Space is vast, and dimensions are even vaster, so there\'s no need to mine gold only on Earth, is there?"

Yeonwoo seriously examined the document before shaking his head. He placed the document on the desk and pushed it slightly away.

"This isn\'t my area of expertise. It would be better to find magicians or the company\'s space research department."

Magicians who are experts in two-dimensional exploration. The company\'s department specializing in space science. It would be right to entrust it to them.

"We\'ve already tried all that."

But the old man muttered gloomily. Of course, they had first tried collaborating with experts. The result was...

"A magician knew of a dimension made of gold. We paid a hefty sum for the coordinates of that dimension. But do you know what happened?"

"I don\'t know."

Yeonwoo blinked, and the old man pressed his head firmly.

"That dimension... It had been plundered by magicians several times already. Since gold is a material magicians use too. So when the natives saw us, they attacked immediately."

The Club had only suffered losses and withdrawn, he said.

Yeonwoo\'s mouth fell open. It seemed the Club had been badly scammed.

"No way. A scam... What happened to that magician?"

"What do you think happened? They took a huge chunk of our resources and fled to another dimension."

"That\'s all that happened?"

The old man wore a tired expression. He tapped the floor with his cane for no reason.

"Then what else could we do? If we pursued it to the end, we\'d only increase our losses."

The profit and loss didn\'t match up. If they used Golden Omnipotence to punish the magician who had fled across dimensions, the resources they would lose would be more than what they could recover.

Not just the gold that would be consumed.

"In the past, one magician opened a door to a dimension of meat and turned an entire gold mine into flesh. Another magician dropped their enemy onto a Club branch. They\'re potential terrorists."

There\'s no one who lives as freely as magicians. And those who play word games were actually the better ones.

Most of them blatantly committed fraud. If things went wrong, they could just run away.

After hearing all this, Yeonwoo blinked.

A strange realization crossed his mind.

\'I guess if you have power, even dangerous things aren\'t dangerous... No. What am I thinking?\'

The experience at the Dream Exchange seemed to have shaken his values somehow.

Yeonwoo shook his head and lightly patted his cheeks.

"So what\'s the request?"

"It\'s simple. Bestowing luck."

The old man pointed to a paragraph in the middle of the proposal.

"Roll the dice for a few Club members. We plan to assign random exploration to the one who gains luck."

"This seems okay."

Yeonwoo nodded. It wasn\'t particularly dangerous work, just rolling for luck for a few people.

The old man held out his hand.

"Then we\'ll consider the contract established."

Yeonwoo stared at the wrinkled hand for a moment, then shook his head.

"I\'d rather not shake hands. I\'m afraid there might be some kind of binding force."

He was the head of the Club\'s Korean branch, after all. There might be something hidden in even a small action. The old man said he understood and withdrew his hand.

Suddenly, Yeonwoo asked a question.

"Haven\'t you tried collaborating with the company for space development?"

"Ah, that."

The old man let out a hollow laugh.

"They told us not to come out because space is under the jurisdiction of the company and ordinary people."

"Ah."

They didn\'t know what kind of anomalous entities might be in space, so they couldn\'t allow hostile groups to come out. It meant they wanted to control it from the start because they didn\'t know what kind of accidents might happen.

Not that other groups obediently listened, but collaboration was impossible.