Please Don't
A dancer who draws every gaze on the battlefield with her uniquely beautiful appearance and fluid, graceful movements.
Camilla loves dancing for its own sake. She takes pure joy in the act itself—and that is precisely why she fights while dancing, even on a fierce battlefield where life and death hang by a thread.
The half-god body blessed by the God of Revelry never tires, no matter how long she dances.
Wherever Camilla has danced and departed, a faint scent of roses lingers, stirring in those who catch it the urge to dance themselves. (This doesn't appear to be reflected in-game, however—she holds no charm-type CC abilities or the like.)
She is one of the user-recognized Abyss Top 10 Lunatics. The reason she stepped onto the battlefield in the first place was to show her dancing to more people, and to find others who would dance with her.
The very idea of fighting while dancing is mad to begin with. According to official lore, Camilla is a half-god—if she ever properly took up a weapon, no hero would be able to stand against her.
Backed by exceptional dynamic vision and physical ability, she is good at most things that involve the body. She can usually replicate any movement she's seen once—though the quality of the result is another matter entirely.
The developer has openly called her a labor-of-love character they poured real effort into creating, so the minor lore details are plentiful. Most of what users dismiss as useless, otaku-grade fantasies are, in fact, official settings.
Among the countless official settings—so many even the developer can no longer remember them all—a handful actually affect the game like easter eggs. e.g.) Camilla fears spectral beings → Camilla's fear duration is 0.1 seconds longer than other heroes.
…(continued)
Excerpt from the cinematic trailer Abyss: The New World
It was a rather sudden proposal.
Dancing, huh.
Thinking about it rationally, turning them down was the correct call. I was an outsider here, and I was in the middle of a stream for my fans, no less.
Granted, the people watching didn't seem to mind… but even I had standards. I had enough social awareness not to just jump at something like this with a big smile.
"Unnie, if you're holding back because of the stream, you really don't have to worry about that."
"The fans say they want to see it, though?"
"Just don't overthink it and do whatever you want!"
Somehow, though, Seulbi and the rest of the members all piled on with the same message.
Do whatever I want. Was there any phrase more difficult—and more simple—than that?
The fact that I was agonizing over it this hard already meant I had my answer. I wanted to learn the dance too, didn't I? Not that I particularly wanted to admit it.
It was something I'd never told my viewers, never mentioned to anyone around me—but long before the chat started begging me to perform the dance I'd learned on Midnight Talk, I had already gone back and practiced it over and over on my own.
Just yesterday, when I got a little bored, I'd stood in front of the mirror and moved through the steps again and again. The house was too cramped to fully recreate the perfect choreography Seulbi had taught me, but with a little creative use of space, it wasn't completely impossible either.
And it wasn't just the dance Seulbi had taught me. Wondering whether I even remembered the choreography right, I'd pulled up practice videos on Vtube—and there were so many of them, for Midkiss songs and plenty of other tracks too. With nothing better to do, I'd watched those videos and carefully worked through the moves one by one.
Coldly speaking, I had no reason to practice dancing. I wasn't a streamer who danced for donation reactions, and I wasn't someone like Seulbi who made a living from it.
And yet the fact that I kept moving my body every spare moment could only mean one thing: I was enjoying that time.
Obviously, the old me had never enjoyed dancing. I hadn't had much talent for physical things either.
But now was different. Seulbi had said on stream that I had talent, and it hadn't been empty flattery—at home, watching the videos, I could pick up the movements with almost no trouble.
…Is this another change that came from becoming Camilla? Are even my own temperament and preferences getting overwritten and assimilated into hers?
There was no way to know, and thinking about it wasn't going to produce an answer. This wasn't even the first time I'd had this kind of worry. I'd run through similar questions countless times, and every single one of them had come up empty.
I'd only ever reached one conclusion. Just live however I feel like living, moment to moment.
What was I doing tying my brain in knots over this? The water was already spilled.
Abyss had become the god-tier game I'd wanted it to be, and I had become Camilla.
I'd become a pretty girl who could freeload through life. The stream was a success, and it was only going to keep growing.
I had money to spare and a healthy body. From here on out, I could do whatever I wanted.
There was no need to overcomplicate it. Keep it simple. Keep it easy.
I decided to stop lying to myself. After sorting through a thousand thoughts in a single short moment, I answered with a head that felt clearer than before.
"Yeah. I want to learn."
And so a rather strange scene unfolded inside Midkiss's choreography practice room.
"H-how about this?"
A pretty girl, her forehead and the whole upper half of her body soaked through with sweat, swept her arms wide as she looked at someone across from her.
On that grimly determined face was a look that seemed to say, There's no way she can do this—but her expectations were shattered the moment the other person answered.
"Like this?"
A silver-haired, blue-eyed beauty with long, cleanly extended limbs swung her arms in a broad arc, trying to match the movement the girl had just shown.
It was clearly a step behind the girl who'd demonstrated first. The motion wasn't smooth, and there was no real feeling put into it either.
But it was still something you could call dancing. If anything, it carried a special charm unique to beginners—something the girl who'd shown the move first didn't have at all.
A scene like this had been repeating itself for a while now. Hyeyoon, the leader with a reputation as the idol who could actually dance, would demonstrate a move, and Kayak would copy it.
Seulbi and the rest of the Midkiss members couldn't hide their shock.
"Whoa, she just watched it once and copied it?"
"It took me three days just to get the choreography down…."
"Three days is fast. It took me a whole week."
It was no different from sight-reading a difficult score and playing it fluently on the first try. No wonder the members were making a fuss.
"Hehe…."
And then the fans piled on with the finishing blow.
Getting showered in praise from two different groups, of course the corners of Kayak's mouth started climbing.
At first she'd started with the group choreography, learning dances they could all do together. But Midkiss had run out of stamina first, and now only Kayak and Hyeyoon were left.
Seulbi, who'd turned into an audience member and been clapping nonstop, suddenly shot to her feet as if something had just occurred to her.
"See? I told you, unnie needs to go into entertainment. What are you going to do with this charisma, this talent? Come join our company!"
"We're live right now—are you sure you should be saying that…?"
Idols were everyone's role models. That was why you couldn't show only the raw, honest side of yourself. A little artifice was necessary too.
But Kayak's concern might as well have not existed—the members beside Seulbi started chiming in right along with her.
"She's right, she's right. Letting talent like this go to waste is a national loss."
"It doesn't even have to be our company. Another agency is fine too."
"If you went on an audition show you'd get picked on the spot, for real. Something like Produce."
"The whole world needs to know unnie's charm! Unnie should debut as an idol too."
Kayak's face was a mix of awkwardness and embarrassment. To the people saying it, the words were genuine praise spoken from the heart—but to her, they were nothing but cringeworthy flattery.
The people watching through the live stream, on the other hand, took it completely seriously.
That was why an untimely flame war broke out in the live stream chat.