Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Reunion With the Game Was the Worst
The Abyss Gallery.
A community where discussions about Abyss were more active than anywhere else in Korea, fitting for a game that had spread far beyond the country and gained worldwide popularity.
Its beginnings had been tiny, but now countless people lingered there, and for most hours of the day it firmly held the position of the number one gallery.
Anything related to Abyss was allowed there.
This character is broken, that character is broken. This person’s a master, that person’s a master. Who’s better than who.
Internet streams, the Abyss Champions League. Character analyses and strategy guides. Plain trolling.
Amidst the countless posts flying around, someone made a thread.
<Does Kayak not play these days?>
I came back recently and was checking what happened to the people I used to play with, but I can’t find Kayak anywhere
Where’d this guy disappear to?
-Idk maybe he suddenly enlisted or something
-Pretty sure he already did military service though
-For real, he disappeared starting from Season 5
-He stopped after the shutdown announcement lol maybe he thinks the game died?
-Who’s Kayak??
There was this guy who used the gallery back in the dead game days
But he only played Camilla
?? He played Camilla?
Oh, you mean the number one Camilla master ranked player?
Yeah lol even now he’s still immortalized on the rankings even without playing
CamillaIsWeak. Shortened into the nickname Kayak.
A top-tier Challenger player. A Camilla master. A one-trick Camilla player.
Camilla was originally a character nobody touched. More accurately, she was a character people tried once before giving up.
A beautiful appearance that lured Abyss players in, yet performance completely unworthy of that beauty.
Her performance was far too terrible for her difficulty. High risk, low return. Thus Camilla came to be called pretty trash, a hero newbies sampled once before dropping.
Except for one person.
-Kayak was ridiculously good at Camilla though.
The user named CamillaIsWeak had suddenly appeared like a comet one day and proposed an entirely new theory surrounding Camilla. Naturally, people couldn’t help but pay attention to the sudden master player.
After all, nobody like him had existed before. Even pros had declared Camilla garbage, so how was someone reaching Challenger and maintaining it with her?
-“See? Pretty easy, right?”
Of course, users failed to properly understand the strategies and theories he proposed. And even if they did understand, they didn’t accept them.
Because they believed it was more worthwhile to improve at other characters than pour that much effort and passion into someone like Camilla.
Even so, among some users, the name CamillaIsWeak, Kayak, remained deeply engraved in their minds.
Because during an era when barely anyone even played the game, he was one of the rare players who had style.
Yet now that the game had exploded in popularity, for some reason nobody could find him anymore.
And just as those who still remembered him were leaving comments in regret—
A new reply appeared on the post about Kayak.
-? Kayak’s literally in-game right now though?
There are certain unspoken laws in the world.
For example, things like this. If you hold an apple and let go, it falls to the ground. If a person gets shot, they die.
Those kinds of obvious laws.
Obvious enough that they don’t need to be explained to anyone. We agreed to call those things “common sense.”
And the common sense I believed in generally went like this.
A TS beautiful girl should be absurdly good at games, breathtakingly pretty, and possess physical skills good enough not to lose to professionals, such that if she started streaming, everyone would shower her with praise.
Massive donations popping off nonstop was a given, and a beautiful editor should naturally cling to her and volunteer to manage her YouTube.
Right, this was “common sense.” It’s only natural for a TS beautiful girl to be loved and pampered by everyone, isn’t it?
That’s why I planned to start streaming eventually too. Since there wasn’t any issue with making a living, I figured I’d play games and raise my rank a bit first.
At the very least, Diamond. No, shouldn’t I reach even higher before streaming to save face a little?
As someone aiming to be a skill-based streamer, there was no way I could show others a rank that amounted to little more than scrap-tier.
Maybe something in the world had changed alongside everything else, because my account, which should’ve been parked at the top ranks, hadn’t even finished placements yet.
The last time I’d played the game was three entire seasons ago. Three whole years in the past.
Because of that, it took me quite a while just to unlock my dormant account.
Still, none of that was a big problem.
Three years after the game announced its shutdown, it had ascended into the ranks of god-tier games. That was simply how Abyss’s history flowed in this world.
Compared to that, my account getting locked and becoming unranked? Trivial. The game hadn’t died, and ranks could always be climbed again anyway.
To say it again, winning games and climbing rank was child’s play to me.
Why? Because I was a TS beautiful girl. I’d already been a regular top-ranked player before. And now I’d received the TS buff too? From that point onward, it was already over.
Who would dare stand in my way? TS beautiful girls were gods, invincible beings!
…At least, that’s what I thought.
-You have been slain.
“Huh?”
How… how could this happen…?
I could only stare blankly at the message on the screen.
No, I die there?
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon) has pinged CamillaIsWeak(Camilla)!]
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon) warns that enemies are missing!]
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon): CamillaIsWeak - 24 seconds until respawn]
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon): Why the hell would you go in there?]
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon): Are you fucking stupid?]
Along with sharp pings, my teammate’s furious messages rapidly flooded the chat.
This too felt just as unfamiliar as my changed appearance.
Back then, there simply weren’t people like this. Every single player, every single newbie, had been precious, so people rarely got angry over ordinary mistakes.
Even the harshest insults had only been things like “close one lol” or “you probably should’ve done this instead.” That alone said enough.
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon): Why do I always get matched with fucking braindead fresh accounts holy shit]
[IfYouEmptyYourMindYouBecomeHappy(Ran): Stop flaming and focus]
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon): Focus my ass the game’s already over]
Aside from Nixon’s constant swearing, his words were fairly accurate.
The game already looked hopelessly lost. My mistakes mixed together with my teammates’ mistakes, snowballing into disaster.
Still, Nixon’s attitude rubbed me the wrong way.
There had barely been users like him in the past.
And even if there were, they’d quickly get exposed on the gallery and bombarded by criticism, or get shut down by the rest of the team.
But judging by Nixon’s shameless attitude and Ran’s reaction, players like Nixon seemed completely normal here now. Just your average Abyss player.
As my precious dead game became a god-tier game and attracted more players, it seemed the community quality had become polluted as well.
It couldn’t be helped. Even the god-tier games in my original world were full of users who seemed mentally unstable for some reason.
A game where only one out of ten players was sane. This too was an unavoidable fate every god-tier game had to bear.
[IfYouEmptyYourMindYouBecomeHappy(Ran): We’re fucked lol]
[Pacquiao(Nox): gg]
Meanwhile, even as I continued thinking while playing, the game steadily marched toward defeat.
Ran, who’d been trying to calm the team earlier, now seemed mentally checked out, and Nox, the ADC who hadn’t typed a single thing all game, had clearly lost the will to fight too.
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon): We lose because of one fucking idiot]
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon): Camilla was Challenger in Season 5 right? Did you buy the account? Why are you so trash?]
[DiseaseGame(Haven): Don’t even get why people play trash like Camilla in the first place nobody uses that garbage character]
Even Haven, who’d been quietly trying to win the game, started insulting me now, throwing criticism at Camilla in too.
But at this point, something felt strange.
Sure, I’d played badly. I’d made mistakes here and there. But was it really enough to make me the sole target of all the blame?
No. Looking at it objectively, I wasn’t the reason we lost this game. If anyone deserved blame, it was probably Nixon, who had died the most.
“Ah.”
That was when I realized something.
This wasn’t that—they’d politically scapegoated me!
This bastard had chosen an easy target before anyone could blame him, directing all the criticism toward me first!
A grimy scheme that would never have existed in the clean games of the past.
First, Nixon manipulating public opinion through chat instead of focusing on the game. Then again, the subtle silence of the other teammates, who practically seemed to agree with him.
Altogether, twice over, I was deeply shocked.
-Defeat
And in the midst of all that, the enemy team steadily advanced and succeeded in destroying our base.
[OneStepToMaster(Nixon): Just quit the game lol]
Nixon’s final message appeared as the game ended.
The moment I saw it, humiliation made my hands tremble slightly.
Tremble tremble.
My reunion with the game after just one day had been the absolute worst.