What Even Is That Woman?
Waiting for Lee Harin to log in, Baek Dojun found himself stuck on a single question.
Just how many hacks was she running, anyway?
Even counting only what she'd shown in-game, the list ran long—from slipping bullets to landing shots on distant targets. She'd even read a stealth approach coming and turned it into a counter. A rough tally put her at an evasion hack, an aimbot, and a wallhack.
Last of Quantum's base anti-cheat was rock-solid, which meant any cheat that could punch through it came with a brutal price tag. Running not one of those, but three...
Is she just swimming in money or what...
Then—
Ding!
A match invitation has been sent to user Unknown.
He'd figured there was a decent chance she'd just bolt, or simply refuse. Most hackers were all pride and no skill. Unless she was genuinely confident, he'd expected her to pretend to connect and then run.
Instead, against every expectation, she actually took the invite.
"She... she actually accepted."
He was recording, so he kept his face neutral as he said it.
At least this is better than watching her run.
It wasn't the script he'd had in mind, but schooling her like this wouldn't be half bad. Beat her down, then needle her with a line like, That's why a player like you has to hack—that would make for a great clip too.
Ding!
User Unknown has accepted the match invitation.
A moment later, Unknown stepped into the room he'd prepared in advance.
He'd noticed it before, but her face really did pull the eye. A custom avatar looking that good wasn't strange in itself. Except for a few people with truly peculiar tastes, Last of Quantum was overflowing with beautiful characters.
If that was her real face, though, the story changed completely.
Unlike players who at least tweaked a few things, Unknown wore a face so identical to reality he couldn't find a single difference. If that ever got out, it would be chaos. And even before that, the simple fact that she was a woman was more than enough to draw a crowd.
"Just in case—would you mind telling me your LoQ rank?"
Jump asked on a hunch. If her tier was high enough, he could honestly make sense of every play she'd shown. It wasn't rare for people at the top to hit a wall and deliberately drop down to mess around in the lower ranks. He couldn't rule out the possibility that Unknown was one of them.
"The highest tier..."
The moment he heard that, Jump couldn't help the look of contempt that crossed his face. And he had reason. Unlike every other rank, which you could reach just by stacking points, Challenger was a special rank reserved for the three hundred players standing at the very summit of Last of Quantum. Almost everyone there was either a pro or a genuinely famous name.
The idea that one of those apex players had felt some kind of wall and dropped all the way down into what people called the depths? That had to be a lie.
He was just thinking he'd landed another clip to pin on a hacker when Unknown went on.
"Eventually."
"Sorry—what does that mean?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. If you're going to start something, you ought to at least hit the top."
For a second, Jump wondered if he was standing across from a complete lunatic. Then again—how many people who ran hacks had their heads on straight? He filed Unknown under that same category and let it go.
"So when do we start this duel?"
"Ah. We'll start right now."
"The fastest way to prove I'm not a hacker is for you to feel it yourself."
"...Understood."
Unknown eased back a set distance and reset her grip on her weapon. Behind her stretched a wide plain under a sunset-red sky, striking in its emptiness. With almost no objects and next to no variables, the map demanded the ability to shape a fight and raw one-on-one skill. Because the setup was so simple, it was also the national practice map whenever a new trait or weapon dropped. There was no better stage for checking Unknown's actual ability.
Waiting on her first move, Jump sank into thought. What kind of play was she planning to show him?
A few months back, he'd done a collab stream with a Platinum-rank streamer under the banner of a "skill check." They'd met through a streamer tournament on the same platform and decided to run with it. Two veterans on one broadcast—the stream itself had ended in fine form. As a skill check, though... all it had proven was that he was godawful at the game.
He'd gone in thinking Gold and Platinum weren't that far apart. The duel had been a massacre. It ended 1–9, a miserable record, and after that collab Jump had picked up yet another nickname.
Game Illiterate. A little insulting, as nicknames went.
A pile of nicknames was supposed to be proof a streamer was popular, but he couldn't pretend it hadn't stung.
So I lost to a higher rank. Big deal. Like any of you are any better.
Now the situation had flipped completely. A hacker with the cheats stripped off was Silver at best, clinging to the edge of the tier. There was no way she could stand up to a Gold like him.
"All right. Starting now."
With that, from the far side of the field drowned in red light, Unknown broke into a sprint.
At this range he could have thrown suppressing fire without a second thought, and yet she came straight at him—as if she meant to put her Physical on display.
Cute.
And who was he? The poster boy for no-brain play, the man who had climbed to Gold on Physical alone with his head switched off. A clean one-on-one with nothing around to interfere was the one fight Jump trusted most. Even the streamer who'd crushed him had said that if he just built up his gamesense, his rank would climb.
He burned the image of Unknown closing the gap at speed into both eyes, lined up his rifle, and squeezed the trigger. Combat started with initiative. Against someone charging in that mindlessly, taking the first shot was almost too easy.
Bang—!
The round tore out in a bloom of muzzle flash and flew true. Dozens of aimed shots screamed toward her, and still Unknown kept coming. Either she was delusional enough to think she could dodge this without a hack, or the bullets were simply too fast for her to even react.
That was when it happened.
Unknown's body seemed to blur, inverting for a fraction of a second—and Jump's screen dropped into gray.
"Wait... what?"
A single strike.
Jump didn't even register how he'd died. He'd been sure he had the initiative. He'd already been thinking about his next attack.
Still sitting there stunned, waiting on the respawn, he heard Unknown's voice.
"Has that proven I'm not a hacker?"
Nothing came to mind to say back. For a second he even wondered if he'd used a hack himself without knowing it—but this was a PC cafe. There was no chance an unauthorized program was sitting on a cafe Connector.
Which meant...
"That's... actual skill?"
His head was still spinning around a reality he couldn't quite believe, and yet a clickbait title was already assembling itself behind his eyes.
Infamous Hacker Turns Out to Be a Skilled Beauty?
Yeah. As ragebait titles went, that one was excellent. When was he ever going to get an experience this rare again?
The corner of Jump's mouth pulled up before he could stop it.
This was already a game starving for women. Climb into the upper ranks and even talking about a gender ratio started to sound like a joke. You could tell just by looking at the female pros—there was exactly one of them in Challenger.
And the woman in front of him had just said she was going to take it.
On any ordinary day he would have laughed. After seeing her play, Jump couldn't hear it as a joke.
She might actually hit Challenger.
This was real stream gold. For now, if he wanted a future out of this, he needed to close the distance.
"Wow. That's genuinely incredible."
"That's the hack thing settled, then? I'll end the match."
"Wait—"
Jump tried to hold Lee Harin back, but she was done with her business. She closed the game without a shred of hesitation and left.
His mind kicked into overdrive. If they parted here, there was no guarantee he'd ever run into Lee Harin again. He'd finally found a content angle this good—he was not about to let it slip that easily. The recording he already had would play just fine, but Jump was sketching a bigger picture.
One way or another, I am getting her on my stream.
A clip he'd shot here would only go so far. What he needed was Unknown appearing on his broadcast. She wouldn't even have to turn on a face cam. The fact that she was a woman who could actually play would be more than enough to pull eyes.
Baek Dojun killed the game in a hurry and caught Lee Harin by the shoulder as she tried to leave the PC cafe. All he'd meant to do was stop her from walking out.
The result of putting a hand on a woman's shoulder that carelessly was, as it turned out, fairly catastrophic.
Wham.
"Ghk—! Cough... cough!"
Like a scene out of a movie, she hooked his leg, dumped him, and pinned him in a single motion. Baek Dojun was already rattled that he—a man—had gone down without even managing to resist. What rattled him more was the way Lee Harin had done it: no hitch, no pause, as smooth as water finding its course.
What even is that woman...