Trying to Launder the Image (4)
"So. What the hell is going on right now, No-yeong-bin."
"What if Gyeo-wool hears you talking like that?"
"She can't hear us from over there. Don't you feel Yuk Min-su screaming on the inside right now?"
Oh, he felt it. Yuk Min-su, who'd ended up sitting right next to Jin Gyeo-wool, was already screaming with his entire face.
Lee Yeong-bin let out a short sigh and turned to Choi Go-yun.
"You know she's just a little mean. And she's actually decent at Recon. It'll be fun if we play together."
"She's decent at Recon?"
Choi Go-yun craned his neck forward and checked on Jin Gyeo-wool, who was fiddling with the mouse beside Yuk Min-su. She was moving the mouse around and tapping at the keyboard, but he couldn't tell what she was actually doing.
"The game isn't even the problem. She looks like she's not used to the computer itself."
That was fair enough. Among the kids in class, Jin Gyeo-wool was famous for her physicality, not gaming. Before she'd executed Lee Yeong-bin's hairline back in April, she used to occasionally jump into soccer games with the guys.
She hadn't had any real friends, but as long as she wasn't being ostracized, the boys had no particular reason to shut her out. At least, that had been the vibe back then.
And shockingly, she'd been really good at running around. It wasn't that she had great stamina — she couldn't keep it up for long — but wedged in among the guys, she'd held her own as a striker.
At first they stuck her on defense because nobody knew what she was good at, and before anyone noticed she'd crept all the way up front, taken a clumsy cross, and put it in the net. Her shooting, at least, had been absurdly clean.
"No, you'll see. Do you even know what tier she is?"
"What."
"Master."
At the word Master, Choi Go-yun nearly burst out laughing and clamped a hand over his mouth. The mood was already weird from the crap he'd talked earlier — if he ran his mouth any louder here, his own scalp might be next on the chopping block.
"Hey. Master at Recon? Not Master of MMA?"
"Why would MMA come into this?"
"There's a reason. Well… whatever. If No-yeong-bin says so, we might as well play a game."
Lee Yeong-bin seemed tired of trying to convince his friends any further. He called out toward Jin Gyeo-wool, who was sitting at the far end.
"Gyeo-wool, you ready? Can I queue?"
"Ah. Yeah."
After months of playing only at home, just being in a PC bang felt like a long time coming. Jin Gyeo-wool had struggled quite a bit trying to match the slightly different settings to the ones she used at home.
The mouse is kinda…
Well, of course it was. The mouse Jin Gyeo-wool used at home was a model built for pro gamers.
The PC bang mouse was decked out with all kinds of buttons and decorations under the banner of being a "gaming mouse," but it was all flash and no substance.
But a true craftsman never blames their tools. Now that she was a proper Master in her own right, Jin Gyeo-wool decided she wasn't going to fuss over gear anymore.
Coming to the PC bang with friends to play Recon together was a blessing for him, too. Before, he'd always been so trapped in self-loathing from never being able to satisfy himself that he couldn't even properly ask anyone to play with him.
He could have put together an amateur team at least, but Bae Do-hyun had always had the words "once I hit Master, once I hit Master…" hanging off his lips. He'd never imagined he'd end up forming a team with friends like this.
First things first… gotta babysit the Silvers, right?
Normally when you queued with mixed tiers like this, the enemy team got matched at a similar level. With allies at Diamond-Gold and Gold-Silver, the other side would clearly land at Gold average or higher.
Ideally you'd get matched lane-for-lane at the same tiers, but the odds of that were low. The bot lane — the weakest players on the team — could get blown up and lose the game. This wasn't a pro match, so you couldn't just order them to sit tight and farm it out.
That was when Jin Gyeo-wool would need to step up. Whether they'd actually get the kind of skewed-tier queue she was expecting was still up in the air, but there was a saying about always preparing for the worst.
The best-case scenario would be the enemy's strongest player landing in the top lane.
But honestly, anyone was fine. The Gyeo-wool who'd grown past who she used to be was ready to look at the game from a wider angle — not just winning alone, but winning for the team.
"Queue popped."
"Hey. Yuk Min-su! What are you doing!"
"Ugh. Uh! Uh. I clicked!"
Poor Yuk Min-su's language skills had devolved to full troll. Having Jin Gyeo-wool right next to him was apparently that nerve-wracking.
Lee Yeong-bin sighed briefly and said to Yuk Min-su,
"Yuk Min-su. If you throw like you did earlier, I swear I won't let it slide."
"Uh. Not throwing. Min-su not throwing!"
"Can you talk like a normal person…"
"Got it!"
Watching all of this from right beside them, Jin Gyeo-wool could only feel awkward. There was no way a game would go well in that state. Grabbing a total stranger and asking them to play one game would probably help the team win more than this.
With no other choice, Jin Gyeo-wool called Lee Yeong-bin over to her seat. Naturally, the queue that had just popped got declined on her end.
"Hey, Lee Yeong-bin. You come here."
"What?"
"Switch seats. Look at this guy. How is he supposed to play like this."
"I-I'm fine! Can do!"
Choi Go-yun clutched his forehead and groaned at Yuk Min-su, who still couldn't drop the troll-speak.
"Aigoo, this fucking idiot…"
"Alright. I'll come over."
"Happy! Happy!"
Seat swap successful at last. Yuk Min-su moved over next to Choi Go-yun and barely managed to recover his language skills.
"I'm alive…"
"Bro, you are genuinely the biggest loser among every guy I know."
"What the fuck are you talking about. You sit over th—!"
Yuk Min-su started to raise his voice, then glanced toward Jin Gyeo-wool and dropped it as low as it would go.
"…Whatever, look if you want. I genuinely felt my life flash before my eyes times five hundred."
"……Bullshit."
There had been a few twists and turns, but the game started anyway.
Yuk Min-su, back to being a person, shouted loud enough for everyone. Empty vessels make the most noise — the saying fit perfectly.
"Holy shit. Enemy bot is Diamond."
"What?"
Choi Go-yun startled and looked at Yuk Min-su's screen. The match history site showed the enemy tiers plain as day. One Diamond, two Platinums, two Silvers.
Lee Yeong-bin looked at Gyeo-wool with a puzzled expression.
"Why is the tier so low?"
Gyeo-wool just shrugged.
"It's a normal game?"
That could be it, but something felt off. Lee Yeong-bin followed Yuk Min-su's lead and pulled up the match history site, and he spotted the weirdness almost immediately.
"……"
Jin Gyeo-wool's ID wasn't the one she normally used. Her solo queue ID was definitely ValKyrie, but the one she'd brought today was VaIKyrie — a fake ID with the lowercase L swapped out for a capital i.
And she'd apparently played on this ID a bit already; the smurf account was Gold.
"What. Why aren't you on your main?"
For Lee Yeong-bin, who'd wanted to show off her dominance in front of his friends today, this was something of a problem.
"Hm? Just wanted to play relaxed."
"Huh?"
She could do that just fine on a Master account. Why bother with a Gold smurf? At this rate, Lee Yeong-bin was going to look like a liar in front of his friends.
Panicking, Lee Yeong-bin tried again with Jin Gyeo-wool.
"Don't do that — from next game, use your mai—"
"No."
Just a plain refusal. But those two short syllables stabbed Lee Yeong-bin right in the heart. It was an ordinary look, but it seized Lee Yeong-bin — who still suffered from PTSD — with pure terror.
"R-right. Let's just go with this for now."
The reason Jin Gyeo-wool had deliberately pulled out a smurf. Hon Gyeo-wool's leftover oppressive atmosphere had a lot to do with it.
Everyone already seems tense enough just being around me. If I bring out the Master account too, they'll just freeze up more.
She wanted to enjoy the feeling of gaming with friends. If she went full tryhard, it would just turn into a babysitting session. The second someone made a mistake and lost the game, the witch hunt against that person would start.
On top of that, Choi Go-yun had gone and made pointless jokes about the past incident a minute ago, sinking the mood even further. Right now, rather than showing her hidden claws, the correct play was to pretend she only had cute little cat paws.
So Jin Gyeo-wool had pulled out the smurf. Originally its purpose had been digging up the weird builds and new metas that sometimes popped up in low elo, but using it this way didn't seem half bad either.
"Right, Jin Gyeo-wool. What's your position?"
"I'm top."
"Top?"
Choi Go-yun rolled his eyes back and forth between his three friends with a startled look. Of the four of them excluding Jin Gyeo-wool, they just so happened to be missing a top laner.
Lee Yeong-bin, who'd brought her along with exactly this in mind from the start, just shrugged.
"Well, let's just try the first game. Uh… play what you know, play what you know!"
The moment the loading screen appeared, Choi Go-yun turned his head toward Yuk Min-su's monitor — where he'd just finished looking up Jin Gyeo-wool's ID — and started whispering.
"Hoooooly. Dude what the hell, she really is Master?"
"…You idiot. Has this guy's brain degraded too. The spelling in the middle is wrong."
"Oh. That wasn't a lowercase L?"
"It's a capital i."
Yeah, figures. No way that Jin Gyeo-wool was a gaming shut-in averaging eighteen games a day until yesterday. Yuk Min-su nodded and searched again. The new account info that came up showed Gold.
"Gold even though she hasn't played much?"
"Guess she plays a bit."
The match history wasn't that deep, but her last twenty games were all wins. And she barely had any normal game history recently.
Choi Go-yun — himself Diamond, and with a Master-tier jungler for a little brother — smelled something fishy.
Curiosity that outstripped even the terror of the Follicle Thresher expanded Choi Go-yun's thinking.
A smurf…?
Even Choi Go-yun occasionally queued on smurfs. Not because he wanted to — he had to forcibly derank whenever he duo queued with Yuk Min-su.
And one of the hallmarks of those smurfs was that when you solo queued alone, the win rate went completely insane. Especially on the climb up to a certain rank, you barely lost at all. Just like Jin Gyeo-wool's ID right now.
Plus, wasn't the naming way too obvious for a smurf? One letter difference.
This is definitely a smurf.
Now certain, Choi Go-yun decided he'd use this game to gauge Jin Gyeo-wool's real skill. Until a minute ago he hadn't believed Lee Yeong-bin's "Jin Gyeo-wool is Master" story, but smelling a smurf changed things.
And if she really was a Master top laner, that was sensational in its own right. He'd thought she was a Master of MMA, and it turned out she was a League of Council Master?
That was more than enough gossip to keep the guys in class talking for at least a month.
"What. Top mirror match?"
"Irelia versus Irelia? This is gonna be hilarious."
"But is her Irel okay. Isn't that champ kinda hard for girls?"
Whether Lee Yeong-bin knew this or not was unclear, but what if Jin Gyeo-wool had deliberately pulled out a smurf to hide her real tier?
Choi Go-yun started freely imagining the conversation he was about to have with Jin Gyeo-wool. He arbitrarily set her real tier at Diamond.
Hey. You're actually Diamond, aren't you?
Hah. How did you know?
A Diamond knows a Diamond…
The dialogue that followed was a bit middle-school-delusional, but that was the style of Choi Go-yun, currently the only Diamond in the group. Arrogant. Those two syllables were the fastest, easiest way to describe Choi Go-yun.
So how about it, want to duo with me? My friends' skill level doesn't match mine either, so playing with them isn't fun.
Really…? Would that be okay? Everyone's scared of me…
In his imagination, Choi Go-yun made a cool confession.
Forget those cowards. I'm different from them. From the start I never thought you were that kind of mean girl. A girl this pretty — why would you be?
Everyone already knew, didn't they? People just didn't get close because they were afraid Jin Gyeo-wool would thrash someone again. The real culprit behind the April incident — the one who'd used Lee Yeong-bin as a human shield — had been someone else entirely.
The real culprit, terrified after watching Jin Gyeo-wool go berserk ready to kill someone, had fled the scene. Lee Yeong-bin, who'd only tried to break up the fight, had ended up getting mistaken for an accomplice.
A guy who'd just been trying to calm things down as the mediator of Class 1-8 had gotten properly marked by Hon Gyeo-wool. The truth had all come out in the investigation afterward, but mean-spirited Hon Gyeo-wool had never properly made up with Lee Yeong-bin.
But the fifty million won in settlement money given to Lee Yeong-bin had smoothed everything over. Jin Gyeo-wool and the real culprit's forgiveness. Everything else had somehow been resolved with fifty million won and Jin Gyeo-wool's forced apology.
Thanks to that, Lee Yeong-bin and his friends had been able to live large for a year. The reason they feared Jin Gyeo-wool but were still friendly toward her was exactly that.
The one who was actually wrong is someone else. I believed in you from the start.
Go-yun…
In his imagination the two of them hugged like a couple from a romance movie. Then they clasped hands and slowly walked into the PC bang together.
So that was why he'd gone eighteen years without a girlfriend. Choi Go-yun finished his long fantasy in a satisfied mood and opened his eyes. There was Lee Yeong-bin, who had potential as a rival, but the guy was only Water Gold at best. No match for Diamond-tier Choi Go-yun.
"Hey, over there…. Hey! Mid! What's that guy's name."
"Choi Go-yun! What are you doing?"
"Uh. Huh?"
The moment he snapped back to reality, he heard Jin Gyeo-wool's gentle voice. More precisely, it was an urgent warning of danger.
"Mid's getting ganked, back off!"
"Uh."
But it was already too late.
OmaewaMoshindei▶GoGoYun
"Son of a—!"
And just like that, Choi Go-yun — with the most pathetic scream imaginable — offered up his first life to the Platinum-tier enemy he'd been so busy looking down on.