Was It All for Nothing, Bom
Lee Do-jin strode down the familiar street at a brisk clip, and Jin Gyeo-wool quickened her pace to keep from falling behind.
Hon Gyeo-wool had said Lee Do-jin was quite gentle, but watching him now, that didn't seem entirely true. The stale, long-settled emotions piled up in both their memories seemed to surface in the way they moved together — less like a casual older-brother-and-younger-sister acquaintance and more like siblings who'd grown so close they'd worn each other smooth.
"This place okay?"
"Yeah. Fine by me."
McDonald's. The undisputed king of burgers you couldn't go wrong with. Just imagining the taste of salted fries already had Jin Gyeo-wool's mouth watering.
The moment they stepped inside, the weekend afternoon crowd hit them — the place was packed. Gyeo-wool glanced at him, wondering if they ought to be more careful about being recognized.
"Shouldn't you at least wear a hat or something?"
If people started swarming them, they wouldn't even get to eat in peace. Some kids would take photos just for spotting a LoC pro gamer, and a few might even follow them all the way to a PC bang. Or… was that actually a good thing? It could make for decent publicity. She couldn't quite decide which was better.
"It's fine. Even if someone recognizes me, nobody gets aggressive about it. Most people are pretty nice."
Gyeo-wool snorted a quiet laugh at that. Considering the community reactions, saying something like that took real nerve. On the LoC galleries, people tore into Lee Do-jin and mocked him every chance they got. Reactions like "I want to kill him" or "I want to beat the crap out of him" were rare, sure — but still. The same people who roasted him online would greet him politely in real life and ask for a photo first thing. She found the friends who drove internet opinion oddly endearing.
And it wasn't just them. She wanted that kind of attention herself. Get cursed out when you play badly, get cursed out when you play well. Being talked about — even if it meant getting dragged — had to be better than never being mentioned at all. Though she suspected that once she was actually on the receiving end, she wouldn't call it fun.
"Whoa. You're Plum?"
Speak of the devil. The second they ordered at the kiosk and went to pick up their burgers, the counter staff recognized Lee Do-jin. He greeted the fan with his usual bright smile and quickly snapped a photo. Fan management had always been one of his strong suits, then and now.
"Enjoy your meal! I threw in a few extra fries…!"
So that was why there seemed to be so many. It looked like they'd gotten the amount usually reserved for a large size.
As Lee Do-jin carried the two burger sets upstairs, Gyeo-wool trailed after him and asked,
"You really get recognized everywhere you go."
"Pretty much."
Someday she'd end up in situations like this too. Limited to younger people, of course. No matter how globally famous League of Council was, as long as hobbies and tastes stayed firmly divided by generation, the people who'd recognize her would be a select few.
But if someone did recognize her. If someone called out the name ValKyrie first — or the name Jin Gyeo-wool — that would make her happy. She'd never managed to make the name Bae Do-hyun known in her whole life, but if Jin Gyeo-wool could stand in for it, that was fine. Nothing in the world felt quite as intoxicating as a stranger recognizing you and saying your name.
"Eat slowly."
"We've got to eat fast and get back to playing."
"So, how's recruiting for the amateur tournament team going?"
"Ah. Yeah."
Gyeo-wool grinned brightly and launched into a full rundown of everything that had happened. How she'd met Choi Do-yun through her classmate Choi Go-yun, and how Do-yun had been so moved by her dream that he'd come over to her side. How Yu Min-jae, introduced by Do-yun, had steadied his wavering ambitions and joined the team. How Gong Je-hyeon had shown up out of nowhere with a wager, and how she'd beaten him. How Han Yeo-reum and Cha Ga-eul were hustling to find their last missing piece — a support. And how she planned to go meet that support in person soon.
Listening to the amateur tournament prep unfolding according to a concrete plan, Lee Do-jin couldn't help but be impressed.
Is this really the same Jin Gyeo-wool…?
The more he looked, the stranger it got. Gyeo-wool had never been this systematic or rational. She used to smash her keyboard when she got bored, and when her rage hit its peak she'd grab someone and scream until the fury burned out. There was a simple reason her older brother Jin Ju-yeong was terrified of her — Gyeo-wool was so vicious she could overcome the physical gap between men and women.
I keep catching flashes of Bom in her… I don't know why.
Maybe Lee Bom's soul really had settled into Jin Gyeo-wool's body. He knew better than anyone that something that absurd couldn't happen… but as an older brother who'd lost his little sister, he couldn't just let it go without checking.
Still, dredging up memories of Lee Bom was agonizing even for him. So instead of talking about his sister, he reached back into the past he shared with Gyeo-wool.
"Do you remember three years ago, when you first said you wanted to start streaming?"
But Gyeo-wool's reaction to the question was off. She was concentrating on her food as if she hadn't heard him.
"Jin Gyeo-wool?"
"Huh. Yeah. What?"
"Three years ago. When you first started streaming. Do you remember?"
"Uh……"
Her words trailed off. Of course she couldn't answer. She barely knew anything about Hon Gyeo-wool right now. She had a dad, a mom, one older brother. The family was fairly well-off and had a housekeeper. Han Yeo-reum and Cha Ga-eul were old friends, and there was a kind classmate named Lee Yeong-bin. That was it. Beyond the fact that she'd once raised hell at school and acted like a complete lunatic, she had nothing. And when it came to Lee Do-jin, even less!
"Uh… yeah, I remember!"
She couldn't afford to fumble this by admitting she knew nothing. Lee Do-jin was the golden thread closest to her goal. If he started putting distance between them, it could throw a wrench into her one-year pro debut plan. Her recently revised plan included his supporting fire, after all.
I'll just have to bluff my way through this somehow.
If she'd known this was coming, she would have made time to hear Hon Gyeo-wool's stories. But regret was useless now. Gyeo-wool steeled herself and focused on what Lee Do-jin was saying.
"Looking back on it, the fact that you've grown this much is honestly amazing."
Even if Hon Gyeo-wool had been a gifted freak, she must have been godawful when she first started streaming. Gyeo-wool made that assumption and tossed out a few casual lines.
"Right, right. I was terrible."
Wrong answer.
"What are you talking about. Your mechanics were insane from day one."
"O… oh. Yeah. They were. They were."
So everything except the personality was cracked, Hon Gyeo-wool? She was a little rattled, but she forced herself to stay calm.
"But honestly, back then you were just watching what I did and copying it… you didn't have the ability to run the whole game. It felt like you thought winning your own lane was enough, and you'd just go wild."
Gyeo-wool nodded along vigorously, treating everything Lee Do-jin said as absolute truth.
"How do I put this. Lately it's like… a brain suddenly appeared where there wasn't one before?"
That one hit her like a truck. Come on — was that really something you said to a little sister you cared about? If Bae Do-hyun had been sitting in Lee Do-jin's seat, he would have at least softened it to something like, It feels like you're making smarter plays you never used to?
"So it's kind of uncanny. Before, if you lost lane you'd rage like the world had ended, and if you lost a fight you'd smash your keyboard."
So that's why Hon Gyeo-wool never wanted to talk about the past. Listening to Lee Do-jin go on, Gyeo-wool found herself nodding in involuntary understanding.
"And now that same kid knows how to lose lane on purpose and play for the late game. More than anything, your CS is incredible. It finally feels like you've figured out that farming gold is just as important as getting kills."
So she didn't even farm CS and just lived for lane and teamfights… and she still held Platinum? That's actually impressive. Gyeo-wool tilted her head.
"So when I watch you now, I keep thinking of someone."
"Ah… ah."
Gyeo-wool almost blurted out something about Lee Bom and clamped her mouth shut just in time. But neither Jin Ju-yeong nor any of the family or acquaintances had ever brought Lee Bom up first.
If nobody around me is bringing Bom up on purpose… there's no need for me to bring her up either, right?
Lee Do-jin would keep thinking of her whether he wanted to or not, but there was no reason to pour oil on a fire that was already burning.
"Someone with a good head and bad hands. A fool who tried to win on brain-mechanics alone. It feels like your play is starting to resemble that kid's."
A good head and bad hands. Strong brain-mechanics, weak physical mechanics. The description fit both Lee Bom and Bae Do-hyun. Gyeo-wool had watched every video left on the YouTube channel Hon Gyeo-wool and Lee Bom had run together. She decided this wasn't a bad opportunity.
Yeah, from the outside it would look pretty similar.
If she said she was absorbing Lee Bom's playstyle into her body and evolving through it, Lee Do-jin might more or less buy it. Making him think Lee Bom was inside her was better for the long run than telling him some random guy was occupying Jin Gyeo-wool's body. So she offered a suitably vague answer.
"I studied the videos left on the channel. The person in them was pretty good."
The way she said it — as if she'd simply made use of what was available — needled something in Lee Do-jin. Gyeo-wool had probably forgotten Lee Bom as a defense mechanism just to keep living, but it still hurt. She'd been a friend Gyeo-wool had treasured so deeply she'd said she never wanted to be apart for even a day. Had the longing been so overwhelming that the rebound had wiped the memories clean?
She really forgot completely.
And yet her body alone seemed to remember Lee Bom — judging by how naturally she'd taken on Bom's playstyle. Lee Do-jin muttered as if complaining to himself.
"Yeah. I know her well. She was someone precious."
She'd known full well her own skill would never make her a pro gamer, and still she'd run alongside her friend purely for that friend's dream. A kind kid. Lee Do-jin hadn't had time to teach her, and there was no proper coach he could trust her with. So Lee Bom had arbitrarily appointed a convenience store part-timer near their house as her teacher and learned top-lane play from him. Maybe it was Jin Gyeo-wool rubbing off on her best friend, but Bom could be stubbornly reckless sometimes too.
"She was a fool. Back then, at least."
Gyeo-wool was thrashing around in a trap of possibilities, desperate to redirect Lee Do-jin's attention. But Lee Bom had been the kind of friend who played along even when she knew her friend was doing something stupid. That was how kind she'd been.
"Come to think of it, that Hwasong GN convenience store part-timer who helped her even knowing she had no talent was pretty funny too. You could tell from a distance he had a decent face — I roughly knew he was a good person."
Listening, Gyeo-wool felt a strange, unplaceable sense of déjà vu.
Hwasong GN convenience store?
That was definitely where Bae Do-hyun had worked when he was alive. The fog of memory that had been drifting in loose wisps suddenly condensed, and a single line spoken by a girl who used to visit the store took shape.
"My oppa is a really famous person, you know. He'd probably freak out if he heard about you."
The only person who'd ever acknowledged the worthless Bae Do-hyun. The only person who'd always planted self-esteem in the inadequate Do-hyun, telling him she'd improved so much thanks to what he'd taught her.
"I want to become a brain-mechanics top laner like you, oppa. My physical mechanics are total garbage."
The one who'd made him unable to let go of a dream he knew could never come true. The girl who'd pushed Bae Do-hyun forward.
That girl had been Lee Bom.
"Come to think of it, I wonder what that guy's up to these days…"
Bae Do-hyun was dead. The brain-mechanics top laner who'd cherished Lee Do-jin's little sister more than anyone was already dead. His vengeful spirit was simply occupying Jin Gyeo-wool's body now, racing toward a future he'd never managed to reach.
No way. Something hot began spilling from Gyeo-wool's eyes.
"…Hey, are you… crying? Why are you suddenly crying!"
Startled, Lee Do-jin grabbed napkins and wiped at the corners of her eyes, but the tears wouldn't stop.
"She died… Bom-ie… she was dead… so that's why…"
"…!"
Lee Do-jin froze. A few careless words, spoken while he'd been overlaying Lee Bom's image onto Jin Gyeo-wool — and now it looked as if Gyeo-wool had recovered the memories of Bom she'd lost.
"I… I didn't even know… like an idiot… ha… hahaha…"
Gyeo-wool sank into despair. She'd worked so hard because she wanted to see her again. She'd loved it enough to throw away her future and pour everything into it, even knowing it was a dream that could never come true. And that cute, lovable kid named Lee Bom — Jin Gyeo-wool's friend, Lee Do-jin's little sister — was dead.
Despair wrapped around her in an instant. The grief of losing Lee Bom wasn't something only Gyeo-wool was feeling — it was an emotion Hon Gyeo-wool, the body's original owner, had carried for a very long time. And because this body had already been steeped in despair once before, it came on even faster.
Realizing that six years had been nothing but wasted time, Bae Do-hyun had no choice but to run. Down past consciousness, into the deep abyss of a heart where no one could ever find him.
Thud.
Her body went limp and collapsed face-first onto the table.
"Jin Gyeo-wool? Hey! Gyeo-wool!!"