White Skulls at the Gates
The color had drained from Lee Bok-dong's and Jijonmussang's faces, but the broadcast rolled on.
"Repeating. The White Skulls have marched an army on this city. Not long ago they had their newbies looted—"
Jijonmussang finally forced his mouth open.
"What the hell do you mean everything we listed at the auction house gets taken?"
Lee Bok-dong stammered out an answer.
"Well... in this game every item is a physical object, so you have to buy and sell in person, same as real life. Which means if the city falls, everything you've got listed at the auction house gets seized too..."
"Then we sell it all, right now—"
"Who's going to pay full price for stuff that might get looted any second? If we dump it we'd have to fire-sale it, and looking at this... I don't think it'd move even at a discount."
Jijonmussang's voice shook.
"Then let's just grab the goods and get out, yeah? We pull everything from the auction house, load it on a truck. We can sell it somewhere else..."
"What, you're going to punch through a siege with one truck? And listen to those people out there. If we try to walk out with our loot, they're not exactly in a mood to wave us through..."
Right on cue, someone bellowed from outside.
"Who the hell hit that fort?! Get your asses out of the city yourselves and stop dragging the rest of us into this!"
In most games, an enemy army marching on a city would have been treated as an exciting event. Apparently not this one. Enraged players kept shouting.
"Turn yourselves in! Turn yourselves in, you bastards!"
Players who had suddenly found themselves under attack—and about to lose items worth real money—were not taking it well. Curses filled the air, and footsteps thundered through the streets. Were they hunting down the newbies named in the broadcast, intending to hand them over to the army that had come for them?
"So what do we do? Just go turn ourselves in?"
Lee Bok-dong asked it in a trembling voice. Jijonmussang shook his head violently.
"Are you out of your mind? You wanna throw away a couple million won?"
"I mean, still..."
"No. No way!"
Even as he shouted it, Jijonmussang's eyes raked the people around them, ready to open fire the instant anyone made a move. Fortunately, the ARMA members gathered at the swordsmanship hall showed no interest in grabbing them and turning them over. The only items those members owned were a few swords, and in this game, swords were cheaper than toy replicas. With no fortune to lose, they felt no dread at the prospect of the city falling. They weren't even paying attention to the broadcast. They were too busy swinging their blades, lost in training.
And Gaon, for his part, was one of them—a man who just wanted to swing a sword.
"We need to hide—"
"Where...? No, wait. Let's log out. Log out."
"Log out? Oh. Right. This is a game."
While the two of them muttered, Gaon frowned.
What a mess.
He ran through how this would play out if he let it. People furious over lost property. They would be a nuisance in every way that mattered. Bad for training. Very, very bad. After a moment's thought, irritation still plain on his face, Gaon spoke up.
"If those auction listings actually sold, how much would you make?"
Jijonmussang, who had been about to log out, answered.
"About two-point-six million—"
"I'll cover it. Let's go turn ourselves in."
"What?"
"I said let's go turn ourselves in."
Giga City sat close to the Korean players' starting region. As a major hub it was valuable enough that the city had even ended up with an elected mayor.
The current mayor was a man named Jung Jin-young. He looked out the window. The building he stood in was forty stories tall, high enough that the land beyond the city walls was visible in the distance.
His view was full of dots. The White Skull Unit, come to take the city. Even at a glance there looked to be over a thousand of them. How that many people had assembled and marched here on such short notice, he had no idea.
Jung Jin-young kept the broadcast going, trying to rally anyone willing to fight.
"Repeating. The White Skulls have marched an army on this city. Not long ago, some newbies looted—"
Meanwhile, a younger brother he knew from the real world spoke up.
"Hyung, please don't fight. I bought land here. My entire net worth is locked up in this city. If it falls and I lose everything, I'm taking a dive in the Han River."
"Hey—then we just don't let them take it."
"How? Those White Skull bastards are insanely strong. You know their boss is a former general, right? And the guys under him are all lunatics in military uniforms playing army?"
Jung Jin-young thought, Like I don't know that.
He didn't want to fight either. Why would he? The odds were poor and the losses would be enormous. And yet he hadn't given in to the enemy's demands—not out of any sense of justice.
If word gets out online that I handed newbies over to an Ilbe guild, then what? You want me on the front page of every humor board for days?
So he was pretending he intended to fight, all the while privately hoping the broadcast would rile up the city's players. Please, find those reckless newbies and drag them out here.
He prayed for it, but he didn't rate the chances highly. This was a game. There was no way to know if those newbies were even logged in—and even if they were, they could just log out. Wait it out in the real world, then sneak back in once it was over and claim they'd had no idea any of this had happened.
They were going to have to actually fight. He was sinking into that grim conclusion when a knock sounded at the mayor's office door.
Jung Jin-young snapped, irritated.
"Who is it?"
A voice answered from the other side.
"The stars of your broadcast."
Everyone gathered in the office went wide-eyed. Jung Jin-young's voice shook.
"Come in."
Three men entered. Two of them looked terrified. The third just looked annoyed.
Jung Jin-young asked the question with a heart split evenly between the urge to swear and the urge to cry.
"You're the ones from the broadcast, sir? The ones who cleaned out that fort?"
Gaon answered, irritated.
"I don't know about 'sir,' but I'm the one who hit that place, yeah. I'll give everything back. Tell them to get lost."
Jung Jin-young nodded at once.
"That's the right call! Thank you so much, sir. Truly."
He tried the radio immediately, hailing the White Skull Unit encamped outside. It took a little while before a reply came through. An old man's voice crackled from the handset—some kind of officer, by the sound of it.
"You'll return the spoils, will you?"
Jung Jin-young answered at once.
"Yes. Yes. Thankfully those friends came forward. They say they'll return everything. We'll load it on a truck and send it over right now, so please don't shoot, and—"
"Why so polite all of a sudden? Talking to a maggot."
"Excuse me?"
"I heard that little broadcast of yours. Stirring up every maggot in the city who doesn't like us. Telling them to come out and fight."
Jung Jin-young faltered.
"Ah... I did do that, yes. If we caused any offense..."
"Offense? Of course we're offended. We've posted on the forums like ten times that we're not an Ilbe guild. And we've tried to correct people calling us the White Skull Gang instead of the White Skull Unit more times than I can count."
"I'm truly sorry, I—"
"You think 'sorry' turns a Gang into a Unit?"
"Then what would you...?"
"I'm too pissed off to let this slide... Tell me. You got a lot of assets tied up in that city?"
"What? Yes. Yes, we do. We don't want to lose them, please. My brother says if it all gets taken he'll throw himself in the Han River."
"Tell your brother to check the water temperature."
The radio went dead.
Jung Jin-young looked around. His brother was staring at him, face gone white.
Fuck. So this is on me now? On me?
Voice shaking, Jung Jin-young asked,
"Have we got people outside ready to fight?"
"Yes. About three hundred..."
"Then ch— charge."
"What?"
"I said send them in!"
At that, a player who'd come as a representative of the residents pushed back.
"What are you talking about? Do you have any idea how many machine guns those bastards brought? Even a Swordmaster doesn't charge straight at a machine gun, you know that?"
Jung Jin-young forced his voice to stay level.
"We still can't just sit here and let them. They're going to finish those trenches and get their artillery in place. Then they'll sit back at a safe distance and shell us to hell. We'll die in our seats..."
"So the answer is a suicide charge across open ground? That's insane! What are we, the Soviet army? We should be fighting this as urban combat!"
"Urban combat? They know as well as we do that fighting inside the city costs them, so why would they be stupid enough to push in first? I'm telling you, they're going to dig in right where they are..."
"I'm still not signing off on a charge! Call for backup, then. If we put the word out, people will come, right?"
That, at least, sounded halfway reasonable. Jung Jin-young's hands kept shaking as he worked the message window, sending out pleas for relief in every direction like a man at prayer.
No replies came. Time crawled while they waited. Everyone watched the world beyond the glass with set faces.
"We're already surrounded..."
Outside, a long trench line was taking shape. Fast enough to watch it happen with the naked eye. People were digging with actual shovels, but some systemic assist was accelerating the work far beyond what human labor could manage. It was a quality-of-life feature, meant to spare players hours of mindless toil—but right now it felt like nothing but a cruel imbalance.
"Any word yet?"
"No. Not yet."
An hour passed. Jung Jin-young felt like he was going to die. He was a game character, and he still felt like he might pass out.
Then, at last, the communications officer spoke.
"We've got a reply."
"What did they say?"
"They're not coming."
His heart sank.
"Why not?"
"The White Skulls hit them too. Looks like they attacked everyone at the same time. They figured as long as they were taking revenge for the fort getting cleaned out, they might as well expand their territory while they were at it."
Silence swallowed the room. After a long while, someone finally asked,
"So what do we do?"
"We fight. What else..."
They had to fight. Steeling himself, Jung Jin-young looked out the window again. The enemy lines were in view, and the critical pieces—the machine-gun nests—were already fully in place. He let out a groan.
"They've almost finished the trenches already. That's why I said we should have charged sooner..."
"Then we'd already be dead!"
That was when it came. A voice he had never heard in his life, one that seemed to ring directly inside his skull.
"You do not appear to be enjoying this siege."
Jung Jin-young whipped around, horrified, toward the source of the voice.
He saw a skeleton. An actual skeleton.
He nearly fainted on the spot.
"What the hell! Who are you?!"
It probably hadn't been a request for an introduction, but the skeleton that had appeared in the room was happy to provide one anyway.
"I am called Kashal, commander of the Dead Mercenary Corps. As you can see, I am a lich who has received the grace of His Majesty the Immortal King, and I have come to offer a modest bit of help."
"A modest bit of help?"
"And what help would a mercenary company offer, if not soldiers—for a price?"
The offer came out of nowhere. Everyone stood there blankly, still trying to catch up, when one player suddenly shouted.
"Wait, I've seen this on the forums! When a battle's about to break out, an undead lich NPC teleports in and offers military support!"
Was there hope after all? Jung Jin-young asked, a spark of expectation in his voice.
"So how many troops can you lend us?"
The undead lich replied.
Force offered: 200 skeletons
Fee: 200,000,000 gold
"Two hundred skeletons. A mere two hundred million gold, and I shall gladly provide them. What say you?"
The flicker of hope died on the spot.
Everyone recoiled, then burned with anger in the same breath. Two hundred million gold was over a million and a half dollars in real money. And for that, they would get two hundred skeletons? The offer was absurd.
Still, no one quite dared tell an undead lich to get lost, so the room stayed shut. The silence held—until Gaon broke it.
"Nobody got the money? Then I'll pay."
Jijonmussang's face went white.
"Have you lost your mind?"
"No."