The Start of the Tutorial 01
Do you know of the fool who became a stuffed specimen? The fool who lost his life getting worked up over nothing more than a game.
I muttered that with a self-deprecating snicker, and curious glances came flying my way. Well, of course they would — a perfectly normal-looking man muttering to himself was bound to draw stares. Even so, everyone was busy knocking back drinks, so the eyes only lingered for a moment. Nobody tried to snatch my glass or talk me down.
But no matter how many looks gathered on me, my brain was so thoroughly scrambled by the alcohol that I couldn't stop the cheerful muttering.
Lee Haneul, twenty-five years old. Died of a heart attack immediately after posting a long, profanity-laced rant on a community forum about a new mobile game pickup character being male. Not even the greatest literary masters in the world could craft a sentence more ridiculous than that.
The obsession started with nothing special. It was just that in the autumn of my twenty-second year, on the day I was discharged from the military, I found out a certain mobile game had launched. It felt less like coincidence and more like fate, so my freshly shaved head and I downloaded it without hesitation.
Heroines Chronicle — this mobile collection game was clearly designed to target hardcore otakus. About eighty percent of the cast was female, and the few male characters that existed were mostly 3-star or lower fodder units.
A turn-based RPG mobile game where you built parties of sexy girls and collected their steamy, stripped-down skins. Even with the thickest face in the world, you'd have a hard time calling it a masterpiece. All kinds of bugs, server crashes, ranking calculation errors, cancelled events—
But one thing was certain. Everyone agreed that while this wasn't a masterpiece, it was a masterwork of art.
Having targeted otakus so squarely, the game had poured everything into its illustrations and character models. So whenever the servers went down, users didn't get angry so much as they got interested in the apology illustrations and apology skins posted as compensation.
Being able to fully staff both a main party and a sub party just from apology skins was pretty damn ridiculous, but whatever. When it crashed in winter they handed out Santa girl skins, and when it crashed in summer they handed out bikini skins.
The problem, if anything, was the balance team — worse than the art team's toe jam. No, looking at how these bastards operated, maybe a balance team didn't even exist at the company.
A new character stronger than the bunny girl, stronger than the nurse outfit, stronger than the Santa girl, stronger than the cowgirl, stronger than the bikini — limited-time pickup event!
Whether the developers' generosity was as thick as their belly fat, somehow every new character came out with stats that had extra bulk slapped all over them. Some people said that was fine since their chests got bigger too, but that was a minority opinion.
Where there are pretty girl characters, there will be overinvested otakus — that's just the natural order of the world. Who would welcome a perfect upgrade of their beloved character flipping the ranking boards upside down? Of course, I never got angry about it myself.
I wasn't the type to hang myself on any single character. I was a collector-type whale who spent real money hoarding every must-pull unit.
If a Serica stronger than Erica dropped, I pulled both. If the main tank meta shifted to a new tier-zero, I pulled her too. They say a light rain soaks you without noticing, but I wasn't standing in a drizzle — I was throwing myself headfirst into a stream of cash.
I dumped my entire paycheck into the game, cut back on the food tourism that used to be my hobby, and spent clothes money on gacha pulls. Hobby: mobile games. Specialty: posting deck optimization guides for new characters and getting called a premium whale for it.
Ah, it was a pretty decent life.
Until the final patch.
Characters in Heroines Chronicle were ranked by the number of stars. The floor was 1★ for an innate 1-star, and 5★ for an innate 5-star. Even if everyone could promote up to a maxed-out 6★, the base stat gaps from innate rank could never be overcome. And even among innate 5-stars, the newer characters had higher stats — so the godawful balance was beyond anyone's ability to defend.
Six Stars Shining Brilliantly!
The patch in question was a new character launch event. A new unit starting at innate 6★ and promoting into 7★ — what the hell was supposed to happen to every character that already existed?
From the hardcore fans they called "character moms" to theorycrafters like me scrambling to grab even the shattered fragments of the broken balance, everyone was screaming blue murder and forming a wave of public outrage. Typing with the right hand while checking the remaining ammo in their wallets with the left, of course.
No matter how much you cursed, what was coming was coming — so you had to pull the new character anyway. It was going to be obscenely strong. Everyone was thinking the exact same thing. That was why these bastards kept repeating patches like this.
Right after the patch, regretful but without hesitation, my hand went to the payment screen. With my usual guide site already open, I pressed down hard on my phone.
A few taps, and fifty thousand won vanished into thin air. A hundred thousand. Two hundred. Three hundred. You fucking bastards—
Whether I was unluckier than usual, or whether innate 6-stars simply had lower drop rates than innate 5-stars, I only saw those glittering rainbow-colored stars after dumping eight hundred and fifty thousand won. 4-stars and below were silver, 5-stars were gold — so 6-stars were rainbow, huh.
No, wait. The boards had the expected value pegged at a million won, so I'd actually come out a hundred and fifty thousand ahead. In a game where the pity ceiling had vanished right along with the developers' mothers.
Lightning flashed, and a star descending from the sky wrapped around the character's hazy silhouette. A high-quality animation that called to mind a magical girl transformation sequence. Radiant golden hair, porcelain-white skin, clear and luminous blue eyes, a sweet voice flowing out through the speakers.
The innate 6-star pickup character destined to shatter the balance had finally descended upon my account.
With just one little problem.
"Why… is it a guy…?"
The bastards who'd tried to sell a reverse-bunny-girl skin with nipple stickers as a substitute for the summer bikini skin they'd handed out as an apology, only to get punched by the censors. Where the hell had scum like that gotten their heads filled with rotten ideas about gender equality? While stewing over that question, I wrote a 5,700-character daily gratitude punch a hundred times a day, posted it through a macro every single day, and died of a heart attack.
When I opened my eyes after that, I was in the world of Heroines Chronicle.
More precisely, it was a hodgepodge world with the setting of Heroines Chronicle mixed in. Familiar RPG game systems were quietly woven into this continent.
But that wasn't what mattered.
Radiant golden hair, porcelain-white skin, blue eyes clear and luminous as a lake, broad shoulders and a sculpted physique — and instead of massive breasts, a dangling massive cock. Honestly speaking, the body alone was perfect. With a body like this, I was confident I could survive anywhere you dropped me.
That muscular frame was so powerful I couldn't even guess how faithfully the stats had been translated into reality. Wearing gauntlets and squeezing my grip left finger marks in solid rock, and I had no idea how many kilograms of force that even was. On top of that, I wore what seemed to be the default skin — armor, helmet, a massive shield and a war hammer — as comfortably as a tracksuit, and at a full sprint I could run without tiring at roughly the speed of a horse-drawn carriage.
How wonderful it would have been to have a body like this in modern society.
Looks that could have coasted through life as a model or a TV personality on face alone. A muscular physique that was sturdy, healthy, and beautiful on top of it. Even as an ordinary civilian in the modern world, that appearance could have earned me a fan club — how easy and comfortable would life have been?
Of course, just because this was a fantasy world didn't mean the looks were useless.
Back when I had nothing but a body and no money, starting with the inn waitress who threw in free meat scraps even when I only ordered soup, all the way to the senior adventurer women who helped me when I was wandering around clueless — over ten years of life, the number of times I'd benefited from my appearance was more than I dared to count.
Right. Ten years.
Ten years of rolling through the dirt like a dog in this goddamn fantasy world, with a sturdy body and a fragile mind. More than enough time for a scrawny office worker who'd never so much as twisted a chicken's neck to become a veteran warrior who casually smashed orc skulls with a war hammer.
— When you live long enough, things somehow work out.
I couldn't deny that the absurd good looks and the talent-packed body with its stat buffs were what kept me alive, but the mental side took a lot of suffering to adapt to. By now I was so used to bone shards poking out of broken limbs that I couldn't even make a joke out of it anymore.
Still, I had no intention of spending my whole life on something like a battlefield. I'd made a name for myself as an adventurer, so the plan was to rake in gold for one big score, then — just like every adventurer's favorite line — retire somewhere with good land and run a farm or an inn.
That was what I thought, until she appeared in front of me.
"Waaah, look at that tall tower. I was a little worried since this is first-gen, but they actually rendered something like this? Did they catch an alien and torture it or what?"
A woman in clean, refined-looking cloth armor. Fair white skin that stood out against the grimy medieval peasants, and long, well-maintained hair.
"Ooooh, there are so many NPCs too. …Ah! I wasn't supposed to say that word out loud. Ahem, okay, full roleplay mode starting now!"
And accompanying her, a translucent camera orbiting around her head… an internet streamer.
"Ahem! So this is the city of adventurers, famous for the Tower of the Firmament!"
Ten years after being dropped into a fantasy world with no dreams and no hope.
Join streamer 'Han Sea' and form a party
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My first quest had begun.