A Real Friend
Consideration… so that's how she saw it.
Han A-yeon had the kind of looks that made you look forward to her future, and on top of that she carried herself with a composure no child her age should possess.
Thanks to that, there wasn't a single person on set who didn't already like the girl. So whenever she acted, everyone rushed to praise her — and she seemed to have decided those compliments were nothing more than the polite, obligatory kind people give a kid, not anything earned by her actual skill.
No need to correct her on that.
Judging by her attitude, this wasn't the kind of atmosphere where she'd believe you even if you told her it wasn't mere consideration. Besides, some things were better realized on your own.
"Aigoo. An old soul like our A-yeon — I've never seen one in my life. Never."
"Thank you for the compliment."
"…Pffft."
That was why he liked Han A-yeon. The sheer absurdity of taking a joke as a genuine compliment — that was a rare talent. At least in the media industry, where you had to sell your own charm to people, it was.
"Let's go. It's almost your turn."
"Nngh…!"
The way she stretched her arms high overhead as she stood up was adorable every single time. When he'd asked why she stretched so often, she'd answered that she'd been doing it since she was little because it made your arms and legs grow longer.
The gazes that followed Han A-yeon as she headed toward the center of the set were full of goodwill. Part of that, no doubt, came from the background of a girl being consumed for the sake of adult ambition.
Han A-yeon had no parents. And the role she was playing — Lee Ye-rim — might as well have had none either. A mother who neglected her child and drowned herself in gambling; a father whose life was such a wreck that theft and fraud barely registered as minor offenses.
Seo Hyeon-woo hadn't gone looking through orphanages for no reason. It had been a pursuit of authenticity.
…Honestly, I brought her here, and I feel terrible about it.
That guilt was one of the reasons he went out of his way to look after Han A-yeon.
Clap!
Regardless of Seo Hyeon-woo's brooding, the director's cue rang out and filming began.
A dark alley.
"Haa…"
Han A-yeon let out a long breath and slowly closed her eyes. For three full seconds the girl stood perfectly still — then her eyelids gradually lifted.
Is she… really only eleven?
Knowing the script cold was the bare minimum. Watching her sink into the atmosphere of Lee Ye-rim felt less like watching a child and more like standing across from a seasoned professional actor.
The moment Han A-yeon — no, Lee Ye-rim — took a single step forward.
Zzzt, zzzzt…
A worn-out streetlamp flickered, spitting irregular threads of light and a soft electric hiss. But there was no hesitation in Lee Ye-rim's stride. With every step she took, her fingertips brushed the time-stained walls, tasting their texture as she moved through the alley steeped in deep darkness.
Tap.
The girl's footsteps, which even the cold dark couldn't stop, came to a halt before an unexpected scene: a full-grown cat and several kittens trailing at its side. She was supposed to walk a little farther, all the way to the fork in the road — but for some reason, she couldn't bring herself to simply pass them by.
Spotting the cats, Lee Ye-rim edged closer, crouched down, and reached out a hand. But the animals slipped away before she could even get near. The girl stared blankly at her hand, still stretched into empty air, until her fingers slowly lost their strength and fell.
"…"
Was she hurt that even a mere cat had rejected her touch? A single tear finally slipped down the face of the girl who had held her expression blank — and only then did a boy appear.
"Um…"
There was supposed to be a short exchange of dialogue.
"Uh, so…"
But the boy, flustered by the single trail of tears running down the girl's cheek, couldn't easily find the next words.
The moment filming wrapped, every ounce of strength drained from my body and a heavy drowsiness settled over me.
…I only shot for a little while and I'm already like this. How on earth do other actors keep enduring this kind of exhaustion?
I was starting to feel genuine respect.
"You okay?"
"Huh? About what…"
I looked at Seo Hyeon-woo's face as he pulled out a tissue and held it out to me, and then it hit me. I was a child actor. And a child actor crying on set was a situation everyone desperately wanted to avoid. Not only had I stopped walking on impulse — I'd cried and completely ruined the take.
"I—I'm sorry."
"…No, looking at it, that was an ad-lib, wasn't it?"
Thankfully, just as Seo Hyeon-woo said, the set was only a little quieter than usual. There was no particular reaction beyond that. But he was wearing the kind of expression that asked for some kind of explanation, so I spoke first.
"I just… felt like she should cry."
"She should cry?"
"I know it's an important scene — the first meeting with the male lead, Kang Min-seok. But Lee Ye-rim is drowning in sadness. She wouldn't have the room to care about something like that, so…"
Seo Hyeon-woo suddenly started nodding over and over. Director Kim Tae-sik, who had been replaying the previous take, abruptly stood up from his seat, clapped his hands, and strode toward me.
"That was incredible! Thanks to A-yeon, we just landed a fantastic scene! Everyone, give her a round of applause!"
Caught in a sudden shower of clapping, I rubbed the back of my neck and managed,
"Th-thank you…?"
I thought I'd done a pretty decent job of acting just now, but I wasn't sure it warranted this much celebration.
The long, long winter break finally ended. My assigned shoots wrapped up at the same time, and I returned to the ordinary daily life of an elementary school student.
Along the way, according to Seo Hyeon-woo, my performance had led to a bittersweet little development — they'd added a scene where the male lead, Kang Min-seok, teases Lee Ye-rim for being a crybaby. Still, the fact that an impulsive ad-lib had turned into a success rather than a failure was a relief.
If anything had changed since break ended, it was that Seo Hyeon-woo now sent me messages from time to time. He'd looked after me so consistently on set that, unless he unilaterally cut contact, this relationship would probably last quite a while.
Anyway, the thought of sitting through elementary school classes again made my head ache a little — but I was still in a good mood. Finishing the shoot without incident was part of it, and so was the fact that I'd gained one decent connection.
"A-yeon~!"
And then there was Lee Hye-yeon, whom I'd expected to be separated from as we moved up a grade — only to find her right back with me. If I had to sum up my feelings about Lee Hye-yeon briefly… honestly, I'd thought of her as nothing more than a very short school-days acquaintance.
"What've you been up to?"
"Mm… just stuff."
But I needed to rethink my relationship with Lee Hye-yeon — the girl with the round glasses that suited her so well, who always smiled when she looked at me. The reason was simple: when I saw her face again after so long, the feeling that hit me was startlingly warm.
Going through the movie shoot and talking with all kinds of people had taught me something. Even if I couldn't be fully honest with myself, I at least owed the people who liked me a serious attitude.
"…I think I did miss you a little, though."
At the very least, that felt like basic courtesy.
"No way… me too!"
Thinking that, I couldn't quite hide a small smile as I took her hand. For some reason, it felt like the first time I'd ever made a real friend.
By the time filming was over, the money sitting in my account was… a full five million won. Converted purely into PC bang hours, that was at least five thousand hours. In other words, the amount of time I could devote to games — including Rune Breaker — had just expanded to an extreme degree.
Now this is more like it.
Click, click.
Pressing the keys again after so long felt wonderfully calming. Memorizing scripts, practicing acting alone, going to set and performing… I'd managed to carve out some game time here and there, but I'd held back out of worry that it might affect the movie shoot.
Now, though, I was a free woman. I'd already built one credit as a child actor, and my bank balance was comfortably padded. Even Yun Hyeon-mi — the only person who could really rein me in — knew about all of this, so I finally had a legitimate excuse to play a little more openly.
On a spring day when the white snow-blossoms clinging to every tree branch had begun to melt under the warm sunlight—
"Haa."
Yun Hyeon-mi let out a world-weary sigh as she walked a route that had long since become second nature.
She's not answering again…
Han A-yeon. A girl who still had no friends at the orphanage, and yet somehow never quite managed to make you worry. Maybe it was her easygoing nature, or the way she talked that was nothing like a child — or the fact that the movie shoot, which Yun Hyeon-mi had assumed would just blow over as a one-off, had wrapped without a hitch.
Ding-a-ling—.
But so what? To Yun Hyeon-mi, she was still just a careless kid who went to the PC bang to game and never checked her messages properly.
She no longer needed to look at a map, or wander the PC bang searching for her. Heading straight for the usual corner seat, she found Han A-yeon sitting there, mid-game, exactly as expected.
Clack-clack-clack!
The typing speed was as brisk as ever, and the monitor screen whipped around so fast you had to wonder how she could even see it.
They talk about the media generation this and that… are all kids like this these days?
Just looking at it was enough to make you dizzy. Knowing that A-yeon's focus wouldn't break unless someone physically touched her, Yun Hyeon-mi decided to wait just a little while.
"Hrmm…"
Scroll.
I rolled the mouse wheel and browsed leisurely through Monk's skin list. Before, I hadn't had the luxury to even glance at them — but now my situation was more than comfortable. It was downright abundant. Among all the skins, one pulled my gaze harder than the rest.
Hood Monk… but twenty thousand won for a single skin?
Buying it immediately, of course.
After that I opened a custom lobby and inspected Hood Monk's model from a free camera. A squirrel in a black hoodie. Roughly twenty hours of PC bang time had been traded for one Monk skin — but this one went beyond cute and into genuinely cool. It was as close to perfect as a skin could get. Not a shred of regret.
If you buy a car, you take it for a test drive. If you buy a skin, you queue up a game right away.
Unlike before, when a match would pop in under a second, it now took about ten. Maybe that was the reward for steadily grinding ranked. Aside from the intentional trolls — or teammates who might as well have been — I'd won every game on the way up, and my tier had become what people called the final boss of the mineral ranks: Diamond. All of it on Monk alone.
This was the tier where people who actually knew how to play started showing up, and everyone was hungry for wins. Paradoxically, the Monk pick that nobody had bothered to care about in the lower ranks was now something people flinched at the mere sight of.
But I typed into chat without a shred of shame.
Win rate-wise… roughly over ninety percent.
After my message, the team went silent. They'd probably looked up my match history, confirmed I'd climbed this far on a single character — Monk — and shut their mouths.
The tiers left were Master, Grandmaster, and the final goal: Legend. My aim was to become the one and only Monk one-trick of Legend rank.