Elementary School Life
Elementary school life was hard.
That was the day I realized dealing with fully grown adults was actually easier than dealing with kids.
"The lunch today was good, right?"
"Yeah. It was."
Lee Hye-yeon, the girl in the seat next to me who I figured had been Han A-yeon's best friend before, tightly held my hand as she spoke.
I was really sorry, but I'd only learned her name during morning assembly.
From Lee Hye-yeon's perspective, the friend she'd been close enough to sit next to had had her insides swapped out for a fully grown adult—and a man, at that. Still, suddenly giving her the cold shoulder and pushing her away felt too cruel, and honestly, having her around was convenient for me in more ways than one.
Why convenient?
Because a few of the boys had started eyeing Han A-yeon's—well, my—face and looking for openings to strike up a conversation, only for Lee Hye-yeon to slide in first and start talking to me with aggressive enthusiasm.
There were moments I wondered if I was being vain, but one glance at the face in the mirror was enough to remind me that I still hadn't fully objectified this new body of mine.
School life turned out to be less of a problem than I'd expected. The original Han A-yeon had been the timid type, so simply listening and giving halfhearted responses was enough to keep me from being treated as a complete weirdo. And unlike at the orphanage, there weren't many situations where I risked standing out in a strange way.
If I had to pick something, going without a single friend would have been an issue—but thanks to Lee Hye-yeon, that was already solved.
The real problem was that I didn't have a smartphone.
You've got to be kidding me…
Of course they collected our phones in the morning. Which left me with nothing but tedious elementary school lessons and kids who, during every break, started conversations about topics I knew nothing about.
People could go on all they wanted about youth being the best years of your life, or how childhood was the freest time of all—but the reality was that kids could do far less than adults. You couldn't do what you wanted, watch what you wanted, or buy what you wanted. Obviously.
I'd vaguely overheard somewhere that it was about teaching the value of choice and building self-control, and from that angle it made perfect sense. But unlike the real kids, who craved rebellion without ever having experienced anything, I'd already been through it all.
Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division…
It felt like my human rights were being violated in real time. I understood that keeping kids this age off their phones and forcing them to develop social skills was a solid approach—but couldn't they make just one exception for me?
Eventually I made it through the boring school day and arrived at the PC bang. I didn't know how other orphanages operated, but Pure Orphanage didn't interfere much during the school year. They just set a curfew, that was all.
Thinking about it, it made sense—building healthy friendships mattered, and some kids were probably embarrassed about living at an orphanage in the first place.
As for why I'd come straight to the PC bang: online, I didn't have to completely hide who I really was. It was the perfect way to burn off the stress of putting on an act that didn't fit. …It wasn't simply because I wanted to play games. This was a rational decision made for the sake of my mental health.
Click.
I headed for my usual corner seat and checked the remaining time.
Eleven hours.
I'd already poured every last bit of my allowance into PC bang time, and the next allowance was a full ten days away. I'd wanted to try as many different games as possible—FPS titles, for instance—but this damned age was the problem. I couldn't even play games rated for ages twelve and up.
Which narrowed my options down to one: Rune Breaker, the most popular game around, complete with an age-restriction mode.
Now this is the good stuff.
Humming under my breath, I browsed through the Rune Breaker roster.
Yeah. This one's still my favorite.
Monk—an assassin-type character with outstanding mobility and high damage. The important part was that it looked like a cute little squirrel.
The fact that cute things were catching my eye suggested my aesthetic sense had shifted a little along with this younger body, but I decided to accept that much without a fight. Start nitpicking every little change like that and I'd end up as a real-life Jekyll and Hyde before long.
This piece of shit pisses off his own team AND the enemy, so why is he still in the game?
Click, click.
I'd already gone through Rune Breaker videos and community sites on my phone, but looking at it on a real computer just hit different.
Is it really that bad?
Monk actually had more dedicated one-tricks than you'd expect—if you excluded high-rank players, that is. Looking at it through the eyes of a worn-out gamer rather than a ten-year-old elementary school girl named Han A-yeon, Monk's kit itself wasn't particularly broken.
The real issues were the short range and the paper-thin durability. Sure, the mobility and raw damage made up for it, but in a game built around first-person perspective, most players simply didn't like short range.
And so Monk had become a kind of trolling character—one that charged the enemy faster and died more often. Buying a character with that kind of reputation using the free currency you got for signing up, as a completely free-to-play player, was a heavy decision in more ways than one. And I wasn't just free-to-play—I barely had enough money to keep coming to the PC bang.
Click.
"…Oh."
But my finger had already bought Monk.
Neo was a popular streamer on the major streaming platform Flick. He'd built his brand on FPS games, but with his viewer count steadily dropping and Rune Breaker's popularity impossible to ignore, he'd finally jumped into the game late.
This game's pretty complicated.
Every map had different terrain and special gimmicks, and you had to pick traits to counter them. That could have been a barrier for new players—but Rune Breaker was already a worldwide phenomenon. There was no need to coddle newbies. The developers only cared about preventing the game from going stale, chasing fresh changes with every patch.
"Is this how you do it?"
Neo spoke in a bright voice, buoyed by the rare uptick in his viewer count.
The toxic newcomers stood out, but Neo took even that in stride. For a streamer, indifference was scarier than hate. Looking at the lively chat filled him with energy.
"Haha… sorry, I'm still a total beginner at this game."
Neo laughed awkwardly, equipped the recommended traits, and queued into a match. He picked Garland—a sword-and-board warrior beloved across every tier, high and low.
His health did start dropping the moment he left the safe zone—but contrary to his viewers' expectations, Neo made it to his lane without any real trouble.
The core of Rune Breaker was simple. Outside of a few special maps, you led the Guardians spawned by your Rune, destroyed the enemy's Rune Towers, then pushed into their base and smashed their Rune. Along the way, the two teams' characters clashed head-on.
Just grab the attack-speed buff and go, right?
The one special wrinkle was that you could kill the Rune Monsters scattered across the map for buffs.
"Nah, I just watched some videos and picked it up."
That was a lie. He'd actually made a smurf account and practiced behind the scenes—but Neo swallowed that fact. He had an image to protect: the streamer who was just naturally good at games.
He cleared the nearby monsters without a hitch and reached the Rune Tower zone—where the enemy character finally appeared.
Negative reactions started flooding the chat at the same time.
Monk.
Neo himself had once been tempted by the title of "one-trick of Rune Breaker's most infamous troll champion" and tried to play it—but his dream had never made it out of custom lobbies.
Whoosh!
…Just watching this makes me dizzy.
Monk's skill, Mist Dash, spun the camera the second you used it—and the range, the single most important factor in Rune Breaker, was painfully short.
On top of that, the paper-thin durability made it nearly unplayable. But the enemy Monk was weaving freely through Neo's Guardians without the slightest hitch. Probably playing with their eyes closed half the time.
In a melee-versus-melee 1v1, the most important thing was raw bulk. And looking at how many of his Guardians had already been wiped out, the enemy had almost certainly skipped the buffs and come straight in.
Thinking that, Neo was confident he could swat this fragile little squirrel with ease, push the enemy Guardians, and snatch a quick win. So when the Monk cut straight through the Guardians and came at him head-on, he felt no particular tension.
Whoosh!
…What the—?!
In a fraction of a second, the Monk sidestepped by a hair's breadth, dodged the sword, and landed its attack animation—Scratch—right on Neo's leg. Neo immediately backstepped to avoid a follow-up, but the Monk just stood there and used an emote.
"You little…"
It was shaking its hips side to side in a steady rhythm.
A squirrel doing that might have looked cute under normal circumstances—but those rules did not apply to Neo right now. He snapped back to focus, tightened his grip on his sword, and fully believed he was about to butcher that damn squirrel.
But as his viewers made perfectly clear—
—Neo couldn't even graze the tip of his sword against the enemy. All he could do was stand there and watch the Monk's back as it slaughtered his Guardians and smashed his Rune Tower to pieces.