Hacker
“…Ah. Fingers got tangled.”
Still new enough that everything felt awkward, I’d tried to throw in a fake and ended up dancing instead. Or maybe it was just these short little fingers, still struggling to hop between the keys.
Taaang!
I parried the first swing of the enemy Garland’s sword, then drove a Mist Rush straight into his face.
A little slow?
The parry hadn’t landed clean, and he rolled sideways out of the skill. I’d practiced Garland’s kit a few times against AI bots in a custom lobby and figured I had it down, but the timing was off — he must have come in with an attack-speed buff.
I was still a beginner. No point dwelling on the miss. I filed the failure away and decided, this time, not to think — just feel.
Tak. Tak.
Like a boxer flicking out jabs to read an opponent’s reactions, I eased back a step and threw attacks into empty air. He came forward behind his shield, sweeping his arming sword in wide arcs, trying to shove me off. Unfortunately for him, backing off was the last thing on my mind.
Tang!
Not a drawn-out clang — a short, bright crack of impact. A flicker of stun, and his midsection opened up. If I’d pressed the advantage right then, I could have locked the fight down in seconds. I didn’t.
Tak. Tak.
I’d found myself a good sparring partner.
“Haa…”
I tipped my head back against the chair and let out a long breath. What set this sigh apart from the usual ones was the satisfaction packed inside it. I held down the parry key, then released it, savoring the moment.
Monk had the shortest range of any character in Rune Breaker. Short range meant a razor-thin window for a successful parry. And with a body that fragile, choosing to parry instead of dodge or block was an enormous risk. Pulling off something that hard filled some quiet hunger inside me to the brim.
In the end I’d died eight times on my own, pushed into their base, and still had to peel off without finishing Garland when the whole team collapsed on me — but in a five-on-five, dragging half the enemy roster to your side of the map tended to decide the game all by itself.
I looked at the victory screen and murmured,
“…This is fun.”
Part of me had only picked it up because it was the number-one game at the PC bang and my age left me with so few options. That thought was gone now. This game lets you parry skills. All that remained was a girl sinking deeper into the game, studying it in earnest.
Unlike basic attacks, skills were tuned to be almost too fast to react to. Garland’s Finishing Blow, for instance — I hadn’t even tried to parry it. Just get out of the way. Next time, I told myself, I’d go for skill parries too. I queued up another match without hesitation.
Every so often, some piece of fiction will stage the absurd spectacle of a character watching a bullet come at them and simply stepping aside. The reason that comes to mind is that I was starting to feel something uncomfortably close to it.
…It still surprises me every time.
Some famous pro once said that if you dodge everything and hit everything, you win. As Monk’s controls settled into my hands, the idea that I could handle multiple people coming after me stopped sounding crazy.
Eventually I solo-killed three of them, smashed their Rune — the heart of their base — and took the win. Along the way I landed skill parries more than once.
Realizing I was pulling off something this ridiculous in real time sent a shiver racing down my spine. Today’s session had been more satisfying than I’d expected.
“Nnngh…!”
I stretched hard to unkink my stiff body and was about to close the client when a notification lit up in the friend-request tab.
Last game’s Garland?
Had the teabagging set him off enough to send a friend request? I didn’t think much of it. I shut down the computer and stood up.
Thud.
Neo smacked the desk — not hard, but hard enough — then forced himself to breathe, slow and steady, wrestling his temper back into its cage.
0/9/0.
Not a single kill. Not a single assist. Nine deaths in a row. That was what happened when a Monk dismantled you so thoroughly that your towers crumbled and the enemy Guardian snowballed out of control.
Chat was a mess of people roasting him and people arguing over whether it was a hack. Normally Neo would have pulled himself together, cooled the flaming chat, and tried to mediate. Not this time.
Is it actually a hack?
Even stripping out the tilt, even thinking about it coldly, the enemy Monk had been that good. You could write it off as a smurf who just happened to main Monk.
But one viewer who’d successfully sniped off Neo’s stream had just flashed a Diamond account — top ten percent — and that lent the accusation real weight.
Even so, hack accusations were radioactive for a game streamer. Great content on paper, sure — but if it turned out you were dogpiling some innocent player, the pitchforks could swing right back at you.
Please just accept the friend request!
Standing at the center of a roaring bonfire, Neo couldn’t bring himself to say anything reckless. All he could do was clutch his head and think.
“Hwaaam…”
My whole body felt heavy. Fifth period after elementary-school lunch always hit harder than I expected. Most of the kids were already nodding off or face-down on their desks, completely out. Our gentle teacher only lowered her voice and kept the lesson going in a soft murmur.
I appreciated the kindness, really… but it just made me sleepier. I wanted nothing more than to pass out like everyone else. If I did, though, the drowsiness would carry straight through and I’d end up sleeping at the orphanage instead of going to the PC bang.
For a second I wondered if skipping just one day would really kill me.
No. Absolutely not.
I refused to imagine a world where I ran out of daydream material to survive these endless elementary-school classes. I had already become someone who couldn’t go back — someone who spent lessons replaying Rune Breaker matches in her head, one game a day, two on a good day.
…Well. I could dress it up with all kinds of reasons, but the biggest one was simply that I wanted to play. That was unavoidable. The way a shark has to keep swimming its whole life just to breathe, I kept heading to the PC bang for the elasticity that made life feel worth living.
Jingle.
A little bell chimed, and the employee at the counter looked over. Not the usual guy — the part-timer today was a woman.
“Hi~.”
“Hello, Yuri noo… unnie.”
Lee Yu-ri, the one who always greeted me when I came in. She smiled warmly and held out a little bag of snacks.
“Ta-da!”
She’d clearly been hoping for the full bright-eyed little-kid grin. Unfortunately for her, I was not the kind of elementary schooler who sold smiles that cheaply—
“Oh, and I snuck a little extra time on for you. Don’t tell the boss.”
“…! Thank you!”
Human beings, as a rule, want to feel safe and protected. So where did that leave me?
A face that made people like me on sight, and a young age to match. Especially in a country like Korea, still steeped in Confucian habits, a ten-year-old Han A-yeon sat in a very advantageous seat. Receiving unconditional kindness from adults for no reason except being small and cute left me feeling oddly unsettled in all sorts of ways.
…Is this just how it is?
I remembered holding doors open a little longer when someone was coming behind me. I remembered standing quietly on the subway, staring at my phone, when a seat opened up and someone older — or a much younger child — was nearby. Humans are social animals. Stack enough of those small courtesies together and you get the civilization we have now.
The reason I was suddenly spiraling into philosophy was this:
A flood of friend requests had come in all at once. I’d accepted them without thinking, and several users who happened to be online had greeted me with the warmest, most considerate welcomes imaginable.
“Hmm…”
A few others had expressed their consideration in language too rich to repeat out loud.
Click.
You never know where life is going. I took screenshots first.
Hacker?
The curses didn’t hurt my feelings, and being accused of hacking didn’t leave me feeling wronged. If anything, the sudden pile of friend requests itself had my interest.