Winter Break
Time is merciless.
It had slipped by without pity, and before I knew it the new year had dawned and break season had arrived. That meant I was about to turn eleven — and that I had been living in this body for nearly a full year.
Some things never change, no matter how much time passes. Chief among them: the mechanical loop of school, back to the orphanage, then off to the PC room — and the kids who kept trying to get close to me every single time.
"Haa…"
A pale puff of breath spilled from between my lips and scattered into the air. A chill wind wormed its way through the gaps in my clothes, and my shoulders hunched up on their own. My nose stung; I sniffled.
If I catch a cold like this, it's going to mess with my Rune Breaker play…
I supposed I should at least be grateful that no white crap was falling out of the blue sky. Roaming around outdoors in the cold had been a misery in my old life, and it still was now.
I was mentally reviewing the break schedule I'd drawn up for myself and about to push forward when—
"A-yeon!"
A thin, clear voice that stuck in the ear even from a distance tickled my hearing. The person calling my name so urgently was… Lee Hye-yeon. Cute twin tails, a round face, and a pair of glasses that rounded the whole look out — the girl who had been Han A-yeon's inseparable friend.
"I really hope we end up in the same class again next time!"
"…Yeah."
Surprisingly, over the past year I had failed to make a single friend besides Lee Hye-yeon. Or rather — the accurate way to put it was that I had deliberately not made any.
If I was going to wear a mask and deceive kids, better not to create more contact points than necessary from the start. Hye-yeon had already been too close to push away, so that had been unavoidable.
And so, outside of Hye-yeon, my real-world channels of communication were limited to Lee Yu-ri, who occasionally gave me free PC room time and snacks; Yun Hyeon-mi, my caregiver at the orphanage; and my friends online.
"Ah, Mom told me to come home early today! I'm gonna head out first, A-yeon! Bye-bye!"
"B-bye-bye…"
Kids who stuck together every day turning suddenly awkward the moment they landed in different classes was common enough at this age.
But I couldn't picture Lee Hye-yeon — who bounced around radiating more tension and positive energy than one person should reasonably handle alone — ever snubbing me. If we crossed paths in the hallway, she'd probably call my name and come over all warm and friendly.
Even after all this time, I still didn't have the courage to coldly reject pure goodwill. …Well, having at least one same-sex friend was better than nothing.
Unlike me, who tended toward silence, Hye-yeon was a natural chatterbox — even just the two of us, awkward silences never happened. And she never brought up the children's cartoons I hated, which made her even easier to be around.
And now.
Do I really have to do the break homework… right now?
I was sunk in an important dilemma. Setting aside simple busywork like the XBS viewing assignments, the independent research project, the hobby presentation, the book report — all of it was stuff I could finish off the top of my head if I wanted to. Putting things off was a bad habit in principle, sure, but I had something far more important on my plate.
I have to hit Legend.
Getting inside the top five hundred — the maintenance requirement for Legend, the highest rank in Rune Breaker. And to that end, at least reaching Master was the goal for this break.
I still hadn't queued a single ranked game. I knew how critical the early placement matches were on an account. I'd already gotten a full taste of this body's ridiculous talent, but the time I had was still limited, so I had to be careful.
On top of that, I was seriously considering streaming as one of the few legal ways for a kid my age to make money — so hitting Legend in Rune Breaker wasn't just for my own entertainment. It was groundwork for a skill-based streaming concept.
…With a fully intact male mindset still running the show, it would probably be easier to succeed by leaning into the soft, fan-service angle. But if I was going to stream at all, I wanted to blow up on game skill more than I wanted to succeed as a girl. Was that just stubbornness from still not fully accepting Han A-yeon?
I just felt like doing it that way.
"You're going to the PC room?"
"Yes."
As always, talking with Yun Hyeon-mi left me with a little prick of conscience. Even so, I held my ground. Within the line where my meager limits wouldn't show, I deliberately got a few answers wrong on the Yukmon homework, stayed otherwise perfect, and — the shower incident aside — had never caused any trouble. I was a good kid.
Becoming the orphanage's top outsider? If having no friends in this world was a crime, there would be far too many guilty people. …And that would just be too sad.
"Then how about Teacher comes along today?"
Was I imagining it? Something like worry showed through in her expression and tone.
"I'm fine!"
I answered on purpose with bright, clean cheer.
"That's a shame… I was hoping to hang out with A-yeon this break."
Normally, Yun Hyeon-mi would walk me to the front of the orphanage after that and tell me to make sure I checked my messages. Today, though, she was hesitating differently than usual. In a brief silence, as if picking her words, she gently stroked my hair and spoke.
"A-yeon… mm… you're not short on allowance, are you?"
I could read the concern in what followed. So she'd been wondering where the money was coming from. Neo — who kept thanking me for how well his streams and NewTube were doing thanks to me — had sent more money to the account he'd used before.
Between that, the occasional mission appearances on his broadcasts, and the free time Lee Yu-ri kept slipping me little by little, her suspicion had snowballed.
A kid who got twenty thousand won a month in allowance showing up at the PC room every single day — from her position, it wouldn't be strange for a hundred different thoughts to cross her mind.
I could have told her the truth. But the fact that I'd fully parsed her thinking in this short exchange… given my age, that flow would have been far too unnatural. Same reason I deliberately got some of the Yukmon homework wrong. I had no intention of cosplaying as a genius.
I was just an ordinary person who had already walked through the process other kids still had to go through once before. When the day came that I hit a wall, I didn't have the confidence to handle the moment my bare face got exposed.
"I'm fine, though?"
So as sorry as I felt toward her, all I could do was play the part of a pure, clueless child who knew nothing. If a moment ever came when I had to reveal the truth, I figured it would be better to wait until after I'd started streaming and was making money of my own.
I'd fretted plenty over streaming and the rest, but Han A-yeon's life was already barreling down the success track. The looks that had started standing out early were pretty even to my own eye. If life went sideways, I half-suspected I could eat off this face somehow. And if I thought that, how must other kids see it?
"A-A-yeon!"
"…Sorry. I was just about to hit the bathroom — my stomach hurt."
I was simply trying not to become a walking black-history generator. That, at least, was one of my more encouraging achievements. The disaster that had unfolded after I'd answered on autopilot while my mind wandered… really was something else.
…Ah.
Even now, just imagining that moment made my head throb. No matter how hard I tried to forget it — or rather, the harder I tried, the more it floated up — it already felt like one complete piece of life black history had been locked in. Bad memories always outlast the good ones.
Anyway. Today, to commemorate the start of break, I had come to the PC room and opened the Rune Breaker client.
Click. Clack.
In the hush, the intermittent sounds of mouse clicks and keyboard taps rang out. I simply blended into that atmosphere and quietly added my own handful of noise.
Games, by nature, ought to be fun. And the most fun thing in a game, I believe, is beating actual people — not some AI. In that sense, Rune Breaker was an excellent fit for someone short on time.
High concurrent player counts meant short queue times, and under a simple surface it hid enough complexity to make digging into it satisfying. Outstanding dynamic vision and reaction speed that outstripped even that refused to let me lose easily. Falling into this game had been a natural flow.
Pew!
A playful sound effect, and a rock came flying. Chico — a character in cheetah hide with a slingshot, whose goofy design belied a reputation as a solid performance pick. The projectile's slightly parabolic arc made it hard to deal with, supposedly…
Whoosh!
Not a problem for Monk, with its superior mobility. The enemy tried to pop a speed skill and peel back, but I stuck to them the whole way and stomped Chico into the ground. Herding them off and snagging a buff or bashing the tower would have been more efficient — but I wanted to kill them even if it cost extra time.
After that I farmed the now-ownerless rune monsters on their side of the map, wrapped myself in buffs, led the Guardian in, and walked into their base with ease.
What the hell?
And I took the win with absurd ease. It had been barely fifteen minutes since the game started. Even a fast game usually ran about twenty minutes. Anything shorter usually meant someone had left or surrendered — but this time I'd just walked in alone and broken the rune.
First placement match result: Bronze 5. Bottom of the bottom tier.
Rattle.
I checked the match history site. Our team and theirs were all Bronze — the lowest rank. Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, Legend.
Considering how often I'd casually run into Platinum and Diamond players in normals and beaten them without breaking a sweat, it was a natural result.
Winning like this has no feel to it…
Winning beat losing, sure, but there still needed to be some give-and-take. At this rate it was no different from queuing AI bots. Telling myself I'd just gotten especially bad players, I queued again — and the result didn't change.
Figuring today's games probably weren't going to be fun, I gritted my teeth for the sake of climbing and kept matching.