2. My Childhood Friend Was Different from What I Expected
2. My Childhood Friend Was Different from What I Expected
"Who are you...?"
I murmured, still half-asleep.
Was I not fully awake yet?
Why was some woman I didn't know sitting on top of me while I'd been asleep?
The sight that greeted me as I surfaced from deep sleep had barely any grip on reality.
Severely so.
The girl spoke in a slightly sulky tone.
"Oh, so that's how you're gonna play it? Fine. I am absolutely not waking you up after five more minutes today. Do you have any idea how bad it would be to show up late for the entrance ceremony? Get up and get ready already!"
"No, I mean, who are you?"
"I said it's not gonna work today."
It's not about whether it works or not. I'm asking who you are.
We were getting nowhere.
Frustrated, I glanced around.
The walls were painted sky blue. The study desk was packed with dozens of books.
Like a boy's room in an ordinary family home.
'Ah.'
The thought hit me with a small, dying groan.
This wasn't the room I lived in.
That fact was more than enough to plunge me into shock.
"Forget about me. What's my name?"
"Did you sleep wrong or something? It's Han Si-jun. What else would it be?"
Han Si-jun.
My name.
But every last thing around me had changed.
Only then did the memories of the night before come flooding back.
'I definitely created a character for V. AGE and then fell asleep at my desk...'
No way. It couldn't be.
An anxious thought flickered through my mind.
A girl with black hair.
She spoke to me as intimately as a friend of ten years.
She'd even woken me up the way a childhood friend you'd grown up beside your whole life would.
"Are you... feeling sick or something...?"
She was looking at me with worried eyes.
I don't even know your name. Why are you looking at me like that?
It gave me an oddly ticklish feeling.
In that moment, tiny scenes began trickling into my memory.
Kindergarten days.
A memory of holding the hand of a little kid who was crying for reasons I couldn't grasp.
Elementary school days.
A memory of a kid who protected me when I was being bullied at the hospital.
Middle school days.
A memory of a girl I walked with, breathing in the scent of spring.
The kid in my memories looked a lot like the girl standing before me now.
"Yu Ha-yeon."
"What? Are you really feeling sick...?"
"No. I just wanted to say your name."
Memories were finally clicking into place, one by one.
The girl in front of me was my childhood friend, Yu Ha-yeon.
And she was one of the roughly ten S-rank Heroes in V. AGE.
[S-rank Hero's Childhood Friend]
The character background I had set up in the game.
With my Will stat high enough, I managed to calmly sort out the situation.
I was now inside V. AGE. Inside the game.
And.
I had become the childhood friend of a future S-rank.
That fact meant exactly one thing.
I was screwed.
Hiding the despair welling up inside me, I spoke to Yu Ha-yeon.
"Could you leave? Right now?"
I wanted to be alone.
Mana 0.
Physical ability practically 0.
The day my bleak stats had come to mind.
Unlike my mood, the world outside the window was disgustingly sunny.
***
"Haa..."
Why had I fallen into this world?
No matter how much I thought about it, all that emerged was a deep sigh.
I couldn't taste the rolled omelet in my mouth at all.
While I picked at my food,
a middle-aged woman's voice reached me.
"...I'm telling you, I hate cooking for him. Right, Ha-yeon?"
"Absolutely, Auntie. The food you make is so good. It's always the best!"
Yu Ha-yeon giggled, clinging to the side of this world's Han Si-jun's mom.
A level of sweetness on an entirely different plane from when she'd woken me up earlier.
The display was pure sycophancy.
'This is good...?'
The spread was kimchi stew, rolled omelet, and assorted other dishes.
But every last one of them defied my understanding of taste.
The rolled omelet was disgustingly bland, as if they'd forgotten to add salt.
The kimchi stew genuinely tasted like they'd thrown kimchi into water—only the flavor of chili powder lingered on my tongue.
This is not the food I knew...
I set down my chopsticks and said quietly,
"Thank you for the meal."
"When you barely ate a single spoonful?"
"...I don't have much appetite."
I couldn't force down another bite.
This was not a meal...
Even with this world's Han Si-jun's memories muddling things, my sense of taste was perfectly normal.
Even if it's your own mother's cooking, there's nothing you can do about it. Right?
The expressionless face of the father silently eating his food seemed to answer my unspoken question.
This was not fit for human consumption.
I quietly prayed for mealtime to end.
***
I waited out the meal like that.
Once it was over, Yu Ha-yeon reminded me that today was the entrance ceremony. I put on my uniform and resolved to head for Hero Academy, the main setting of V. AGE.
'...Do I really have to go to that?'
'Stop talking nonsense and put your uniform on.'
Black blazer, red necktie, black vest, white dress shirt.
The Hero Academy uniform, done in achromatic colors.
I had no desire to drag my weak body all the way there, but I had no choice except to follow her lead.
In truth, going was the safer option anyway.
Villain's Fate.
Among the categories of fate, it fell squarely on the unfavorable side.
Literally a destiny that turns you into a villain.
For example, negative fates like getting kidnapped by some shadowy organization and subjected to biological experiments.
If I had the power to protect the people around me, that would be one thing. But right now, I was little more than a walking tree.
Inhale, exhale. Just repeating the process.
A tree without even a drop of mana. I needed a forest to shelter me so I wouldn't get chopped down.
'That forest is the Academy and Yu Ha-yeon, the future S-rank Hero.'
My number one priority—far above the early fantasies I'd once had about romance with a childhood friend—was survival.
I would keep my distance from villain threats at the Academy and build up my power however I could.
I had fallen into the game's world, but thanks to my Will stat of 8 keeping me level-headed, that was the conclusion I had reached.
But still.
How had this body managed to pass the Academy entrance exam?
Leaving that one question unresolved, I stood in front of the door to leave the house.
"Stay safe, son."
"Take care of yourself."
Once I enrolled in the Academy, I would have to live in the dormitory, so this might be the last time I saw them.
These people were not my real parents.
Even so, the emotions my original body remembered seemed genuine.
"See you next time."
I would rather there weren't a next time, but I offered them words that promised one.
A wish that they wouldn't get swept up in my fate. And the words a son was supposed to say.
Refusing to say farewell properly wasn't something a child should do, was it?
Oblivious to my feelings, Yu Ha-yeon wrapped her arm around my neck and shouted cheerfully.
"We'll be back safely, Auntie, Uncle! Don't worry—I'll take good care of this one!"
Who's taking care of who?
From what I remembered, Yu Ha-yeon was not someone suited to looking after anyone.
The girl who showed signs of being a future S-rank was self-righteous and selfish.
Whenever something didn't suit her, she'd poke at me and act irritated.
And yet to everyone else, she put on a mask of the sweet, diligent kid and faked an innocent smile.
The past version of her in my memories had shattered my ideal image of the childhood friend into pieces.
'Give me back my childhood friend.'
I aimed the thought at the back of her head as we walked toward the Academy.
"What? You got something to say?"
"...No."
Maybe there was a reason she became an S-rank after all.
Had she heard me cursing her in my head? Yu Ha-yeon shot me a suspicious look.
Then, after studying me intently for a moment,
swoop.
She suddenly grabbed my hand and pulled.
"We're gonna be late, dummy. Just hurry up and follow me."
"I'm not a kid."
"Hmph. You're still a kid in my eyes, you know."
Yu Ha-yeon gave a scoff, then set off with my hand still clutched in hers.
Technically I was older, but I swallowed the thought and walked along beside her.
Her hand, as always, was small and warm.
***
The era of V. AGE was modeled after the real Earth. The Korea I was in now bore a certain resemblance to reality.
In the sense that monsters existed, and that there were people in power who held dangerous ideologies.
Creatures called Magic Beasts emerged from gates.
They were classified from F to S based on the amount of mana radiating from the gate they came from.
F-rank was a level ordinary citizens could clear if they worked together.
E-rank could be easily cleared if someone capable of manipulating mana was present.
But starting from D-rank, the difficulty spiked exponentially.
To clear a gate, you had to enter it and destroy its core.
Gates below D-rank mostly generated as flat terrain or simple structures.
So what about D-rank and above?
Mazes. Mountains. Oceans. Ruins.
From that point on, the gates contained distinct terrain. To conquer them, people with specialized training became an absolute necessity.
That was the reason Hero Academy had been created, and it was also one of the Association's efforts to protect ordinary citizens.
'Though that's not the whole story.'
In truth, the Association had a good public image, but in the game, it was a deeply corrupt organization.
I'd made destroying the Association my top priority back when I played for a reason.
The Hero Association was one of those useless institutions you could rank right up there with the villains themselves.
"What are you spacing out about?"
"Huh?"
I'd been so lost in thought about V. AGE's worldbuilding that I'd completely failed to notice the gaze beside me.
Yu Ha-yeon was staring holes into me with her dark eyes.
I decided to brush it off.
"Nothing. Just staring out the window."
"Hmm. Really? What's out there?"
"Buildings. People."
Not that I could actually see them properly.
The scenery outside a train moving at high speed by way of mana was gone in an instant. You couldn't even follow it with your eyes.
Yu Ha-yeon didn't seem pleased with my indifferent response. She fixed her black hair and glared at me.
"You're hiding something from me."
"What?"
"How many years have I been watching you? You think I wouldn't notice?"
She murmured in a chilly tone, her eyes as eerily calm as the sea before a typhoon.
"Tell me right now. What are you hiding."
My childhood friend's intuition radiated a murderous edge you'd sooner expect from a ghost.
'I knew it...'
There wasn't a trace of innocent sweetness to be found.
Somehow, my childhood friend felt deeply, profoundly off.