This Body, Resurrected

There was so much I wanted to say.

Everything that let me be this happy now—I owed all of it to my viewers.

Mine had been a life without purpose. Honestly, I'd been at a complete loss for how to spend whatever years I still had left.

The people who breathed hope back into someone like me were, without question, precious connections. So being comforted wasn't a bad feeling at all. Someone who'd spent a whole lifetime starving for love and attention could never have rejected this.

"Mmngh..."

And yet, for some reason, my mood felt... off.

How to put it—like wearing clothes that didn't quite fit?

Viewers who normally spent their time tearing into each other for fun were suddenly sending me these worry-soaked messages, and it only felt awkward. Maybe it was because they were approaching me so carefully now, so differently from before. Well... after what happened yesterday, it was only natural.

That was probably why.

"Aww, no way~"

My usual tone slipped out before I could stop it.

"We're all the 'diligent' types who get up at this hour, right?"

"Haha, I'll gladly take the concern. But honestly, this kind of vibe is way more comfortable for me."

Only then did something like a relaxed atmosphere settle in. Figuring it was safe to get to the point, I started with what I'd wanted to say most.

"First of all—thank you, everyone. You guys saved my life."

I murmured it softly and switched the cam on. Talking into a pitch-black screen just felt too awkward, and the viewers would prefer this side of things anyway.

"Sorry to crush the hype, but... no."

It wasn't that I didn't want to show my face, honestly.

But... I was still bound by a contract with the World Government. The Sword Saint Serena Eustania was a presence that absolutely could not be exposed.

So the only thing I could show my viewers was the no-cam hardcore streamer known as Lee Haneul. Crossing that line would have to wait until the war was completely over.

"...Right?"

Honestly, I'd been half-expecting a riot. This place was where all the trolls of a fringe gallery gathered to stream, after all.

So the unexpectedly mild reaction was genuinely moving. These weren't the type of kids to act like this... Knowing they were doing it out of worry for me made me feel strangely good.

"Well, I'll still make sure you don't leave empty-handed."

So I wanted to look as pretty as I could for them.

Before the camera came on, I checked myself once in the mirror.

An oversized top hung all the way down to my thighs. The exaggerated neckline laid my collarbones completely bare, and even a chest with a mind of its own peeked out just a little. The T-shirt hanging precariously off one shoulder carried a faintly dizzying atmosphere—the kind that looked ready to slip the second anyone so much as touched it, the kind that made people invent the rest of the picture on their own... that sort of suggestive air.

"...Hoo. Perfect."

I hadn't dressed up all that carefully, honestly. I didn't know women's fashion sense, had no idea how to put together a cute outfit, and I hated skirts on top of that—so my options were limited.

But I knew a man's heart well. I still carried a man's memories, and I'd lived shoulder-to-shoulder with men on the front lines.

"How do I look?"

Thanks to that, I could ask with real confidence the moment the camera switched on.

My first stream day came back to me.

The reaction when I'd revealed I was a girl that day had been exactly like this... except the firepower pouring out of a hundred viewers now was even hotter than back then.

So, half out of habit, I shifted how I was sitting.

I pulled one leg up and hugged it, resting my chin on my knee—the posture that always came out whenever I was watching something.

"My hair color? Aah, I told you I'm not Korean. This is my natural color."

I twirled a strand around my finger as I answered. My silver hair, steeped in that mysterious sheen, caught the weak light of the computer screen in the dark room and glowed a pale blue-green.

Wanting to amplify that otherworldly air, I released a thin thread of mana.

When I opened both hands, azure particles of wind unfurled outward. As the room took on a deeper blue cast, the hair reflecting that light grew richer still.

"See? I can even change the color like this."

"Heh..."

On any other day I would have recoiled and shut that chat down hard, but today I was in too good a mood to care.

The happiness of being loved outweighed any resistance to leaning into girliness. These viewers had gone out of their way for me, and I was so proud of them for it. I just wanted to show even a little of this gratitude that felt ready to spill over from my chest—gratitude I still didn't know how to put into words.

What filled the space left by the guilt that had been crushing my heart was the need to be wanted.

Maybe it was because I'd spent the age when I should have been growing up loved rolling around a battlefield—I found myself craving affection without meaning to. Being liked and cherished felt good.

So as long as no one crossed the line too hard, I left it alone.

But every so often, someone still completely lost it.

"Ah—thank you."

Of course, Maria cut it off in an instant.

"Oh right—I never mentioned the manager, did I?"

Honestly, she'd been so quiet until now that I'd completely forgotten for a moment. I kept thinking I'd bring it up later and then just... blanked.

It couldn't be helped. Today really had been one thing after another.

No headache. No miserable thoughts surfacing. No heavy, sagging mood—this was the first time. I'd been so busy just thinking about meeting the viewers with this fluttery feeling in my chest that I hadn't thought about it at all.

"She's my personal physician. We've known each other since the Siberia War, and it turns out she hangs around the Swordsmanship Gallery too. So I made her manager and Par-ttak."

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As I spoke, I pulled up the Swordsmanship Gallery on stream, scrolling to the notice from two days ago and pointing out her gallery nick.

"See her? The one who threatened to terrorize us if we don't bring SsaX Burgers? She's our Par-ttak and stream manager from now on, so treat her carefully, okay?"

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"Pfft—hahahaha...!"

I burst out laughing at their reactions before I could help it. I knew what Maria was like in real life, after all.

As the princess of the Far East Army, she had always been grinding away in the frontline field hospitals. Everyone respected her for it—everyone loved her.

And that same person was being treated like a complete freak here.

There was no way I could hold the laugh in.

"Heh... But deep down she's a good person. She's the one who treated me, and she's the reason I can stream again at all."

So this was what people meant when they said time flies without you noticing.

Laughing freely, talking freely—before I knew it, a pale blue light was seeping in through the window. Dawn was breaking over the sky.

"Huh? How long has it been...?"

Only then did I check the clock—six-thirty.

The sounds of a city preparing for a new day drifted in. Soft car noise spreading across the quiet sky woke my sense of time back up.

"W-wait a second?"

I'd only glanced at the clock for a moment, and in that blink the chat had already gone completely feral. You'd think I'd be used to this kind of situation by now... but I wasn't quite there yet.

I kept talking, trying to calm them down first.

"Don't worry. I'm not ending the stream."

"Ah, I'm seriously fine, okay? My doctor unnie buffed me up—I'm still good."

And just like that, the viewers' attention poured over toward Maria instead.

A true doctor of our age, they said. Worship her, they said... Watching them flip from recoiling in horror a second ago to this made them look oddly cute, so I left it alone.

Right now, there was something else bothering me more.

"More importantly—why did our room fill up this much?"

"Ah..."

Thinking about it, they weren't wrong.

Toxic viewers from a fringe gallery, a streamer they'd never met before, and the snipers who'd been targeting that streamer all joined forces to save one person. It would have been stranger if it hadn't gotten famous.

But I couldn't quite say I was happy about it.

This was supposed to be time just for me and our gallery viewers. It felt like that time was being stolen.

Looking at the comments, most of them seemed to be people who'd been watching Ara's stream—and somehow it felt like I was poaching my benefactor's audience.

.

.

.

Under the flood of incoming chat, the regulars' messages got buried. The cozy little late-night chat-stream atmosphere flipped completely.

"Mmm..."

I already had enough money to loaf around for the rest of my life. Fame? There wasn't a person alive who didn't know the name Sword Saint. Even the number-one streamer on the platform would be just another civilian in front of the name Sword Saint.

So the reason I streamed at all was purely because I wanted to talk with the viewers from our gallery.

The grateful friends who'd given a goal to someone lost and wandering, locked up in a room. I didn't know how the viewers saw me—but to me, this time was truly precious.

So—

"First of all, I'm really grateful you came all the way to a tiny stream like this at this hour."

"But... today's a meaningful day for me in a lot of ways, you know?"

I said it brightly and stood up from my seat. When I powered on the VR device, the stream feed shifted from reality into the virtual world.

I kept talking as I switched the capsule on.

"So I want to be with the people who actually like me."

I offered a gentle smile to the viewers who were starting to feel uneasy, then climbed into the capsule. My vision flipped, and a kendo dojo appeared.

"So I'm gonna shake the ants off a little."

Before I knew it, the viewer count had ballooned close to six hundred. Considering Ara averaged around three thousand viewers, it wasn't all that strange.

Which left me curious.

If I seriously started shaking the ants out—how many would be left?

"Begin training."

Watching the viewers recoil made a faint smile tug at my lips, somehow.