Snipe!
"Haa..."
An island with a nuclear power plant. Arkhangelsk.
Inside Front Line, Ara's breath fogged out across the virtual Siberian city. A place where the temperature swung past twenty below, the city was never kind to anything that still drew breath.
And if you weren't in the downtown core where the reactor stood, but out on the snow-buried fringe of the island—well. That was worse.
"Of all the maps I could get stuck with, it had to be this one."
Ara's immersion rate was currently at twenty percent.
That low, even death-level pain registered as little more than a scratch. And still she could feel the brutal cold. Even the thick default winter gear couldn't keep it out.
In other words, her character was freezing to death.
Your character's cold resistance is critically low.
We recommend entering a safehouse immediately.
"Ugh—I need a safehouse to show up before I can enter one...!"
"Hrrgh... you guys are so dead when I'm done...!"
Ara muttered under her breath and glanced up at the top-left of her screen. The mission payout that had already piled up to three hundred thousand won sat there like a prophecy of her inevitable failure.
...She did not like that one bit.
Sure, she'd never taken first in Survival Mode. But the idea that she wouldn't even crack the top five? Come on.
She was going to live. She was going to make top five and watch her chat spiral into despair. With that vow clenched between her teeth, Ara pushed forward into the cold.
As if the world had heard her, a tiny safehouse wavered into view through the raging storm.
"I'm saved...!"
A glance at her wrist display showed the ambient temperature already plunging past twenty-five below. The health bar on the same readout was more than halfway gone.
So Ara moved faster.
But there were a few things she had overlooked.
First: people weren't the only things drawn to a warm light.
And second: charging blind through a whiteout, broadcasting your position to everything that hunted in it, was a very bad idea.
Monster signatures detected nearby.
Please exercise cautio—
"Kyaah?!"
Warning text cascaded across her vision all at once. She yanked her gun free and dropped into a ready stance, but there was no way she was going to answer creatures that had been waiting for her.
She never even got the gun up properly. Her eyes squeezed shut.
No matter how much Front Line was her main content... in moments like this, she just couldn't hold the fear down.
And the audience mostly came to enjoy exactly that reaction.
So, clinging to a thin thread of regret, she let the muzzle drop toward the ground.
"Uh—?!"
In that instant, three currents of wind tore through the space around her.
Horizontal Slash
⟨ Harvest ⟩
Grrraagh?!
Kieek?
Kiiiiiiik...
The three werewolves lunging for Ara dissolved into the wind. Through the bone-cutting Siberian cold, a warm, soft green breeze wrapped her whole body.
Before she could even process what had happened, a hand reached in from beyond her field of view.
"Ah...?"
Survival Mode was a mode that crowned one survivor out of a hundred. You might join forces against monsters and NPCs—and still never know when someone would put a knife in your back.
Which meant an offered hand was something you treated carefully.
She knew that. And still, Ara took the pale hand without thinking. Something about it felt familiar, in a way she couldn't name.
"Ahaha. Good—I made it in time."
Whoosh—
The other girl pulled, and the blizzard between them tore open. Beyond it stood a black-haired girl, smiling bright and clear.
She was wearing a mask, but recognizing her wasn't hard.
Yesterday was still lodged in Ara's head, after all.
That girl, smiling through a haze of tears, whispering thank you for coming back—she had looked so fragile it almost hurt.
"...What are you doing here?"
"Came to repay a favor."
Click.
Sheathing her sword, Haneul helped Ara up. Neither of them said a word until they were inside the safehouse.
Only when Ara was starting to feel restless did Haneul's lips move.
"In that spirit—shall we have a deep conversation about why your muzzle was pointing at the floor?"
"...Ah."
"Well. Honestly, this is a matter of mindset."
Haneul finished there and took a step back. Ara's expression had gone faintly blank.
Wondering if she'd gone too hard, she flicked a glance sideways—and found the chat window on fire. Ara's stream chat was halfway to a riot.
Well. This was probably far enough.
Anything more wouldn't mean much—and the blizzard was starting to ease.
"Feeling a little better?"
"Thanks to you. You got here in time—nothing too bad."
"Then shall we get moving?"
"Yeah."
Ara gathered her scattered gear, nodded lightly, and pushed herself to her feet.
When she turned her head, she saw that lively-looking avatar again. Lee Haneul. The girl who had come because she wanted to repay yesterday.
"...I really can't get a read on her."
That first meeting with Haneul was burned in.
When Ara had been in danger, the way she appeared like the wind and gunned the monsters down—she had looked like a real hero.
But under that strength lived things no girl should have to carry. Every word stained with the memory of war had hit like a bruise.
And then today.
This completely different, happy girl was a good sight, of course. Ara was relieved she didn't seem crushed by yesterday. And hearing that she'd come to repay a favor—that was kind of her.
Obviously. A kid that cute coming all the way out to a backwater like Arkhangelsk? Who could possibly hate that?
"Come to think of it..."
How did she even get here?
The thought arrived all at once.
Too strange to call coincidence.
As she'd said more than once, the outer zone of Arkhangelsk was the middle of nowhere. Most people never even considered dropping there.
So—how?
"Haneul... is that okay? Calling you that?"
"For now, sure. Why?"
"Ah, nothing big—"
Ara hesitated a beat over how to put it, then decided to just throw the pitch.
"How did you even get out here? This is the fringe—hardly anyone gathers in a place like this."
"Ah. I had a little help from the stream."
"Huh?"
"People usually call that sniping, right?"
"Excuse me?"
The sheer shamelessness of the snipe confession short-circuited Ara's brain for a second.
The chat, apparently, had the same reaction.
"Don't worry. I'll protect you somehow."
"Uh, um..."
Honestly, for a moment Ara wasn't sure what to do.
If this girl was guarding her, top five felt almost guaranteed.
But the trauma piece snagged. If the same thing happened again—wouldn't that be genuinely dangerous?
She couldn't forget the way immersion had spiked past ninety percent, the way the virtual world had started to eat into reality.
That girl, trapped in a blood-red world that made your head ache just to look at—was she really okay? Ara's brow drew together a little.
"Is the PTSD... okay?"
"Yes. Thanks to you, Ara, and the viewers who helped me, I was able to get better. For a while, the same thing shouldn't happen again."
"Well, if you're saying that much..."
The chat didn't look opposed either.
So Ara nodded, sealing the agreement.
"Alright. Let's stick together."
The story of the grateful magpie was one of my favorite folktales. I loved the idea of someone laying down their own life to save the person who had saved theirs.
In the real world, people like that were rare.
War drove people mad, and the fear of death was more than enough to make anyone forget a favor.
But even in despair, there were people who held onto those shining things.
My sister, Cecilia, was one of them.
No matter how hopeless the situation, she told us never to stop being human.
The moment we let common desire take us, she said, we became no different from the monsters themselves. That was her doctrine.
Maybe that was why.
"Ara—get down!"
Piiing—!
"...Ha?"
It was the donation that flew in with the sniper shot that made my eyes roll back.