The Worst Boss
“Hello. My name is Shin Daeun.”
If Daeun ever began introducing herself, nine times out of ten she would start with a line like that.
“I’m twenty-six years old, and I’m a streamer on Picsic.”
After that would probably come the basics of her background.
There were quite a few streamers who didn’t want their real-world identities known.
Some of Daeun’s colleagues hid their faces from the start because they didn’t want their personal information exposed, while others did it because of the negative image people still had of streamers.
Once your identity was out there, all kinds of tedious things could happen. Even though public perception had improved a lot compared to the past, there were still plenty of times when people’s expressions changed the moment they learned what you did for a living.
Daeun had been through all of that herself, so she could understand perfectly why some of her colleagues chose to keep their jobs secret.
And yet she still chose to tell people, partly because she had shown her face from the very beginning of her broadcast career, and partly because she simply didn’t want to be trapped by that sort of thing.
That attitude soaked straight into her broadcasts. Her streams and videos came to be known for one thing above all else: freedom, or maybe healing.
“It’s been five years since I started streaming, and my streamer name is Journey. I picked it from the English word journey because I love traveling.”
She loved traveling.
That sentence took up the biggest part of Daeun’s life.
Enough to name her streamer account Journey.
Ever since she was young, she had gone everywhere she could, both in Korea and overseas, and her parents, seeing how badly she longed for it, supported her without complaint.
What did money matter when their child, who had practically lived in hospitals from the moment she was born, was finally healthy enough to roam around on her own?
Daeun actually had a harder time convincing her parents to stop supporting her so much when they kept worrying over her and giving her even more.
For someone like her, Silia Online was a revolution.
“Whoa…!”
The sunlight wrapping around her skin, the breeze gently brushing her hair, the soft feel of earth under her shoes.
Everything was no different from reality.
Daeun savored the freshness of nature, something she could rarely feel in the real world.
And she knew it at once.
She was going to fall head over heels for this beautiful world.
* * *
One week after the first discovery.
“Aaaagh!”
“Healer’s dying!”
One week after that.
“Just die already, you bastard!”
“This insane boss—go easy on us for once!”
...Then a few more days after that.
“How did you die?”
“My neck got sliced off in one blow. You?”
“He destroyed my heart.”
“Oh, wow… But why do you talk like that?”
“I, foreigner. Korean not familiar.”
“Come on, the automatic Big Data translation module’s been out forever. Stop talking nonsense.”
“I, not understand. Korean is difficult.”
“What a crazy attention-seeker…!”
Among players, the Grave Keeper had become the kind of boss people said might one day reveal a key clue toward clearing the game, but for now he was treated as a boss that couldn’t be beaten—effectively impossible to clear.
An NPC designed to block players from progressing. Or perhaps the enormous stain on the reputation of Demonins, the company that made Silia Online.
Many players gave up on the boss fight, and the ones who remained split into two broad groups.
Those who kept challenging it for the glittering honor of being the first kill or first clear.
And those who had fully entered complete-enjoyment mode.
The community was a mess of every possible kind of nonsense and running gags.
And yet the heat around the Grave Keeper was clearly dying down.
Posts had started thinning out several days ago, and now the difference from the game’s peak was obvious.
With no clear and no meaningful progress to speak of, it was only natural that the enthusiasm would fade.
If things kept going like this, the boss would end up as nothing more than a badly designed mistake, forgotten by the players.
Yes, if nothing unusual happened.
* * *
“Ugh... guys, are we really going the right way?”
“No, it’s weird!”
Usually Journey’s chat was playful, sometimes even a little teasing, but overall it was pretty calm.
Given how gentle her streams usually were, there wasn’t much reason to curse. And even when the occasional troublemaker came in to stir things up, she cut them off immediately and without mercy.
But today, the chat felt very different from usual.
Not a single person on her side, not a single person agreeing with her—just a barrage of thrown stones.
After blocking the people who crossed the line, Journey lifted her head and looked up ahead.
“Is it really fair to call this a road?”
What, exactly, was a road?
By dictionary definition, it was a strip of land with a certain width made so that people, animals, or vehicles could pass over it.
There were other meanings if you dug deeper, but leaving those aside for now—
“It’s so overgrown…?”
She hadn’t exactly been expecting a neatly paved asphalt road or a clean line of sidewalk in the middle of a mountain like this.
Still, if you were going to call it a road, shouldn’t you at least be able to travel on it?
What lay before Journey’s eyes was a dense forest of trees and weeds, along with steep, rugged mountain terrain.
I knew the path would be rough, but not this rough...*
Journey let out a sigh so heavy it seemed to sink into the ground.
“All those raid teams that tried this had to pass through here every time they died. Wow, I really have to respect that.”
It already took quite a while just to get here from the nearest respawn point, and even after arriving, the fun of hiking up a mountain was waiting for you.
Journey thought it wouldn’t be strange at all if an ordinary person got fed up and quit.
“Fine. I’m going, I’m going.”
After denying reality for as long as she could, she finally set foot into the treacherous mountain terrain.
“But seriously, no one thought to make a proper road? Isn’t that the sort of thing people would do?”
“Ah, right. Fair enough.”
They’d probably just bash their heads against the wall one more time instead.
Journey accepted that easily enough.
Half-sobbing as she climbed the mountain, she stopped for a moment to catch her breath and wipe away the sweat beading on her forehead.
“Wow, this is seriously rough. At this point, I bet at least one person thought about setting the whole place on fire.”
“Ah, no! I didn’t mean me—I mean, someone like that could exist!”
“Permanently hunted...? What’s that?”
“...So it’s basically telling you to quit the game?”
Considering there was only one character she could create, and that deletion meant she could never create another one, it was an incredibly harsh punishment.
“Huh... there was something like that?”
For a game famous for its enormous freedom, Silia Online having a system like that was surprising.
Journey found it rather unexpected.
“I thought Silia Online wouldn’t care what you did.”
“Hey, don’t fight. If you fight, I’ll ban you.”
Journey hurriedly slammed shut the door to what looked like it was about to become an arena.
After locking it tight and issuing a stern warning, she glared, just in case anyone tried to push through from the other side.
“Those people are all permanently hunted, right? That’s what you said. Then they’ve already paid the price, so there’s no need to keep arguing about it. If you really want to complain, take it up with the game company, not my stream.”
The way people enjoy a game varies from person to person, so there was no simple line between right and wrong.
Maybe there was room to criticize bug-abuse play that twisted the system, but could you really condemn someone for using a system the game itself had implemented?
It was a difficult issue that people genuinely debated a lot.
Given the severe penalties, it was clearly not the kind of playstyle the developers wanted, but since it wasn’t an external punishment and was instead a built-in in-game leash, Journey felt there wasn’t much room to complain.
She also just didn’t like the idea of indiscriminate slaughter, deep down.
“Anyway, we’re almost there now, right? It feels like we’ve been walking forever.”
“...”
They were right.
According to the information, the monsters that spawned in this mountain were fairly high-level, so with her low level they would not be easy opponents.
She wasn’t a combat-focused player to begin with, and her proficiency was lacking too, which only made it worse.
“Don’t you dare jinx it. Whenever someone says stuff like that, it always—”
“Kyaaaaaaek!”
“...happens.”
What goes around comes around.
Was there a proverb more fitting for the situation than that one?
The moment she finished speaking, a cockatrice—a monster with a chicken’s head—appeared before Journey.
And to make matters worse, it was a flying monster, which was bad news for her matchup-wise.
“Um, I don’t really want to hurt you, so could you just let me pass?”
Kyaek! Kiek!
“...Yeah, that’s a no then.”
Unfortunately, the cockatrice didn’t seem interested in talking to Journey.
Should she run? If she did, it would just catch up and kill her.
Should she accept death? Then she’d have to make this long trip all over again, from the respawn point back here.
If she ran into another monster on the way, she might have to start this whole journey from scratch yet again.
And besides...
I don’t want it to hurt.
Journey gritted her teeth and drew her sword.
The chat was in turmoil, spilling out opinions of every sort, but none of it reached her anymore.
I can do this.
All she had to do was stay calm, watch the motion, and respond.
Her grip tightened on the sword until the bones in her hand stood out white beneath the skin.
Inhale deeply. Exhale.
When she repeated that process about three times—
“Kyaaaak!”
“...!”
It’s coming!
The cockatrice lunged.
With her concentration driven to the absolute limit, Journey saw the cockatrice’s movements as if they were slowing down.
The right leg drove into the ground, then the left followed.
Its wings, pulled back tight, carried enough force to swing at any moment.
Its head, staring at her with murderous eyes, slipped free from its body—
“...Huh?”
Fwoosh!
The neck of the cockatrice charging at her suddenly flew into the air.
Its body, now headless, crashed to the ground, and bright red blood geysered from the severed wound.
Thud.
When Journey could only blink in stupid disbelief at the sudden turn of events, a black shadow landed lightly in front of her.
“...Grave Keeper!”
The figure she had seen countless times in the community was standing right in front of her.
In any case, she was alive, so wasn’t that good enough?
The tension that had been clamped tight through her whole body drained away at once, leaving her limp with relief.
But it was still too early to relax.
“...”
“W-wait a second!”
The battle state was still active, and that sword was still pointed at her.
Even someone clueless would understand what that meant.
It was an old, worn sword that looked like it could snap at any second, but Journey knew that countless players had already been sent back to the respawn point by that very blade.
Drip.
Swallow.
A drop of blood fell from the sword, and Journey swallowed hard too.
“W-wait! Time out!”
Just as when other players had tried to speak to the Grave Keeper, no reply came.
One step.
Two steps.
The Grave Keeper drew closer and closer.
At the sensation of death itself approaching, Journey’s heart was pounding like crazy when—
She shouted before she knew it.
“Wait!”
He stopped.
“...Granic?”
At the same time, a soft, delicate girl’s voice slipped out from beneath the cape.
“...?”
Journey and her viewers both froze.
---