Into the Game
My name is Lee Hyeon. Age: twenty-three. Currently on a leave of absence from university.
When my parents adopted me from an orphanage as a child, I'd half expected them to mistreat me — but that was just drama-story thinking, a one-dimensional cliché. They treated me with the same tenderness any birth parents would have shown.
So I turned twenty, and at last, with my early-admission acceptance letter in hand, I was sprinting home with a smile of pure joy to show them. What I found instead was a seething wall of flame, consuming our house and spreading to every building around it.
It had been an ordinary residential neighborhood. The fire spread all the way to the apartment complex nearby, and it took five full fire engines before it was finally brought under control.
The point of origin was our backyard.
Someone had slipped in, set the fire for no reason at all, and walked away.
That fire claimed a hundred lives.
My family was among them.
My father, who always took the scoldings from Mom yet never stopped cheering me on. My mother, who nagged Dad constantly but was warmer and kinder than anyone. Even my little sister, who snapped at me day and night but gave me everything she had to give.
Their bodies were never found.
The fire took everything I had.
On the day of the funeral, I met my aunts and uncles — and they hurled a letter written by their own sister at me while wailing.
"You killed our sister!!!!"
"When you said you were adopting him... I should have torn you away from that idea, should have stopped you with my own hands..."
A single venomous word, drowned in my aunt's grief.
"Honey. That's enough."
"Haah..."
Why would you even say that?
Your sister died in that fire too, didn't she? Your brother-in-law as well?
Then you shouldn't be blaming me — you should, at the very least, be mourning her. Crying for her.
So why? Why do you stand there drowning in rage, cursing only me?
Why? I hadn't done a single thing wrong.
I'd simply come home, and an inferno had been there to greet me.
They were relatives, yet faces I had never once met until that day...
But for some reason, their eyes were full of hostility toward me...
It was as if the sole reason they'd come was to tear me apart...
And as they kept hammering at it — my fault, my fault, my fault —
my mind, gnawed hollow, finally gave way.
I cut off every trip outside. I severed every line of contact.
Friends. Family. Neighbors.
What I buried myself in afterward was games.
Just as my parents' relatives had chosen me as their scapegoat,
games became my refuge.
Money didn't matter.
My parents had left me their estate.
Of course, I knew I shouldn't be spending it that way — but whenever I looked away from the screen, all that waited outside was the trace of my family. So to keep my eyes off those traces, I clung to the one thing that demanded total focus, and I played.
Black Soul.
Monster Hunter.
Elden Ring.
I cleared them all through brutal, grind-every-hour playthroughs, and as that mountain of beaten games grew, one title caught my eye.
Four Pillars.
I don't know why, but it stood out — and before I realized it, I was hunting down its strategy guide.
The first time I opened it, I groaned at the sheer thickness of the thing and at the fact that it was an adult game. And yet, some time later, I had read it cover to cover countless times and was already buried in the game itself.
But I couldn't clear it. No matter what I tried.
Another bad ending. Another game over. Another, and another.
It was an unbroken chain of failure.
No other game had ever pushed me this far.
So I told myself: one more run, and then I quit for good.
That was when something arrived in the game's shared message inbox.
One single line waited inside.
This time, I hope you can save what is precious to you.
No sender — only a recipient. Me. What I felt reading it was fear, and suspicion.
Who on earth was this, to know me so well?
Who could speak as if they knew my background, my family?
Could it be... is the developer of this game the arsonist?
I opened the download site where I'd gotten the game — but my installed game wasn't listed there anymore, even though I had downloaded it from that very page.
Worse, the site that had supposedly hosted the strategy guide turned out to be a blog documenting someone's pet hamster growing up.
And the notepad file where I'd copy-pasted the entire guide to memorize it? Blank. Completely blank.
Though by then, the guide and every hard-won lesson it held were burned into my body rather than my notes — muscle memory down to the bone.
Concluding that my computer had been hacked, I was in the middle of shutting down my bank account and freezing my cards when it hit.
A splitting agony tore through my skull — a throbbing, pulsing headache like nothing I had ever felt. Pain beyond anything.
Tears welled up from the sheer agony, and I lost consciousness.
Even as my eyes closed, the last memory surfacing in my mind was the warmth of my parents holding me close.
And when I opened my eyes again—
a colossal tree loomed before me, and a dirt road stretched endlessly into the distance.
A landscape like something straight out of a game.
As I stood there blinking around, trying to gather any information about where I was, my gaze locked onto one scene: a band of men who looked like bandits, brandishing glinting blades, marching toward what appeared to be a village. Bandits — the kind of thing that only existed in novels and games. I couldn't wrap my head around it. My mind spiraled with too many stray thoughts, and apparently I made a sound, because one of the bandits noticed I existed.
"Hey! Who's there?!"
"Shit..."
None of it made sense, but the thought that being caught meant dying drove me into a mad sprint — yet their encirclement closed far faster than I'd expected. Before long, I was seized by the man who seemed to be the bandit leader. He grabbed my crotch, then clicked his tongue in disappointment.
"A pity. If you'd been a woman, we could've had some real fun with you. A boy, huh. Still, that skin's clean as porcelain and you've got one baby face — some highborn noble lord would pay handsomely for you. Khekhek..."
Just as they moved to haul me off, a woman's voice sounded behind the leader.
"Is that so? Then I'd be grateful if you told me which noble that was."
"Who—?! Are you an imperial knight?!"
The leader whipped around at the sight of the female knight and shouted in visible shock.
"You know me?"
"Of course I do. Had a taste of you last time, didn't I... right around here, in fact."
As he spoke, the leader gestured toward his own crotch.
Understanding the meaning instantly, the female knight — her face hidden by her helm — must have been scowling something fierce beneath it.
Natural enough. Her hand had already drifted to the hilt of the sword at her hip.
Shiiing.
Without a word, she drew the silver longsword and leveled it at the bandits.
Then she addressed them.
"You defiled a knight? I can't fathom why you'd taunt me to my face like this — but let me make one thing clear. You won't be dying easily."
"Subdue her and strip the armor! Tonight, that woman's ours!"
The instant the words left his mouth, the knight and the bandits collided.
But the fight was utterly one-sided. The female knight cut through the bandits' throats one by one — every time her blade swung, another head dropped to the earth.
"The knight who came before was never this strong...! Don't tell me... the Commander...? Why...?!"
The leader, aiming for her blind side, lost his right arm to her sword as well.
Perhaps he sensed he was going to die there, because even at the very edge of death, he kept boasting of his crimes like a man recounting his life's achievements.
"That knight was something else, I tell you. A shame I never got a taste of you. Khekhekek... you, too, s-someday..."
He was still laughing as he tried to force out more words — but they never came. His head left his shoulders, and from the severed stump there was only a wet hiss of spraying blood and the rush of escaping wind.
"Even in death, I pray you're torn limb from limb beneath the claws of the Four Divine Beasts. May you be trapped in torment eternal."
"Are you hurt anywhere?"
Unlike with the leader, this voice asked me with genuine gentleness.
Startled, I looked at my reflection in a pool of still water nearby.
With a face like this, if I'd gone into child acting, my parents would have adored it and given me everything I ever wanted.
Not that they hadn't spoiled me plenty regardless.
That's how handsome the face looking back was — a boy of about fifteen.
"Hey, kid? You okay? Are you hurt badly?"
The knight removed her helmet, leaning in with rippling golden hair and sapphire eyes to check me for wounds. She looked like an elf straight out of a game.
Though since her ears were round like an ordinary person's rather than pointed, let me correct that: a woman with elf-like beauty.
I opened my mouth to answer her.
"I'm fine. Thank you... noona."
The words had come out in Korean — yet somehow she understood them. Muttering her relief, she approached me slowly.
"Thank goodness. Do you have somewhere to go? Where is your home?"
I lowered my head, hiding my grief as best I could.
Even so, she seemed to sense something, and gave a sorrowful smile before gently ruffling my hair once.
"I have no home. My whole family is dead. Though it wasn't the bandits' doing — it happened for other reasons."
Perhaps it was pity that moved her.
She held out her hand and asked me to come with her.
Dropped into another world just now, food, clothing, and shelter were the first priority. And after what had nearly happened, staying safe mattered most of all.
Another reason: judging by this woman's clothing and armor, she was almost certainly of the very highest station.
"I see. If you have nowhere to stay right now, how about living with me?"
"I... beg your pardon? But we've only just met."
"Oh, so you even know the phrase 'only just met.' You're a sharp one. But I can't just abandon you here. I have no way of knowing what sort of threats the demons might bring to your doorstep."
From her lips came a word I could not afford to let slide.
"..."
That word settled it for me.
This really was the world inside a game.
She'd said demons — and if I had to guess, only one game used that term.
Four Pillars.
Damn it. Of all the games in the world, I'd been dropped into the one I'd been trying to delete.
"Hey, kid?"
Seeing me lost in thought, the knight must have worried I was in pain, and called out to me.
Having finished sorting my thoughts in record time, I answered her.
"Yes."
"You look dazed. You don't seem well — let's get you to my estate."
"May I, really?"
"Of course. Just think of it as your big sister sticking her nose in where it doesn't belong."
And so, still trapped in the body of my game avatar, I followed the beautiful golden-haired knight out of the forest.
Churning through every possibility of how I would survive from here on—
—I set my one ultimate goal.
Whether this was some other world or the world inside a game, I was certain my purpose would never change.
Survival.