Breaking Limits Side by Side
People have a habit of setting their own limits in advance. Personal fears or prejudices born from past failures keep them from showing their true ability. It was something the coach of the Blue Dragon Dragons told me while I was preparing to go pro, a fragment still lodged in my chest.
“Baekseolgi! The next attack is coming!”
“I know. Just stay calm and block it.”
I deliberately gave Yujacha the shadow tiger, whose patterns were easier to dodge. Unlike the human-shaped grim reaper boss, the larger enemies with wide attack ranges were actually simpler to handle. It was common sense in games: the bigger the body, the more gaps between patterns. This wasn’t a punishing soulslike, and the horror game seemed to account for the player’s mental fatigue.
“When he slams his right foot down, block it with your sword! The left is just a feint!”
While slowly parrying the grim reaper’s attacks, I kept calling out safe moments so Yujacha wouldn’t make a mistake. The enemy I faced threw daggers from afar for ranged pressure and swung a lightning-wreathed blade up close. Every time our swords clashed, lightning erupted with a delay—clang, clang, clang, krrraaang!—making it an annoying opponent.
Originally, we were probably supposed to clear the shadow tiger first and tackle this boss together. My fingers tensed over the keyboard, sweat beading on my skin.
「Hahahaha! Yes, yes! This is the kind of opponent worth fighting! These days, vengeful ghosts have no conviction!」
My protagonist barely managed to fend off the grim reaper’s strikes, even deflecting the lightning, and the enemy spat out that line.
The BGM grew faster and more tense. Listening to it, I caught the hint. The timing for parrying the sword strikes wasn’t identical, but the moment the lightning gathered was fixed—right at the song’s climax, when the electric guitar rang out. Only then did the enemy wrap lightning around his blade and swing.
‘If I’d been playing alone, I never would’ve noticed this.’
This discovery came because I was also focusing on the shadow tiger’s sounds and patterns to help Yujacha parry. Normally I would’ve ignored the background music entirely and tried to brute-force the enemy with raw mechanics. One of my chronic weaknesses while preparing for pro play was refusing to rely on the team and insisting on solo carrying instead. It was a bad habit born from a desperate need to prove myself—good intentions twisted into something ugly.
Back then, after my mother’s divorce, I hated being ignored or overshadowed more than anything.
‘…It’s definitely different when I play with Yujacha. It feels like every burden in my heart has been lifted.’
But right now, things were different. Just like when I achieved a hexa-kill in Grand Arts Hero, the pressure to perform perfectly had vanished. My goal wasn’t to prove my skill to others anymore—it was to help more people watch Yujacha’s stream.
“I’m starting to get used to it. I can see the breathing room now.”
I had been no-hit perfect-parrying the grim reaper this whole time. All I had to do was focus on the music and watch for the electric guitar.
“B-Baekseolgi! I did it by myself! I mean, I saw some scary parts in between… but when I told myself it was just a really big cat, it became a little more manageable!”
Right after that, a triumphant voice came from beside me.
“And… knowing you were right next to me made it less scary too.”
Yujacha had finally defeated the shadow tiger. Even with my support, repeatedly achieving clear results like this was an experience that pushed past her limits. It would surely help her later when she became a major corporate streamer.
“Good job. Now focus on the music that’s playing… just be careful when the electric guitar sounds. That’s when he does the lightning slam.”
I praised her and shared the strategy I’d discovered. Even if the grim reaper’s patterns were faster and more off-beat than the tiger’s, once you knew the trick, he wasn’t an impossible opponent.
“…Are you giving me hints right now? Spoiling it like this takes the fun out of it!”
Yujacha actually teased me for telling her. She must have gained real confidence in the game. She’d been the same in previous streams—if she truly believed she could do it, she showed decent skill.
“It’d be a shame to die meaninglessly after coming this far. That’s why I’m telling you.”
“Don’t do that next time! Games are supposed to be fun, remember!”
Yujacha repeated something I’d said before, her voice bright with excitement. Maybe I’d been underestimating her.
After we finally dealt with the grim reaper, what greeted us at the very end of the game was this:
「So you fake bastard actually crawled all the way here.」
The enemy had the exact same face as the protagonist Cheoyong—unlike the gods, he had no twisted parts. He looked like a perfect mirror image of the character I was playing. The game’s main plot involved the cursed mirror called Manwoegyeong, which had supposedly buried the protagonist underground along with his identical copies.
「I knew you’d come back even if I buried you. No matter how much you wear my face and clothes, you’re nothing but a lump of flesh without a heart.」
Something felt off about both the grim reaper’s lines and this one. While I was still trying to piece together what was happening—
“Wait, does this mean Baekseolgi was the fake one from the start, and the real Cheoyong is the person standing right there?”
VTuber Yujacha suddenly showed off unexpected knowledge and explained the game’s twist. Maybe she really was a rich young lady after all. Thinking back, she sometimes displayed sharp insight in the strangest places, like someone who’d been educated from a young age.
“Why would that be the case?”
“That’s how the original story goes. The Silla-era song Cheoyongga, written by a man whose wife was stolen by a plague god, is exactly about that.”
The legend was that Cheoyong had calmly composed and sung a song after witnessing his wife sleeping with the plague god one night. In short, after his wife was NTR’d by the disease deity, the protagonist Cheoyong responded by roasting the god with a song.
“But this game twists it a little. The mirror that copies himself ends up twisting the person.”
Yujacha neatly summarized all the cutscenes we’d seen so far. The scene where Cheoyong’s wife pulled the buried protagonist out of the ground. The grotesquely twisted copies rushing to kill both him and her. And finally, the grim reaper mentioning the ledger and calling the protagonist a vengeful spirit who had deceived another man’s wife.
“At first it must have been nice. He could make copies with the mirror and make them do all the annoying work.”
“Right. It’s basically a tool straight out of Doraemon.”
“But then he started pushing even the things he should do with his wife onto the copies. Not just listening to her complaints or worries, but helping with farming… even nighttime activities.”
I couldn’t help but be surprised by how casually Yujacha mentioned “nighttime activities.” Given her usual RP, I’d expected her to tease me with that kind of word.
“Love is something you have to express with words, or the other person won’t know. No matter how much money or actions you show.”
She spoke in a slightly serious tone, as if overlaying someone she knew onto the game’s hidden mastermind. Come to think of it, I probably didn’t know anything real about Yujacha. I didn’t know her actual personality, speech patterns, or what sorrows she carried. After all, a VTuber was ultimately just acting out a fictional character through RP. Even from the private messages she’d sent as CodeCode, she seemed far more cautious and introverted than her on-stream persona suggested.
“Right? Even if I were Cheoyong’s wife, I might have thought the fake who took my side and cherished me was the real one.”
“…Yeah.”
Should I think of Yujacha as fake, or as real?
「Haha, so you ended up mixing bodies with my wife and growing attached? I tried using this cursed mirror again to kill you, but it seems it was all pointless.」
The enemy in front of us blew away those worries with his next line. For me, who still carried childhood trauma, infidelity and affairs were especially sensitive topics.
「Now, who’s the real one and who’s the fake? Hm?」
The real Cheoyong leapt down from the moonlit roof, drew his sword, and charged straight at us.
“Let’s just finish this quickly. At this point, whether the protagonist is fake or not doesn’t matter, right?”
I spoke as if trying to convince myself, telling her to prepare for the enemy’s attack.
However, the final boss—the real Cheoyong—was on a completely different level from the previous enemies. Unlike before, the BGM gave no hints at all, and he used all sorts of dirty patterns to prevent the player from parrying properly.
“Ah, I keep dying. At least there aren’t any scary scenes when you die here…”
The boss prioritized attacking Yujacha first, then switched to me once she was dead. That meant our previous cheese strategy—me taking the hard parts and her taking the easy ones—was no longer possible.
“Maybe this is just impossible to clear? The difficulty is ridiculous compared to before.”
After dying about twenty times, Yujacha muttered to herself. It was easy to blame herself because the enemy kept targeting her first. She was probably thinking of quitting the stream to avoid causing me trouble.
The chat was gradually flowing in the direction Yujacha wanted because of her comments, but—
“No, we can clear it. Yujacha, you can do it.”
I didn’t want to give up like that. She was the one who had first shown me the joy of games and had been my support whenever things were hard. I wanted to repay that kindness.
“This time I’ll show you my playstyle. Try parrying exactly like I do.”
It was worth a shot. After repeating trial and error, one thing became clear.
“It seems like he’s copying me.”
Modern AIs had intelligence that could pass for real people, and the real Cheoyong appeared to be an enemy that had learned from all the protagonist’s accumulated combat data and adjusted his movements accordingly.
“What do you mean by that…”
“If you can surpass me, we can clear the game.”
I would have to defeat myself. Alone, it would be impossible—but together with Yujacha, it should be doable.
“Instead, while you’re fighting, could you sing one song for me?”
“What song…? The one you mentioned last time, Sparrow?”
“No, the very first cover you ever did. We Are Being Hated by Life—the one composed by Kenzaki Iori.”
I always had a finishing move I listened to whenever I needed to repeat a routine.