Struggle (2)
Kendo is, without question, a combat sport.
It has been sanitized into modern athletics, but at its root it was a martial art designed to kill. In a discipline like that, a certain amount of injury was simply part of the package.
Before the bamboo sword was invented, people occasionally died in training. Even a wooden blade is still a blunt weapon, after all.
And even with a bamboo sword, the small cuts and bruises never completely disappeared. So a little pain, a little damage—those things were familiar.
What truly hurt was rotting alone with no pain at all.
What she needed was the certainty that she was still moving forward. As long as she had that, she could endure the rest.
You were killed by …….
Death penalty waived due to reason: Training Mode.
Respawning in the Player Waiting Room.
Death kept coming.
A blade through the heart. Steel across the throat. Organs crushed. Again and again she clutched her chest and dragged in ragged breaths.
And with the pain came a fierce, electric joy.
Weapons that skimmed past her by a hair’s breadth. The result of taking exactly one step back at the precise moment her opponent committed.
She was starting to feel it—where their eyes flicked even while they traded blows, how their breathing turned unnatural the instant they staked their life on a single strike.
Good. Better than before.
Let’s go again.
You were killed by …….
She stepped over death and kept going.
Honestly, she didn’t have to push this hard. What Sigma wanted was combat data—more precisely, data under a wide range of variables. They already acknowledged the risks of high synchronization rates. They had never demanded anything as crude as “keep dying in extreme situations.”
If she had to drive a dagger into her own left leg right now, she would hesitate. Luce had already decided to try lowering the brainwave-type synchronization rate as much as possible. Daeun didn’t understand the technical side, but apparently the access device her parents had built was helping more than anyone expected. So there was no need to force it, they said.
Still… more is better, right?
Han Daeun had already survived countless battles and deaths without falling into shock. Even if the worst happened, Sigma could intervene immediately. That fact alone gave her leverage. The more fiercely she endured, the sooner she could return to paradise.
Besides, dying once or twice inside a game was nothing new. Phantom pain was still kinder than those long hours in that dark, damp room. And this—this was the dream she had wanted for so long. How desperately she had waited to stand on the pro stage, to prove her skill, to prove herself.
The chance was finally here. She would not run just because it hurt. If she were the kind of person who ran, she never would have clung to this miserable life this long.
Prepare yourself. The next opponent will be deployed with no waiting time.
Pain—no, vitality—surged through the hand that gripped the dagger.
Camelia. In Shin Eun-chae’s mind, the word that fit Gawol best was poison.
She already knew Gawol did not belong in the category of ordinary people. The Gawol she had seen was someone who clung to victory with a near-pathological intensity—and that assessment had been correct. She simply hadn’t realized it went this far.
How many hours had passed since the practice session began with such swagger?
The room that had once seethed with hostility and fighting spirit gradually sank into silence. In that heavy atmosphere, one man finally found the courage to speak. Defeat colored his voice.
“Can we… stop for today?”
“Already?”
“It’s not ‘already.’ We’ve been at this for hours.”
“Hmm. Fine. If you’re tired, there’s no helping it. Pushing further would just tank efficiency.”
So the hierarchy had been settled. When the gap was this wide, you had no choice but to accept it whether you liked it or not.
Watching from a distance, Eun-chae let out a quiet snort of laughter. The practice room that had been thick with enmity now carried something closer to awe. On the main display in the center of the room hung a line of text that no second-string player ever wanted to see.
Rule: 5-Player King of the Hill
Map: Shadow Hall
Achieved by: Gawol (Assassin)
Luck had played a part, honestly. Shadow Hall was practically an assassin’s home ground, and a few trainees had been mixed into the roster. That didn’t diminish the feat of an all-kill, though. How many first-string pros could even pull something like that off?
There was a reason Luce had been willing to wrestle with the access-device problem just to bring Gawol in.
And her stamina is better than active pros…
Sigma eSports’ practice volume was never light. Korea had always been a country that ground people down for efficiency, and that long tradition made no exception for eSports. Practice volume alone still ranked among the highest in the world. Even second-string players were still pros. Eun-chae had assumed Gawol would lag behind in pure physical endurance. The result had been hard to accept.
People filtered out until the practice room stood empty. Eun-chae claimed the vacant seat beside Daeun. Pretty eyes flicked toward her once, then she pretended not to care and toyed with her phone.
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
“Just… not really in the mood right now.”
“I bet people tell you to put on some weight a lot.”
“I don’t want to hear… nagging.”
Ah. She looked dejected. The corner of Camelia’s mouth curved into a gentle arc. No words came out, but she could almost hear the grumbling.
“Come on, eat something. You’ll practice better that way.”
“What, are you going to join me?”
“After I finish this. Sandwich okay?”
“……Fine. Give it here. I’ll eat.”
Chew, swallow. A long, noisy slurp of coffee. Daeun pushed food into her small mouth. Watching her hurry and then suck down coffee, it was clear she was trying to eat quickly. Physical limits kept the pace modest.
Looking like that, she could have been a tiny animal. And this person was really Gawol. They had faced each other several times by now, yet to Camelia she still felt strangely unfamiliar.
“Are you sure you’re okay, though? I thought they told you not to overdo it.”
“I could go all day.”
“That’s such an old line.”
“Shut up. I like it, okay?”
For all the bravado, her complexion didn’t look great. That already fragile impression, the tired way she sipped coffee—Camelia suddenly felt as if she had done something wrong. What was I doing while this small, delicate girl got herself into this state? Never mind that Han Daeun was actually the older one.
That face is over twenty? Seriously?
At a glance she could pass for a girl. The faintly dark, gloomy air around her, the decadent allure—if not for those, Eun-chae might have thought kids these days just developed early. Maybe that was why using polite speech felt fine, but she simply could not bring herself to call Daeun “unnie.” Somewhere in Camelia’s chest, something screamed that it was impossible. The moment anyone outside heard Shin Eun-chae call Han Daeun “unnie,” they would assume they had wandered into some bizarre social experiment. As a woman, that felt far too tragic.
“I, uh, tried that brainwave access device. I was curious.”
“Yeah? How was it?”
“Didn’t seem like something a human should do.”
“Pfft… You get used to it. It’s manageable.”
A typical pro gamer’s synchronization rate hovered a little above 20 percent. The rate currently applied to Gawol was 65.8 percent—and that was already lower than it had been during the Arena. She hadn’t been joking. It really wasn’t something a human should endure.
Once synchronization passed 20 percent, you could read your own body’s condition by sensation alone—how far the damage went, whether a wound was fatal or something you could still fight through. In other words, the pain became real enough to feel. The 65.8 percent Camelia had tasted was comparable to reality itself. And in that state Gawol had casually thrown herself into brawls and carved up bodies without hesitation?
If their positions were reversed, could she have done the same?
A creeping sense of defeat rose. Camelia forced her competitive fire back down.
“How long are you staying today?”
“Until there’s no one left who’ll practice with me.”
“What kind of weird standard is that?”
“Too lazy to explain. You’ll understand once you go through it yourself.”
She was right. Two hours later, Camelia—who had not won a single match—stormed back to the dorms, fuming. Only then did Han Daeun finally head home.