No, Thanks
After getting home, I washed up haphazardly, unpacked my things, and threw myself into the dive pod with more urgency than the situation strictly required.
A blue veil of light wrapped around my body, and in the space between one breath and the next, I was standing in front of the Duel Arena.
No sooner had I logged into DOEN than a friend message arrived.
Ten seconds after I sent that reply, another one came through.
I sent one more reply, then leaned back against a statue for a moment. There was something oddly soothing about its presence beside me.
I closed my eyes to wait for Yena, and only cracked them open again when the murmur of the crowd began to swell.
People had ringed themselves around me in a loose circle, staring the way one might gawk at a zoo monkey.
And yet not a single soul could work up the nerve to push through and approach me.
Well, this is a bit unexpected.
Wherever I'd been deposited, there had never been a shortage of people who came to me first.
Whether out of a simple desire to challenge me, or out of reverence — and failing that, out of pure greed or open malice, they'd come all the same.
Back then I'd have a dozen or more such encounters in a single day. Now, not one person would come near me.
Looking closer at the crowd, I saw they were shoving each other and bickering among themselves — each one waiting for someone else to make the first move.
Ah. It's the people around them.
Humans are social animals. They worry about the person standing next to them before they worry about themselves, and they agonize over how their own behavior looks reflected in other people's eyes.
Not everyone, of course — but most people, most of the time.
And there was certainly no one in this crowd who could ignore every gaze around them and brazenly ask to speak with me.
"E-excuse me!"
"?"
There he is.
The spearwoman Lily had appeared.
Hear that sentence on its own and you'd assume a boss mob had just spawned in the middle of town — and honestly, it wouldn't be far off the mark.
A conversation lasting all of three hours, and a single duel. For what was, on paper, just a mid-sized streamer's broadcast, the ripple effect had been absolutely colossal.
Anyone with even a passing interest in the community or the streaming scene knew her name by now.
Her skill was one thing, but her borderline-insane custom avatar had done its share of the work too.
The majority of DOEN's player base — ordinary people, not the hardcore "gamers" — tended to savor healing over combat.
Farming, fishing, crafting, architecture: players of the so-called "production classes" made up a full sixty percent of the population.
And among them were those who lived inside the game as if it were real life.
Gulp.
This man — Kim Chul-soo — was one of them.
A tired office worker, sick to death of the daily grind, who had logged into DOEN for the first time on a friend's recommendation. And found a brave new world waiting.
Sensations indistinguishable from reality, and an appearance he could reshape however he pleased through customization. A new world, one where he could finally escape the drudgery of his real one.
Falling head over heels for DOEN, he'd chosen a production class instead of fighting or dungeon delving.
The reason was simple: he hated conflict, and even in a virtual world, the thought of attacking another person made his stomach turn.
Now, that alone wouldn't have been worth debating.
The game company itself actively pushed PvP and PvE, and even for production classes, dungeon runs were practically mandatory — everyone had to do some fighting at some point.
But Kim Chul-soo, who treated this world as if it were real, wouldn't even do those trivial dungeons.
Because to him, this place was real.
"If it's not too much trouble, could I maybe get your number?!"
Which is to say — that was exactly why a confession this absurd was even possible.
Dating here wouldn't be strange at all, right?
What happens when the world freezes over?
No one had ever lived through it — but in that instant, everyone gathered in front of the Duel Arena felt something an awful lot like it.
"What the..."
"Whoa. I just got chills."
"People like that still exist, huh."
"That is genuinely a public nuisance. The devs literally built a safeguard against that exact thing, and he just... ignores it."
A brief silence — then the area erupted into noise.
They wrote the man off as a weirdo, but they couldn't help burning with curiosity about how Lily would handle it.
Then they caught a glimpse of Lily's face — and flinched as one.
"No, thanks."
Lily's face was faintly furrowed.
The kind of frown you'd miss entirely unless you looked twice.
But the veterans standing nearby felt a killing intent so sharp they reflexively reached for their weapons.
Kim Chul-soo, an ordinary civilian with no way of sensing anything so crude as murderous aura, did not give up.
"I'm rich! I can make you happy, I swear!"
"God... I hate this so much."
"Same. And that avatar is hideous, too."
"As a proud member of the Baby Lily Faction, I cannot let this stand."
Strange mutterings occasionally bubbled up through the commotion, but the ruckus only grew.
Lily gripped the shaft of her spear, weighing whether this man really needed to be run through or not — and it was at precisely that moment that a voice cut through the din.
"Lily, sweetie~"
The one and only person who could save this situation.
Yena had arrived.