This Time, I Won't Let Go
When did it start?
I won again? So the chocolate's mine, right?
Was it back when we always bet our favorite chocolate on every little contest?
How do you win every single time? Obviously, because I'd rather die than lose.
Or was it when her friend said, You love winning—why not give boxing a try?
Through that friend, who was in the boxing club at the time, Choi Ha-na ended up joining the club herself, but she wasn't particularly interested in boxing.
She liked winning, sure, but there was no rule saying it had to be through boxing.
And joining right now wouldn't mean winning right away, either.
Chuka Chip. No—top-of-the-school middle schooler Choi Ha-na wore a bored expression as she received yet another identical report card.
Winning was fun. Winning the same way, every single time, was not.
Maybe that was why she'd joined.
Maybe, just maybe, she'd find some real thrill of victory in there.
Oh! Right, and the club captain's parents run a bakery. He brings in handmade chocolate every time because they have leftovers. Whatever, just saying.
...Though, okay, the chocolate was part of it too.
Crack!
"Wow... how are you even good at boxing too?"
Jeong Ye-ji, the friend who had dragged Choi Ha-na into the boxing club in the first place, gave a hollow laugh as she stared down at her own collapsed body on the mat.
First in the whole school.
Her looks weren't quite celebrity-tier, but she was pretty, with a great figure to match.
During PE class Ye-ji had noticed her athletic talent and figured, maybe she'd be good at boxing too, so she'd introduced her to the club...
"How many months did you train again?"
"Six? Huh, now that I think about it, that's actually pretty long."
Choi Ha-na pulled off her gloves and answered without a trace of excitement.
Something about that reaction made Ye-ji want to scream.
A girl who hadn't known the first thing about boxing had beaten every single member of the club in just six months.
She'd already won a youth boxing championship, and scouts kept making eyes at Ha-na, trying to lure her into the pros.
How boring.
Yet Choi Ha-na herself found none of it satisfying.
Top grades in school. Top in athletics, too.
With beauty on top of it all, she was someone everyone envied—yet the joy of victory had shrunk to less than it used to be.
Unless a match was so absurd it made winning impossible, she never lost.
When she was little, that fact had been pure delight. But with all the tension gone, so was the satisfaction.
If she went pro like this, would she ever taste a real victory?
Maybe she'd just be throwing away her time for the same old result...
Maybe I should quit.
"Oh, right. A newbie joined the club. The captain brought him in personally, said he looked talented."
"...A newbie?"
Then let me take one look at this newbie and quit for good.
Her parents had just told her to decide, anyway—academics or continuing with boxing.
"Hi there? I heard you're crazy good?"
And that was how she ended up training for two more years.
It was an overwhelming feeling of defeat unlike anything she had ever known.
It wasn't that she'd never lost before.
As a kid she'd lost games of rock-paper-scissors with friends, pure games of chance, and she'd lost when she first joined the boxing club, too.
But those were uncertainty-based matches—games of luck.
Or else fights where the other person had already learned so much more that winning from the start was simply impossible.
"...Huh?"
But this wasn't that.
"What? How did I lose?"
Her opponent was a complete beginner, barely learning the basics of boxing.
Meanwhile, she'd only trained six months herself—but she'd won a youth championship, and there was no one among middle schoolers. No, maybe not even among high schoolers—who could beat her.
I can't win against him.
It was, in the truest sense, talent.
Seeing a greater talent than her own for the first time in her life, something unfamiliar bloomed inside Choi Ha-na.
Pride. And a refusal simmering up from somewhere deep in her chest.
Maybe... maybe she could find it after all.
"Do I really have talent? My older sister told me to try it, so I did, that's all."
"You... keep boxing."
"Huh? Well, yeah, I was going to... why?"
Shff.
She pulled her gloves back on.
"Because you're going to beat me."
First, she would win once.
"Hey! What do you mean you're quitting?!"
February of her second year of high school.
Choi Ha-na grabbed her rival by the collar as he packed away his worn-out gloves.
He was more than good enough to go pro.
Unlike her, he had no talent outside of boxing—but in that one thing, boxing, he was a genius among geniuses.
So why on earth was he quitting?
"Ah... my parents' work. We're emigrating overseas. It's not like I'm giving it up completely, though. No idea how I'll do against foreigners, but still."
"Don't go... no, wait, then maybe I should—"
Choi Ha-na was spouting pure nonsense and she knew it.
Emigration was not a decision light enough to overturn just because she wanted it changed. It was already done.
Besides, her own family wasn't the type to move abroad, and Ha-na didn't particularly like the idea of overseas life either.
He shook his head with a hollow smile, as if it were nothing.
"Congrats. Once I'm gone, you're number one again. You finally beat me, huh?"
"Bullshit. You think I'd want a win like that?"
"...Knowing your personality, yeah, you wouldn't take it."
1,294 matches. 0 wins. 3 draws. 1,291 losses.
That was the record between the two of them, excluding the matches he'd deliberately thrown—a record she'd believed would go on forever.
Not anymore.
"Stop chasing me and throwing yourself into boxing for nothing. Do you have any idea how much you torment my parents?"
"...Sorry about that."
In her obsession with beating him at boxing, she had let her studies slide.
She'd kept up enough to always stay near the top, but she was no longer first in the school.
"One last thing."
"Ha-na. I'll feel bad saying this, but... I really envy you."
"......"
"You're smart, you're pretty. You're athletic and popular on top of it. I opened your locker once by accident and love letters came pouring out—I couldn't believe my eyes."
"...None of that is worth a damn."
She had worked hard. Relentlessly.
She'd been born with a gifted mind and body, but she'd never once gotten lazy with her effort.
Winning had always felt good, and she'd won so, so many times.
And yet why...
Why can't I beat him?
Tap.
Something small was placed on the boxing club table.
Her favorite...
"Well, at least one thing I'm better at than you, so that's a small comfort. Hehe."
"...Are you making fun of me right now?"
"You don't have to take it seriously. From a guy like me."
Chocolate.
"You've been cutting weight for the tournament, right? Bet you haven't been able to eat much. A little of this won't hurt."
"......"
"Take care of yourself. You'll be fine no matter what you do, so I won't pry anymore."
See you around.
"Hey."
Wham.
She hurled a glove at his retreating back.
She put her gloves on.
"One last match. And don't you dare go easy on me."
Naturally, she lost.
She quit boxing.
The former pro coach who'd taught her, the boxing club she'd spent so long with, her family, everyone she knew—every one of them tried to talk her out of it, but her decision never wavered.
Her mother, if anything, was delighted, as if she'd finally chosen the academic path.
Yeah, that's not where I'm headed.
Getting into university wouldn't be a problem, but studying was never a contest where two people squared off and settled a winner.
The days when ranking first on an exam brought her joy were long behind her.
More than anything, there was no opponent she could see right in front of her. That was the real problem.
"Ah."
Spring, before the last traces of winter had melted away.
The late winter of her second year of high school.
Scarf around her neck and bag in hand, she walked out through the school gate.
Snow was falling. Just a light dusting, not enough to be annoying.
Should she try a different sport?
Would there even be enough time?
She's a second-year in high school; maybe just focus on university first...
Waking from her daydream, reality came flooding back in.
Crunch.
She bit into the chocolate.
It wasn't sweet.
Not sweet at all.
Bzzz~
"?"
Jeong Ye-ji.
Jeong Ye-ji.
Choi Ha-na's best friend—and the very person who had introduced her to the boxing club in the first place.
Having made the introduction, she'd turned out to have no talent for it, and had given up boxing before even reaching high school.
"For the record, I've heard 'don't quit boxing' three hundred times already, so I'm not listening to it again."
Yeah, obviously not that. Have you been on the internet lately?
"The internet?"
Still holding the phone to her ear, she pulled up a browser.
At the very top of the page, the first things to catch her eye were virtual reality game and Devil of Angel.
The moment she read the name, one thought came to mind.
Wow... that's a terrible name.
What era did they think this was, the '90s? Who names a game that cringey?
"So what about it?"
Play it right now! It feels exactly like real life!
"Real life, my ass..."
She'd heard VR was a thing, sure, but wasn't it all just clunky headgear and screen graphics?
Loved competition though she did, Ha-na had played games before—but somehow she'd never cared much for them.
On the other end of the line, Jeong Ye-ji was practically bouncing off the walls.
No! Hey! Where are you right now?!
"Where do you think? Grabbing my stuff and heading home."
I'm coming over!
"Huh? What—?"
The call ended.
And so, dragged along by Jeong Ye-ji's insistent hand, she found herself heading to a place called an Access Room, which she hadn't even known existed until today.
Between the brand-new building and the immaculate interior, it looked like the shop had opened only recently.
"...Game companies build whole buildings now?"
"Beats me? I looked it up, and apparently they've been constructing these all over the country since a year ago."
"That's a stupid amount of money."
Not like she had anything better to do. She figured she'd humor her friend for a little while—just this once, after so long.
And that was how she fell in.
It was a whole new world.
There, she could become countless different people, and meet countless others besides.
The talent she had in reality worked just as well here, and after only a moment's deliberation, Choi Ha-na began her new competitive life under the name Chotachoka Chuka Chip.
It was fun.
Playing team matches meant she couldn't win every single time—but there was no opponent she couldn't beat.
Every so often, the world did produce monster-like beings for whom winning itself was impossible—but they weren't like him. They didn't overflow with talent like he had.
They weren't him.
"I just played, and it worked out?"
Flawless talent.
An unbridgeable, insurmountable gap.
And yet, a rookie barely new to the scene.
The world does, once in a while, go and create something truly absurd.
"I won't let go this time."
She would win this time. Without a doubt.
Absolutely.