I Don't Use Hacks
After a quick meal, I went digging through NewTube for DeoEn-related content, figuring I could pick up some information while I was at it.
Unsurprisingly, duels dominated everything.
Among them, I clicked on a video from a channel with a fairly respectable 300,000 subscribers. Slick editing and sound effects aside, two players were going at each other hammer and tongs.
The sword and the dagger — the two weapons every player handles first when they take up arms at all. The blades crossed, strikes were deflected and parried, and with a pounding battle theme driving things forward, the fight built to its peak.
Pshing—! The swordsman swept out a trail of blue light and carved straight through the dagger-wielding man's body. His opponent collapsed limply, dissolving into blue particles. The swordsman flashed a grin, and the screen flipped to an end card with an animation linking to the next video.
A short video, maybe three or four minutes long. Thinking that was all there was to it, I scrolled down and found some seven hundred comments.
A comment section awash in nothing but praise.
"...Doesn't seem like they did that well, honestly."
If anything, it had all felt pretty mediocre. The patterns were far too one-note. Even the mage I'd met in my very first spawn had looked more skilled than this guy.
This is Diamond?
"And I got placed in Gold?"
I couldn't tell whether my placement had simply been dragged down by being a fresh spawn, but I understood Diamond to sit around the top one percent of the player base. And the top one percent was this?
Something felt off, so I tapped open the replies on the very first comment.
"...Why am I suddenly in this?"
Why is my name coming up here?
"What is this nonsense."
Me, a hack?
I'd met plenty of genuinely cheat-like monsters in my life, but this was the first time anyone had ever called me one. If these people ever saw the absurd battles I'd witnessed — a high-ranked Celestial slaughtering fifty thousand demon beasts with a flick of the hand, and a high-ranked Demon carelessly raising every one of those beasts back up as undead — my abilities would look like nothing more than adorable party tricks.
If anything, I was closer to the victim who'd been crouching in the shadow of those monsters.
Ah, and now I remember again. How much I suffered trying to hold the line because that Demon had dumped the fifty-thousand-strong army I'd gone to such lengths to save, like tossing out dead weight. Of all things, it had to be headed for a densely populated city.
I'd wondered why, having already quit being a Saintess, I still had to run a rescue operation — but Lily was simply born that way, so there was nothing to be done. And after fighting so desperately to hold them off, watching the local lord whine at me to personally repair his collapsed city walls, I'd nearly lost the battle to keep from beating him to death on the spot.
Of course, I wasn't the Saintess back then, so I just stuffed his mouth and slammed him face-down onto the table until he calmed down.
"Hmm..."
Creeeak... The chair serving as my backrest shifted along with my will. I brought my hands to the keyboard.
Lily_
Tak.
"Huh."
I'd typed exactly two letters, and a cascade of videos about me came pouring out as if they'd been waiting for the chance. Earlier I'd only clicked into one of the recommended videos, so I hadn't noticed — but looking at it now, the vast majority of recent duel videos were footage of my fights. The battle with Yena, of course, along with the mage duel, the Bandits, Kroktoos, the Hobgoblin King, and various other duels besides.
They were simply taking every video related to me and running with it. And of all of them, the most eye-catching and popular upload:
Barely three days old, and the view count was anything but ordinary. Korea's population was over fifty million, if I remembered right? I couldn't be certain, but this many views out of a single country seemed a little hard to pull off.
I clicked the video. At the top, under the words "Preview," came Yena sweating buckets, alongside a shot of me clutching a pouch of gold coins and trying to get my bearings. After about three seconds, a sound effect flipped the screen, and an SD-character version of Yena burst in scattering particle effects, shouting "YeTube!" as the video proper began.
The video was genuinely entertaining. Beyond the Yena-and-me material, whoever edited it clearly had real talent — the pacing never dragged, and the sound effects and scene ordering were arranged with evident care.
Or maybe not — maybe it's just me coming back from the Middle Ages.
Honestly, I suspected I'd find any video from the modern era entertaining. Scrolling to the comments, I found a staggering fifty thousand of them, with the occasional comment in English or some other country's language mixed in.
As a Celestial, I could understand every language. A rough skim told me most of them boiled down to: pretty, skilled, great, that sort of thing.
There were the occasional sexual comments here and there, but I simply ignored them. They weren't about me — they were about Yena, and demanding she delete them because I felt uncomfortable would've been going too far. They weren't worth my individual attention anyway.
"Why is everyone so convinced it's hacks."
Comments with two, three hundred replies each showed people locked in ceaseless debate with one another. Some had crossed the line so far they seemed to have been deleted outright. Most of the arguments hung their case on how my movement, destructive power, and instant reactions all exceeded the existing "common sense."
Common sense.
...Did I even have that? Being possessed into the body of a Heaven-Scented Human, wandering for thirty years, and then getting Returned — the entire premise was already beyond common sense?
A hollow laugh escaped me, and I chuckled for a moment. The chair reclined a little further back.
Life as a Saintess had not been as smooth as one might think.
Healer and mercenary. Mercenary and guardian of humankind. Guardian and someone's pillar of support. Though I was only the little Saintess of the Small Village, humans were physically weak while their numbers were vast, which meant a great many people fell under my care at once.
My status rising was only the natural consequence, and Lily Elbrit, who began her work in earnest at fifteen, became a person of renown within barely a single year.
And naturally, envy and jealousy followed.
Power far too great for the title of "Saintess." Beauty and a voice so radiant that no one else could even begin to compare. Divinity capable of healing both the gravely wounded and the terminally ill awaiting death, together with a compassion that could embrace everyone. I hadn't gone out of my way to cultivate any of that image — but Lily's temperament was my temperament. Whether I wanted it or not, I could only ever act that way.
Truthfully, I didn't feel much resistance toward it myself. It was just a bit of a hassle, and I hated the people who treated goodwill as their entitlement.
Heaven-Scented Humans were frail — quite literally no more than the residue of a "scent," a byproduct of something greater. But compared to ordinary humans, they could look awfully close to "perfection."
And that unassailable shell of perfection draws other people's envy.
"Hah."
Creeeak...
Why did they hate me so much? I had, in fact, helped them.
"That's going too far, you—?!"
CRASH!
"Augh!"
The chair tipped over. My back hurt...
Shwuk.
The tip of my window sheared through a Death Wolf's neck. Two more wolves flanking it met their end in the follow-up combination that came without pause.
"Time to hunt. I've got a class advancement quest to clear."
About five hundred remained. Apparently the kills merged from the Hobgoblin King counted toward the tally too, because the number had climbed faster than expected. Two or three more hours of grinding today should just about finish it.
I withdrew my window and turned toward the camera. I noticed it every time — so many questions.
"Guild recruitment is for later. Yena and I are just streamer friends who happen to broadcast together. As for donations, I'll open them for a little while later on."
Shwaaak.
"And, for the record — I don't use hacks. I absolutely despise that sort of thing."
I'd said it time and again, but the truth was simple: I hated Celestials and Demons with every fiber of my being.