No Need to Hide, Really
Look, I know Lily worked hard, but if she said she was taking five days off, shouldn't she come back ON the fifth day?
And she hasn't even posted a single update or gone live for like a minute. Just radio silence. Sigh.
The DCK finals are TODAY and there's still no sign of her turning stream on.
Life is too hard. Ffs. My life is missing Lily.
The DCK Stadium is already absolutely packed. Who's taking it, CO or WoW?
Upvote if you think CO wins — led by Choco, the God of the Spear, the team's ace, backbone, and living poster child, currently sitting at an 85% win rate.
Or nah. You think Baekseol, who clawed her way to the very tip of Lv. 90, looks like a joke? Downvote if WoW wins.
Ah, of course I upvoted lol
The day of the DCK finals.
Before meeting Yena, I got dressed up to head outside for the first time in a while.
"Hmm."
Actually, let me correct that. "Dressed up" might be going too far.
I pulled a black cap over my conspicuously blue hair and put on a black mask.
It was late summer, the season just beginning to fade into autumn. A white short-sleeved shirt, a black jacket draped over it, black pants below — put it all together and the message practically wrote itself: I'm a celebrity, so I'm hiding my identity.
Of course, I wasn't hidden at all.
"Maybe I should just cut my hair."
It did draw a bit too much attention. But something held me back from chopping it off, so I decided to live with it.
Click.
"Miss Lily, I'm all ready—"
"Yes, I'm ready."
"...You look like a total celebrity."
Did I? Well, she wasn't wrong.
My original plan had been to tie my hair up and tuck it all into the cap, but it was simply too long to keep stuffed in there for any length of time.
"You look great too, Yena."
"I put some effort in, you know!"
Yena spun around with a proud ahem!, showing off her fully made-up self.
To be fair, with proper clothes and makeup on, she was quite pretty. At this level, wouldn't she be about 0.7 DeoEn Yena?
"...Something about that feels weird."
"Oh, come on."
It wasn't that the real Yena was lacking — it was that the Yena inside DeoEn was exceptional. That was simply an unavoidable gap.
"How are we getting there? Taxi?"
"Pfft. You think I'd chauffeur Miss Lily around in a taxi?"
"?"
Yena twirled her finger with an air of showmanship. Dangling from it was a small white car key.
"Your chauffeur for the day, Miss Lily, at your service."
◇
When I followed Yena out to the apartment's parking lot, there was a sports car that looked expensive at a glance — the kind of expensive you could feel in your bones.
A two-seater with doors that swung upward. White, which happened to suit Yena's breezy summer outfit surprisingly well.
"Ooh..."
"Hop in!"
"It looks seriously expensive."
How much did something like this even cost?
The moment I settled into the seat beside Yena, the door closed on its own with a smooth mechanical sigh. Yena reached up, flipped open the overhead compartment, took out black sunglasses, and slipped them on. Then she glanced back at me, lifted the corner of the shades, and grinned.
"1.1 billion won."
"Whoa."
That was more than my apartment.
"Pretty eye-popping, right?"
"It costs more than my place."
My apartment had been 700 million. And the car was 1.1 billion. I'd heard property values had dropped since DeoEn appeared in the world — so why were cars untouched?
"Why do you think car prices held while home prices fell?"
"...Cars have swagger, maybe?"
"Hmm... that does kind of track."
Unlike housing, which was woven deep into the basic business of living, hardly anyone bought a sports car like this for value-for-money or genuine necessity. It was mostly for showing off, or a toy for people whose wealth already had plenty of room to spare.
No one buys an F1 car to drive on public roads, after all.
Vrrrooom!
A startup growl unlike any ordinary car rang in my ears. It clearly earned its price tag — the ride felt fantastic.
"Honestly, I didn't buy it myself. It was a sponsorship, technically... but given the state of my career, I barely ever use it."
"...A 1.1-billion-won car. As a sponsorship?"
Wasn't that a bit much, even for a sponsorship?
When I tilted my head, Yena smirked and pressed a button, and the ceiling slid smoothly open, transforming the car into a convertible.
Off we go~
Yena's car pulled out of the parking lot. A cool breeze swept past me and Yena in turns — not wind from some special ability or flight, but purely the real-world kind, felt on real skin.
Not bad at all.
Maybe an occasional drive wasn't a bad idea.
"You wouldn't know since you never do ads or anything like that, Miss Lily, but this is honestly tame. If someone just agrees to appear or do promotion, some places will offer even bigger stuff. One of them even offered a whole building."
Rankers were celebrities.
Not merely celebrities who appeared on TV, but famous figures whose exceptional abilities could influence the state of DeoEn itself. Corporations were steadily establishing their footholds in DeoEn too, so if a ranker came forward to promote them, the benefits were obvious.
Yena turned the wheel with an easy, natural motion. For someone who apparently rarely drove, she was remarkably practiced behind it.
"Ah, but sponsorships like this really only go to a tiny handful of people you could count on two fingers. The current me doesn't qualify."
I was famous back in the day, but...
With those words, Yena turned her head away, a touch bitter.
Made sense — a car like this would only come as sponsorship to someone in DeoEn's very top tier. Yena had once stood at that height, but her position had slipped quite a ways since.
"Well, you're famous again now."
"Oh, please. I'm washed up... no wait, not washed up. Anyway, it's just the truth."
"Your ranking went up again, I heard."
"It did, yeah."
Yena's current ranking was 19th. She'd broken into the top twenty, but matches against higher-ranked players were agonizingly hard to come by. And even when one did pop, it meant facing a ranker you could count on one hand...
"But everyone's genuinely gotten so much better. The players who made the finals too... Whew. Every single match is brutal now."
"Baekseol, right? The one up against Choco's team."
"Yes. You saw her briefly in the dungeon."
After deciding to attend the DCK finals, Yena had shown me the rosters of the teams that made it.
Team CO, led by Chota Chokachukachip, was a heavy favorite for the championship. And Choco — the Rank 4 ranker I'd crossed spears with in the Mock Siege — was also the main account of 'Candy Star,' one of my students.
And she got blown up by Yena, remember.
Wiped off the field without a trace by the full-hearted cry of Yena's daggers, no less.
Standing against them was Team WoW, led by a player named 'Baekseol.'
Team WoW was built around mages — of its five starters and three bench members, a full five were mages. Baekseol herself was known as a formidable Frost Cryomancer, currently ranked 9th.
Come to think of it, Baekseol had also dropped in briefly and made a name for herself in the Black World Tree dungeon.
"Honestly, in a straight 1v1, Choco has the edge — but Baekseol's team play is outstanding... so there's no telling how it'll go."
"Team CO has the better overall win rate, though, doesn't it?"
"Right now, sure. But if you look at recent results, it's almost dead even, so..."
No matter how well you performed personally, you couldn't win if the team didn't hold up. A few match formats made solo heroics flatly impossible, and when those rolled around, WoW would gain the upper hand.
"Anyway— we're just about here..."
Yena and I looked around.
Cars packed bumper to bumper on the road. And filling our view: the enormous stadium, and the sea of people standing outside it.
Among those people...
"...Really didn't need to bother hiding, huh."
"There are more than ten of you, Miss Lily."
More than ten people were cosplaying as me.