Throw It First, Think Later!

Just shove it in first and figure it out later!

Devil of Angel was a national pastime enjoyed by millions.

And yet, paradoxically, the vast majority of those people never actually played the game.

The reason was simple.

"It's expensive. Seriously expensive."

The rig alone cost over seven thousand dollars, and even at a discount it never dipped below three and a half grand. Playing on a computer demanded an equally monstrous spec sheet.

So most users rented time at gaming lounges instead — but at five dollars an hour, not many people could afford to enjoy the game that way either.

That was why, in its early days, only a small circle of players truly enjoyed it. But discounts multiplied, lounge events piled up, and these days the game boasted four hundred thousand concurrent users in Korea alone.

And the place everyone who couldn't squeeze into that number went?

Streaming.

Unable to play themselves, they watched broadcasts for their vicarious fix, then flooded every community they could find with game-related theories and bait.

And among those communities was one of the biggest of them all — the Devil of Angel Gallery. Or, as everyone called it, the DeoAe Gallery. That was where a certain post appeared.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

And so, while some cursed and others cackled—

"So much to do…"

CRUNCH!

The star of all that bait was busy doing what she did best: hunting.

I'd found a hunting ground with no one else around.

The reason was simple.

People stared way too much.

The moment I did anything, whispers started up. I couldn't make out the words, but there was a lot of suspicious pointing-cameras-at-me movement.

They all thought they were being subtle about it. But "subtle" was a word that simply did not apply to a Heaven-Scented Human.

Because this insane species already operated beyond the range of ordinary human perception.

"Feels even worse than before, somehow."

It wasn't unfamiliar enough to faze me — if anything, the experience was strangely nostalgic.

But it had never reached this intensity.

Back in the world I'd possessed, the whispering was where it ended — and half of even that had been about Heaven itself.

Now it was all purely about my looks.

I picked up a spear with no engravings and no enchantments of any kind.

Ahead of me, a pack of bizarre monsters was closing in.

They'd called this a fantasy game, so I'd assumed goblins or orcs — but instead these things looked like some kind of fried shrimp that had committed unspeakable crimes.

Bipedal, branch-like weapons clutched in both arms, sprinting straight at me.

Incidentally, the shrimp-tail part was the head.

"Hm."

I drew the hand holding the spear slightly back and gave the shaft a subtle twist.

Then I drove it forward.

The moment the shaft's tip touched the monster's torso, the fried shrimp burst apart with a wet pop.

Corpse fragments rained down, and the shrimp that had been charging alongside it froze mid-stride.

"Hmm? Why'd you stop?"

It wouldn't come any closer.

So I rested the spear against my shoulder and gave it a little grin — at which the trembling shrimp flung its branch aside and bolted.

I cast a skill.

Something I'd unlocked upon hitting level 10 — one of the three skills I currently possessed.

'Dash.'

Ten-second cooldown, and it propelled me rapidly forward in a straight line.

Not especially impressive, if I was honest.

FWOOSH!

'Running on my own is faster, anyway.'

I jammed the spear carelessly into the dirt and went around collecting the loot.

And here, at last, I truly felt what made this place a game.

Kill a fried shrimp, and out drops something called Mucus of a Vanished Acquaintance. Come on.

The world I'd possessed had skills and racial abilities, sure — but nothing like items dropping. If you killed an orc and yanked out a tooth, that was an orc's tooth. If you slew a dragon and peeled off a scale, that was a dragon's scale.

Nobody's mucus ever materialized out of thin air like that.

And apparently money dropped too.

Since when do monsters carry cash?

"Haa… haa… FOUND HER!"

"?"

Maybe it was because I'd let myself get absorbed in the hunt for a moment, but the assassin woman who'd been trailing me — the one I'd considered saying something to and dismissed as too much bother — had finally caught up.

She mumbled something delighted at the camera, then abruptly cleared her throat and spoke up.

"Um, hi! Do you have a moment? It's nothing weird, I promise — I just wanted to help you out—"

"When you get tired in the game, do you feel that fatigue in real life too?"

"…Excuse me?"

The woman froze.

She looked like something had glitched.

Was that really such a difficult question?

"Hello?"

"Oh! Oh, right. Um, no, not exactly tired-tired. It's, uh, there's this thing called stamina, and when it gets low…"

She babbled on, her eyes darting sideways every few seconds.

At her chat window, presumably.

Huh. So she really does feel fatigue in there.

I'd confirmed long ago that pain and the like couldn't be felt beyond a certain threshold. In that case, maybe mental-type effects didn't work on them either.

Which would be a slight problem if I ran into a demon.

The thought of the first time I'd ever met the demon race made my brow furrow for an instant.

Nothing dramatic had happened that day.

It was simply the day I realized that if Heaven was broken, the demons were somehow even more broken.

I'd been so depressed I'd skipped every official engagement, shut myself in my room, and done nothing but peel and eat fruit all day.

"Um… I'm s-sorry!"

"…For what?"

Out of nowhere, an apology.

What was there to apologize for?

For someone apologizing for chasing me down, she'd certainly shown zero guilt about the actual chasing.

Come to think of it, from my perspective this was arguably something worth getting angry about.

Alright. Time to set the record straight.

The staring, the sneaky filming, all these tiresome intrusions — I'd tell her, through the stream, to knock it off. That should dial the attention down a notch.

She seemed reasonably popular, so her word had to carry some weight with her viewers.

But the very moment I opened my mouth to say ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it—

"Please accept this as a token of my apology!"

With a flourish of the woman's hands, a massive pouch of gold coins dropped in front of me.

"?"

And at some point, I found myself hugging the pouch of gold coins.

Two full hours of desperate searching, and maybe the sheer thrill of finally finding her had short-circuited something.

Or maybe her stamina had bottomed out and her brain had simply stopped.

Either way, a whole chain of reasons had led to this moment.

First shock: the woman was gorgeous — and her voice was pretty too.

Second shock: out of nowhere, the question — when you get tired in the game, do you feel it in real life too?

But setting all that aside, Yena was actually thrilled.

From the content of that question, one thing was crystal clear: the woman in front of her was definitely a newbie who knew nothing about DeoAe.

Raising newbies was the whole point. That was where the fun was.

Only she'd lunged in too hard, and now the newbie's face had gone stiff, an unmistakable expression of displeasure settling over it.

Yena broke out in a cold sweat.

She was a four-year veteran streamer with real experience under her belt, but right now she had a lot of viewers watching.

17,230 of them.

A number that rivaled her golden days — and one thought seared itself into her mind: if this ended here, she'd be torn apart in the comments, and the downhill slide her career was already on would turn into a free fall.

The chat was already descending into chaos.

And so a single idea took root in her head and refused to let go.

'Just throw it and run!'

This is Newdlebak, isn't it?!

Which means: shove it in first and figure it out later!

…And that was how this situation came to be.