Life's Breakthrough (1)
Four honors.
And the unreserved praise of his teammates.
All of it was proof of just how thoroughly Park Jimin's Fiora had torn this game apart.
"Thank you!"
"·····"
"Thank you!"
Donations poured in without pause. Between the cam feed of a beautiful woman and a top laner with apocalyptic carry power, there was no turning the stream off.
"Hm?"
Dahye checked her own rank.
"Having fun?"
"Sorry?"
"You said you wanted to play together."
"Ah·····"
Dahye asked for his thoughts. The reason Jimin himself had given for sniping her queue was simple: he wanted to play on her team, show her something cool, and help her win.
"Yes. It's fun."
His answer was as plain as his motive. Not only had his mistakes been forgiven — he was getting to live through something this good. To Jimin, it felt like a dream.
"Then let's keep going."
"Sorry?"
"Excuse me?"
"Didn't you already fill out the LP though?"
"Hmm? You can't think of it like that."
"·····"
Jimin couldn't immediately grasp what Dahye was getting at.
"Chat, if this guy hadn't sniped me — thinking about the form I was in back then — I'd already be Diamond 1 by now, right? You have to factor in opportunity cost."
"Ah·····"
Empathy aside, Jimin at least understood that Dahye wanted more wins, more LP, and a higher tier.
"If you don't want to, I guess that's fine."
She reached for the queue button, then set her mouse down again. Dahye seemed to be taking a step back.
"·····"
Jimin hesitated over whether he should be the one to speak first.
"Ah damn, but I'm hungry."
Dahye said it as she picked up her phone.
"I'm gonna order delivery. Jimin, wait a bit."
"Okay."
"What should I get?"
She poked at her phone with more focus than she'd shown playing SOL.
The chat was packed with more than twice the usual number of viewers. Even so, Dahye didn't look particularly flustered.
"Ah·····"
"Hm?"
"Ah, nothing."
Something had clicked for Jimin. He stood up from his chair.
Checking his phone, he found a text from his mom. Thank goodness.
She hadn't come home at the usual time. But at least a message had arrived — that was a relief.
"·····"
They were in contact, but he still had no idea why she was late.
Dahye kept making little nasal sounds without saying anything. After a discreet glance her way, Jimin called his mom.
"Hey, Mom."
"Hm?"
Dahye turned her head at the sound coming through Discord. It was fainter than before, but she could still make out every word.
"Ugh, seriously."
Dahye muted Jimin on Discord.
A guy who played so well on his own in-game somehow still managed to need babysitting in every other way.
"Mom's at the clinic getting acupuncture right now."
"At this hour?"
"I have work tomorrow — I can't go in the morning. There's nothing in the fridge to eat, is there?"
"Well, not really·····"
"Just wait a little. I'm sorry."
"No, it's fine. Get home safe."
The call between mother and son stuck to the essentials and ended quickly.
"Haa·····"
There were a lot of days when Jimin regretted calling his mom. There were eggs in the fridge; he could feed himself just fine. And yet he hated himself for never being able to say, I'll handle it, just come straight home.
He knew she often went to orthopedic clinics and traditional medicine places, and still found himself feeling pathetic for the relief that washed over him when he confirmed it wasn't anything major.
"Hm?"
A message had appeared in Discord. How had she known he was back from the call? Had he taken too long?
"Ah·····"
Even Jimin's flustered sound made it onto the stream.
"I only heard the 'Hey, Mom' at the start, so don't worry."
"I'm sorry·····"
"It's nothing, so stop apologizing. Hmm."
Unlike the moment when he'd carried so boldly on Fiora, his voice had gone a little soft and deflated.
"Want to call it for games? I'm kind of scared that if we keep queueing we'll snap the win streak."
"Sorry?"
"And Nuna's ordering kimchi stew. It's no good once it gets cold."
"·····"
Even as she spoke, Dahye kept tapping at her phone. Placing the order didn't take long at all.
"Yes, thank you for the twenty thousand. I should've gotten pizza too. Sorry, chat."
Dahye was free-associating out loud, and her face looked anything but sorry.
"Jimin, thanks for the carry today. Get some sleep early."
"Okay·····"
Jimin was still half-dazed by the whole situation. Nobody could ever predict this nuna's stream-end timing.
Dahye checked the viewer number again.
"Whoa, three thousand seven hundred?"
A number she'd never seen before. For someone with as strong a personal brand and as irregular a schedule as Dahye, it was a genuinely massive audience.
"Hmm·····"
A streamer's natural dilemma.
"I don't really do mukbangs····· Ahem. Yes, thank you to all the new people who came by! Follow me and come back next time! Everyone, bye!"
Dahye on the cam waved her hand.
"·····Ah."
The stream was off, and so was her Discord.
Heh.
A laugh slipped out of him unbidden. Even that confidence — the absolute certainty that no matter what she did, he would come back to watch her — felt cute.
Dahye nuna will be there tomorrow too.
And the fact that there was a next day after that made his heart flutter. Whether "cute" was even the right word for a girl, he couldn't say — he couldn't remember the last time he'd thought of one that way, or if he ever had.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep-beep-beep.
The sound of the door lock opening.
"·····"
One piece at a time, he lifted them to his mouth with wooden chopsticks. Tuna kimbap — Jimin's favorite kind.
"Is that enough for you?"
"It's fine."
With every piece of kimbap, he glanced at his mom. The distinctive smell of a traditional medicine clinic clung to her. The way she kept kneading her shoulder made it clear that side was bothering her.
The tightness in his throat didn't seem to come only from eating kimbap without water.
"Did you meet your friends again today?"
"Yeah."
"You see them a lot."
"Yeah."
The conversation ended in one-word answers. Calling it a conversation at all felt like a stretch.
Whenever his mom turned away, Jimin looked at her; whenever she actually looked at him and spoke, he lowered his head and just ate his kimbap.
"You're really okay?"
"Yeah."
Jimin threw out the trash, cleared the table, and headed to his room.
"·····"
Thud.
Careful not to disturb his mom, who needed rest, he eased the door shut and lay down on the bed.
"Haa·····"
He was starting to understand it now, more or less.
The reason for these stupid habits was that he believed there was nothing he could do. At best, he could clear the trash without putting it off so her hands had a little less work. Even stating his own will in front of her had, at some point, started to feel like something he should apologize for — so even the smallest things wouldn't come out of his mouth properly.
A mother who went to work at a restaurant even when her body hurt, who earned money the hard way and couldn't even spend it on herself. Watching that was a stain he had no way of scrubbing off.
"·····"
At the PC bang, on stream, everyone had praised him and liked him. Right now was different. Nothing reached his ears, and he couldn't find a way forward.
No one had ever taught a boy who had lost his father too early — a boy who had drifted away from the world he was supposed to be in — how to overturn the reality he was living in.
In South Korea right now, a second-year high school student was a protected person. Protection and restricted freedom were inseparable. And when he hadn't even finished school, what exactly was he supposed to be able to do?
"Aaa·····"
A feeling that wasn't unfamiliar, and yet one he could never get used to. Suddenly the ceiling looked like it was rippling. His chest felt tight, as if a hole had been punched through it.
"·····"
But it was okay, more or less. This wasn't school, and no one was watching.
Ding.
"Huh?"
His body reacted on its own and sat up. And as if by a lie, his eyes grew steadily clearer.
He hadn't turned off the computer this time either, and a sound came from Discord. He'd reacted to the sound — but what he was really reacting to was something else.
"·····"
There was no one else it could be. She had logged back into Discord.
She had a lot of demands, but none of them were hard to keep.
Jimin typed out his account number without suspicion. An account number didn't mean much by itself anyway.
"Huh?"
It was a bank app notification — the kind he only ever saw when his mom slipped him a little pocket money.
"·····"
Money had been deposited into Jimin's account. To a boy who until recently had been a high school sophomore, the number looked impossibly large.
Jimin knew he needed to say thank you right away — and yet his hands were shaking too hard to type properly.