A New Game

I like to think I play a lot of games, and that I play them well.

FPS, MOBA, RPG—the genre never mattered. Start me on a new game and I would touch its peak at least once. Ask whether I was as good as a pro, though, and the answer was half yes, half no.

Immersion, I think, was a big part of why. Pro gamers lock onto a single game. They analyze it, study it, and dig until there's nothing left to dig. I simply got bored, fast, of whatever was sitting on the monitor.

In short, I was a rank-one sampler.

Clicking away at a keyboard, a mouse, a controller—the whole thing felt hollow. The funny part was that a new game would delight me more than anyone, and then, before long, I'd be bored of it. No content update could stir my interest.

A lack of realism, maybe. I can't explain it properly. I just can't enjoy a game I've been playing for a long time.

If I thought about the ones I'd stayed with the longest, they were RPGs. The road up to a raid, studying the gimmicks everyone called difficult, and then the sense of achievement when I finally cleared it—that feeling was genuinely good.

But in every RPG, time turned the gimmicks into repetition and the damage rotation into repetition, and boredom was inevitable.

So there I was again. I'd deleted the game I was playing and was wondering whether anything worth starting even existed.

And then—what was this?

I looked around.

A blue sky, beautiful clouds drifting through it. A pleasant, cool breeze. Medieval buildings on every side, and crowds of people.

I was standing at the center of what looked like a plaza.

Another world? A reincarnation?

No.

The proof that this wasn't some simple isekai reincarnation was right there in front of my eyes.

At eleven o'clock in my vision, a long red bar.

No matter how I looked at it, that was a health bar. A bar displaying my health. Then the one beneath it had to be mana, and the one beneath that, stamina.

Above the heads of the people passing by, octahedrons floated. Something was written under each of them. The text was different on every person, which made me think they were nicknames. And beside each nickname, English letters and a number.

Anyone could see that meant the person's level.

A game?

A UI that belonged in an RPG hovered in my sight.

Was this the old staple of comics, anime, and novels—a transfer into another world? It felt like it might be. And yet the voices around me were saying exactly the sort of things you'd see in an RPG's global chat.

Hunting grounds, dungeons, items, potions—ordinary RPG talk. Now and then I caught the word logout, and this place stopped feeling like some other world.

"Hey, see you tomorrow. I've got cram school, so I'm out."

"What? You're still going to that English cram school?"

"Yeah. It's so annoying. I told Mom the English teacher pisses me off, and she still won't switch me."

"For real? I'd hate that so fucking much. See you tomorrow. Hang in there."

"Okey-dokey."

Two guys who looked like students chatted back and forth beside me. Then the one who'd said he had to get to cram school pressed his index and middle fingers together, brought them down through empty air, kept gesturing at nothing, and vanished where he stood.

As if he'd logged out.

A virtual reality game?

The thought was ridiculous even to me. People online were still arguing over whether you made your game in Unreal Engine 5 or not, and suddenly this was virtual reality.

But every sensation hitting me was far too vivid.

Sunlight stung my eyes. A cool wind moved over my skin. The flood of information coming in from all around was no different from reality.

I lifted my hand the way that boy had.

Huh?

The hand that entered my sight was deeply wrong. This wasn't my hand. Mine was bigger, rougher. The hand in front of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠me now was, no matter how you looked at it, a little girl's.

Only then did I notice something else that was off.

High.

Everything around me was high. People, buildings, all sorts of objects.

I was usually tall enough to go around looking down at the crowns of people's heads. Now I had to look up at those same people.

Did I shrink...?

A dream?

I lowered my head and found a small body. Both hands ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠were small and neat. I was wearing a skirt, and the feet on the ground—how small were they?

In the glass of the building beside me, a little girl appeared. That little girl was looking at me.

Long, straight black hair fell neatly to about her waist. A small girl who seemed to have no expression at all.

When the blank girl's eyes moved and the corner of her mouth lifted, I understood that the small, cute girl reflected in the glass was me.

What is this? Is it actually a dream? But for a dream, this is way too vivid.

I pinched my cheek with my fingers, and pain came.

Except the pain was strange.

A vibration?

At first I thought it was pain. It felt more like I'd pressed a smartphone to my cheek and it had started buzzing.

My head began to ache.

Between the sudden change and this body, I couldn't get my thoughts in order. But I was pretty sure of one thing.

The place I was standing was a virtual reality game, the kind I'd seen so often in the comics, anime, and novels I read.

I tried the gesture I'd abandoned a moment ago. A chime sounded, and a hologram window appeared. A menu. I scrolled it downward, and there was the logout button.

It wasn't like that famous novel, where the game had no logout at all.

I wanted to press the button right then. I wanted, even more, to play this virtual reality game.

The virtual reality game I'd assumed wouldn't exist before I died—I was inside it.

I have to play this. Now.

First I decided to learn about the game. I sat in the chair in front of me and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠immediately started picking the menu apart.

Sure enough, I was level 1. Even the clothes I had on were the sort a beginner would be wearing.

In what looked like an inventory, there were ten potions and a one-handed sword. I clicked the sword.

A one-handed sword appeared before my eyes, and I snatched it up in a hurry.

Weight traveling through my hand. A cold grip. This sword felt like a real sword.

The next menu brought up a quest window. There was exactly one quest in it, and its name was Tutorial.

The objective was simple. Kill one goblin.

I pressed the path guide beneath the quest window, and a trail unspooled across the ground in front of me. I broke into a run along it at once.

I followed the quest guide to the end, and what waited there was a plain where goblins wandered—the same goblins I'd seen in every kind of media.

Short monsters with green skin. Every one of them carried a small dagger.

The people around me were hunting those goblins in earnest. Not clicking basic attacks and skills the way you would in a computer RPG, but moving, striking, and dodging with their own bodies.

I leveled my sword at the goblin in front of me.

My heart pounded. Feelings I had never once felt in my life took hold of my body, and in the instant every bit of my focus locked onto the goblin—

A beautiful woman's voice rang through my head, and a hologram appeared before my eyes.

Huh?

The moment I opened my eyes, what I saw was a pure white hospital room. Not an ordinary hospital room—an absurdly luxurious one.

Machines stood all around me, and a woman was carefully shaking my body.

She was incredibly pretty.

The thought came the instant I looked at her. A cold impression—the feeling of a charismatic noona, if I had to name it.

A noona who could go anywhere and not be outshone was dressed in a suit, shaking me.

Repeating the name Arang.

Now that I thought about it, the beautiful woman's voice I'd heard before I lost consciousness was probably this noona. And she'd said Arang!

I was wondering why she was calling me that when—

"Agh!"

A headache hit me ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠like my skull was splitting apart.

"Arang! D-Doctor!"

The pain was so bad that I passed out on the spot, and by the time I came to again, a vast mass of memories had poured into my head.

Simply put, I had become a little girl named Lee Arang.

Was this possession? I wasn't sure.

This world wasn't the one I'd lived in. It was a world a little further into the future. I also learned that the place I'd just been was a virtual reality game in the middle of a huge boom.

The problem was that this little girl was dead. Not physically. Mentally.

The reason was the situation Lee Arang was in.

Lee Arang had no arms and no legs. Because of an illness she'd acquired later in life, her arms had to be amputated a little above the elbows and her legs a little above the knees, and the muscles of her body kept weakening.

Arang had come down with this horrific disease at the age of only ten, and her mind couldn't endure it.

The noona who had been looking at me was Lee Arang's older sister, Lee Anna.

Noona Lee Anna and Arang's parents had cared for her with everything they had, but in the end Arang's mind, unable to overcome the sickness in her heart, had died.

She didn't react to anything they did. She didn't react to pain, or to any stimulus at all, and the doctors said there was no hope for her.

Arang really had died. And now I had entered that dead Arang.

All of Arang's memories, and every feeling of how hard it had been for her, came over to me.

When those memories and emotions first arrived, I was lost in confusion. Now I'd adapted.

From here on, I had to live as Lee Arang.

No arms, no legs, and I still had to live. It would be deeply inconvenient and hard, but I had to get through it.

But when I picked through the memories more carefully—

Our house—that is, Arang's house—was very, very rich. They owned an apartment building. Enough for three generations to live on, maybe?

And in the virtual reality game I'd just been playing, Legacy of Raid—LoR for short—I had clearly run on two legs and held a sword with two hands.

Did I really need to try that hard at living in reality?

Even without arms and legs, I could enjoy that famous virtual reality game...? Without worrying about money...?

Lee Arang in the Game