Thumbs Up
"Hyah!"
I spat the kiai and slipped past the venomous fangs of the field boss in front of me—the Queen Spider—then triggered Pentagon, the Sword Master skill I'd learned at level forty-five.
Pentagon linked with Chain Slash. It threw five strikes in a row, and every one of them counted as a Chain Slash hit, which meant I could stack the attack-speed buff five times in a single instant. The burst flared violet and shredded the spider's belly. Red blood sprayed out.
"KISHAAAAAAK—!!!"
The Queen Spider roared in fury, and the four legs along her back lit up red. Her tank-burst. Tank-burst—short for tank burst—was, simply put, a savage beating reserved for whoever held aggro. A tank was supposed to meet it with a defensive skill while a healer kept them standing. Right now there was no tank. Just me on damage, and Pink Berry on heals.
So I had to take it. The kind of hit that usually killed a damage dealer outright, but—
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
The Judgment Sword, wreathed in blue, parried all six of the boss's strikes in a row. Not one got through.
"That's how it's done!"
My health hung by a thread. I'd finally survived the Queen Spider's tank-burst—and I'd died to the thing more than five times already. Pink Berry and I had talked it through, settled how we'd use our skills, and after watching the pattern about five times I'd grown used to it. On the sixth try, it finally worked.
Past the tank-burst, the Queen Spider was nothing special. Every swing of the Corrupted Adjudicator hit so hard that even a successful parry left me fighting knockback and recovery lag, but the Queen Spider was built on speed and chains. Land the parries, and she was easier than the Adjudicator. The tank-burst had been the whole problem. Clear that, and the fight was as good as won.
It wasn't long before she burst apart in a flare of bright light.
Whew. This region's field boss, cleared safe and sound.
One thing this run had driven home: the synergy was no joke. Chain Slash, Pentagon, and the Judgment Sword's bonus—three percent attack and defense on normal attacks—all feeding one another.
I turned my head this way and that over the spot where the Queen Spider had died.
"Nothing. Not a thing..."
Field boss drop rates were miserably, miserably low to begin with. Still, I'd seen something drop with my own eyes when we took down the Corrupted Adjudicator, and that was enough to get my hopes up.
"Nice work, Arang."
"Yeah!"
I threw Pink Berry a thumbs-up as she came over.
"You look like an ajusshi."
"Ghk..."
I folded on the spot. The remark came out of nowhere and knocked the wind out of me.
S-sure, before I'd ended up in Arang's body I'd been in my late twenties, but I didn't think that made me ajusshi material—somebody's middle-aged uncle. And now I was getting called one out of the blue. I was a fifteen-year-old girl, for crying out loud! No arms or legs, but still!
"Then what are people doing these days...?"
Even rummaging through Arang's memories got me nowhere. She'd been in the hospital since she was twelve and had no idea what was in fashion. Before the DeathBed she couldn't even handle a phone by herself; she'd lived on whatever happened to be playing on the TV, and she'd never once looked at social media or Ryutube.
"Hmm... lately people make a V with their fingers and point it down. Like this."
"A V, downward? What's that?"
"It's called a Garupisu. It was huge forever ago, and now it's trendy again."
"Ooh... You could just do a normal V. Why flip it upside down...?"
"Because it's cute?"
"Ohh..."
Lee Hayan found herself taking screenshot after screenshot of Arang earnestly practicing the Garupisu she'd just taught her. With every shot, a certainty settled in—about everything so far, about the moment just now, about the way Arang moved.
Arang was cut off from the world.
Fifteen was an age that lived on trends. You picked things up off social media and Ryutube just to keep up with your friends, and Arang had none of that. Connector time limits, the games and dramas and movies everyone was into—she knew none of it. She might as well have been living somewhere else entirely. She'd said she wasn't going to middle school. Skip compulsory middle school and you were supposed to be homeschooled, but it had been about a week since they'd met, and Arang was always logged into Legacy of Raid, putting in the same sixteen hours Hayan did. At that point, shouldn't her parents have put a stop to it?
Look at it another way, though, and the story changed. Arang had to stay in the virtual world.
The MDB Medical DeathBed—the connector people called the MDB—was the only model in the world with no connection limit. Arang was definitely using one. Five of them existed on the entire planet. Korea had exactly one, and it sat at Seoul Asan Hospital, still the most famous hospital in the country. So Arang was probably very sick. Sick enough that an MDB was the only option.
Having reasoned that far, Lee Hayan didn't know how she was supposed to face her. This went beyond being ill. It was bad enough to need a machine people called a deathbed. Was there anything Hayan could even do? Was there anything, in the first place, that she could offer Arang? They'd known each other a week. One week—but nearly sixteen hours a day of playing together, clearing quests with the same thumping heart she'd had when she first started Legacy of Raid, adventuring, even raiding a field boss. In that week they'd grown close, and to someone who had lived without friends, Arang had become more precious than anyone. And she was very, very cute.
Anyway. The thought of that cute girl, bright smile and all, happily playing while she went through something that hard made Hayan's chest ache. She turned over how she might meet her and help, even a little. Going to Seoul Asan Hospital crossed her mind, and she set it aside as too much of an imposition. Arang might not want it. Anyone would struggle to let someone else see them that sick—
"Oh, right. Pink Berry, want to meet up offline?"
"...Huh?"
"We just took down the Queen Spider and hit max level, of all things. And we've gotten pretty close! Ah—is that too much?"
"We... we can actually meet offline...?"
"Right? No reason we couldn't."
Arang said it so naturally that Hayan was thrown.
"R-really?"
"Yeah. Let's get something good to eat. Oh—my sister'll be there, though. Is that okay?"
"Your sister?"
"Yeah. I kind of need her."
"Uh, y-yeah. That's fine. But is meeting offline really okay?"
"It's fine! Oh, right, there was something else. I'll pick the place! Just show up! My sister's calling, so I'm logging out first!"
The talk blew through like a storm, and then Arang logged out and vanished.
What...? Have I been wrong about all of this, all by myself?
Offline meetups.
Play long enough and you met up in person now and then. Liking games didn't mean I hated meeting people. I just hated talk that went nowhere. Getting together with people who loved the same thing and actually talking about the game—that, I liked. So after a week of getting close to Pink Berry in Legacy of Raid, I'd been thinking of asking her to meet offline.
I used to get together with anyone, guys or girls, and we'd just hang out and make noise. I couldn't do that anymore. The reason was simple. Anna had come down hard against it.
When I first told her about an offline meetup, she'd worried, and she'd been happy too—happy that I, shut in this hospital room alone with no friends, finally had one. The trouble was she didn't know games, didn't know Pink Berry, and had no way to tell what kind of person she was, so she worried. That left one condition: Anna had to come with me. Meeting a girl was allowed. Meeting a guy was absolutely not. She'd nailed that down.
For a second I'd wondered why. Then I got a look at myself and nodded.
I wasn't a man anymore. Just a frail fifteen-year-old girl, and a disabled one, with no arms or legs. Well. In the virtual world, what mattered was that I'd become a known name in Legacy of Raid. Make a guild later and a lot of interesting people would show up, right? I was looking forward to it.
Three days later, Lee Hayan—Pink Berry, online—stood before Seoul Asan Hospital and swallowed, her throat tight.
When Arang had suggested meeting offline as if it were nothing, Hayan had wondered whether all her agonizing had been pointless. Then the mail arrived, and the place was Seoul Asan Hospital. What she'd figured out was real.
Offline meetups. She'd liked them once, and come to hate them after something ugly happened. But Arang, she wanted to see. Those ten days together had been genuinely fun, and happy. Even hunting a single little monster had been a good time, and raiding a field boss side by side had set her heart racing—tension, thrill, and the rush of having actually done it, all at once.
To meet that Arang offline, she stepped into Seoul Asan Hospital.