Inquiry
Once the farming was done, I logged out of Legacy of Raid so I could finally sleep.
The moment I dropped back into my room in the virtual world, I launched myself at the bed. Sleep came crashing down the instant I sank into the plush mattress, but I still opened the menu and slipped onto the internet.
It had been a while since I'd set foot in the Gallery.
Most of the posts were ordinary game talk, but here and there my own name kept catching my eye. Heart pounding, I opened the thread with the most upvotes.
Inside were screenshots people had taken of me today, while I was grinding the dungeon and running into whoever happened to be around.
I already knew I was pretty and cute, but seeing myself in a screenshot, I looked cool. Pitch-black armor, a pure-white cape set off against it, and a Tasim sword dripping with swagger—nobody could look at that and think anything but cool.
And sure enough, the comments—
"Huh? What? They're calling this tacky?"
Most of them were saying my avatar looked tacky. No. Armor this cool, and they were calling it tacky...?
Jet-black plate, a snow-white cape, and a Tasim sword flushed with red. This was tacky? Were these people blind?
I went straight to the most upvoted comment and left a reply.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap.
Mm. That was plenty. They wouldn't realize it was me, and I'd still told that person their fashion sense was wrong.
If this was tacky, then what on earth was supposed to look cool?
"Huh? You want to play Legacy? For real? You...?"
Yoo Eunji, Lee Anna's friend from university, doubted her own ears the moment Anna brought up Legacy of Raid.
"Yeah. You're the one who kept asking if I'd try it, since it was fun. And I'm not saying I will. I'm asking you to explain it."
"Uhhh...? So you still don't plan on playing. You just want to know what kind of game it is? You, who's never played a game in your life?"
"Yeah."
Lee Anna took a sip of the americano in front of her, then spoke.
"In college I said I couldn't, because I had to study. After I graduated I said I couldn't, because I had to work. So why now, all of a sudden?"
Yoo Eunji thought back to their university days.
If you asked anyone at Seoul National University to name the most famous student on campus, the answer was obviously Lee Anna.
From her face to her figure, there wasn't a single part of her that failed to be beautiful. She didn't drink, didn't smoke, had no piercings and no tattoos—pure and modest, in the most literal sense. Men came at her from every angle, desperate to charm her even once, and she turned every last one of them away cold.
Men and women alike found Anna difficult to approach. Then one day Yoo Eunji heard someone crying in an empty lecture hall, stepped inside, and found Lee Anna there. She'd been so startled that she went over and asked if Anna was all right, but she never learned why Anna had been crying. She simply comforted her. That was how they grew close.
Yoo Eunji had loved games since she was little. More than once she had asked Anna to play with her, hoping to share a hobby with the friend she was so fond of, and every time she had been shot down.
And yet here Anna was, out of the blue, asking to be told about Legacy of Raid.
"Thanks to Legacy, I've gotten closer with my little sister."
"...Huh? Little sister? You have a little sister?"
"Yeah. So I'm really grateful to you, Eunji. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't even be able to talk to her."
"Wh-wh-what? I can't keep up with where this is going. So you had a little sister, and once she started Legacy the two of you got close? Did I hear that right?"
"Yeah. That's right."
"You got close with your sister—does that mean the two of you weren't, before?"
"Mmm... something like that."
Anna told her a little about Arang. She said nothing about the state of her body—only that Legacy had brought them closer.
"Oh... so you want to learn about Legacy to get even closer with your sister? So you can talk about the game and everything!"
"...Yeah."
"Whoa. This is huge. Did your sister like games?"
"Not really. She never used to play, but she likes Legacy a lot. She's always talking about it."
Anna thought of Arang. The Arang inside the virtual world really was that pure, adorable Arang from long ago.
The problem was reality. The moment Arang came back to the real world, she reverted to the Arang from before—the girl who had been as good as dead.
A reality with no arms and no legs. No one would want that. But through Legacy of Raid, Arang had come back as the Arang Anna knew.
"She must be famous in the game. She gets so happy telling me what she did, and how people kept praising her."
"Famous? Getting famous in Legacy isn't easy, with so many people playing. What's your sister's name?"
In her entire life, the only games Lee Anna had ever touched were a little mobile gaming on the side. She had no idea how famous her little sister currently was in Legacy, so she simply said the name.
"Lee Arang. Isn't that an incredibly cute name?"
"...? Lee Arang? Lee Araaaaang!?"
Yoo Eunji slammed both hands on the table and shot to her feet.
"Huh? Oh. You know her? How do you know her?"
"Really...? My sister is that famous?"
"I'm telling you! You have no idea how huge Jung2 Arang's impact has been! She soloed a field boss, and she took every low-level field boss with a world-first minimum-player clear—a genius among geniuses!"
Yoo Eunji snatched up her phone and showed Anna the screenshots of Arang that had surfaced from the dungeon.
"This is Arang, right!?"
"Yeah, that's Arang. Mm. She was wearing armor like that."
"Hah. No way. Anna doesn't know the first letter of the word game, and a little sister with talent like this came out of her genes."
"Why does that sound kind of insulting...?"
"Anna, Anna...!"
Yoo Eunji caught Anna by the shoulders and looked at her with sparkling eyes.
"Introduce me to Arang...!"
"Introduce you...? In real life?"
"No, no, in the game! Hold on...!"
From the bag she'd brought, Eunji pulled out a diary, scribbled her Legacy nickname as fast as she could, and carefully set it in Anna's hand.
"This is my nickname, okay...!? If—i-if, just if—she says it isn't a burden, could you tell her to send me a friend request under this name...!? Please!?"
Anna studied her friend.
Eunji. The only friend she'd had through all of university.
These days she ran a famous clothing shop in Gangnam. It got a little tiresome whenever she asked to play games, but as a person, and in temperament, she was genuinely good. Anna did worry that some of the people you met in a game might turn out rotten, but if a friend was right there beside Arang—
It'll be a good influence on her.
Anna herself had learned, thanks to Eunji, how to talk with other people a little more smoothly. She nodded.
"All right. I'll pass it on to Arang."
"R-really!? Thank you!"
A woman working the Legacy of Raid customer center let out sigh after sigh today, same as always, over the endless stack of inquiry mail, and started working through them one by one.
Most of it was the usual. Someone had thrown an item away by mistake and wanted it restored. Questions about the Mom's Touch collaboration. Balance complaints, and update complaints.
Whatever she could, she cleared with macros—but in the Mom's Touch collab inbox, she found a strange one.
The woman frowned.
By default, you could neither buy a connector nor use one without the user's fingerprint authentication. But there were people in the world without fingerprints. Those people could purchase a connector by going to a store in person, with a resident registration extract and an ID.
That was why, in very small print at the very bottom of the Legacy Mom's Touch notice, it said you could bring your connector and authenticate that way.
"So many people can't even read something like this. Ugh. I already have too many inquiries to get through—read it properly before you write in."
She pasted in the macro reply prepared for this round of Mom's Touch inquiries and sent it off. Then she opened the next one at once.
"What is this!"
I'd woken up, and before I even logged into Legacy a reply had come in on the inquiry I'd sent, so I opened it right away.
The actual answer was a boilerplate macro.
Did any of that make sense?
They wanted me to haul in a deathbed unit bigger than a king-size bed? Huh? Like that was possible!? I'd sent the inquiry because it wasn't!
No. Fair enough, though. The MDB deathbed connector I was using was extremely rare—only five of them existed in the whole world.
Everyone on the planet used an ordinary choker connector, so of course an inquiry like mine would come back like this.
Mmm...
What was I supposed to do? If it were only the authentication, I could just go with Anna.
No. This time it wasn't only the authentication. It was the connector. I should send another inquiry and say so.
Legacy had taken care of me during that hacking and illegal-modification mess last time. Maybe they'd help again?
This time I wrote it properly, beginning with:
Hello. I'm sorry for sending another inquiry.
And continuing from there:
I currently have neither arms nor legs, and because of my illness I am not using an ordinary connector, so authentication through a connector is impossible.
Good, good.
I don't have an ID card, since I'm not an adult yet, and I don't have a student ID, since I'm not attending school. Could you let me know whether a family relation certificate or a resident registration extract would be acceptable instead?
Oh, right. I couldn't leave this part out either.
The connector model I am currently using is the MDB. Thank you.
Good. Perfect! If this one came back as a macro too, I was calling them.