The Deathbed
On the carriage to the next village, I turned over what had happened a little while ago.
At the time I had blocked that man and gotten out of there because I just wanted to get back to playing. Looking back now, though, every person in that place had been staring at me. The crowd had gathered for one reason. Me.
"What the hell... did I do something weird?"
No matter how I worked through it, all I had done was kill goblins, slimes, and rabbits, and take down a level-15 field boss. The man I had blocked had definitely been level 60, the cap, and most of the people around him had looked capped as well. A crowd like that usually meant an update, or an incident. There had been no update when I launched the game, so it had to be an incident.
"And I was at the center of it...?"
Thinking about it now, they really had all been looking at me. I had not done a single thing wrong, and yet this was starting to feel like a real problem. People gathering like that meant plenty of them had already seen it somewhere—on some site, a gallery.
In an RPG, reputation mattered. A great deal. In the highest raids especially, a player's reputation decided whether you even made the roster, so reputation and logs were things you always had to manage. A log, put simply, was a record of what you had done in a raid, and the one people used most was the DPS meter: how well you dealt damage, how often you made mistakes, all of it written down.
Some players stressed over every single number, but as someone who played RPGs, I thought it was better to have a meter. You could see yourself grow. At first you were stuck down at the bottom, and then, as the raids went on and you got used to the mechanics and your class, you watched your records climb. I was rambling. The point was this: if you wanted into a raid group, your reputation had to be good. Who would want a raider who swore at people over the smallest mistake, picked fights, and soured the whole group? Get thrown out of one raid, and it was hard to get into another.
And no matter how I looked at what had happened in the starting village, it did not look good.
At this rate, am I going to hit the cap and still not be able to raid...?
Hands and physical skill only got you so far. A raid was the one thing you could not clear alone. The game had been built from the start around group play, and I probably would not even be allowed through the door. All those capped players had been looking at me as if they did not like what they saw.
I need to find out what happened.
I logged out. The moment the pure white space met my eyes, I opened the connector menu and pulled up the internet. They called this the future, but the internet was no different from the world I had come from. I searched for LeoRe, clicked the LeoRe Gallery at the top of the results, and posts flooded the screen the instant the page opened. I opened the popular tab, and the title of the very first thread caught my eye.
I clicked in, and a game screenshot filled the screen. I was in it.
"Huh?"
One look at the most upvoted comments, and I had the situation in a hurry.
The field boss was a raid boss?
I had thought it was just some kind of unique monster. It was a boss that proper raid groups sat down and killed in earnest, and the parry had been where the whole incident started. Parrying had been difficult, sure, and it had taken work, but I did not think it was as impossible as those comments made it out to be. This body was talented, that much was true, but it was still a little girl's body.
Fair enough. If a beginner had suddenly killed a boss, the old me would have called it hacks too.
But hacks did not exist in this game. In LeoRe, a hack meant an illegal modification. The connector sat at the throat like a choker, blocked the signals running from the brain to the body, read those signals, and sent them into the game. That was why I moved the way I thought. There were modifications, I had heard, that deliberately amplified those signals. The side effects were serious enough that the law had banned them, which was why they were called illegal modifications. And right now, they were saying I had one.
So that was why he told me to play fair.
Only now did this morning start to make sense. If I really had been running an illegal mod, I would have been anxious and on edge. I was not. I was using a perfectly healthy, perfectly normal connector. It was nothing like anyone else's, but it was still a normal one. If this had been some ordinary RPG, I would have ignored the whole mess, quit, and gone looking for another game that was fun. I wanted to play Legacy of Raid for a long time.
"Mmm... what do I do?"
Leave it alone, and people would keep misunderstanding until I was fixed in everyone's mind as a cheater. After that, getting into a raid would be impossible.
"I don't want that..."
Even so, stepping out in front of that many people to clear my name felt like too much. Still, if I was going to play LeoRe, I at least had to settle anything to do with hacks and illegal modifications. Anyone who played even a little had already seen the screenshot with my face in it. I was already famous.
"But how am I supposed to clear this up? Hnn..."
Thinking about it, all I had done was try to kill the Orc Chieftain, parry, and somehow end up killing it. They were saying that was impossible. I had already done it. Was everyone else just short on skill?
The Legacy of Raid customer center was buried. Inquiry mail had come in at five times the usual volume, and the strange part was that every one of those inquiries concerned a single user. A staff member sensed something was off and sent the matter up the chain. The head of the customer center read the report and went through the inquiries about that user himself.
"Someone solo-cleared the Orc Chieftain?"
Until now, not one of the level-synced bosses had ever been cleared alone. Even the physical freaks, the people with monstrous bodies, had needed at least six. One person clearing a boss like that was plainly an anomaly. Most of the mail suspected an illegal modification of the connector and asked the company to verify it directly. The lead felt the same unease, and moved at once to bring it to the other team leads.
The leads gathered and went over the controversy unfolding in LeoRe. One user had solo-cleared the Orc Chieftain with parries that should not have been possible, and every one of them watched the footage of a level 5 taking the Orc Chieftain down.
"It's impressive, I'll give it that. In theory, though, it's possible."
"It is. There is one problem."
"A problem?"
One of the leads had already been gathering information on the user Lee Arang, just in case. He told the others what he had found, and once they heard it, they took the problem to the executive director. The director of Legacy of Raid put the controversy that had blown up out of nowhere to his team leads.
"So this child really did solo-clear that Orc Chieftain?"
"Yes."
"The user's information?"
"Her real name is the same as her nickname. Lee Arang. She's fifteen."
"Then what's the problem? It's not as if our game actually has hacks. Was there something in the logs?"
"Nothing wrong with the logs. This fifteen-year-old girl really did clear the Orc Chieftain by herself."
"Then there was no reason for this to reach me, was there? There's another problem."
"The problem is the connector."
"The connector? You're telling me she actually modified it illegally? This girl?"
The director's brow tightened.
"We haven't confirmed an illegal modification. It was a connector model none of us had ever seen, though. And the model name..."
"A model you've never seen? Is that even possible?"
The director of Legacy of Raid took the paper. It held what a game company could obtain on the user Lee Arang through ordinary channels, not a full dump of personal information, and among those details was the connector she had used to log in. In that field sat a model name even he had never seen.
"This is..."
A model name the game's director had never once laid eyes on. It did not say which company had made it, or which generation it was, but the name alone was intuitive enough that a single glance told you what kind of connector it had to be. MDB Medical DeathBed. In plain words, a medical deathbed connector.
He had heard of it. Because the device blocked signals generated in the brain, medicine had taken an interest. The whole thing, he had heard, began as a curiosity over whether it might replace anesthesia, which carried a slight risk of its own.
Deathbed. A heavy word. It meant a life coming to its end, or death drawing near. The MDB Medical DeathBed, then, was a connector meant to lessen the pain of a patient whose death was already close.
"This little girl..."