Day 21: One Pixel Is Enough
“Um… miss?”
“Yes?”
A young man’s trembling voice drifted from behind her. Cheon Seo-ah kept her gaze locked on the monitor and answered in a mildly puzzled tone.
“M-may I ask just one thing?”
“What is it?”
“How on earth are you landing those kills?”
He asked it with genuine, absolute incomprehension. Even watching from right over her shoulder, the young man—and the shadow monster beside him—could not grasp the principle by which Cheon Seo-ah was eliminating enemies. The opponents were not even visible to their eyes, yet she moved as if she already knew exactly where every one of them was.
And it went far beyond that.
“Holy…!”
The young man choked out the word. The instant Cheon Seo-ah headshot the last remaining enemy, the round ended in victory. The way it happened, though, defied belief.
She had clearly been defusing the spike. The enemy, hearing the defuse, had approached in full walk—not a single footstep—closing in from stealth. Yet long before that enemy burst out of the alley, Cheon Seo-ah had already swapped to her gun with the number-one key. The moment the opponent appeared, in less than a tenth of a second, her crosshair was already locked onto their head.
And after that?
Naturally, the moment the match ended, all-mute lifted and the chat flooded open. The other team exploded into every kind of curse imaginable, screeching about hacks and bugs and other nonsense.
“Are you actually using hacks?”
The young man asked again, still unable to believe it. Of course, he did not care in the slightest whether Cheon Seo-ah used cheats or not. But for her to be cheating? That was impossible from the start. She had not even known what Valorant was, and from the second she installed the game, he had been glued to her side. Even if she had installed a cheat, there was no way he would have missed it.
Cheon Seo-ah, however, looked back at the young man—and at the shadow monster wearing the exact same look of disbelief—as if she were the one who could not understand them.
“Why can’t you do this?”
She asked it with pure, unfiltered innocence.
Fuck! That’s what I’m asking—how the hell did you land those kills?!
The young man forced down the scream clawing up his throat and managed a strained smile.
“I truly don’t understand. If it wouldn’t be any trouble… could you tell me how you did it?”
“Hmm.”
At the young man’s forced smile and earnest request, Cheon Seo-ah puffed out her cheeks. She had only just started having fun, and she had no desire to waste time on him. Still—
Well… he did work up the courage to ask.
Mm-hmm. With that thought, she nodded and pulled up the replay of the previous round.
“Here. Watch carefully. This part. Do you see it?”
“S-see what, exactly?”
“You don’t see the gun barrel right here?”
She pointed with a finger. The young man frowned and stared holes into the monitor. A few seconds ticked by.
“Ah…!”
He let out a low, half-laughing sound. He saw it. He finally understood what she was pointing at. But—
“Y-you saw this?”
His voice shook. Where Cheon Seo-ah’s fingertip rested, a gun barrel no larger than a single pixel peeked into view. Calling it one pixel was generous; the actual size was even smaller. Not that it was truly invisible. If you focused hard enough, you could make it out. The problem was that she had confirmed it in real time, mid-match.
How…?
The thought had barely formed when she continued.
“If there’s a barrel, that means there’s an enemy character, right? And once I played a bit, I noticed Valorant has something called wallbangs. Character models have fixed sizes, too.”
Wallbangs. A system that let bullets fired from behind a wall deal damage to enemies on the other side. Valorant did support wallbangs, of course—but not everywhere. Some angles could be wallbanged; others could not. In other words, Cheon Seo-ah had looked at a sub-pixel-sized barrel, identified the type of gun, aimed where the opponent’s head had to be, and if the spot allowed a wallbang, simply fired and killed them.
Fuck, what kind of bullshit is this?
The young man barked a hollow laugh. But her explanation was not finished.
“And even if I hadn’t spotted that, if an enemy suddenly popped out, I’d just aim for the head and shoot, wouldn’t I?”
In short, what she was saying was this: she saw it, so she aimed and shot.
That was…
Possible at human reaction speeds?
Come to think of it—
The second the enemy came out, before I could even blink, her crosshair was already glued to their head.
Truly beastlike… no, calling it beastlike was an insult. It was a monstrous level of reflexes and dynamic vision.
At the same time—
What kind of ability does she even have?
Curiosity pricked at him. He already knew the girl in front of him was “something” great enough that even his master, Chilgeomje, bowed his head and took a low posture. He just had not expected physical capabilities this absurd. Were all of those things the product of some superpower?
While the young man was still turning the question over—
“So. That settles your business, doesn’t it?”
“Huh? Ah—yes. It does.”
“Then please don’t interrupt me any further.”
With that, Cheon Seo-ah fixed her eyes on the monitor again and went right back to her game.
“Is that so? Cheon Seo-ah… no. The young lady has taken an interest in a game?”
“That is correct.”
“Hmm. Games, is it. Not a bad hobby, certainly. Ah—what game has she taken a liking to?”
“It’s called Valorant.”
“Valorant. Valorant, is it…”
At his subordinate’s report, Chilgeomje scratched his chin and rolled the name around on his tongue. According to the report, the young lady had not set a single foot outside for three whole days, doing nothing but play Valorant. Was it really that entertaining?
In that case—
“Get in touch with Riot.”
“Regarding…?”
“Tell them we’ll sponsor. Tournament, event—doesn’t matter. Have them throw something together.”
“Understood.”
With that, the line cut out. Only then did Chilgeomje rise from his seat and look out the window. Far below, throngs of people crawled through the streets like ants. Watching them, he allowed himself a thin smile.
“Meeting the young lady that day was the greatest fortune of my life.”
Turning over memories that were growing fainter with time, Chilgeomje cast his mind back to the day he first met Cheon Seo-ah.
Chilgeomje had been born under Japanese colonial rule. The eldest of seven children in a household so desperately poor that scraping together a single day’s meal was a struggle. Perhaps that was why. Simply for being the eldest son of a starving family, he had been forced from childhood to give up almost everything—food and clothing, play and schooling, all of it.
In particular, from the moment he turned thirteen, he had done anything and everything that paid. He had no choice. The moment the man who brought in what little money they had—the so-called father he could barely stand to call by that name—fell ill, the burden of earning fell on him alone.
Then, one day, while running an errand for a Japanese policeman and carrying a certain package, another officer who was on bad terms with the first had caught him. That bastard’s ability tore both of Chilgeomje’s legs clean off, leaving him critically wounded.
So, lying in a trash heap with both legs gone and dying by inches, he cursed his parents. He cursed his siblings. He cursed his family. He cursed the entire world.
And just as he was racing toward death with hatred for everything under heaven, he met Cheon Seo-ah.
The first time their eyes met, Chilgeomje thought she was an angel come down from heaven to carry his dead soul away. She was neither angel nor reaper, though. He still remembered it with perfect clarity: the moment she gave a light wave of her hand, the legs the Japanese policeman had torn away regenerated completely.
And then the girl who had restored his legs spoke.
A poor child. That was how she had named him. No one else had ever pitied him. Not the so-called father rotting on a sickbed. Not the so-called mother who only shut herself up in their crumbling house under the excuse of nursing him. Not his damned little siblings, who never once thought of earning a single coin with their own hands, who only ate through the food he scraped together and pursued the studies he himself had never been free to chase. The whole world had refused him pity—yet one person, only Cheon Seo-ah, had pitied him, called him a poor child, and even shed a single tear for his sake.
And then—
“Help…?”
As she spoke, a book had already appeared in her hands. The volume she held out was not made of ordinary paper. He had not understood it then, but looking back now, the material binding that book had almost certainly been leather—human leather.
When Chilgeomje accepted the book she offered, she produced something else as well.
With those words, Cheon Seo-ah vanished from before his eyes. In that instant, Chilgeomje cradled a single faith in his heart—a faith that worshiped a nameless girl as its god.
Well. Later he would learn that he was not the only one who had received her help; there were eight others. And when he discovered that one of them was that damned Japanese woman, he had burned with rage. But still.
Coming out of the recollection, Chilgeomje’s eyes suddenly lit up.
“By the way… so they dared spout that kind of filth at the young lady, did they?”
He glanced sidelong at the monitor sitting on his desk. Across the screen, neatly compiled, floated every curse and every piece of filth Cheon Seo-ah had received while enjoying Valorant—who had said what, on what month, day, hour, minute, and second; every insult, every vile personal attack. All of it.
All of these.
“How should I handle them so the rumor spreads that they were handled well?”
He murmured it with a sharp little smile. Behind him, the silhouette of a demon with seven swords strapped across its back flickered into view.