The Curse of Misfortune
“Sunbae. Sunbae. Why is that person acting like that?”
Jeong Su-hyeok asked the question with genuine bafflement still written all over his face.
Tae-hyun kindly explained.
“What do you call it... like eighth-grader syndrome. You know, claiming there’s some uncontrollable power sealed in his right eye... saying people will get hurt if they come too close.”
“Ah. I see! Does that also include things like saying there’s a dragon sleeping in your left hand?”
—Were you talking about me?
“Not you, Yong-yong.”
At the mention of dragons, Yong-yong abruptly cut in.
“Yeah. That would count too, probably.”
At that, Jeong Su-hyeok looked at the full-plate player with the pitying eyes one reserved for the unfortunate.
“There’s nothing to gain from getting tangled up with someone like that, so let’s just ignore him and move on. If we leave him alone, there won’t be any problem.”
“As expected of you, Sunbae! Amazing!”
Tae-hyun wasn’t sure this was really the kind of thing that deserved admiration, but he just shrugged.
Apparently, though, the full-plate player didn’t feel the same way.
He started trembling.
“Huh. Sunbae. Why’s he doing that now?”
“Simple. When people do that, it usually means something hurts or they’re angry. Since there’s no reason for him to be hurt, I guess he must be angry.”
“I’m angry, damn it?!”
The full-plate player leaped to his feet with a shout.
“I went out of my way to warn you not to come close, and what the hell are you saying? I’m not sick!”
“We never thought you were sick. Only... somewhat different...”
“That’s basically the same thing! And it feels even worse when you put it like that, you little punks!”
Jeong Su-hyeok’s clumsy attempt at kindness seemed to have made things even worse.
The full-plate player huffed furiously, then said,
“Fine. I definitely warned you. If you don’t believe me, then come closer and see for yourselves!”
Tae-hyun looked him over, then replied in a flat voice.
“If you lunge at me after I come close, and then try saying something like, ‘Th-this wasn’t me! It was my dark personality!’ I’m gonna beat that dark personality of yours until it dies.”
“...I’m not going to do that?”
The other player asked as if Tae-hyun had lost his mind.
“What kind of person in the world does that?”
“More than you’d think.”
Tae-hyun was reminded of the old days in Fantasy Online 1.
Evil-aligned PK players were usually shameless and had no conscience to begin with.
And once those players were cornered, outmatched, and had nowhere left to run, they started doing things beyond imagination.
—At home, I have an elderly mother and a wife who depends on me—
—And a guy like that has time to play games?
—A-actually, I have anger management issues, so I can’t control it.
—Sure. Then let’s keep hitting you until you can.
—I actually have multiple personalities...!
—Right. Right. Guess we’ll just keep beating you until they merge back together.
Excuses so inventive they could still shock even Tae-hyun, who’d spent years in the trenches of online gaming.
Of course, not one of those excuses had ever worked.
Tae-hyun decided that if this full-plate player tried anything and then came out with some ridiculous excuse, he’d beat him so badly he wouldn’t even be able to open his mouth.
One step, then another—
As Tae-hyun drew closer, the full-plate player folded his arms. His whole body practically radiated the smug air of go ahead, just try it.
And then, right in front of him, Tae-hyun stopped.
“Well? Get it now?”
“...?”
Tae-hyun tilted his head.
The full-plate player looked like he was being completely sincere.
But absolutely nothing was happening.
What the hell?
“What? You don’t see anything?”
“Nope.”
“That’s impossible! Gimme your hand.”
Tae-hyun held out his hand.
The full-plate player grabbed it with a rough gauntleted hand.
“Still nothing?”
“Hmm. I do feel like there ought to be a message over your head saying ‘I have eighth-grader syndrome,’ though...”
“I told you I don’t!”
The full-plate player pounded at his chest in pure frustration.
Then he turned to Jeong Su-hyeok.
“You! You come here too!”
“Me? You mean me?”
Jeong Su-hyeok looked flustered, but when Tae-hyun gave him a nod, he cautiously stepped forward.
And at that moment, a message window appeared.
You have been caught up in powerful misfortune.
All actions you take from this point on will be affected by bad luck.
“?!”
Jeong Su-hyeok blinked in shock.
It was a system message he’d never seen before.
“What is this?”
“Exactly! That’s the normal reaction!”
The full-plate player excitedly pointed at Jeong Su-hyeok.
Unlike Tae-hyun, who hadn’t reacted at all, Su-hyeok had given him the perfect response.
“You got the message too! So don’t pretend you didn’t!”
“I didn’t get anything. Su-hyeok, what did you see?”
“It said I got caught up in powerful misfortune...”
“...?”
Tae-hyun looked puzzled.
Caught up in powerful misfortune?
Usually, something like that only popped up when a dungeon had a special environmental effect, or when a boss monster cast some absurdly powerful spell.
But in a situation like this, where nothing had even happened?
“See? That’s why I told you not to come over!”
The full-plate player looked deeply relieved to have finally proven that he was not just some delusional chuunibyou idiot.
He jabbed a finger at Tae-hyun.
“So if you get it now, stop pretending you didn’t and back off!”
“I’m not pretending. I really didn’t get anything.”
“Stop lying! You can tell just by using one skill! Hey, you there! If you’ve got any weak magic, try casting it!”
When the full-plate player suddenly turned on him, Jeong Su-hyeok jumped.
“Go on. I’m curious too.”
“Lesser Arcane Arrow!”
Jeong Su-hyeok hastily recited the spell.
A faintly glimmering magic arrow shot forward—
And exploded directly against the full-plate player’s body.
Fwaaash!
“?!”
Jeong Su-hyeok’s mouth dropped open in shock.
I didn’t aim over there!
Watching that, Tae-hyun nodded in impressed approval.
“Wow. You’re surprisingly good. Pretending it was an accident while actually attacking him...”
“I didn’t do that, Sunbae! I seriously did not aim over there!”
Jeong Su-hyeok waved his hands helplessly, but Tae-hyun didn’t believe him.
“Pretty... pretty slick.”
Meanwhile, the full-plate player casually dusted off his armor and started talking again.
He looked completely unbothered by having just been hit with a magic skill.
Looks like he’s pretty high level.
That was what Tae-hyun concluded to himself.
The fact that the player was soloing in this dungeon already proved he had real skill.
“Normally, the magic would fail or turn around and hit the caster... but maybe he got a little lucky that time. Either way, you get it now, right? If you use magic while you’re under misfortune, it spirals out of control like that.”
The full-plate player said that, then pointed at Tae-hyun.
“So if you use a skill or spell too, you won’t be able to keep lying— huh?”
Tae-hyun casually pulled out a hammer and anvil, took up an ordinary longsword, and started tapping away at it.
Then bright light burst forth—the unmistakable light that only appeared when a repair was completed perfectly.
Blacksmithing Skill
Perfect repair complete.
“Ta-da.”
“?!?!?”
Evangeline.
That was the full-plate player’s name.
She was, by most standards, a pretty successful player.
She wasn’t part of a guild, but she had a few close parties she ran with regularly, so she’d never really had trouble clearing quests.
At least, not until that day.
The problem started when she carelessly accepted a class advancement quest she’d found in a cave.
The class advancement quest rewarded a class that was, of all things, a Heroic Class!
Excluding Legendary Classes, it was basically the best kind of class you could possibly get.
So Evangeline threw herself into it with everything she had—and in the end, she succeeded.
Just hearing the name sounded cool.
Evangeline had been so happy she felt like she might jump out of her skin.
And when she checked the class’s performance, it was amazing.
Huge boosts to HP and MP, powerful passive skills, and a whole batch of active class skills right from the start...
It was almost suspiciously good.
She doubted even most Legendary Classes would be this absurdly powerful.
Stats, skills, every category across the board—it was an overwhelmingly strong class.
Everything except Luck.
Huh?
For a moment, Evangeline thought she’d misread it.
“...?”
Since the other stats had all gone up, she’d initially thought maybe Luck had shot all the way up to 999 too.
But that wasn’t it.
Not 999.
Negative 999.
It was the first time she had ever seen a negative stat.
“What the hell is this?!”
Your Luck stat is permanently fixed at -999.
It was a short passive effect, but the contents were horrifying.
N-no, wait. Luck is a trash stat anyway... and everything else is insanely good... with this much power, most other classes can’t even compare... right. It’s fine! I don’t need Luck!
But she didn’t have to wait long to discover how wrong that thought was.
Due to powerful misfortune, the durability of your longsword rapidly decreases.
“Hey!”
Due to powerful misfortune, your armor has been destroyed.
“Hey!!!”
Due to powerful misfortune, the blacksmith fails the repair.
Your equipment has been destroyed.
“Hey!!!!!”
Evangeline came to feel, deep in her bones, just how important the Luck stat really was.
At zero, it didn’t seem like it mattered much.
But once it dropped into the negatives, the value of Luck became painfully, brutally clear.
Any equipment she wore either lost durability at an alarming rate or just outright broke in some freak accident before the durability could even tick down.
And repairs weren’t any safer. If she stood near a blacksmith while getting her gear fixed, the blacksmith would somehow screw up and destroy the equipment.
Obviously, that meant she couldn’t even use ordinary items the way normal players did.
And it didn’t stop there.
Whenever she formed a party, her misfortune reached out and infected her party members too.
If Evangeline was nearby, skills failed, item durability dropped, quest rewards came out lower—just a nonstop chain of every kind of bad luck imaginable.
A passive skill that guarantees successful skill activation.
When she’d first seen that passive, she had wondered, What kind of skill is this?
Only then did she realize the truth.
Without a passive like that, it would have been literally impossible for her to use skills at all.
So while the rest of her party stumbled, failed skills, and rolled around on the ground in disaster, she alone could keep fighting properly.
And naturally, the other party members could not accept that.
In the end, even the close parties she’d once trusted couldn’t keep her around and ran away.
From that point on, Evangeline had been forced to play solo.
For someone who genuinely enjoyed playing with people she liked, it had been a bitter blow.
Still, the class itself was overwhelmingly powerful, so somehow she managed to keep going alone.
For the equipment that kept breaking, she searched out gear with indestructible options.
She stayed far, far away from production skills like blacksmithing.
It was, in every sense, the path of an asura.
And now, she had come to Marden Castle.
Because of her class quest.
“Sniff... to think something like that happened to you....”
After hearing the story, Jeong Su-hyeok’s eyes grew watery as he sniffled.
Tae-hyun looked at him like he couldn’t begin to understand.
“What part of that story was supposed to be sad?”
“Sunbae! She got the wrong class, couldn’t socialize with other people anymore, and got forced into solo play! How is that not sad?”
“Doesn’t sound sad to me. What’s wrong with solo play?”
The true nature of a born loner.
Tae-hyun, who was completely used to living the life of an outsider, couldn’t empathize with Evangeline’s sorrow at all.
“And the class is good, isn’t it? Sounds like it worked out.”
“How is any of this working out?!”
Evangeline burst out angrily.
“I can’t even meet up with my friends anymore because of this... seriously... if I just run into a vampire, I’m making them pay for all of it!”
“...?”
Tae-hyun wondered if he’d misheard her.
“A vampire?”
“I told you. I came here because of my class quest.”
“Same here.”
“...?”
Two class quests in the same place?