The Name Everyone Got Wrong
The guild’s name was a guild, and every last one of its members was an Orc, so it was easy to get the wrong idea—but the people gathered here were anything but stupid.
They were middle-aged men worn smooth by real life.
And it wasn’t as if they’d never played games before. Nobody became a tyrant among losers in Lineage by accident.
Kim Tae-san stopped typing and stretched.
The class quest he was aiming for right now was for the Orc Great Chieftain.
A Heroic class, no less—a powerful class worthy of a guild master. In both personal combat power and command ability, getting it would make him several times stronger.
And that wasn’t all.
One of his guild members, Park Won-jun, was in the middle of clearing a quest for the Orc Shaman. It wasn’t quite the same as a Mage, but it was a powerful class that used magic specialized for Orcs.
Another guild member, Seo Cheong-sik, was clearing a quest for the Orc Priest. Same story there—it was a priest class that used holy magic tailored specifically for Orcs.
In battle, it was the kind of class that could multiply a group’s fighting power several times over.
Each of these classes was priceless information—the kind of thing nobody got their hands on easily.
There was only one reason Kim Tae-san had been able to gather it.
Money well spent.
Cash shop power!
Fantasy Online 2 was an international smash hit. People played it from America to Korea—hell, probably even at research stations in Antarctica.
And naturally, with that kind of popularity, players found all sorts of ways to have fun inside the game.
Some of them even turned that fun into income.
You didn’t have to stream or sell expensive items to make money.
Information sold too.
On the Fantasy Online 2 site, there were always tons of posts from people trying to sell rare quest info or obscure discoveries.
Kim Tae-san saw that and sent a private message.
What is with this guy?
The seller was dumbfounded by the sheer force of the message, but still replied.
A customer was a customer, after all.
Did I go too high?
A million won just for information on a rare class quest. Maybe that had been a little excessive.
But the reply came back instantly.
...??
At first, the seller thought it had to be a joke.
But when he checked his account, the money was really there.
This wasn’t just a customer. This was a whale!
...!
And just like that, Kim Tae-san bought up every last scrap of information on the Orc classes around him.
Then he immediately set his guild members to work on their class quests.
His pace was terrifying.
While Kim Tae-san was doing that, Tae-hyun logged back into the game and got ready to disembark.
The merchant ship returned safely to the harbor of Genoma City under the escort of the Atali Kingdom navy.
Since Tae-hyun and the other players had played a major role in defeating the pirates of Katerand Island and bringing down the Specter of the Ancient God, the navy treated them with extraordinary courtesy.
For players who had never experienced treatment like this before, it was enough to make their eyes sting with tears.
“Wow. This is the first time NPCs have ever treated me this well.”
“Doing this quest was so worth it!”
Everyone was beaming, all the hardship they’d gone through on the island already forgotten.
That was how memories worked. Once enough time passed, the rough edges got polished smooth.
Sure, they’d been captured by pirates and worked to the bone—but in the end, the rewards had been incredible.
Their skills had risen, they’d gotten experience, the merchant company had paid them, and the royal navy was treating them like heroes.
Quests this efficient with rewards were rare.
“Kim Tae-san! Kim Tae-san!”
Clap clap clap clap clap clap—
As Tae-hyun walked off the ship, the players burst into applause and cheers.
All of them were looking at him with bright, delighted faces.
And then they put on expressions of expectation.
If we cheer for him like this, he’ll respond, right?
Tae-hyun was known for being prickly and aloof, sure—but the quest was over now. Wouldn’t it be nice to part ways on a warm note?
There were plenty of players active in this city. They might end up doing another quest together someday.
But Tae-hyun looked utterly unamused.
The mask hid his face, of course, but still...
Feels like I busted my ass just to make someone else look good.
The cheers themselves weren’t the problem. Tae-hyun liked it well enough when people chanted his name.
But the name they were shouting was Kim Tae-san.
No matter how successful that man was, he was still someone else!
Damn it...
And what made it worse was that Tae-hyun himself had been the one to give that fake name.
One of the most infuriating situations in life was when you dug your own grave so thoroughly you couldn’t even get mad at anybody else.
Tae-hyun gave them a dismissive wave, as if telling them to break it up.
Then he walked off with Rufo.
The people watching started to murmur.
“What the hell? He’s just leaving?”
“He could at least say goodbye.”
“Isn’t that a little much? We worked hard on this quest too...”
“This is the second time now. Isn’t his personality just awful?”
Listening to the complaints behind him, Tae-hyun grinned.
If things went well, maybe this could actually flip his image.
Yeah. Go ahead and curse me out. It’s not even my name anyway.
But the grumbling didn’t last long.
A few people stepped forward.
The blacksmiths.
“What are you all saying?”
“Do you know how much we profited from this quest? Let’s ask the real question here. Could any of you have gotten a quest like this on your own?”
“W-Well... no, but...”
“And when people get a quest like this, do they usually share it for free? Nobody does! They either charge money or keep it inside their own guild!”
Kim Ji-sahn, Park Seong-chan, and Woo Jeong-sik threw themselves into the argument with passionate intensity.
For an obvious reason.
Tae-hyun was still right there.
If they worked this hard defending him, he’d probably be pleased, right?
“He shared a quest like that for free, and he led us all the way through without losing a single person along the way! Some people just aren’t good at expressing themselves! Kim Tae-san may look like that, but he’s a man with real depth!”
Uh... is he?
That doesn’t really sound right.
At Kim Ji-sahn’s declaration, Park Seong-chan and Woo Jeong-sik tilted their heads.
Stepping up and making sure Tae-hyun saw them was one thing, but the more Kim Ji-sahn talked, the less convincing he sounded—even to himself.
Tae-hyun wasn’t so much deep as he was...
twisted.
Of course, neither of them said that out loud.
Tae-hyun was still walking away over there.
But as Kim Ji-sahn kept passionately talking, the mood among the others shifted quickly.
They knew it too, deep down.
Quests like this didn’t come easy.
No—usually you were lucky if people only left you alone.
Trying to sabotage others so you could monopolize a quest was common.
Big guilds in particular would find a valuable quest and then threaten outsiders or drive them off by force.
And even if you thought it was unfair, there was almost nothing you could do about it.
Compared to that, what Tae-hyun had done here was, objectively speaking, incredibly selfless.
“That’s true.”
“When are we ever getting another quest like this?”
The atmosphere flipped in an instant.
And with Kim Ji-sahn talking like that, people started thinking things like, He acts prickly, but maybe he’s deeper than he looks.
There was one more reason too.
If we’re lucky, we might get to do another quest with him later.
Tae-hyun seemed pretty close with the merchant company.
Maybe another quest like this would pop up again.
And if they wanted to be part of it?
It would be better to stay on good terms with him.
You couldn’t badmouth a guy and then sign up for the next quest he posted.
For all those reasons combined, Tae-hyun gradually became an object of praise—no, outright worship—among the players who had disembarked at the harbor.
Granted, they were worshiping the name Kim Tae-san.
Even ridiculous rumors started spreading.
“I heard he wears that mask because he’s actually shy around people. Like, he’s warm-hearted by nature.”
“Oh, I know that type. They call it tsundere, right?”
Of course, Tae-hyun had no idea that nonsense like this had already started circulating.
“They say an awl in a pocket always sticks out. A real talent is a real talent. Even if you hide him, he still pokes through.”
An awl tucked into a pocket would eventually pierce through just by being sharp.
The same went for people of true ability. No matter how hard they tried to hide, they stood out.
Tae-hyun was no different.
Team Leader Choi Myung-sung scratched his head as he browsed the message boards.
Tae-hyun himself didn’t stream, but several players who had been there did.
At first, just heading to that notorious Katerand Island and doing a quest there had attracted a decent amount of attention.
But only a decent amount.
The players who really knew Katerand Island were the ones active in that region.
For people active elsewhere, a stream with that kind of title just wasn’t all that interesting.
Then a dragon showed up, the whole island turned upside down, the royal navy came in, and total chaos broke out.
Obviously, people’s interest exploded.
Once the quest ended and things were more or less sorted out, viewers flooded the streams and uploaded videos, and the boards went wild.
The video of a dragon appearing and blowing the whole island apart had climbed all the way to the number one spot on the boards.
The video that got shoved down to number two?
It was Smith’s long-awaited class change video, where he finally completed a Legendary Class quest and advanced into the White Knight of the Ancient Empire.
Since it was the second publicly revealed Legendary Class video in the world, people were naturally obsessed.
And true to the name, the White Knight of the Ancient Empire was monstrously powerful.
The knight class was already stable and solid by nature.
And as if to prove that the White Knight was the very pinnacle of knight-type classes, Smith’s durability was absurd.
He wore full plate, mounted his horse, and charged straight into a crowd of hundreds, fighting everything in sight—and still came out without a scratch.
It was no surprise people were flocking to him.
Smith was handsome too.
After scattering the soldiers with a chain of skills, he took off his helmet and swept back his hair.
A nobleman sculpted straight out of a painting.
Good-looking, capable, and with a good personality on top of it...
A perfect man with absolutely nothing lacking.
And yet even that class-change video had been pushed down to second place.
That alone showed how insane the Katerand footage was.
People were busy trying to guess who the masked bastard in the video might be.
Someone raised that perfectly reasonable suspicion—and got roasted alive for it.
“...”
Choi Myung-sung clicked his tongue.
Someone had said the right thing and gotten absolutely flayed for it.