Hack and Slash
"Hmm."
I came out of the wash that morning, caught my own face in the mirror, and the sound escaped me on its own.
"Windy."
It had been a while since I'd called her.
"Does the capsule have a skin-brightening function too? I feel like I've been getting better-looking lately."
Not once in my life had I thought of myself as handsome. I'd been born to a pretty mother, so I figured I hadn't turned out badly, but turn on a television and breathtakingly good-looking people spilled out of it in droves. It wasn't a self-esteem problem. Just my objective opinion. Lately, though—today, especially—I looked kind of handsome.
"Huh? That actually works?"
"Oh..."
"And doing that makes you handsome?"
"Ooh."
"Hmm... you think so?"
"So I'd already changed back when I was seeing Yeonju?"
"Figures."
When Lee Yeonju called me handsome, I'd written it off as something you say to a sponsor. But Lim Sarang hadn't looked particularly put off by me either, and that had stayed with me. Maybe I really had gotten better-looking lately. Hearing the reason put a little confidence in my step.
"Guess I can afford to stand a little taller."
I squared my shoulders and headed for the capsule.
"Haa. Today's gonna be a shitshow too."
A shiver of dread ran through me. Not that the viewers' nagging actually scared me. I came up a professional attention whore. You only earn the title if you savor reactions like these and ride them out—running away because you're scared is coward work. The plan was already set.
"Let's do this."
In the end, every viewer wants exactly one thing. Fun. On a broadcast, fun is enough.
The viewers were grinding their teeth. The community had been plastered wall to wall with talk of Kim Siwoo.
There was so much of it that other users were getting genuinely angry.
And of course the people being told off were not the type to just take it.
The community never rested for a second; the posts just kept coming. Then the users who had been fighting over it for ages went quiet all at once.
The reason was simple.
Kim Siwoo's broadcast had turned on. In the Haven community, suddenly gone cold, the users who lingered had questions.
People who hadn't cared much couldn't help getting curious once everyone else was talking. Users who lived on the community, especially, were finished the moment they fell out of a trend. And today's stream title was the kind that could hook even people who didn't know Kim Siwoo. No—even people who didn't play Haven at all.
One of the things burning hottest in Haven Online was the question of how far Kim Siwoo could climb. Some people insisted that if you simply raised your level, rank one was guaranteed. Others said Haven wasn't a game you played on class alone. Whichever was true, watching would settle it.
The broadcast was on, still sitting on a waiting screen that hadn't started transmitting. Five minutes in, the viewer count had already passed a hundred thousand.
Some people were just trading simple hellos.
And then there were the people demanding he account for yesterday. The ones who had actually been waiting for the broadcast tried to settle them down.
The chat was pure chaos. When ten minutes had passed, the feed finally went out.
On the screen, Kim Siwoo stood in front of a dungeon gate.
"All right. We said we'd do a dungeon today, right? Yesterday's stream blew up on me, so I felt bad and came in the second I woke up this morning."
Today, even with the chat getting wallpapered, he didn't freeze it or ban anyone. He just started walking.
"Going in. Right now."
The screen changed at once.
Inside the dungeon, it was peaceful. Rabbits bounded about. So did slimes. The sort of low-level monsters you could find in any game hopped and skipped across a meadow, and even with me standing there they didn't spare me a glance. Non-aggressive monsters.
Whatever else it was, a level 1 one-star dungeon was a tutorial hunting ground—a practice space Windy had made so people could slowly get a feel for combat they'd never experienced on Earth. None of that mattered to me. I'd come into the dungeon for one reason only: to see just how flashy, and how cool, the weapons I'd obtained really were.
Fwoosh. Eight Fireballs formed in an instant. Mixing them with Ice Arrow would have been the efficient play, but right now using them on their own looked like it would be cooler. Eight orbs of flame circled in the empty air. I didn't bother aiming. I just hurled them into the middle of the meadow where the slimes were playing.
Whoosh—
Everyone played at being excited inside an easy, light mood. The buildup had cost hundreds of billions of won, so expectations were high, but anyone who had played Haven for any length of time already had a rough idea of how this would end. An expensive blade isn't much better than a rock lying in the dirt when all you're killing is ants. That was what they thought.
Boom! Right up until the Fireballs burst.
KRA-KOOM!
A few of them missed, but several Fireballs struck the slimes dead on. The instant they connected, a 77 percent chance proc'd and a second explosion went off, and of course the slimes melted down in the flames. That wasn't the end of it. The burst itself was already too spectacular to think of as a mere Fireball, and what came next was flashier still.
Fwt! A handful of sparks shot toward the other slimes inside a ten-meter radius and caught. Not an attack sprayed at random—a guided one. That was why there weren't all that many sparks. And judging by the slime that happened to dodge as they flew, it wasn't perfect homing either. But they were fast, and the slime that caught fire burned, then died just the same.
A dozen or so slimes died in a single attack.
"Whoa."
Even the users who had been watching with a go-on-then-try-it attitude, no expectations at all, started typing carefully. It had been one attack. The moment a slime died, sparks leapt within ten meters, and from the slimes those sparks killed, the sparks leapt again.
I was satisfied.
"Now this is a mage."
"So this game was a hack-and-slash all along?"
The game hooked me all at once. A god-tier game where you could pull whole packs and farm them.