15. My Buff is a Drug
15. My Buff is a Drug
Lunch came and went. Nothing especially eventful—just the simple pleasure of being surrounded by girls.
At 1:30 PM, Hye-yong headed to the shooting range to see Baek Yun-seo.
'She's asleep again.'
He watched her sleeping face for a moment, then decided to wake her.
"Instructor. Instructor Baek Yun-seo."
"Nnnh?"
Baek Yun-seo wiped the drool from her cheek and came to.
"I'm here."
"Yeah, 'sup. Sniff."
As the blanket shifted, her figure was revealed.
Pajamas of a different design this time.
Can an instructor really get away with this?
Sure, hardly anyone has firearm-related traits, but still.
Baek Yun-seo glanced at Hye-yong's face, then rummaged through a drawer.
"Lemme see, where'd it... Ah. Found it."
What she pulled out was a handgun with a gleaming silvery luster.
'Whoa. That's slick.'
For a handgun, it looked substantial—beautiful, and heavy.
Clack!
After loading the handgun, Baek Yun-seo looked it over from every angle.
"Burst Wolf P. Sounds tough, right? Packs quite a punch for a handgun. How about we take a shot?"
At the suggestion, Hye-yong deleted the buff he'd made earlier while hauling Han Geon-hu around and created a new Firearm Proficiency Buff.
Today, Firearm Proficiency and Shooting Accuracy had both reached level 14.
Proof that he was steadily carving his existence into this world while maintaining good relationships with people.
"Here. Hold the gun properly. Put the earmuffs on, too."
The moment the handgun settled into his grip, Hye-yong flinched.
This heavy, cool sensation...
Was it the buff talking?
For some reason, he felt like he already liked this gun.
"One thing to watch out for: the recoil's strong, got it? An F-rank like you screws up and smacks yourself in the philtrum, your front teeth get wrecked in a heartbeat. Grip it tight, like you're bracing to shove the gun back."
Hye-yong didn't need that kind of advice right now.
The Firearm Proficiency option was telling him.
How to hold this gun. How to shoot it.
Not that he knew better than the instructor.
It just meant the beginner cautions she was giving didn't apply to him at all.
Beep!
A target rose, and Hye-yong fired immediately.
BANG!
The target toppled with a ringing gunshot.
"Whew. Clean hit."
Baek Yun-seo let out a small whistle.
"Oooh..."
His hand, still gripping the handgun, trembled.
The sheer force was on a completely different level from anything he'd fired before.
That cool, heavy feeling the moment he grabbed it—it hadn't been for nothing.
"Sick, right? They mass-produced this thing for non-Awakened military forces back when the war was at its hottest. You'd strap it to your hip, and when your rifle ran dry, you used it in a pinch. They shoved mana bullets into it to take down annoying bastards who had no Mana Barrier but were just pointlessly huge. Supposedly, once it punched into a body where mana was flowing, the rounds reacted and exploded, spreading out and tearing up their insides—pretty damn efficient. Eventually all the small fry were dead and only the big ones were left, so it fell out of use."
Mana Bullets.
Wasn't that obviously ammunition packed with mana?
If you had those, Hye-yong wondered if there was even any need to worry about Mana Barriers.
Curious, he asked.
"Can't you pierce a Mana Barrier with mana bullets?"
"Hey now. Don't go saying that elsewhere. The Mana Barriers of Heterogeneous Species shunt most of the applied force off into some other space. Unless you coat the surface of your attack with mana and excavate the barrier, direct impact basically does nothing."
Wow, it actually flings the force off somewhere.
"So even firing a cannon or a missile wouldn't do anything?"
"If the Mana Barrier's on the weaker side, you can still deal damage in the sense of punching through the shield and wounding them. But there's the economic problem, isn't there? The Heterogeneous Species keep pouring out, and you can't just rain cannon fire and missiles nonstop. Even just to kill one, you'd need a goddamn mountain of ordnance."
Is that... so?
If that's how it is, then that's how it is.
A headache threatened to bloom—this wasn't something he'd ever seriously thought about.
Hye-yong decided to just stop thinking and accept it. "If that's the way things work, then that's the way things work."
"So if you swing a sword without mana, you can't inflict any wounds either?"
"Completely useless. No matter how much you slash, I bet you wouldn't even feel like you'd cut anything."
Mana Barriers, huh.
Why had that setting even come into existence?
Probably because without something like it, humanity would annihilate the Heterogeneous Species before they could even put up a fight?
"Can Awakened use Mana Barriers too?"
"They can. But the nature is a little different from what the Heterogeneous Species use. Heterogeneous Species' Mana Barriers are damage nullification—it's a feeling of erasing kinetic energy itself. Awakened barriers, on the other hand, are damage defense. The kinetic energy itself isn't lost, so a military force can suppress them plenty. Even if one deflects a machine gun and keeps coming, if they take concentrated fire, they'll get pushed back and won't be able to move."
So that's how it works...
"If Awakened barriers were like those of the Heterogeneous Species, Awakened would've swept away all non-Awakened armies and created a world that only benefits themselves, don't you think?"
"That would really be the case."
"...How did the conversation even get this far off track?"
At a glance, Baek Yun-seo looked like the indolent type, but when you asked, she answered all sorts of things pretty well.
An instructor was an instructor, after all.
"Let's get back to the gun. The carapace of Heterogeneous Species is affected by the mana flowing through their bodies, so even without a Mana Barrier, it's considerably tough and hard with fairly high defense. That's why, to embed mana bullets inside, they had to ramp up the firepower somehow, and so this bad boy got made. You shoot fine but have no trait, so considering your situation—looking for a weapon strictly for support use—I brought this one out. So. You like it?"
To think she'd thought all that through and brought it specifically for him.
It was a level of care that made it impossible to say he didn't like it.
And he genuinely did like it.
Looks cool, hits hard—what reason was there not to like it?
"I really like it. Thank you, Instructor."
"But you're only taking it after a few days of practice. There's still plenty more to learn. Also, I'm not giving it to you outright—it's a loan. You know what happens if you lose it, right? And once you have it, you'll have to buy the bullets with your own money."
Right.
There was the bullet problem.
"Those mana bullets, are they expensive?"
"Well, probably not so much that it'll be a burden. Consumption's pretty low these days, so the price has gone down. Might be a little burdensome for an F-rank? Still, I'll spot you some."
Ooh, nice service.
"You'll be firing a lot today, so put on a glove. Shooting a gun with heavy recoil a lot can scrape your skin raw."
Baek Yun-seo held out a half-glove.
True enough—his hand was trembling after every shot.
"If you had a bit of a Stamina stat, it wouldn't matter, but yours is low, right?"
"Level 3."
"Yep, you'd better wear it. Work out hard and raise your Stamina. A grown man looking all scrawny."
He did need to exercise, didn't he.
He thought about adding workouts to his daily routine.
"Then I'll raise the targets."
"Okay."
He spent time with Baek Yun-seo on firearm training.
'Ugh, my arm's all numb.'
Still, in just this one day, he felt completely accustomed to the handgun Baek Yun-seo had brought—the Burst Wolf.
'Just thinking about blasting monsters to hell with this thing already has my balls tingling with anticipation.'
Of course, he still had to wait a few more days.
Until Baek Yun-seo gave the go-ahead.
Part of him wanted to carry it around right away, but Hye-yong wasn't a child.
If the instructor said he had to wait, he had no particular complaints.
ㅡ Work out hard and raise your Stamina. A man looking all scrawny.
Back at the dorms, lying on his bed, that remark suddenly came to mind.
Hye-yong felt his own arm.
If he flexed, he could feel muscle, but overall it was squishy.
'Huh, am I scrawny?'
He took a look in the mirror.
He didn't know his exact height, but it seemed about 173cm, and supposedly he was still supposed to grow.
At a glance, it was a body that visibly lacked muscle.
An overall plain impression.
Not ugly to look at, but not particularly good either.
'Well, yeah. Neither my original body nor Choi Hye-yong's body ever had anything to do with exercise.'
Working out would definitely be an improvement.
When building relationships with people, appearance is always a crucial element.
And it wasn't just about looks—stats like Strength, Stamina, and Agility could be increased through training.
'Right. No matter how you look at it, self-care is necessary.'
Since he wasn't attending classes, he had plenty of free time. He figured he ought to invest at least two hours a day into exercise.
'Is two hours too much? Should I do just one?'
But how would he know, when he'd never exercised regularly in his entire life?
He had no sense of what kind of exercise, or how much of it, was appropriate.
'Normally, an instructor would teach this kind of thing...'
But class season had already passed.
What made Hye-yong so special that an instructor would take personal time to teach him how to work out?
'In the end, is there only one option?'
Still, he wasn't without any support to rely on at all.
One safety net he had kept tucked away in his heart.
'Should I contact her?'
It was Choi Ah-young.
Hye-yong knew.
That a training room session was almost invariably part of Choi Ah-young's daily routine.
'Choi Ah-young works out every day. She's bound to be well-acquainted with efficient stamina training methods.'
Still, since she might refuse, he decided to ask carefully.
[ Choi Hye-yong : Got a moment? ]
Maybe she'd been in the middle of something; the reply came back five minutes later.
[ Choi Ah-young : What is it? ]
[ Choi Hye-yong : Lately I've been feeling tired a lot. I'm trying to do some exercise to build up my basic stamina. ]
[ Choi Ah-young : You're feeling tired often. Isn't that because you're overdoing the buffs? ]
'She's worried, and I just made up an excuse.'
He hadn't meant to worry her, so he quickly corrected himself.
[ Choi Hye-yong : It's not that. I know exactly what it feels like when I'm low on divine power. It's literally just a lack of exercise and not enough stamina. ]
[ Choi Hye-yong : So I'm trying to start working out, but I've never learned how, so I don't know anything. ]
[ Choi Hye-yong : Could you maybe teach me a bit? I don't have a lot of friends. You're the only person I can ask for this kind of thing. ]
No immediate reply.
Choi Ah-young seemed to be reading the message and thinking about something.
'Ah, if she says no, I'm kind of stuck.'
Exercising blindly would still help, but wanting to learn the proper way to do it first is a basic human desire.
Just from the reply being a little delayed, all kinds of thoughts surfaced in his head.
'Is this actually a nuisance? She's probably busy with her own workout; asking her to supervise mine too is kind of a lot, yeah.'
Precisely when he had that thought.
A reply returned from Choi Ah-young.
[ Choi Ah-young : Eat dinner. Meet me at the Physical Training Room at 8. ]
'Oh, nice, nice.'
What's the best thing about friends? This, right here.
Seeing her agree to a request like this, it seemed Choi Ah-young clearly considered Hye-yong a friend, too.
'All that chatting her up and appealing to her paid off.'
You reap what you sow. If he'd just said the bare minimum and kept things superficial even while partied together, she wouldn't have agreed to a personal favor like this.
'Hmm. If it's Choi Ah-young, she'll definitely teach me in a kind and intelligent way. Efficient training... uh, wait.'
Now that he thought about it, a girl his own age giving him personal one-on-one workout lessons was an incredibly heart-pounding situation.
Of course, if Hye-yong considered Ah-young a peer, his conscience would explode, but as long as he kept his mouth shut, no one would know.
Even without a conscience, who was going to figure it out?
If Ah-young thought they were the same age, then that's how it was, as far as Hye-yong was concerned.
It's a fact of life—once you become an adult, you want to be young again.
Weird speech patterns that trend online like "I'm a widdle baby" or "Hnnngg noonah" and whatnot probably all stem from that same impulse.
Here, Hye-yong wanted to live thoroughly as a first-year high school division student.
'A guy and a girl, alone together, sweating and panting while working out? Whoa, you could literally just call that sex and no one could argue.'
Hye-yong surprised himself for a moment.
Had he really been thinking about something like efficient training in this situation?
Before lewd thoughts?
'If I were a real high schooler, the very first thing I'd think about is not "health" but wrecking a different "S."'
It was lamentable in many ways.
After dinner, 8 o'clock.
Hye-yong headed for the Physical Training Room.
'The Physical Training Room, what's it like inside? In the game, they just didn't implement it.'
Since a training session could be summarized away with a single line of text, there'd been no need to actually build the space and show workout animations.
With a slightly beating heart, he opened the door and entered the Physical Training Room.
"Hold on. First time here?"
"Huh? Ah, yes."
As he tried to go in, the person at the counter stopped him.
Did he have to pay or something?
"You need to get your clothes and locker key. If you brought your own workout clothes, it's fine, but you can't go in wearing your uniform."
"Ah, sorry."
"No need to apologize. Please fill in your info and size on the card here, and I'll bring you the clothes."
The atmosphere was similar to a gym, but far more courteous than a typical gym.
He changed into the proper clothes and headed toward the area with the exercise equipment.
'Oh, oh shit.'
The moment he walked in, the smell of sweat hit him—yet somehow it smelled fragrant.
The reason: the entire place was packed with women.
'Whoa. What's with that sports bra thing? They work out wearing just that? Whoa, look at those skintight leggings.'
Overall, workout clothes that clung tight to the body and revealed a lot of skin!
The kind of outfits and physiques you'd only see in Instagram photos were everywhere he looked.
A few people were wearing the workout clothes provided by the facility, but most were in their personal gym wear.
'Fuck, there's nowhere safe to put my eyes. Do these girls not have any sense of shame?'
As he kept looking around, he felt like he understood the reason.
In the first place, Awakened women vastly outnumbered Awakened men.
An overwhelming 2:8 male-to-female ratio!
The setting that most of the characters implemented in the Modpack were women had manifested here as the Awakened sex ratio.
There were some men in the Physical Training Room, but being in the minority, they usually gathered quietly among themselves in corners.
Here, there was simply no need to care about men's stares at all.
'Whoa, I haven't even started working out yet and I'm already getting dizzy. Where the hell is Choi Ah-young?'
As he walked around in a daze, he lightly bumped into someone.
A soft sensation against his chest!
He was about to apologize swiftly, but it was a familiar face.
"I said hi, but I guess you didn't hear. It's noisy in here, right?"
It was Choi Ah-young.
She was also wearing a workout tank top and shorts that made her figure stand out exactly as it was.
'Oh damn...'
He'd held back until now, but the moment he saw that, all the blood rushed south.