29. My Buff is a Drug
29. My Buff is a Drug
A soft clink....
Oh, whoops. A little more than I intended.
The man who murmured that pressed the piston in just a hair.
A thin jet sprayed from the syringe needle, sharp enough to send a chill through anyone watching.
Tap. Tap.
That sound.
The tapping of that horrific syringe, drawing closer.
"Another perfect ratio today......."
Step.
"Too little, and she loses consciousness. Too much, and she gets happy on her own. Truly finicky."
Step.
"And yet perfecting it with such exquisite sensibility — that is the mark of a true artist."
Step.
"Now...... transcendence draws one step nearer."
The syringe slid into a pale white arm.
The girl seated on the operating table could offer no resistance whatsoever.
Only her consciousness remained alive.
She had no choice but to watch everything vividly with her own two eyes and endure.
"I am still immensely curious about you."
A soft clink.......
"What lies beneath that skin."
A soft clink.......
"What form your muscle fibers take."
A soft clink.......
"I can sensitively feel the slightest differences."
The man retrieved a tool from the box and stepped right up to her.
"The drug should be circulating by now."
The man gently stroked the girl's hand.
"Last time I observed the inside of your toenails. I intend to confirm everything about you."
A sinister instrument adorned with a skull motif took aim at the girl's fingernail.
It latched on, covering the entirety of her index fingernail, as if whispering to the girl that it would never let her go.
'Please, please, please, please, please, please!'
She could not even scream.
She could not beg to be saved.
Only her consciousness remained vivid.
All the girl could do was tremble faintly......
Crunch!!
And endure.
"Everyone, would you like to run a few more raids today?"
Seo Ha-yoon asked in reply to Choi Ah-young's cautiously broached question.
"We're going one more time today?"
"Yeah. We cleared it without much trouble again, right? Nobody's really exhausted, so let's push a little harder and climb a bit higher."
Choi Ah-young seemed to want to attempt more raids not just with Hye-yong alone but with the whole party together.
"At the E-rank otherworld level, there's no real downside to putting in the work. If we push just a little more while we've got the energy, we can graduate with much better results."
Hye-yong decided to chime in to back up Ah-young's persuasion.
"Yeah! Third semester is coming up, and we can't all stay stuck at F-rank forever. We've gotta rake in the points, stack up clear records, and live like actual people."
Hearing that, Seo Ha-yoon seemed to resolve herself and clenched both fists tightly.
"You're right......! I can't stay F-rank forever! My stats have started going up lately. And my skills have started to grow. Now even against monsters that bleed, it doesn't bother me at all! I want to run more raids too!"
Her determined expression was cute, and good to see.
"Hahah! 'That Person' speaks as well. 「Bring me their blood, and I shall bestow upon you new abilities by my divine authority!」"
That was roughly a statement of agreement.
"If everyone's going, I can't really refuse. Honestly, I've been resting too long, so my living expenses were getting pretty tight."
Na Hee-yeon agreed too, and so the whole party decided to run a few more raids.
When Hye-yong glanced at Choi Ah-young's face, it was brimming with emotion.
'You're looking good, Choi Ah-young.'
A person who always tries to work hard at everything and gets dejected when she has the means but can't put in the effort.
Hye-yong thought of Choi Ah-young as someone with an exceptionally strong desire to improve.
May 18, 12:31 PM
Otherworld Waiting Room
"Hwaaah! I-I-It was so hard......."
Seo Ha-yoon, who had nearly been blown off a cliff by an air blast from a monster called a Wind Shear right at the very end, stammered as she let out a sigh of relief.
Today they had cleared the E-rank otherworld three times.
When they tallied up the results, the points per person came to about 160 points.
Their luck was a little off, but it still felt stingy for three clears.
'So you're telling me we pull about 160,000 won a day doing this? We're still not even beating manual labor.'
They were students for now, but in this world's setting, all of them were fully fledged adults and members of society.
In a sense, they were laborers who had come to what was effectively a live-in work facility.
Considering they'd burned seven years just to get here, the money was pretty meager.
'Guess it's because we're still E-rank, huh?'
Back when they'd taken down the Earth Golem, they'd hit it big and earned over a million won in a day, so even running otherworlds of the same rank, the amount they took home could vary depending on luck and effort.
'Well...... converting facility currency into real money is pretty meaningless anyway.'
Still, when you see numbers like that, the human mind can't help but want to convert them.
Especially if you came from another world, even more so.
"Good work, everyone. Looks like this is our limit for now."
Choi Ah-young wiped away her sweat and steadied her breathing.
"Yeah...... I can't go any further. My arm hurts."
Seo Ha-yoon, who had slumped to the ground, was kneading her shield arm and complaining of pain.
'You put in the work today, Seo Ha-yoon.'
Seeing that, Hye-yong decided to go over and encourage her.
"You tanked a lot, so it's only natural you're hurting. Everyone stayed safe thanks to you holding the line."
"Hehe. It's thanks to your buff. For some reason, when I get your buff, I feel like I'm overflowing with confidence. Is it because it's my exclusive buff?"
That was because Hye-yong had quietly slipped in a 'confidence increase while holding a shield' function.
Of course, he'd hidden it with the hiding function.
He figured that while he could pass off a cognitive filter as just a feature of an exclusive buff, showing off that he'd just casually slapped on extra functions wouldn't look great.
Whatever the case, thanks to that, Seo Ha-yoon had performed her tank role more splendidly today than ever before.
Choi Ah-young was always dead serious in a fight, and Chae Hwa-ra had so much confidence she needed to dial it down, so the only ones who really needed a confidence-boosting buff were Seo Ha-yoon and Na Hee-yeon.
'Birds of a feather flock together, huh. A low-self-esteem duo.'
A thought always crossed his mind when he looked at Seo Ha-yoon and Na Hee-yeon.
If they had been born with those looks in the real-world Korea where I lived, there's no way they'd have low self-esteem.
Especially Na Hee-yeon — if she'd been an idol, she might've ended up plastered all over fancams as an ultra-high-performance remote protein juicer.
But the place they lived in was the society of the Awakened.
In their own league, good looks were just kind of a common bonus; being above average was enough, and ability was valued far more heavily, so looks didn't carry that much weight.
'Hmm...... maybe becoming Awakened is what made them pretty.'
In any case, it was a moot point.
He did get a little curious about the average male appearance here, though.
Not that he'd think about it very deeply.
'Still, I'd be at least above average, right?'
There was a reason Hye-yong had developed the pride of being above average.
It was because of the one single person who had directly evaluated his looks.
— So what was it about me that made you want to date me, senior?
— Hmm...... your face?
— Oh. Am I good-looking? I haven't really heard that I'm handsome much.
— Still, you're above average. Plus, you gave off the impression that you'd be big down there. Want to go one more time before it's time to head out?
'Looking back, I should've caught on then.'
He'd been purely delighted at being told he was above average.
Hye-yong wasn't some unicorn who'd impale a woman if she wasn't a virgin — if she simply had a few ex-boyfriends, it didn't matter to him at all.
But over thirty people on the side was a bit much, wasn't it.
'Still, let's be satisfied that my face isn't the kind women would reject on sight.......'
He had a charm buff too, so he didn't really need to worry about the looks department.
Hye-yong believed that.
"This one must go replenish her dark powers, so fare thee well! Today I am to enjoy a dark feast with my sibling!"
Chae Hwa-ra declared as she exited the waiting room.
It was already thirty minutes into lunchtime.
It was definitely time to go eat.
'Sibling, though...... is there an older brother of Chae Hwa-ra's in this facility?'
He suddenly grew curious about who this sibling was.
Would they be wandering around fully committed to a bit like Chae Hwa-ra?
Normally, another person's male sibling wouldn't be even slightly interesting, but Chae Hwa-ra was such a peculiar character he couldn't help being curious.
"We'd also planned to go eat sukiyaki today, right."
"Yeah! I'm looking forward to it."
Na Hee-yeon and Seo Ha-yoon had apparently made a lunch date for the two of them too.
"Do you two want to come with us?"
It had started as their own plan, but Seo Ha-yoon asked like it didn't matter how many people joined.
"Ah. I'm planning to hit the school cafeteria today."
He liked sukiyaki too, but since Choi Ah-young was eating at the cafeteria, Hye-yong decided to do the same.
"Same. They've got something good on the cafeteria menu today."
"Okay. Enjoy your lunch, guys!"
Seo Ha-yoon and Na Hee-yeon left, and only Ah-young and Hye-yong remained in the otherworld waiting room.
"After lunch, we're going another round, right?"
"Of course. But didn't you want to eat sukiyaki?"
"Why go through the hassle. I'll just eat with you and we'll move out together."
"That is simpler."
Now was the time.
Hye-yong wiped all his existing buffs and recreated the one he had been carefully designing.
"For taking a breather and just relaxing, here."
And he cast it on Choi Ah-young.
"Comfortable Feeling...... I really do feel kind of comfortable. I like it, somehow."
"Right? I use it a lot too. It's nice."
"Where did you get this kind of blessing? It's not a skill you got from your trait growing, is it?"
"Uh, it was going for a decent price so I just bought one."
"Lucky the wavelength matched. I need to save up more points and try to get another attack skill that matches my wavelength too."
Okay.
She seemed to have swallowed it without any suspicion whatsoever.
To avoid raising suspicion, Hye-yong had even studied up on skills separately.
Though it was really just reading over the manual one more time, studying was studying.
As had been mentioned before, you could spend points and buy skills here.
At the skill shop located in the center of the island where the facility was.
But just because you bought a power stone containing a skill didn't mean you could use it.
The stone nestled in your heart.
You could only learn skills that matched the wavelength that stone emitted.
The wavelength varied from person to person like a fingerprint or an iris, so a skill one person could learn, another could not.
If your wavelength was versatile enough to learn many skills, that was apparently considered talent.
Since training and raising your stats could change your wavelength, if a skill was truly essential for you, people sometimes bought it even if the wavelength didn't match and just waited until it did.
And even if the wavelength did match and you acquired the skill, if you lacked ability or your stats were too low, you couldn't properly utilize it.
It was a world where natural talent really dictated a lot.
Not that any world was any different.
He ate with Choi Ah-young, and then they went to the transition stone shop.
"Ten runs again today?"
Choi Ah-young asked Hye-yong, sounding excited.
She was clearly aiming for essences of strength again today.
Hye-yong gave her the answer she most wanted to hear.
"It's a pain even coming to buy transition stones, right? Let's just grab ten and go."
"I knew you'd say that."
"Of course. You know who I am."
Ah-young thought to herself as she watched Choi Hye-yong answer playfully.
'I'm really lucky to have a friend like you.'
Choi Ah-young had her characteristic businesslike air about her.
All she ever did was study, train, and hunt.
She had no particular interest in the friends around her, so she never spent much time on things like socializing.
Was that why?
When it felt like every misfortune in the world was crashing down on her.
When she felt depressed at endlessly plummeting circumstances.
There had been no one at her side.
In fact, the party members who had always raided with her spread rumors and went so far as to isolate Ah-young.
She could understand it, of course.
Even if she swapped positions and thought about it, she wouldn't want someone who attracted every kind of misfortune in her party either.
But she couldn't help feeling resentful.
She gradually began to dislike people themselves.
She felt like she'd never be able to make a friend she could open her heart to again.
Had there ever even been such a thing to begin with?
Before awakening, when she'd attended a normal school, she'd always failed to fit in and felt like an outsider.
She was polite to everyone and never said anything unpleasant to anyone, yet no one ever approached her to suggest doing anything.
Likewise, unless it was absolutely necessary, Ah-young herself never even entertained the thought of approaching anyone, so her memories related to friends were practically nonexistent.
But Choi Hye-yong felt different somehow.
He was unpretentious but knew how to be polite, proactive in his relationships yet considerate.
In a word, a person with a good personality.
Someone she could be comfortable around without having to think about anything special.
'Plus, seeing the exclusive buffs he gives me, he seems to consider me a real teammate.......'
Lately, whenever Ah-young looked at Hye-yong, she wondered if this was what a true friend felt like.
When she was beside him, the future that had always been a worry didn't seem so worrying.
It felt like the luck she'd never had was slowly starting to return.
It had always been like that, but somehow today the feeling was especially strong.
Was it because of that Comfortable Feeling buff?
'It's not because of the buff. Hye-yong just is...... that kind of person.'
Someone whose mere presence puts you at ease and sets your mind at rest.
Today, Hye-yong had firmly rooted himself in Ah-young's mind with exactly that image.
"Shall we head out right away?"
"Yeah, I'm ready."
Hye-yong, not even dreaming that Ah-young harbored such feelings toward him, was thinking only one thing in his head: 'Will the buff really work properly?'