One-Coin Clear
The capsule remained completely still.
Taeyang spent the days after losing his little sister in a single night like a man who had lost his soul.
“What the hell is going on…”
Hyeonhye sighed deeply as she washed the dishes Byeolim had left behind.
Both Byeolim and Taeyang were like family to her. Having the situation flip upside down overnight left a bitter taste in her mouth too.
“Hyeonhye, look at this.”
Taeyang, hair a complete mess, shoved his smartphone at her. It was the rule book for the virtual reality game Dantalion.
Rule 0. Clearing all stages results in automatic logout.
Rule 1. There are no restrictions on clear methods.
Rule 2. All entities existing within the Dimensional Labyrinth can be killed.
…….
The controversy had begun with Rule 0: “Clearing all stages results in automatic logout.”
When Dantalion had been just a normal game, the clause had meant nothing. But now that players were trapped inside with no way to log out, the sentence took on an entirely different weight.
People began to argue that the developers had foreseen this situation from the very beginning.
Of course Hyeonhye had read it too. She forced a half-smile.
“It’s a relief, in a way. I feel bad for them, but I heard a lot of rankers are logged in. If we just wait for them to clear it…”
“The highest record is only Floor 50.”
Dantalion had seventy-two floors. In other words, gamers had barely passed the sixty-percent mark.
Hyeonhye pressed her lips tightly together.
Dantalion was famous for its insane difficulty. An absurdly hard game with impossible-to-strategize variety and an unbelievable level of polish.
“Be honest.”
“…About what?”
“Can those people actually clear it?”
Hyeonhye couldn’t answer right away. The question carried too much weight to lie just to offer cheap comfort—especially when Taeyang’s own blood relative, Byeolim, was trapped inside a capsule.
“…Why are you even asking?”
“If they can’t, I’m going in myself.”
Hyeonhye shouted in shock.
“Are you insane? Tens of millions of people have tried thousands, tens of thousands of times and no one has cleared it!”
“Exactly. That’s why I have to do it. I’m the five-time consecutive King of Fist world champion. Officially, there’s no one better at VR games than me.”
In terms of pure control, that might have been true.
But.
Hyeonhye pushed back.
“King of Fist only uses seventy-percent sync rate! Seventy and ninety-nine are completely—”
“Ha!”
Taeyang laughed fiercely.
Sync rate.
It was the single most common topic Dantalion players used to dismiss King of Fist users.
“Have you ever thought about it the other way around?”
“Taeyang…”
“That’s right. Even at seventy-percent sync, I can flip my body three times in mid-air and land a full combo in five seconds.”
“……”
“So what do you think will happen if I go in at ninety-nine percent?”
“……”
“I’d be flying. No question.”
“You’ve never even tried it.”
“I don’t need to. It’ll probably be even better than that. You know my constitution.”
Hyeonhye squeezed her eyes shut.
Taeyang had watched the entire process of Dantalion’s release and the subsequent collapse of King of Fist.
Second place. Third. Fifth. Twelfth. Three-hundredth. Then completely off the rankings.
The prestige of King of Fist had crumbled at terrifying speed. Naturally, Taeyang’s own fame had followed the same path.
Many people had asked him why he didn’t just abandon King of Fist and move on to another game.
But Taeyang had refused to let it go.
More precisely, he couldn’t let it go.
‘Damn special constitution.’
Taeyang had a unique condition: once sync rate exceeded seventy percent, the VR system’s pain suppression failed to work on him. In other words, the moment he entered any game running above seventy-percent sync, his pain sync was forcibly raised to one hundred percent.
When a finger was cut off inside a game, a normal person’s brain would filter the pain through the safety device. Taeyang’s brain registered it as real.
If he died inside Dantalion, he would die of shock in the real world too.
He had visited the world’s best doctors, but none could explain why. Naturally, no one had offered a solution.
“What if something goes wrong?”
“Things already went horribly wrong the moment Byeolim ended up like this.”
“You’re different from other people! If you get seriously injured in combat…”
“I’d go into shock. Or, in a worse case, die.”
Hyeonhye started to argue, but the moment she saw the look in his eyes she closed her mouth.
“Don’t worry. I just have to clear it without dying or getting hit.”
Taeyang’s eyes were blazing like twin suns.
As hot as the August sun itself.
“I will clear Dantalion.”
The era of King of Fist might be over, but the best gamer in the world is still me.
Taeyang was confident he could prove it.
“Taeyang, think about this again. This is completely insane, you know?”
Hyeonhye spent a full sixteen hours without sleep trying to talk him out of it.
The TV kept broadcasting news of Dantalion’s casualties and deaths day after day.
But Taeyang didn’t even blink.
Once he made up his mind, no amount of persuasion could change it—an iron stubbornness that ran in the Yoon family blood.
“If you’re not going to help, just leave.”
Taeyang kept his eyes glued to his phone and waved her away half-heartedly.
Every time his finger scrolled across the screen, countless posts slid downward with a rhythmic scroll scroll.
Dantalion was brutally difficult and no proper strategy guides existed, but after eight years online, quite a few tips and setting details had been uncovered.
Hyeonhye clutched her head as she watched him.
“You’re going to clear Dantalion with that?”
Dantalion official forums, Dantalion galleries, Next Roguelike—there were countless sites, but their reliability was questionable at best.
On public boards, genuine information was buried among the garbage posts like rare gems—maybe one or two per hundred.
Having firmly decided to log in, Taeyang was devouring every single one of those posts he could find.
Watching him, Hyeonhye let out a long sigh.
“Ugh… I give up.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll help you!”
“For real?”
Taeyang finally lifted his gaze from the phone and glanced at her, checking her expression.
The sight made Hyeonhye’s hands clench into fists. He had completely ignored her when she told him not to do it, but the second she offered to help he reacted instantly. It was infuriating.
Whether he knew how she felt or not, Taeyang stood up right away and headed for the refrigerator.
“I invited a guest over and didn’t even offer anything. Want some juice?”
“I already drank some, idiot!”
“Then that’s good.”
Taeyang grinned.
Hyeonhye was a skilled streamer who had reached the thirty-eighth floor—the highest record at the time—and was considered a semi-ranker. If she helped him, gameplay would become far easier.
To be honest, his foundational knowledge of Dantalion was severely lacking. He desperately needed her support.
“Alright. Let’s start with the game explanation—”
“Ah, I already know most of it.”
“Shut up and listen. Better to be thorough. Even if I talked for three whole days it wouldn’t be enough to cover everything.”
At her words, Taeyang narrowed his eyes and protested.
“Three days? That’s way too long.”
“What do you mean too long?! Your life is on the line! You need to prepare at least this much. Don’t you realize this isn’t just about you—Byeolim’s life is on the line too?”
The moment she brought up Byeolim, Taeyang shrank like a scolded puppy. And so Hyeonhye’s lessons began.
She taught with the intensity of a homeroom teacher preparing third-year high school students for the college entrance exam.
“Dantalion is a fantasy roguelike game. The goal is straightforward. You simply need to escape the Dimensional Labyrinth known as Dantalion.”
“Mm.”
“Each floor consists of a single stage. Clear the stage and you can proceed to the next floor, the next stage. Hey, are you sleeping? Even if you already know, listen properly.”
From the basic structure of the Dimensional Labyrinth Dantalion.
“Players. Both users and NPCs are collectively called players. To escape, players must climb the labyrinth. Sometimes cooperating, sometimes killing each other.”
The game’s objective.
“The tower has a total of seventy-two floors. Everything changes completely starting from Floor 15 and Floor 36. I don’t know if there are more branching points after that. At least there aren’t any up to Floor 55. Are you asleep?”
Hyeonhye whacked the top of Taeyang’s head with a fifteen-centimeter ruler.
“I’m not sleeping. What did I just say? You don’t remember, do you? This is important! The tower has a total of—”
And then the tower’s detailed structure.
“NPCs are divided into two types. Martial arts NPCs from the world of ‘Changchen.’ Fantasy NPCs from the world of ‘Eden.’”
“Oh, martial arts and fantasy.”
“Familiar, right? NPCs are the most important element in this game, so remember them. Their intelligence is incredibly high, and if you use them well…”
All the way to practical uses for NPCs.
Accurate information accepted as established theory even among rankers—completely different from the B-grade scraps Taeyang had scraped together from communities.
Hyeonhye showed him her own broadcast VODs and various videos from other rankers, drilling him day and night for a full week.
“Ahem. This should be enough. How about it? You get the general idea now, right?”
Thud.
Taeyang slammed his forehead onto the monitor.
Hyeonhye stared at him with suspicious eyes.
“…You actually remember all of it, right?”
“I remember.”
Taeyang answered reflexively. He was terrified that not answering would make her start the class all over again.
“What’s the most important thing?”
“…NPCs. By the way, you should’ve become a teacher. Seems like you’re perfectly suited for it.”
It was a perfectly leveled lecture that matched Taeyang’s exact capacity.
He had never studied in Daechi-dong, but he imagined this was what a top lecturer from that famous cram-school district must feel like.
Watching the impressed Taeyang, Hyeonhye pouted.
“…It’s not that I’m suited for it.”
The real reason Hyeonhye could teach him so well was something else.
She had always been jealous of Taeyang’s talent.
Hyeonhye was a player who excelled in the intellectual side rather than physical play. Because of that, she often hit physical limits during gameplay and watched her character die.
She had frequently imagined how someone like Taeyang—who was considered one of the top ten gamers in the world—would play Dantalion.
That was why she had occasionally wondered how she would teach him if his special constitution ever improved and he could actually play.
‘I never thought I’d actually end up teaching him like this, though.’
The thought left a bitter taste in her mouth.
The “what if” scenario she had imagined hadn’t been this desperate or extreme.
“Right. Taeyang, you should make a Dantalion streaming ID too.”
“Me? Why?”
“You can start broadcasting before you log in. The problem isn’t with the streaming software—it’s that you can’t access it from inside the game.”
“No, I mean—why?”
Hyeonhye smacked him hard on the back.
“Why? Because there’s no way you can perfectly remember everything I just taught you!”
He couldn’t. There was a limit to how much information a person could retain in a short period.
“Hey! Why are you hitting me? Use your words.”
“Because you’re being frustrating.”
“But are you sure you can actually stream like that? You said you can’t start a new stream from inside the game.”
Hyeonhye pulled out her smartphone and showed him the screen.
A blue-eyed foreigner was laughing loudly on it.
“It actually worked. I thought you were the only crazy person who would try it, but apparently not.”
“Wow, that’s strangely comforting.”
“He’s a lunatic. Says he’s going to save the three hundred million people trapped inside the game.”
Looking closer, the streamer’s name was MESSIAH.
It meant savior.
“Huh? I recognize his face.”
“He’s a decent ranker-level player. He was probably in one of the videos I showed you. Anyway, you need to turn on your stream so I can help you from outside.”
“…I never even streamed my King of Fist games.”
“Tsk!”
The moment Hyeonhye raised her right hand again, Taeyang immediately surrendered.
“I’ll do it! I’ll stream, okay?!”
It was the moment Yoon Taeyang debuted as a Dantalion streamer.