Hidden Piece
"Oh, for fuck's sake. What kind of garbage game is this?"
I clenched my fist, staring at the words Game Over glowing on the monitor. The character I'd poured my soul into had just evaporated into nothing. The rage hit so hard it was a miracle I didn't hurl the mouse across the room.
But the feeling was familiar. I settled myself soon enough and stuck a cigarette between my lips.
"…Five years of my life glued to this one game. That's legendary in its own right."
I lit up and looked out the window. Who was I to call anything garbage, anyway?
Park Hyunmyung — the name my parents gave me, hoping I'd live wisely. I had not been living wisely at all.
Outside, the sun already hung high. A weekday, not a weekend. The hour when everyone else was hard at work. And here I was, a deadbeat NEET, unwashed and buried in a game like some shut-in.
"Time to quit, huh."
Pangenia. A game that had flashed into popularity five years ago. At launch, people had called it insane — and not as a compliment. Die, and everything vanished. You started over from scratch. On top of that, the difficulty was so absurd that not a single person had ever cleared it.
Maybe that was why the brief surge of interest had withered almost overnight. These days, I honestly wondered whether anyone besides me was still playing. The concurrent user count on the homepage server always sat at either zero or one — zero when I wasn't logged in, one when I was.
…A dead game with a peak concurrent of one, and they still hadn't shut the servers down. That was impressive in its own way, I supposed.
And I had time to spare. I'd quit my job. The girlfriend who'd nagged me every day was gone, too.
"Ha. Damn it."
A memory surfaced unbidden, and I squeezed my eyes shut.
You're a good guy, but… I'm sorry. I can't keep seeing someone with no future. We're at the age where you start thinking about marriage.
Dumped hard by the girlfriend I'd been with for five years. Apparently I'd been the only one picturing a life together.
All my friends are dating and marrying guys at the big four firms or famous conglomerates, and you… ugh. Forget it. We're done.
She'd packed up her feelings and walked out. That bitch.
Thanks to her, I'd quit the dead-end company, too. What the hell was I supposed to do with my life now? Maybe learn a trade while I was at it.
Click. I picked up the mouse.
A moment later, text appeared on the screen.
Create a new character?
Life always has one last last chance, right?
I'd thought the same thing when I made my previous character. But the last of the last was always the real last.
Of course, the window already held a small army of characters besides the one that had just been deleted. Some had hit max level. Some were decked out in every treasure I could find. None of them, I was certain, had the specs to clear the game.
This insane game had sections where the difficulty spiked beyond all reason. Bosses you had to wonder were even meant to be beaten. Villains who posed as allies and then stabbed you in the back without warning. Named NPCs who hunted you down the moment a bounty went up on your head…
Take the character the company had apparently made for management testing — BrainrotScammer. Max level, a decent haul of treasure-grade gear, but he'd pulled so many deranged stunts that a top-tier bounty from the Named NPCs was locked onto him. Log in, and you got executed on the spot.
A handful of world-class Named NPCs sat above even a player's max level. Get marked by one of those, and you might as well consider the character deleted. Which was why I couldn't even log into that one.
Anyway.
"Casual play. Just casual play."
Even the character I'd built with my life on the line for a clear had ended up deleted. Thinking of the gear he'd been wearing nearly brought tears to my eyes. I'd swept every Unique-grade item from my other characters onto him…
In all of Pangenia, only fifteen Unique-grade items had ever been confirmed. I'd stacked eight of them on a single character. The gamble of a lifetime. Die, and five years went up in smoke.
And he'd died. Character deleted. Every item gone with him. God damn it…
1.6 million Soul Points? Unique items really do dump a mountain of points.
But for everything you lose, something comes back. Pangenia had a Soul Point — SP — system. When a character died, the value of everything they held was converted into points. Players could spend those Soul Points for advantages when raising a new character.
Five years, hundreds of deleted characters, and I'd scraped together maybe eighty thousand SP. Then a character carrying eight Unique items got deleted, and 1.6 million Soul Points appeared. It wasn't just the Uniques — his chapter progress had been the highest I'd ever reached. He'd genuinely been close to a clear.
Ten thousand Soul Points per talent, and you can push it to the ceiling.
The main use for Soul Points was talents. At character creation, you could invest points into whatever talent you wanted, and the more you poured in, the steeper the growth curve. The hard cap was ten thousand Soul Points per talent.
For reference, a past character of mine — MentaikoConan — had dumped ten thousand into swordsmanship, claimed the title of Swordmaster, and then died.
Normally I'd go for the safest bet — lightning-type magic talent…
There were a few established routes. The safest was still a lightning-attribute magic talent. But this game had hundreds of talent types you could invest in. With 1.6 million points, I could max out a huge portion of them, if not all.
Invest three thousand or more into each of the Five Great Elements and the Void attribute opens. Dump another five thousand into Void and you unlock the Nothingness trait.
Talents birthed other talents. A kind of Hidden Piece. Pangenia was packed with designs like that — so many that even a fossilized veteran like me hadn't mapped them all.
With the Nothingness trait, you can use opposing magics. Stack light and dark affinity on top of that, and you've got to take it.
In this game, a single character couldn't wield conflicting attributes at the same time — not without tools or some other medium. But with the Nothingness trait, opposing magics and attributes became usable together.
The catch: unlocking Nothingness alone cost twenty thousand points, which left you starved for everything else. An already brutal game. Die, and the SP you'd invested vanished with the character. Starting with a clear, focused talent build was hard for a reason.
But real casual play is random. Let's go. All Random!
Sit there plotting routes and all you get is a headache. If I was going to enjoy the game one last time and walk away, nothing beat All Random.
Traits, everything — pure chance!
A catastrophic choice. And still, a smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. The goal wasn't a clear. It was fun. All 1.6 million points on pure random.
Can't clear it anyway.
I'd thrashed and clawed at every possible angle trying to beat this thing. Bottom line: this game was never released to be cleared.
At Pangenia's launch, the developer had issued a declaration to the players.
Grant a wish. Whatever it was, he would make it real. That one line from the developer had sent countless people charging in — and crashing out.
Five years later, the game still hadn't been cleared. A year ago there had still been a handful of players. Now it was just me, alone, still throwing myself at it.
But this time — the first and the last — I was going to play it properly.
Am I really pressing this?
I'd randomized appearance before, but choosing All Random for everything? Even I had never done that. The All Random button was infamous for being inefficient and completely pointless.
The distilled essence of every hour I'd poured in. A choice that held everything. Deciding was one thing. Actually doing it was another.
I closed my eyes.
And then—
Click!
I pressed it. Firmly. Dice spun, and everything began resolving at random.
But that wasn't the end of it.
A Hidden Piece has been activated.
You have satisfied a singularity condition and been invited to Pangenia!
Text I'd never seen before floated up on the monitor.
"Hidden Piece?"
O you who dwell in the vortex of creation and ruin,
brighter than light, darker than darkness.
May you find happiness in Pangenia.
The game intro rolled as well. I reached for the skip button out of habit—
"Uh…?"
The letters spilled out past the edge of the monitor, rippling and warping.
And in that instant—
A voice like metal scraping metal tore through the air. At the same time, a vision of hell unfurled before my eyes. The continents of Pangenia were crashing down onto Earth, and both worlds were collapsing together.
This wasn't cheap graphics. The quality was so high it looked real.
Had the intro always had a video like this?
The question barely had time to form before my consciousness slipped away into the distance.