The Constellation's Game [Laika]
About a week had passed.
During that time, I barely left my room.
“Siyul.”
“Yeah?”
“Is your brother sick or something?”
“Hmm... I don't think he's sick.”
“And yet?”
“I am a little curious how anyone can manage to do absolutely nothing like that.”
But I hadn't truly been doing nothing. Call the past week the 'rehabilitation period' of a returned hero, if you will.
I dug into how much the world had changed over those ten years whenever I had a spare moment, and I reached out to the few friends I still had, making my own modest effort to recover the social skills I'd lost.
“What? Jungmin, you and Dongsu... neither of you is married yet?”
“Hm?”
“The country's doomed.”
And that wasn't all. I also learned that Gyeongjun, one of my closest friends, had already been working as a hero—a hunter—for eight years.
Gyeongjun had even been the kid who lived next door. Whether he still lived there, though, I had no way of knowing.
“By the way, Gyeongjun's a hero?”
“Eight years on the job? He must be quite the veteran by now.”
“Anyway, you can't reach Gyeongjun, right?”
“Okay. Thanks anyway, Jungmin.”
“Yeah, later.”
With what I considered a sufficient course of rehabilitation (?) behind me, I finally resolved to leave the house.
Click—
“Where are you off to, sweetie?”
Watching her son step out the door, my mother wore an expression that was half worry, half relief. Reassuring her, I cinched my shoelaces tight.
“It's been stuffy, staying cooped up in here all the time.”
“R-right. I suppose it would be.”
“I'm going out for a walk!”
I really did intend to go for a walk.
Today I'm just... going to get a taste of it. Nothing more.
To Seoul Forest.
Or to be precise, to the 'Village of Beginnings' in Laika, reachable through the Seoul Forest Gate.
The truth was, I had no choices.
I'd returned after ten years, so naturally my bank balance was zero—and I certainly couldn't take allowance money from my parents. I might be a trash-tier hero, but I wasn't trash-tier as a human being.
If I'm going to freeload at thirty-six... I should at least earn my keep.
Which meant that enrolling in yet another academy under the pretense of preparing for guild or government-agency employment was an even more impossible option. So choosing the Seoul Forest Gate was simply the natural flow of logic.
Let's just aim to make lunch money. That's it.
My only real concern was whether I could enter the Gate without any trouble... and when I arrived in front of it, I saw no access restrictions of any kind.
“Oh ho.”
Which made sense, really. Only 'Awakened' could enter Gates in the first place.
I learned later that on Earth, the moment you awakened, you were subjected to every imaginable Awakened training program and required to sign a pledge—and that the pledge included the rather alarming (?) clause acknowledging that you could die inside a Gate at any time.
But right now, I was worrying about something else entirely.
Don't tell me I'm... not an Awakened on Earth?
A flicker of anxiety rose for a moment, but I shook my head. True, I'd never received the system message announcing 'You have awakened' the way ordinary hunters did.
But I could open a system window, couldn't I?
Name:Dave
(Dave#GARQW)
Species: Human
Age: 26
Level: Unknown
Class: None
Title: None
According to the information I'd gathered lurking in various Awakened community forums, only Awakened could bring up a system window in front of their eyes at will. So surely it would be fine.
Unlike when I'd played the beta version, a player name I'd never seen before—'Dave'—floated there along with a strange tag, instead of my real name... but I doubted that would be an obstacle. If anything, the communities showed that virtually no player used their real name as their player name.
Vvvvmm—!!
With those thoughts, I set my foot toward the Gate—and at once, an utterly familiar sensation began to coil around my entire body.
Attempting connection to 'Laika-Laika'.
Server: Earth
Access Route: Seoul — South Korea
The system chime I'd heard past the point of familiarity—well beyond it, into sheer exhaustion. And then the messages.
First-time connection detected.
Synchronizing player data.
1%...24%...27%......98%
Data synchronization complete!
There were unfamiliar message contents I'd never seen during the beta, of course... but those were truly minor issues. After all, the connection itself had succeeded without a hitch.
Access Location: Village of Beginnings — Bereshit
Welcome to the world of 'Laika-Laika', Dave.
Before my eyes unfolded an intensely familiar scene.
“Phew. There we go.”
A sigh of relief escaped me on its own. Right up until I'd returned to Earth, who would have thought I'd find these damn messages so welcome? Truly, the ways of the world are unknowable.
Now a quest should pop up, right?
The panorama of Bereshit, familiar from its scenery down to its very feel. The moment I took a step forward while taking it all in—
Ding-!
A quest I must have done a good twelve, thirteen hundred times appeared before my eyes.
Village of Beginnings — Bereshit
Category: Tutorial Quest
Difficulty: F
You have embarked on the journey to become an adventurer.
Seek out 'Mardini', chief of the primordial village of 'Bereshit', and inform him that a new adventurer has been born!
🎁 Reward: Apprentice Adventurer's Equipment Box
Ceria, a fairy assigned to the Human Resources Management Department of Laika Co., Ltd., was hard at work as always.
“Ugh, why is it that we have no talent in this world?”
Among the countless dimensional planes her team managed, identifying beings with the potential to become 'heroes' was Ceria's single most important duty!
But finding a promising hero—promising enough to warrant sending a truck after them—was harder than plucking stars from the sky. And so today, once again, Ceria was sifting one by one through a database piled as high as a mountain.
“Hmm... at this level, maybe it's worth a try?”
“No. This isn't enough!”
“If I settle for 'good enough', I might end up suffering like hell all over again!”
After all, Ceria had recently paid the karmic price for her own poor judgment in a very big way. She'd been convinced a certain candidate had decent talent, brought him in—and he'd ended up suffering for well over tens of thousands of years!
Granted, that 'ten thousand years' wasn't ten thousand years on any actual timeline. Even so, that span had been agonizing enough to break even a career administrator fairy.
So this time. I absolutely must find genuinely certain talent.
But no matter how many times she combed the data and reviewed it and reviewed it again, finding a sprout better than 'Lee Gunyul' proved difficult.
“Phew.”
She couldn't understand why. Lee Gunyul had, by all accounts, been a hero candidate with merely mediocre talent in every field. That was certain. And yet...
Why is even that level so hard to find?
Even scouring with fresh eyes, she couldn't find a single hero candidate who came close—let alone one who matched Gunyul.
No, if I keep looking, one will definitely turn up. I've just had bad luck.
Something felt off to her, but Ceria chalked it up to her own lack of 'effort'. And so today, once again, she was working harder than any fairy alive.
That is—right up until a moment ago.
Right up until she checked the shocking system message.
Ding-!
Data for tracked hero 'Lee Gunyul' has been synchronized.
Would you like to review it?
“...?”
When the message first appeared, she'd assumed some kind of system error had occurred.
“What... what is this?”
Lee Gunyul had, without question, been the hero candidate she'd played alongside through a countless number of beta iterations. For that 'Lee Gunyul's' data to have never yet been synchronized to the system...
It was something that couldn't happen—and must never happen.
“W-wait a moment.”
But sensing something wrong, the fairy Ceria checked the entire 'system log'—and shortly afterward, she had no choice but to collapse into her chair.
“It—it really was never synchronized? Not once?”
Astonishingly, across the entire beta play period spanning more than 1,200 iterations, the hero 'Lee Gunyul's' data had never once been synchronized to the system.
“Is she... insane?”
Playing without system synchronization meant playing without a single shred of 'system calibration'.
And that meant: a 'human' defeating a 'Demon King' without 'system calibration' was, from the very start, impossible.
No—in most dimensional planes, the vast majority of 'humans'... without exceptional talent, couldn't so much as handle an Ogre. Assuming, of course, that they had no help from the system.
“Th-then Lee Gunyul... killed a Death Knight without system calibration?”
As the situation sank in, Ceria found her teeth beginning to chatter—clack, clack—without her willing it.
“There's no such thing as a human that absurd!”
Even the 'Seventh-Tier Plane' rankers at the very top of the hero ranking charts couldn't confidently claim they could take down a Death Knight without system calibration. Granted, if it were the 'beta' version—built specifically for talent identification—the odds would improve somewhat...
“Wh-what... have I done?”
At this point, at least one fact was absolutely certain.
“Khaaaaaagh!!!”
That of all the hero candidates Ceria had ever brought in, there was no hero better than Lee Gunyul. None whatsoever.
“This is no time for despair. R-right. The official player name! At the very least, I need to find that out.”
Which was exactly why Ceria could only fall into deeper despair.
'Earth' is a server whose official launch has already been completed.
Administrator access is not permitted.
Unable to access the 'Earth' server database.
“Hueeeeeng—”
The truth was, Ceria had known all along. The fact that a 'data synchronization' message had popped up at this late stage was proof positive that the hero Lee Gunyul had, through some channel or another, connected to 'Laika' again.
And there was only one possible scenario for that: Laika's 'official launch' on Earth.
“That moronic fairy idiot... hueeeeeng, huhooooo!”
Which meant there was now exactly one way left for Ceria to approach Lee Gunyul again: wait for the end of the 'Earth' server's first main episode, when the first 'major update' would begin—the point at which the 'Earth' server would link to the main servers—and submit an 'official offer' at that moment.
The only sliver of good news was that the Earth server's major update wasn't that far off.
But if, when that time came, 'Lee Gunyul' had already become a 'high ranker' on the Earth server, the opportunity would never return to Ceria.
And so Ceria made a choice: she would pray.
Please, let the hero be hopelessly lazy...
It was the gaslighting Ceria had inflicted on him a thousand times over the past millennium. She prayed that 'You have no talent' had made Lee Gunyul lose all interest in growing as a hero.