Chapter 196: Preliminaries 5
Chapter 196: Preliminaries 5
A single loss meant elimination. The tournament was merciless.
Lee Ha-rin approached, the matchups for the hundred or so participants already laid out.
Complex lines and messy marks, almost like graffiti, surrounded every name tag.
"Ah, this was just for practice. Not this messy one—this."
Traces of erasure, rewriting, and over-painting.
If this were evidence of studying, parents everywhere would be weeping tears of joy.
Unfortunately, these traces of intense, heartfelt agony were just for a hobby.
This wasn't a simple case of 'I want to watch it.'
It was a bracket that took into account each individual's achievements, stats, and special Traits.
It brimmed with a passion no salaried employee could ever muster out of mere duty.
So much so that, having nothing better to do anyway, I almost felt like asking her to explain it to me.
"Why did you decide on these matchups?"
"Hehe, if you look here..."
I glanced over and noticed Kim Ha-eun had vanished from the seat next to me.
Had she run off to the world inside the dream city gem now that she'd finished her snack?
Or perhaps it was a gesture of feminine solidarity, giving us a moment alone together.
Whether Kim Ha-eun had slipped away or not,
Lee Ha-rin's explanation continued, her eyes positively sparkling.
So this was what she'd been so intensely busy with lately.
"Over here you matched knights against each other, but why did you put a knight against a sorcerer here?"
"That sorcerer's main approach is physical enhancement through Spirit-Summoning Art, so I paired her with a strength-focused knight. There's been a long-running debate over which is stronger: Body Strengthening Art or spirit possession."
"And here?"
"Both are knights, but one is a Magic Knight who uses magic as a secondary skill, and the other is a Spirit Knight who fights alongside a spirit."
Lee Ha-rin's tournament bracket was not built on fairness or equality.
Her standard for making the matchups was the audience's entertainment, pure and simple.
She seemed to believe that in the end, the strongest would win, regardless of tournament luck.
A knight who strengthens her body with mana versus a sorcerer who does the same through possession arts.
A knight who supplements her swordsmanship with magic against one who supplements her spearmanship with spirit magic.
A mage who has honed telekinetic magic to its limits against a pure psychokinetic.
A paladin who swings a mace and self-heals fights an esper with super-regeneration.
Just hearing the descriptions piqued my curiosity about the outcomes.
I couldn't say if it was a fair bracket, but it did a killer job of sparking interest.
She'd also matched the Murim-in according to martial art compatibilities, and—
"To be honest, unlike knights, Murim martial arts are just so incredibly diverse..."
"Yeah, I imagine that's... quite a lot."
A single Murim Constellation brings with them knowledge of hundreds of martial arts.
Take the students of The Sword That Severs the Yoke, for instance. They practice dozens of different weapon disciplines alone—sword, spear, saber, staff, and more.
I could understand why she had no choice but to classify the Murim-incarnations in a simplified way.
But would the otaku-minded Lee Ha-rin ever settle for just 'good enough'?
She'd set up matchups like a Murim specialist in throwing weapons and poison techniques against a fire sorcerer,
skillfully crafted to arouse curiosity about whether skill and technique could overcome a disadvantaged compatibility.
"So I just sign here?"
"Yes, please sign on the approval line at the bottom."
I scrawled my signature on the fresh copy of the document—not the one covered in her fingerprints.
It was just a big letter from my surname in a past life, but
since I wrote it with a pen conjured from my own magic power, it was probably more verifiable than any official signature.
It felt like just yesterday I was flinching at the sight of a refrigerator in my cell,
and now here I was, casually conjuring a pen out of magic power.
An idle, pointless thought drifted through my head.
"Is that everything you needed?"
"Yes, that's it."
Nodding, Lee Ha-rin rolled the document up and tucked it into her coat.
She could roll up an A4 sheet and stuff it into her inner pocket without wrinkling it.
Magic had truly seeped into even the most trivial corners of this world.
the important thing here wasn't the wrinkle-proof paper.
With the preliminaries ending rather anticlimactically and all my tasks finished, I finally had free time.
Which meant it was the perfect chance to do something with Lee Ha-rin I'd been wanting to try for a while now.
"Well then."
"Yes? Is there something you need me to do?"
She looked at me, her eyes shining.
Eyes filled with blind loyalty and love.
"Let me see your phone for a sec."
"...Huh?"
Those eyes began to color with a whole spectrum of emotions.
※
My reason for wanting to take a look at Lee Ha-rin's phone was simple.
She spent her leisure time checking public databases for Constellation info,
and she scoured the news from all four continents daily, claiming she was researching Incarnations.
I was just curious about how much data she'd hoarded and what she actually did with it all.
Had she downloaded a collection of Incarnation photobooks?
Or was she clipping newspaper articles?
Maybe she had a massive spreadsheet organized like a game strategy guide.
"What's wrong?"
"......"
Anyway, I figured it would be a good way to pass the time.
Like when I'd laze around with Han Ye-ji, scrolling through her bookmarked livestreams,
just messing around in bed to kill time.
Sharing a hobby and sticking close together isn't a bad thing.
She'd never hidden it. Whenever a Constellation or Incarnation topic came up, her eyes would sparkle,
and she'd explain with such fervent passion that even Han Ye-ji, Kim Ha-eun, and Song Ye-na would be left chuckling awkwardly.
An otaku so passionate she wanted to spread her gospel, not just enjoy it alone.
So I naturally assumed she'd be thrilled to show me part of her collection.
"Is there something in there you can't show me?"
"It's not that, but..."
Her expression colored with fluster, and for the first time, she hesitated at my request.
This was a girl who'd willingly carry me on her back piggyback-style and even attend to me in the bath,
so was showing me her phone really such a difficult thing?
Honestly, if you compared the options—showing your phone vs. having every dark, insidious desire of your subconscious laid bare—
wasn't just showing the phone the obviously less embarrassing choice?
Back in my old world, when guys asked to see each other's phones, hardly anyone ever refused or got cagey about it.
But my wondering turned out to be absurdly short-lived.
After only a moment's hesitation, Lee Ha-rin placed her smartphone in my hand.
It wasn't even locked with a password. And on the home screen—
"There's... nothing?"
"Yes... I'm sorry."
"Hey, there's nothing to apologize for."
There really was nothing.
Not a single extra app installed for convenience.
No secret pages for dark, twisted desires, either.
Just call logs and message threads with people from the Academy.
'She was actually sorry because she thought it'd be boring for me.'
Come to think of it, this was the same Lee Ha-rin who'd go without meals to run experiments in the magic research lab.
She'd even lost contact with her family because she rarely ever touched her phone.
Which was why I'd told her to at least send them a text letting them know she was alive.
"Um... if you're curious about the data I've gathered, I keep it all stored in the research building. Should I go get it?"
"Nah, forget it. No need to trouble yourself by going all the way over there."
"Then, at least this..."
As if apologizing that this was all she had, Lee Ha-rin shyly pulled some documents out of her inner pocket.
I'm talking about a document. A stack of paper. A damned thesis, easily hundreds of pages long...
Watching her pull reams of paper, each thicker than a handspan, out of a pocket that had to be enchanted—I was speechless.
Wait, she apologized for having nothing to show, and then she pulls out a wad of paper thicker than an encyclopedia?
It was so thick that if you put a hard cover on it, anyone would believe it was a phone book.
I glanced at the first page. It was a detailed analysis of some Constellation I'd never even heard of.
"I used to compile this as a hobby, but I've been so busy lately I had to stop updating it."
Was "updating" really the right word to use for a hobby?
And the reasoning behind the analysis made my head spin even more.
Good lord. She'd researched the most trivial commonalities among Incarnations to deduce a Constellation's tastes?
And based on that, she wanted to see if you could snipe an Incarnation contract?
This wasn't a hobby. This was closer to a professional agency's management analysis.
Height, weight, hair color, daily hobbies, habits, even vocal tone.
It was the kind of data a major corporation's marketing team would painstakingly compile.
'Laughing and joking around over something like this feels... a little hard to pull off.'
Sure, you could watch a game livestream and have a good laugh.
"Constellation Vanguard Standard-Bearer of the Melee prefers females over 170cm with straight brown or black hair."
Just how was I supposed to create a cozy, lovey-dovey atmosphere looking at stiff analysis notes like this?
"I made this back in my school days because I didn't want to work a part-time job, and I thought I could make some money from it as a hobby. So there are a lot of rough parts."
"Rough?"
Hell, more importantly, a student made this while studying? As a *hobby*?
There were clippings from supporting documents and newspaper articles...
The claims were backed up with statistics and graphs. What part of this was "rough"?
I felt like I was watching a master artisan smash her own pottery, shouting "This isn't it!"
I turned to ask her where exactly the flaws were, and looked at Lee Ha-rin.
Meeting my intense stare, she ducked her head bashfully.
"It includes not just accurate data, but also internet tabloid rumors. PR materials, slander, nonsense from community boards—all of that gets mixed into the statistics bit by bit... After I was called out for that, I've been using only officially certified data. It's rare for false rumors to be outright slander, but Incarnations keep spreading exaggerated info just to boast about their Constellations."
"So that's why you use the National Public Data Center?"
"Yes, that's right."
So this document was the reason she'd started scouring public databases for her hobby.
Hm. To be totally frank, continuing this conversation any further felt like it would only be a loss for me.
If I said just one wrong word here, Lee Ha-rin looked like she'd go on a full-blown explanatory rampage.
What I actually wanted was to find some common ground, some shared hobby where
I could tease her a little and find a fun pretext to mess around,
not to be buried alive under a pile of master's-thesis-level documentation.