A Body of Glass
Lee Woojin sat in front of his monitors.
The studio apartment was small, but it was more than enough for a man living alone. Dual monitors, a streaming mic, and a capture card occupied the desk, and an official Fighter of Legend poster hung on the wall.
Beside it, a single frame.
An amateur-era prize. Five years old already.
Lee Woojin sipped an energy drink and stared at the screen, where the Fighter of Legend lobby sat waiting.
31,847 hours.
Anyone looking at that number would assume it was a bug. Ten hours a day, every day, and it would still take more than eight years. Lee Woojin was the kind of human being who had actually done it. More precisely — he was the kind of human being who would have gone insane if he hadn't.
His YouTube channel was called Meori's Fighting Game Lab. One hundred and seven thousand subscribers. Among fighting-game creators, that was a respectable name. The Geum Hyuk guide videos, in particular, pulled serious numbers.
870,000 views
520,000 views
410,000 views
The comment section always sounded about the same.
Lee Woojin read through comments like those with no expression at all, and scrolled on.
Because none of it was wrong.
Lee Woojin had been a boxer.
In his amateur days, the word genius had followed him everywhere he went. His eyes always saw what the other man was about to do. The angle of a turning shoulder, the weight loading into a heel, the faint tremor in a pupil — all of it arrived in Lee Woojin as a signal, telling him the next move before it came.
Rookie Championship MVP. National Sports Festival gold. Offers from pro scouts. Everything had been smooth. People had even started saying he was the one who would carry Korean boxing on his back.
Then a problem no one had seen coming arrived.
"We're seeing signs of connective tissue dysplasia. There's an issue with collagen synthesis, so the elasticity in your ligaments and tendons is significantly lower than a normal person's. If you look at the MRI results, the joint capsule area here…"
The doctor went on for a long time. In short, he had a glass body.
A single sentence from the doctor ended everything.
At first, he didn't believe it. They'd called him a genius. They'd said his future was guaranteed.
But the body does not lie.
Even sparring made his wrists swell. Hitting the heavy bag made his elbows grind. Every time he threw a proper right hand, pain climbed up through his shoulder. In the end, Lee Woojin took the gloves off without ever making a pro debut.
He was nineteen.
Lee Woojin leaned back in his chair.
Five years on, the memory still found him sometimes. The rush of reading an opponent in the ring. The sweet, clean impact of a fist landing flush on the jaw. That feeling — for one isolated moment — of being the strongest person in the world. He had lost every last second of that glory.
For a while he holed up in his room and wallowed. Then he started playing games.
Fighter of Legend. A title called the peak of 3D fighting games. Two million concurrent players worldwide, an annual esports prize pool north of forty million dollars. Praised as a fusion of everything that made Tekken and Street Fighter great, it had conquered the fighting-game market in five years like some kind of monster.
One hundred and forty-eight playable characters.
The one Lee Woojin chose was Geum Hyuk.
A boxing-based all-rounder. Gold hair, tanned skin, a delinquent's mouth — a textbook golden-boy archetype. Bright, big-hearted, and in a fight he moved on pure instinct, like a beast.
"Kyakya, let's throw down!"
"Whoa~ this is gonna be fun!"
Even the in-game voice lines had that energy. Honestly, it was the opposite of Lee Woojin's own personality. He was the calm, analytical type.
So why Geum Hyuk?
The lore.
A born beast. A boxer gifted with an innately powerful body and a genius instinct for violence.
That was how the in-game character profile put it. Injuries? A glass body? Geum Hyuk had never heard of either. Everything Lee Woojin had been denied in the real world, Geum Hyuk possessed in full. He had been filling his own absence through a game character — vicarious satisfaction, nothing more.
From that point on, Lee Woojin had one-tricked Geum Hyuk and nothing else.
He memorized every last scrap of frame data. Jab: four frames to start, eight frames of recovery. Straight: seven to start, twelve of recovery. Uppercut: nine frames to start, and on hit the opponent locked up for eighteen — a confirmed follow-up. He drilled two hundred and forty-seven combo routes until they lived in his hands: wall combos, aerial combos, counter combos, stun combos. For every situation, the route that squeezed out optimal damage. He packed matchup notes and answers for all one hundred and forty-eight characters into his head. Whatever came out against him, he could read their habits in the first five seconds and answer them.
In the community, his tag was famous.
Meori.
The Geum Hyuk specialist, Meori. Even among Challenger-level players, one of the names you counted on one hand.
Maybe they had a point.
Lee Woojin's strength was never simply that he had played a lot of games. As a former boxer, he understood fighting. Even inside a virtual space, he read opponents the way you read them in a real fight.
The only problem was that he couldn't execute any of it with his own body.
A ranked match popped.
The opposing character was Rampakam, the Death King — a Muay Thai fighter. The most broken character of the current season. Elbows, knees, low kicks: a brawler who poured techniques out at close range like a madman, and after the last patch buffed his frames he had rocketed straight into tier one.
The community was howling.
If it's Rampakam, that's probably StrawberryPanties.
Lee Woojin checked the opponent's tag. StrawberryPanties. Challenger #28. A guy who had swapped onto Rampakam after the patch and climbed the ladder in a blink.
Honestly, it was not a kind matchup. Geum Hyuk versus Rampakam was a textbook losing combination for Geum Hyuk. Boxing used only the fists. Muay Thai used elbows, knees, and legs. At close range, the number of cards you could play wasn't even comparable.
Lee Woojin was calm anyway.
The match started.
StrawberryPanties' Rampakam came forward exactly as expected — the early pressure pattern. Two low kicks to shave off mobility, close the gap, then look for the clinch.
Lee Woojin's hands moved.
Step out. The low kick carved empty air. In the same breath he stepped in and snapped a jab, and the jab landed dead on the opponent's recovery frames.
He felt StrawberryPanties flinch.
He got read.
The other man would have known it too — that his pattern had been picked completely clean. Rampakam's strength was the clinch: get close and rain elbows and knees, the golden pattern. But if you kept snipping him with jabs before he ever entered that clinch range?
He couldn't do a thing.
Lee Woojin carried on outboxing like it was nothing. Hold the distance, jab control. If the other man tried to walk in, backstep. The instant the feet stopped, a jab-straight combination.
Round one. Lee Woojin.
Round two, StrawberryPanties changed the pattern. Instead of the clinch, he started checking with middle kicks. Not a bad adjustment.
Woojin had answers for that too.
After the middle kick, he has a habit of coming in with the right elbow.
Lee Woojin had already picked out three more of StrawberryPanties' habits.
The result was a round-two KO.
Lee Woojin leaned back in his chair.
He'd won.
And yet.
His left hand was trembling. The hand resting on the keyboard had started to twitch in fine, useless spasms — the aftershock of too many hours at the machine. Pain was climbing into his wrist as well.
The glass body from his boxing days.
Playing games hadn't changed a thing. Fingers, wrists, elbows. A few hours at the stick and his joints started screaming. Across thirty thousand hours, a wrist brace had become mandatory equipment, and the hospital visits had become routine.
Pathetic.
Lee Woojin let out a self-mocking laugh. Even in a game, his body held him by the ankle.
The night sank deeper, and ranked matches stopped coming. There was never much Challenger traffic in the small hours.
Lee Woojin hesitated a moment, then booted story mode.
Fighter of Legend's story mode had been built with real care. Each of the one hundred and forty-eight characters had their own story chapter, and in the main story those characters tangled together and drove toward a massive fighting tournament.
Geum Hyuk's story chapter. Lee Woojin had already cleared it dozens of times, but every so often he wanted to see it again.
Chapter one. Geum Hyuk's past — a nameless amateur boxer whose talent got recognized, and who stepped onto the pro stage. Chapter two. The first wall. The Fist Emperor, Yu Seonghun. An encounter with a character rated among the strongest in the entire setting; Geum Hyuk got beaten one-sidedly, then rose out of that crisis and landed a single shot — the awakening event. From chapter three onward it merged with the main story and ran into the tournament arc.
Lee Woojin launched story mode.
The screen loaded.
He stared at it, unfocused.
Geum Hyuk stood in the ring. Gold hair, tanned skin, a grin overflowing with confidence — a beast's energy you could feel even through the glass. He had been piloting that character for years. Every one of his fingers remembered how that body moved.
What if.
The thought arrived out of nowhere.
What if I could fight with a body like that myself.
Not a game. A real ring. Not a virtual puppet — an actual body. A body that wouldn't break.
What would that have been like.
Lee Woojin let out a short, dry laugh.
Stupid thought.
That was when it happened.
The screen flared.
"…What the hell?"
He figured it was a bug. It wasn't a bug. The entire display drowned in white, and then a strange string of text appeared.
Connecting…
Measuring synchronization rate…
99.97%
"What is this? Why would it suddenly—"
Lee Woojin never finished the sentence.
His vision went completely black. After that, the inside of his head bleached white, and his consciousness burned away to nothing.