Fantasy of Galicia Is... Shutting Down... (3)
As a certain Pirate King once said: a man dies eventually.
Games are no different.
A title that once felt eternal starts limping through updates. Then, out of nowhere, the usual two-hour maintenance balloons to eight. Players tear open the popcorn, hearts pounding, screaming They held out this long! Something huge is coming! — only to be greeted by an end-of-service notice driven by collapsing revenue.
Of course, Fantasy of Galicia wasn't shutting down. The closed beta was simply ending. But the shockwave that hit one particular community — more precisely, one particular messenger channel — might as well have been a full EOS announcement.
Gold prices freefalling in real time…!
Gold farms, on the brink of extinction from climate catastrophe…!
It was a panic sell on par with that water-balloon game collab where a soda-branded balloon plummeted from two million won to a hundred and fifty thousand overnight.
You could raise the perfectly reasonable question of why anyone would whale on a closed beta in the first place. But this is a world where people throw money at private servers under the banner of "donations" just to feel superior.
And players who wanted every scrap of information advantage heading into launch — especially crafters like blacksmiths and alchemists, who needed mountains of materials to grind profession XP — had been vacuuming up gold by the fistful, keeping the gold-farm economy alive.
Had been. Past tense.
With an official wipe already announced, and the end only a day away, not a single soul was left willing to buy gold at a fair price.
And it wasn't just gold. Gold, items — every form of cyber-asset trade dried up overnight, as expected.
.
.
.
But there was still one person who refused to let go of hope.
What, after all, had been Director Kim Ji-hyun's greatest achievement?
Normalization? Sure. But for Yoo Seol, there was something far more important, far more sacred — an accomplishment worthy of lifelong worship.
Value preservation.
No matter how virtual the world, there was no way they'd take every achievement built with blood, sweat, and tears and hit COMPLETE WIPE in a single stroke. Naturally, the time invested during closed beta deserved proper compensation…!
Her level-36 character!
Countless rare- and hero-grade items…!
The endless piles of gold coins she still hadn't converted to real cash…!
"Uh, yeah, no. None of that. We're not preserving anything. Go home."
"Kim Se-rin…! You are a creature that should not exist…!"
"You didn't use insider info to cheat, right? Because that gets you fired and permanently banned. Just so you know. Last time I checked, you were burying items in some hillside. We're auditing every last one of those and deleting them."
"Gyaaah, gyaaaaaah…! Anything but that…!"
Yoo Seol's rebellion ended as a minor incident.
Time flowed on.
The scheduled end of closed beta drew near.
It had been a two-week schedule, so under normal circumstances the winners' interest should have long since cooled. But this was a mountain of rice that never shrank no matter how hard you shoveled — and almost no one had dropped out.
Which is why, for the final world event before beta closed, people gathered in twos and threes at the temple in Pradera, timed for ten o'clock that evening. They weren't about to miss it.
There, wearing an uncharacteristically resolute expression, stood Elisha in all her majesty.
"Ahem…!"
Dignity exploded!
Exploded so thoroughly that not a trace of it remained in the surrounding space.
The living incarnation of a sage-god, the sole hope of the continent of Galicia, Goddess Elisha herself, launched into a long and earnest address.
"It was a short time, but… um… still, being together was good? It was really, really good…!"
Of course, she was reading a script Se-rin had written for her, so she stumbled through it. A strapping man in his thirties fumbling his lines would be a demerit. A goddess who looked like an adorable little girl fumbling her lines? Instant bonus points.
Unintentionally, Elisha's improvised performance succeeded in raking in a massive share of the Farm Goddess Church's devotion.
If one were to express it in the style of those old game-fantasy novels from back in the day?
Piety has increased!
Piety has increased!
Piety has increased!
Well… system messages like that would have plastered about three pages' worth of screen.
And just as the galleries started flooding with posts like "The world quest was a Farm Farm Show lmaooo"…
"Even now…! My sister goddess is still suffering at the hands of the wicked Demon God…!"
A sudden plot-hook airdrop.
"Heroes…! Please lend this one your strength, is what I'm saying…!"
The phrasing was a little off, but the gathered players finally understood the true nature of the world quest.
It was a continuation of the sudden world quest from before!
Of course, nobody actually believed they could defeat the Demon God. After all, what had happened last time? One gesture from the Corrupted milky— Goddess Se-rin, and everyone had been rendered combat-incapable, forced to sit back and watch the event cutscene.
An event cutscene?
Even better…!
And this time was the first direct mention of the Demon God, who'd only been teased in rumors until now.
"I can testify from the Genshin precedent that the Demon God is a cute girl!"
"Hmm, if Se-rin was based on Morrigan… then Kehole? Cool, but kinda mid."
"Blasphemy! Can you not feel the developer's philosophy? She has to be a cute girl…! The only question we should be debating is Farm or Bread!"
"Losing one's faith has always meant death…!"
"Trolls have been dealt with. Stay the course!"
The players jacked their expectations to the absolute ceiling.
Had the Bread Goddess — Director Kim Se-rin — ever once betrayed player expectations? Setting aside a few weirdos who'd harbored the absurd hope of closed-beta asset preservation, the answer was a definitive never.
Quite the opposite. Whatever you expected, she delivered more…!
Perhaps she sensed the grins spreading through the crowd. Elisha, who'd been sneaking glances left and right, clenched her tiny fist.
And then—
"LEEEET'S GOOO!"
The moment she declared the advance, a massive portal began to ripple open behind her.
And then—
Boing!
Elisha dove straight through without a second's hesitation, and right on her heels—
Rumble…!
—the heroes charged in as one, united in heart and purpose.
Only about a thousand beta testers had been able to attend the final world quest.
But outside the game? The attention it had drawn was staggering.
Even people who'd never considered streaming were wondering if they should give it a shot. The hype was that intense. And among them, ZeroIsGood — Lee Han-byul — had claimed the undisputed number-one spot on the entire platform.
Being a megacorp that had long since outgrown mere "big company" status, even with slow mode on the chat, trolls of every stripe poured in as a matter of course…
"I'm not crying! I said I'm not crying! Hah, damn it. Why is today the last day already? This is actually insane… my entire life is collapsing…"
Lee Han-byul had always had a robust immunity to trolls. So she pressed on with her stream, undaunted.
For a while she followed the vaguely cosmic dimensional corridor inside the portal… until her vision flipped in an instant.
And a cinematic began to play.
Every second felt precious, so her first instinct was to skip it and rewatch the YouTube edition later — but—
"It won't skip?"
"You guys don't get it…! I want to live and breathe in Galicia for even one more second… this place is already my life. Huh? You're the ones living in the wrong world called Earth!"
She bantered with her viewers for a moment, then—
"Huh?"
Zero's eyes went wide.
The cinematic's backdrop was a temple. And not just any temple — its structure was strikingly similar to the one dedicated to Se-rin and Elisha that she'd been standing in moments before stepping through the portal.
But the decisive difference: a proper temple always had a goddess statue raised high for worship and reverence. Here, only shattered stone fragments lay scattered across the floor.
The camera swept forward into the central nave, and there—
Before a banquet table so extravagant it went beyond "feast of land and sea" and qualified as a full imperial spread, a red-haired girl sat at the center — horns on her head, a plump little tail bobbing behind her.
And beside her, the illusion of the Fallen Goddess — unofficially known as "Chuunibyou Se-rin" — was attending to the meal.
The girl chewed a mouthful of food Se-rin had fed her, then her gaze suddenly locked straight ahead — directly at the camera.
Stern. Solemn. Dead serious.
The dialogue of a true villainous overlord and her second-in-command…!
"Ahahaha…! No, why — why does she look like that and deliver lines that dramatic? Is this a sketch comedy?"
Lee Han-byul and her viewers erupted in uproarious laughter.
But the laughter didn't last long…
Something in the middle of that exchange had clearly gone off-script, but Lee Han-byul, her viewers, and the assembled heroes didn't have the bandwidth to dwell on a minor flub.
CRACK—!
With a sudden effect like the dimension itself tearing and space splitting apart, the entire temple was swallowed by darkness, dyed black with shadow.
At the same moment, the cinematic ended.
And what appeared in Lee Han-byul's now slightly less amused field of view was…
The form of that pathetically adorable little girl transforming into a colossal black dragon that looked ready to devour the entire world whole.
And then—
Unlike Se-rin's "Illusion of the Goddess Engulfed in Shadow," which had been marked with question marks, this one bore the grotesque value of infinity floating above its head.
"DON'T PULL THIS BRAIN-ROT CRAP ON MEEE!"
Staring up at the black dragon's head — so high she had to crane her neck until it vanished into the distance — Lee Han-byul let out a piercing scream.
But in that very moment—
"Heroes…! All of my power — to you!"
Elisha rose into the air, light bursting outward in a brilliant flash as she bellowed a line that was, despite everything, still a little janky. And before the eyes of every connected hero—
Temporarily grants power equivalent to divine rank.
A buff appeared.
And then, once more, before Lee Han-byul's eyes—
Temporarily grants access to all skills from every job class branching from the Archer class.
Another new buff appeared.
"Huh, what the—?! Skills just started popping up left and right? Storm Arrow… Multi-Shot… Bullet Time? Is this a handgun skill? This game had handguns?!"
A cry of pure amazement burst from Lee Han-byul's lips.