An Inescapable Fate (1)

The closed beta test of Fantasy of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Galicia had come to a triumphant close.

Nearly a thousand beta participants had stayed right through to the final moment — an unprecedented, near-miraculous metric in the entire history of gaming. And as a bonus, the closing cinematic had cleanly snuffed out every last anxiety people still carried.

The cities had been too far apart, making travel a pain. The terrain was gorgeous but felt a little empty. And once the game went fully live, how on earth would it handle the flood of players pouring in?

Every one of those worries melted away — just like that.

Even in the brief flashes of footage, each city had unfurled in all its grandeur, every one of them stamped with its own distinct personality.

Whoa! Dozens of times more quests!

Thousands of times more NPCs!

Is this even possible? For real?

Plenty of people had floated question marks over a scale that vast — but those were industry professionals talking. The people who had actually lived through the closed beta, and the ones who had hopped from stream to stream like locusts devouring every scrap of footage, believed without a shred of doubt.

Shin Se-rin is a god, and FoG is invincible!

An attack on FoG is an attack on me!

The dumpster-fire reputation that had clung to Galicia Online had long since faded from public memory. And besides — everyone already knew the common wisdom: slap an RE on something and it succeeds.

Take that one revive game where the knight builds a harem that somehow includes both a tentacle monster and a beastkin. Or the other revive game where a dual-wielding maniac crashes in, stabs a goblin priestess to death, then holds a sword to your throat and tells you to draw.

Even a certain reboot title had been a success from the players' point of view — setting aside the company's little problem of nobody having a reason to stick around on the live servers and the revenue drying up.

Of course, Fantasy of Galicia was neither a revive, nor a reboot, nor a remake. But as the spiritual successor to its predecessor, you could still say the will of RE lived on.

And so belief climbed all the way to the level of faith.

Hmm…? Why does the faith keep stacking…?

Even though the game wasn't even in service yet, faith was piling up across the continent of Galicia — a measure of just how sky-high the anticipation had become.

But the withdrawal still lingered in people's hearts.

While the wailing of people who had lost their entire way of life overnight shook the heavens, the bloodless, tearless demon director Se-rin was hard at work poring over the statistical data accumulated during the closed beta test.

To users, a closed beta was nothing more than a chance to sample the game. To a developer, it was a goldmine of information. There was a reason they collected playstyle data from other games and all sorts of metrics before locking in the lottery winners.

And so, one shocking metric after another began to surface.

"Ugh."

She had already confirmed that the world brimmed with life day, night, and dead of night alike — but seeing it in numbers was downright violent. No matter how fully immersive the VR experience was… or more accurately, how much it was an actual transfer to another world — eleven and a half hours a day?

Strip the working adults out of the stats and the core users had basically been living on a diet of eat-shit-game-sleep.

"I'll need to put in a request to make real-world physical feedback a little more intuitive…"

Se-rin had zero interest in reading headlines like SHOCK: 30-Something Man Starves Himself Playing Games, Found Dead in Capsule?! in the news. But since she hadn't developed the capsules herself, the best she could do was propose a system that forcibly ejected anyone who tried to game without eating.

Next up: the rough economic indicators.

Because durability drain had been tuned fairly realistically, repair costs had run higher than expected — and that burden had been passed straight on to the players.

"Ahh."

A surprising number of users had picked the blacksmith class solely for the repair skill. Looking at these numbers, the reason was suddenly crystal clear.

In a normal game, weapon durability only dropped when you hit an enemy, and armor only when you got hit. But here, bumping into a wall by accident or ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠slamming something into the ground — just moving your body around — had been chewing through durability at an alarming rate.

Cross-referencing that with the other metrics confirmed her suspicion. She filed it under the planned fix list.

And then there was everything else…

"Tsk."

"Heheheh…"

"Why are there so many Leap of Faith deaths?"

She laughed at some stats, sighed at others, and chewed over a few with genuine seriousness — calmly compiling her list of improvements as she went.

If it were up to her, she would have run the beta a few more times and polished the environment into something as positive as possible. But…

"There'd be a riot."

Se-rin had already done a casual bit of community recon. And she put herself in their shoes. If she were a player? And the beta ended, only for them to fire up the oven and bake another batch? She might grit her teeth through one round — but a second would be rough. If that wasn't torture, what was?

So next time, even if it meant running an open beta first, they absolutely had to go into official launch with no wipe.

Starting tomorrow, the new hires would be reporting to the office — and even those two remote-work enthusiasts, Yoo Seol and Seo Han-ryang, would be coming in. She needed to get some chemistry going with the new team members, too. They were probably even more restless than she was. Nobody wanted to do the work — but the faster it got finished, the sooner they could play.

"Heh heh…"

Se-rin broke into a bright, beaming smile. Collaborating with people who burned with passion for games — what a blessing that was!

And right in the middle of that thought—

Bzzzt—

As if it had read her mind, a message arrived from Yoo Seol.

"Huh?"

Se-rin tilted her head in mild ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠surprise. Not that Yoo Seol sending a message was surprising in itself — the woman carpet-bombed her with dozens, sometimes hundreds of messages a day. But those had all been to Kim Ji-hyun. With Shin Se-rin, she only ever talked in the group chat. She had never sent a personal message.

And yet the phone that just buzzed was Shin Se-rin's.

Still puzzled, Se-rin opened the conversation.

What she'd sent was a single Nertube link and a cute emoticon. Without thinking, Se-rin tapped the link Yoo Seol had given her.

And then—

A bright, bouncy intro that could have been straight out of Japanese city pop slammed into Se-rin's eardrums, and at the same time…

"Oh, for fuck's—! What is this?!"

The curse slipped out before she could stop it.

She had thought she was completely free of it. She had thought the trend had come and gone and washed out with the tide three times over. But the ghost of the past had clawed its way back up — and now it had Se-rin by the ankle.

"No, but why is it the gray sweatshirt and the Kim Gu glasses again…?!"

Se-rin's hysterical shriek rang through the office, loud enough to shake the walls.