Official Service Launch Day (3)
Even in a moment overflowing with a firepower so intense it defied belief for a weekday noon—more than a hundred thousand Koreans alone surging in for the open-run rush—a seed of potential conflict still lingered within Fantasy of Galicia.
That seed was the existence of the closed beta testers.
Or, as they were known among gamers by their popular nickname: the Cle-ryong-in.
Much as, in Serin's generation, a certain dual-wielding swordsman had earned the title "Beater"—a portmanteau of beta tester and cheater—so too had this one been coined. Take "closed beta tester," slap on "Celestial Dragon," the name of the supreme ruling race from a certain pirate manga whose final boss was widely spoiled to be a parrot, and you got Cle-ryong-in.
Tracing the etymology properly would mean starting from the history of a certain king-god-tree game where "demon population decline" had somehow mutated into "user population decline"… but setting aside such dry, pedantic explanations—
The real reason the term existed was simple. Across game after game, the phenomenon of closed beta veterans monopolizing information had been quietly, steadily taking root.
Use a certain skill in a certain place and a bug triggers. This item's performance is absurdly better than that one. There's a spot where monsters respawn like honey on toast—and they're non-aggressive, no less. Interact with an NPC a certain way and something very good happens. Heh heh… pahupahu…
So-called honey tips—just enough to give someone a decisive edge.
Of course, why does closed beta testing exist in the first place? Precisely to catch those bugs, and to weed out irregulars that fall outside the bounds of ordinary balance.
But people who deliberately intended to exploit that information after launch did, in practice, control it and milk the honey more often than one might hope.
…Among those cases, there were occasionally ones where the game company itself had received the reports and still kept its mouth shut—whether from incompetence or corruption—but that was beside the point at this stage.
Not everyone harbored such wicked hearts, of course. There were also those who shared information without holding back.
The chroniclers of the wiki.
The burden on their shoulders was immense. The game's scale was no ordinary thing, and then there was this:
A database boasting security so absolute that mere humanity—nowhere near goddess-tier—could never hope to hack it. And on top of that, Serin's peculiar brand of romance…
An information lockdown at the company level that, no matter how you looked at it, had clearly been influenced by old-school RPGs and game-fantasy novels.
Even now, GaliWiki—the dedicated wiki for Fantasy of Galicia—was being updated and verified in real time with countless pieces of information.
But no matter how hard the chroniclers worked, they couldn't uncover everything. And so the thousand-strong Cle-ryong-in, by their very existence, could not help but become objects of suspicion.
At least, until the official launch.
A streamer who was, without exaggeration, the most famous woman among the Cle-ryong-in.
ZeroIsGood—Lee Han-byul.
Despite the endless barrage of viewer criticism and perfectly legitimate complaints, she had stubbornly succeeded in producing Lee Han-byul MK2, an avatar with every physical shortcoming improved as far as the system would allow. Then she set foot on the continent of Galicia once more.
And—
"…What the hell? Why is the game… completely different?"
Of course, she had already felt some of the changes at the Gamestar demo zone. In the raid and combat experience areas, the class system had been overhauled entirely…
You could still raise a single class up to Rank 3, same as before—but now every skill had its own proficiency. Push the most basic Double Slash to its absolute limit and you could split a mountain in two; fulfill certain conditions and you could even fuse and evolve it into a higher-tier skill.
If there was any system that had barely changed, it was the lifestyle content—and even that had been carefully rebalanced between game-like allowances and realistic effort.
So what, exactly, had changed completely?
Everything else.
The landscape she was looking at right now, for instance…
"There's a castle on the plains, the forest's gone and turned into flatland, the cliffs are a quarry now, what used to be a river is a lake, the mob placements are all different…"
Granted, the Shin Se-rin Show had given them a heads-up that the open-world setting was a hundred years after the closed beta. But even allowing for the passage of time…
Could this much really change?
Lee Han-byul had stubbornly pushed her "map exploration content" through every curse the chat could throw at her, so the difference hit her all the harder.
"Wait, wait, everyone. This isn't the time for that. I… I have to see this with my own eyes."
A flood of barbed hooks poured in within half a second of her opening her mouth—but there was no viewer alive who could put the brakes on Lee Han-byul once she'd started the engine.
"I… have to see it. My heart's hometown, Pradera… with my own two eyes…!"
Even if the news that another so-called "Zero-rant" had begun sent viewers fleeing in droves…
"The map looks a bit bigger, but when I checked from the sky earlier it didn't seem that far, y'know? Just in case, I'm hitting Pradera first and then we roll. No objections accepted. Alright! Departure! Let's-a go! Kitaaaaan! Ikuyo~!"
She abandoned the starting point and ran toward the hometown of her heart.
From Malachen, the small town where Lee Han-byul had first respawned, to Pradera—the imperial capital of the Pradera Empire.
Two hours on foot. Then, shamelessly exhausted, an hour hitching a ride on a passing NPC's oxcart, plus another thirty minutes transferring. All told, a three-and-a-half-hour pancake had started frying on the griddle.
At that same hour—
"Hmmm…"
Serin—more precisely, Serina—was also frying a pancake of her own.
She stood inside a branch of the Adventurers' Guild. It was the place where a hero newly descended upon the continent of Galicia first proved their qualifications, and where one could immediately class-change into one of the six foundational classes without any separate quest.
Swordsman. Magician. Archer. Cleric.
Basic class archetypes so familiar to RPG players that they needed no further explanation.
And two new foundational classes revealed at official launch.
Craft—the base class for every lifestyle profession, added because lifestyle content had proven far more popular than expected.
And then—
Not monkey… Fighter. A class built around refusing weapons entirely and fighting solely by reinforcing one's own body.
At this point, one could probably understand why Serina was frying pancakes.
No matter how freely you could change classes, no matter how much proficiency you could build through effort… a person cannot erase all their memories and experience in a single instant. Even amnesia leaves the habits etched into the body.
And so—a class reset function?
Not available right now. And probably not later, either.
Your first class was a tattoo that would stay inked until the day the service shut down.
Which was why Serina had no choice but to fall into deep deliberation.
First, Fighter—the monkey—the martial artist: eliminated.
Sure, the grand ambition of trading one-two punches with a Malayan sun bear bare-fisted and going on to conquer the world was admirable enough. But in Serin's view: Hmm? Why bother? When weapons exist?
She held a firm conviction that humanity had evolved since antiquity specifically to specialize in tool use. The decision was only natural.
Next to be struck from the list was Archer. The reason was nothing complicated…
"This is uncomfortable…"
Why had the Amazons committed the extreme act of cutting away their full bosoms?
…In terms of historical accuracy, the claim that they actually amputated one breast was likely an exaggeration tacked on by later generations. But Serin's physical characteristics were just substantial enough to slightly impede the free movement of her arms.
"Ow?! Ahhnn…"
Lost in thought, she accidentally released the bowstring—and the snap of the string sent a massive jiggle through her chest along with a sharp jolt of pain.
For that reason, Archer was also a pass.
A goddess declaring herself a Cleric felt a little off. Magician looked too much like mindless one-button spam after watching Yoo Seol, so that was out…
In the end, after a few more trials—
"You'll class-change to Swordsman? A very wise choice! The sword is a perfectly solid pick, and down the road you'll be able to reach a level where you can freely wield any weapon you desire!"
Serina ordered the gukbap.
The romance of setting out on an adventure with a single blade. How was anyone supposed to resist that?
And among the sword-related classes, there was one particularly appealing—
"Ugh, my head."
The self-imposed seal on her knowledge cut her train of thought short mid-reach.
Goddess Serin, that most extreme of concept-obsessed roleplayers, had slapped a terrifying restriction onto her alt character: she could not recall any information she had not yet personally experienced or that had not been publicly released.
Of course, if she returned to being Goddess Serin she could remember everything instantly—but the moment she became Adventurer Serina again, it would all vanish. A highly sophisticated seal.
And so every Swordsman-related class build designed by the developers of Team Galicia, along with all the efficiency-maxxing builds Serin herself had daydreamed about with a gleeful heh heh, like this, like that…, was locked away.
The only one standing here was Adventurer Serina.
So she shook off the headache that had surged up, and prepared to set out on a true adventu—
—re, in that very instant.
Whether from a sudden spike in inter-floor noise or not, a noise complaint from the neighbor Asile—relayed through Elisha—landed squarely on Serin's desk.
Serina let out a sigh and glumly sheathed the sword she had drawn with such dramatic flair in front of a slime.
For now…
It was time, once again, to soothe a malicious complainant slash illegal refugee squatter.