The Blade of the Unknown
This video series was a declaration of war.
A war to escape a world that had buried him deep at the bottom of the sea.
The blade of an Unknown.
A gamer existed who could delete the data of game labyrinths.
The rumor spread through the crowd like wildfire.
Gamers who exploited 'bugs' or 'cheats' were nothing new — they had existed in droves since the beginning.
But not a single gamer in history had ever been able to erase a game labyrinth's data.
Public opinion calling the Deep Sea Escape series a hoax had been steady since the beginning, but over the past week, the number of doubters had suddenly surged.
And no wonder — the newly uploaded video contained content so absurd it beggared belief.
The ambush by Linzea Guild. The showdown with Linpel Darius.
Ryu7017 had utterly crushed the Linzea raiders and gone on to defeat Linpel Darius himself.
Beating Linpel alone would have been hard enough to swallow, but the footage showed, in its entirety, the moment both Linpel and the Starlight Spear were deleted.
At that point, the suspicion that it was all 'fake' grew louder by the hour.
Some outlets that specialized in game labyrinth coverage ran articles titled 'The Fraudulent Fool Ryu7017' without doing so much as a proper investigation.
That set off a domino effect, with media outlets across the board racing to publish hit pieces targeting the gamer Ryu7017.
Seizing the moment, self-proclaimed 'experts' crawled out of the woodwork to analyze exactly why Ryu7017 was a fraud.
"Every video Ryu7017 has ever released is nonsense from start to finish. Anyone who believes this garbage is an idiot. For example, his very first upload......"
"This isn't even a bug. It's cheap editing. This weapon came out of a game labyrinth ages ago — it's already been decommissioned. The data of a decommissioned game couldn't possibly still exist."
"Kids could put together better fakes than that these days."
Yggtube creators jumped at the opportunity, flooding the platform with videos on the subject.
The vast majority were nothing but clickbait titles slapped onto content-free hit pieces, churned out for the views.
A few did put in genuine analytical work and offered reasonably in-depth takes, but even they concluded that Ryu7017's videos had to be doctored.
Opinions across the community ran the whole spectrum, but broadly speaking, most agreed on one thing: 'data deletion' was impossible.
With humanity's current technology, no one could interfere with Yggdrasil's data.
And yet, even those who refused to believe in 'data deletion' found themselves troubled by one nagging detail.
If Ryu7017's videos really were nothing but clever fakes, Linzea Guild would have reacted instantly.
All Linpel Darius had to do was show his face in public, and the entire video would be exposed as a lie.
Yet despite the Deep Sea Escape series savagely tearing into Linzea's reputation, the guild maintained a stony silence.
In fact, there were gamer testimonies from people who claimed to have witnessed the clash between Ryu7017 and the raiders firsthand.
They were only a handful, so the evidence was still thin...... but slowly, people began to wonder — what if those videos were real?
What if a gamer truly existed who could 'delete data'?
What if the videos were genuine and Linpel Darius's data really had been erased?
And if every last bit of it was true......
Then a storm was coming.
A colossal storm, big enough to shake the stagnant world of game labyrinths to its core......
"There is no place for you in Linzea anymore."
The life of Linpel Darius — once an ace whose name shook the entire Linzea Guild — had plummeted into the abyss in a single night.
"Brother, please! Give me one more chance! One more chance!"
Linpel clung to Gabriel Darius in a pathetic, undignified heap.
Linpel had always been proud, arrogant, and overflowing with confidence.
But none of that remained now. All that was left was a haggard wreck of a man.
"A chance?"
Gabriel, dressed in his immaculate black suit, looked down at his younger brother with cold eyes.
"You — who defied my orders, acted on your own, and lost your account on top of it all. A chance?"
At the icy voice, Linpel trembled despite himself.
There wasn't even a flicker of familial affection to be found in it.
"I-I'll do better from now on, I swear......!"
"Unfortunate. The rule is one account per person. No matter how you beg, there is no chance for you."
"There has to be a way! Some way to take someone else's account, or......"
Gabriel's gaze grew colder still.
"How utterly ignorant, for someone who has been a gamer for so long. Frankly, it's embarrassing to share blood with you."
"Ugh."
"I will say it once more. One account per person. That is an absolute principle. No scheme on earth can get you a new account."
Linpel knew that as well as anyone.
But surely — surely there was some back door, some loophole?
That was what he had hoped for.
After all, even Unknowns, who should never have been able to obtain accounts under any circumstances, had become gamers before.
"Even if you're no longer a gamer, your past achievements will keep your rank from dropping right away. You'll find a way to make a living."
"Brother!"
"You've saved up money over the years, haven't you? Don't bother me again. I have no time to waste on you."
At Gabriel's glance, two men who had been waiting in the background seized Linpel by the arms.
"Get off me!"
Some sliver of petty pride still remained in him.
Linpel could not tolerate being treated like a joke by these nobodies.
"Linpel, choose. Will you walk out on your own feet, or be dragged out by these men? It's a simple choice. Everyone you've cast out before walked this same road. It's simply your turn now."
"I'm nothing like those pathetic—"
"You are exactly the same."
Gabriel gave his glasses a light touch.
"Fools who had their lives stolen out from under them by someone else."
"......!"
In that moment, looking into Gabriel's eyes, Linpel understood.
He understood that Linpel Darius had already become a worthless nobody to Gabriel — a thing of no value whatsoever.
"You'll receive a severance package. Don't ever set foot in the guild again."
There was truly no place left for Linpel in Linzea.
A week had passed since then.
Linpel drank at bars every single day.
The bar he currently occupied was a high-class establishment so exclusive that a Silver-rank man wouldn't even dream of setting foot inside.
It didn't matter today, but if this went on for a year, two years, his savings would evaporate entirely.
Linpel knew that perfectly well.
"Damn it all."
Knowing it didn't stop him from gulping down expensive liquor, glass after glass.
A warning flashed across his field of vision, urging him to stop drinking, but Linpel ignored it.
Without the alcohol, he simply could not bear to exist.
"My name is Linpel Darius!"
He pulled up his gamer account information.
Various data floated into his view. Normally, his account information would have appeared right alongside it.
But......
"Damn it! DAMN IT!!"
He checked again and again, but the account information simply did not exist.
Every last record — including his entire game labyrinth history — had been wiped away without a trace.
As if to proclaim to the world that Linpel Darius was no longer a gamer.
"You've got to be kidding me!"
Linpel hurled his glass across the room.
Drunk and raging, he threw a tantrum and was promptly thrown out by the bar's security.
To make matters worse, other patrons caught his pathetic display on camera.
It went without saying that footage of Linpel Darius's disgrace would soon be all over the community.
"Would you happen to be Linpel Darius?"
As he sat slumped in an alley after being tossed out, someone spoke to him.
The man looked suspicious at a glance.
He wore a suit that didn't suit him at all and grinned from ear to ear — a smile that practically screamed 'you should be wary of me.'
Hyenas that smelled money were a dime a dozen. Assuming this man was one of them, Linpel tried to brush him off.
"Pardon the intrusion. It seems you could use our assistance. Perhaps you'd care to look at this."
The man produced a single photograph from his breast pocket. The moment Linpel saw it, his eyes went wide.
"7017 doesn't make the slightest effort to hide, you see. An Unknown without even personal data protection — all the easier to track down."
Confirming that Linpel's gaze was glued to the photograph, the man's smile turned all the more sinister.
"Information...... you said?"
Linpel's eyes glinted in the darkness of the alley.
Ever since his fight with Linpel, Ryu Hwi had been in a state of total exhaustion.
The mental and physical strain had been considerable, so for the past week or so he hadn't logged into any game labyrinth at all, lying around like a dead man.
YggON's conversion system automatically healed even physical damage, but it did nothing for the accumulated fatigue of mind and body.
A week.
To a gamer, that was time worth its weight in gold, but rather than scramble into action, Ryu Hwi decided to sit back and observe how things played out.
YggON grumbled as it scrolled through the community's reactions.
It wasn't angry that Ryu Hwi was being branded a fraud — it was angry at the humans who failed to comprehend Delete.
"Well, it was bound to happen."
Ryu Hwi had expected more or less exactly this.
People can't easily accept things that fall outside their common sense.
Which meant, in other words, that Delete had been exactly that shocking.
Fraud or not, though, the name Ryu7017 had spread wider than ever.
Thanks to the third-rate media outlets and Yggtube creators working so diligently to broadcast his name to the world.
The hate comments calling him a con artist kept piling up for now, but one day those people would have no choice but to accept the truth.
The truth that a being existed whose very existence defied their petty common sense.
Ryu Hwi checked the time.
Today, he had an appointment to meet '5555'. The appointed hour wasn't far off.
Lethargy still clung to him, but he couldn't sleep his life away either.
After one more skim through the community boards, Ryu Hwi rose from his bed.
The Entertainment District, for the first time in a week.
Even in broad daylight, the crowds were thick. A street painted in human desire, a hotbed of every kind of illegality — and yet those at the top left it alone.
At YggON's report, Ryu Hwi furrowed his brow.
"I even disguised myself, though......"
YggON's words stung.
The blow landed hard precisely because, on his way out, he had glanced in the mirror and thought, huh, this kinda works on me, doesn't it?
New visual data bloomed in the lower right of Ryu Hwi's view — a perspective seen through YggON's eye.
A familiar group of faces was lurking in the shadows, watching him.
The Black Snake crew.
Do they never get tired of this? Ryu Hwi let out an involuntary sigh.
Paying them any mind was a loss, plain and simple.
He ignored them and kept walking.
Before long, a shop front he'd grown well acquainted with came into view.
Jucheongwang.
5555 would be waiting inside.
What kind of person could they be?
Ryu Hwi carefully pushed open the door of Jucheongwang.
"......?"
Someone was there.
The figure turned toward him as he entered the shop and offered a friendly, welcoming smile.
"Hey there. I'm '5555'."
"You're......?"
At the true identity of '5555', Ryu Hwi's breath caught in his throat.
It was someone he never could have imagined.
No way. The real identity of '5555' was......