Chapter 186
Translator: Vine
Chapter: 186
Chapter Title: Release - Hellic 2 Remake (2)
It was all because of the alcohol.
Naturally, Ji-hyeon soon forgot she had even started a stream.
Of course, if she had known, she wouldn't have been in her pajamas, nor would she be chugging soju straight from the bottle on her table.
*Swoooosh—*
Having forgotten everything else, the sight before Ji-hyeon's eyes was a beach, both familiar and strange.
The waves rolled in and out.
Seeing the scene again with upgraded graphics, one thing had changed.
“Oh, footprints.”
The footprints being erased by the waves belonged to a child.
It stirred a strange emotion in her, but Ji-hyeon couldn't yet identify what it was.
She simply started the game.
Then, the camera angle shifted.
A butterfly fluttered in.
From the beach up into the sky, toward an island towering somewhere above.
Ji-hyeon's eyes followed the butterfly.
A change in angle, not a screen transition.
It was a technique that provided seamless immersion right from the start, but it wasn't surprising.
After all, Ji-hyeon was already too captivated by her reunion with the girl who had made her heart flutter back then to care about the intricacies of the technique.
Before long, the butterfly reached the girl.
Alice, sleeping soundly, looked like a fairy.
To be more precise, she looked like the last survivor of a fallen fairy kingdom.
Presently, Alice opened her eyes.
The butterfly landed on her fingertip and spoke in a playful, warm voice.
[Hello, I'm a butterfly.]
For some reason, her heart stirred.
It wasn't just because she knew their story, their true identities, and their ending.
***
The girl met the butterfly.
The two made their way through a dark, arid forest.
Ji-hyeon did so with practiced ease.
It wasn't that there were no new systems.
Nor was it that nothing had changed.
Yet, it was possible for one reason: the core system hadn't strayed from the *Hellic 2* she had played to death.
As her concentration on the game soared, something else soared with it.
“I was doing so well back then.”
Her memories of her past self.
A mumble that sounded like a sigh.
Of course, if she had been mindful of the stream, she wouldn't have said such a thing.
Having lived as a celebrity for so long, she had been educated—practically brainwashed—on how to craft her media image.
In other words, the alcohol was the problem.
“What was I doing back then…”
It was an unavoidable human habit to face fragments of the past and dwell on the self of that era.
A long life as a recluse makes one prone to talking to oneself.
Ji-hyeon's lips twitched before she finally spoke.
“…Ah, our second album was released.”
In her second year after debuting, at the most brilliant moment of her life, she had met the girl.
Back then, Ji-hyeon feared nothing.
Because the world was at her feet.
If she smiled while walking down the street, it was photographed and made headlines.
If she yawned in her car, it was photographed and made people's hearts flutter.
On stage, she was an idol who drove people wild; on variety shows, she was the nation's little sister everyone wanted to protect.
During that incredible time, Ji-hyeon met Alice.
“I cut back on sleep to play. Yeah, that's what I did.”
The schedule of a top idol is grueling.
*Hellic 2* was even released during the third week of their comeback promotions.
She had no time to rest; even six hours of sleep a day was a lot.
Nevertheless, Ji-hyeon split even those six hours to see Alice's story.
Her mindset was that she could just sleep in the car.
“Se-jin always scolded me. She said I'd be a burden to the team if I collapsed. That I lacked professionalism. But what could I do? It was fun. It was so damn fun I couldn't stop.”
Recalling the memory, she remembered Se-jin's expression at that moment and smiled.
“When I got a nosebleed in my sleep, Se-jin cried.”
Now she's called the Ballad Queen, but Se-jin was young back then, too.
Just twenty-one, an age where one is barely getting used to college, she was just a girl pretending to be mature while shouldering the weight of being the leader.
“Thinking about it now, I feel bad, but if I went back, I think I'd do it all over again.”
She had always been interested in games.
Hiding behind a mask in online communities and swearing in ways she never could normally—there was no feeling of liberation quite like it.
That must have been why.
Why she, who had never been so fanatically obsessed with games, became more and more crazy about them as the years went by.
“I remember that. When I saw the *Hellic 2* ending for the first time, I was bawling my eyes out alone at dawn. Se-jin woke up startled, and when she saw me crying over a game, she… she started crying with me, looking like she was heartbroken. Hwa-rin just kept sleeping. And that Kang Hyo-seong, when she heard about it in the morning, she was the only one thrilled, laughing her head off. She's a total sociopath, I tell you.”
She had met a good team that understood such things.
She had, and she thought that was nice.
“They banned me from gaming. They even cut my computer cable. So I secretly bought a few more and played every night.”
She talked to herself like that.
Not knowing who she was talking to, or why she was telling these stories.
“Ah, it was fun.”
She licked her lips.
Meanwhile, Alice entered the first chapter, the Hell of Heretics.
In the middle of a completely serene world, somewhere within it, Ji-hyeon remembered the first time she had encountered this place.
“I remember playing the demo before our second album came out.”
Looking back, that was when she truly fell in love with the *Hellic* series.
“I got major goosebumps seeing this back then.”
The people standing in a landscape that looked for all the world like heaven were anything but.
The graphics were clearly nothing more than clay lumps, but perhaps because of that, the heretics bowing their heads before a silently staring god were all the more unsettling.
“Ah, with the quality upgrade, it's even creepier.”
Grinning, Ji-hyeon ventured through the map.
[Now, you have to avoid those heretics. Can't avoid them? Then you'll have to fight!]
She listened to the butterfly's advice.
The little girl, wielding the butterfly that had transformed into a weapon, began to swiftly strike down the heretics.
All the while, Ji-hyeon continued to mutter to herself.
“For our third album, the *Hellic* series was popular on console, wasn't it? Yeah, I think so.”
Adventuring through hell,
“I spent money to play it again on console and got scolded by Se-jin again.”
adventuring through memories.
“I memorized the game's dialogue so well I'd forget my own lyrics.”
Like that, she laughed and cried while retracing her past.
Ji-hyeon felt a strange sense of déjà vu.
Alice's adventure was clearly moving forward.
But the further the girl advanced, the more she herself retreated into her memories.
As if to say the two couldn't advance at the same time, Alice pushed Ji-hyeon back a little with every step.
She didn't dislike it.
Drunk and tipsy, wandering through her memories was quite a pleasant experience.
“This is nice.”
After walking a slow downhill path for a long time to get here.
And yet, because the girl had reappeared looking exactly the same as back then, she could forget her current sadness.
The unchanging thing shielded her eyes from all that had changed.
Soon, it was Chapter 3.
Her eyes stung a little.
She turned her head and saw it was morning.
Only then did Ji-hyeon realize she hadn't drawn the curtains.
“…Oh, I should sleep.”
As she said that, Ji-hyeon's head lolled to the side.
Her eyes, with only the whites showing beneath half-open lids, her mouth agape and drooling, the game pad clutched dearly in her arms, and her curled-up posture.
And so, Ji-hyeon fell asleep.
Thus, she never saw it.
[Viewers: 10,234]
[Bukbuk: This is freaking legendary lolololol]
[Hansu: Is Malgeumi sleeping…?]
[Yeongrongman: Jini is hilarious lolololol]
[HellicIsMyWife: Think I'll get top post if I dig up Malgeumi's old forum quotes?]
[ㅇㅇ: What a stream… an absolute masterpiece from start to finish….]
[One Hit Lover has donated 10,000 won!]
[One Hit Lover: Jini!!!!!! Please turn off the stream and go to sleep!!!!!!!!]
The fact that her drunken mumblings and her passing out like that had been witnessed live by 10,000 people, with a total of 25,000 viewers.
***
*Diring! Diring! Diring!*
What woke Ji-hyeon was an early morning alarm.
Of course, that's if you could call 1 PM "early morning," but for a hikikomori, any time the sun is up is early morning, so it wasn't exactly wrong.
In any case, since Ji-hyeon had fallen asleep curled up uncomfortably in her chair, waking up wasn't too difficult.
Of course, the time it took to grasp the situation was another matter.
*Diring! Diring! Diring!*
The alarm, still ringing incessantly.
[The stream has been forcibly terminated.]
The streaming software that was somehow open, and the notification floating above it.
Blinking her eyes slowly, Ji-hyeon began to piece together the whole situation in her brain.
And then,
“…Huh?”
she let out a dazed sound, her face turning deathly pale.
“You crazy…!”
A curse couldn't help but escape her lips.
As the events of last night began to return one by one, what welled up was shame, which was then covered by a giant curtain of anxiety and fear.
Did I really start a stream?
I played a game on stream?
While reminiscing and complaining about my idol days?
How many viewers were there?
Did I check? No, I couldn't have.
What about the media?
Her hands were trembling.
A wave of self-loathing washed over her, paralyzing her thoughts, and Ji-hyeon gasped for breath as her breathing became ragged.
‘I have to sort this out. Damage control…’
She hastily checked the records; there were 10,000 live viewers at the end.
In other words, she had captured the full attention of the citizens of the digital world who stayed up on a weekday night to watch her stream.
From the donation history, she could infer that she had held nothing back when talking about her idol days.
[One Hit Lover has donated 1,000 won!]
[Whoa is this real? The real Jini Jini???]
[Hansu has donated 1,000 won!]
[Is that you, Malgeumi…?]
[HellicIsMyWife has donated 5,000 won!]
[Malgeumi was an idol…?]
This was a disaster of epic proportions.
The real disaster was that this streaming account was the same one she had created for her community activities.
In other words, the whole world now knew that Jini of Won Hit Girl was the person behind all the posts she had written online since her active days.
‘Damage control…’
Seems impossible, doesn't it?
Just as she had that thought.
*Trrrrring!!!*
Her smartphone rang.
It was Hyo-seong.
Ji-hyeon answered with a trembling hand, and a roar immediately came from the other end.
-YOU CRAZY BIIIIIIITCH!!!!!
It was a cry louder than a rooster crowing at dawn.
***
At the same time, at the Rewind headquarters.
It was the president's office, which Yeon-ho visited for just four hours one day a week to handle paperwork.
Yang Gil-sang scratched his bald head and said to Yeon-ho.
“President.”
“Yes?”
“The *Hellic 2* viral marketing was a huge success, sir.”
“???”
Without a word, Yang Gil-sang pulled up an online news page.
The headlines plastered across the front page made Yeon-ho's head spin.
[Won Hit Girl's Jini Takes the Industry by Storm with Chaotic Online Game Stream.]
[Won Hit Girl's Behind-the-Scenes Story, Ballad Queen Se-jin: "I Was a Bit Sensitive and Cried Often Back Then".]
[Actress Kang Hyo-seong Dismisses Controversy on Social Media: 'I'm Not a Sociopath'.]
[What is *Hellic*, the Game That Drove Even Jini Wild?]
[*Hellic 2 Remake* Hits #1 on Steam Sales Charts Just 3 Days After Release with Explosive Sales.]
[Rewind Does It Again.]
[GOTY Hunter Cheon Yeon-ho. Who Is He?]
Yeon-ho tilted his head in confusion.