The Tutorial Exit Is Strange

As of today, it had been a full week since that sentence first appeared floating in front of my eyes.

At first I thought I was losing my mind. Hallucinations, maybe. I figured the right pills would make it go away, so I hunted down some anti-inflammatories and painkillers and swallowed them.

The next day, the sentence was still hovering there, perfectly intact. I went to an eye doctor. No problems found. I went to an internist. Then a surgeon. The doctors in their white coats all shook their heads. Perfectly normal, they said.

I went to the dentist, who got annoyed and asked why I'd even come. I got a scaling done while I was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠there anyway.

I'm sorry, Doctor. It's just that I really didn't want to admit I might be mentally ill.

I went to an optician. New glasses changed nothing. And then, at the very, very end of the line, I dragged myself to the one place I truly didn't want to go: a psychiatric clinic.

"So you believe you're seeing this text, is that right? Anything been stressing you out lately? Hmm… For now, it looks like depression brought on by stress you weren't even aware of. I'll write you a prescription—come back in a week."

Same as always: cause unknown. The best they could offer was a guess that excessive stress might be to blame.

No matter how I turned it over in my head, there was no reason for me to lose it. I worked hard at my job, met up with friends regularly for drinks. Wasn't that a perfectly healthy life by Korean standards?

Just as I was about to set the prescribed pills in my palm, I slowly made up my mind.

"Maybe this is real."

Maybe tapping that 'Yes' button in front of me would actually start the tutorial.

Instead of swallowing the pills, I decided to press the button. The instant the thought of pressing it crossed my mind—before my finger had even made contact—it was pressed.

"Wha—wait, hold on…!"

Fwoosh.

The light of the world smeared and spread, and a moment later I found myself standing in a pure white room.

"It—it was real."

I'd read my fair share of web novels. This tutorial business was a classic cliché—the opening mission that shows up constantly in hunter stories and tower-climbing stories. A ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠place where they hand you the chance to practice in advance, as a courtesy, before your destined life of beating back monsters begins.

I looked around, and there in the distance a row of weapons stood on display, each one floating weightlessly in the air by some unseen force.

Starting from the left sat a familiar black weapon.

The standard-issue service rifle of the Korean military.

"Huh?"

Beside it was an old American military service rifle too—one of those antique things I'd first laid eyes on during reserve forces training. Then a wooden-stocked bolt-action piece, all the way up to the Soviet bestseller that had been sold across the globe. And a silver revolver straight out of a cowboy movie…

"Guns? After all this—guns?"

Something about it ticked me off. This was supposed to be a tutorial, right? I'd be fighting monsters. And they were offering me a gun?

If I was going to shoot a gun, why would I need a tutorial like this in the first place? Skip the tutorial and just send me to boot camp.

Disinterested, I flicked my hand sideways, and the armory display spun away like a scroll being scrolled.

As I moved down the line, the guns kept getting bigger. An unmarked sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, a flamethrower.

And then, at the very end of the very end, I finally found it.

A straight-bladed Western sword with both edges honed sharp. Its grip and blade were both a touch too short to call it a longsword, but that just-right length made it look easy to handle one-handed or two.

"A sword. I'll go with this one."

A spear and a blunt weapon appeared behind it, but I snatched up the sword without hesitation. Forget the guns—this was a tutorial.

In most of these stories, the sword is the strongest. And tutorials are a well-worn cliché. If a miracle like this had actually happened, then the events to come were bound to unfold like a cliché too—and the sword would be the strongest, just like in the clichés.

As always, whether you're dealing with the world or answering test questions, you have to think about the intent of the person setting the exam. Especially for a Korean man, the fact that the most familiar weapon—a gun—was placed front and center felt deeply significant. Arranged so that anyone could pick whatever they wanted. So that whoever picked would become 'average.'

I was experiencing the miracle of a tutorial entrance, and I was supposed to settle for average? No way. If you're going to do it, be the protagonist. What's life for, anyway?

"Whoever you are, you planted a trap at the front. Nice try—I'm not falling for it."

Five, four, three…

Fwoosh.

The white room vanished, and a forest stretched out before my eyes.

"Gob?"

A short, squat monster appeared: a goblin. Lumpy green skin, pointed ears, a small frame. Just as predicted. It was sticking faithfully to the clichés.

I raised the sword. If I charged in like this and cut it down in a single blow…

Click.

"Huh?"

A sound I should not have been hearing reached my ears. The sound of interlocking metal parts moving.

The source was the object clutched in the goblin's hand, and the moment I saw it, my heart froze over cold.

"Why are YOU holding a gun?"

"Gooob!"

It was a gun of unknown make. It looked like a short pipe, thick enough to fit five human fingers inside, lashed down with crisscrossed cords to a wooden handle.

How would it even fire? It resembled a matchlock, and while it clearly had a trigger, I couldn't see anything inside that would ignite a round. At the very least there should have been a burning slow match—there wasn't even that.

It was a crude thing with a lumpy silhouette you couldn't parse at a glance. Squint, and it looked like a toy gun.

That was the end of my analysis. I whipped my body around and started running—for cover.

Behind me, a gun report rang out like a birthday firecracker.

BANG!

"Gwah—agh!"

Letting out a strangled yelp, I threw myself behind a tree trunk. By some mercy, the shot hadn't hit me.

I poked just my head out to look, and the thing was busy stuffing this and that down its pipe. So it was one of those old muzzle-loaders, apparently.

'Insane. This is insane! I'm the one who got played!'

Come to think of it, maybe that white-room armory never had any intention of deceiving anyone in the first place. Maybe the guns were just placed up front to let you choose with an easy mind—the firearms humanity had used most throughout its history, or the ones most familiar to you personally.

'Whatever. Survive first. Panic later.'

I counted in my head. It would take the thing a whole fifty seconds to reload. Small mercies.

So one shot and the monster would be helpless for a long stretch of time—good news, that. I examined the sword I'd grabbed from the tutorial display, sizing up my opponent.

The edge had been honed to a keen blue-tinged sharpness. When I pressed a fingertip lightly against the blade, I felt the menace of a razor. It looked like it could cut through something just by dropping it and letting gravity do the work—the condition of the edge was superb.

Even a complete beginner could slice a runty goblin like that in one stroke.

In that case—time to make it waste its next shot.

Resolved, I dashed out.

The goblin pulled the trigger as if it had been waiting for exactly that. After less than a second of dead silence, a thunderous blast erupted from the pipe's mouth.

This time I didn't duck back into cover. I rolled across the ground like I was sliding into base.

The calculated gamble-roll, body bruising be damned!

The goblin had to aim for someone comparatively taller than itself, so my thinking was simple: drop low like this, and its bullet would sail off into the sky.

Just as expected, the prediction hit the mark.

I sprang back to my feet. The goblin started fussing frantically, stuffing this and that into its pipe's mouth again.

"Gob, gob, gobb!"

Inside fifty seconds, I could close that distance.

I broke into a full sprint. As the sword-wielding me came bearing down on it, the goblin's hands grew desperate. Trembling, it spilled something dark onto the ground. Gunpowder, by the look of it.

"Gob! Gobobb!"

The goblin raised its head, then dropped it, glancing ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠back and forth between the gun in its hands and me charging at it.

At last it gave up on reloading. It hurled the pipe aside and started fumbling at its waist.

But it was already too late. My sword was falling toward the goblin's head.

'Got it!'

The goblin belatedly whipped out a dagger, but nothing could stop the blade once it had bitten in from the shoulder.

'…Huh?'

There was no sensation at all coming through my hand. Was the sword simply that sharp?

The goblin scrabbled and thrashed along the ground. The bleeding was heavy—red spread across the floor. Before long it seemed to breathe its last: its thin arms and legs shivered once, and then it went still.

The goblin's corpse scattered into powder and drifted away.

The goblin's belongings lay strewn across the ground. I poked through them with the tip of my blade and the matchlock snapped clean in half. Three large beads—bullets, apparently—rolled out onto the floor.

The moment I picked them up, an information window popped up.

Well, they could be recycled, at least, so I pocketed them.

Oh—a skill called Swordsmanship. I could feel strength flowing into the hand gripping the sword.

Five, four, three…

Fwoosh.

Just as on the way in, the location changed in the blink of an eye.

It was a room I'd never seen before—and one that showed every sign of being occupied mere moments ago.

A rumpled comforter on an unmade bed. Jeans and a shirt sprawled across the floor. A half-finished bowl of ramyeon sitting on a low table. And was that a vanity? A woman's room, then?

Something felt off. I pulled a phone out of my pants pocket—and a phone I'd never seen before popped out. My own phone screen had been perfectly fine, but this one was cracked in a thick spiderweb across the whole face. An unfamiliar model, too.

"What the—? Where's my phone? Whose is this?"

Then it dawned on me to look at myself.

A man standing blankly in a young woman's studio apartment, a sword in one hand and a phone in the other.

If the owner of this room walked in, wouldn't this be exactly the kind of thing that got you arrested?

As I stood there awkwardly, the phone screen lit up. Fingerprint authentication, apparently.

"This is… mine? No way it is…."

The phone unlocked, and a menu spread out that felt both familiar and not. Phone, text messages, internet, a banking app, a shopping app…

Except the icons were similar to the ones I knew, yet unlike anything I'd ever seen.

For starters, I tapped the gallery. It was clearly someone else's phone, yet my fingerprint had unlocked it—that alone was strange.

Maybe there'd be a photo of the original owner's face in here?

"Wh—what is this?!"

A photo saved in the gallery.

It was my own face—light makeup on the eyes and lips, both eyes rolled upward. And drenched in filters, at that.

Horrifying!