The Vampire Steps Out
The tutorial is a stage that informs you of the direction in which the world of Eclipse flows. Though faint, you are not insignificant! I hope you have realized how each of your actions influences Eclipse.
This time as well, you faced several crossroads of choice. Yet you remained calm, recognized your limits, and chose the most stable path. I salute that cold rationality.
But have you not mortgaged the future too heavily? In more ways than one.
The main scenario of Eclipse unfolds thirteen years from now. The world will no longer wait. Countless threats lurk everywhere.
What results will your choices bring? Three days remain until your future is decided.
Access restricted for 3 days.
— Until we meet again.
—
Psht—
The capsule opened with an outdated sound.
The room was dim, as always. Only a single ray of light slipping through the curtains told me it was still daytime.
“Am I insane?”
An anomaly is supposed to seduce or threaten humans and devour them. Yet this one drove me out without even using its power. What a disgrace to its own nature.
After feeding Rebecca dinner and doing a thorough cleaning of the sticky blood clinging to every corner of the house, the thing simply announced [Mission Complete] and kicked me out. I wanted to resist, but it happened in the blink of an eye. How could I not be furious at such negligence? If there were performance reviews in the anomaly industry, this would be more than enough grounds for dismissal.
Ha.
Would Rebecca be all right?
The notification said the main scenario takes place thirteen years later. In other words, there is nothing I can do to intervene. I worry whether the ‘Lee Han’ inside the game will be able to handle the tasks given to him in the meantime. We still have not even held the funeral for the two of them. Rebecca is still so young. There must be so much she needs to learn and so many hardships she will have to overcome. Taking care of someone means shouldering that responsibility entirely. I cannot bring myself to believe I can properly look after that wounded child whose heart has collapsed.
Rustle—
I tossed the snack bag that had caught on my foot into the trash. Looking around, I saw dust quietly piling up in this cramped room. A cold, shabby, lonely reality. The sense of disconnect I had not felt in a long time left me feeling gloomy.
Memories rise. Rebecca in pretty clothes with cotton candy in her mouth. Tom and Susan smiling brightly at her. Those smiles had been directed at me as well. Even though their deaths and Rebecca’s hair turning white had torn my heart apart. Unlike my own life, where only colorless light and stale dust accumulate, a place where one can dream of tomorrow. A place that affirms my existence. A place where I can exist purely as myself, not as a stranger. The virtual world created by a filthy anomaly. Eclipse.
Crack.
The bathroom door handle broke when I tried to open it to wash my face with cold water. Ah, my mistake. The face of my beloved bulldog doll—Gaesik—now clutched in my left hand was crumpled to its limit.
…Sorry, Gaesik. But in the bulldog industry, a crumpled face counts as a charming point, so please forgive me.
Whoosh—
The water in this chilly winter, with the boiler not running, should have been cold enough to sting my hands. Yet I felt no chill against my face. Right. I am not the boy Lee Han from Eclipse, but the pathetic vampire Lee Han of Earth.
“Haha.”
Still, they say the mind follows action. The lingering traces of my human days, when I spent those long years chasing the remnants of sensation. Even though I felt no cold, this conscious act of trying to clear my head neatly organized my murky thoughts.
What does it matter anyway? There is nothing I can do right now. As I came out drying my face with a towel, my gaze landed on the computer.
“Puhaha.”
A hopeless game addict. I had acted as if I logged in to protest the anomaly’s provocation and hunt it down, but in truth my heart had simply been drawn to the fact that it was just another game. I am nothing more than an escapist who rushes toward anything that is not reality. I need something that will strongly addict me and marinate me in comfortable laziness.
So.
Whirr—
I pressed the computer’s power button firmly. As always, let’s just play a game.
—
“Aaaaargh! This goddamn game!!!”
The game I am playing is Legend of League. It is the game I have been playing most seriously for nearly ten years. I had been only one win away from the honorable title of ‘Challenger,’ given to users ranked within the top 1000—a rank I had never once reached…!
While trying to soothe my frustration, chat messages from my teammates began to appear one by one.
…?
Are you kidding me?
Why are these people so interested in me? If I say I’m not jobless, they should just accept it. Ah, maybe I should just ignore them. But unfortunately, my finger muscles, soaked in the savagery of the internet, did not obey reason’s command.
Why are you butting in? You didn’t do well either!
…What HR? That’s obviously just a bluff to pressure me. Right, this is like bluffing in poker. If you’re scared, just die already—leave it to fate.
Of course, I was the one who was scared. Maybe poker isn’t for me.
I’m screwed…
After the sudden spam, I left the chat one by one, my cooled anger left behind. The sight of my fallen game character only deepened the bitterness.
But what does it matter? As they said, time is infinite. If I had to pick the most worthless thing I possess, it would be time. And the gentlest way to handle this suffocating flood of time is…
Find Match
Dum dum.
It’s a game.
Ding!
Once called the national game, it has lost its popularity, so it will probably take a long time for a match to be found. So I might as well watch a few VTube videos to kill time. The recently uploaded video…
“December 29th?”
Ding!
A strange thought occurred to me, so I checked my viewing history. The date I watched the video that had been uploaded on the day I entered Eclipse…
“December 19th.”
Ding!
I had clearly spent three months there, yet only ten days had passed in reality. No wonder. I should have noticed from the fact that it was still winter weather.
Ding!
Ah, this persistent bastard who can’t play!
Friend Request
GondyuCarry Y/N
This is the guy I keep running into whenever I play. His skill is nowhere near satisfying. I can understand wanting to ride the bus, but I have no desire to play with him, yet he keeps sending requests persistently. Maybe I should give him a sharp reply.
Y.
The moment I accepted, the private chat window in the corner of the screen began blinking.
What is he saying out of nowhere?
Of course…
Is this guy an idiot? He actually believes this.
—
Hair neatly combed back. A tidy shirt and a stylish coat. Finally, the watch I bought thirty years ago—the so-called “looks expensive” one. Snowflakes that had begun to fall lightly on the winter night gradually settled on my shoulders.
What kind of suffering is this? Right now I should be in a warm room taking great strides toward Grandmaster. I tightened my coat against the winter wind.
GondyuCarry—that is, Jung Ji-soo—says she is trapped in her own room. Not metaphorically, but a full-blown anomaly where the door has vanished and the windows will not open! She sent a rescue request through the only working computer, but because she had no identity, no one took her seriously, so she ended up asking me for help.
…I wanted to refuse if possible, but when she threatened to intentionally troll and snipe me in future games, I had no choice. Still, since she expects something from the Hyeonhwi name, I could not show up looking shabby. Hoping the musty smell of the coat that had been left unused for a long time would fade, I looked around.
Noryangjin, Seoul. Though not a heavily trafficked path, there is a sinkhole in a relatively open area. Beyond the barricade set up to keep people away, the entrance to a pitch-black abyss gapes open.
…So your last memory is falling in here?
“Seriously! Officer! How many days has it been already! We need to do business too! Blocking people from approaching is not the solution!”
“For safety reasons, you must not approach until an official document is issued. It’s dangerous.”
“Aigoo~. At this rate I’m going to die! Anyway, you officers are all watching, so as long as I don’t cross the barricade it should be fine, right?”
“Toxic substances might be released…”
In the alley where the auntie and the police officer were arguing, I flexed my fingers. Tsk… It’s been a while, hope nothing’s wrong. The target is… well, way past the barricade. Right in front of the sinkhole. I gently close my eyes. A sensation as if my body is shattering into pieces. It does not hurt, but feels as though I am disappearing somewhere. Feeling that chaotic sensation slowly reorganize, I open my eyes.
Kya! This is it. My last remaining authority—teleportation. With this, going down should be fine, right? Looking at the bottomless hole before me, I take one step. Then another, as if there were a foothold. Unfortunately, there was no real foothold, so I fell with a whoosh—. In the endless fall, in the darkness where I could not tell if my eyes were closed or open, once I grew accustomed to the sensation of falling and it began to feel ordinary, I opened my eyes inside someone’s narrow room. It would have been an ordinary, dull one-room apartment, the kind that is neither fresh nor elegant, if not for the grotesque maw of a monster lined with hideous teeth where the door should have been.
“Hic, hic. Oh my god. You… are you that… person?”
A woman with short hair. With dark circles under her eyes from exhaustion, she stared at me with wide eyes behind her glasses.
“Ta-da! Not a jobless bum, right?”
“Ah…”
Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes. Unable to hold back the tears that quickly filled and fell against gravity, I could not hide my bewilderment.
“Hey, hey. Why are you crying? There’s no need to cry over this.”
“Try being trapped where you can’t meet anyone for almost six weeks. See if tears come out when you see a person or not.”
“Six weeks without leaving the house was fine, wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t forced confinement! And you said you weren’t a jobless bum, yet when did you ever try that?”
If I were the kind of playboy who pretends to be sweet, I would have hugged her under the pretext of comforting her. Ahem, but as you can see, I am a gentleman. Maintaining an ambiguous distance from the sniffling woman, I spoke.
“Um… So your name was…”
“Jung Ji-soo. I already told you.”
“Sorry, I don’t remember trivial things.”
She looked at me with wide eyes, then let out a small laugh.
“But you… you look more normal than I expected? Not gloomy at all?”
“You said you believed I wasn’t a jobless bum! What did you think I was?”
“That was just in case, since there was nothing to lose. Honestly, I didn’t really believe it. Even if I had believed it, it would be hard to think highly of someone who plays games all day, wouldn’t it?”
“I really shouldn’t have come.”
“Ha… haha, no. You’re more handsome than I thought, that’s all. So your name is… Lee Han? Is your nickname the same?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, Lee Han. Thank you. Shall we get out of this disgusting room first?”
Ji-soo approached hesitantly and carefully made her request. Huh, but wait. I closed my eyes once more and flexed my fingers. Teleportation… doesn’t seem to be working. It does not work even for me alone, so there is no way it would work while bringing this woman along.
“It seems I’m trapped too.”
“What?”
“I came with a way out in mind, but it’s not working.”
All I could see was Ji-soo, her face turning pale as she collapsed to the floor.