Service Termination

"Well, shit. I am thoroughly fucked."

The moment the message surfaced on my screen, a curse came ripping out of me, loud and satisfying. When a quarter of your income goes up in smoke, who could possibly hold it in?

"Kang Guk-young, you insane bastard."

The problem was a new policy the government had just rolled out. A blanket increase in the purchase fees on every resource mined from the Tower and sold through official channels. A sweeping crackdown on the black-market dealers who preyed on low-floor players. ...And since the overwhelming majority of the public considered all of that the right thing to do, not a single voice was raised against it. That was the problem.

Of course, complaints did surface now and then in backwaters like the Domestic Players Minor Gallery—

—but sentiment like that had already become the mainstream.

Then again, low-floor players below the 5th floor earned nobody's sympathy. They didn't even make up thirty percent of the player population, and as a slice of the general public they were a minority too small to bother mentioning. Worse still, the thuggish antics of the early players had dragged public perception of low-floor players down to rock bottom. Expecting the masses to empathize with "a young man who risked his life hunting for six hours and made eighty thousand won" was pure fantasy.

"...A convenience store kid makes more than I do."

Earning 84,900 won for six hours of scrapping with monsters, in an era when minimum wage was 16,830 won an hour. That catastrophic sentence was the reality staring me in the face.

"Then why not just get a part-time job?" If anyone ever asked me that, I was confident I could plant a knife in their gut before they finished the sentence.

Thanks to this useless awakening, I was subject to the Player Secondary Employment Prohibition Act — a law written back in the Tower's early days. Which meant that from here on out, I was doomed to live as "the young man who earns 14,150 won an hour while getting chewed on by goblins."

Only the modifier at the end of that title would ever change. The young man would become middle-aged, and the middle-aged man would grow old.

"...Goddamn it."

Not that every low-floor player was stuck in my situation. Most below the 5th floor fell into one of two camps: freshly awakened, or cowardly far beyond the acceptable threshold. Players who genuinely couldn't climb due to mental or physical conditions actually received government subsidies on top of everything else. Me? I fit neither category. And naturally, there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell of national-level support reaching a freak like me.

"Player information check."

A sigh leaked out of me the instant the status window appeared. An inexplicable block on my growth. That was the reason I was still stranded on the low floors.

It was unjust. A thought I'd chewed on hundreds, thousands of times over the years. If I'd grown at even an ordinary pace like everyone else, I could have escaped the low floors long ago. Clearing the 4th floor over and over with a spec this pathetic had already gotten me flagged as an outright anomaly.

But so what? What was I supposed to do about it? The bare fact that I could still scrape together a living meant not a single soul genuinely pitied me. Not that such pity would have been worth anything in the first place.

"Haah..."

And so, this was the life I lived. The bad news of the day was nothing more than a notification that my existence had gotten a little more grinding. ...My mood was in the gutter.

For me, right now, the only refuge was the world inside this phone screen. I opened the mass-produced gacha game I played every single day — and was greeted by a single notice.

"They're shutting it down?"

Wow.

That was the only sound that left me when I read it.

"Wow. Fucking hell."

The one game I still had, and it was shutting down too? I was so dumbfounded I nearly laughed out loud.

For a long while, I just stared blankly down at the screen.

Service termination. It's a phrase anyone who plays mass-produced mobile games long enough is destined to face eventually — all the more so for a user clinging to a game ranked so far beneath the revenue charts it could vanish any day without anyone noticing.

But reading a typhoon forecast doesn't make you serene when the roof actually tears off your house. When reality finally arrives, all you can do is flounder exactly like this.

"Ah..."

It was real.

Below the notice, they had thoughtfully laid out the schedule to come. End of paid currency sales. One final update. The refund process. And then, exactly two months from now — service termination. Apparently even a dying game needed its funeral rites.

Still, I'd figured it had at least another six months in it. Not that my six-month prediction rested on anything solid. It was still chugging along, after all. They'd kept pushing updates right up until recently, so...

"...My time."

That my lament came out as "my time" instead of "my money" was, for me at least, only natural. Like I had cash to throw at a gacha game when grocery money was already on the line...? While everyone else cosplayed as whales and fought over the rankings on a bottom-shelf gacha game, I'd paid with nothing but hours ground down to dust. And every one of those hours had just turned to foam.

A brief spell of existential whiplash. What came after it was acceptance.

"...Still, I should at least see the end with my own eyes."

Lying on my bed, I tapped the familiar icon. The developer's logo played. The loading screen I'd seen ten thousand times appeared. And out flowed the main theme — the one I'd cursed as tacky a hundred times and never once changed.

"..."

There in the lobby, Seria was smiling, same as always. My first SSR hero. To be precise, my first SSR after eighteen-odd rerolls. The character I'd stubbornly dragged up by the scruff of pure affection — the single most irrational reason there is — while an endless parade of superior powercreep units released one after another.

A character in a game about to shut down doesn't know she's about to die. Of course she doesn't. If she did, the genre would be horror. Even so, watching her wave and smile exactly as she always had left me feeling strange.

"You've only got two months left either, huh."

"Adventure, my ass. The publisher's the one walking out first."

With a hollow laugh, I opened the mailbox first. Inside sat a mountain of currency far too generous to call a "service termination commemoration." Free diamonds. Top-grade summon tickets. Selectors. Enhancement materials. The kind of things they'd have bundled up and sold for cash back in the game's prime. Now they were being handed out by the armful, like a restaurant dumping its ingredients the day before it closes for good. In a game on its way out, everyone becomes rich.

"...Might as well run the gacha, then."

Hoarding it was pointless anyway — in two months, all of it would vanish along with the rest of the data scraps. Without much thought, I entered the summon screen. As it happened, the pickup banner for the final new character was open.

The character's name was ominous from the very first syllable. Releasing "a witch who records the end" right before the service terminated — maybe the dev team was flexing its own sense of humor. In that case, I sincerely hoped they would leave that sense of humor out ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of their next project...

"Whatever. Spend it all."

Ten-pull. Another ten-pull. Miss. Another miss. I burned through my hoarded currency without feeling a thing, and just as I tapped the final ten-pull—

Woooom—

"...?"

The screen froze. The light at the center of the display, right where the gacha animation should have begun, hardened in place, and no matter how many seconds I waited, nothing changed.

"Now even the server's giving out?"

Not even an hour after posting the shutdown notice, and they'd blown up the servers too. I couldn't even fathom how badly these people had wanted the game dead.

That was the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠moment. Just as I was pulling a hollow face—

"...?"

"What is this?"

Had there been an animation like this? I certainly didn't remember seeing anything about a hidden service-termination event on the community boards. But there was something stranger still.

"What ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the fuck is this."

The message was still there after I turned the screen off. On the blackened display, only the pure-white text remained, floating in place.

And now it was floating before my eyes. A message hovering in the air in front of me — not on any screen. That could only mean one thing.

"...Awakening?"

As I lay there staring blankly upward, dumbstruck by the incomprehensible phenomenon—

The messages kept surfacing. Then, at the bottom of my vision, a string of numbers began ticking upward.

The numbers kept climbing even as I sat there with my jaw hanging open. As if hypnotized, I tapped the question mark beside them.

Master-exclusive shop. My eyes snagged on those words. And as luck would have it, the shop icon drifted into view at that very moment.

"Yes."

The messages kept coming, walking me through it step by step like a game tutorial. Entranced, I clicked through the options one after another.

"Nngh—?!"

Heat flooded up my arm. A sensation like something seeping in between the fibers of my muscles washed through me, and startled, I threw a hand out to the side of the bed as I jolted upright.

Krrrk—

"..."

I lowered my head. The spot on the bed frame where I'd braced my hand was caved in.

Even an idiot could work out what that meant.

My second awakening had arrived.