Chapter 1: At First, It Was a Joke.
Chapter 1: At First, It Was a Joke.
At first, it was a joke.
I was completely unsuited for public education.
If you could just dig into the subjects you were good at, that should have been enough, so why did you have to learn every random thing under the sun? I was not interested in most of it in the first place, so none of it ever went in.
Say you were raising a game character. No idiot would spread all their stat points evenly, putting one point into everything.
If you built a character like that, you would just end up with a useless mess that was neither here nor there.
So I could never understand why school forced students to distribute all their stat points evenly across the board.
The stat points a human being could invest were limited too, damn it!
“Hey, Ryu Hyesung! Are you drawing weapons in class again?”
“Puhahaha!”
Maybe it had been too obvious that my mind was somewhere else. The teacher stopped the lesson, glared at me, and snapped.
“You’re a senior in high school now. Shouldn’t you get your act together?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”
In times like this, the fastest way to end the lecture was to lower your head and not argue back.
Pretending to focus on class again, I continued sketching the blueprint for a new “weapon” beneath my notebook.
That was right. The truth was, I was obsessed with weapons.
At first, I designed fantasy-game weapons like swords and axes, imagining how they would evolve from +1 all the way to +99. Setting every little detail one by one, from attack values to changes in appearance to unique traits, was the most fun thing in the world to me.
Then my interest shifted to real-world firearms.
I dug into the ruggedness of the AK rifle and the mechanisms of submachine guns like the M4 and MP5, and later I even branched out into stealth fighters like the F-22 Raptor.
And now I had come back to “game weapons.”
Designing overwhelmingly over-technological weapons that looked like they belonged in an SF game set hundreds of years in the future was an absolute thrill.
“Hey, Hyesung. What did you draw this time?”
My desk mate, Taeju, was the only guy who ever took an interest in this bizarre hobby of mine. Maybe it was because he was such a hardcore gamer, but his eyes always lit up whenever he looked at the blueprints in my notebook.
“A drone defense system.”
“What’s that?”
“Imagine dozens of suicide drones rushing in like maniacs. This is a system that physically blows those swarms apart at a rate of twenty-two per second.”
“Oh, like that Night Crow skill from that game?”
(Translator’s Note: Night Crow — Likely a game reference within the story’s modern gaming context. Because the title also exists as a real-world Korean game released in 2024)
“Something like that. It detects drones in all directions across a full 360 degrees, then fires twenty-two rounds a second to intercept them with precision.”
“How is that even possible?”
Taeju never stopped at shallow reactions. He always dug into the theoretical side of things too.
Whenever he did that, I really felt how well we clicked.
“Four cameras rotate minutely while scanning all directions. The key is that I completely removed the expensive LiDAR and radar sensors.”
“Why remove them?”
“Because I need to keep costs down.”
“You’re just drawing up imaginary concepts anyway, so why are you worrying about production costs too?”
“What do you mean, why? What kind of money does a student have? If I want to make a real one, I have to make it as cheap as possible.”
Because what I wanted was not to leave weapons as fantasy, but to implement them in ‘real’ reality.
“You’re really going to make it?”
“Want me to show you?”
“Hold on, I have cram school…”
Taeju frowned and fell into thought. Grinning, I drove the point home.
“Skip it for one day.”
In the end, Taeju skipped cram school and followed me into our neighborhood.
“Huff, huff… damn. This slope is insane. You really live in a place like this?”
“You get used to it if you go up and down every day.”
To other people, it probably looked like one of those shantytown hillside neighborhoods that might collapse at any moment, but I was satisfied living there in my own way. There were plenty of empty lots with hardly any people around, so there was no better place for running all kinds of experiments.
“Hey, but didn’t you say it was a drone defense system?”
Still panting, Taeju suddenly asked, sounding like something had just occurred to him.
“Yeah.”
“To test that, you’d need drones to use as targets first. Aren’t those crazy expensive?”
“How many years do you think I’ve been doing this? I’ve got eight of them standing by at home.”
“You have eight? Hey, living in a run-down neighborhood like this, where the hell did you get the money to buy expensive drones?”
“I bought broken used computers dirt cheap through Danggeun, repaired them all, and resold them.”
(Translator’s Note: Danggeun Market — A South Korean local secondhand marketplace app. The name is commonly shortened to “Danggeun.” It launched in 2015 and became widely known as a neighborhood-based buy-and-sell platform in Korea.)
“Wow… you really live hard.”
“Really? I thought I was making money on easy mode.”
“That is living hard.”
Taeju stared at me with his mouth hanging open.
I went into the house, grabbed the prototype for my “drone interception turret,” and headed out to the vacant lot.
“Hey, but there’s only one controller. How are you controlling all eight drones?”
“I’m not controlling them. I programmed them all in advance.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Want to see something fun?”
Wiiiiing—!
With a light snap of my fingers, all eight drones on the ground rose into the air at once.
They stopped in midair, maintaining perfectly measured intervals like marks on a ruler.
“If I stretch out my hand like this, they go left.”
Wiiiiing—!
“If I lift it upward, they go up.”
Weeeeeeng—!
“What the hell? How are you doing that?”
“Cool, right? Controlling them one by one with a controller was annoying, so I set them up to move all at once through gesture recognition.”
I spread both arms wide in every direction.
At once, the eight drones scattered like a swarm of bees and began darting through the open lot.
Wiiiiiing—!
Eeeeeeng—!
“Damn, that’s insane! How do they automatically dodge the trees and obstacles?”
“Have you seen Gundam?”
“Of course I have.”
“You know how they’ve got those weapons called funnels?”
“Sure. Those flat things that stick behind the mech, then once the battle starts they zip off on their own and fire beams.”
“I wanted to make that real at least once.”
“You’re seriously nuts. Aren’t you a genius?”
“What genius? I’m just some loser with a third-tier GPA rank.”
“But you get all top marks in math and science!”
“So what? My Korean and English are totally screwed. Quit talking and look at these instead.”
Beep—!
I turned on the power to the interception turret I had placed on the ground.
The machine began moving busily as it checked its own sensors.
Whirr. Clack.
Four cameras swept sharply across all directions, and the model gun barrel spun rapidly up, down, left, and right. Like a living creature, the thing finished all its self-tests and then stood motionless, as if declaring itself ready.
“Whoa, what was that movement just now? It looks like a real robot. That’s cool as hell.”
“I actually coded it to move like that on startup on purpose, just to make it look cool.”
“You went that far? Why?”
“You were just the one who said it looked cool as hell. Robots are all about style.”
Maybe he agreed with me, because he snickered and said,
“Yeah, fair enough. The style is off the charts.”
Tap, tap.
After finishing a few settings on my laptop, I moved into the real demonstration.
“Now watch carefully.”
Clap!
The moment I clapped briskly, the eight drones waiting in midair all dove at us at once.
Weeeeeeng—!
“Ah, shit! Hey, are you sure this is really safe?!”
Taeju, scared out of his mind, instinctively hunched his neck and stumbled backward.
And then it happened.
Pipipipik—!
The barrel of the interception system spat out BB pellets at terrifying speed, almost like it was breathing fire.
Thunk, thud!
Seven of the drones rushing toward me were hit dead on and reeled violently in midair.
Only one slipped out of the interception net.
“One shot barely missed. I’ll have to adjust the trajectory-prediction algorithm later.”
When the demonstration ended, the drones returned to their original positions in neat formation and landed lightly.
“Hey, but your hobby must cost a shit ton of money.”
“Yeah, it does. Honestly, repairing and reselling used computers isn’t enough to cover it anymore.”
The more concrete my weapon concepts became, the more money they demanded. I needed to find some other way to make money.
“So what, then? You going to get a part-time job?”
“I don’t have time for that. I’m thinking of selling a few drones.”
Just designing and developing weapon concepts took an enormous amount of time. I did not want to lose any of it to some part-time job.
“You sure about that? You put a ton of work into them. Won’t it feel like a waste?”
“Well, as long as I keep four of them, it won’t really interfere with interception tests.”
“Hey, if you’re going to sell them, make sure you sell them for a high price.”
“A high price?”
“Yeah. From what I just saw, they move around in a pack and dodge obstacles on their own. If you sell them with that insane control system included, wouldn’t the value shoot way up?”
What he said was tempting. If I bought them cheap, loaded them with my software, and sold them for more, would that not solve my money problem?
“Oh. So your family really is rich, huh? You’ve got some business sense.”
That evening, I listed a cheap drone that had cost me 150,000 won on the used market for 500,000 won.
That was the result of faithfully following Taeju’s advice to hook just one sucker.
“There’s no way anyone would buy something like this used unless they were insane.”
It was not like I needed the money right away anyway, so I figured I would cast the line and wait leisurely.
“Oh, right.”
If I only posted text, no one was going to believe these insane specs. So I casually added a link in the post to the video of the interception demo I had filmed earlier that day.
Filled with a modest sense of anticipation, I went to bed.
Then a few days later, on Friday evening,
Ding-dong.
A notification chimed from the used-market app.
[Has the drone been sold?]
Huh? I had listed something that cost 150,000 won for 500,000 won, and I had actually gotten a bite?
[No. It hasn’t been sold yet.]
I fired back the reply in one second flat.
[Would it be possible to buy just one?]
[Of course.]
I quickly arranged the deal and headed to the designated vacant lot.
But the build of the buyer approaching from afar was no joke.
To my surprise, he was a big, burly foreigner.
“Excuse me… are you perhaps Weapon Doctor?” he asked in awkward Korean.
“Ah, yes. Are you ‘VodkaLike’?”
At my question, the foreigner simply gave a heavy nod without a word. That was one intimidating username.
“You can move it with the basic controller here, but if you press this button, it’ll also follow its owner around automatically…”
Excited, I showed off the over-technological system I had loaded all over it to the fullest.
The foreigner nodded over and over with a serious look, as if he understood everything I was saying, then coolly handed over the money, took the drone, and left.
“Holy shit. I invested 150,000 won and got 500,000 won back, so that’s 350,000 won in pure profit?”
The moment I saw the crisp bills in my hand, I could not stop grinning.
It was a huge sum of money, the kind I could only touch after breaking my back repairing two junk computers.
Wasn’t this basically creative economy? If I sold drones like this, maybe I would not have to worry about money at all.
A few days later.
“Hey, Taeju. Wake Hyesung up. That idiot’s sleeping again.”
“Hey, Ryu Hyesung. The teacher says wake up.”
Taeju’s foot tapped at me under the desk, and my eyes snapped open.
“Huh? Mm… I guess I dozed off.”
“Ryu Hyesung. Are you planning to give up on life the moment you become a senior?”
The teacher’s chilly voice stabbed straight into the top of my head.
I instinctively bowed flat.
“Ah, I’m sorry!”
Bzzz. Bzzz.
Just then, the phone in my pocket vibrated briefly.
I secretly checked the screen. It was a notification from the used-market app.
It was from ‘VodkaLike.’
[Doctor. Have all the drones been sold?]
Huh? It was that big foreign guy who bought a drone a few days ago.
Was he asking for a refund because it had broken?
[No. I still have some left. Do you need another one?]
I ducked beneath the desk and typed a quick reply.
The little 1 disappeared almost immediately, and then another message came in.
[How many are you selling?]
[I can sell three.]
[Don’t you have any more?]
What was with this guy? Just how many was he trying to buy?
He had bought a dirt-cheap drone at an absurdly high price, and now he was demanding more.
Was this actually becoming a business?