I've Been Caught
For five days straight I stayed logged into Icarus, rolling nothing but Cubes, until I reached that fabled state of perfect oneness where I could no longer tell whether the Cube was me or I was the Cube.
"It popped!"
Was this what tens of thousands of Cube rolls had bought me? Thankfully, the grind ended in a happy ending. Day and night for five days I had done nothing but cube, and all that effort finally paid off when I locked in a perfect potential of 36 percent.
The money that went into it was beyond counting. On top of that, I even broke out Miracle Cubes—the ones used for so-called bottom potential—and successfully finished the perfect lines that only those cubes could roll.
I could say it without hesitation: an item now existed that was one of a kind on the entire server. I stared at the dazzling piece with eyes that sparkled right back, caught in the illusion that it was glowing with a crystalline light.
I made up my mind to enhance it only to +22, where the success rate still sat in the thirties. From +23 on, the odds fell off a cliff, and a single failure meant the equipment went boom and was gone. I'd get to that later, if I ever had time to spare.
The chat was on fire. There weren't even thirty people watching, but the old me had once shut a stream down without ever scraping together five. Set against those days, the crowd I had now was a tremendous leap forward.
Still, this was only the beginning. I would have to repeat the whole ordeal dozens of times yet. I drew a deep breath and stretched where I sat. It was a game I loved, and the hope that I could become a ranker thrilled me more than anything else.
"Hmm..."
I hammered at the keyboard.
Maybe it was because I'd typed so fast. A typo had slipped in. It was absolutely not because my Korean was shoddy.
If I was going to stream properly, a cam and a microphone were essential. Internet broadcasts lived on two-way communication between the viewers and the host. The gameplay unfolded in real time, so what mattered was how the host reacted to it in the moment.
I ended the broadcast and climbed down from the chair. There was something I needed to say to Bora. I had to ask her to buy me a cam and a mic, and if the plea came from me—and it was desperate enough—I was sure she would hear me out.
I ran to the office. Bora was in there alone; Baldy and Haru were nowhere to be seen. I crept quietly toward the seat beside her. I couldn't tell what she was working on, only that she was sunk so deep in it she had no attention to spare for me. Once I got close enough, she seemed to sense me there and turned her head my way.
"Hm...? Hana, what's wrong?"
I hemmed and hawed, pressing my index fingers together. It felt like I was about to make an unreasonable request, and I was nervous for no good reason.
"Bora."
"Yeah?"
"There's something I want..."
"Oh? Did new Rumi merch come out?"
She had the wrong idea. She thought I was trying to buy goods from Little Magician Rumi. New merch wasn't out until next month, so there was no need to buy any now...
"No! Bora, could you buy me a cam and a mic?"
I could have just ordered them online, of course. But whenever a package arrived, Bora was always the first to take it and look it over, so I had to get permission ahead of time.
"A cam and a mic? Why do you suddenly need those, Hana?"
From her point of view, she must have been bracing for a request that had something to do with Little Magician Rumi. Instead I'd asked out of nowhere for a cam and a microphone, and she sounded flustered.
"I want to do internet streaming, so I need a cam and a mic..."
"Internet streaming?"
Her eyes went wide. It was the face of someone who had just heard something she never saw coming.
She rose slowly from her chair, gathered me up into her arms, and spoke.
"You suddenly want to stream. What do you mean, Hana?"
She looked straight into my eyes, as if telling me to answer right now. That gaze was too much, so I dropped mine and said,
"I've wanted to for a long time..."
"Is this really something you want, Hana? Nobody's threatening you, are they?"
"Yeah! It's something I want to do."
Somehow, this seemed to be going better than I'd expected. I'd thought Bora would be prejudiced against internet streaming, but lately she gave me almost anything I asked for.
"Then let's agree to use only the mic for now. The cam can wait. I'm a little uncomfortable with you showing your face."
"Can't we do it like when we filmed that YouTube video before?"
"There were circumstances back then... All of your videos have been taken down now, remember?"
She had a point. Ever since my ID had shown up, Bora herself had never filmed a single video.
Even so, permission for a microphone was worth something. I might not have been allowed either one. Having a firm yes from her left me in a good mood.
I squirmed and struggled to get free of her arms, but she didn't let me go so easily. She pressed her nose to the crown of my head and drew a long, deep breath—a thoroughly perverted little stunt—and I screamed.
I passed the good news on to the viewers.
The reaction was immediate.
A few of them were gasping over my flashy piece of equipment: the cape.
In a sense, I was confident enough to swear this cape was the only one of its kind on the whole server.
I equipped it and smiled as I watched the stats climb. Even so, I had only just taken the first step.
From everything I'd already been through, I knew that rolling perfect potential was exhausting beyond belief, so I decided to settle for decent options for the time being.
Money I had in abundance. Time, I did not. Turning a single cape slot into perfect potential had cost me five days of nothing but Cubes. A handful of people said that finishing in five days was lucky in itself. But even I, who had assumed my time was unlimited, had run into a wall.
Next year, I would have to start elementary school. If I wanted every piece of gear at perfect potential, I could cube from this moment until the day I enrolled and still not have enough time.
So I compromised with reality, up to a point. Even so, the need to keep rolling Cubes was plain as day, and I readied my card without hesitation. Set right beside the monitor, my phone kept chiming, one payment alert after another.
"Ms. Bora, some mail came in at the company. It's addressed in Hana's name, so I brought it over."
"Ah, that should be the statement for Hana's debit card. I had one made in her name."
"Oh, really? I'll leave it here on the desk."
"Yes, thank you for bringing it."
An employee who worked in the building delivered the mail to Bora in person and left. Seeing that something had arrived, she turned her attention back to her work.
She had a report that needed to be finished today. The mail could wait until she had a spare moment. How much could Hana possibly have spent? She'd ordered a single microphone last time, so it would come to twenty dollars? Thirty, at most?
With the mail entirely out of mind, Bora focused on her work. Who knew how many hours passed. When she had one report written to perfection, she stretched in her chair, arms reaching so far that her shirt rode up enough to show her navel.
She picked up the cup of water beside the desk and got to her feet. The office felt stifling if she stayed shut inside it, and she meant to step out for some air.
Then, all at once, a piece of mail caught her eye. She opened it slowly, and sipping her water, began to read the statement. She was curious just how much it came to.
A little time passed, and Bora reached the billed amount at the bottom. The moment she saw it, the water in her mouth had nowhere to go but out.
She hastily set the cup down on the desk and ran for Hana's room.