You're Not Hacking, Right?
"Hmm..."
I had stumbled onto an unexpected way to make money. It was called stocks, and from what I'd heard, you put your money in and prayed with all your heart, and the size of that desperation decided how much you got back.
I wanted to try it at least once, so I went to Bora. Ever since I was little, watching people who played the market had filled me with something almost like admiration.
"Bora, Bora."
I went to the office, caught her sleeve, and said it. Lately my stealth had gotten so good that I had to make my presence known before she even realized I'd come up beside her.
"Hm?"
Bora turned her head toward me.
"I want to do stocks."
"Out of nowhere?"
"Yeah."
"Hmm..."
Bora looked as if she meant to think it over for a long time, and I waited with my heart in my throat. What if she just said no? But a moment later she smiled and answered.
"Well... it's important for Hana to learn how the economy works in this world, so stocks should be fine, right?"
"I'll work really hard!"
"Then we'd have to open an account together..."
"I wanna make one! I wanna make one!"
Whether my burning wish had gotten through or not, Bora opened a stock account just for me. The balance was a hundred million won, with safeguards so I couldn't lose more than the principal itself. Things like futures were walled off completely—I couldn't get anywhere near them.
I'd heard futures were the absolute best at making money, so it stung a little. And there was nobody who understood economics as well as I did.
I waited in front of the monitor where the stock chart was drawn. There wasn't much time left before the market opened at nine. Sipping hot chocolate, I pretended to nudge a pair of glasses up my nose with one finger, glasses that did not exist.
Most famous, clever people wore glasses. I would have to ask Bora later to buy me a pair of fashion glasses, at least.
When the market opened, I felt the storm of numbers with my whole body. Everywhere I looked, there was nothing but numbers. Bora had said red was the good color...
Among the graphs surging up in red, I picked the one I liked best. But Bora was standing right beside me, so I couldn't bring myself to press the buy button.
"Hana, why did you want to buy this one?"
Bora asked me a philosophical question. I hadn't thought that far. Still, I explained that I had chosen it by the most reasonable method available to me.
"I picked it because it shot up the reddest and the highest..."
"That's such a Hana answer."
"Hnnn..."
I didn't know what a Hana answer was supposed to be, but it didn't sound like a compliment. Seeing my face, Bora laughed and stroked my hair.
"I don't know stocks in any real detail either, but I do know the basics. How about today we start with you and me just looking at the chart?"
"Okay."
And with that, Bora's explanation began.
"Hana, stocks aren't a lottery you win by swinging blind on a feeling. First you put the chart together with the state of the market and the information in the papers, and you buy quality stocks that are undervalued. Then you sell those quality stocks at the right time. That's the basic way to invest. I can't exactly call it the one right answer, though. There are plenty of ways to make money with stocks."
As she spoke, she pointed at the screen where the chart was up and walked me through it—from how to read a graph to the financial statements of all sorts of companies, the information most closely tied to stocks.
From where I sat, every bit of it sounded like an alien language. What had I even thought I was learning, back at the start...? Had stocks always been this complicated? Listening to Bora, I couldn't begin to understand how anyone made money at it.
It hadn't been this hard when I first started studying, but Bora's stock lessons lived somewhere past that. Deflated, I clicked the blameless mouse for no reason at all. I realized every scrap of my earlier confidence had been nothing but bluff.
Not touching stocks and safely depositing the money in a bank really did seem like the best choice. Because I'd gone and blustered about investing, I'd been saddled with economics lessons I never asked for.
Waaah! I screamed on the inside. I never should have asked her to teach me!
"That doesn't even make sense!"
A clear, refreshing voice rang through the room. Kim Ina, a broadcaster in her third year, looked at her own champion lying there cold and dead, and howled.
She was a woman streamer, and yet she held a high rank in League of Relics, and perhaps because of that she enjoyed a considerable following in the streaming scene.
Her tier sat between Master and Grandmaster—a height most people never reached—and on top of that she was a rare woman streaming the game. Today, though, she had no choice but to scream.
Lux, the champion she loved to play, had been done in by the enemy Irelia. Spacing was everything on that champion, and she had done her utmost to keep her distance and poke. One instant of carelessness, and she had given up a kill in lane.
"No way they dodge my root and my damage spell both? This isn't even hardstuck-Master level."
"Oh, please, one more win and I'm Grandmaster!!!"
"Whoever said that last is blacklisted."
"The first death was a mistake. From here on I'm locked in. Gonna take the solo kill."
But Kim Ina's words did not hold. Irelia came on like a storm, riding the minions with Bladesurge, and Kim Ina's skills didn't so much as graze her—they never even arrived.
"Whoa... this is a scripter, isn't it!?"
"I'm seriously gonna have to autopsy this. No matter how I think about it, that movement just now made no sense."
And Kim Ina, rinsed clean in the lane, was promptly declared the criminal of the game.
"Instantly what? What are you gonna do!"
Kim Ina clicked the viewer who had rubbed her the wrong way and cornered them with the mouse. It was a motion she had performed many times, and it looked very practiced.
Fail to answer properly, and it was a ban. But the viewer she had sniped set himself on fire.
"No!!!"
"Get out!"
Kim Ina sent the viewer who had told the truth straight to jail. Thanks to that truthful viewer, chat, unlike usual, caught fire.
"All right, I'll go run an autopsy."
With that, Kim Ina played back the replay of the game she'd just been rinsed in, and began to analyze it slowly, starting from the lane.
"Right here! I used my skill because I thought they'd move this way, okay? Look—the second I cast, they snap their whole body the other way, see? A human being has to react after the skill comes out, but this person reacts the instant they see the cast animation!"
From Kim Ina's point of view, it was a fairly reasonable inference. But players at the top react on a champion's animation alone, so it was only half a theory.
"And this... and this..."
Kim Ina hammered the keyboard and poured out a passionate speech—the kind of breakdown that left you no choice but to see why she had been demolished in lane by a scripter.
"Anyway, if you listen to me, you think I'm at least somewhat right, don't you?"
When the viewers chimed in with her, Kim Ina's shoulders started to bounce. She had gone and played the apostle of justice again today. She had successfully autopsied one hacker defiling the Rift, and pinned the specimen up on her broadcast.
But her triumphant expression was cut short by the very next line.
"What?"
Kim Ina reacted as if she had heard a ghost. Which made sense—people who left a stream running in the open and played with hacks while they did it were not exactly common.
What if it really isn't hacks, and they're just that good?
She curled in on herself, as if she had gone and poked a hornet's nest for nothing. A successful pinning brought a huge payoff in views, but fail, and the humiliation was humiliation like nothing else.
Kim Ina clicked the link a viewer had posted without a second thought. And a stream came up.