I'm Not Going
Not a single scratch marred Seyul, who stood there in defiance.
And it wasn't just appearances — her health bar hadn't dropped by so much as a sliver.
Even when the feverish orks had charged her all at once, not one blow had landed.
The orks, by contrast, were in a pitiful state.
Most of them lay sprawled in the very pools of blood they had spilled.
Only one still breathed.
"Heh heh... what a sorry sight we've become."
The old ork sneered at himself. He had served as the temporary leader of the others, and he was the last one left alive.
His body, however, was in ruins.
Seyul stood over him, unscathed, the only one still upright in the field. The old ork remained alive, but his legs had been skewered through by her spear, leaving him unable to move.
"A failure of judgment on my part."
Blood seeped thickly from his mangled legs. Sensing death was near, the old ork muttered to himself with unsettling calm.
"I should have recognized how strange you were the moment the gods first came to you. Whether or not you accepted their power, I should have run."
But he hadn't.
His opponent was a single human, powerless and alone.
It was an unfounded certainty — the notion that there was simply no way he could lose to such a creature.
"The gods would never seek out an ordinary human. You were hiding your strength, weren't you? I still can't fathom why someone like you let herself be dragged here as a slave so obediently."
"...Is that all you have left to say?"
Seyul looked down at the old ork with cool indifference as he kept talking.
"Go ahead. Leave your last words."
Perhaps it was because he had once asked her why she refused the gods' power.
Whatever the reason, Seyul had spared the old ork to the very end, willing to hear him out.
"How kind of you. Then I shall accept your mercy and speak. ...Human. I acknowledge the greatness of your spearwork, but this domain of monsters is not a place one can leave by human skill alone. Sooner or later, you will come to regret refusing the gods' power."
"You people truly don't understand. That has nothing to do with it. I didn't refuse them because I believed I would never regret it. I refused so that even my regrets would belong to me alone — the result of my own choice and nothing else."
Her voice was heavy with regret.
The old ork, who had meant his words as a barbed jab, found himself at a loss before a reaction he had never anticipated.
"...If that is how it is, then this old man's meddling was for nothing."
"Anything else?"
"No."
The old ork answered firmly.
His life had been stained through with blood and violence. He had always assumed that someday, in some fashion like this, he too would die at another's hand.
And so he meant to accept it without resentment.
"Only... if it's you I see on my final road, I suppose that's no bad thing."
It had been a battle drenched in blood.
And yet Seyul's body — her dazzling silver hair and pale skin — remained utterly unstained.
A beauty as pure as if no color in the world could touch it. Even the sight of her sweeping a spear at him resembled nothing so much as a goddess of war.
Taking the imprint of that figure on his retinas as his final comfort, the old ork died.
And with that, the last of the orks was gone.
The chat descended into chaos — though for an entirely different reason than before.
Mob #1 — the nameless creature that spawns when you start the game on extreme difficulty.
Something barely worthy of the title had died delivering a genuinely stirring line.
Viewers scrambled to process it. So this kind of thing was even possible?
What a relief.
Meanwhile, Seyul felt a surge of liberation.
It wasn't merely because she had escaped her life of slavery.
It was because this incident had set the direction of her path forward.
"Let's go."
Seyul spoke quietly and took a step.
With small but resolute footsteps, she faced ahead.
"H-hey, wait!"
"You can't go that way!"
The other slaves, whose lives Seyul had spared, tried to stop her — but she paid them no mind.
Whatever they said, she intended to move forward.
It was only something happening inside a game, but today's events had taught her something profound: the resolve to choose of her own will, rather than running down rails someone else had laid for her.
And so Seyul did not look back.
At first she had planned to follow the story, but now she no longer cared. Whatever the outcome, she pressed on for the simple reason that she wanted to go there.
In games and in reality alike, she vowed — from here on, she would see her own will through.
Needless to say, the road she was walking was not the proper one.
The exasperated viewers cursed and tried to steer her back onto the main route, but it was no use.
She ignored the chat.
No reactions. Story progression ignored too.
She did everything she wasn't supposed to do. By all rights, her viewers should have been flooding out the door.
Yet somehow, the audience kept growing.
The first reason was the furious reactions of the original viewers, who simply couldn't hold it in anymore. The chat was such a disaster that newcomers kept piling in just to see what the fuss was about.
The second reason was Seyul's looks.
Beautiful even by the standards of Another World, a place crowded with the handsome and the fair. Her face drew pure, involuntary gasps of admiration — and it ensnared everyone who wandered in without knowing any better.
And finally, the third reason.
The hardcore gamers pounced on the viewer who had donated out of sheer admiration for her looks.
The gamer viewers were thoroughly enraged by the trainwreck play.
But instead of leaving, they stayed to watch Seyul crash and burn under the fallout of her own disaster run.
Thus the exodus of old viewers stopped, and only new ones poured in. And the influx was all the heavier because she was a brand-new streamer on a masterpiece game that had gone quiet for a long stretch — largely thanks to the thumbnail Semi had slapped together as a joke: Seyul's face.
The result was that her viewer count had quietly blown past triple digits and now sat at around 120.
A pleasant breeze.
Seyul had no idea that more than a hundred people were watching her right now.
She strolled along at her leisure, taking in the scenery around her.
Another World had beautiful natural surroundings. She had been able to enjoy nature whenever she pleased there — but not in Korea.
And so the game's natural environments filled in what her life had been missing.
Even the soil pressing bare against her feet felt endearing.
But then —
⟨ Human. You must not go that way. ⟩
A familiar voice suddenly rang out, barring Seyul's path.
Its owner was an existence wreathed in blue light.
It was the God of Water, one of the Five Gods.
The moment Seyul laid eyes on him, her good mood evaporated in an instant and her brow furrowed.
"I told you to disappear. Why are you here?"
It seemed odd that the being who had simply walked away would come back — but in truth, this was the point in the timeline where he was scripted to reappear.
⟨ Though you displease me, I cannot simply leave you to die. I have come with a warning. Soon, one will come looking for you — the chieftain of the orks you slew. ⟩
The Orc Chieftain.
He was, one could say, the early-game boss.
The story established that he had briefly stepped away, which was why he hadn't been there at the start — but the moment the player killed the orks and escaped, he would come hunting for revenge.
And at that point, the God of Water would appear with a warning.
Fight, or flee?
He offered two choices —
⟨ You must NOT fight him. Run! ⟩
— but for Seyul, he forced exactly one.
The gap in stats was simply too wide.
The viewers who had played the game all reached the same conclusion as the God of Water.
"The Orc Chieftain is coming for me?"
The warning was unexpected, but Seyul didn't tell him to get lost right away — she decided to hear him out.
"I never saw him. So there was one more of them, then."
⟨ He had stepped away briefly while you were there. ⟩
"So he's showing up now, and you're telling me to run from him."
⟨ Precisely. Good — you understand this time. ⟩
The God of Water sighed and pointed in a specific direction — the direction the player was supposed to go.
⟨ Go that way. It is the safe road, and there is one there who will help you. You must learn the art of combat from him. ⟩
A mentor who taught the player useful early-game skills.
The God of Water was instructing her to head to where an NPC waited to become her teacher.
⟨ You cannot mean to refuse even this? It is mere guidance along a road. Who in this world refuses directions? It is all for your sake, so please, just listen to me. ⟩
The God of Water all but begged her to return the game to its proper course.
"No thanks."
Seyul didn't listen.
Without a moment's deliberation, she declared she wouldn't — and then, as if determined to make a show of her own will, she flopped down flat onto the ground.
"I don't want to go down that road, and I'm not running anywhere either."
Lying on the ground for all to see, Seyul spoke with perfect composure.
Watching her, one of the newcomers finally understood why the chat had been in such an uproar.