VR Game (2)
“Whoa... so this is virtual reality? This is really amazing.”
“Hey! Keep your voice down, Dad. I’m embarrassed.”
Yeongho, looking around with wide-eyed curiosity, gave an awkward laugh at his daughter’s rebuke.
He was only a little excited because it really was amazing, and yet she was acting like this. Talk about harsh.
Anyway, just by putting on a slightly oversized pair of sunglasses that served as the interface and attaching a few band-like sensors to his limbs, the scenery before him had changed in an instant.
The advance of technology really was something else.
A ruined city.
A bleak atmosphere that felt eerie even under the bright midday sun.
He glanced around, then lowered his gaze to his own body and saw hands that looked translucent, like some cartoon ghost.
It didn’t seem like he’d stay in this state forever, so it probably meant the game still hadn’t started.
“Dad doesn’t have full-dive data yet, so you have to play on a temporary account. It’ll feel a little weird.”
“Huh? Full-dive...? Oh, okay.”
“Honestly, Dad—”
His daughter gave him a brief explanation, since he knew nothing at all.
Normally, the system would measure highly detailed data in a much larger machine, then link the checked body information to the game for use.
Sounds vaguely familiar. Wasn’t it called a capsule? These days, I heard PC cafés are disappearing and being replaced by capsule rooms.
Capsule-type VR devices large enough for a person to step into were still far too expensive to be considered a household necessity.
But just as the arrival of smartphones had reshaped so much, VR equipment was also in the middle of transforming the market.
“Anyway! Since your account isn’t synchronized, you’ll probably play using the average values of a typical adult male? Something like that, so it shouldn’t feel too strange. You’re, well—yeah. Pretty ordinary, Dad.”
That was a little sad.
But he couldn’t exactly argue.
He had no special talents to boast about and nothing particularly outstanding to set him apart. He was just an ordinary person through and through.
He knew that about himself better than anyone.
“Th-Then... is Ttoringi using a temporary account like Dad too?”
He’d been sternly warned before the broadcast not to use real names, so he asked with an awkward nickname that still didn’t sit right on his tongue.
Chat logs from viewers, now numbering well over forty and closing in on fifty, raced up one side of his vision.
Since the game supported live broadcast integration even while connected, viewers could watch the game screen while the streamer could see the chat.
If the streamer played together with someone, the chat screen was shared as well, which meant Yeongho could also see the conversation taking place among his daughter’s viewers.
The scenery looks completely real, but seeing this makes it obvious it’s still a virtual world.
As he watched people react, his daughter’s answer soon came through.
“Of course I’ve already synchronized mine! I’m still growing, so I have to go to the center every month and update my physical data. Jae-min probably goes almost every week.”
“Jae-min? Is he streaming like this too?”
At the mention of his second child’s name, she reacted.
“He’s been fr... no, never mind. Anyway, he doesn’t stream, but he probably plays even more than I do.”
“Really?”
At her answer, he nodded and fell into thought for a moment.
Come to think of it, the VR gear he was wearing now had probably been taken from his son’s room by his daughter.
So both of his kids played with VR like this.
I should really focus and do my best at this.
For the first time in a while, it felt like he was finding common ground with his children.
Bam-ba-bam!
“Huh?”
Startled out of his thoughts by a strange sound, he turned his eyes toward the chat window and saw something flashy sparkling above it.
⊳ — TtoringiUncle
⊳ Clear the Chapter 1 boss by today
“Wow! Thank you, TtoringiUncle! I’ll definitely get it done!”
So that was what it was—a mission.
A system where viewers set conditions and receive rewards if those conditions are met.
⊳ — PinkPigUnderTheMonitor
⊳ I’m in too, for the boss clear mission
⊳ — CuteBabyHippo
⊳ Adding a little more, haha
One person set a mission, and then others began stepping in to raise the mission amount.
In the end, the coins they’d receive if the mission was completed came to 340 coins.
And then, one more.
⊳ — WhatDoBeaverMeatTasteLike
⊳ If you one-shot the Chapter 1 boss, eat up~
“Ohhh! Thank you, WhatDoBeaverMeatTasteLike! Five hundred coins! Chapter 1 boss? He’s already as good as dead!”
One-trial clear.
It meant to clear the boss in a single attempt, without a single failure.
After the 500-coin mission was posted, a few more people added one-shot-clear missions, bringing the final reward up to 900 coins.
“Coins are basically the same as cash, right?”
“Yeah. Think of it as 1,000 won for 10 coins.”
“What?”
So if he cleared the 340-coin mission and the one-shot-clear mission too, adding the 900 coins would make it 1,240 coins.
That meant 124,000 won in cash.
Just for enjoying the game for a little while, he could earn well over one hundred thousand won?
These days, they say almost all the kids want to become streamers or BJs or some kind of creator. I guess there really is a reason for that.
He was wondering whether it was really possible to make money that easily when—
“Okay, then we’ll start! Dad, you ready?”
“Huh? Ah, yeah.”
He didn’t know anything, so there wasn’t really anything to prepare for, but at his daughter’s voice he focused his mind on the scene before him.
After a brief opening video that explained the game’s story,
a man and a woman appeared amid the ruins.
“Whoa...”
Unlike the translucent hands from before, now his own hands looked like real flesh and blood, moving in front of his eyes.
Not only sight, but sound and touch felt real too, enough that he almost wondered if his physical body actually back in his daughter’s room was the illusion.
“But if we move around like this, won’t our real bodies keep bumping into walls and stuff?”
“Seriously, Dad! Are you talking about old-school VR? These days all the senses are completely blocked, so your real body doesn’t move around while you’re in VR.”
“Oh, really?”
“Apparently very sensitive people might twitch a little, but there’s no way they’d move enough to hit things in the room.”
He nodded at her explanation, then replied,
“I see. But if the senses are blocked... does that mean you can’t feel any outside impact at all? Isn’t that a little dangerous?”
“Aha! That’s the thing. Even if the player’s body can’t feel it, the sensors detect impacts and the surrounding environment and send separate signals, so if someone touches you or a dangerous situation comes up, you’ll know even while playing the game.”
“So that’s how it works. I get it.”
He stopped talking and looked around at the chat that was floating up.
For now, the two of them were standing on a roadway.
More precisely, they were inside the sunken underpass commonly called a tunnel road.
And there were people lying collapsed all around them.
Corpses... maybe.
Escape City was an apocalyptic game where you had to survive by fleeing humans who had mutated into grotesque monsters.
The protagonists had to escape a city crawling with monsters and set out in search of some safe place, wherever it might be.
The realism was so intense that the sight of actual-looking corpses made him frown slightly.
It wasn’t easy to live through your life and see this many bodies like this.
Short of a battlefield, it was the kind of carnage only soldiers deployed to war might witness.
This isn’t good for Sun-hee to see.
Worried that his daughter might be shocked, he turned to look at her—
“Wow! A gun! Huh~ it’s pretty heavy?”
“...?”
Sun-hee cheered brightly and ran over, lifting a firearm that had been draped over one of the collapsed bodies.
The fact that the corpse was the only one wearing a military uniform, and that it had been carrying a rifle, suggested that he had probably been active-duty military.
But even putting that aside—
“Daughter...? You’re okay?”
“Huh? About what?”
“The, um... the corpses, and all the blood, and—”
“Ah~ the corpses? I’m in 15+ mode anyway, so it’s not that gross. They just look like mannequins. It’s a little disappointing, honestly, because the realism is kind of lacking.”
Come to think of it, it seemed only adults could experience this kind of realism.
Even for him, facing corpse after corpse with dilated eyes and blood splattered everywhere was shocking, so he felt relieved that his daughter wasn’t seeing anything that would be emotionally harmful to her.
“Grrrhh!”
Along with someone’s chat, a grating sound reached his ears.
Two moving corpses approached them with grotesquely twisting motions.
The name was now so famous there wasn’t a single person who didn’t know it.
“Zombies! I’ll take them down, Dad!”
“Hey, wait—”
His daughter, clearly imitating something she’d seen somewhere, awkwardly brought the gun to her shoulder and pointed the barrel forward.
Then came the loud report.
Bang-bang-bang!
“Eek!?”
Sun-hee staggered and fell over from the recoil of the automatic fire.
It was impossible to control properly when a frail middle-school girl stood in an unstable stance and fired a gun.
Still, luck seemed to be on her side, because one of the two zombies took a bullet square in the torso.
The creature collapsed as chunks of flesh sprayed outward.
But the remaining one was already close.
“Damn it!”
Unable to get back up quickly, his daughter was saved by Yeongho, who sprang forward and swung the object in his hand.
An item any veteran of the military would know well.
He couldn’t fight barehanded once battle had broken out, so he’d scanned his surroundings, spotted the entrenching tool lying nearby, and picked it up.
Staring at the zombie lunging at him with its mouth gaping open, he swung hard, and the spade blade of the entrenching tool sank viciously into its neck.
Snick—
The severed head hit the ground and rolled away.
The chat logs surged upward in a flood.
But Yeongho had no time to pay attention to the chat, because he was looking down at his own hand, still left with a strange lingering sensation.
What was that? I just felt something really strange.
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