The ending credits rolled on and on.
Scenario writers, design staff, character illustrators... hundreds of names flickered across the monitor. I just stared blankly at the screen. The names registered in my eyes but never made it into my head.
How many hours had I been glued to this thing?
My thoughts wouldn't turn over. It felt like my brain had gone on hiatus.
I craned my stiff neck around. The wall clock pointed to nine o'clock. Evening or morning... Come to think of it, it was bright outside the window. Nine in the morning.
After sitting down at my desk, I checked the time—at least three times—to confirm it really was nine. In other words, at least thirty-six hours had passed since the game started.
"Hah..."
A hollow laugh escaped me.
"Now that's what you call a real invalid."
I was about to say something more but stopped. The cola I'd chugged straight from the bottle last night had turned into residue, clinging stubbornly to the inside of my mouth. Now that the hole I called a mouth—which hadn't uttered a single word for at least thirty-six hours—was finally open, it felt unbearably stale. It was bad. If people caught a whiff of my breath right now, they'd immediately stage a protest and demand an amendment to the Special Breath Odor Act. I'd stand in court and plead the charges were unjust, but the judges would keel over from the stench and I'd end up imprisoned without trial...
I had probably survived on three or four meals of cup noodles and boiled eggs.
The grease from the cup noodles had caked onto my nose, cheeks, and skull. Suddenly my body felt like a giant bag of food waste. It wasn't entirely wrong as a metaphor—except that food waste gets picked up by someone, whereas nobody was coming for me.
"Hah..."
Another hollow laugh leaked out. I turned my head.
Right then, the player character's Status Window popped up on the monitor.
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Name: Lolita Mundus
Class: Adventurer (SSS+), Swordsman (SSS)
Level: 98 Renown: 63050
Command: 94/100 Might: 132/140 Intellect: 125/125
Politics: 93/95 Charm: 100/100 Technique: 80/81
*Titles: 1. Legendary Adventurer 2. Legendary Mercenary 3. Dungeon Breaker
*Abilities: Tactics SSS, Swordsmanship SSS, Strategy S, Persuasion S+, Horsemanship S, Elemental Magic A
*Skills: Militia, Thousand-Mile Stride, Fatal Strike Nullification
[Achievements Unlocked: 1,088]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
"Haaaah."
I tilted my head back. Buried in my chair, I stared up at the ceiling. It felt like my brain had been scoled out of my skull and slipped entirely into the monitor, leaving me with nothing but an empty cranium.
Practically the maximum stats a player could ever reach.
"How many playthroughs… was it sixteen last time?"
My head had apparently melted down to the point where words came out one at a time instead of full sentences. My thoughts wouldn't connect in a straight line. They hopped around like I was crossing a river on stepping stones. To force some semblance of a through-line, I started muttering to myself.
The dungeon RPG <Dungeon Attack>.
This game was infamous for its brutal difficulty. In a single playthrough, you couldn't even beat the mid-boss. The final boss? Not a chance. Playthrough two, three, four. It wasn't until I'd ground my way all the way to playthrough seventeen that I finally managed to take down the Grand Demon Lord, Bael.
Bael's legion was powerful. But between them and me lay a gap — the gap of a playthrough advantage.
There was no such thing as grinding without results. As a player, I accumulated experience and knowledge, and that's how I beat them. From Bael's perspective, it was cheating and cheap tricks. What could I do? That was the systemic difference between a player and an NPC.
But the emotion I felt in that moment of victory wasn't joy. Not by a long shot.
It was an emptiness stickier than the grease settling on your face.
"This year's summer vacation is over too."
A single room.
It had been ages since the place was last properly cleaned. Clumps of hair rolled across the floor. Textbooks were stacked in every corner of the room, reproducing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. After a long stretch of leave from school, I had sworn to myself I'd finish top of the department. The self-help books I'd blown my allowance on… now formed a low hill of dust.
This wasn't how it was supposed to be.
When I first moved out on my own, I had been brimming with motivation.
"……."
I looked around the room.
This was my world.
Small, shabby, insignificant—this, too, was a world. Like a dried-up wad of tissues, it had accomplished nothing; all that remained was the trace of fleeting ambition that had long since evaporated.
Ha! Was it really so different from the world inside that monitor?
That world didn't lie. If you did something, it accumulated. It didn't vanish into nothing. One level-up was always one level-up. You couldn't go from level 90 down to level 80 just because you'd done nothing, and your stats wouldn't drop either. Once something existed, it continued to exist! Yet in this world, everything evaporated without a trace. Which one was the real deal?
"……Damn it."
I grabbed the mouse.
'Would you like to save your data for the next inheritance?'
When the prompt appeared on screen, I naturally clicked 'Yes.' Then I shut the laptop in a fit of nerves.
An unbearable feeling was welling up inside me. I left my room.
Late summer.
The muggy air greeted me. In other words, the only thing that bothered to welcome me was the thick, humid air. It felt like steam was filling my lungs. I stepped into the convenience store in front of my building and bought a pack of cigarettes. Swiping the card Mom had given me.
The part-timer greeted me.
"Thank you. Come again."
I half-heartedly returned the greeting and walked out. I settled into a quiet back alley and lit up.
Then my phone buzzed. It was Mom. Apparently, the moment I'd swiped the card for cigarettes, the charge had pinged her phone right away. I quickly tossed the cigarette away.
"Yes, Mom. What's going on?"
Mom spoke brightly over the phone. Of course, "brightly" was how she always sounded — but underneath it, there was a sad kind of affection.
"Oh, nothing. I was just wondering what my boy was up to."
Now it was time to lie.
"I was studying and just stepped out for some fresh air. Maybe it's the heat, but my head feels a little fuzzy…"
Even to my own ears, that was pretty funny. Of course my head felt fuzzy. I'd spent dozens of hours staring at a monitor, pulling an all-nighter while riding the waves of radio signals. If my mind were still in one piece after that, *that* would be the real miracle.
"Yeah, that's right."
For the record, there was absolutely no energy in my voice — not because I felt guilty about lying to Mom, but because I was trying to make the lie more convincing. Lying was the one thing I was genuinely good at. I'm not joking. If the Olympics had a competitive lying event, I'd have gotten a military exemption by now.
Just as I expected, Mom interpreted my voice as a red alert signaling her son's deteriorating health. Her tone grew even gentler as she asked how I'd been doing. I kept up the powerless voice. Yes, I'm doing fine. Sure. Studying here and there, more or less. It was a truly flawless performance.
"Eat whatever you want. If you need to buy something, buy it. If you're going to drink coffee, get the expensive good stuff. And hey, why don't you go study at one of those nice cool cafés? You know our family isn't so strapped that we'd make you feel bad about spending money, right?"
I smiled genuinely as I answered.
"Yes, Mom. I should get back to studying, then."
That was where the call ended.
A first-rate liar had been born.
I put a cigarette in my mouth. "Get back to studying"? Since when had I ever been studying in the first place?
It hadn't always been this way. There had been a time when I genuinely threw myself into my studies. I'd gotten into a university that, if not the very top, was at least respected. That damn persecution complex ruined me — the delusion that I'd been unfairly depriving myself of all the fun and things I wanted to do, just for the college entrance exam.
…No. If I'd only fallen a little bit into that delusion, it would have been fine. But I partied in the most spectacular and decadent way imaginable — the kind that would make anyone who saw it go "Gah!" out of sheer shock. Out of the entire school, only five guys had filled their report cards with Fs in every class except one during the first semester. Since I ranked sixth from the bottom on the grade sheet, I was one of them for sure.
I'd gone to college and partied, right?
So what's the harm in just going ahead and doing it?
"Hey, bro. Get your act together."
My younger sister watched me with a look of pity. My parents didn't try to stop me. They were the type who were satisfied just knowing I'd gotten into a decent college. As long as I took over the family business and didn't end up with cobwebs in my mouth, that was good enough for them.
"Sigh."
At the end of the day, that's the kind of person I am.
I grabbed my laptop from my studio apartment and headed to a nearby café to enjoy the nice air conditioning.
I sat down in a corner of the café, and all I did the entire day was surf the internet. I bounced from site to site, laughing at pointless posts, and wrote equally pointless ones of my own.
The online community I spent the most time on was, without a doubt, the <Dungeon Attack Fan Site>.
Dungeon Attack had cultivated a fiercely loyal fanbase precisely because of its absurdly high difficulty. "Hard is good! If it's not hard, I don't want it!" — there were more of these freaks in the world than you'd think. This place was the holy ground they'd all gathered to build.
I posted an update about the achievements my player character "Lolita" had earned today.
The moment I posted, the members flooded in with comments. Fast! Do these people just eat and live on the internet? Not that I was one to talk, but still — impressive…
— Golsugeo: Whoa. Check out those stats.
— Heukjangmi: TequilaLatte, as always. All those S-rank stats plastered everywhere are disgusting.
TequilaLatte was the nickname I used.
— Jachingsonyeon: Dude, what run number is this?
I'd been waiting for someone to ask — I answered that it was run 17. The members immediately poured in with more comments.
— Pusyutsagwa: He said seventeen. That's insane. Absolutely insane.
— Mayurim: Even a rough estimate puts the playtime at over five thousand hours. Holy crap, I used to worry about whether the devs were even sane making Bael's Demon Lord's Castle into a dungeon meant to be cleared, but now I'm starting to question TequilaLatte's sanity instead.
— Richa: The mental hospital always welcomes you with open arms.
— Gatremnal: Is this the mental hospital I've only heard rumors about?
— Yulveria: Reporting for mental hospital duty. (2)
— Jeongyukjjom: Hey, how did you unlock the mage Rowmei? I cleared the Gaf dungeon like the guide said, but the Affinity cap won't budge.
Trash Kim. At the end of the day, you're nothing but a cripple.
Click.
The mouse wheel stopped. My eyes snagged on the comment.
'At the end of the day, you're nothing but a cripple.'
Below it, replies poured in — taunting, asking where there was anyone in this place who wasn't a cripple. The members were taking my side.
I was grateful. But I knew it, all the same. What that guy said was the truth. At the end of the day, I really was nothing but a cripple.
And the more important truth was:
'The thing is, I don't even care anymore.'
Even being fully aware that I was a cripple, I had no will to escape that state. In that respect, I wasn't merely a cripple — I was something like food waste. The kind of food waste that, for whatever reason, had a head and a tongue, and knew how to buy a 6,500-won café mocha with his mother's credit card.
That was when a new post went up on the board.
'Title: Lattes are overrated. ·····Nickname: VenusPants'
VenusPants — this was a member I butted heads with constantly on the site.
His game knowledge was encyclopedic, but his way of looking at Dungeon Attack differed from mine, so we clashed without cease. The two of us were the twin pillars of the cripple hierarchy, as recognized by every member on the board.
If anyone ever asked how to clear a particular dungeon, the two of us could rattle off seventeen different strategies right on the spot, in order. In short, both VenusPants and I were people who had devoted our lives to Dungeon Attack.
As a side note, in VenusPants's case, he had even mastered internal affairs that only a game developer should know, leading to occasional rumors that maybe he actually was a developer.
'What's he trying to pick a fight about now?'