Chapter 3
‘Later on, just hearing that guy’s laughter would send chills down my spine…’
Cynthia, too, had once boldly challenged the game, only to end up, thanks to that insane mastermind, collecting nothing but a pile of brutal death scenes before quitting. And with the bugs on top of that, it was only natural to understand just how much despair players who had barely managed to reach the ending must have felt.
But this time, the game devs said the difficulty had been drastically lowered, so she thought she might be able to hope a little.
As luck would have it, tomorrow was a rare day off. With no one to stop her, Cynthia settled herself in front of her laptop, determined to pull an all-nighter gaming for the first time in a while.
“Alright, then… Huh, what’s this?”
After the brief game background explanation passed, there was a new feature that hadn’t existed before. It was none other than ‘protagonist customization’.
Originally, the protagonist’s appearance was fixed, but now not only the looks but even the character’s background could be freely created. No wonder the file size was so large—this feature had been added.
Although the character displayed in the game was just a tiny pixel sprite, things like hair color, eye color, and skin tone could all be chosen in various ways. Cynthia, who was quite fond of customization, poured her tastes into it and created a protagonist who would roam the game world in as her avatar.
There were several available character settings for the protagonist. Second princess in line to the throne, an eccentric mage expelled from the Mage Tower, detective’s assistant at a small office, apprentice holy knight, maid from a poor noble family, thief from the back alleys, and so on…
After much deliberation, Cynthia chose ‘the young lady of a noble family on the verge of ruin’ as her background.
It was said that the protagonist’s stats and behavioral principles would differ depending on the chosen background, and for the noble young lady, the ‘Agility’ trait was attached. In a game like this, agility was an even more valuable stat than attack power, so it seemed she had made a good choice.
“All done!”
Once she finished setting up her character, the game properly began.
But for some reason, the loading time was unusually long.
Messages like ‘Checking updated features’, ‘Optimizing protagonist settings’, and ‘Adjusting difficulty’ appeared alternately several times, but there was no sign of the game actually starting.
‘Don’t tell me this update patch is riddled with bugs from the start…’
With growing anxiety, Cynthia stared at the endlessly loading window and let out a sigh as she stood up. It was late at night, after all, and her stomach was growling, so she put water in the kettle to eat the cup noodles she’d bought with her beer at the convenience store.
That was when she checked the text message that had just arrived on her phone, and her face twisted in a grimace.
“Ah, again?”
It was a message from her direct superior. The content, asking her to come to work tomorrow because something urgent had come up, didn’t contain a trace of apology, and to make matters worse, it ended with the annoying news that, since it was the department head’s birthday, they’d have to collect 50,000 won each.
“Go to hell, you damn trash SME!”
Cynthia wanted to throw her phone, but held herself back. She had endured with this precious phone for seven years—if it broke, she’d have no answer for what to do. And despite her words, she didn’t really want her current company to go under, since she’d have nowhere to go if it actually did.
Suddenly, everything felt unbearably suffocating.
The company that endlessly wrung out its employees and always seemed to have an emergency whenever she tried to use her paid leave. The old phone she could see dying a slow death but couldn’t afford to replace. The studio apartment where she always had to worry about scraping together the rent and watching the landlord’s mood.
The reality that, with no parents to rely on, every day was a precarious struggle.
“Haa…”
She just wanted to throw it all away and run far, far away somewhere.
The moment that thought crossed her mind…
Ding—!
At last, the loading finished, and the sound effects from the game spread from her laptop.
Cynthia turned around….
And lost consciousness.
Discussion
0 CommentsNo comments yet.