Chapter Text
‘… -ster … -for …’
Yoo Jonghyuk’s eyebrows drew together into a pained expression. His head nodded and in his half-sleeping state he could feel his body precariously leaning towards the left with nothing to stop him. Before he could fall from his chair, his eyes opened abruptly and he managed to pull himself back upright. In front of him, his screen had turned entirely blue.
With a deep sigh, he grabbed around to find whether his console was still properly connected with the ports to his PC. Everything seemed fine at first glance. However, even the screen on his console had started to show a blue screen.
‘What … is this PC from the early 2000’s or something,’ he wondered, irritated, ‘the rumoured blue-screen of death? I’ll have to e-mail my manager to contact that sponsor.’ As he motioned to take off his headset, a crackling noise could be heard amidst the static. Right, he had been swaying in his chair for a reason. As an experienced gamer, falling asleep in his chair had never been an issue. He would have brief naps leaned back into the specially designed ergonomic shapes, customised perfectly to assist his spine for long hours of gaming and resting (or so the sponsor to his chair and desk set-up had boasted). This time, however, he had sat upright which caused him to lose that support. His body had been alerted by something, and that something appeared to be the noise in his headset.
The crackling became more insistent until it started to resemble a voice which was able to form words. The voice sounded nothing like anything a human’s vocal chords would be capable of, it was wholly a combination of distorted sounds managing themselves into full sentences.
‘Test, test. 5,4,3,2,1. Yes?’
‘Hah?’
’You can hear me now? Fantastic,’ the voice on the other end seemed to have had some trouble to transmit itself to his headset which had caused the crackling sounds. As it was made up out of distorted noise, there was no detectable intonation or emotion to the voice.
‘Did you find your companion?’ It asked soon after. Jonghyuk tensed up, his previous fatigue had disappeared in an instant. He wasn’t the type to doubt his own senses so his body was immediately on alert as he tuned his ears into the sound.
‘Who the hell are you?’ He responded unkindly.
‘Ah right, uhm … I know it’s cliché to put it this way, but I promise that it does not matter who I am. I am not a ‘who’ in the first place. More importantly, please answer my questions,’ the voice responded. It didn’t sound like an experienced scammer.
‘Did you hack my PC,’ asked Jonghyuk icily. He felt some relief. Being hacked was a terrible thing, but at least this could be solved rather quickly if he messaged some of his contacts. It would’ve been a disaster to all his progress had it been a manufacturing mistake causing an unidentifiable error.
‘Sure, I hacked your PC or whatever. So now I’ve been honest, please throw me a bone. It’s about completing your game … you know,’ the voice slowed down for emphasis, ‘the one you have not been able to clear, yet cannot seem to put away.’
‘…’
‘I see, silent treatment. It will take some more time to gain your trust, I understand. However, you must have already noticed that this game is not like the others. If you were to abandon it now, you would regret it immensely and we both know you know this,’ the voice insisted on continuing the conversation and appeared to have increased the speed of its distorted speech to cram as much information as it could before Jonghyuk could interrupt. ‘There is a higher reason for clearing it and time is not on your side. You’ll have to contact your companion asap. The gap between the updates is diminishing and when they collide when the timing isn’t right it’ll be trouble.’
‘Ha,’ the edges of Jonghyuk’s mouth lifted with some scorn resting in its corners, ‘you sound like an annoying bastard. I don’t want to hear about my circumstances from you. Now get out of my PC.’
‘…,’ finally, the voices on the other side seemed to realise it wasn’t going to get through to the boy, ‘this stubborn brat.’ It was odd to hear somebody curse at him without any intonation whatsoever. It truly felt as if he were speaking to a machine who couldn’t express its emotions like a human.
‘Fine, have it your way. But I can’t [get out of your pc] because I’m not in your PC in the first place. I’m in your console. And before you’ll kindly request me to: no, I cannot leave your console either. Let’s all talk when you’ve matured a bit more, bye bye,*sshole.’
Before Jonghyuk could retort, his screen had turned back to normal and his headset was free of any static.
Ever since he had picked up the game, he had been encountering one after the other annoying situation. But the voice had not lied, he was unable to put the game away. His intuition was rarely wrong and the feeling of pressure he felt to clear it was real. He glanced briefly at his console. Surely, the annoying bastard had made itself a home in there like some genie in a lamp. He felt the sudden urge to hurl his console through the window, but managed to control himself with the reminder that he needed more information. Whether the voice was to be trusted or not, he had a need to know more about the purpose of this mysterious game that had turned his console into a device which could change reality. Unfortunately, the voice had been the most powerful lead up till now. Jonghyuk clenched his teeth in annoyance, if only the game hadn’t been such a damn bore to clear after the first few regressions.
‘If you were to abandon it now, you would regret it immensely and we both know you know this.’
The memory of those words had hit Jonghyuk the most. It was possible to know about his circumstances through hacking his in-game activity and possibly the microphone of his console. But to know about his feelings … that was something impossible to just know like that.
‘The gap between the updates is diminishing and when they collide when the timing isn’t right it’ll be trouble.‘
This was another concerning piece of information and another part that had held him back from simply unplugging his console to make it shut up. It had only confirmed that his sense of urgency hadn’t been unfounded. With reluctance he turned his head to another device which had been connected to his PC, his phone. Maybe it was time to call for that bastard and see if they could advance in the game.
—
They reconvened under the bridge. Somehow, after their little territorial scuffle about a week ago, neither Dokja nor J had been bothered by the bullies again. Dokja figured the bullies had received some sort of trauma because they would not look him in the eye in school.
‘As long as this will not become some social media incident in a few years,’ he thought staring at the underside of the bridge, ‘it wouldn’t matter if I was just being insulted. But I remember them taking some awful pictures with their phones. I hope they did not save those.’ Dokja glanced around at J with a sigh.
‘If it is that guy, he would look good no matter what angle they had taken the picture from. Surely, he would resemble the tragic male lead in a drama or something.’ Imagining J with blood trickling from the corner of his mouth did not diminish any bit of his good looks. It made him look a little badass which annoyed Dokja. So Dokja tried a little harder by imagining him with a silly expression … and with some blood trickling from his nose, for effect. He could not complete his vision, however, as he was suddenly hit in the back of his head as per some sort of heavenly retribution for blasphemous insults to God’s more attractive creations.
‘What was that for?’ He widened his eyes to stare at the culprit. J wasn’t able to read minds today because of the game, right? … Of course not. He’d have been hit way earlier if that were the case. J had apparently been calling for him a few times and got fed up with his vacant expression.
‘Today, I will have to leave early,’ he was back to frowning at the river as he spoke, ‘so, this time I want you to play it by yourself.’ J unceremoniously shoved the console in Dokja’s hands and turned around with an occupied expression. His mind had already determined his business to be elsewhere.
‘Huh?’ A bewildered sound escaped from between Dokja’s lips. When he turned around J had already started to walk towards the stares leading to the dirt path in the distance. Truthfully, he was partially shocked that J had bothered to explain this to him at all.
‘How long are his legs for him to be that fast?’ Dokja wondered in confusion as he chased after J whose legs were taking strides he could apparently only catch up to with a small jog.
‘Hold up, J!’ Dokja tried to stop him, ‘I’m still not that great with the controls of this game. Let alone if an error occurs like last time. Take it back with you, we can try another time!’
‘I don’t have time. You have to deal with it’ J’s voice had this layer of dull grey to it again. Damn, it was hard to defy J when his voice and eyes felt grey like that. To Dokja, it almost sounded like the end of a plea.
‘What if I break it?’ Dokja’s voice had lost its power so he doubted J had heard, but J — who was already climbing the stairs — replied in a grave voice.
‘You can’t break it,’ J sighed, ‘You have to do it … I will come back for you so …’ then J shook his head impatiently clicking his tongue and left. Just like that. Again.
…
When J had left the atmosphere the grey voice had created had left with him. As Dokja was walking back to the bag he had left beneath the bridge to chase after J, he stared at the console in deep thought.
‘This thing is dangerous,’ he thought remembering what had happened before.
‘This thing is dangerous,’ he repeated again in his mind, as if he was convincing himself of something.
In truth, he was trying to convince himself. Kim Dokja was fighting. He was fighting the inner part of himself who was tired of acting like a mature realist. The part inside that wanted to fight with swords and explore Neverland. The part that thirsted for adventure and other realities.
He wanted to level up, he thought. The console’s weight was pleasant in his hand. It was a solidified piece of ambition that had fallen into his open palm like a falling star. He almost felt guilty.
‘Well, J asked me for help …’
—
[Password: ]
‘…’
[Password: ]
‘…’
Kim Dokja was blankly alternating his stare between the console screen demanding a password and his phone screen with an inactive chat between him and J on the Dissonance app. There were only spam messages from his side asking J for his password.
‘That empty-headed. Sunfish. Brat,’ Dokja thought, falling back in the grass with a groan.
—
Jonghyuk had entrusted the game to that bastard that had been running around freely with his own name. Not even in his mind could he call him by that name. Right, ‘bastard’ would suffice for a companion bastard. He spent no further ounce of creativity on the matter.
Under the bridge, he had been contemplating how to proceed if the game had still not unpaused. His mind had been forming a list of priorities as he had been staring at the river and the grass sticking out from the soil to bow towards the water …
Urgency, he had felt it so much more powerful in that moment. An electric current that ran through his spine as if a switch had been flipped and he was working on a timer now. He couldn’t dawdle around with that bastard this time. No, he felt a pull to do something entirely different. He had to find out more about why he had this pressure of time in the first place. Playing the game again and again had only made him more proficient in the game itself, but it hadn’t exactly given him more information about why it could influence reality and why it seemed to choose who would play it and how. If there was some sinister reason as to why the game could influence reality, he’d like to know how to break free from those puppet strings.
First and foremost, he thought, he had to learn more about the game before he got tangled up with that creepy voice again. His gut told him he could be hurled into some nasty business if he had nothing to verify that robot bastards’ claims with. It was not hat he had not previously put in some effort to find more information. Unfortunately, all he had found online was some free webnovel of which the chapter count was in a disproportionally inverse correlation with its reader count. Back then, only a few readers seemed to have been reading the updates. Now, the count had dwindled to just one person.
‘What a tenacious bastard,’ Jonghyuk had thought when he scrolled through the chapter list and saw the reader count remain a faithful ‘1’ for the past year or so. He had tried to read the novel himself and had even based some of his earlier strategies on the first few chapters when he realised what it was about, but — as it seemed to be stuck in aimless regressions itself — he could no longer bear to read it. He was not the type to docilely sit down twiddling his thumbs to read how things progressed in the first place. Not to mention, the website he tried to read it from seemed to be partially corrupted as the name and descriptions of the main characters always looked distorted. So he had given up on that as it provided no further information on what the purpose of the game was. In addition, he had become wary of finding a virus on his PC if he hung around such a broken website for too long.
As for trying the Wikipedia route, the game did not show any company logo or name to hint any place to contact or search for. The webnovel only showed the writer’s username, TSL123. However, that bastard’s identity was hidden away so carefully that he only seemed to exist to write the novel and had no further verifiable presence in reality. Not even his information-broker contacts online could find any leads.
Previously, he had given up when all roads seemed to be closed off and he had focused solely on beating the game. However, with the added sense of urgency and after meeting that copying bastard, he felt motivated to try the information approach again. That was when an idea had hit him.
What if he could draw out that author fellow instead?
He could ask him if he also played the game or had any relation to its creator. However, despite having only a single reader to boast now, TSL123 was selective to whom they replied. So far, the only person receiving real replies were that tenacious bastard. He felt he had to learn more about that website before approaching them. It was the only lead he had and he had this feeling he had to be more tactful this time around.
In that moment, there had been a flash of a memory of one of his classmates seemingly typing something in an app of which the interface looked like the website these sorts of novels were published on. If he had learned anything from the game it was that some bastards were there to be useful and that hints would present themselves in the right moments. He thought that, that mental case of a class-president had finally found her use.
… He rolled his neck as he walked on with a reluctance he barely managed to contain.
She was such a pain to deal with. But he had no other choice now, had he? In fact, he already regretted getting involved with her insanity before taking the first step. He could imagine her cat-like grin already …