Chapter 129
[This is World of Arseria, a virtual reality game released by Wearsoft in 2044. Wearsoft has faced harsh criticism for its inadequate response to the unprecedented esports match-fixing scandal that occurred last month. And at 11 p.m. last night, Korea time, users finally erupted after yet another emergency maintenance with no stated reason.]
The man representing the protest organizers gave an interview, passionately urging Wearsoft to change in an agitated voice.
[Next up, the Seoul Regional Tax Office's Fourth Investigation Bureau has announced that it will conduct a three-month special tax audit into Wearsoft Korea and others. Following that announcement, Wearsoft Korea CEO Yoo Jong-won has also been summoned for questioning by prosecutors. According to legal circles, the Economic Crimes Division of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office—]
It took WoA users less than a day to decide to protest Wearsoft's outrageous mismanagement.
They already had enough kindling piled up to burn the company to the ground, but because the parent company was a foreign corporation and had built up trust through its user-friendly policies, most people wanted to believe in it and wait a little longer.
In the end, it was NoName who lit the fuse.
A full twelve-hour stream.
She spent ten of those hours tackling Wearsoft's game, setting the hearts of WoA users around the world ablaze.
Regardless of the difficulty, simply clearing Nightmare guaranteed that a player was among the top five percent worldwide.
3/3/3 was a gate that everyone entering the top one percent Master Tier, where endless competition began, had to pass through,
and even 5/5/5 was regarded as a sort of pilgrimage for challengers seeking to reach the pinnacle of World of Arseria.
Because of that, no one believed that 10/10/10 could be conquered through human strength alone.
Why else would even the operators joke that anyone who cleared the highest difficulty must have reached the realm of the gods?
Just as there are always plenty of people willing to challenge problems that have remained unsolved for centuries, famous pros and streamers from the highest tier had once attempted it as well, only to suffer miserable defeats every time.
Once people realized that it was theoretically impossible to clear through skill alone, public interest could only gradually fade.
Even a problem proven to have no solution was, however anticlimactic, still a form of proof.
But as if smashing that prejudice head-on, NoName's performance was nothing short of unprecedented.
[Nocturne isn't something you can slice up that easily, you bastards.]
Mr. Y, renowned as one of the world's top game-strategy streamers, was one of the twenty thousand people watching her stream.
Normally, clearing a Legendary Quest awarded up to three character traits, but in Nightmare, a boss fight against Nocturne Nailing was added in Part 2 to simplify the process.
The three random bosses summoned by Nocturne.
Each time players defeated one of them, they could receive the trait symbolized by that boss.
As luck would have it, perhaps because of the influence of her Part 1 run, every boss NoName defeated was specialized for the Knight class.
Mesomia Evening's [Twilight Doppelganger], Lo Dante's [Mirage Strike], and Reinhardt Shifot's [Pacifying the Realm].
Even if a character started as a Healer, having a trait specialized for one-on-one combat could hardly be a bad thing. In other words, it could improve their survivability.
But if it had been easy, everyone and their dog would have built their character that way.
The three bosses all shared the ability to create a unique mana field that blocked mana.
NoName had overwhelmed enemies designed to shut down every strategy except those used by aura-focused Knights, using nothing but pure swordsmanship. She had clearly reached an astonishing level.
If the Part 2 boss fight had been a fresh shock only to a tiny handful of people, the Part 3 boss fight made a huge impression even on the general public, who knew little about swordsmanship or magic.
<Magic Studies Gallery>
<Question>
[F2ck, what kind of magic is this?]
(Baal-zebub defeated screenshot.jpg)
The magic circle is bigger than a futsal field?
[Comments]
-It's wide-area casting.
-Wide-area casting, yeah.
-(OP): What's wide-area casting, anyway?
└ It's a method used when you need to amplify a spell's output, scale, and so on.
└ (OP): So does drawing the magic circle that big automatically make it wide-area casting?
└ Of course not. You can basically consider wide-area casting an entirely different type of magic.
└ To explain it simply, it's easy to find natural-number solutions satisfying x^2+y^2=z^2, but if you expand the dimension to x^3+y^3=z^3, it becomes Fermat's Last Theorem, right? In the same way, most wide-area magic is completely impossible, and even when it can be done, you have to approach it in an entirely different way.
└ Damn, that's complicated;;
<World of Arseria Gallery>
<Featured Post>
[Hey, Jesus, why aren't you starting the meeting?][347]
(Picture of the Four Great Sages.jpg)
“Shut your trap. NoName just took down Baal-zebub.”
(Picture of a cyberpunk Jesus with bloodshot eyes, angrily grabbing someone by the collar.jpg)
[Comments]
-LMAOOOOOOOOOO
-This featured post is so low-effort, you bitch.
-Where the hell do they get pictures like that?ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ Did they make it with AI?
-Is NoName really human? Getting three laurels has her going wild on a whole different level from Part 1.
-Could the laurels actually have been chains meant to control the demon called NoName?
└ For real lol.
-Surprisingly, the damage Adella was landing from the side was pretty solid too.
└ The dildo Adella is sticking in is dealing some damage too, oh my...
-If we'd had just one person like that on our side during World War III, we would've felt pretty secure lol.
└ So reassuring that it would probably make gukbap come back up your esophagus lol.
-A superhuman high school girl really exists...!
-Namen!
└ NamenNamenNamenNamenNamen
└ Namen
└ Gasp...! I worship you! Namen lol
└ What is this supposed to be?
[If you love Adella, upvote this lol][85]
I think these two should take down Mephisto together and film a thick, sticky, soft, squishy, slippery yuri-beam yas scene, so upvote lol.
[Comments]
-LMAOOOOOOOOOO
-Goodbye, gay boy lolㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-(OP): ???
-LMAOOOOOOOOOO
-LMAOㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ Screenshot saved; I even copied it all into a PPT.
-Mod, don't take this down. I warned you lol.
-Dad, why do people laugh when they see this post?
└ Son, think about why Han Moon-cheol TV has been popular for decades.
└ Did you get hit by a truck called “minor”? LMAOOOOOOOOOO
-People still don't know NoName is a minor?
└ Wait, seriously? Not a retired officer around sixty?
└ I'd sooner believe she had reversed aging and become young again lol.
The otherworldly play that made the impossible possible had already raised countless people's expectations to the sky, but those expectations were about to collapse in the worst possible way.
In the final chapter, with only the final boss remaining, NoName was kicked out of the game.
If she had succeeded, the viewers could have been among those who witnessed an event that would never be repeated in history.
But the emptiness that swept over them when they had to end the game without even getting a chance like this was impossible to put into words.
I can't let it end without doing anything.
[I'm thinking of going to Wearsoft and holding a one-person protest myself. Is anyone interested in joining me?]
It was a shitpost impulsively written by a young man, but no one could have anticipated that it would cause such a ripple.
Contrary to people's concerns, the hastily assembled protest group operated in an organized manner, and the story gradually gained momentum as foreign media took notice of the solidarity of the Korean people.
And two days later, when the stock price of the holding company, Intellience Wearsoft (INCE), plunged 48 percent from the previous trading day, people dubbed it “Mephisto's Wednesday.”
* * *
‘Something feels off.’
For the past week, things had been so peaceful that it was practically as if nothing had happened at all.
The everyday routine, set against my increasingly complicated feelings, felt vaguely uncomfortable.
At the Academy, nothing much had been discussed except for guidance about the upcoming field trip.
There was truly nothing at all for me to learn academically, but watching the children with eager eyes was the only joy in my life.
Yuna and Haru seemed to have grown much closer after the pajama party. Before I knew it, I found myself chatting naturally with them among the group.
I sent a few more inquiries to Wearsoft, but they still hadn't responded at all.
When I first received a generic response automatically generated by AI, I was beyond angry—I was practically dumbfounded.
They said my account hadn't been suspended, but that my play records might disappear during the server restoration process and asked for my understanding. To make it worse, even though I had clearly asked my question in Korean, the reply came back entirely in English.
And then the weekend came again.
When your mind and body are tangled up, seek familiarity.
So I reread the journals I'd skimmed through yesterday from the beginning, and spent several hours verifying the eighty percent of Alphonse's unique magic that remained uninterpreted, trying to reproduce it.
In the end, unable to decide on anything, I filled the bathtub with hot water. Maybe emptying my mind while bathing would help me feel a little more at ease.
Swoooosh—
My reflection in the mirror looked a little uncanny.
Really small.
Everything was small, as though someone had used Photoshop to shrink an entire person while preserving their proportions.
The skin that hadn't seen sunlight in a long time was white as marble yet smooth, and looked soft enough to yield beneath a touch.
And that thin, slender neck looked so fragile that I wondered if it might burst if I wrapped one hand around it and squeezed.
Sharp eyes whose depths were impossible to discern quietly stared back at each other. Why did that face look so full of pent-up dissatisfaction?
Wouldn't other kids be frightened if they saw me?
‘Maybe I should live with a smile on my face, at least sometimes.’
I forced the corners of my mouth upward into a smile, but it looked even stranger, so I stopped.
Hot steam rose in wisps from the surface of the water.
The bathroom mirror gradually turned hazy. The naked body revealed after I took off my clothes was gradually losing its form as well.
“Ah, hot...!”
When I dipped my toes into the water, I felt their delicate skin swelling red from the heat.
I turned the faucet back toward lukewarm and decided to sit on the edge of the tub and kill time on my phone until the water cooled a little.
Other than the occasional messages from Seomaru fawning over me, I had fewer contacts than I expected.
I hadn't exchanged contact information with every single one of my Academy friends, and given my habit of rarely going outside, the result was only natural.
Once I confirmed that the water had reached a satisfactory temperature, I slid my body into the tub and, as a last resort, logged on to TGD, a personal community.
[Day 6 of praying for NoName's return][8] - ❤️
I announced that I was alive by clicking the heart on the topmost post.
The quick-witted viewers immediately began posting new messages one after another.
“At this point, I can't not stream.”
[Streaming begins: 0:00:01 – NoName]