9 I Don’t Shy Away from Fights

Shall I tell you a story from a little while ago?

[Estacia Latias de Kaizen, Imperial Princess, one day I’ll crucify you and burn you in front of the citizens of the Empire.]

Talking about the imperial family is putting me in a terrible mood right now, so let’s go back even further.

I lived alone with the woman who gave birth to me in a single semi-basement room.

I don’t know whether she had been there since I was born or moved there when I was very young.

In my oldest memory, the child was crying out desperately. But in that smoke-filled space, the woman never answered my desperate cries.

I could never leave the single semi-basement room. My legs were the problem.

The exact diagnosis was hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), though I only learned that later, after I became interested in the field.

The woman’s emotions were always filled with hatred.

She hated the cramped semi-basement, the drunks who got intoxicated at dawn and shouted at the top of their lungs, me, who was nothing but a burden, and, in the end, herself.

When everyone else was choosing the schoolbags they would first carry with their parents, she suddenly disappeared.

I hadn’t cried from exhaustion even once since I was three, but I had never cried as long as I did that day.

Thanks to crying so desperately that my throat bled, I was miraculously rescued three days later.

I learned the harshness of the world at a very young age.

From society’s perspective, I was a useless person.

Wherever I went, I was nothing but a burden and an object of hatred.

Unless I had something special to offer them, they would have abandoned me coldly at any time.

Fortunately, I was more mature than my peers, and I held that up as my own strength.

I consoled myself by thinking that if I had been born in 10,000 B.C., I would have been destined to fall off a cliff and die the moment I was born, and I became obsessed with studying.

I didn’t need to be overwhelmingly good. Just as a seventh grader learning first-grade math would find everything easy, I decided to get ahead of everyone else.

Even though I knew they would catch up someday, I couldn’t give up.

But I had been overlooking society. The world we live in wasn’t something as simple as a contest of knowledge.

Even if scholarships covered my tuition, where would I sleep? What would I eat?

While other people were studying, I had no choice but to scour every corner of the city, desperately looking for somewhere I could work.

And when my first paycheck was deposited into my bank account, I despaired.

With the creditors’ collection notices and my mother officially declared missing, the inheritance process began when I disposed of the semi-basement room, and I ended up inheriting 1.243 billion won in debt that I hadn’t even known she had.

That day, I quietly burst into tears for the last time.

If there really was such a thing as a next life, I wanted to live as the richest person in the world.

* * *

“Name, the game started! What should I buy first?”

Arin clung to me again, looking like she was about to cry.

Right—in contrast, what the game demanded of me was clear.

“A sorcerer’s staff and one potion. Stick close to me.”

The goal was to destroy the enemy camp’s fortress. The penalties inflicted on both sides in the process were equal.

The simpler things were, the clearer my head felt. That had been the secret to surviving my third life of getting screwed over by fate.

A pleasant breeze rustled past. There were a few clouds, but so what?

“Hello, Riri.”

“Suuuuurp? Don’t misunderstand, I absolutely wasn’t asleep! Oh my? You know my name?”

Even though my three teammates were still in the starting village, I could talk to Riri, the fox merchant. Feeling intrigued, I reached out and patted her head.

“Thanks. I’ll be relying on you again today.”

I handed over five silver coins and slipped the Soul Harvester’s Ring onto my finger. The intermediate potion was thrown in for free.

The air of the battlefield was cold, but refreshing.

“This feels weird! But I feel like I can’t detach from Name.”

Arin had become a fluffy cat and was flying around my head.

“It’s a skill. If you think you want to fall off, you can, but it’ll be dangerous. Stay attached, and shoot arrows when you see an enemy.”

“Okay!”

“Read this for now.”

She was an elementary schooler, so she could at least read, right? I handed her a manual with explanations of the skills.

“I... I’ll try!”

The familiar forest scenery I had seen fifty thousand times unfolded before me. I had memorized exactly where each red-spotted fly agaric was and how many there were.

The jungler who had been waiting at Red welcomed us.

[Lucaliss: Is this really you, NoName?]

So this was how chat normally looked. When I was trapped in the capsule, all the letters had appeared garbled, so I had always played with chat disabled.

After hitting the spawned Red about five times, I headed toward the bottom lane.

The champion I was possessing now was Kai’Sa.

She had the tragic backstory of a girl who was separated from her parents, stranded in the Demon Realm, accepted the power of monsters, and fought desperately to survive and return alive.

Because of that, her entire lower body and part of her upper body were covered in rough, crustacean-like armor.

On the opposing side, a pirate beauty often seen in League of Legends and an anchor-wielding mechanical monster took the front line in the bottom lane.

Soon, six minions faced off.

“Aim your arrows at the red-haired girl. Even if you aim wrong, they’ll home in to some extent, so you should be able to control them.”

“I’ll try!”

The cat fired an arrow in an adorable pose, but it was blocked by a minion and canceled out. Arin made a distressed noise, but I reassured her that it was fine.

At level one, we needed to focus on clearing minions rather than trading damage.

The enemy composition was strong at level two. In other words, if they reached level two first and tried to pressure us, we would be forced to use our skills to clear minions, whether we liked it or not.

Fortunately, the enemy’s level of harassment wasn’t particularly high, either.

Kai’Sa’s skills cleared the minions quickly, and stripping the enemy’s Bone Plating was an added bonus.

The second wave came rushing in. One of our minions from the first wave was still alive.

I turned my body to the side and pretended to retreat. When the enemy tried to finish off the last minion, I unleashed an auto attack and Q on the pirate girl.

The mechanical monster belatedly tried to stop me with its anchor, but I had already anticipated that and pulled back.

The pirate girl lost her composure and instinctively retreated.

As you would expect from people who didn’t yet understand the mechanics of trading, they didn’t seem to realize that backing off here could result in an even greater loss.

I attacked in advance, whittling down their health before the second wave arrived.

As though they couldn’t afford to lose like this, the two suddenly lurched forward.

Judging by the timing, they seemed to be trying to escape the pressure with an unavoidable meteor attack and farm in the meantime.

I stepped forward as though I would accept the attack, then shifted my path to the side again.

The rock didn’t even hurt, and only one of them hit me.

“Arin, heal!”

“Got it!”

My movement speed and attack speed suddenly increased.

Kai’Sa’s stats were excellent at low levels, but her attack range was short.

But once I increased my movement speed, managing a range gap of 25 was nothing.

I landed one auto attack and retreated.

The pirate girl tried to hit me as well, but the distance had already opened up, canceling her attack.

I used that opening to respond with another auto attack and Q.

The two minions I had hit earlier vanished after taking two of the six missiles each. The remaining two were for the girl.

This time, she reacted quickly and answered with an auto attack when I entered her range, but my increased attack speed let me squeeze in one more auto attack.

The six minions that were still alive joined the fight and focused their fire on the pirate girl. By comparison, taking hits from four of them was nothing. The mechanical monster looked completely helpless.

I was about to retreat, thinking I had done enough, when Arin landed an arrow.

“I hit it this time!”

The girl irritably complained at her support.

Just as I finished clearing the remaining minions and was about to drink a potion,

I realized that the passive stacks on her still hadn’t reset.

[w-Flash-AA-Ignite]

The pirate girl’s Heal and Flash flashed into use in an instant, and Exhaust was applied to me, but I had already used every skill I had.

[(All)MintChocoRiceBurger: She dies to the last tick? For fuck’s sake]

After that, the laning phase proceeded smoothly.

The top and mid laners had racked up ten deaths between them, so a surrender vote was called as soon as the clock hit fifteen minutes. But since I had taken on the mission of winning for Arin, I couldn’t agree to it.

I even took down the mid laner and jungler who came to relieve the bottom lane, bringing the game back to even.

Kai’Sa had both physical and magic builds.

However, the so-called hybrid build, which invested in both, never received much attention because its middling scaling in both directions suppressed an ADC’s ability to carry.

But what if I had an overwhelming lead and piled on item after item?

She transformed into an all-purpose champion capable of close-quarters fighting, poking, initiating, and kiting.

“Waha!!! Let’s go, let’s go! Name, wipe them all out!”

I charged at the enemies at what felt like a speed of over 300 kilometers per hour.

I assassinated Nautilus first, the enemy team’s only guaranteed hard crowd-control champion.

Arin’s ultimate activated in perfect unison without me even saying a word.

The most important thing when playing Kai’Sa in a one-versus-many fight was to reduce the number of enemies as much as possible.

It was true of any champion, but Kai’Sa had to learn to make especially delicate use of it.

[(All)MintChocoRiceBurger: Now she dies to AA-Q-AA too, what the hell lol]

Whether they were tanks, bruisers, or assassins, they all fell equally before Kai’Sa and Yuumi.

Although the top and mid laners had already left the game, leaving us with only three allies, Arin thanked the jungler who had stayed with us this far.

[NameIsTooCute: Thanks for staying until the end!]

[Lucaliss: Thx for the carry, your friend is fucking good for real]

[Lucaliss: Why are you even here with that skill?]

Now that I had kept my promise to Arin, it was time to leave the game.

“Was it fun?”

“Yeah! Can you play with me again sometime?”

“You have homework.”

“Tch... I can do that later.”

“I heard you came late again today and got scolded by Mr. Cheolmin.”

Arin’s entire social life revolved far too much around me. Learning how to get along with other people applied not only to her school friends, but to her teachers as well.

“The PE teacher doesn’t really like me...”

“If you get to school early and clean the classroom in the morning, he’ll like you.”

“Should I?”

“Instead, let’s play a board game when you get out of the capsule.”

“I like that too! Should we play Halli Galli? Or Monopoly?”

“Anything is fine. Wait outside for a moment; I have something to do.”

“Okay, okay! I’ll get everything ready.”

I opened my sparse friend list. I left a short message for the three clan members of ‘PleasePlease’ and the Rammus one-trick jungler I had happened to meet, ‘TryHardWithoutGettingAngry.’

* * *

“Ah, shit. I lost again.”

Minjun pounded the innocent floor. The defeat itself was bad enough, but the streamer’s taunting voice made him even angrier.

[Yeah, keep sniping me~ Winning is all that matters~]

-LMAOOOOOOOOOO

-His form is insane today lol, let’s go for a four-win streak

-Peak

-Getting sniped duplicates your points! Getting sniped duplicates your points!

-Are you really hitting Challenger this week?

-Bliss

-Peak

-At this rate, Fedor will get demoted to Master first lol

Why had BebeGood gotten so good? No, had my own skill declined?

Whenever streamer BebeGood queued into me as an opponent, I always gave it my all. I didn’t want to claim that I had lost because I let my guard down.

Minjun clutched his throbbing head and left the lobby.

[Message from NoName]

‘What?’

Had I seen it wrong?

Minjun rubbed his eyes, but the strange nickname was still visible.

NoName, the ultimate gimmick player who never said a word, let alone typed in chat.

His contact had suddenly been cut off a month ago, and he hadn’t even logged into the game since then.

Everyone thought it was strange, but since he had always been strange, people simply shrugged it off.

Even Mir hyung didn’t seem to have any intention of kicking him from the clan.

“What is this...”

[Thank you all for saving me. I’m living well.]

[Recipients: IlllIllIl, plzplzlqzlq, HyejiMeansNight, TryHardWithoutGettingAngry]

[Sender: NoName]