Episode 49

It was an amount of HP I normally would have shaved off in no time, and then some, yet the number stubbornly refused to drop to 1. I grew more and more impatient, and as if to speak for my state of mind, the sound of my keyboard pounding grew louder and louder through my headset.

I pressed down with all my strength, as though hitting the keys harder would add extra damage. Perhaps my character understood how I felt, because it managed to rally and reduce the boss’s HP to 1%.

Just as its HP had fallen, the casting bar was almost full. If we don’t clear this, I’m lying down in protest. I chewed at my lip, pressuring myself.

Once it dropped below 1%, it began displaying decimals, and the steadily decreasing HP—0.9%, 0.8%—stood out all the more. The number fell at a constant pace, and the cast, too, raced toward its end at a constant speed.

0.6.

0.5.

0.4.

0.3.

0.2.

0.1.

I recited the numbers in my head like a countdown. And in the very instant that 0.1 dropped to the 0 we had wanted so desperately, the boss stopped casting. It was right before the cast finished. With a gap so narrow it wouldn’t have been an exaggeration to say only a single pixel remained before the wipe mechanic went off, the boss halted its cast, even stopped the motion of its fingers tickling the air, and lowered its arm powerlessly. At some point, even the background music that had been gnawing at my nerves had stopped, leaving everything silent.

The wings that had copied my appearance gradually crumbled from the bottom upward. Retake’s remained as they were; only mine turned to dust and vanished. Then, the nameless boss, whose face had always been expressionless and bored, sneered for the first time, as if we were laughable.

In the next instant, with a sound that stabbed into my eardrums like tinnitus, the screen turned white.

Wincing at the sudden light attack, I hurriedly checked the monitor as soon as the screen darkened again. Before the screen had flashed, all it had shown was an uncertain scene where I couldn’t possibly tell whether we had cleared it or failed.

What was waiting for me was……

[Error: Unable to connect to server. (??null?)]

A system window floating on the dark screen.

[Error: Unable to connect to server. (??null?)]

Error.

Unable to connect to server.

……Unable to connect to server.

I slowly moved the mouse and pressed the confirmation button on the message saying I couldn’t connect to the server. To be precise, I was pressing it when, on impulse, I slammed my fist down on the mouse.

We get disconnected out of nowhere at 0% on the wipe mechanic? Are you serious? Are you insane? So did we clear just now or not? If we cleared and got kicked like this, what happens? Don’t tell me Retake got kicked too. If both of us got booted from the server, the boss’s aggro drops, so doesn’t it reset? Fuck, if that’s really what happened, I swear I’ll go lie down in the game company’s lobby like the worst kind of customer and run my mouth all day.

I propped my forehead on my fist and steadied my breathing, which had grown ragged along with my surging emotions. Right. It had already happened anyway, and since we had seen all the way to the wipe mechanic, even if it reset, we could definitely clear on the next try. We were fully proficient with all the early and mid-phase mechanics, we knew how to handle the sleeve-stuffing mechanic, and we knew the floor AoEs in the final phase had their colors reversed. All that was left was to clear it, so wasn’t this something to be happy about?

I was not happy at all. We could have cleared it. Fuck.

As I did nothing and quietly waited for my anger to settle, the reason that had shriveled under its force began to revive little by little.

That reason raised a question in my head. But had I ever been disconnected like this in the middle of a dungeon before?

The moment that thought occurred to me, my head shot up. Come to think of it, the final boss had displayed an unimaginable mechanic that used the “system.” That same boss had smiled unpleasantly as if it had been aiming for this the moment its HP hit 0%, the screen had flashed, and an error message saying I couldn’t connect to the server had appeared.

What if this was the wipe mechanic? If it wasn’t a server error, but the result of failing to clear the boss, then the story changed a bit. It would mean we hadn’t been unfairly robbed of the clear, but wiped because our damage was lacking or we hadn’t met the conditions.

As I calmly retraced the situation, my rage had faded before I knew it, and anticipation, a slight chill, and a subtle sense of resentment toward the game company filled its place. First, I grabbed the mouse and hurriedly clicked to launch the game.

I had to check whether my guess was right or not. But even when I pressed the left button with my index finger, there was no clicking sound, nor even the sensation of it being pressed. When I picked up the mouse and inspected it, the left button, apparently broken from when I’d punched it earlier, was dangling like a torn-off fingernail. Weak bastard.

With hurried hands, I opened my desk drawers here and there, found the spare mouse I’d bought, and swapped it in. I shoved the broken mouse roughly to the side, then immediately moved the cursor to the auxiliary monitor and brought up Retake’s streaming window, which I had minimized. It was to grasp the situation while the game relaunched.

As if to prove I hadn’t been kicked due to a server error, Retake was still playing just fine. That lent weight to the assumption that the “unable to connect to server” message was part of the wipe mechanic’s presentation. Though why I alone had been kicked remained unknown.

On top of that, Retake was still alive. Seeing that, the first thought that flashed through my mind was, “Did we clear?” But I couldn’t be certain. Retake was alive, yes, but the situation shown on the stream was unfolding strangely.

Judging by the boss collapsed on the floor, the battle seemed to be over, but Retake’s character was afflicted with a status abnormality and sat with one hand on the ground, unable to move.

In the place where the status abnormality icon should have been, there was a black icon I had never seen before, with no indication of how many seconds remained. Retake had noticed it too and was hovering the cursor over the icon. In the status abnormality description window, only the incomprehensible number “412” was written there by itself.

It was extremely suspicious that even though the boss had clearly fallen, Retake was afflicted with an unfamiliar status abnormality and couldn’t move. But the strangest point was something else entirely. My character was moving.

Hadn’t I definitely been disconnected? Bewildered, I looked down at my two hands, then looked at the monitor as well. My hands were politely clenched into fists, waiting for the game to connect, and on the monitor, the game had just launched and entered the character selection screen.

What was more, when I looked at the party list on the stream, the nickname Honeybun was blacked out as if to prove it had logged off. No matter how you looked at it, that meant the person controlling Honeybun wasn’t in the game.

Under the circumstances, my character shouldn’t have been moving, yet it creaked forward precariously, like a baby taking its very first steps.

The place where the ownerless Honeybun laboriously stepped forward, one step at a time, was none other than in front of Abrea. Perhaps my character approaching her with that somewhat grotesque gait was chilling, because Abrea backed away with all the color drained from her face. But had she only taken two or three steps back? Adam stretched out an arm to block Abrea’s back, preventing her from retreating any farther, and she was caught by Honeybun.

[- Abrea: ]

— “What…… is this! Th…… no……. Hey, ……your body……! Hey!”

For some unfathomable reason, the script where dialogue should have been displayed had only the name written, perfectly blank without a single character of text. On top of that, perhaps because there was quite a distance between Abrea and Retake, I couldn’t hear what she was shouting.

Retake hurriedly went into the system settings and adjusted the volume. He raised the character voice volume to the maximum and pressed apply, but Abrea, who had been screaming in horror, had already fallen silent. It wasn’t that she wasn’t saying anything. Whether she had lowered her voice or not, it was so faint that I could barely tell someone was speaking at all.

The script was still blank, and Abrea was too far away for her words to be heard. It was probably a story presentation meant to stir the player’s curiosity, but that almost-audible, not-quite-audible sound scraped and scratched at the already impatient temperament of a Korean. In games, wasn’t the player usually a superhuman who could miraculously hear even supporting NPCs whispering schemes in low voices?

Deciding I wouldn’t gain anything by continuing to stare at footage I couldn’t even hear properly, I returned to the game monitor, clicked on the Honeybun character, and connected to the server. I worried another error message might appear, but fortunately, no such thing happened. A perfectly ordinary loading screen with an illustration simply appeared.