For the moment, it seemed he felt burdened by being recognized by other people, so Haein could not just blindly latch onto him and pester him.
But that did not mean he could do nothing and simply watch, either.
Once he started entering areas with a decent amount of player traffic, rumors would spread in an instant.
There was no way only one or two guilds would want to recruit that legendary Named, so he could not just sit around idly.
When Haein fell silent for a moment, sitting in front of the monitor and agonizing over it, Suyeong sent a chat message.
[Guild/Middle-Aged Hunter: ? What]
[Guild/Middle-Aged Hunter: Need help with something?]
But if he could not even resolve a trial of this level on his own, he would be too ashamed to stand proudly before Ignis.
Haein immediately shook his head.
[Guild/DoHaesal: No no]
[Guild/DoHaesal: I’m trying to solve it myself]
[Guild/DoHaesal: I’m in the middle of actually thinking]
[Guild/Middle-Aged Hunter: Is that so;]
[Guild/Middle-Aged Hunter: Sounds like some fucking who-asked shit;]
To settle himself for a moment, Haein pulled up a video that was good to watch at times like this.
Whenever his mind felt completely blocked and no good ideas came to him, it helped to watch Ignis’s Ironblood Aigos boss raid video.
Ignis’s Tower of Agony climbing videos never got old no matter how many times he watched them, but among them, Aigos, the boss of the 40th floor, was even more special.
Because there was a scene where Ignis, who almost never got smacked around by bosses, took a critical hit at around the 2:19 mark and lost fully half his health.
After one fatal mistake, he was even inflicted with a damage-increase debuff, leaving him in a situation where one more hit would send him all the way back to the first floor.
In a situation where an ordinary person would get nervous and make mistakes they normally never would, Ignis used the opening created by the phase change to recover his momentum and turn the tide.
And in the end, as always, there was the perfect ending with the boss monster’s defeat.
Haein counted the 40th-floor boss video among those legendary plays that made his chest swell no matter how many times he watched it.
Ah, of course, it was not that any of the other videos were lacking.
It was just that among them, there were naturally some that made your heart race in a special way.
Seeing Haein go quiet, Suyeong instinctively realized, This bastard went off to watch videos again.
Same old pattern.
He shot him a half-contemptuous look.
Well… it was his life, so he would deal with it himself, but…
From everything Suyeong had seen while watching Haein all this time, there had been no shortage of absurd episodes.
Just think about high school alone.
Right after starting school, he got confessed to by some girl from another class he barely even knew, and Suyeong had naturally assumed he would reject her.
The memory of how shocked he was when Haein readily accepted was still vivid.
Wow, so this Ignis-obsessed bastard really is dating?
That thought immediately became meaningless when he watched him spend all day at school showing his girlfriend Ignis gameplay videos on his phone in the name of spending time with her, and he had recoiled in horror, thinking, This guy is the real thing.
In other words, the reason he had accepted her confession was not because he genuinely wanted to date, or because he liked her.
When Suyeong found out it was solely for the purpose of converting her to Ignis, it seemed like there was a real need to do something about his fantasies and obsession with Ignis, if only for the sake of restoring this lunatic to normal.
Up until now, Ignis had been an unknown existence who had vanished somewhere out of reach, so maybe that had made it impossible.
But now he had become a real existence whom he could contact if he tried hard enough, so if that idiot found even some excuse to be disappointed in Ignis, maybe he would finally let go of that abnormal obsession.
After scratching his head for a moment, Suyeong shook it.
Forget it.
It was his life, so he could deal with it himself.
His immediate curiosity won out over the friendship of a childhood friend whose family had been close with his since their parents’ generation.
If he came back rejected, I’m gonna give him so much shit.
“So after making that much of a fuss, you finally quit stanning too.”
With that much thought as his conclusion, Suyeong went back to what he had been doing.
“Hmm…”
After receiving gear from DoHaesal through the mail and sending a message of thanks, Yeonjun kept receiving new gear from DoHaesal in step with the pace of his leveling.
Since Yeonjun’s playtime was not all that long, the days continued with him steadily gaining as many as three levels a day, or at least one, and on weekends he could play a bit more generously, so with level 100 already just ahead of him, he had already received about four full sets of gear from DoHaesal.
He had not originally planned to level that fast.
But as he kept playing, he got hooked, and after coming home drained from work, he was squeezing out whatever time he had left to spend on the game.
Well, there was nothing he particularly had to do right now, and he had no plans to change jobs, so there was no need for self-improvement.
A little entertainment like this was probably fine.
Yeonjun thought this as he looked disdainfully at coworkers from other departments who were always going out drinking and then making their hangovers painfully obvious the next day.
Compared to hobbies like that, which cost money and wrecked your health, a game company employee spending two or three hours after work on his own company’s game was nothing at all.
Far from the fact that until now he had never even dreamed of returning and had kept his distance from it, the world of Erha Online, which he was enjoying again for the first time in a long while, really did have the kind of fun that could make his roughly twenty-year-old self pour most of his time into it.
So much so that, with how often he kept at it until well past midnight, he was starting to think he needed to be careful.
To be honest, one reason he had been able to get so immersed was also thanks to the gear he had received from Haesal.
What was it that reduced the fun of a game?
Repetitive grinding and bullshit luck-based elements wore players out.
If there was an instance dungeon you could move on from without ever needing to play again once you got the gear in one go, but instead you were spending thirty or forty minutes rerunning it solely to get a single piece of equipment, then of course you were bound to get sick and tired of it.
Since he could easily skip that whole process with the crafted gear Haesal had sent him, there was no need to revisit dungeons he had already cleared, and he could focus immediately on clearing the main quest and leveling up.
Honestly, both his body and mind felt at ease.
That much he could not deny.
‘Still, I shouldn’t get used to depending on him like this…’
Contrary to his worry that Haesal might keep following him around like a stalker and stubbornly cling to him, asking whether he had any intention of joining the guild, Haesal neither whispered him first nor came looking for him in the fields where Yeonjun was playing, except when he was sending gear through the mail.
It really was just the sort of small unsolicited help you give a newbie while they are leveling.
Now that he was level 100, what kind of repayment could he possibly offer to a max-level ranker from a major guild?
Still, since he was receiving help, he could not just take it and pretend nothing had happened.
After thinking it over for a bit, Yeonjun decided that at least he should offer a proper thank-you.
But what awaited him was an entirely unexpected situation.
[Offline]
[DoHaesal]
Every time Yeonjun checked his mailbox and then looked for Haesal on his friend list to thank him, Haesal’s connection status was marked [Offline].
What was this?
There was no way a ranker would be this completely absent during prime time.
Separate from Yeonjun’s puzzlement, users marked [Offline] could not receive whispers or party invitations.
Maybe something had come up during this time slot and he logged in at different hours.
Since he could not verify someone else’s circumstances one by one, Yeonjun decided not to think too deeply about it.
Still, he kept waiting to see when Haein would finally be on at the same time.
In the meantime, Yeonjun received two more mails from Haein and quickly succeeded in breaking past level 110.
[Mailbox]
[Sender] DoHaesal
[Congratulations on reaching level 110! If there’s anything else you need, feel free to whisper me anytime :).]
[Attached Items]
[Otherworld Emperor Coat]
[Otherworld Emperor Rapier]
[Otherworld Emperor Boots]
[Otherworld Emperor Gloves]
[Otherworld Emperor Trousers]
No, I don’t need anything else.
Just log in already.
How am I supposed to whisper you when you never log in?
He was sending replies of thanks to the mail without fail, but no response ever came back.
Yeonjun wanted to thank him directly, not through one-sided messages.
Because of work, Yeonjun could not possibly log in before 9 p.m. no matter how much he squeezed his time, so just to wait for DoHaesal, he even stayed up until 2 a.m. once.
Even then, Haesal’s connection status was always [Offline].
Wasn’t this guy supposed to be a ranker?
Then when the hell did he do ranking matches or siege battles?
After looking into it, Yeonjun confirmed that DoHaesal was the current lord of Parel Castle, and learned that Parel Castle’s regular siege battle schedule was on Fridays.
‘If it’s Parel Castle…’
It was the very castle he had held as lord the entire time after driving out Bingsu and taking it over, right up until he quit the game against his own will.
‘…’
Yeonjun recalled how DoHaesal had first approached him, saying he was a hardcore fan of Ignis.
Surely he had not taken Parel Castle too as part of his fangirling over Ignis, had he?
Yeonjun immediately shook his head.
Taking a castle and managing it was such a pain in the ass.
Why would anyone take a castle they did not even need for such a stupid reason?
Seriously, at least think something that makes sense.
Muttering to himself not to spiral into self-conscious delusion and to just see the light already, Yeonjun let out a hollow laugh.
Rather than consciously reading into it and getting suspicious for no reason, it was a hundred times better to just think of it as coincidence.
And meanwhile, on the server board of the game community Yeonjun no longer checked, all kinds of rampant rumors about Haesal were beginning to billow and spread.
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