The scene of him dodging a melee DPS’s punches with swish swish footwork without letting a single hit land, then lifting the Aque into the air, was actually pretty comical when you were not the one on the receiving end.
He really was absurdly good.
And Yeonjun knew full well just how hard it was to play like that without taking even one hit, since he too had once raised a DPS whose health bar was thin as paper.
Judging by the way he talked, he still seemed like a kid.
How on earth had he ended up maining that?
Was it the spirit of challenge that came with youth?
Never even dreaming that he himself might be the reason for it, Yeonjun gave a bitter smile as he thought of the people he used to run siege battles with back when he had been making a name for himself.
They were probably all managing their own lives and doing other things now.
And yet there had once been a time when he saw them so constantly he was sick of it, when the first thing he did after sunrise was show his face there again day after day.
Back then, they had been so close it was as if they were comrades who could not live without one another, and now he did not even know how any of them were doing.
Time really was merciless.
What a good time of life.
At the uproar that felt like a glimpse of his own past, a faint curve touched the corner of Yeonjun’s mouth.
Was he jealous?
Of course he was.
It was not so much that he envied Haesal’s game skill or the way he could stir the whole community into a frenzy…
It was that he envied being in a period of life where it was okay to throw yourself that completely into a game.
For Yeonjun, that time had already passed.
A very short stretch in his life, only two years long.
If it turned out that Haesal too was actually grinding down his real life and ruining his future, then Yeonjun probably would not envy him at all, but that was something he did not know yet.
Anyway, at that level, there had to be no shortage of people everywhere pestering him with things like, “Come raid with us,” or, “Just do one friendly match with us.”
So why was he taking such good care of some bootleg former Named?
He really was a strange person.
Was that why he said he still respected a Named who was already past his prime?
That, in Yeonjun’s mind, Haesal’s image had risen from “a user with too much free time who is annoyingly nice” to roughly “a player who’s good at the game and is burdensomely nice” was, likewise, something Haein had no way of knowing.
After the day Yeonjun learned that Haein was a hot star setting the server board on fire, the variety of items arriving in Ignis’s mailbox increased.
Up until then, it had been nothing but level-appropriate potions and gear, but now one food item a day was being delivered.
‘Is he sending these because I said I was doing codex completion…?’
And these were not just any items, either.
Most of them were foods that had been handed out for events, the kind of things you could no longer easily get from a shop.
They were too trivial to be sold on the market board, and usually just lay asleep in the storage of long-time players, so just what kind of talent had he used to dig them up and send them over?
Yeonjun right-clicked the icon for the 2015 Chuseok commemorative Five-Color Tteokguk and pressed the Use button, adding the item to the codex.
Thanks to that, he really was filling out the food codex faster than he had expected, but…
He felt bad just sitting there taking and consuming it all, and guilt kept poking at Yeonjun’s conscience.
You’re deceiving a user who’s showing you kindness simply because your nickname overlaps with that of the player he admires.
Isn’t this just the sort of help that could be casually given to anyone?
Yeonjun tried to force himself to ignore the prick of conscience, but once that too dragged past two weeks, he could no longer brush it aside.
If Haesal had at least kept annoying him every three seconds with, “Want to join the guild?” “Guild?” “Guild invite?” then Yeonjun could have just gone cold and gotten irritated.
But once he was told that joining the guild would be difficult, he gave up cleanly, and the fact that he knew how to keep that distance, doing nothing more than supporting him from afar with leveling items, wore down Yeonjun’s guard by the tiniest sliver.
‘What kind of repayment can I even make…?’
Before he knew it, Yeonjun was only single digits away from max level, and there he was, thinking it over in an unpopular map so empty it was practically a ghost town.
All the old rare items he used to own had long since been sold off, and there was no way a returnee with shabby finances would have anything worth giving to a ranker as a gift.
But at the same time, giving him a cash item felt like that could burden him in its own way too.
This is a problem…
After thinking it over for a while, Yeonjun opened up the crafting recipe book.
Then he checked what craftable items he had access to.
‘Ah.’
After rummaging around for quite a while, one pretty decent item caught his eye.
[Crafted Item]
[Housing]
[Flame Music Box]
[Play Count Limit]
[99/99]
[- A music box that vividly preserves the heat of the battlefield where the Flame Dragon Salamander was subdued.]
There were two reasons this item was special.
First, because the “recipe book,” which qualified someone to craft it, had only been given out as an event reward to the first ten teams to clear the raid called the “Flame Labyrinth,” also known at the time as the Flame Palace.
Since the Flame Labyrinth was a six-man special raid, that meant there were only sixty people per server who could make it, so even back when it first came out, it had been a fairly rare item.
There had also been a lot of people who left the recipe book sitting unused in storage because they planned to sell it later once it became expensive.
Now, most of those sixty had probably quit, transferred to other servers, or vanished altogether, so it was only natural that the market had completely dried up.
And the second reason was this item’s English name.
[Music box of Ignis]
Embarrassing as it was, even Ignis himself had once liked that English name enough to stack a whole bunch of them in housing he barely even used.
Though he had sold them all when he quit.
Since he had sold quite a few back then, saying he had picked one up before quitting because he was an Ignis fan would not seem all that suspicious.
If someone liked Ignis enough to call himself a hardcore fan, and liked him enough to go this far out of his way for a user with the same nickname, then even if he was not Ignis himself, there was no way he would not like a [Music box of Ignis] with Ignis right there in the name.
Ahem.
With a faint, awkward embarrassment, Yeonjun rummaged around for the materials needed to craft the Flame Music Box.
[- Silver Ingot]
[- Spring]
[- Silver Plate]
Most of them were things that had become low-level items by now, so they were easy enough to get.
But there was one last material mixed in there that was hard to obtain.
‘Would it not be on the market board?’
Yeonjun scratched his cheek for a moment and searched the market board for the problematic material.
[Search: Flame Ebony Lumber]
[Search Results: 0]
Ugh.
Maybe because this too was such an old item, there was none of the material listed on the market board.
It made sense.
Who would still have old raid mats lying around like that…? Nobody even ran it anymore.
On top of that, six-man raids were special raids, so clearing them was not necessary at all for progressing through the main quest.
In other words, aside from back when it was a brand-new raid and people crowded in to challenge it, it had been an abandoned raid that nobody even attempted.
So of course the market for a special material that dropped there at random had dried up completely.
Now there was only one method left.
Yeonjun had to clear it himself and come back out with the lumber as a reward.
The Flame Palace was a level 70 dungeon, so…
At his current stat level, he could probably clear it alone.
This can be done.
With that faint confidence, Yeonjun removed the level restriction check and immediately entered the six-man raid by himself.
The grand BGM that had once thrilled him ten years ago rang out majestically, and after sweeping away the small fry at the entrance like some overpowered protagonist, Yeonjun made it to the boss room in no time.
Going by the level of the trash mobs out front, it felt like the boss should not be that hard to clear either…
But unlike the light mood in which he had started, he soon grew serious.
No one was watching, so you could ask what it even mattered.
But there was still one spectator watching him, and that was himself.
If he did PvP, he had to win, and if he ran raids, he had to play well.
If you asked why, the answer was simple.
It was pride.
That one thing everyone has that they do not want to give up.
Even if people looked down on him at work, even if his home life had been reduced to rubble, even if he had become an insignificant person, he still wanted to play in a way that he would not be ashamed of before himself.
Because the brightest moments in Yeonjun’s life had, after all, been when he was gaming.
As Yeonjun prepared his skills to attack the boss, the floor split open with a crack, and pillars of flame shot up, setting his character ablaze. “Gyaaah!”
[System: The party has been wiped out and will be returned to the beginning.]
?
What exactly is happening right now?
Yeonjun stared blankly at the screen, which had gone black in an instant, then searched the internet for one of his old videos.
[Ignis Flame Palace guide]
And just like that, a long string of videos he could not even remember when he had filmed came up in the search results.
It was time for the Yeonjun of the present to get help from the Yeonjun of the past.
As he carefully watched the guide from the beginning, memory came flooding back fresh.
Ah, right.
At the very start here, hexagon-shaped pillars of fire used to shoot up, and even brushing against them meant instant death.
When we first cleared this, Mangchung had barked that he needed to try the recipe book out right away, so whoever got the lumber had better hand it over on the spot.
The memory slowly resurfaced of how everyone had readily handed the lumber over to Mangchung, who had been the exclusive crafter for Flammer.
And at this part, SouthPoleBear kept messing up, and Noona Chandal had been seriously irritated on voice chat, telling him to get it together.
Maybe that part had all been edited out, because there were no voices now, only the background music resounding grandly.
At memories that had now become nothing more than things of the distant past, Yeonjun let out a faint smile without realizing it.
The sight of names that could no longer be seen now, chatting away in a familiar bustle while casually snapping at each other and working through the raid together, looked genuinely fun.
Which made sense because it really had been fun?
By the time the short fifteen-minute video was nearing its end, the corners of Yeonjun’s eyes were stinging before he realized it.
It was less sadness that he could not go back to that time, and more regret over how quickly a period that had once felt like it would never end had passed.
Life was long, and Yeonjun was still young by human standards, not even halfway to the average lifespan yet, but the period in which he had shone most brilliantly had already passed.
No matter how much he regretted it or missed it, that time when he was twenty would not come back.
The days of living without a shadow over him, in the innocent, childish belief that someone would naturally protect him and that there was nothing for him to worry about, were over.
Truthfully, that was the saddest part of all.
The Yeonjun in the video had been an adult only in age, not truly grown up, but the Yeonjun of now was an adult.
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