And the time when adults ought to be asleep was fast approaching.
[11:26][PM]
Now was not the time for this.
If he wanted to get the wood quickly, he needed to grind through runs and get out.
Barely pulling himself together, Yeonjun ran from the restart point back to the boss room.
After going over the pattern sequence once in his head, he charged at the boss monster again.
First, it fired an instant-kill attack straight ahead at the target it had been hit by.
A long horizontal blaze skimmed low across the ground as it flew toward his character.
This one could be easily avoided with a standing jump.
Next, a semicircular danger zone spread across the floor, and the ground flashed.
Yeonjun quickly launched a melee attack skill at the boss.
[System: <Flame Slash>]
After the long blade cleanly cut across the boss’s torso, and before the danger zone that had appeared first could explode, another zone spread behind him too, leaving no room to plant his feet.
Conscious that the front danger zone and the back danger zone would explode with about a three-second gap between them, Yeonjun stepped back for a moment, then immediately stuck back to the boss with a charge skill and slashed again.
Having slipped out of the hit range by the narrowest possible margin, his character leisurely used another melee skill and raised the stack of the [Ignition] buff state to stage 2.
A countdown showing the remaining time, 10 seconds, blinked beneath the buff.
That meant he had to land another melee attack within 10 seconds in order to keep the buff active.
Ignition, counted as the core of Flammer play, was the key thing that had made Yeonjun be called the living legend of Flammer.
Stage 1 lasted 30 seconds, stage 2 lasted 10 seconds, and stage 3 lasted 5 seconds, and the only way to maintain the stage was to land a melee attack within that duration.
Which was easy to say.
Once you were dodging boss attacks and constantly moving according to gimmick patterns, maintaining the stack level was by no means easy.
There had even been talk that, in solo play, for the sake of your mental health, it was better to think of stage 3 as a buff you could only hope to see at the very end of a combo chain skill, and that stage 2 was the real maximum.
But the difficulty of maintaining stage 3 only applied when you were solo, or when there was no one helping you.
If Storm Haste gave the [Fair Wind] buff, which granted a class-specific synergy effect to nearby targets, then even the attacks dealt by Storm Haste were counted toward maintaining the stack, so stage 3 could be kept up without much difficulty.
That was the theory, anyway.
Yeonjun had never once received the benefit of Fair Wind in his life.
He had never needed it.
Even right up until before he quit, he had never once let his stacks drop while dodging every existing gimmick and attack.
After that, the boss let out a roar and a knockback, which he easily blocked with a defensive skill, and when he landed another melee combo, he was able to overpower it with sheer damage and claim the clear rewards in under five minutes.
For a moment, Yeonjun’s heart raced from the fact that it had been so long since he had tasted raid gimmicks that actually felt like raid gimmicks, but then he calmed himself down.
With defense and attack power having gone up, this was the kind of difficulty where even a beginner could clear it easily as long as they just dodged the instant-kill attacks.
If, after running this place so many times back in his active days, he still made mistakes or failed to speed-clear it, then he ought to be ashamed of using the nickname Ignis at all.
To keep any pointless desire for raids from creeping out of some corner of his heart, Yeonjun thought of what had happened with Saekyeonpil.
‘You already saw perfectly well what happens if you think you’re at anything close to the level you were ten years ago.’
As he forced himself to settle down and let out a sigh, a different kind of emptiness now knocked against his heart.
A boss that, back in the day, had taken six people scrambling around like they were peeling potatoes to escape the flamethrower pattern and abuse the gimmicks against it, had now become something a single leveling character, not even at current max level, could kill alone.
When Flame Palace had first been updated, the level cap had been 70, and now Yeonjun was level 133, so in truth it was only natural that he could solo it, and yet it was hard to hide how regretful he felt.
It was not just Yeonjun who had become a tiger with its teeth pulled.
The bosses that ten-years-ago Yeonjun had challenged were the same.
Well, what does it matter if I feel regret over it?
With a self-mocking laugh, Yeonjun re-entered Flame Palace and started clearing it again, faster than before.
Once he had cleared it once, he got used to it quickly, and he could finish it faster and more easily than last time.
As his attack power had risen, there were many cases where patterns got skipped or disappeared altogether, so even solo, it was much easier than when he had cleared it in its prime.
Had he run it about six times like that?
From inside the reward chest, a pitch-black piece of lumber rolled out.
Ah, finally, it came out.
Having obtained the material he wanted, Yeonjun left Flame Palace without a second thought and opened the crafting recipe book.
The crafting process was not difficult, and by the time he finished it, the Flame Music Box item had been completed just before midnight.
‘I hope he likes it…’
Honestly, it would be awkward if Haesal already had one.
With half anticipation and half worry, Yeonjun sent Haesal a mail.
The attached item in the mailbox gave off a clear light and sparkled.
It felt somehow embarrassing to whisper and ask him to check the mail just because he had sent it.
What if he misunderstood and thought Yeonjun had done something huge as repayment?
Judged coldly, what Yeonjun had sent was, for high-end content, nothing more than useless junk.
Since I sent it, let’s log off now.
Yeonjun had just started sliding the mouse toward the Log Out button when whispers began pouring in from Haesal, whose name had definitely looked gray in the friend list.
[Whisper/DoHaesal: Ignis????]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: I checked the mail, but???]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: Did you make this yourself????]
Before he had even finished reading all the chat content, the impression Yeonjun felt was simple.
Why are there so many question marks?
Yeonjun lied calmly.
[Whisper/Ignis: I didn’t make that]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: ?????? (item link)]
The reason Haesal had sent the link was obvious.
Because the four letters of Ignis were shining there clearly in the crafter field.
[Whisper/Ignis: Yeah, I didn’t make that]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: ????]
[Whisper/Ignis: It’s one of the ones Ignis made that I happened to have]
In truth, if someone dug into the item log, they would be able to tell at a glance from the crafting year and month that it was all a lie, but…
Who cared?
Only officials could look into the item log in the first place.
There was no way Haesal could check it.
So since, from the level of an ordinary user, it was information that could never be verified anyway, Yeonjun lied shamelessly and confidently.
No, strictly speaking, was it even a lie?
That Ignis had made it, and that he had possessed it before handing it over, even if only for about ten minutes, were both true.
[Whisper/DoHaesal: ????]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: Is it really okay for you to give me something this valuable????]
No, you’ve given me way more valuable odds and ends than this.
Growing embarrassed for no reason, Yeonjun typed quickly.
[Whisper/Ignis: It’s not that valuable]
[Whisper/Ignis: Ignis sold a ton of these before quitting]
It could not be helped.
All they had was the house.
His father had been steadily paying down the remaining mortgage little by little, but once he collapsed, they immediately needed living expenses, and even tuition had become precarious, so Yeonjun had been desperate to scrape together as much cash as possible.
[Whisper/DoHaesal: Even so, there aren’t any listed on the market right now]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: Thank you so much, really ㅠㅠ]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: What I did for you was nothing]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: I like this so much I feel bad even accepting it ㅠㅠㅠㅠ]
At the rapidly climbing chat, Yeonjun’s face flushed hot.
He’s probably just saying that to be polite, right?
Getting embarrassed for no reason, he tried to change the subject and ended up bringing up a sentence he really should not have let slip.
[Whisper/Ignis: Um… I’m worried this might be a rude question]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: Ah yep yep]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: It’s okay!]
No, you haven’t even heard what it is yet.
Yeonjun drew in a short breath and typed.
[Whisper/Ignis: Why do you like Ignis that much, Haesal-nim?]
[Whisper/Ignis: There were a lot of other Nameds active around the same time too]
He understood that Ignis had symbolic weight because he had been such an overwhelming Named in the early days of the game.
But after the reboot, the player base had been thoroughly replaced, and now most people truly did not even remember him anymore.
If some scraper channel made a clickbait video titled something like, “What Ignis is up to now,” then there would probably be plenty of people who clicked just out of curiosity over how badly some old game Named had ended up fucked, but this was not the kind of era where a fan this fervent ought to still be around.
The fact that, even after raising this character to level 133, the only person who had recognized him enough to whisper him personally, party with him, or invite him to a guild was Haesal alone was proof enough.
This guy really was uniquely persistent, excessive, and weird.
[Whisper/DoHaesal: !]
Before Yeonjun even had time to feel unsettled by that lone, neatly stamped exclamation mark, he tilted his head in puzzlement.
[Whisper/DoHaesal: No, Ignis is different]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: The clear records are clear records, sure, but]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: Once you know what happened to the other Nameds you mentioned]
[Whisper/DoHaesal: It can only be Ignis, all the more]
At Haesal’s firm attitude, Yeonjun asked back, feeling puzzled.
[Whisper/Ignis: What happened to the others?]
Had they sold their accounts after quitting, and then an impersonator gone around scamming people or something?
That was roughly the kind of scandal he had imagined, but what he heard from Haesal about the former Nameds’ later lives was truly a spectacle.
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