Chapter 104: Identity Decryption and System Overload

After we finished eating, I offered to help clean up, but Na Eun-hyeok firmly refused. Since there was absolutely nothing left for me to do in this house and the atmosphere felt as suffocatingly uncomfortable as sitting on a bed of nails, I told him I was leaving.

Na Eun-hyeok walked me all the way to the front door to see me off.

“Get home safely, and text me.”

“Uh-huh.”

I nodded at the standard, empty courtesy. What on earth would I gain by contacting Na Eun-hyeok? He was probably just tossing out whatever words came to mind, too. The unfortunate part was that because of what had happened last night, it caused me to overthink things all over again for no reason.

“I’m heading out.”

I forced the words out to shake off the thoughts. Just like I said, nothing happened last night. Nothing could have happened if Na Eun-hyeok and I were to maintain any semblance of a normal relationship.

I slowly turned around. The urge to stay and the desperation to flee coexisted within me. Dragging my heavy feet, I took a step forward. Na Eun-hyeok didn’t follow me out to the elevator.

Right before the elevator doors closed—

“Goodbye, Ble-ya.”

I heard a word that should have been absolutely impossible to hear.

Startled out of my wits, I spun around, but the front door to Na Eun-hyeok’s apartment was already firmly shut. Confusion and sheer panic washed over me. Even though the elevator had arrived, I stood frozen in that exact spot for a long time.

In the entire server, there was only one bastard who called me by that ridiculous nickname.

Sephiroth.

[Hey, I need some advice] I have this crush on a guy who is seriously kind and incredibly well-mannered. But it turns out he’s actually famous in Zelfia for being a total toxic player… His notoriety is so bad that even I’ve heard of his name before T_T What am I supposed to do.. I don’t think I can look at his face anymore.

[Comments] Is he hot? └ Lmao 😂 └ Tsk tsk; Just how toxic is he? You gotta tell us what he did so we can judge. A literal two-faced man, damn. Just be toxic right back with him, let’s go. └ Let’s not increase the population of lunatics in Zelfia, please. └ Ffs why are you guys like this └ But look at the OP’s tone, there’s no way they’re capable of being toxic.. └─ Fact.. └─ People like that might actually be the ones who are truly crazy. └─ OP literally said their crush is kind and polite, you never truly know a person. └── Aren’t you just wearing rose-tinted glasses? Honestly, a person’s in-game personality is their true personality, period. I’ve never seen anyone who acts like a piece of trash in-game be a decent human being in real life. └ Upvoted for facts. └ This is the absolute truth. T_T Hang in there, OP… I’ve had a one-sided crush before so this hits too close to home T_T └ Are you a solo-since-birth? └─ You ****, why are you suddenly picking a fight? └─ Witnessing someone instantly losing their mind over a truth bomb. └─ Lmaooooo └─ Damn, that hit where it hurts. Well, no matter how bad he is, there’s no way he’s on Sephiroth’s level. Just shoot your shot. └ Hahaha └ Sephiroth crosses a line, for real. └ Putting it that way makes everyone else look like a literal saint. └ The Theory of Relativity for Psychopaths lmfaooooo 💀 └ Lmfaorotfl

‘…Well, he is on Sephiroth’s level, because he is Sephiroth.’

Staring down at my phone on my way to school, I let out a heavy sigh. The advice post I had uploaded online was filled with nothing but people completely missing the mark. Or wait, from a certain perspective, did they actually hit the nail right on the head? I hadn’t expected much, but as expected, the internet yielded zero nourishing solutions.

“No way he’s on Sephiroth’s level.” But what if he literally is Sephiroth……?

“Wow……”

A hollow gasp escaped my lips. I wondered if Pandora felt this exact same way when she opened the box. My head spun violently from the truth I had inadvertently stumbled upon. No matter how much I thought about it, reality refused to sink in. Na Eun-hyeok was Sephiroth.

Na Eun-hyeok was Sephiroth?

“My head seriously hurts……”

Stepping into the convenience store on the first floor of the Social Sciences building, I bought another hangover cure. The one I had downed at Na Eun-hyeok’s place hadn’t worked at all. Did he dilute it with water or something? While the Na Eun-hyeok I knew would never do such a thing, the sudden realization that he was Sephiroth made me think that it was entirely within the realm of possibility.

I mean, how could a single human being be so drastically different?

Sitting at the bar counter inside the convenience store, I stared blankly out at the parking lot. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something dark hiding behind the faces of all the busy people passing by. If Sephiroth could be Na Eun-hyeok, then who was to say other people weren’t doing the exact same thing?

I desperately wanted to organize my thoughts calmly, but composure eluded me entirely. Hovering in a state of semi-insanity, I replayed the situation in my mind once more.

Na Eun-hyeok is Sephiroth.

“……Is there any possibility that he isn’t?”

Maybe I had misheard a completely different word, or maybe Na Eun-hyeok had accidentally blurted out a pet name he used for an ex, or—as a option I desperately didn’t want to consider—maybe I had begged him to call me that during the black hole of last night.

There’s no way in hell.

Or did Na Eun-hyeok intend to keep this a total secret, only to make a careless slip of the tongue and call me what he always called me? A casual mistake that unearthed the exact nickname he had used to death in Zelfia.

No way. It was definitely intentional. He did it on purpose.

Na Eun-hyeok’s voice telling me that ‘it’s darkest right under the lamp’ and Sephiroth’s voice asking me to grab dinner together buzzed aggressively in my ears. The memory of me casually mentioning to Han Gyu-tae that their voices sounded similar flashed through my mind. I had constantly felt a strange sense of déjà vu around the two of them, but I had never, in my wildest dreams, imagined they were the exact same person.

I mean, how could anyone know? Their personalities were polar opposites.

“And why the hell did he choose to reveal it like that……”

If he intended to tell me, he could have just been honest from the very beginning. Even if he couldn’t do it initially, he had plenty of opportunities to confess later on. I felt like we had quite a few moments where we could have laid the truth bare—whether it was as Na Eun-hyeok dealing with Chae Un-ha, or as Sephiroth dealing with BlueberryWhisky. Yet, after hiding his identity for this long, he suddenly chooses to expose himself in this exact manner?

Seriously, Na Eun-hyeok. How did you expect me to react?

Did you think I’d be happy? Or horrified? How do I actually feel right now?

Ah, seriously.

Clutching my hair in sheer frustration, I buried my face onto the bar counter. I could feel the intense gaze of the part-timer who was emptying the trash bins burning into the back of my head, but I didn’t have the mental capacity to care about social embarrassment. Whenever I thought about Na Eun-hyeok, my heart would violently race, but right now, that flutter wasn’t filled with pure excitement anymore. The bizarre trajectory of the situation was thoroughly drenched in chaos.

Even throughout the lecture, my consciousness remained entirely checked out. Over the figure of the professor frantically writing notes with a whiteboard marker, the glossy black armor of Sephiroth continuously overlapped. My white lecture printout was completely vandalized with meaningless doodles. My leg, which I normally never bounced, shook restlessly. Without even looking in a mirror, I knew my facial expression must have looked entirely dead. It was so bad that Han Gyu-tae, who was taking the class with me, turned to ask in a worried voice:

“Un-ha-ya, are you okay?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“You’ve been completely spaced out for a while now. …Do you want to grab lunch together today?”

“No, it’s fine.”

Even as the words left his mouth, Han Gyu-tae looked visibly relieved when I declined. If you’re going to be like that, don’t offer in the first place. Hiding my irritation, I unlocked my phone. Right on cue, it vibrated.

[ Na Eun-hyeok: Want to grab lunch together today too? ]

Ah.

I barely suppressed a scream. Slamming the phone shut, I flipped it face down on the desk. My heart, which would usually flare up with excitement, felt chillingly cold. My already complicated mind became an absolute war zone.

Does he think I haven’t realized he’s Sephiroth yet? Or is he doing this while knowing that I know?

I had already arrived at a conclusion. If he was the Sephiroth I knew, he was entirely malicious enough to pull something like this while knowing full well. No, he was doing this precisely because he knew. He was purely curious to see how I would react to this nightmare.

Then why the hell did he have to drop the bomb today of all days?

Was it because I failed to notice it sooner? But honestly, who could have guessed this quickly? Was there anyone else out there who had successfully connected the dots that Na Eun-hyeok and Sephiroth were the same person? Anyone at all?

“Hey.”

I leaned over to whisper to Han Gyu-tae, who was messing around with his phone.

“What.”

“What do you think Na Eun-hyeok and Sephiroth have in common?”

“They’re both human?”

“Besides that.”

“They’re both Korean.”

“Besides that!”

“How should I know? Ah, their voices sound kinda similar, though.”

See? Look at this. Is this my fault? No, it’s entirely Na Eun-hyeok’s fault.

I felt incredibly wronged. If you asked a hundred different people, not a single one would have predicted that Na Eun-hyeok and Sephiroth were the exact same person. It wasn’t that I was dense; Na Eun-hyeok was just entirely too extreme. If it were anyone else in my shoes, they wouldn’t have known either.

The summary of the current situation that I managed to compile during the lecture was this: Na Eun-hyeok had known for a long time that I was BlueberryWhisky. Armed with that knowledge, he played the role of the sweet, gentle Na Eun-hyeok in front of me, while simultaneously playing the role of the insane, berserk warrior Sephiroth in-game.

And completely oblivious to all of it, I had literally gone to Sephiroth for relationship advice about my crush on Na Eun-hyeok.

‘ Forget it. Don’t worry about what I said. I’m not good at romance either. ’ ‘ Do you have a lover? ’ ‘ No. A one-sided crush. ’ ‘ Who? ’ ‘ A college friend. ’

I want to die……

“……Groans.”

“Why are you suddenly tearing your hair out?”

This time, Seong-jin looked over at me with a deeply concerned expression. I felt bad, but I had zero energy to appease him.

My stomach churned violently.

While I had been trying to laugh it off as something trivial, it seemed my body was reacting differently. The sudden avalanche of truth was proving to be incredibly difficult to digest. A heavy, suffocating sensation settled tightly into my chest, right below my sternum. It was glaringly easy to identify the source of this weight. My pure feelings of admiration had been thoroughly crushed alongside his unexpected identity.

I kept trying to tell myself that it was fine, but a stubborn voice inside me kept screaming that it absolutely wasn’t.

“……Sigh.”

And on top of all of that, you bastard…… you literally slept with me.

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