Chapter 105: System Degradation and Historical Telemetry

I had spent the night with Na Eun-hyeok, and then I had turned around and declared that we would act as if it never happened. I had killed my own feelings over and over again just to avoid losing the good opinion of the person I loved. Did he really have to choose that exact day to reveal the truth? At the very moment I felt both the happiest and the most pitifully small?

When my thoughts reached that point, anger finally surged. My face flushed with heat. The realization that Na Eun-hyeok had orchestrated this entire scenario while knowing every single detail filled me with a sudden cocktail of rage and humiliation.

“Are you okay?”

Seong-jin whispered with wide, startled eyes, clearly catching onto my shifting expression.

“Sorry. I think I’m just going to head home after this lecture. Can you please take notes for the Latin class for me?”

“Sure. Go on ahead.”

There was one more lecture left today. Latin—a general elective that Na Eun-hyeok was also taking. Normally, I would have arrived early just to watch him walk into the room, but today I was in absolutely no condition to do so. I was incredibly grateful that Park Seong-jin offered to cover the notes for me.

The moment the lecture ended, I left my friends’ worried stares behind and headed straight home. I didn’t even want to ride the bus, so I trudged down the campus hill on foot. As the cold wind brushed against my cheeks, a million chaotic thoughts swirled in my head. By the time I finally buried my face into my white bedsheets, the separate identities of Na Eun-hyeok and Sephiroth were constantly merging and tearing apart in my mind like pieces of tangled clay.

“I’m home,” I muttered into the mattress. “I’m finally home.”

This wasn’t a strange, unfamiliar bed thick with Na Eun-hyeok’s scent; it was my own familiar room. Lying there, I tried to piece together the blurry events of last night. What had initially seemed like a deeply embarrassing, drunken mistake on my part was steadily expanding, warping into a much darker shade.

Bzz. My phone, tossed carefreely onto the bedside table, vibrated.

[ Na Eun-hyeok: Un-ha-ya? ]

It was him again.

I stared back and forth between his previous invitation to grab lunch and this new message calling my name.

Eun-hyeok-ah. What on earth are you thinking right now? I typed out the words, only to delete every single one of them.

[ Na Eun-hyeok: Are you alright? I don’t think I saw you in class. ]

The consecutive texts seemed to be laced with genuine worry, but I could no longer trust whether it was real concern or just another calculated act.

Up until today, I had always responded to Na Eun-hyeok’s texts at lightning speed, but right now, I had zero desire to reply. To be more precise, I couldn’t even begin to formulate a proper response. I switched my phone completely to silent and pulled the blanket all the way over my head.

Soon, a heavy silence filled the room.

How am I supposed to look him in the face now?

I turned the thought over and over in my head.

Do I even have to keep seeing him?

Was the sense of betrayal I felt over his incomprehensible behavior entirely dramatic? Even if it was, I couldn’t stop the bitter feeling of resentment from bubbling up. If Na Eun-hyeok had respected me even a fraction, if he had cared about my feelings or shown the slightest bit of consideration for my position, he would never have dropped such a massive truth bomb so playfully at a time like this.

Which meant, we definitely slept together.

And then Na Eun-hyeok chose that exact morning to expose his identity.

The weight of that action felt like a deliberate attempt to force me to recognize the true gravity of what had happened last night.

‘Why are you so tense?’ ‘They say people get nervous whenever they’re standing in front of the person they like. Could it be something like that?’ ‘Though I’m sure there’s absolutely no way that’s the case. Right?’

You knew. You knew all along that I liked you.

Since when did you know?

And you still went through with it?

I swallowed down the torrent of unanswerable questions destined never to reach him. I already knew my feelings were bound to go unrequited anyway. I was the one who had constructed a flawless, saintly image of Na Eun-hyeok in my own head, so this narrative collapse was entirely my own karma.

Yeah. It actually makes perfect sense if I just view him as Sephiroth. That bastard was naturally a toxic, unhinged piece of work. Completely oblivious to that fact, I had been running around like a foolish boy entirely blinded by love, and now the curtain had simply been pulled back.

I picked up my silent phone. There were no additional messages. Watching the blank screen, the frantic thumping in my chest went completely cold. It seemed that up until the very last second, a pathetic part of me had still been holding onto a shred of hope. It was a thoroughly futile lingering attachment.

I typed a few frantic search queries into the digital display: ‘revenge’, ‘how to get revenge’, ‘how to screw over a bad guy’. They flickered briefly on the screen before fading into irrelevance. I glared at the device and flipped it face down once more. The phone didn’t ring again for the rest of the day, leaving me feeling strangely drained.

But one thing had crystallized with absolute certainty.

Falling in love with Na Eun-hyeok was, without a doubt, the single stupidest thing I had ever done in my entire life.

Na Eun-hyeok thoroughly disliked people.

Rising to stardom at a tender young age had been nothing short of a curse. Exceptionally sharp and perceptive, he had been able to read the hidden, transactional motives of everyone who approached him since childhood. Their smiles, their adoration, and their sudden interest were nothing but an exhausting burden. Even after retiring from the entertainment industry to live as an ordinary citizen, his admission into Hankuk University thrust him right back under the exhausting glare of the public spotlight. He was utterly sick to death of plastering on his well-practiced customer-service smile just to greet the crowds.

Even after entering university, the people who tried to get close to him were all cut from the exact same cloth. They worshiped his face, they loved his fame, and they fawned over his voice. Everyone expected something specific from him, desperately trying to force Na Eun-hyeok into the rigid, idealized mold they had constructed in their minds. Whenever he displayed a trait that didn’t align with that perfect image, they would tilt their heads in confusion and subtle disappointment. That silent pressure always forced him to step right back into his box, at which point everyone would clap their hands in delight.

It was profoundly suffocating.

Whenever he stepped outside, entirely too many strangers recognized his face. Tens of thousands of people who didn’t know a single real thing about him felt entitled to judge him. The molds they demanded he fit into were always identical, forcing him to live inside a cage within a cage no matter where he went.

He couldn’t breathe.

It was around that period of absolute exhaustion that he first discovered Zelfia.

The virtual reality game suited Na Eun-hyeok perfectly. It made sense; he had possessed incredible physical coordination and a sharp intellect since he was a child. Virtual reality demanded excellent motor control and a high degree of tactical strategy, making it the perfect playground for his skillset.

But above all else, inside Zelfia, absolutely nobody knew who Na Eun-hyeok was.

His only lingering regret was that he had carelessly skipped past the character customization screen when he first started. Because of that oversight, the very first things he purchased upon entering the game were a matte-black helm and a matching set of heavy plate armor. While his tall, striking physique couldn’t be entirely hidden, his face was perfectly concealed. Only then did Na Eun-hyeok finally taste true freedom.

Sephiroth. That was his new name.

As Sephiroth, he could fearlessly unleash the countless suppressed fragments of his personality that Na Eun-hyeok was forced to hide away. He was an entity that had completely shattered the suffocating cage holding him captive. Things that were strictly forbidden for Na Eun-hyeok became second nature to Sephiroth, while the polite behaviors required of Na Eun-hyeok became entirely foreign to his in-game avatar.

Zelfia was the only place where Na Eun-hyeok could truly breathe. And it remained that way for roughly three years.

“Hyung.”

“What.”

“I’m honestly getting so bored of this game lately. There’s zero content left.”

But after three years, even Zelfia had ceased to be a proper escape.

The new mold that had formed around the identity of Sephiroth was no longer entertaining. Meeting Sephiroth on the battlefield had become such a guaranteed death sentence that the community boards literally pinned ‘instantly surrender’ as an official strategy guide. Fighting against the game’s AI was amusing for a while, but now that he had completely memorized every single mechanical pattern, combat had devolved into nothing more than repetitive, robotic movements.

Yet, migrating to a different game wasn’t an easy solution either. Zelfia hadn’t claimed the top spot in the industry for nothing; no other virtual reality title on the market could guarantee that level of absolute freedom and vast content. He was utterly bored to tears with the game, but there was nowhere else to go. At the same time, stepping outside to find a real-world hobby was out of the question. It was precisely when everything in his life had dissolved into a state of gray, stagnant apathy—

That Chae Un-ha suddenly caught his attention.

Initially, he had sought the user out out of pure, unadulterated curiosity. He simply wanted to see the face of the brand-new player who had managed to defeat his personal AI record for the first time in three long years. But when he finally tracked the user down, looking at that utterly dazed, blank face that genuinely believed he was just a regular NPC, a sudden realization struck. He recognized him. It was Chae Un-ha, a classmate from his major.

Whenever they attended the same lectures, that boy would always steal long, quiet glances at him from a distance.

Na Eun-hyeok had recognized the crush instantly. Having dealt with a lifetime of endless infatuation, it was just another familiar spark of interest. He was entirely used to watching people panic and avert their eyes in a fluster whenever he offered a polite smile in return. To him, Chae Un-ha was just another timid, nameless classmate passing through his life. Nothing more.

Therefore, when he first initiated a PVP match against BlueberryWhisky, it wasn’t out of any personal interest in Chae Un-ha. It was merely that at the exact moment his in-game content had dried up and he was contemplating quitting the game entirely, a fresh, entertaining piece of content had dropped right into his lap. The side of him that relentlessly pursued the new player was strictly his identity as a hardcore gamer, completely detached from the persona of Na Eun-hyeok.

When that encounter unexpectedly triggered a hidden quest, he figured he could afford to stick around the game a little while longer. Again, it was purely his gamer instincts driving him. That was all it was.

“Make sure you level up properly while I’m gone.”

“You know the coordinates, right? Hey!”

Ignoring BlueberryWhisky’s frantic shouts calling after him, he casually hit the log-out button. Although he had used a somewhat forceful method to compel the user into a friend request, it was a necessary evil to progress through the hidden quest line. He had zero intention of letting Zelfia’s first piece of fresh content in years slip through his fingers.

The reason he had logged off so early today was due to a prior engagement. It was the day he was scheduled to meet Ju Do-won. Driving over to Ju Do-won’s residence, he noted that while the luxury apartment complex in Hannam-dong boasting stunning Han River views was famous for its tight security, there was always a lingering risk of paparazzi catching wind. Armed with a pair of dark sunglasses, a thick face mask, and a low cap pulled tightly over his eyes, he pressed the button on Ju Do-won’s intercom.

The heavy door clicked open almost immediately. Walking through the inner foyer, the shadow of a figure approached him, carrying a bottle of alcohol in each hand.

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