Chapter 83: Goddess Complex and Toxic Excuses

In any case, Sephiroth and I had already agreed that lifting Ignas’s curse was bound to be tied to the game’s main storyline. We’d made a pact to quietly grind out the Battlegrounds until every last debuff was cleared.

But I genuinely never expected to cross paths with the Endless guild here of all places.

[All] SoldierAfrica: Well, look who it is ㅎㅎ~

[All] Vergwalo97: I’m gonna kll u all

[All] Vergwalo97: Die

[All] SoldierAfrica: Aren’t these the folks whose mouths must be sore from constantly sucking up to Sephiroth? ~ㅎㅎ

Naturally, Vergwalo97 and SoldierAfrica—who had both tasted death at Sephiroth’s hands just yesterday—were the first to flash their fangs. SoldierAfrica, in particular, had tried to drag Sephiroth into a toxic typing war on the forums only to get utterly humiliated, forced to tuck his tail and run. He was adding “ㅎㅎ” to his texts, but you could practically feel his blood boiling through the screen.

I mean, if you know you completely lack the verbal capacity to match him, why do you keep trying to pick a fight with Sephiroth……?

[All] SnowBloodPerfume: Oppas ㅇㅅㅇ!!

[All] Hyangi’sBerion: Our Goddess Hyang-ie, what’s up?

[All] SoldierAfrica: Why is our little sister calling us~ Just say the word, Hyang-ie~ ㅎㅎ

[All] SnowBloodPerfume: Hyang-ie wants their heads as a present! >ㅅ<!!

[All] Vergwalo97: Consider them dead right now.

[All] 99Pigeon99: Okey-dokey.

[All] Hyangi’sBerion: Hyang-ah, Oppa will catch those bastards for you.

Meanwhile, a deeply bizarre and unsettling conversation was unfolding in the All Chat. It was so stiff and performative that it looked entirely scripted. The most terrifying realization was the high probability that they weren’t acting; they were just genuinely like this. I didn’t even want to think about it. It was NasiGoreng who perfectly gave voice to my mounting disgust in the Party Chat.

[Party] NasiGoreng: Barf.

[Party] NasiGoreng: What is actually wrong with them;;;

[Party] BuffNinjaPls: One must maintain the unshakable, stoic mind of a Ninja.

[Party] ParkJinSol: ㅋㅋㅋ There are always losers like that.

[Party] ParkJinSol: Incels who are so desperate to flex the fact that they have a female player in their guild that they completely lose their minds.

[Party] BlueberryWhiskey: Wait, aren’t Goreng-nim and JinSol-nim female users too?

[Party] BlueberryWhiskey: Why do they feel the need to flex so hard;;?

[Party] ParkJinSol: ㅋㅋㅋㅋ Blueberry-nim, you’re still so innocent.

[Party] ParkJinSol: Do you really think a normal woman would voluntarily stay in a guild full of creeps like that? ㅋㅋ

Ah. Come to think of it, she had a very solid point.

[Party] ParkJinSol: They’re just pathetic losers ㅋㅋ

[Party] ParkJinSol: They’re single because they’re absolute trashbags.

[Party] ParkJinSol: But they assume every other guy out there is just as starved for female attention as they are ㅋㅋ

[Party] BuffNinjaPls: This is pure facts.

[Party] BuffNinjaPls: If they simply embraced the path of the Ninja, they could transcend these worldly illusions.

[Party] BuffNinjaPls: Foolish mortals.

[Party] ParkJinSol: Ninja, shut up.

While Park Jin-sol and BuffNinjaPls resumed their usual bickering, Endless was still aggressively spamming the All Chat, trying their absolute hardest to project: “You guys don’t have a girl, do you? We have a literal Goddess!”

Looking at it from that perspective, it actually felt a little sad. Zelpia was a massive, global mega-hit game with countless female players running around, yet these guys only had a single token female player, and they were treating SnowBloodPerfume like a sacred relic because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves……

[Party] Sephiroth: They’re a bunch of brainless dipsh*ts.

Yeah…… They really did look incredibly stupid.

The standoff between the SnowBloodPerfume simp brigade and our pitying guild finally ground to a halt as the thirty-second pre-match countdown struck zero. The moment we dashed out of our respective spawn gates, Endless fired another sharp volley of texts.

[All] Vergwalo97: Ready to lose?

[All] SoldierAfrica: I believe we gave you a painful lesson last time ^ ^

[All] SoldierAfrica: I guess you guys are gluttons for punishment ^^~

[All] 99Pigeon99: ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

[All] SnowBloodPerfume: Our Oppas are going to slaughter you all over again ㅇㅅㅇㅋㅋ

[All] Sephiroth: Are you playing the game, or are you playing the keyboard?

The absolute mockery dripping from Sephiroth’s text instantly froze the chat log. While the enemy team processed the burn, my teammates and I crossed the threshold into the central grand hall. Through the dim lighting at the far end of the opposite corridor, the silhouettes of Endless charging toward us became fully visible.

This specific map placed teams at one of eight random corridors radiating out from the central hub. The standard tactical meta was to sprint and secure the central hall as fast as possible to identify which corridor the enemy was advancing through, thereby locating their base altar and setting up an ambush. Because the surrounding pathways intersected like a giant, chaotic spiderweb, you couldn’t blindly assume the enemy’s approach vector led straight to their altar. Usually, competitive teams measured the precise seconds it took the enemy to reach the center to deduce their base coordinates. Sometimes, teams skipped the central clash entirely, utilizing the side passages to stealthily hunt for the altar.

We, however, didn’t give a damn about hiding our altar. Since the [Core Castle] was safely nestled in my inventory, our base layout was entirely irrelevant. Furthermore, according to Sephiroth’s calculations, Endless wouldn’t bother leaving their Core Castle at their altar either; they’d be carrying it on their person and running a brute-force, straight-line sprint toward the center.

[Party] Sephiroth: Those idiots actually think they’re going to win.

In other words, they were choosing to face us head-on in a meat grinder.

Exactly as Sephiroth predicted, Endless and our squad slammed into the central hall at almost the exact same millisecond. The brief, tense standoff shattered instantly as a barrage of high-tier skills erupted across the room. Had any of those opening volleys connected cleanly, our health bars would have been in serious jeopardy. However, after surviving a full week of Sephiroth’s merciless hell-training, every single one of our guild members dodged the incoming hit-boxes with flawless precision.

[All] BuffNinjaPls: The will of the Ninja…… can never be broken……

BuffNinjaPls fully committed to his roleplay and unleashed his signature Dance of the Scarlet Blossom. Shuriken adorned with bright red tassels spun and scattered across the air like a lethal storm of blooming petals. His target was SnowBloodPerfume. She desperately scrambled to evade, but her mechanical control was abysmal. Right before the slicing projectiles could shred her avatar, the Mage, Hyangi’sBerion, threw his body directly into the trajectory.

What on earth was I even looking at? He looked less like a competitive gamer and more like a cringe-tier knight trying to shield a fairytale princess in the middle of a warzone.

[All] Hyangi’sBerion: I guess your guild doesn’t understand the concept of ‘Ladies First.’

[All] ParkJinSol: We were trying to send your lady back to spawn first.

[All] ParkJinSol: Do you just not speak English?

Along with her text, Park Jin-sol unholstered a massive Buddhist wooden temple block. Usually, the wooden blocks carried by the Monk class were compact, hand-held instruments, but the thing she was wielding was an absolute anomaly. It was a colossal, heavy chunk of solid iron encrusted with high-tier diamonds—an object that had completely abandoned the holy purpose of a traditional ‘wooden’ block. She hoisted the massive iron structure and hurled it with maximum force directly at Hyangi’sBerion’s face.

[System] ParkJinSol has defeated Hyangi’sBerion.

[All] ParkJinSol: Imagine a squishy mage trying to frontline ㅉㅉ

Her closing remark was pure disrespect.

Before anyone from Endless could type out a retort to Jin-sol, another kill notification flashed across our screens immediately after.

[System] Sephiroth has defeated 99Pigeon99.

Sephiroth, who had been silently putting in work in the backline, had already claimed the head of their Vanguard Knight. During our very first skirmish, 99Pigeon99 had maintained a smug smirk even while dying, but this time, he couldn’t keep up the act. Watching their formation fall apart in the first ten seconds left him completely rattled.

[All] 99Pigeon99: ??? F*ck

[All] Vergwalo97: This is so goddamn trash

Vergwalo97, who already possessed the distinct honor of being dissected by Sephiroth previously, started raging in chat. Apparently, their entire competitive playbook revolved around throwing a typing tantrum the moment a match started going south. It was honestly pathetic.

[System] Sephiroth has defeated SoldierAfrica.

The kill feed continued to light up in our favor. It was a textbook victory born of organic teamwork. During our maiden clash against Endless, our members hadn’t been fully attuned to high-tier team coordination; everyone had just been relying on their individual micro-mechanics to force trades. But after enduring Sephiroth’s brutal tactical boot camp, the entire party was moving like a singular, fluid entity.

While the Assassin SoldierAfrica’s avatar collapsed into a gray corpse on the stone floor, I was smoothly weaving through the attack strings of Brrrbrr, who had locked onto me. Since I had already faced him in the Red Zone, I had his entire rotation memorized, making his telegraphed strikes incredibly easy to counter and avoid.

[All] Sephiroth: Leave SnowBloodPerfume alive.

[All] Sephiroth: I want a high-kill victory screen today.

Naturally, Sephiroth chose this exact moment to drop the ultimate psychological disrespect. Since SnowBloodPerfume possessed the lowest effective combat rating in the Endless guild, killing her would instantly trigger the match-end mechanics. By explicitly ordering us to keep her alive, he was declaring his intention to farm the rest of the Endless guild repeatedly within the remaining match timer, maximizing their humiliation.

It was an incredibly arrogant and toxic statement, but given how thoroughly disgusted our guild was with Endless’s behavior, not a single one of our members objected. If anything, they were absolutely thrilled.

The newly spawned 99Pigeon99 and Hyangi’sBerion rushed back into the central hall to reinforce their line, but a momentum shift of this magnitude wasn’t something they could easily overturn. From the very beginning, their roster completely lacked a mechanical titan who could match Sephiroth’s micro. It wasn’t that they were completely talentless casuals, but if we were talking about high-tier mechanical execution, our side already boasted monsters like Park Jin-sol and BuffNinjaPls.

NasiGoreng and Won-jae hyung occasionally dropped a life due to over-extending, but their isolated deaths couldn’t even begin to balance the absolute slaughterhouse we were running on the enemy’s respawns.

By the time the match timer entered its final closing minutes, SnowBloodPerfume—who had been stomping her feet in frustration at the backline—abruptly suffered a complete mental breakdown in All Chat.

[All] SnowBloodPerfume: Ha.. ㅇㅅㅇ

[All] SnowBloodPerfume: I really wasn’t going to say anything ㅇㅅㅇ

[All] SnowBloodPerfume: Does it feel good to win matches by using illegal hacks? ^-^

Hacks? As in… third-party cheating software?

Who the hell was hacking right now?

“Did someone actually turn on a cheat client?”

The completely unhinged accusation brought our party voice comms to a sudden, bewildered standstill. Won-jae hyung asked the question, his voice laced with pure confusion, but our internal party text log was instantly filled with a cascade of denials. We had literally spent the last week sweating, crying, and bleeding through intense, manual mechanical training together; we knew our team’s capabilities better than anyone. If there had been an illegal software user among us, it would have been blatantly obvious during Sephiroth’s rigorous drills.

Sensing our sudden hesitation from across the hall, SnowBloodPerfume doubled down, shifting into an even more aggressive, toxic typing stance.

SnowBloodPerfume is trying to weaponize gaslighting to save face! Do you let Park Jin-sol dismantle her false accusations with sheer verbal violence, or do you let Sephiroth deliver a final, humiliating mechanical play to shut them up permanently?

📚 Also on NHV Novels

The Magical Girl Is Raising a Child Today, Too

ActionGender BenderMagic

Read Now →
Not interested