1.

Around the year of 2020, Virtual Reality games began trending on the global scale.

Soon after, in 2034, the virtual reality game that the world had been waiting for finally appeared.

God Wars.

The game that held the title of a war between gods surpassed the imagination of the people, as it took the world by storm and firmly took over it.

In 2038, the number of registered players was 1.8 billion while the number of viewers surpassed 5.1 billion.

This became known as the moment in history when all kinds of entertainment from sports such as soccer, baseball and basketball, to opera, concert and orchestras were all taken over by a single game.

The era of God Wars had started.

In such an era, being good at the game called God Wars was a formidable skill to have.

[Professional player’s yearly salary reaches 300 million dollars!]

[[Two Hand] becomes the professional with the highest salary!]

A single person had managed to earn a yearly salary of over 300 billion won just because they were good at the game.

[Haze game company, starts stocks on COSDAC]

[Haze game company, stock value increasing 5 days in a row!]

[Goblin Guild, propelling plans to start stocks in NASDAQ?]

On top of that, the so called game companies gathered players who played God Wars and earned a profit off of them and became the hottest items on the stock market.

[The value of God Wars’ greatest guild Beta?]

[Beta guild: Its members won’t change guilds even for 10 billion dollars!]

It became an era where the value of a single guild in a game surpassed hundreds of billions of won, and sometimes even reached the trillions.

As such, many leading figures appeared.

[God Wars changed my life as an outcast!]

[God Wars is the reason I, a long time shut-in, managed to become a millionaire!]

People whose lives had changed so dramatically that even Cinderella would be jealous appeared and became able to grasp wealth and fame by gaming.

Many people grew in fame and power in that way.

“This is too much. Isn’t a daily salary of 300,000 won too low for a raid with a survivability rate lesser than 30%? 80 hours of hard work just disappears once it’s game over, right?”

Also, extras that were more than tens of millions more in number than the main rankers appeared.

– Don’t do it if you don’t like it.

“It’s not that I don’t like it, I’m just asking for a raise. Isn’t only offering 300,000 won for a level 100 and the same 300,000 for a level 200 going too far?”

Jung Hyun-woo was that extra.

– Hey, Ciroco guild is only giving that much so what do you want a broker like me to do?

What the 5.1 billion viewers enjoyed the most was none other than boss monster raids.

Of course, boss monster raids being the main profit of guilds and game companies, they were farming them without rest.

After all, the most important thing to them was generating benefits.

“Damn it, if they’re going to wrung me dry then they could at least admit me into the guild. Are there no seats left in Ciroco guild?”

– Hey, it’s a situation where even existing seats are disappearing. It’s not like Ciroco guild members are overdoing themselves to run raids you know.

To earn a greater profit than guilds or game companies, one had to manage groups more efficiently.

Looking at it from this point of view, it was inefficient to permanently employ all thousands to tens of thousands of players.

Because of that, they started employing them only when they were needed.

– It’d be a good idea to go while they still give 300,000 won. There’s a rumor going around that large guilds are colluding to lower the price of extras.

“What?”

He was one of those extras.

“The guys that earn big are going to cut the already low pay?”

– What can you do? Be good at the game if you don’t like it.

Of course, there was not a single person that dreamed of being an extra, and Jung Hyun-woo was the same.

“Bastard, hitting the sore spot with facts.”

In 2034, when God Wars was revealed to the world, Jung Hyun-woo had poured everything he had into it to become a main character.

He had quite some confidence too.

‘Damn it.’

The source of his confidence was none other than baseball, a sport he used to play but that had ruined his life.

Virtual reality, as the words suggest, meant controlling a virtual body, which only made the gap in talent appear more noticeably.

Magician was the prime example of this.

It was not difficult to use magic in God Wars, the problem was landing it.

Other games had auto targeting, but in God Wars, spells that could be targeted had limitations, and their power was mediocre as well.

In the end, it meant that players had to manually aim at the target.

On top of that, they didn’t just have to land the spells, but also needed to run around to kite running monsters, which wasn’t easy even for professional baseball players.

– Hey, don’t feel so down, yeah? You used to be pretty good at one point, didn’t you?

‘Yeah, it went pretty well in the beginning.’

As a former professional baseball player who had been been evaluated to have good control in exchange for low speed, it came as a golden chance.

On top of that, to Jung Hyun-woo, who had been expelled from his professional team after an injury, it was more than just a golden chance.

He wasn’t part of the worst players in the beginning.

No, he was actually quite good.

There were more players than grains of sand, but in a situation where only a small number of magicians that could properly land their magic, Jung Hyun-woo’s record was on the good side.

There were many times when he partied with players with good abilities, and he used those to get a few connections with rankers.

He had thought that he entered their league.

He thought that his flow wouldn’t be bad.

– If it wasn’t for this accident you had, you wouldn’t be like this…….

Indeed, if it wasn’t for his life’s worst event, it wouldn’t have turned out bad.

“That doesn’t matter anyway. It’s just that I didn’t have anything at that time.”

But Jung Hyun-woo didn’t think that he ruined his life that day.

“The reason I’m in this situation looking like this is just because of that. It’s just because I have no talent, no money, and no luck.”

– And you have no penis either?

“You want to die?”

The mood of their conversation softened and they returned to the original topic.

– So you’ll do it, right?

“I have to.”

– But this is dangerous and you know it. Are you going to be alright? No matter how one looks at it, anyone can tell that Ciroco guild is overdoing themselves.

“The chance the raid will succeed is less than 30% according to my calculations.”

– It’s really low.

“However, the chance I’ll survive is over 80%.”

Jung Hyun-woo’s eyes became sharp as he said so.

“My nickname isn’t die-hard for nothing.”

The one man on the other side of the phone said to such Jung Hyun-woo.

– Isn’t your nickname cockroach?