GBAS 28

“The pretty one isn’t me, it’s you, hyung……”

“Ha.”

Hyunwoo, who had started speaking as if it were obvious, trailed off, flustered by Jooin’s reaction.

‘Whoa, that scared me.’

The irritation and contempt that had flashed through Jooin’s eyes in that brief moment were vivid. Hyunwoo, his mouth now shut, looked up at Jooin with frightened eyes.

Jooin, who had instantly wiped the uncomfortable look from his eyes, spoke in a flat yet firm voice.

“No, what I mean is. Not that you’re pretty, but your hair.”

“…….”

“I was saying the hair is pretty, the hair……”

Ah.

At the belatedly added subject, Hyunwoo’s mouth fell open.

His expression stiffening, Hyunwoo looked at Jooin and pointed with his index finger, alternating between his chest and his temple. So. Not me, but this?

Jooin nodded, and Hyunwoo cried out inwardly.

‘I’m going crazy.’

He felt wretched. The one fortunate thing was (though he wasn’t sure if he could call it fortunate) that he had done so many strange things now that it wasn’t as embarrassing as it was at first. However, the feeling of his mind going completely blank was still there.

Jooin, who was standing there looking down at Hyunwoo, added with a sigh.

“Anyway, I just wanted to say it suits you. Don’t misunderstand.”

“Yes, yes. I’m sorry. I misunderstood……”

“It’s fine.”

While the embarrassed Hyunwoo was cautiously observing Jooin, party chat messages began to pop up one by one. The chats were filled with cries of anguish, but also a palpable anxiety that the advance party might leave.

[Party] poSquadLeaderwer : Ah I’m really going crazy

[Party] Jinyoung-kun : You two can’t go anywhere!!!

[Party] JuJuGeneralAssembly : Really soon

[Party] JuJuGeneralAssembly : We’ll be there soon ㅡㅡ;

[Party] Aqua : I got it now, the feeling, I totally get it yes yes

Just when he was getting his hopes up that they might really be coming down, Napjakmandu spoke.

[Party] Napjakmandu : What do you getㅠ

[Party] Napjakmandu : You’ve been saying that for 30 minutes now

[Party] Napjakmandu : You’ve already crashed and burned five hundred times

[Party] Jinyoung-kun : Hey hey???

[Party] Jinyoung-kun : Didn’t we agree to leave together on good terms!

……It’s going to take a while.

Hyunwoo, who was debating whether he should summon Frost and at least kill a mob, first brought up the potion crafting window along with his inventory. It felt like a waste of time to just wait around, and he thought it would be better to do something rather than just stand there awkwardly, watching the other’s every move.

Below this was the 47th floor, and the closer they got to the boss, the more the difficulty of each floor would increase. Naturally, they would need more healing items than before.

Hyunwoo scanned the window that appeared before him, set up the job-exclusive elixir recipes one by one in the five resting brewing machines, and started the operation.

And in the remaining one, he put in a pre-made base potion along with a pile of herbs that radiated a purple aura. The items in each slot moved along the arrow and mixed in the center slot. Below it, a purple liquid full of glitter dripped down. When he hovered the cursor over the bottle, the item name appeared.

[Rare] High-Grade Antidote

This antidote was an item he was crafting in advance, just in case they ended up going straight to the boss room.

The boss of this dungeon, the demon ‘Vasshin’, presided over herbs and gems. Based on this, the guild members had inferred the boss’s skills, and the most likely guess was that it would use skills utilizing gems for physical attacks and skills related to poison for chemical attacks.

Now that he’d made it, he would be more satisfied if they ended up using it, but Hyunwoo did not welcome chemical warfare. This was because their amazing developers had made the pain design for poison damage unnecessarily detailed.

‘Seriously, so unnecessary.’

Tsk, he clicked his tongue and was closing the window in front of him when he heard the sound of a guitar string being plucked somewhere.

The source of the sound was right across from him. Jooin, sitting with his back against the wall opposite Hyunwoo, was strumming a guitar. The guitar he had taken out this time was an acoustic guitar with a completely different shape from the one he had been carrying until just a moment ago.

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

Sharp rhythm, sharp sound. What Jooin was playing was a chromatic scale, which was familiar to Hyunwoo’s ears.

Chromatic. He remembered looking it up, thinking it must be a famous song because Jooin would hug his guitar and play that whenever he had a spare moment.

The chromatic scale was a warm-up exercise and a drill to solidify fundamentals. To Hyunwoo, who had asked if he wasn’t already good enough without doing such things, Jooin had said it was like the jump rope that boxers do when they start their workout.

But.

What kind of boxer does their warm-up so brilliantly?

As expected of a real guitarist. Baek Jooin, then and now, inside and outside the game, never let go of that damn guitar.

‘He said he was in a band.’

Kirin-a (麒麟兒).

The band that Baek Jooin formed at the age of 18 with his high school classmates consisted of a lead guitarist, Baek Jooin, and one rhythm guitarist. There was also one person each for drums, bass, and keyboard. A team of five in total.

Kirin-a wasn’t famous, but they performed consistently. It was thanks to the good fortune of their gold-spoon bassist, Cheon Namyoung, whose mother ran a large real estate business in the Hongdae and Sangsu area.

Since they didn’t sell tickets under the team’s name, the performance income that each individual took home was little to none, but Jooin received many requests, such as for session recordings or to be a guest member for teams lacking a guitarist. And the people who commissioned him for a recording once would, a hundred out of a hundred times, seek out Jooin again.

That’s how outstanding a guitarist Baek Jooin was. It was to the point that even to his own ears, which were completely ignorant in that area, Baek Jooin’s guitar sounded special.

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

From the index finger to the pinky, his fingers moved in a precise sequence. 6th string 1st fret, 6th string 2nd fret, 6th string 3rd fret, 6th string 4th fret. And then 5th string 1st fret, 5th string 2nd fret, 5th string 3rd fret, 5th string 4th fret.

Six strings in one block. From far from the guitar body to close to it. As the scale performance went on, the notes got progressively higher. After finishing one set like that, he would change the fingering order and repeat it again.

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

Why would a person who seems like he should be playing the guitar all day be so into a game?

That was because Baek Jooin was truly, really, a complete guitar fool, a music addict.

And he was lucky, too. Baek Jooin was one of the 100 closed beta testers. He had applied thinking he would just put his name in at a friend’s persuasion, but he ended up getting selected. Naturally, Jooin’s friend was not selected.

A game? What game. Jooin, who had reluctantly taken the capsule with the intention of handing it over to his friend as soon as he arrived, retracted that thought in just two hours. This was because he had discovered an electric guitar at a musical instrument shop in the town he entered just to look around before handing it over to his friend.

While others focused on understanding the game more than other people and pushing through the main quests to savor the story, Jooin played the game purely to buy the most expensive guitar sold at the instrument shop.

As a result of doing dozens of quests every day and endlessly repeating the quests that gave the most rewards, Baek Jooin was able to buy that guitar. One sad fact is that this was when there were only three days left until the end of the beta test period.

Anyway, Baek Jooin, who had finally obtained what he wanted, practiced the guitar continuously from that day until the moment the server closed.

Even in his real-life studio apartment, he could connect his guitar and audio interface to headphones so that no sound would leak outside, allowing him to practice without worrying about noise. Nevertheless, Baek Jooin preferred the world inside the game. This was because this place was overwhelmingly freer than reality.

First of all, he was not bound by place or time. Everywhere was a practice room, and wherever he wanted to stand, that place became a stage. What was best of all was the fact that he could practice with the ‘real’ sound that made his clothes, his skin, and every single strand of his hair vibrate.

There were differences in the effector tones and amp sounds compared to external ones, but as mentioned a moment ago, Jooin was such a guitar fool that he accepted even those differences as something new and enjoyed them.

Since the open beta service began, Jooin started using the capsule more seriously, like a soundproof booth. Since his amount of practice was different from other Bards from the start, a large gap in initial skill proficiency opened up, and he was always able to maintain an advantage in gameplay.