“What are you looking at to be smiling so creepily?”

Won turned his head at the voice coming from behind. There stood his childhood friend, Chaei, glaring at him with narrowed eyes.

Even at words that were clearly meant to pick a fight, his bright smile did not fade.

It was a smile so radiant that anyone watching would be full of admiration, but the face of the person actually seeing it wasn’t very good.

Staring at Won as if looking at an exceptionally beautiful Venus flytrap, Chaei let out a disgusted, reluctant noise.

“No, seriously, what is it? I’m starting to get anxious. What? Did you bury someone? That guy you said free-loaded on your assignment, did you finally bury him?”

“Would I?”

At Won’s question back in a soft voice, Chaei rubbed her goosebump-ridden arms.

Won and Chaei were cases of being forced to become childhood friends after growing up together in an orphanage.

Having spent so many years together that it was hard to even count, Chaei knew her friend’s personality very well.

‘When he smiles that brightly, it’s usually for one of two reasons.’

One is when a guy he usually dislikes hits rock bottom, and the other is…

“Did that person you said you liked lately do something cute?”

When a ‘woman’ he liked did something pretty.

Whether he was living up to his face or just crazy about women, Won tended to love women very much.

How much did he love them… when asked why he was so obsessed with women, he left behind the famous quote, “It’s not that I’m obsessed with women, it’s that the existence of women shines brightly on its own.”

Even he—who left behind gem-like quotes about all women being beautiful simply because they were women—had a specific type he was exceptionally fond of: a woman who shared his hobbies and had an overall soft, delicate aesthetic.

A lovely woman who suited pastel tones like pink and light blue perfectly.

And everyone in the guild knew that he was currently head over heels for a certain very pink user.

“That, Peach or Chichi or whatever. What did they do, seriously. Let me in on it.”

“They’re leveling up crafting to give me a gift.”

“……That is a bit cute.”

“It’s seriously, incredibly cute.”

Won, who muttered lowly, leaned back deeply into his chair.

“Where did such a pretty thing fall from?”

​“I heard she literally fell. Didn’t you say your first meeting was her dying from fall damage?”

Chaei shook her head at the voice that was clearly a bit excited.

Someone needs to show up and fix that habit of his of losing his mind the second he sees a woman.

Unfortunately, because his physical appearance was overly perfect, everyone would fall head over heels for Won instead of fixing him.

They say every straw sandal has its match. She wondered if a match would ever appear for a friend like him…

It was a question she was very curious about, yet at the same time, wanted to never know the answer to for the rest of her life.

***

About two days had passed since then.

With Won’s help, Dohwa finally maxed out both the Plant Expert and Cook classes.

It was partly because of Dohwa’s efforts to be a grateful magpie, but Won bringing various things as gifts also played a big part.

However, even at max level, making food worth eating for Won wasn’t easy.

Only after trashing the ingredients about five times was Dohwa able to make the food Won ate: Pickled Peaches.

But the real work began now.

The pickled peaches Won ate weren’t just pickled peaches; they were pickled peaches of ‘rare’ grade.

In the end, after ten more attempts, Dohwa was finally able to craft a Rare Pickled Peach.

“I almost quit the game in the middle.”

Unlike his character, who was delighted while holding the pickled peaches, Dohwa, completely soaked in fatigue, leaned back into his chair as if collapsing.

Next to him, Sohyun, who was playing the game together, bit his lip and held back his laughter.

Unable to make a loud noise in the PC bang, he suppressed his laughter and muttered softly.

“Hey, why did you even make pickled peaches? There’s a pickled peach sitting right here next to me.”

“Shut up.”

“I told you to just buy it. Or I even offered to make it for you, so why did you insist on walking the hard road?”

At Dohwa’s sensitive reaction, Sohyun clicked his tongue loudly enough for him to hear.

​Keeping his mouth stubbornly shut, Dohwa muttered quietly.

“……There’s no sincerity in that. Won only gives me things he made himself.”

At that mutter, Sohyun shook his head.

‘Is that rotten veteran the same as you? You don’t even know how hard it is to get what you’re wearing right now.’

The cosmetic items Dohwa was currently wearing were all new releases that had just come out.

That meant getting the fabric, which was the material, was like plucking a star from the sky, and an enormous amount of effort went into crafting them.

They were outfits with a difficulty level so high that even a hardcore player would have blown them up at least once or twice.

If he told him even that, he felt like Dohwa would really offer himself as pickled peaches to that user named Won.

‘Still, it’s a bit much to watch a friend offer themselves as an offering to a rotten veteran.’

As a friend, Sohyun decided to quietly shut his mouth.

Anyone could see he was a hardcore player’s trophy newbie— no, under their care. Looking through narrowed eyes at Dohwa’s character, which sparkled even from a distance, as if broadcasting that fact, Sohyun muttered.

“Hey, but that… what did you say the user’s name was? Why does it sound like I’ve heard it somewhere?”

The fact that Sohyun, who wasn’t particularly interested in other users, felt it was familiar was not a very good sign.

Unless they were an acquaintance, the users Sohyun remembered fell into one of two categories.

​Angels or living Buddhas who had descended upon the mortal realm. Or else… a walking disaster brought upon the mortal realm.

And most of them, with a high probability, belonged to the latter.

Those nicknames flashed through Sohyun’s mind.

The nickname ‘Won’ wasn’t among them, but strangely, something felt uncomfortable.

Sohyun, who had better intuition than others and knew that fact well, trusted his gut quite a bit. he let out a groan and scratched his chin.

“Ah, should I go check the Incident Board? No, but that’s too much of a hassle.”

It felt like a bit much to go all the way into the Incident Board just to look up one user.

The ‘Incident Board,’ a place where ‘trivial incidents and accidents’ were posted, had a power that made one’s insides noisy just by looking at it.

But it also wasn’t right to go around asking people.

​Sohyun hadn’t joined a guild and was mostly a solo player with very few acquaintances. Even those he considered acquaintances were just a few people he had been half-forced to get close to while running the same raids.

Even then, because he happened to play as a healer in raids, they were only objects of love and hate for Sohyun, who would be the first to be blamed if something went wrong.

To put it simply, he didn’t want to talk to them unless it was about raids.

“Tsk. Ah, why do I feel so unsettled?”

She felt like he was forgetting something very important.

And regardless of whether Sohyun felt unsettled or not, Dohwa was working very hard making the ‘Rare Pickled Peaches’ to give to Won.

Relentlessly crafting the same thing over and over, he was no different from a canned peach factory.

Sohyun, who late in the game realized that his friend had reached the level of a pickled peaches master for one person, smacked his lips.

It was because it was obvious he wouldn’t listen even if he said something felt unsettling in that state.

‘Eh, well, it can’t be helped. As long as he isn’t a star on the Incident Board… But then again, are there any sane people among the hardcore players?’

One thing he had learned from playing Betting Bad for a few years was that a sane person among the hardcore players was very, very rare. Even people who seemed sane at first glance eventually did something crazy.

Then again, you’d have to be that crazy to cling to a ‘dead game’ with an insane setting where saving the world gets you treated like a villain, and the higher your infamy, the more good deeds you’ve actually done.

Recalling a truth universally acknowledged in any game, Sohyun vigorously scratched the back of his neck.

​“Ah, um… I’m just saying this just in case. But if anything happens with that user Won later on, cut ties immediately. It’s just an in-game connection anyway, so cutting ties isn’t that hard.”