Rumble—!
On the monitor, the colossal mountain range of bones that had filled the entire screen came crashing down.
White skeletons shattered into tens of thousands of fragments and scattered in every direction. At the center of it all, the heart of mana that had burned crimson slowly faded to ash-gray.
It was pure catharsis.
[You have defeated the Mythic Raid Boss, “Whitebone Dragon Calcifer”!]
[You are the first player to defeat it solo!]
[Your achievement will be recorded forever in the history of the Rachenos Continent.]
[You have acquired the hidden title: “Lord of White Bones.”]
“...That actually worked?”
It was past midnight.
Everyone else had already gone home, leaving me alone in the bleak, empty office of a game development company. I stared blankly at the monitor and muttered in disbelief.
On one of my two screens was the crude, mass-produced monster model I had to finish by tomorrow morning.
But my eyes remained fixed on the main monitor.
The rest of my team had gone home while I stayed behind to work overtime. Since I was already destined to pull an all-nighter, I had logged into the game as usual under the excuse of gathering design references and started attacking the boss.
And somehow—
“I actually killed it.”
I let out an incredulous laugh as I looked over the equipment covering my character, Dogani, from head to toe.
I can’t believe collecting every last bone fragment really was the answer.
There were 2,847 varieties of Bone Fragments—junk items that everyone else threw away because they did nothing but take up inventory space.
I had spent three years collecting every single one.
Why?
Because they were pretty.
Seriously, for worthless junk items, their designs were absurdly intricate. How could I possibly resist collecting them?
That obsession had unlocked a hidden crafting quest, and the bizarre equipment I obtained from it turned out to be the key to breaking the Whitebone Dragon’s solo-raid mechanic.
Who could have possibly known?
Unable to suppress the grin creeping across my face, I immediately uploaded the recorded gameplay footage to the community forum.
***
Title: [Breaking News] Whitebone Dragon Solo Kill. I Did It.
***
The forum had practically become a ghost town inhabited only by veteran players, yet the moment I refreshed the page, comments poured in like a waterfall.
***
└ Bullshit. It’s a twenty-four-player raid.
└ Go watch the video. It’s real.
└ Whoa, what the hell is that equipment?
└ Apparently, you can craft it after collecting all 2,847 Bone Fragment varieties.
└ What the fuck? I threw them all away because they were trash! Those were crafting materials?!
└ Dogani’s been acting like a filthy bone addict forever, and now he’s finally done something insane. LMAO.
└ He collected every single one? Is he even human?
└ A genuine bone freak.
***
...“Bone freak” was supposed to be an insult, not my nickname.
So why did it feel so heartwarming now?
I slowly scrolled through the comments. A surprising number of people were still clinging to this game in the middle of the night.
Most of the usernames were familiar.
***
└ LMAO. The title “Lord of White Bones” is real. I’m crying.
└ Congratulations, Dogani. Seriously. That was the last hidden achievement, wasn’t it?
└ Damn, though. There’s genuinely nothing left for you to do in this game now.
└ What are you going to do next, Dogani? LOL.
***
My finger stopped at the final comment.
Good question.
I sank deep into my chair.
I was happy.
Of course I was.
I had become the first person in the world to accomplish a feat every other player had declared impossible.
But the happiness was fleeting. The moment I saw my haggard face reflected in the monitor, a crushing sense of emptiness washed over me.
Is this the end?
I had now completed every known achievement in the game.
Veteran players like me—people who had practically sacrificed their lives to this game—had explored every conceivable possibility. After all that effort, the only unconquered frontier left had been defeating the Whitebone Dragon solo.
Perhaps there were still achievements hidden somewhere that no one had discovered.
But honestly, I no longer felt as though there was anything left to do.
“......”
I took a sip of cold coffee, trying to soothe the heaviness in my chest.
I had devoted my life to this game, Dungeon & Empire, ever since I was in college.
Its main storyline was simple: players joined the Holy Rachenos Empire and fought against the armies of the Demon Realm.
But its attention to detail was downright obsessive.
Its physics engine was so sophisticated that players joked the developers must have tortured aliens to create it. Every single joint in every monster’s skeleton had been meticulously rendered, and the world’s ecosystem functioned with an almost insane degree of complexity.
It was a masterpiece.
Thanks to that uncompromising vision, creature-design fanatics like me flocked to it, and the game developed a worldwide cult following.
Meanwhile, my real job was as a 3D character modeler for a mass-production mobile game company that cared about nothing but profitability.
My daily routine consisted of changing yesterday’s monster from blue to red, slapping something like “Flame” onto its name, and repeating the same soulless copy-and-paste process.
“Mr. Seungwoo, bone rigs consume too many resources. Just fudge it with the textures. Who’s going to look at every individual joint anyway?”
I am.
I look at them.
These ignorant fools had no idea how majestic a bone dragon looked when the bones of its wings unfolded.
Whenever my clueless team leader criticized me, this game had been my only refuge.
It was a masterpiece on a completely different level from the garbage my company churned out.
Under the pretense of gathering design references, I ended up playing it far more than my own company’s games.
What was the point of working at a game studio if I couldn’t run another company’s game during work hours and call it “reference gathering”?
It was the same principle that made everything more entertaining than studying during exam season.
I played another company’s game obsessively until I reached the level cap, collected every hidden title I could find, and eventually became one of its most famous top-ranked players.
But nothing lasted forever.
It had already been a full year since the game’s last major update.
Even a masterpiece like this couldn’t escape the passage of time.
New players had all but vanished. The only people left on the servers were ghosts like me, wandering through old maps and reliving memories from better days.
The guys camping on the forum this late at night are all just like me.
Looking at the familiar usernames celebrating my achievement and expressing their disbelief made me strangely melancholy.
I could still enjoy myself simply by admiring the game’s incredible monster designs, but even that wouldn’t last much longer.
For an online game that had stopped receiving new content, there was only one possible ending.
One day, without warning, an announcement would arrive declaring the termination of service.
“Haah... Another masterpiece is going to die just like—”
Ding.
Before I could finish sighing, a golden mail icon began flashing in the lower-right corner of the screen.
It wasn’t an ordinary global notification or guild message.
It was an administrator-exclusive system mail.
“Huh?”
As if hypnotized, I moved my mouse over and clicked it.
***
Dungeon & Empire Expansion: The Demon Realm Strikes Back
Beta Tester Invitation
Greetings from the Dungeon & Empire Operations Team.
In recognition of your exceptional contributions to the game and your overwhelming record of accomplishments, Dogani has been selected as a priority beta tester for our final expansion, The Demon Realm Strikes Back.
If you wish to participate, please click the [Accept] button below.
[Accept] [Decline]
***
I froze with my hand gripping the mouse for five full seconds.
...Holy shit.
I rubbed my eyes and looked again.
It wasn’t a hallucination.
Th-There was an expansion coming?!
My heart began pounding like crazy.
Those lunatics had actually been working!
People had even started rumors that the entire development team had fled in the middle of the night, yet they had secretly been working on an expansion behind the scenes.
They could have announced it sooner.
Those twisted bastards certainly knew how to toy with a man’s heart.
Adrenaline exploded through my veins.
I immediately clicked [Accept] and dashed off an ecstatic post on the community forum.
***
Title: AN EXPANSION IS COMING!!! I GOT A BETA INVITATION!!!
***
But apart from the reactions to my solo-kill video, the forum remained silent.
Looks like I’m the first one.
The pride of a veteran player swelled inside me, and my grin stretched from ear to ear.
Now, then.
When did the beta test begin?
I reopened the invitation and checked the date written in tiny letters at the very bottom.
Tomorrow at 00:00?
In other words, midnight.
I checked the clock at the bottom of the monitor.
The current time was 11:56 p.m.
The server would open in less than five minutes.
Reality abruptly smacked me in the back of the head.
I still have a deadline.
My gaze drifted toward the monitor on my left.
The project file I needed to submit by tomorrow morning was still open.
After several consecutive nights of working overtime, my entire body felt as heavy as lead, and my eyes seemed ready to fall out of their sockets. If I stayed any later, I might genuinely end up on the news as another victim of death by overwork.
“......”
With solemn reverence, I reached over and turned off the left monitor.
If I’m going to die, I might as well play it first.
Tomorrow’s me might get his ass kicked by the team leader, but tonight’s me had a Demon Realm to conquer!
[Connecting to the beta client...]
[Loading The Demon Realm Strikes Back data... 48%]
[Loading The Demon Realm Strikes Back data... 65%]
My heart pounded with anticipation.
I knew absolutely nothing about the contents of the expansion. Since it was a beta test, that was only natural.
But I didn’t care.
The game I thought had reached its end was coming back to life.
[Loading The Demon Realm Strikes Back data... 82%]
As the loading bar slowly filled, my eyelids began to droop.
[Loading The Demon Realm Strikes Back data... 99%]
That cursed final one percent.
I glared at the magnificent illustration on the loading screen.
Then my vision suddenly blurred.
My head spun, and the extreme fatigue accumulated over the past several days crashed over me like a tidal wave. My eyelids grew impossibly heavy.
Just a little longer... I only have to hold on a little longer...
The humming of the cooling fans gradually faded into the distance.
The strength drained from the hand gripping the mouse.
Before I realized it, I had lost consciousness, my head slumping forward in front of the monitor.
And then—
Thud!
The instant I opened my eyes, someone’s battered military boot slammed straight into my face.