Chapter 63 – Reconnaissance

“A hidden camera?” I said in disbelief. “In my apartment? Are you sure?”

Euphemia nodded. “Yep, it was stuck behind the toaster. Not easy to notice at all.”

I ran my hand through my hair nervously. “Jesus… so the government is actually spying on all the seizure patients. I wonder why…”

Euphemia crossed her arms and frowned. “That’s what I was going to ask you! I thought this was all some overblown stuff on the news like it usually is with news reporting, but it’s kind of hard to ignore when it’s someone I know on the headlines!”

“I didn’t even believe it at first, and I thought that it could be someone else with the same name as you, until they said your in game username as well,” Euphemia continued. “When I heard ‘spoon’, I knew it had to be you. After all, nobody else in the world would want such a stupid and lame name…”

…

Ah, the curse of my name. This was going to stick with me till the end of days.

Euphemia continued to speak while hugging a pillow to her chest. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you once you got back. Did you do anything really naughty that would make the government want to spy on you? Hmmmm?”

“Not really–”

Euphemia looked at me suspiciously, batting her pretty eyes.

“Are you sure~? Maybe you were looking up some illegal things on the internet~”

“Why are you making me sound like a terrorist”

“Because you are one~”

“...”

Euphemia looked up, making a thinking gesture that was a bit mocking. “Or… I was thinking, maybe you killed someone.” She nodded and made a stabbing motion as if she got to the bottom of the mystery, before continuing. “Yeah, that’s gotta be it. Spoon, are you a serial killer?”

“No, but if you don’t shut up I’m about to be one.”

Euphemia snickered with her hand over her mouth. Before she could continue her wild theories about me being some sort of crazy terrorist killer, I decided to change the subject.

“By the way, I finally died.”

“Oh~ really?”

“Yeah. Thirty day death penalty, or at least until the Hidden Challenge begins, if that starts before my penalty is up.”

“What are you going to do with all the free time?”

“What free time? I play in my sleep most of the time anyway. This doesn’t help at all,” I groaned.

Euphemia chuckled. “Oh come on Spoon, every boy I know is spending most of their free time watching Eclipse Online content even when they’re not playing~”

I sighed. “Yeah, that’s true. I do that too.”

“So I guess now you have more time to spend with your wifey~”

I raised an eyebrow. “And who’s that?”

“Me, of course~” Euphemia chimed.

I pulled on her cheek.

“Ow ow owww!”

After joking with Euphemia for a bit longer, I went back home to relax. But first, I checked the sink for the hidden camera. Making sure not to show that I was aware of it, I discreetly glanced at the subtle black sticker right behind the toaster. Honestly it was a bit of a miracle that Euphemia even noticed it. I probably would never have noticed it.

The camera had a full view of my living room and kitchen. I honestly had no idea why the government was keeping surveillance on me like this, but for now I decided that there wasn’t much I could do about it.

Plopping onto my sofa, I turned on the tv and checked my bank account quickly. After all, I was expecting a fat check from the government.

I completed the security question and logged into my account. A moment later, my eyes nearly glazed over.

A transaction of 360,000 dollars transferred from the Treasury Department was sitting in my account. I blinked, just to make sure what I was seeing was real.

“Yeah!!!!” I shouted in excitement.

Okay, they could spy on me as much as I wanted. In fact, they could even watch me shower and brush my teeth if they wanted. I didn’t give a shit at this point.

With this amount of money, I could fully pay off the remaining loan shark debt from my dad’s machinery shop. My old pops really had no sense of finances at all, borrowing that much for a business that eventually didn’t work out.

Anyway, that was a huge load off my shoulders. Up until now, I was living extremely frugally… actually not much was going to change. I’d still have to be careful with my spending, but at least I could treat myself like a human being more often than not now. Hell, maybe I’d be able to go out for dinner at least a few times a week.

But first, I needed to deal with the loan sharks. I picked up my phone and called a number that called me every Friday at eight pm for the last five years. In the last five years, this was the first time I was calling them instead.

Ring… ring…

A high strung male voice picked up the phone on the other end.

“Ha?”

I took a deep breath and spoke. “It’s Kim Taek-yong. I’m calling to pay back my debt in full.”

“Ehh? It’s little bro Taek-yong? Have you lost your mind, calling me trying to renegotiate? What did I tell you last time. You miss a payment, we break your arm. Got it?”

I took another deep breath and patted my chest, trying to calm my nerves. This guy never ceased to be as abrasive as possible. “I said, I’m paying back the amount in full. Wire transfer. Then we’re done.”

For a moment, there was silence on the other end. Then, I could hear an overly sweet tone from a woman from the loan shark’s end.

“Honey, who are you talking to? Don’t you want to pay attention to me?”

“Shut up, bitch! Go fuck off and whore somwhere else until tonight,” the loan shark barked.

Seemed like he was talking to a prostitute or something. I could hear him slamming a door shut as he walked.

“Taek-yong bro, let me tell you something. You’re nowhere close to paying off your full debt. You see, you’ve only been paying interest until now.”

I could tell this loan shark was trying to fleece me for more.

“No. I paid fifty percent principal every single time. That’s what we agreed to.”

“Let’s talk in the park later. Meet me at 9pm tonight.”

“Listen,” I enunciated clearly into the phone, getting increasingly agitated. “I will transfer you the remaining principal my dad owes. After that, you never contact me ever again.”

The loan shark paused for a moment, and then spoke. “Three million.”

“What?”

“Three million dollars. That’s the principal you owe.” I could almost see him grinning through that snide tone in his voice.

“Bullshit! I’ve kept records until now, it’s nowhere near three million left.”

“You don’t like it, little bro? Then see me at the park tonight. Nine o’clock. Don’t be late, or you’ll regret it.”

Click.

The loan shark hung up.

Scowling, I cursed at him. That slimy fucker. At this moment, I decided. He was not going to get another payment from me, and there was no way in hell I was going to meet him and his goons in the park at night.

Originally my plan was to just pay off the debt and avoid dealing with them, since I was well aware that loan sharks were sleazy criminals that were all too willing to blackmail or violently assault their clients for missing payments.

But never did I imagine that they wouldn’t even accept a full payment of the debt without getting greedy.

Anyway, there wasn’t much I could do from this point onward. I decided to ignore them as best as I could, and take on the full consequences of doing so. At least I made an honest attempt to pay them back. What happened from here on out was no longer my responsibility.

---------

The days passed quickly as I went back to work, and soon twenty days passed since I died in Eclipse. I was bombarded with questions about my hospitalization, but due to my non-disclosure agreement with the government, I couldn’t really answer any of the questions my managers and coworkers were asking, including the constant barrage of “what did you see in the hospital” and “did they do anything suspicious to you” type questions.

I decided to put the pipe bomb incident in the hospital bathroom behind me. There was a lot I did not understand about that, like how it happened and why the government was so keen on keeping it under wraps, but they did pay me to keep my mouth shut, so I would do just that.

There was one new seizure case since my release from the hospital, but other than that, things seemed to have calmed down a bit due to the suppression of news, and the government was still keeping that section of the hospital a quarantined zone.

A young streamer tried to break into the hospital and record what was going on, but they were shot in the leg by a rifle. That almost sparked a national controversy, but it also just added to the mystery of what exactly was going on in that hospital.

A few days later, I got an email from the Eclipse game.

The Hidden Challenge will begin on the 24th. You have been invited to participate as a gold invitation holder. Good luck.

The 24th was just a few days from now. I decided to take it easy for the next few days and research as much as I could about the Hidden Challenge and Eclipse related things.

There was a lot of online speculation about the Hidden Challenge, and it was separated into two camps. One camp believed that it was going to be primarily a PvP event, and the other camp believed it to be a PvE event.

Both camps were heavily active online, and game news coverage extended to all sorts of wild theories and conjectures, even going into in depth analysis on hypothetical situations.

One of the most popular topics at the moment was yet again the head-to-head matchup between classes. This was because the number one ranker on Eclipse Online just hit level 100, and found out a huge problem about classes in this game. The problem was that after level 100, stat increases from level ups were drastically diminished.

The ranker sold this information to KB broadcasting for a large sum. He probably would’ve kept it secret as well if it wasn’t for other rankers hot on his tail who would’ve found out at level 100 anyway.

This revelation about diminished stat increases meant that higher level players couldn’t just bulldoze lower level players with unreachable stats, which was the case in many other MMOs in the past.

In Eclipse Online, these stat limitations meant that which class you picked really dictated your gameplay experience. A healer actually felt like a healer, regardless of level, and a warrior actually felt like a warrior.

In fact, the stat difference between a level 100 warrior and a level 200 warrior was minimal.

Upon realizing this, players about to hit level 100 were beginning to shift their attitudes about leveling. It was no longer about simply bum rushing levels. Now, the focus was more on training and honing combat abilities outside of just statistical increases. Some rankers that were about to hit level 100 were trying to achievement hunt for stat increases, but achievements were so hard to come by that it was often times a more efficient use of time to just level grind.

Other rankers had a different approach. Steel Slice, for example, was still active as ever on Death Tube, killing whoever he came across to keep himself on the leaderboards as a high level ranker. He was also equipped with some of the best equipment in the game at the moment, paying an egregious amount of real world money for the [Dragonlord’s Battleaxe] off the auction site.

That battleaxe could probably buy an entire apartment in some parts of town, and he was just showing it off on Death Tube like it was nothing.