digital heart | minsung | ✔

23

Despite how late we got home yesterday, we all find ourselves online immediately after waking up the next morning, deciding to hang out there.

Of course, it's a good thing to keep hanging out in real life as well every now and then. But the game feels so realistic that the difference between hanging out online or in real often seems to be missing. I'm distantly aware that it's a little concerning but I always ignore the small nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It's okay, it's only for the summer vacation, anyway. Felix, Seungmin and I made a promise, about limiting our time online once college started. We'll probably only go online during the weekends and I'm sure the game will stop ruling my life like this then.

The others of the guild -Lino, Bin, and Chris- are online as well and we decided to go on our very first guild mission. So we traveled to a small village to the west of Nox, accepted the first random quest we ran into and split up in pairs.

The first pair is Chris and Seungmin, since the leader demanded the smartest person to go with him for his part of the mission. They have to locate the goblin lord and convince him to stop the assaults on a small village and to be honest, I totally get why he didn't want Felix to go with him. Felix would -literally- just yeet himself onto the goblin lord tactlessly and probably ruin the entire thing.

Felix and Bin are doing their part as well. They are supposed to protect the said village from the upcoming wave of goblins. First, they assigned Lino and Bin to that objective but Lino insisted that he wanted to pair up with me. I think it's not necessary to say that my heart did a thing back there.

So here we are, walking around in a bigger town I forgot the name of, close to the targeted village. We actually have the least thrilling part of the quest; to find witnesses that might know about what happened between the goblins and the people that live in that village. It basically means we have to talk to a bunch of NPCs, hoping that they'll tell us something.

It's not even a necessary part of the mission, just a side-quest inside the big quest to earn some extra credits and XP. I think we've been here for the past two hours and we still know absolutely nothing. All of the NPCs we approached either knew nothing about the matter or refused to speak up on behalf of protecting themselves from the wrath of the goblin lord, no matter how we tried to convince them to at least spill a little bit of the tea.

It was boring in frustrating, but as long as Lino was with me, I didn't really mind.

"You know, I think I'm really close to giving up," Lino speaks up after another failed attempt to get an old woman to talk. He watches the old lady sauntering off into the distance, probably still muttering offensive things about disrespectful youth butting into matters that weren't theirs.

"Same, it's getting old how butthurt all those NPCs are," I reply, tearing my gaze away from the horizon and looking at Lino instead. "How about we just ditch the quest and go shopping instead? I've never been here before and it's not like we didn't try to fulfill the quest."

"You have a point," the raven-haired replies, thinking for a second before shrugging his shoulders. "Okay, we're going on a shopping spree. Where do you want to go first?"

I remember seeing a store with avatar-items when we walked into this street and from a quick look through its large windows, it seemed quite interesting. It's not like I really want to change my appearance but at the same time, a small change every now and then is refreshing.

"Follow me," I say, grabbing Lino's hand on impulse and dragging him back into the direction we just came from. A smile invisible to the other plays on my lips as I mentally thank the game developers for making this game as they did. Lino's hand is warm in mine, the feeling no different from what it would feel like in the real world.