Chapter 1: From the victim’s perspective(1)

I woke up to the sound of a loud horn.

Still half-asleep, I sat blankly for a moment before realizing the source of the noise was right outside the window, and I pulled back the curtain.

Whether it was a car accident or not, flames and black smoke were rising from the road in front of my house.

Upon closer inspection, I saw a huge, collapsed figure lying on the side of the chaotic road.

Two ears sticking up above his hair and fur protruding from outside his shirt.

If I had to guess, that person was probably someone who had been raising a werewolf character.

Casually admiring the tangled cars and police vehicles, I opened my mouth with a faint hope.

“…Status window.”

[Failed to load status window.]

• Stat bonuses cannot be received.

• Skills cannot be used.

• Leveling up is impossible.

• Physical abilities are fixed at level 1.

“It’s still the same.”

That phrase ‘Failed to load.’

Not a single word had changed in a year.

I let out a bitter sigh.

Getting up from my seat, I slowly headed to the bathroom.

In the bathroom mirror, a fair-skinned, white-haired beauty with a pair of huge horns was staring back at me.

It was still a sight I couldn’t get used to.

Trying my best not to pay attention to my body, I mechanically applied lotion to the dry horns.

When I was young, I had envied cartoon characters with horns.

But now that I actually had these cool-looking horns, they were nothing but inconvenient.

It was like one more annoying area that I always had to take care of.

“If I had known it would be like this, I should have abandoned the dragonkin…”

Dragonkin.

A race with a simple background story of being a hybrid of humans and dragons.

Because of the hybrid part, physical abilities were very low, but instead, the magic-related stats had excellent bonuses, making it a race with both advantages and disadvantages specialized in raising mage characters, but…

I glared at the gradually disappearing words of the status window with annoyance.

[-Skills cannot be used.

-Stat bonuses cannot be received.]

Even if the magic power bonus is high, I can’t receive stat bonuses, and I can’t use skills.

Since the mage character, whose lifeblood is skills and magic stat, had both of those sealed, there was not much difference from a very weak horned ordinary person.

A year ago, everyone who had mutated into a game character with me stated that their status window would not open.

However, among those users, there were people who chose races with excellent initial stats.

For example, people who became races such as werewolves, beastmen, demonkin, or celestials were such types.

They never experienced common minor illnesses at all, could catch up with cheetahs, which are said to be fast, just by running, and some could even fly in the sky with wings on their backs.

In comparison, the dragonkin was weaker than most people who chose the ordinary human race, had to manage their horns to prevent them from drying out, and because they couldn’t even receive stat bonuses, they suffered from frequent minor illnesses.

At the point where the status window was blocked, the only advantages of the dragonkin were excellent eyesight and appearance.

Still, being a white dragon, I could shoot breath, but that only amounted to spitting out a few pieces of ice.

It might be a useful ability in the summer, but after using it, my whole body would be exhausted, so it was much more cost-effective to freeze ice in the refrigerator and eat it.

“Hoo…”

Letting out a bitter sigh, I grabbed a cigarette and tried to open the window, but I stopped because I thought the smoke coming from the crashed vehicle would come in.

In a year, a time that could be long or short, even the taste of cigarettes had changed.

In fact, since becoming a dragonkin, it felt more like I was smoking out of habit than taste.

Should I quit on this occasion?

I sat blankly on the bed and looked at my phone.

Today’s date appeared on my phone.

December 17th, weather clear.

And a red day, Sunday.

At the same time, it was exactly one year since the users’ bodies had changed like this.

With nothing to do in the morning, I lay in bed and browsed my phone, and a few breaking news headlines caught my eye.

• [Serial killer, revealed to be a werewolf again.]

• [The night of terror on the 15th, the necessity of isolating werewolves]

These were news flashes on the main portal site.

When I clicked on one and went inside, the content was as expected.

Every month on the 15th, whenever the full moon rose, werewolf users who couldn’t control their instincts often caused trouble.

So, the country introduced a system for such users, where applicants would have restraints placed on their bodies and be managed from the afternoon of the 14th to the afternoon of the 16th when the full moon rose.

The problem was that most werewolves didn’t like such treatment.

Well, I wouldn’t like it either.

Even though I’m unconscious, I still have memories of what happened.

Who would like to be tied up for 3 days, relying on IV drips to survive?

Maybe succubus and incubus users with fetish for being tied up might like it, but most werewolf users had normal sexual preferences.

• Arrest all the werewolves and isolate them from society.

• Again, the victim’s photo isn’t mosaic’d, but only the perpetrator is.

Are you kidding me?

• Anyway, all the user b*stards should be managed with leashes.

Scanning through the comments section of the news, it was, as expected, full of comments containing indiscriminate insults and denigration against werewolves.

Some of them criticized all users indiscriminately, or even expressed extreme ideologies that users should not be treated as the same human beings.

“…Ugh.”

With a sigh, I pressed the back button.

All users are not criminals, and most of them try to live without causing harm to others, but public opinion was still negative towards users.

I got up from my seat and put on the hoodie that had been thrown carelessly in the corner of the room.

When the horns were covered by the loose hood, I looked like a fairly ordinary human being.

‘…A walk will make me feel better.’

I turned off my phone and moved my steps outside the house.

As soon as I opened the door, the refreshing morning air greeted me.

After enjoying the cool morning air to my heart’s content and taking a walk, the sun was already high in the sky.

I was getting hungry, so I boiled some ramen and ate brunch, then prepared to go out.

This time, unlike when I took a walk, I wore a long padding over my hoodie so that the horns would never be exposed to the outside.

This was because the number of people picking fights for being a user has been increasing recently.

Because I couldn’t deal with those people with this weak body, hiding the parts that made me look like a user in this way was almost the only way to protect myself.

On top of that, with a mask to cover my fangs and lenses to make my golden eyes look ordinary, my appearance looked like an ordinary person who was sensitive to the cold and wore a lot of clothes.

“Ugh, it’s hot…”

However, this method had a major side effect.

That was the heat.

Although it was winter, the weather felt warmer than usual today, making it even more so.

Suddenly, the will to go out dropped sharply, but I overcame my powerlessness and threw open the front door.

It was almost a month since I had a proper outing, not for the purpose of taking a walk.

The streets in the afternoon were deserted.

Perhaps because it was a suburban area without a downtown area nearby, I could count the number of people I saw while walking from my house to the bus stop on one hand.

With the AirPods I bought with the money I saved last month in my ears, I hummed along to the music that was playing automatically, and the bus arrived.

Whether they were going to a meeting or something, the bus was full of middle-aged women and men.

Judging from their attire, it seemed like they had been hiking in a mountain club, and judging from the red faces and strong smell of alcohol of some people, it seemed like they had heavily drunk makgeolli.

I instinctively went to the corner of the back seat of the bus to avoid being noticed by them.

The people who picked the most fights were those kinds of middle-aged people.

Unlike the younger generation, who only hated users who directly harmed people, like werewolves and demons, most middle-aged people found it difficult to understand and ostracize the existence of users themselves.

In particular, people who liked to assert their authority, commonly referred to as ‘old farts’ in the world, even regarded it as a kind of pride to pick fights with users who had lower physical abilities than humans.

Of course, not all middle-aged people were like that.

In particular, people whose children or families had become users often strived to promote the rights of users, hoping for people’s understanding and consideration.

Even if they tried so hard, the reality did not change.

“So, you know, I just slammed that beastwoman down back then!

So she was crying while whimpering.”

“As expected of Mr. Jang, those guys should all be banished from society.

They’re all children of the devil, you know?

They turned into demons or such creatures because they played demon games!”

“Tsk tsk, how can the country recognize such uncivilized people as citizens when it’s going to hell.

The government is all in cahoots!”

I was disgusted by the words and actions of the man, who was boasting about unilaterally beating the weak, and his party, who were praising him.

Having experienced similar incidents, I felt like I was involuntarily empathizing with the victim.

Maybe that beastwoman was also caught up in trauma and became a half-cripple who couldn’t go out without a hoodie and mask like me.

Users are subject to aggravated punishment if they engage in mutual violence, regardless of their physical abilities.

It was a new bill that had been created a few months ago.

The country said it was a law to prevent some users with excellent physical abilities from turning ordinary people into half-dead in the name of mutual violence, but in the end, it was the powerless ordinary users who suffered.

Users could not even resist even if someone was hitting them.

However, people who committed crimes against users were not properly punished either.

How serious it was, users often lamented that they were living sandbags.

Perhaps the beastwoman, who was the victim in that old fart’s story, couldn’t even resist the unilateral violence.

If she did something wrong, she would be charged with mutual violence, and mutual violence between users and ordinary people is unconditionally judged as the user’s fault.

The Munsik Act.

It was a mob law enacted in the name of a child who died after being assaulted by a minotaur.

It was a mob law that completely ignored the basic principle of ‘equality’ stipulated in the Constitution, but in reality, there was no place to listen to the unfair voices of the victimized users.

Rather, public opinion was in favor of these laws being enacted.

Whenever such unequal bills appeared, users naturally protested.

However, their voices, which accounted for less than 1% of the total population, were quickly buried.

Since most of the privileged class hated users, each political party was busy gaining votes by introducing bills to sanction users.

In addition, human rights groups, which had been losing public sentiment by advocating for criminals, began to argue that users were ‘not subject to human rights protection,’ judging that they could not recover public sentiment as it was.

Naturally, people who had felt threatened by users agreed with it, and public opinion turned favorable to human rights groups.

Legally and in public opinion warfare, it was always the users who were at a disadvantage.

As this atmosphere became prevalent, the number of people who looked down on users gradually increased.

They were fired from the company, assaulted, or, in severe cases, even murdered for religious reasons because they were of a different race.

Due to legal restrictions, users could not properly protest against this.

Nevertheless, reporters and newspapers did not pay attention to the suffering users.

Rather, they poured out articles that fueled hatred of users.

Everyone who produced articles or news knew that public opinion was being controlled somewhere.

However, not a single one of them stood up for the users.

The place for users in this country was gradually disappearing.

Negative thoughts followed one after another.

I slammed my head into the seat in front of me.

The cold chair frame made of metal touched my forehead, and it felt like my head, which had been hot, was cooling down a bit.

I closed my eyes in the same position, and then realized that the voices of the mountain club members, which had been constantly heard, had stopped.

The horns were sticking out of the hoodie.

I felt dozens of pairs of eyes fixed on me.