Even Lee Joo-hwan, my father’s son and the president of the company, asked me.
“Do do you really have to kill off that character? Isn’t the team strongly against it?”
“Sayla is—”
“—the most elegant and alluring when she dies. I’ve heard that so many times, I think my ears are going to bleed.”
I made every effort to kill Sayla, believing it was the right decision as a developer and character designer, and the
results were indeed excellent. The game we developed,’That Summer, There was Them(TST)’, caused a global
sensation as soon as it was launched. Sayla Devernon, a character I painstakingly designed, was named “The Most
Captivating Villain” by the game industry’s equivalent of TIME magazine, ‘Gomonji’.
“You were right. Sayla overwhelmingly took first place in the popularity polls. We’re already getting tons of requests
for Sayla merchandise.”
Experts pointed to Sayla as the biggest factor in TST’s success. But I still couldn’t be satisfied. In my view, TST was
still incomplete.
“There’s still a route where Sayla survives!”
I had to eliminate it, to make TST more perfect. I played countless times, trying to kill Sayla. Just now, I managed to
kill her again.
“Great. I killed her again!”
As I was about to put down my phone, I heard a voice.
{“I didn’t want to die.”}
Startled, I looked around, and there she was, Sayla, staring at me from the screen.
{“Now you experience it. Save my life.”}
I had transmigrated into the body of the world’s most captivating villain, Sayla Devernon, the very character I had
struggled so hard to kill.
