Where There Is Meeting, There Is Parting
Where there is meeting, there is also parting.
The girl drew a long greatsword nearly as tall as she was.
Slight of frame, almost too delicate for a battlefield, she bent her knees and raised the blade overhead as if settling into some preparatory stance—something that looked half like a dance pose, strange and deliberate.
At a glance it might have seemed ridiculous. The great warrior facing her, however, never loosened his grip on tension. Too many of his allies already lay dead at her feet for that.
He could not afford to lower his guard. That was no child. That was a monster wearing a little girl's skin. The moment he let himself be fooled by that lovely face, his own head would be the next one kissing the dirt.
So the great warrior held the standoff, nerves drawn tight.
The girl only stepped lightly, expression blank.
The strange deadlock shattered in an instant.
While he tracked every flicker of her movement—
Plip.
Something like a water droplet fell from the air.
His senses, already stretched razor-thin, recognized it at once.
Blood. A bead of blood sliding from the tip of the greatsword that had cut down his comrades.
It dripped, and dripped again—far more than seemed natural.
A veteran of countless fights, he knew exactly what that meant. Quietly he tightened his hold on the shield.
And just as he expected—
BOOM—!
The girl slammed into him. Fast, ferocious—but still something he could take.
A light-attack command.
She'd deliberately held back on the first strike to manage her stamina.
On pure exchange of that opening blow, the great warrior came out ahead. A clean shield block would have shaved extra stamina off her.
But celebrating a first-move advantage would have been suicide. Her true terror always came after—the razor chain of follow-ups.
Whsshk!
The greatsword split the air.
The successive strikes that flew for his vitals were sharp and lethal beyond reason.
At that point he abandoned any thought of watching and blocking with his eyes.
All he could do was trust instinct. That was the only road left toward victory.
In the end his choice was only half right. Her combo did not last long; he slipped some of it and ate the rest.
The problem was that every single hit landed on a critical zone. One clean connection gouged a massive chunk of his health.
Having weathered the flurry, the great warrior spat blood and let out a hollow laugh.
All crits… Even if she was aiming only for weak points, it was still absurd.
Did she have aimbot eyes or something?
Critical hits in Abyss were never that generous. Yet the girl treated them like the easiest thing in the world.
Now he understood why his comrades had fallen so mercilessly. None of them had survived this chain. With crits popping like that, five hits would have been the absolute limit.
But he had somehow taken the blow—and that meant the turn had come around to him at least once.
The girl across from him was breathing hard. Even a glance showed she was in bad shape; she must have burned every last scrap of stamina.
Of course. No one walked away clean after a spray of attacks that wild. So the turn had passed to the great warrior.
A seasoned fighter never lets an opening slip.
—-!
He roared and charged.
He lifted the shield he'd been gripping so tightly and swung it like a bludgeon on a diagonal, his one-handed sword in the other hand hammering forward in relentless arcs.
The girl flicked her signature silver hair and slipped every strike.
Parrying. A craft only people who split a single second into frames could perform—and it was unfolding nonstop right in front of his eyes.
If the pressure stalled here, the turn would flip back to her. On top of that he was already bleeding from the earlier hit. Objectively he was behind—
Yet the great warrior's face stayed perfectly calm.
And with good reason. He pressed the assault with a calculated glint in his eye, and for a heartbeat her guard cracked open.
She had been beautiful at redirecting every incoming edge with the flat of her greatsword, but even that had its limit.
Stamina. She had to be running dry.
The cause was obvious: that earlier combo.
She had planned to drop him with the opening flurry and end it there. When he refused to fall, the plan collapsed.
Then the great warrior who had weathered the storm seized the counter and claimed victory.
In the end it was a mind game. Duels between players who actually understood the game often turned on tiny, almost invisible differences in build or item tree.
The girl was half-immobilized. The great warrior who had won the mind game now reached for the sweet fruit of victory.
Certain of the win, he exhaled calmly and thrust his sword to finish her.
The blade sank into the body of a girl who could not even counter.
That was when he felt it—the wrongness.
His honed instincts screamed. Only then did he realize something had gone terribly off-script.
Why wasn't she falling? He had put steel through a vital point.
Lightning cracked through his skull. He looked up in pure horror, but it was already too late.
The girl's eyes flooded red.
Still unable to drive the sword deeper or pull it free, the great warrior froze the moment those crimson eyes met his.
Ah. Right. At the root of every fight lay the mind game.
He had thought he'd won—only to discover he'd been dancing on the palm of her hand the whole time.
Maybe he had already lost from the very beginning.
That was the last thought the great warrior had as the once-expressionless girl smiled.
"And that's how you use Zombie Camilla's burst lifesteal to delete an enemy bruiser."
Even I was satisfied with that fight.
The higher the tier climbed, the sharper the opponents got; that last skirmish had genuinely cost me effort.
Luckily the bait—deliberately leaving an opening at the end—had landed perfectly. If the other player hadn't taken the hook, we might have been stuck trading steel for a long, sticky while longer.
Chat was flying.
Somehow even faster than before… Had the viewer count jumped already? I wondered, then decided I didn't care enough to check. Whether the room was packed or empty didn't matter right now.
Viewers were busy dissecting the last play among themselves. Just watching it made a warm little smile tug at my lips.
Mixed in were pure one-sided praise and compliments aimed at me.
A genius who could blaspheme even the gods, Camilla herself incarnate… Chat that made my face burn and felt almost too heavy to read. And yet a corner of my chest still fluttered; I couldn't deny that being praised felt good.
I guess even I, as a gamer, still carried a need for recognition. That need was being fed in real time.
Compared to the old days—when a clean play had no one to see it and I only occasionally dumped clips in a gallery—the present felt downright luxurious.
Luxurious enough that ending the stream felt a little wasteful.
But where there is meeting, there is also parting. Regretfully, our goodbye was already approaching.
You know the saying—leave while they're still clapping. Anything worth remembering should end just a little too soon, so people want to come back for more.
"Looks like it's time to end the stream, everyone."
Truthfully I had never planned a long stream today.
I hadn't expected this many people to show up in the first place.
Even the whole "introduce Camilla and show off various builds" segment had been half improvised.
One game per build I'd cooked up—that felt like enough for tonight.
Hmm. Seemed like people had enjoyed today's stream after all.
I ended it under a shower of cheers. I would have loved to read every nickname one by one and say goodbye the old way, but that would never have ended.
"See you next stream. Bye."
I finished by leaning a little closer to the mic and whispering it.
The moment I hit the end-stream button, the screen went black—impressively abrupt.
Chat, by contrast, kept rolling even after the broadcast died. Most of it was people savoring the afterglow or already hyped for the next stream.
A little over six hundred. Only after shutting down did I check the viewer count; it had more than doubled since the moment I'd gone live.
I watched that unreal number slowly dwindle, then powered off the computer.
Moonlight spilling through the window looked strangely bright.