A Worn-Out Newbie
Unless you were playing a single-player game, any competitive title eventually ran you into a matchmaking system.
You needed teammates. You needed an enemy squad. The mode demanded bodies, and those bodies had to come from somewhere. Queue times, then, lived and died by the size of the player base. On a dead game, sitting for more than ten minutes without a match was nothing unusual.
That was how I finally understood what it meant to play the number-one title on the market. I hit the queue, and a match locked in on the spot. Even for a popular game, that kind of snap pop was rare.
The instant every player accepted, my vision went black and my character was shunted elsewhere.
A grand swell of BGM rolled in with the loading screen.
DEATHMATCH — SHANGHAI
First game. I didn't know the map. Judging by the loading-screen still, it was an urban fight set in a Shanghai bristling with skyscrapers.
The map finished loading, and the match began in earnest. I figured I'd poke around and get a feel for what kind of game this actually was.
A sliver of prep time came first—just enough to check your weapons and talk over a plan with the team. I opened the loadout on a hunch. All I had was the default kit: an M16 assault rifle, a Glock 17, and a tactical knife on my hip.
Better than nothing. Not that I had a choice. Apparently you could buy weapons once you farmed the in-game currency. Something to look into later.
That was when the chat in the lower left lit up with what looked like enemy-team traffic.
Being dismissed like that didn't sit well. I still didn't feel any particular need to answer.
They weren't wrong. I was a brand-new sprout of a newbie, just starting out. Getting looked down on came with the territory. If it pissed me off, I could pay them back with skill.
Not that I expected to farm the enemy on day one. This was only the first step toward getting used to the game. They'd said it was a title you learned by getting shot, so I wasn't expecting it to be easy. I would simply do the best I could with what I had.
The enemy was laying down suppressive fire from cover. He wasn't even aiming—rounds spraying everywhere—but pushing through that spray was still a bad idea. I'd seen people shoot like that on real battlefields. Minimize your exposure. Best way not to take return fire.
That didn't mean there was no answer.
Accounting for his suppression, I tucked myself behind decent cover. Firearms were threatening, no question—but they came with a constraint called ammunition. If he was dumping rounds without even looking at me, he'd burn through his mag fast.
I broke cover and charged.
He spotted the opening, stopped spraying, and settled into a calm aim. At this range, with bullet velocity what it was, dodging was impossible. Normally you'd want friendly support to close a gap like that. I wasn't moving with my team, though, so backup wasn't coming.
Time to use my head.
The biggest weakness of a gun was all the constraints that came with firing it. Steady aim was the baseline. You had to control your breathing and manage recoil. Wind and environment could throw the trajectory off, too.
I twisted right, slipping the round cutting through the air. The bullet was too fast for a clean dodge. It punched through my right shoulder. The hit painted my vision red—the game's way of saying I'd taken damage.
I didn't stop. I kept charging.
He pulled the trigger again. The gun clicked empty. Every firearm needed a reload when the mag ran dry. An empty gun was just a club—and that was the biggest opening you ever got. Which was why you always shot with care. Especially when you had no one covering you.
He scrambled to swap to his pistol. Too late. I'd already taken the initiative. By the time he realized he'd become the prey, it was over. The moment he'd dumped his ammo for nothing, all he had left was a last, desperate flail.
I squeezed the trigger without mercy on the defenseless enemy. A single short crack. A hole opened in his forehead. A thrill ran down the back of my hand, and I shuddered before I could stop myself.
Yoonho had lost the ability to speak.
What? The newbie he was supposed to help?
The woman he'd been worrying over was not some innocent newcomer who'd picked up Last of Quantum out of curiosity. She was the opposite kind of fossil—the type who put holes in incoming newbies.
In Yoonho's fantasy, a woman playing for the first time would slam into the wall of Last of Quantum and come begging him for help. He had neither expected nor imagined a scene like this.
Last of Quantum was a game that, the higher you climbed the ranks, overflowed with so-called fossils—players with insane weapon mastery and game sense. It wasn't a title you got good at just by grinding hours, either. Split-second judgment in chaotic fights mattered, and the main 6v6 deathmatch demanded map-specific strategic calls.
And yet the woman moved as if she already understood everything.
Watching her tutorial, he'd figured she'd just skimmed some guide. The type who reads a random post online and decides they know the game. That was why she'd turned down his offer. Once she hit the difficulty, she'd need help.
His past self looked painfully naive.
The woman in Yoonho's eyes was a human slaughterer, plain and simple. Every play was impossibly calm and perfect. Not a wasted motion. Even with an M16—awkward at close range—she slipped enemy fire like it was nothing, closed the distance, and went only for vitals. It was as if the enemy's bullets veered away from her and hers chased them down.
Overwhelming. Anyone who tried to take her got ventilated on sight. At this point he had to wonder if she was farming bots.
Was it just because this was newbie matchmaking? The so-called new-fish queue?
Yoonho shook his head. One of the things players loved most was killing newbies and tea-bagging them. Some people even refused to climb specifically for that. Most of the people sitting in the newbie zone were obviously experienced.
And more than that... even to Yoonho, who considered himself a mid-to-high-tier Last of Quantum player, her play was shocking. It went beyond good shooting. She knew the grammar of combat. More precisely, her hit-and-fade timing was flawless. She stabbed every gap and extracted before the respawned enemies could swarm her. That wasn't the work of someone who'd done this once or twice.
No wonder the chat was "praising" her for playing dirty as hell.
Yoonho's hand drifted to the phone beside him. On a hunch he searched Unknown on the LoQ stats site. No record. Account created today.
VR Last of Quantum used biometric login. You couldn't use another account, and you only got one per person. Smurfs were impossible.
It's not like she rolled in off some battlefield... so where the hell did this skill come from...
Looking at her face and build, she didn't look like a soldier. Hell, even if she were, you wouldn't get this good unless you'd come out of special forces. Otherwise most of South Korea's men would be top-tier players.
With one balance-breaking slaughterer on the field, a match couldn't last. Twenty minutes later she finished the game looking bored, backed out, and queued again immediately.