A Fresh Green Newbie
I knew I was supposed to talk to them.
The chat was already flooding with questions in real time, and I would have answered if I could. But a sniper who had already set up shop had spotted me and was lining up the shot.
Him first. Then I'd talk.
A rifle cracked.
I'd been watching the chat. My reaction came a beat too late. If I hadn't taken the Threat Sense perk, I would have died without even getting a chance to fight back.
I reset my grip and charged the building the sniper was nested in. The ground between us was almost bare of cover, which at least meant I didn't have to worry about some ugly surprise jumping out from behind a wall. Put another way: I was going to have to take him head-on.
That didn't mean I was sloppy enough to eat a bullet from a sniper whose position I already knew.
Crack—!
Crack!
Craaack!
The shots came one after another. No pause to cycle the bolt meant the rifle wasn't a bolt-action. It was a semi-auto. A sniper rifle that let you keep the sight picture and just squeeze the trigger again. Great for putting down multiple targets, and even if the first round missed you could send a follow-up almost immediately.
Definitely nastier than a bolt-action.
Then again, nothing in this world comes without a downside. Semi-autos are only fussy. In some ways they're actually more forgiving than a bolt gun. The action slams every time you fire, and that mechanical shudder makes it physically harder to match a bolt-action's precision.
A truly elite shooter might shrug that off. The shots I'd just eaten told me this one wasn't elite. He was nowhere near a one-shot, one-kill marksman.
Exhibit A:
Crack!
Craaack!
He couldn't even put a meaningful hit on me as I closed. The nearer I got, the more the nerves seemed to get to him; his accuracy kept falling apart. The last round punched a hole in the dirt a long way behind me.
Even with me almost on top of him, he showed no interest in running. He probably figured the high ground still belonged to him, and he meant to use it.
Not a bad read, honestly. The pistol I was carrying couldn't touch a sniper dug into an upper floor, and an M16 with no optic wasn't going to do any better. The second I stopped to aim, he'd put one through my skull. With nowhere decent to hide, my only real option was to go into the building after him.
Which, of course, favored the guy who already had a nest.
He must have decided further sniping was pointless, because he vanished deeper into the building. Five stories, give or take. From the outside I couldn't map the interior, which meant an ambush could come from anywhere.
Walking in there was as good as suicide.
The smart play would have been to write the sniper off and go find someone else. Sometimes, though, you do the dangerous thing anyway. Especially when this many people are watching. I wasn't about to show them my back.
A wound in the back is a swordsman's shame, as the saying goes.
I wasn't a swordsman. And this was a game. Die and you respawn. There was nothing to hesitate over.
I'd gotten too locked into the game. With no interaction at all, the chat had started throwing a tantrum in every direction.
Reading the match already took real focus. Trying to track the chat on top of that was harder than I'd expected.
"This is my first time streaming, so I can't check the chat as often as I'd like. Sorry about that."
All I'd said was that it was hard to watch the chat. Somehow that had turned into talk to me through donations.
Dealing with an anonymous crowd was turning out to be trickier than I'd thought. I looked at a chat that refused to go where I pointed it and could only shake my head.
Fine. I'd finish this match fast. Then I could talk, or do whatever else they wanted.
The door creaked—and that was all the cue he needed.
A storm of gunfire hammered the half-open door, dozens of rounds from a player who'd been waiting on the other side.
He thought the ambush had killed me. He let his guard down, lowered his weapon, and stood there catching his breath. That was my opening.
I closed the distance before he could do anything about it. An unarmed man doesn't have a lot of options. He started to reload, trying to put up at least some kind of fight. I wasn't about to stand there and let him.
A single shot cracked. A new breathing hole opened in his forehead, and he went down.
At the same time, a single word swallowed my vision.
Match Complete
Even after the way I'd been carving through people, I hadn't thought the game would end this fast. While I'd been glancing at chat, my teammates must have been butchering the other side. A match that had been even had tipped in an instant, and I'd taken the last kill.
With the game over, my eyes drifted back to the chat on their own. Messages were still pouring in without a break, and I had no idea what I was supposed to say. I couldn't tell what would actually get a reaction.
A greeting, maybe. Keep it light.
This was the internet, but it was still a human relationship. A hello is the catalyst that maximizes familiarity. If you want someone to open up, it's basically required.
"Uh... hello, everyone. I'm Unknown. This is my first time going live."
My streaming career was about as thick as a sheet of paper, but watching the chat, I was starting to get it.
It wasn't the content of the messages that mattered. It was how fast they scrolled. Easily half of what came through was empty noise anyway. You could measure whether a stream was popping just by the speed of the chat.
By that standard, mine was already a success. Look at it. The thing wouldn't stop moving.
Being able to actually read the chat made talking a lot easier. That didn't mean I could sit on the lobby screen forever and just chat, though. Multitasking was still rough, but I was going to have to at least try to glance over now and then.
Viewers would rather watch someone fight to talk to them than stare at nothing but gameplay for hours.
"Someone asked what I'm doing next. I'll keep queuing games for now. If you throw a mission at me, I'll give it a shot."
A mechanical woman's voice read it out.
My first donation. I'd been live for about thirty minutes. Getting paid to sit here and play a game was a strange feeling. It still didn't quite register that the money was real.
"Thanks for the first donation. The 'newbie' in the title is there because I am one."
Looking at chat, I couldn't really blame them for not buying it.
If I had to put my current skill into game terms, I was probably knocking on the door of what people jokingly call a fossil—one of those ancient tryhards who never left the server. The game itself was new to me. This kind of fighting, I'd done until I was sick of it. Combat, I had down cold.
Not that I had a choice in how I started. Everyone begins at the bottom. Pretending otherwise would be ridiculous. Letting someone skip straight into a high tier wouldn't be fair.
How many players was I going to have to kill before the game finally put me where I belonged?
"...There's a lot of players. I guess it doesn't matter."
If they didn't like it, they could just get good. Last of Quantum was the number one game in the world, no argument. Did I really need to worry about that kind of thing? Losing was on them for playing badly. It wasn't like I could throw a fight on purpose even if I wanted to.
Besides, I still hadn't fully adapted to the game's systems myself.
"I'm a fresh green newbie too. Is that a problem?"
The chat's reaction was extremely satisfying.