Never Drop Your Guard
Killing a player who farmed newbies wasn't particularly difficult.
He'd claimed, in his own words, to sit in the upper tiers — but in the end he was just another guy who'd slammed into a wall and slid all the way down here. Aside from being a little sharper than average with a gun, his skill was honestly nothing worth mentioning.
And yet he seemed convinced he could still beat me. The way he kept fighting back was almost funny.
Ratatatatat!
He dumped every last round he had trying to put me down. Dodging a bullet once didn't mean I couldn't dodge it twice. A gun's great virtue was that anyone could squeeze decent power out of it — which also meant that no matter who pulled the trigger, the ceiling was just as clearly defined. Unless his skill suddenly skyrocketed, he wasn't going to kill me.
"...Shit! Just get hit already!!"
He screamed like a man possessed. I walked toward him the way you'd take a stroll through a park — no sprinting, no sudden bursts, nothing of the kind. Just a slow, unhurried advance, slipping past every incoming shot. One step. Then another.
I could have killed him outright. That wasn't what I wanted. I wanted him to feel it — that he was being toyed with, helpless. So I didn't finish him. I closed the distance on purpose, slow enough for the powerlessness to sink in. And I never stopped needling him along the way.
"You don't know what aiming is, by any chance? You haven't landed a single shot."
"I'm going to fucking kill you for reeeal!!!"
Watching the rage boil straight out onto his face was genuinely entertaining. This kind of thing only really sang when the other person reacted.
He kept backpedaling until, before he knew it, his shoulders hit a building wall.
"You fucking bitch!!"
The moment he realized it, he dumped the rest of his magazine in a blind fury. I wasn't about to stand there and eat wild, panicked fire.
Click. Click.
The rifle coughed dry. Empty. The second that fact registered, he swung the gun like a club, roaring with the same incandescent rage.
"Die! Just die already!"
By now he had to feel the gap between us in his bones. The reason he still wouldn't surrender, still kept hanging on — somewhere in the back of his mind, he was waiting for me to show an opening. Just once. He was human, after all. The second I attacked or dodged, I'd leave a hole. That was the idea.
A stupid, pathetic idea.
One thing I'd learned as a mercenary: you never drop your guard until everything is over. A mission going smoothly meant an ambush was waiting. There was no such thing as a perfect plan. Complacency was a trick that could steal your life in a single heartbeat — so until the match ended, I would not let mine slip.
But I could use that. Despair hit hardest when hope had just been stomped flat.
Thud!
I let the rifle stock smash into my head on purpose. The impact knocked my stance loose; my body staggered.
"DIE!!!"
Convinced he'd found the gap, he bellowed with everything he had and threw himself at me without a shred of hesitation.
How did they all move exactly the way I expected? And this guy called himself high-tier.
I slipped the clubbed rifle and stepped inside his guard. My vision was swimming from the hit, but Lee Harin's superhuman senses told me exactly how to move.
Whoosh!
The rifle butt carved empty air so clumsily it was almost insulting. He tried to pull back a beat too late — and I wasn't about to miss a hole that wide. The knife went in in a single motion.
"Ah... shi—"
A short death rattle, and the enemy player's body crumpled.
Waiting for him to respawn, a question surfaced.
Just now, Lee Harin had shown outstanding talent — both in raw instinct and in dynamic visual acuity. That wasn't something you earned by grinding. So had she even known she had it?
The reason the question occurred to me now was, of course, the state of this body in the real world. The talent was clearly there. The body that was supposed to carry it was not. What good were razor senses and elite tracking vision when the thing that actually had to move was garbage?
Maybe Lee Harin had never known the talent was there at all.
The world I saw could only ever be my world. You couldn't look through someone else's eyes, so people lived treating their own view as the average. If you had something to compare against, the differences jumped out — but looking at the life she'd led, there was a real chance Lee Harin hadn't even had friends. Whether she'd talked to her family was an open question by itself.
I'd originally been a man, so I could feel the gap in my bones. Lee Harin had been Lee Harin from the moment she was born. If she'd never had anyone to measure herself against, it was entirely possible she'd never known she was gifted.
Even so, the condition of this body was still hard to accept.
While I turned all of that over, the newbie-farmer's respawn timer ran out. I had a pretty good idea where he'd go, so finding him wouldn't be hard. Once he'd decided he couldn't win up close, what would he do next? He'd fall back on the thing he was most confident in: sniping. The gun he'd been carrying was an M82A1 Barrett. If the fight turned into a long-range duel, he'd be sure he could take it.
And if he wanted to settle it with a sniper rifle, there was only one place he'd go. On this map, there was a single spot actually worth using for that.
I turned my gaze toward a building near the center of the map. It stood taller than the ones around it, with a clean view of everything nearby. For a sniper, you weren't going to find a better perch.
Once I knew where he was headed, the rest was already decided.
I broke into a run toward the central building without wasting a second. I was running the Sprint Trait, and I wasn't even carrying a primary — just a sidearm and a knife — so my movement speed was always going to outstrip other players. Put simply: a guy lugging an anti-materiel rifle and an assault rifle could sprint until his lungs gave out and he still wouldn't be faster than me.
"Why are you so slow? A slug would beat you there."
He clearly hadn't imagined I'd already be waiting. The look on his face was almost worth the trip.
"Th-that's cheap..."
Game or not, this was still a war. Words like cheap and dirty didn't apply in a fight. Rolling in the dirt, taking hostages — none of it mattered. If it kept you alive, what wouldn't you do?
And more than that—
"I think you've got the wrong idea. You think I'm some kind of saint? Why would I stand here and watch you walk into a position that favors you?"
He couldn't seem to find an answer. He just stood there, face twisting.
I adjusted my grip on the knife and started toward him, slow and deliberate. He'd given up completely, standing there wide open — and just as I moved to cut him down, a sudden flare of light burst in my face and scrambled my vision.
I threw a hand up, scrambling to block it and get my sight back, but the instant my arm came up the light vanished without a trace.
I looked around, dazed.
Where'd he go?
Had he slipped away while the flash went off? That thought was still forming when a message slid into the corner of my vision.
A player has disconnected.
Disconnected.
He'd realized he couldn't win no matter what he tried, and he'd run.
"He actually ran."
Still — I'd killed him more than ten times and spent the whole stretch mocking him. He had to be furious. Maybe he'd even realize how outclassed he was and quit the game entirely.
Then again, if he hadn't started farming newbies in the first place, none of this would have happened.
"What's even fun about killing newbies."
I muttered it under my breath and glanced at the chat.
Chat was scrolling at a terrifying speed. The viewers seemed to be having a great time watching me dismantle a toxic newbie-farmer. If I was reading the room right, their blood had been up just now too.
Was this a kind of catharsis as well?
I didn't know how much of what I'd felt had actually carried over. Did people watching a stream really immerse themselves in the streamer like that? The chat racing past seemed to be answering yes, and that felt good.
The match wasn't over, but today's highlight already looked locked in.
Something in me wanted to let that aftertaste linger.
Ending the stream right now would do it, wouldn't it?
"Thank you for watching. That's all for today — I'll see you next time."
There was no better way to leave a long aftertaste than a screen going dark. People always said a drama should end on the note that made you want the next episode.
A stream wasn't all that different.
I ended the broadcast on the spot.