Stand and Fight
They seemed to be trying to open some distance, or at least hold the gap. It didn't feel natural, though. More like watching a video that kept stuttering and skipping. At that skill level, closing in should have been perfectly doable. That was my read.
Clang! Clang!
If I just slipped the arrows aside with my one-handed sword the way I was doing now, the hits didn't amount to much. A shield might have been more efficient, but given an arrow's penetrating power, there was a real chance it would punch straight through a ballistic plate.
Cheap. Cowardly. Cheap-shot. Labels like that get used as compliments inside a game. Making your opponent feel that way means you've played something so meticulous — or so infuriating — that it crawled under their skin. Plenty of players who'd met me as an enemy had probably felt the same thing. I'd even seen users spit curses into chat after watching me play.
I ignored every last one of them. I'd simply used the tools the game gave me and shown the best play I could. I didn't see a problem with that.
What I was feeling right now, though, was that my opponent was genuinely, actually cheap.
Arrows take more wind than bullets. Dodging or blocking one that snakes through the air demands more concentration than usual. And this player was loosing bolts with no cooldown at all, darting from cover to cover like a rat. Just watching it was irritating. Calling that "good play" was something I, as the one holding a sword, had no intention of saying out loud.
"This is some real shitty-ass play."
I'm coming at you head-on to smash you. Stop running like a coward.
The other player only smiled a little at that. They'd probably figured out I didn't have a ranged weapon — that I was in trouble because I couldn't close the gap. That was how it looked to them.
No. That wasn't it at all. I wasn't struggling so much as I was pissed off. I wanted to walk straight up to this cheap crossbow rat and make an example of them in front of everyone.
I flicked a glance at the stream window parked in the corner of my vision. Chat was still ripping past at speed, but I checked the number underneath it.
One thousand four hundred ninety viewers.
For a stream that had only just started, that figure was hard to believe. I figured most of the people watching were Last of Quantum players. How frustrating must this look to them?
Objectively speaking, taking down a crossbow user wasn't that hard. A rifle that could reach from range — hell, even a pistol — would have made it easy. The only reason I was having a hard time was because my weapon was a sword. It was absolutely not because the other player was good.
Whoosh!
They opened the distance again and sent an arrow from range. I deliberately took it head-on and kept closing. There was the stress of fighting ranged with melee, sure, but there was also a streamer's vanity — I wanted the performance of smashing a crossbow user from the front. And more than that, I just wanted to wreck this player.
The shield wasn't doing much for defense right now. I'd bought a ballistic shield, but a relatively cheap one. Given the materials, an arrow would punch through it for sure. No reason to keep lugging around something that was only getting in the way.
I dumped the shield and charged even faster. The Sprint Trait I'd taken for closing on enemies poured speed into my stride.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
They laid down covering fire in time with my movement and kept peeling away. Their footwork wasn't as fast as I'd expected, though — maybe they'd dumped everything into reload speed. That didn't mean closing was easy. Arrows that bent with every shift of the wind took serious concentration just to block. Catching them on top of that was no simple thing.
"Tch."
I clicked my tongue and poured on more speed. A bolt from the crossbow came for me, but this time I didn't raise my sword. Unless it hit a vital, I was going to tank everything and keep charging.
Honestly, I didn't want to take damage from a crossbow bolt. A person who can dodge bullets getting hit by an arrow? That's just embarrassing. But if I kept batting every shaft aside on the approach, we'd just stalemate until the match ended. In overall speed I had to be faster — I had Sprint. If I ate the minimum damage, they'd be the one who got caught.
They seemed to realize it too. The incoming arrows were sharper than before. Not spray-and-pray — they were lining up aimed shots at vitals. That was a bad call. Aiming actually stretched the gap between shots compared to before.
Whoosh!
I twisted my head and slipped the arrow aimed at my skull. At the same time I knocked aside another that came sneaking in from a blind angle, catching it on the blade.
I minimized the chat window for a moment and kicked off the ground hard. I'd told them not to run and to stand and fight — I just hadn't expected them to "stand and fight" like this.
I tightened my grip on the sword and locked my eyes on the direction of their crossbow. They were aiming at my heart with the precision of someone appraising a jewel. Watching that, I pushed my focus to the limit and prepared to land a Parrying.
That faint smile on their face. They probably thought I couldn't dodge or block an arrow from this range. I badly wanted to wipe the smirk off someone grinning while they lined up a crossbow shot.
Whoosh!
The bolt loaded in the crossbow fired. It was faster than I'd expected for a simple swing-parry — it came on like it meant to punch straight through me. And I still saw it.
The instant I registered it, I kicked off the ground and lunged. Timed exactly for the moment the arrow would reach me, I swung the sword I'd gripped in both hands in a wide arc.
CLANG!
A sound almost crystalline rang out, and a burst of bright light exploded. The successful Parrying sent the bolt ricocheting off to clatter on the ground.
I thought it was time to drop the guillotine on them — and then I saw an arrow that hadn't been in my vision a second ago. Too late to block. I twisted hard to dodge, but the shaft was just a fraction faster. I failed a clean evade, and the bolt punched into my left chest.
A sliver of health left. Thankfully it had glanced off the heart.
Hiding an arrow behind an arrow. I hadn't seen that coming, so I was almost impressed — for a second — before I wondered if a crossbow's fire rate even made that possible. This player had been shooting at a speed that didn't make sense for a crossbow the whole time. Even with a trait that boosted reload speed, was that rate of fire actually legal?
Thinking that, I leapt at the enemy in front of me. They hadn't expected me to dodge it either — they were standing there wide open. The distance was already close enough that my sword came down faster than they could aim the crossbow.
Slash!
A satisfying cutting sound, and the enemy player's body crumpled. Watching it, I felt like ten years of heartburn had just burned clean off.
"Huh? What the..."
Still riding the high of the win, I noticed the weapon that had dropped beside the corpse. The weird part: there had clearly been one crossbow, and now two were lying there.
They were alternating between two? No, even then...
A bug?
I went through the rising chat one line at a time and figured out what the donation had meant. Simply put, the bug's condition was holding two identical crossbows and taking the reload trait. The method was simple: fire, then swap weapons while reloading. That canceled the reload animation and instantly chambered the next bolt — that was the bug.
Crossbow users were so rare that apparently nobody had noticed until now. The person who'd just donated had been on the fence until they saw two crossbows drop, and that sealed it.
Moments like this really drove home that this was a game. I'd worked so hard to take this player down, and they turned out to be a bug abuser. Kind of a deflating ending.
"I think that's enough LoQ for today. Completely killed my mood."
"There's no deadline on the mission. I'll do it next stream."
I looked at the rising chat and closed the game.