You Need the Habit of Using Your Head
Humans are animals of adaptation. I had heard the line so many times it had gone stale.
There was that other saying, too — that it is not the strongest who survive, but those who adapt the best.
Mankind spent dozens of centuries locked in a ruthless contest for survival, and only the people who adapted well to nature made it through. That ancestral knack for adapting must have filtered down, quite naturally, into a piece of the genes we carry now.
I understood the idea in my head. Experiencing it firsthand, though, I was always a little startled by the speed of my own adaptation.
Those moments tended to arrive when I felt my life was on the line.
Suddenly I thought of my mercenary days.
I had been shoved into that life against my will, packed in among people I did not even know. The discomfort had been so sharp it felt as if I had lost a part of my own body. Even when everyone around me was sleeping soundly, I alone could not close my eyes, sitting through the night wide awake.
Strangely enough, after a week it had started to feel like my own room. Even firearms I had never handled before became as natural in my hands as my own limbs.
I had marveled at human adaptability then, too — and then I had forgotten about it for a while.
Anyway, the reason I was turning all of this over now was that I was watching that same capacity play out in real time.
This was someone who, until a moment ago, could not even react properly to an attack. Someone who had been so overwhelmed by fear she had looked ready to cry and had given up on the fight altogether.
And now, even in the instant of dying, she was trying to track my attacks with her eyes.
This educational broadcast had originally been something I meant to wrap up. One look at Amber's condition and I had decided further sparring was pointless. But the woman had grabbed me as I was about to leave, apparently deciding the moment was an opportunity.
She wanted me to teach her a little more about the game.
Which was how we had ended up here.
The relationship between teacher and student was a curious thing. There seemed to be a hierarchy, and yet it was not vertical. You could not really call it a bureaucratic chain of command. Education was not one-way communication.
People say the teacher learns more than the student in the process, do they not? The heart of education is two-way exchange. Rote, one-directional instruction is coercive and outdated.
That was why I liked teaching. Sometimes explaining something felt more fun than learning it. Maybe it was just a desire to show off what I knew.
Still, walking someone through an explanation had a way of refreshing everything I already understood. A kind of mental rumination. Conversation flowed more easily then. It actually felt like we were communicating.
Yes. Communication. Communication was important. And the attitude you needed for it was consideration, respect, an effort to understand the other person's point of view...
What a load of crap.
"Amber. Is it possible you are not thinking at all?"
"...I am thinking."
"Why? If you were actually thinking, there is no way you would have fallen for that fake just now."
"That is not— Unknown, you told me to watch the character, not the weapon, so I started trying to predict how you would move next, and then the knife..."
Is the skull on your shoulders just decoration?
I swallowed it. The words I refused to spit out piled up inside me anyway.
"Amber."
"Yes..."
"What did I tell you a minute ago?"
"Not to shoot blindly. To watch how the opponent moves."
"So you did hear me. Did you take a brief trip to another world in the meantime?"
I thought back to Amber's match history, which I had checked earlier. Hundreds of games a season. That was more than enough to say she played a lot. People varied, of course, but as a rule you got better the more you played. The most obvious common sense in the world. Repetition was the foundation of mastery in every human activity.
On that obvious foundation, a Last of Quantum player with hundreds or thousands of matches under her belt ought to have been far easier to teach than a raw beginner who had just installed the game.
That was the theory.
She lined up the gun and fired. It was not a rifle she had any feel for. The thing was tiny — a Kolibri. Aiming it at all was a struggle, and the rounds refused to go where she wanted them. If the other person moved with even a little composure, the attack was perfectly answerable.
Sure enough. The bullets failed to punch through the armor on the charging target and died a pathetic death against the plates. This was the part that mattered. The movement that had let her stop the attack. You could not reduce a live fight to a formula, but when people hit a particular situation, their behavior was usually already decided.
She charged?
What a spectacle. Truly.
Did she think she had the advantage just because the magazine was empty? The opponent closing the distance stopped moving and shouldered a rifle.
Again. Movement that did not account for the other person at all.
Where did you even get the idea that the enemy would stand there and wait while you lined up a aimed shot?
Watching those choices one after another, I understood perfectly why a streamer named Amber could sit through hundreds of games and still be parked in Silver.
She was shooting in a stance so textbook it could have been a manual illustration. But I was closing the gap faster than the bullets coming at me.
"Aaagh."
Beating on someone was only fun when the sandbag was good quality. If the thing leaked sand every time you hit it, where was the entertainment supposed to come from? This was just sad.
Jump really had been an excellent punching bag.
The realization arrived a little late. I did not throw the follow-up. I stepped off. If I killed her and sat around waiting for the respawn, we would never finish this lesson today.
I already felt like I could not breathe. It was not that there was a lot to pick at. The problem sat much deeper than that.
At this rate, I was going to walk away having learned more than she had. Things like, how is it even possible to play this stupidly?
People parked in the lower ranks really did show you plays you would never think of on your own. I was collecting that particular enlightenment in real time.
"What went wrong just now?"
"Uh— charging in blindly...?"
"Why is charging the problem?"
"Because... I charged without thinking about how the other person would move..."
I skimmed the reeling chat, and a few of the people typing vanished behind bans. Considering the only person I had given manager permissions was a single editor, that editor was clearly watching the stream.
I had been about to ban them myself. At least this one was fast on the trigger.
"Is this how you normally fight?"
"Yeees."
"And people just... take that?"
"There were people who let me, I guess..."
"So this is where the Jump clone was hiding."
"Pardon?"
Hundreds of games. Still Silver. I turned the meaning of a rank over in my head again. Everything in the world had a cause. A result like that always had a reason behind it.
People said games were about talent. The truth was that in most ranked games, Last of Quantum included, anyone could reach a certain level of the ladder. So-called mechanics had nothing to do with it.
Silver... with even a little talent, Gold ought to have been free. Up to that point, mechanics did not matter at all. All you needed was a basic understanding of the game. Yes. Understanding.
People who were severely short on that could dump hundreds of games into the current season and still never climb. It was meaningless. An act that did nothing for their rank and only poured time into the dirt.
If you were just here to have fun, that would not have mattered in the slightest. But someone who had grabbed me and asked to be taught was not going to be free of attachment to her rank.
This person needed theory first.
"What is the biggest advantage of a firearm?"
"...Uh, that you can kill the enemy from range?"
"Did I ever tell you to fight me up close, Amber? Why do you go flying in on a charge the second anything happens?"
"I thought it would be easier to hit if I got close."
My head started to hurt.
I was jacked into the game. There was no pain to feel. I felt it anyway.
"Sure. If you are close to the enemy, hitting them is easier. But like I already said, you have to read the other person's movement and actually think. The other person is not going to stand still while you move, right? The baseline is reading their movement and reacting to it. You are just mindlessly playing your own game."
The point was to focus on the opponent's movement, not your own. At first you might spend the whole fight just trying to look at the enemy and never get an attack off. Once it became familiar, the body answered on its own.
You could even say that degree of fluency was what separated the ranks.
If you would not even try to read, you were not at a level where rank was worth discussing.
What was the difference, at that point, between you and a scarecrow that happened to move?
I could pick her next play off her face and her body language alone. That was the level Amber was playing at.
If you wanted to be good at a game, you had to use your head.
You needed the habit of using that skull of yours.