The Master Challenge (1)
"One month?"
Yerim had no choice but to ask again at Pi Anta's bold declaration.
Not Diamond — Master. Even when Yerim had set the condition at six months, she'd wondered if she was being a little harsh. And now this girl was saying one month? Was the arrogance just that extreme, or did she simply have no sense of what the tiers meant?
"Pi Anta. Conservatively speaking, there are three million people playing BoL on the Korean server. Looking at account numbers alone, it's closer to ten million."
"That's a lot."
"To reach Master rank among them, you have to be in the top 0.12 percent. Have you forgotten where you currently stand?"
"Iron."
"Still not sinking in?"
Even taking a generous baseline of ten million accounts, the top 0.12 percent came out to twelve thousand people. Assuming the pool was drawn from three million active players, that left just thirty-six hundred nationwide.
Those numbers should have been terrifying just to hear.
Pi Anta, however, remained perfectly calm.
"Thirty-six hundred is more than I expected."
"…Excuse me?"
Yerim felt her head spinning.
Far from being daunted, the girl was reacting as if the number were actually better than she'd hoped.
"I don't think I'm the kind of player who can't crack the top thirty-six hundred in Korea."
Yerim was so flabbergasted she lost her words and could only manage a hollow laugh.
But Pi Anta had her reasons for thinking that way.
It was only a daunting goal if you were starting from absolute zero.
Pi Anta was a veteran. And not just any veteran.
She was the kind of absolute monster who had claimed the batting title in her second year in the league, then in her fourth year swept both the batting title and the home run crown — and still wasn't finished. In her sixth season she had finally taken eight crowns at once: batting average, home runs, RBI, runs, hits, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and stolen bases on top of it all, earning the glowing praise of "Please just leave for the majors already."
Her physical ability might have declined a little, but that baseball sense wasn't going anywhere. And Pi Anta's greatest weapon wasn't talent.
It was diligence.
Ever since becoming a woman and realizing she was stuck in a body that had never been trained, she hadn't slept in a single day. The thoroughness and sheer grit of always filling her meal times, her training hours, and her target swing counts — that was the greatest force pulling her body toward the dream of succeeding through baseball.
Form is temporary. Class is permanent.
Pi Anta was confident she could prove that with her own body.
She was someone who had already reigned from the very top of the heads of the best professional players in the game. Not first place — just inside the top thirty-six hundred.
Thinking it would actually be easy wasn't strange at all.
"…Just don't push yourself too hard."
Still unable to truly believe it, Yerim decided to accept the claim for now and leave herself some room, wrapping up the conversation that way.
But if this girl actually achieved that goal — she would get uncontrollably excited when the time came. So, just in case, Yerim decided to float a quiet question.
"But how exactly are you planning to hit Master tier in one month? Do you have some kind of clever approach?"
Of course, she couldn't claim pure professional curiosity had nothing to do with it.
Either way — when someone said they would accomplish in one month, not even six, something most amateurs spent ages wondering whether they could achieve at all, how could you not be curious?
Pi Anta smiled brightly and laid out her plan.
Hearing it, Yerim was once again so speechless she could only rake a hand through her hair.
"Are you serious?"
"Didn't you say WAR is the record that affects tier the most? Then I feel like anyone, not just me, would do it this way."
"No, that's only because you're thinking about it in the simplest possible terms. If just deciding to do something made it happen, why would every team in the world kill themselves developing players?"
An outlandish plan.
But for the WAR stat, it was the fastest path.
"It's fine. It's not like I've never worn a mask before."
She was going to play catcher.
WAR is an extremely objective metric showing how many additional wins a team would earn by using a given player instead of a replacement-level one. In the past, visible numbers like batting average, hits, and home runs — the so-called "classic stats" — had been used to evaluate a player's value.
But dig a little deeper and the problem becomes obvious. Even two hitters with identical .300 averages, thirty home runs, and a hundred RBI would be judged completely differently depending on position: a designated hitter with those numbers would get a casual "pretty solid," while a catcher with the same line would be called a total league dominator. Classic stats alone simply couldn't evaluate a player's true worth.
That was why WAR adjusted the numbers based on a player's primary defensive position, even when the batting production was identical.
Assume a designated hitter and a catcher both played every single game of a season. In the process of calculating WAR, the DH would take a penalty of minus 17.5, while the catcher would receive a bonus of plus 12.5.
In plain terms:
If you were going to put up the same numbers with the bat, being a catcher was far more advantageous than being a DH.
While waiting for her ranked match to queue, Pi Anta ran through various game scenarios in her head. Mental rehearsal like this made it much easier to handle unexpected situations once the game started.
"But shortstop also gets a pretty high positional adjustment bonus, doesn't it?"
As the head of the scouting team, Yerim was well-versed in WAR. Catcher carried the highest positional adjustment at 12.5, but shortstop — Pi Anta's primary position — still sat at a far-from-shabby 7.5.
The reason she chose catcher anyway:
"A shortstop has fewer ways to influence the game."
Shortstop defense mattered. It was the zone farthest from first base, where hard-hit balls screamed through at high speed, so you needed sharp instincts for reading the ball off the bat, quick feet, and a strong arm on top of it.
But even a shortstop, when you really thought about it, couldn't arrange for the ball to come only to them.
A catcher, on the other hand, could shape the outcome to a meaningful degree through pitch calling.
You guided the pitcher toward certain pitches.
Through that, you steered the batter toward the result you wanted — ground ball or fly ball.
On offense, you could actively produce runs yourself.
That was also why catchers were given the highest positional adjustment of all.
The core of the infield defense.
The manager on the field.
The field commander behind home plate.
In short, catcher was a position where you could hard-carry.
"I never said wins and losses don't matter at all, did I?"
If she was going to do this, she wanted the wins on top of everything else — so she could climb the tiers that much faster.
Game found!
While she was organizing her thoughts, the match locked in. Just like in real baseball, catcher was the most avoided position in BoL as well, so finding a game was easy.
The reason people avoided catcher was simple.
Just assembling pitch sequences was enough to make your head hurt — and on top of that, you had to take every bounced pitch with your body as a matter of course, and occasionally even eat foul tips off the bat.
Not many people were willing to endure that kind of pain in a game they were supposedly playing for fun.
Which was exactly why Pi Anta wanted the position even more.
Matches filled easily, you could dominate the outcome of the game, and as a result it was the position that gave the biggest bonus toward climbing tiers.
Aside from getting hit by the ball — what was there to refuse?
If he were a left-handed pitcher, it would have been nice to have a breaking ball that ran in on left-handed hitters. A little disappointing — but given her own tier, she decided to just be satisfied and play.
At that, the pitcher nodded and focused on the signs Pi Anta was sending from between her legs.
The leadoff hitter was a righty.
First she wanted to gauge how well he handled fastballs, and also check the pitcher's stuff, so she called for a fastball clipping the outside edge of the strike zone.
The pitcher lifted his leg.
One.
Two…
WHAP!!
"Strike, one!"
A thrilling sting landed in Pi Anta's left hand. She had once genuinely dreamed of being a catcher, but she had switched to shortstop because shortstop was more dynamic.
Even so, the pleasure of having a pitch land exactly where she intended in the mitt was nothing to dismiss.
Now for the second pitch…
Hoping the batter would be sitting on a fastball — and partly to test the pitcher's breaking-ball stuff — she called for a power curve that would start outside and dive down through the middle of the zone.
The pitcher lifted his leg.
Pi Anta widened her eyes and waited for him to fire.
One.
Two…
Crack!
"Foul!"
The trail the batter's bat left behind was chilling. Apparently that pitcher's power curve was not a particularly trustworthy weapon.
She had expected as much. She had put on the catcher's mask with the goal of pubstomping noobs — but the problem was that the pitcher she was working with was also a noob. Razor-sharp command and fireball velocity were too much to hope for.
When you really thought about it, this was extreme difficulty: perfect pitch sequencing plus praying the pitcher didn't hang anything.
Even so, there was one more reason Pi Anta had volunteered to catch. It wasn't reflected in any baseball metric, but it might have been the most important element in the game.
Pi Anta's most powerful weapon. That was…
"Being the leadoff hitter must make you pretty nervous, right? So far I've called a fastball on the first pitch and that last one was a power curve. Your focus looks excellent."
"What…?"
"So what's coming next? A fastball? Good choice. Stuffing a heater in there to catch you off guard and watching your reaction time is pretty appealing too. But if the batter's fastball reaction isn't bad? I'd call for that same power curve in the exact same spot. You know — the 'there's no way they throw that again' surprise."
"Wait, what are you even—"
"A little confused? Unfortunately for you, we still have more breaking balls. What could that be? Left-hander, so a circle changeup? Or a two-seamer? If it's neither of those, don't tell me it's a screwball? Speaking of screwballs, that reminds me of this one story…"
"What— what the hell are you talking about?!"
Psychological warfare.
She kept rattling on without the slightest sign of tiring while still flashing signs to the pitcher, and the batter — who had zero experience with mind games — completely lost his concentration.
In the end, he could only watch helplessly as a fast heater came screaming into the exact same spot as the first pitch.
As he stared at her with a blank expression, Pi Anta politely gestured toward the dugout with a "You can head in now," then turned to face the second batter.
And then:
"Ah, the two-hole. I've hit second a lot myself, you know. Let me tell you about the role of the two-hole hitter in modern baseball…"
The so-called mouth hard-carry had begun all over again.