Chapter 98: The Heat of the Finals
Chapter 98: The Heat of the Finals
“The two players are entering!”
This time, it was not Delmongu speaking, but a plump-faced Orc dressed in a wine-colored suit. Sitting beside him was a lanky Beastman man with long animal ears, almost as tall as the Orc.
They were game commentators, newly introduced starting with this tournament.
Honestly, Tetris 2 was intuitive and progressed so quickly that there was not much to commentate on. But after holding the previous tournament once, Ras understood why game broadcasts used commentators.
Of course, in games like StarCraft, where strategy stood out, ordinary viewers could not immediately understand things from a professional gamer’s perspective, so commentators also helped comprehension.
But more than that, their larger role was increasing immersion in the broadcast.
No matter how exciting matches between experts were, human concentration had limits. It was hard to stay immersed continuously, and once attention dropped, the match became less fun.
But if someone else explained the game for the viewer, less concentration was consumed, and it became easier to immerse oneself in the game while sympathizing with the commentator’s heightened voice and perspective.
Of course, if overdone, it could damage concentration instead. However, the two commentators hired this time had shown through interviews that they understood the game, had a speaking style that did not feel unpleasant, and possessed good verbal skill.
Ras did not expect them to produce a huge effect immediately, but he believed they would not ruin things either.
“The players are choosing their characters!”
In truth, this game’s characters only had different illustrations, and the block races only differed slightly. Yet the commentators managed to create talking points even from that.
They even talked about character settings that Ras, the president of the developer, could not remember.
Was that one a mid-boss?
He had thought the character was simply wearing a cloak, but apparently, that cloak was a symbol of status.
In any case, the first match soon began.
The players immediately started stacking blocks in rough arrangements. Beginners were busy clearing them one by one, but experts aimed to insert chains somehow and hit the opponent with something big.
“Player Chinaije has already stacked more than half the screen! If all of that explodes, how many dragons will it create?!”
“That’s right! But Player Puntaki is the same! Ah! From how Player Chinaije is rotating the block, it looks like he’ll trigger his chain this time!”
The two watched each other carefully until one player triggered a chain first.
Once one block exploded, the empty space caused others to settle down and explode again as a chain. As this repeated, magic stacks built up one by one. Each time a block burst, a cluster of light-like magic flew over the opponent’s head.
The dragon changed from green to yellow, then blue, black, and finally a Red Dragon. Even after that, the chain did not end, and Red Dragons continued stacking one by one, then two by two.
The Dwarf named Puntaki kept observing his opponent’s chain and timing his response.
In truth, Puntaki tried to remain calm, but he was extremely anxious. He had worked to prepare his setup so a chain could start no matter what block appeared. But if he was truly unlucky and panicked at the moment his opponent’s chain ended, one of the Red Dragons stacked above his head would activate immediately.
For the sake of his chain, he had already filled more than half his screen with blocks. If a five-line Red Dragon fell on top of that, he would not be able to use the chain blocks he had built and would have to start stacking again in the little remaining space.
And since there was not only one Red Dragon, another five lines would fall again, and then it would be game over.
Oh! Blue!
Fortunately, the next block was suitable for starting a chain. The moment he confirmed it, he quickly checked with his eyes and mind how the chain would connect. As soon as the block appeared at the top, he rapidly rotated and dropped it.
“Player Puntaki is launching his chain spell at the perfect timing!”
The blocks burst one after another, turned into magic, and began striking the dragons stacked above his head. At first, it seemed to break the Red Dragon down into lower-tier dragons, but starting from the fifth chain, it smashed one Red Dragon at a time.
The chain continued even after that. Once it finished canceling everything out, the magic changed direction and flew above the opponent’s head, beginning to stack dragons there.
However, while Puntaki’s chain was exploding, Chinaije had already worked hard to stack blocks again. At the exact moment the opponent’s chain ended, he began his own chain once more.
“Again! He’s counterattacking!!! What precise timing!!”
“That’s right! If this went even slightly wrong, it would collapse right there, but what incredible nerve!!”
The heat in the audience rose along with the commentators’ excited fuss.
“Waaaaaaaah!!!!”
The seesaw match continued like that. It was so close that despite the similar pattern, the audience could not relax and had to keep their eyes fixed on the match.
But concentration always reached its limit eventually.
Puntaki was stacking blocks again for another counterattack. He rotated and dropped a falling block, but by mistake, he failed to account for the block on the left.
“Ah! Player Puntaki! Did he not see the one below the cliff?!”
The plump Orc commentator shouted in a voice almost like a scream. Hearing him, the audience let out regretful groans as if the crisis had truly fallen on them.
“Ah...”
And Puntaki, inside the player box, grimaced as if he had heard their voices.
Of course, the player box had been soundproofed with magic, so no outside noise entered at all. It was simply that he too belatedly noticed the problem. The block on the left side of the one he had turned and dropped sideways had separated from the block placed on the cliff and matched the color of the blocks where it landed.
In the end, that block burst, and it ended with only an unplanned three-chain. That merely struck one of the dragons above his head a few times.
Puntaki did not give up. He quickly dropped blocks and tried somehow to rebuild another chain, but up until then, he had been locked in an intense seesaw battle.
Once things tilted, reversing them by briefly pushing himself was nearly impossible.
“Ah! Player Puntaki! He did his best! He did his best, but!!”
“It was already irreversible!”
In the end, Red Dragons poured down over his head one after another, and the illustration of his cloaked character collapsing and bursting into tears appeared. Puntaki slumped over the control panel and wrapped his arms around his head.
“Player Chinaije wins!!!”
“Waaaaah!!!”
Puntaki’s defeat was his opponent’s victory. At the commentators’ declaration, the audience shouted and applauded.
“Using commentators definitely seems better.”
Brams, the team leader of the Management Team, applauded along with the enthusiastic reaction. Then he turned to Ras and spoke in a tone of complete admiration.
“It’s decent, right?”
“Yes. This really feels like watching a boxing match. I truly didn’t know the difference between having commentators and not having them would be this large.”
It was not actually Ras’s own idea. He had merely done it the way he had seen on Earth, so he felt rather embarrassed. But he could not explain that situation, so he could only smile awkwardly.
The following matches were all exciting as well.
Of course, not every match was like that. Some ended in an instant because of ridiculous mistakes, and some players lost because they used overly experimental metas and failed to handle them properly.
The third match of the round of sixteen was like that.
It involved a Lizardman player named Baros on the 2P side. Instead of stacking as many chains as possible, he had prepared a strategy of continuously throwing out two-chain Green Dragons with single-hit attacks.
In theory, it was fairly decent.
The plan was to use dragon blocks to block the opponent’s chains, ruin their calculations, and make them panic.
But the problem was that his opponent, Player Keinal, responded calmly.
Keinal deliberately stacked blocks in an up-and-down pattern. If he did that, the blocks’ connections would not be completely cut off.
Dragon blocks also were not connected by lines. If there was a height difference, they separated and fell downward, so he could still connect around them.
Moreover, another problem was that these dragon blocks sometimes connected unexpected chains instead.
“Ahhh! Player Keinal is calm! He’s calm! Even with dragon blocks piling up, he’s somehow finding directions to chain!”
Then Keinal, who had endured stubbornly, triggered an eight-chain all at once, and three Red Dragons stacked above Baros’s head.
“He has to cancel this out! But Player Baros doesn’t have the materials to chain!”
“That’s right. Because he kept sending single-hit attacks, he has no blocks left saved up! I don’t see a way out of this!”
It was exactly as the commentators said.
Perhaps Baros had already lost his composure, because the blocks slowly fell without even being rotated. Every time his block fell, a five-line Red Dragon dropped. After this repeated three times, his box filled with Red Dragons, and he lost just like that.
“Player Keinal wins!!”
The audience cheered.
However, there were also many people who had been expecting something from Baros’s unusual playstyle, so some reactions sounded regretful.
Still, the victory and defeat were decided, and Keinal advanced as the tournament continued.
And amid that tournament, Kadabi was also fighting fiercely and climbing one step at a time.
“Player Kadabi wins!! Amazing! He’s still such a young player.”
Kadabi had somehow added another victory through sheer grit, but he was already exhausted. As expected, the people who participated in the finals were on an entirely different level from the people he had defeated without much difficulty back home.
Every single one was at a similar level to him, so he had to pour all his concentration into each game. This was already his fifth duel. There was no way he would not be tired.
He left the arena and headed toward the player waiting room, turning his gaze toward the huge tournament bracket hanging on one wall.
To reflect the match that had just ended, staff members removed his opponent’s name and moved the wooden board with Kadabi’s name upward.
Kadabi looked up above it.
There were still many fights left before the summit called victory. He pressed down the weakness rising inside him and bit his lip.
“This is truly incredible.”
Baron Taito of the Nuchin Kingdom had flown across the sea and taken a seat among the audience. He too had been greatly impressed from the moment he entered this stadium, and the more the tournament progressed, the more excited he became.
“Yes, it is. This heat is truly beyond expectations.”
The large Beastman man accompanying him as an attendant had the black head of a Doberman. True to his appearance, his voice was utterly calm, unlike the heated atmosphere of the stadium.
Taito was not disappointed by his attendant’s reaction. He was far too intoxicated by the atmosphere of this tournament to care about such things.
He had thought it would be a small festival between people who simply liked games, but this was a truly proper tournament.
The money he invested in buying game boards did not feel wasted at all.
In truth, he had done it as a business, but since more money went into it than expected, his resolve had wavered slightly. But after coming here and watching the tournament in person, all he could think was that he wanted an expert from the Nuchin Kingdom to emerge quickly and participate here.
“This match features a rather unusual participant! Player Malexia, who has come all the way from the Brunyard Federation!!”
And Taito’s thoughts became even firmer when he saw an invited player from Brunyard participate.
This was still an era with strong national exclusivity, but fortunately, the audience was not so lacking in generosity that they booed the few foreign invited players.
Or perhaps their sense of kinship as fellow people who loved games was stronger.