Chapter 99: Kadabi’s Struggle, and the Finals

“Waaaaah!!!”

The audience welcomed the stiffly tense Elf player from the Brunyard Federation, Malexia, with cheers and applause.

At that, Malexia seemed to relax a little. His rigid movements softened somewhat, and he even awkwardly waved to the audience.

Once the match began, Malexia showed fairly decent skill. As expected, he was good enough to have been selected as a regional representative. But that was all.

Everyone participating in these finals was also a regional representative. With only that level of skill, it was difficult to show outstanding results. Still, because Malexia had come as a representative of the Brunyard Federation, he clenched his teeth and managed to earn one victory. But he lost in the very next match.

He drooped his shoulders, but he left a fairly strong impression on Taito.

In any case, seeing a player from another country fight an extremely close match and even gain one victory stirred something in Taito, who was also a foreigner.

Next time, our country must participate too.

Of course, he had no intention of being satisfied with a result of only one victory. He did not know about winning, but at the very least, he wanted a result that would place someone from his country on the podium.

Most of the players from the Brunyard Federation were eliminated early, and only one player made it to the quarterfinals. However, he lost there and failed to place in the rankings.

“You fought well! Player Churas! I think we can look forward to next time!”

That player and the spectators from Brunyard were deeply disappointed, but no one caused a disturbance. Since this was an electronic game where victory and defeat were clearly decided, there was no room to pick a fight, and everyone had come to enjoy it, after all.

Of course, not everyone had come just to enjoy it.

Kadabi, in particular, was fighting almost as if his life depended on it. The semifinal match after Brunyard’s Churas belonged to Kadabi.

Fuck, he’s seriously insanely good.

Kadabi had to focus on the game without leaving even the slightest bit of room in his mind. After making it this far, everyone was unbelievably good. Honestly speaking, in pure skill, his opponent seemed better than him.

“Player Kadabi is in danger! The dragons have blocked almost all the other blocks!”

But Kadabi had one thing better than his opponent. It was a refusal to give up. In other words, spite.

Even when his opponent became careless, thinking he had practically won, Kadabi never let go of the controls. In his head, he endlessly repeated “please” and hoped the next block would be an Orc block that could break through the tiny thread of connection.

“It came out!”

And when that block appeared, Kadabi shouted without realizing it. He glanced at the Red Dragon waiting to fall above his blocks, then moved as fast as he could and drove the block into the starting point of the chain.

“Player Kadabi is calm! He’s calm! How did such a young player find that hope in that situation?!”

The Orc commentator shouted in utter frenzy.

Then Kadabi’s chain began exploding. His opponent, who had relaxed because he thought he had won and had been stacking blocks somewhat mechanically, panicked badly. Perhaps because of that, several mistakes followed.

As a result, he failed to connect his chain to the end. Only a few blocks burst before it stopped, and he sent out a single weak Green Dragon. But that was caught in Kadabi’s chain, which continued to explode, and quickly disappeared.

With eyes full of spite, Kadabi watched as his chain smashed apart all the dragons above his head and shifted over to his opponent’s side.

Phew...

He had survived by a hair.

Kadabi, who truly did not have even a single bit of leeway, actually breathed roughly. And as soon as the chain ended, he charged back in and began stacking another chain.

In truth, even by this point, Kadabi had only barely returned the scale to neutral. But the fact that his opponent had already panicked and failed to regain composure was huge.

In the end, Kadabi managed to cling to an opponent stronger than himself until the very end and seize victory.

However, perhaps because he had spent too much strength there, he lost helplessly in the next round.

“Ah!...”

After his defeat, Kadabi blamed himself endlessly. But a person’s mental strength and stamina had limits, so it could not be helped.

Afterward, in the third-place match, he fought with desperate resolve and barely defeated the opposing Orc player, allowing himself to enter the rankings.

Tch...

Naturally, he felt terribly disappointed. But Kadabi, who had survived on the streets, was a boy who knew how to accept reality. He lowered his head deeply and thought about how he should use the third-place prize money.

Three thousand Del. It was only one-tenth of the first-place prize, but it was still ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠by no means a small amount of money. From the perspective of an orphan like him, that was even more true.

First, he decided not to return to his hometown. Everyone in that neighborhood knew each other too well. The moment he went back with money, rumors would spread everywhere, and many people would rush in to try to rip it away from him. It would be better to go to another neighborhood, rent a room with this money, and find a proper job.

Well, if that Penlon guy could do it, there’s no way I can’t.

Penlon was one of his fellow orphans, a child who escaped street life and became a restaurant employee. Of course, he did have the advantage of a fairly clean-looking face. But Kadabi thought that if he washed properly with the prize money and bought decent clothes, he could at least become an employee at some small shop.

Thinking that way allowed Kadabi to quickly forget the disappointment of not taking first place. Of course, the moment it came back to him, his insides would twist again.

Damn it!

And since they said this tournament would continue being held, he might be able to take first place someday. Kadabi burned with that motivation.

The finals bracket was decided.

The university professor who had received attention in the magazine, as well as the others, had already fallen. Since they had not been interviewed based purely on skill in the first place, there was nothing particularly strange about that.

One finalist was a man named Geeks, the champion of eastern Ranchelt. His small build and large round glasses defined his character.

The other was a rugged, muscular Beastman man named Sinajon. Judging from the two pairs of horns on his head, he seemed to be a Bull Beastman.

Tetris 2 had a fair number of female players, and among the champions who advanced, women made up around forty percent. However, nearly sixty players had to continue through the tournament, turning it into a battle of stamina, and it seemed they could not endure.

“Next time, we’ll have to make it a two-day schedule again.”

Ras had originally wanted a two-day schedule, but there were almost no holidays that included Monday or Saturday, so there had been no choice. Also, Rica Stadium’s rental fee was so expensive that the Management Team had pushed for a one-day schedule.

“Yes... It does seem somewhat unfair.”

Brams answered that way not because he truly cared about fairness, but because the tournament’s response was better than expected. With this level of response, terrestrial broadcast coverage did not seem like such a distant dream, so he calculated that such an investment would be worthwhile.

Fortunately, the audience was not particularly disappointed that no female player had reached the finals. Of course, some female spectators felt a little regretful, but that was all.

Still, a performance was scheduled right before the finals, so the players had some time to catch their breath. In truth, this was not so much for the players’ sake as it was to prevent the tournament from ending too quickly.

In any case, the audience enjoyed the singer’s performance, the players could rest, and it was a good time for everyone.

“Did everyone enjoy that?”

Not long after the performance ended, Delmongu came out and gathered the audience’s attention. He drew responses from the audience and raised their interest as much as possible. Then, when he felt the stadium’s atmosphere had ripened enough, he declared,

“Now, the finals will begin!!”

At the same time, the screens showed the player seats.

If this had been a professional league, perhaps the players would have been used to it in their own way and shown composed expressions after receiving coaching from their teams. But they were all amateurs. Even though they were players who had reached the finals, they looked deeply nervous and awkward.

But no one booed them.

Everyone remembered the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠super plays the players had shown so far. So they all applauded and welcomed the players’ entrance.

“Waaaaah!”

Ras had even installed devices on the stage that set off small fireworks to deliberately raise the excitement. When they went off, the players flinched in surprise. They had been warned in advance, but it seemed difficult to remain composed even so.

“We’ll have to remove that next time.”

“Yes. Understood.”

Ras had muttered it to himself out of embarrassment, but Brams beside him somehow understood and immediately answered that way.

It ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠became even more embarrassing, but Ras could not tell him not to do that, so he only smiled bitterly and asked him to handle it.

Meanwhile, the two players entered their boxes, and the doors soon closed.

It would have been nice if they could film the players’ faces inside the boxes too, but that was impossible due to technical limitations. The screens simply showed the two commentators in the broadcasting booth for a moment before returning to the game screen.

Without much hesitation, both players chose the characters they often used and immediately began stacking blocks. As expected of experts who had reached the finals, the blocks fell swiftly without any sense of fumbling.

“They’re fast! So fast!”

They built up past the halfway point in an instant, and there was no sign of hesitation about what would happen if they failed to chain it.

“Could they really be calculating all of that?”

“Wouldn’t they be? They’re the best experts in the country.”

Then, after almost filling the screens to the end, they triggered their chains immediately. Both sides collapsed downward in sequence and exploded, activating magic that flew across the screen.

The 1P player, Geeks, was slightly faster, so the magic repeatedly stacked and canceled above Player Sinajon’s head on the 2P side. Since the combo had gone past fifteen, the commentators shouted breathlessly while the audience watched in a daze.

For a while, stacking and chaining, stacking and chaining repeated that way, with dragons merely moving back and forth above each player’s head.

It seemed they exchanged attacks for about five minutes like that. The time was short, but because both the players and the audience watched while holding their breath, the perceived time felt incomparably longer.

“Huh?! The balance has broken somehow!”

In truth, the balance had not actually been maintained the entire time. It only seemed that way because, aside from the players, few people counted exactly how many chains were going back and forth.

They had simply repeated desperate recoveries whenever they were pushed back, so it looked as if the balance had been maintained.

But this time, the weight of the scale clearly shifted before everyone’s eyes. Player Sinajon on the 2P side failed to cancel all the dragons above his head, and those dragons soon fell, covering his blocks.

“Is Player Sinajon going to be pushed down like this?!”

The audience’s feelings matched the commentator’s shout.

However, this was Sinajon’s strategy to break the balance. He had stacked his blocks in a sharply uneven shape. Because of that, instead of covering everything, the dragon blocks left many gaps, and on the very next turn, Sinajon began canceling them out.

As the chain exploded, the three-line dragons burst in an instant. And because he had been sharpening his blade for this moment, he overwhelmed his opponent in the number of chains. No, since he had deliberately taken several of his opponent’s chains in advance, even doing the same thing would inevitably put him one step ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ahead.

Geeks panicked when he realized he was starting to be pushed, but he clenched his teeth and countered.

However, his opponent was just as desperate.

In the end, that slight tilt gradually shattered the balance. Moreover, the psychological pressure was considerable, so Geeks eventually made one more mistake and was instantly struck by a five-line Red Dragon pouring down over his head.