Karma
Game over.
Color drained from the screen, fading by degrees. As if his soul had slipped free of his body, he found himself looking down at what had once been him. A monochrome death screen filled his vision completely.
A wretched corpse. Beside it, the ranking 2/100 glowed clear and sharp, along with a notice that his RP had ticked up by a modest amount — the inevitable math of a battle royale where a hundred players dropped into every match.
His rank hadn't even fallen. Still, he sank deep into the private booth chair and covered his face with both hands.
"Ugh…"
Eugene.
It wasn't as if he didn't know who she was. As a streamer himself, he had to stay sharp about the noise circulating around him — and when that noise involved battle royale, his main content, the need only grew sharper.
Besides, ranked population always formed a diamond: the higher you climbed, the thinner the player pool became. Put bluntly, running into the same person again got a whole lot easier.
If one of them had been clearly outclassed or overwhelmingly superior, this whole mess might have stopped — or never started. The problem was that it kept happening.
And you couldn't even call it sniping, not really.
If someone had deliberately hunted him down mid-fight just to kill him or force a loot donation, that would have deserved condemnation beyond mere criticism. But lately, every time Kato ran into Eugene, it was at least inside the top five — and more often than not, it boiled down to a one-on-one between the two of them.
In a battle royale, you couldn't avoid someone even if you wanted to. And if this were sniping… the idea of grinding into the final five every single match just to chase one person was its own kind of insanity.
So sniping was off the table.
At this level, changing your entire stream schedule just to dodge one player was excessive by any reasonable measure. But forcing himself to ignore it and keep going meant facing something even harsher when they met.
Take the death he'd just suffered. The moment the distance closed even slightly, a thrown dagger had buried itself in his face and put him on the express highway to the afterlife.
By count, they'd landed in the same lobby roughly seven times. Was there anyone who wouldn't mind a fishbone catching in their throat seven times over dinner?
So he shouted the question that would never find an answer.
"Ha, for real. No, what the hell even is that person? I've been grinding Apex ranked forever and almost never hit a wall, you know? The top tier here is kind of like that. There's no eternal number one."
A person's will fed directly into an avatar's movement — far more performance than a keyboard and mouse could ever deliver. That was why the top ranks cycled endlessly. Human physicality introduced variables far beyond reflexes, reaction speed, aim, and game sense.
In other words, it meant you could watch a pro from the previous era get randomly demolished by a Tier 2 player over a single momentary mistake.
And yet…
"…Is that person actually military? Was she military? This is ridiculous."
That person tossed inconsistency to the dogs and casually dismantled every enemy in her path with deranged physicality.
Maybe she was… one of those North American server players he'd only ever heard about? The place where the weak all washed out, and the absolute top was crawling with presumed ex-military, PMCs, and tactical consultants?
Of course, he'd heard Eugene had barely started playing at all. Dark Zone logged every scrap of play history. If she'd come from NA, the rumors would already have been everywhere.
His fingers itched.
If he died two more times in ways he couldn't even imagine… he would probably snap under the combined weight of pain and curiosity and send her a friend request.
And if he died two more times after that, he'd probably hammer out a 5,700-character message begging her to spare him.
Somehow, that future didn't feel very far away.
Meanwhile, elsewhere—
───Thwack!
"…Tsk."
An unnecessarily cheerful sound. The character, having misjudged a jump height, smacked into a wall with a spectacularly pathetic effect, then tumbled downward through no fewer than five camera transitions before hitting the ground far below.
Watching the avatar stand up as if nothing had happened, Eugene drew a small, irritated breath and scowled.
A match still hadn't even queued. The higher the tier, the fewer people inhabited it — and the longer the matchmaking took.
"This is a seriously awful game."
Eugene was enduring the irritation that kept creeping up while playing the game Harmony had recommended.
It was summer.
"Teacher! It's been so long! Wait, how are you already this big when you only started streaming less than two weeks ago!?"
"I know, right. I wonder whose fault that is."
"Uh… mine?"
A few days later.
Before going live, Eugene was perched on the private booth chair, wondering what to do with the day, when Harmony — already set as a friend — suddenly barged into the room.
It was abrupt enough that words failed for a moment, but then the realization hit that the stream wasn't running, and the speech register eased a little.
Harmony generated a chair with remarkable naturalness and settled in beside her. She looked like she had plenty of questions.
"Anyway, um… is it still okay if I keep calling you Teacher?"
"We haven't even played together in a while. Just call me Eugene."
"That'd be better, right?"
After a brief pause, she grinned and added,
"Then when it's just the two of us, just call me Harmony. You don't have to stick a 'Miss' on everything."
"Alright, I'll do that."
A short silence, then the small talk that followed. She was the one who spoke first.
"How's streaming treating you?"
"It's not as hard as I expected. Still… I should say it feels like too many people are watching? That part's still unfamiliar."
"Might be because you just started. If you're going to keep streaming, try diversifying your content. Viewers get bored if you only show them one thing."
That seemed reasonable enough — and then a thought occurred. Eugene pinched both soft cheeks and stretched them sideways.
"So those are the games you recommended?"
"Ah— aah! Aughyaaaaah!"
If the recommended games shared one common trait, it was this: a single mistake sent the character plummeting straight into the abyss. Every time it happened, chat flooded with bizarre spam about starter towns and electric rats, and Eugene would stare at it and despair at having returned once again to a familiar place.
What would you even call this — roguelike? It wasn't quite that, but the part where one miss made everything you'd built collapse in a heap felt the same. Discovering she was terrible at this genre of game was just a bonus.
"Augh… I saw it through video donations too. It was so funny I rewatched it a few times, but you only played between matches, so I was disappointed. Any chance you'd use it as a warm-up game?"
"…You actually liked it?"
"Yes!"
Should she kick her out?
The impulse — not quite an impulse — rose all the way to the crown of her head, but Eugene was a modern person and a functioning member of society. You couldn't just banish someone over a difference in taste.
At any rate, the mint-flavored cat's bizarre preferences were now roughly understood.
The conversation kept going.
"Games like this are always like that. Super hard at first, but once you get used to them they're doable. I've played so many of these that… now I clear the ones I've done before pretty easily."
"I'm sure you do."
"…Ugh, whenever I say I play these games, everyone gives me the exact same look…"
By Eugene's standards, what other reaction could anyone possibly have? Still, it was a genuinely appropriate game to kill time while matchmaking ran. You had to climb back up the path after face-planting into the ground, but once a ranked match actually queued, it barely registered. Of course, opening that game window again always brought a sigh.
"Anyway, you're way better at Dark Zone than I expected! I still struggle a bit just pushing the main missions, so when did you already climb that high?"
"Took about a week, I guess… I just played without thinking much, figuring I'd try entering an esports tournament once. I didn't say that on stream."
"Hehe, yeah. If you had, chat would've roasted you alive."
She waved a hand briefly, then showed Eugene something.
"You might not be that curious, but this is the progress on the legal action against the person who sniped me last time. I wanted to update you on it today."
"Ah, that… is it going well? Have you been struggling mentally since then, or anything?"
"No, thankfully. The first few nights I kept waking up a little, but after a few days it settled back to normal."
Various technical terms scrolled past, but the summary was simple. The report had been properly filed; a police station summons had gone out by registered mail; and according to the lawyer consultation, ordinary charges mixed with the illegalities around Dark Zone stream broadcasting meant the punishment would be fairly severe.
In a way, wasn't this poetic justice? Having a legal representative so she didn't have to face the suspect directly was also a relief.
"Everyone's going crazy telling me not to settle. And when they ran various record checks, it turned out he was a habitual sniper… so it probably won't end well for him."
"You're alright with that?"
"I'm trying not to think about it from that angle. You commit a crime, you take the punishment. That's all. Worrying about sentencing is the lawyers' job, not mine, right?"
That was fair enough.
Eugene was, in a sense, a party to the incident as well — but if the direct victim put it that way, there was nothing more to say.
And so the idle conversation continued. There was still time before going live, and a chat that had started on miscellaneous topics eventually veered toward the idea of a Dark Zone collab to celebrate Eugene's streamer debut.
There was no reason to refuse, so the moment Eugene cheerfully agreed, a message suddenly arrived.
A Dark Zone message.
"One second. Something just came in."
Clicking it brought up a popup that wasn't particularly long.
"Is this something I shouldn't be looking at?"
"Ah, it's not that, it's just…"
It's probably just his karma catching up to him.
She couldn't quite bring herself to say it out loud.