A Deranker's Welcome
A deranker?
“It was decent, honestly. A shame it ended there.”
The day after my broadcast with Yena, I'd decided on a light duel stream — and my Diamond debut match ended in victory.
My opponent had been a swordsman draped in five brilliant colors, and he'd put up a better showing than I expected. Not just his gear; he had genuine skill to boot. Still, it wasn't enough.
No matter how they balance stats and equipment, anyone short of true ranker-caliber skill will never stop me.
Swinging my black spear, I queued up the next match. The spear had been stained black by the Shadow Spirit — since it had only been sealed, no new ability had been granted to it, but there was one change: it was a little sturdier than before.
The match found us almost immediately, and my opponent and I were whisked away in a swirl of blue particles.
If Platinum's arena took the form of a temple, Diamond's took the form of the sea. Set against a vivid blue sky, the location shifted at random — a beach, an island, the open ocean, and so on. And since every map involved 'water' terrain, certain users started each match with a distinct advantage.
And among them…
Some of them abused that advantage on purpose.
A mage.
Short snow-white hair and a cold, navy-blue noble's attire. An ice-crafted staff in one hand, a book brimming with overflowing mana spread open in the other. And, to bind it all together, an aura of frigid magic.
“Is he famous?”
A deranker, huh.
Truthfully, the feel of him wasn't out of place in Diamond. Not that he was overwhelmingly powerful or anything.
We'd spawned on a tiny island in the middle of the open sea. Though it counted as an island, it was so small it might as well have been a bare rock — closer to a mere outcrop amid the waves.
The moment he got a look at me, he flinched.
“Whoa. A certified celebrity.”
“Pardon?”
“Now that I think of it, you did climb into Diamond, didn't you?”
Crack-crack-crack! The rock beneath his feet and the surrounding sea froze solid in an instant. At the same time, a cape of ice rippled out behind Frost as the chill swallowed his whole body.
“That's right.”
“I've heard a lot about you. That you've been demolishing rankers left and right.”
That I had. But why did that matter to him?
When I asked, Frost gave a thin smile.
“Oh, it's nothing much.”
Keeying.
“I just wanted to get a taste of ranker-level skill.”
Before the words had even finished leaving his mouth, a storm erupted.
A blizzard conjured in the middle of the open ocean. The tempest was wilder and more destructive than I'd anticipated; cutting its influence away with my spear, I fell back a step.
The instant I retreated, the roar of my spinning spear tore the storm apart. The blizzard of ice could blunt the blow, but it couldn't stop it. What remained was a merciless onslaught mimicking a dragon's breath — and at the end of that rush, an ice dragon rose up in front of Frost.
Kragagak…!
“Oh.”
What had blocked the dragon's breath was a dragon-shaped sculpture of ice. Judging from how it worked, he was using the water strewn all around us as his raw material. Frost didn't stop there — he summoned five more of the ice dragons.
The way he handled his skills was astonishingly deft for a player supposedly reliant on system skills.
“Now~ let's see that technique of yours, the clone spear thing.”
“…?”
“Use it, and try to kill me once.”
With a confident look, Frost spread both hands wide like an actor taking the stage. I conjured six clone spears and sent one hurtling at each of the six dragons. I didn't load each one with a Spear's Roar, but they were still plenty sharp on their own. A single strike pierced each ice dragon's gaping maw.
And then they exploded.
All six ice bombs went off in a chain reaction that blew the entire surroundings sky-high. And through the swarm of ice shards, Frost was smiling. A heartbeat later, the icy detonation swallowed him whole.
Kugugugugu…
Smoke from the explosions billowed thickly across the surrounding area.
Lily. Full name, Lily Elbrit. The talk of the town, a player whose skill rivaled the single-digit rankers themselves.
Frost had heard plenty about her — but he'd never once gotten to meet her in person. He kept himself confined to the Diamond bracket, with its terrain tailor-made to maximize his abilities, and never went out of his way to appear in public beyond quests and hunting.
The reason he never climbed out of Diamond into the higher tiers was pure amusement.
There's no way I could beat a ranker in the top hundred anyway.
He was an ice wizard with multiple hidden pieces and even Legendary-tier gear in hand, yet breaking into the ranks of the ranked had always felt like a bridge too far. The reason was simple.
Against rankers in the top hundred, 'constraints' become meaningless.
They were the kind of players who, in any situation, in any condition, could find the optimal path and carve out a route where none existed. No matter how hostile the terrain or how unfavorable the matchup, they dug up some ingenious counter and fought through it.
Frost couldn't do that.
Or rather — he had no intention of trying.
Why would I ever fight on the back foot?
All he had to do was pick the places that favored him, the places where the advantage lay with him.
The moment Frost arrived in Diamond and laid eyes on the arena's distinctive terrain, the decision made itself. He would never, under any circumstances, climb above Diamond. The method was simple: win just enough and lose just enough, cycling victories and defeats, while holding onto enough points that he'd never drop a tier.
He could get away with this because DeoEn imposed no real sanctions on derankers.
Devil of Angel does not interfere in matters internal to the game.
No matter what a player did, no matter what strategies or methods they used, non-interference was the ironclad principle of Nutri Company, the conglomerate behind DeoEn. So long as one didn't violate the game's own established laws, and nothing spilled over outside the game — that is, into reality — not the slightest punishment would be applied.
In fact, that was exactly why so many 'gatekeepers' camped Platinum and Diamond. Plenty of people filed complaints, but Nutri was, after all, the number one corporation in the world. Only a single VR game existed on the entire planet, and no one could so much as follow at DeoEn's heels, let alone match its technology. No handful of protesting users would ever change the direction a game company like that chose to take.
They were already the best in the world.
“This is what it's all about.”
Granted, the rewards dwindled the longer his losing streaks ran — but for Frost, what mattered most was the fun. Beating an opponent he could never beat on his own through nothing but 'terrain'.
That Lily player was no different.
An opponent he could never have beaten otherwise. If they met on a regular field instead of open water, he'd be flattened before he could even lift a finger.
But here? Here, it was possible.
He drew up the sea's bottomless reserves of water and cast his skills at minimal cost. Standing atop the waves, every one of his stats, every one of his skills' corrections and buffs, rose dramatically. The lone problem — the 'temperature' — was nearly erased thanks to 'Cold Heart', a hidden piece he'd obtained long ago that converted heat into cold with barely any penalty.
All he needed was water. And the water was already his.
Psssssss…
“Just as I thought.”
A silhouette emerged through the cold-choked smoke.
Lily, exactly as expected, had taken no serious damage. This was the woman who'd beaten single-digit rankers — if she fell to this much, something would be very wrong.
Then how about this?
The aftermath of a colossal surge of cold hung in the air. The scattered fragments of freezing mana had already claimed the entire vicinity — and Lily stood at its very center.
Flutter. A page of Frost's book turned.
Page 78. An ultimate skill requiring a full seven seconds to cast, usable only atop snow-burdened mountains whipped by winds of bitter hibernation. And this place, right now, was as good as the dead of winter.
“Curtain Fall of the Glacier.”
The frozen winter that pronounced the end of all things seized hold of the arena. A temperature that had sat at early summer plunged to an ice age in a single breath, and the entire sea locked solid.
His staff moved. A colossal hammer, poised to finish the frozen Lily off—
“…Hm? A hammer?”
“A hammer.”
BOOOM-KRACK!!!
His sevenfold shield shattered to pieces. Curtain Fall of the Glacier, his mountain of buffs, his water-and-ice defense skills — every last one of them was smashed apart by a red hammer radiating ferocious magic. All that remained was a snow-white head.
Frost hastily activated Cold Heart and layered another protective membrane of chill over himself, but it meant nothing.
“Smite.”
The hammer wielded by an angel of heaven crushes everything.
Be it a shield forged from a Dragon Lord's scales — or a genuine Dragon Lord — there are no exceptions.
KWAJIK!
Frost's head went flying.