So Who Won?

"You piece of—"

When, exactly, does a person hit true despair?

Whatever the official answer was, this moment had just locked itself into the Top 5 Most Despairing Moments of Lee Hari's Life. She had poured out every last scrap of focus. Her eyes burned, her skull throbbed, and every joint in her body ached as if the flu had moved into her bones. After driving herself that hard, she had finally scraped the boss's health down to nothing—only to be told there was a Phase 2.

And Phase 2's patterns had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Phase 1. Why would they? A two-and-a-half-meter dragon-man who had been throwing a greatsword around had just turned into a giant dragon. What were those patterns supposed to share?

Worse: die here and retry, and the odds were overwhelming that she would have to clear Phase 1 all over again before Phase 2 would even show its face. No. Call it certain. If Raider had been kind enough to save a Phase 1 clear, word of a First Clear would have broken long before now.

She dragged her composure back. Then she squeezed her eyes shut hard enough that a few tears stung out, shaking off even a little of the fatigue packed behind them. Patterns first. A body that size meant parrying was already half sealed off. Close in, bait something——

It flew?

No. No way.

"Hey!!! You son of a——"

"...Even if it's only because I'd be too sick over all the time I dumped into this, I am getting that payback. For real."

She fixed her grip on the controller and started piloting Yurie. The lonely marathon that still hadn't reached the halfway mark went on. The finish line, of course, was nowhere in sight.

"...She's still at it."

Had she declared a Kyeonwang or something? Jo Yeryeong, Editor No. 2 of Medongbu, muttered it while putting a late breakfast together, having just confirmed that Märchen's stream was still live.

She filled a big, wide soup bowl about two-thirds full of cereal, took the milk from the fridge, and poured. Then she opened Märchen's broadcast on her phone. As a rule she watched other NewTubers, hunting for something she could steal as editing inspiration, and there was no special reason she had pulled Märchen up today. She simply felt like it. That was the whole reason.

Yeryeong chewed her cereal in silence, eyes on the stream, then let her gaze slide over to the chat.

"It's fast..."

Back when she had become the editor for the streamer called Märchen, back when she had sat down to her very first edit, the chat on those streams had not burned anywhere near this hot. The Jo Yeryeong of those days could not have imagined Märchen growing into this.

Then, Märchen's NewTube subscribers had been sprinting toward twenty thousand. Now they had cleared a hundred and seventy thousand and were staring down a hundred and eighty. The editor of a ten-thousand-subscriber NewTuber had become the editor of a hundred-and-seventy-thousand-subscriber NewTuber. If Märchen posted an editor opening now, the competition would be vicious compared to back then. Thinking about it, Yeryeong felt like someone watching a stock she had scooped up at the very bottom slam into its daily limit, day after day.

She turned that over while the chat scrolled, then looked back at the broadcast and finished the cereal in a hurry, watching her employer disappear into the game. Seriously, though—was this game called Raider actually that fun? A nosebleed, and she still would not take her hand off the controller——

"...Huh?"

Something warm slid out of her nose. A nosebleed, most likely. It was not cold enough for anything else to be running.

She did not try to stop it. She let the blood quit on its own. Miss this moment, and there would be no next one.

Her crits had gone fully broken. Skill cooldowns and the ultimate were locking onto the boss's patterns with obscene precision, and she seized the focus that had hit its limit and kept trying to collapse, holding it up by force.

The wyrmling pattern.

Wyrmlings you failed to clear in time simply exploded. Fortunately, Tequiel's ultimate had just come back, and every last wyrmling sat inside its range. She erased them without a heartbeat of hesitation, swapped straight to Yurie, and drew on Techsecular as it dropped from the sky toward the earth.

Aim, loose. Aim, loose. About three cycles of it. In the instant the third arrow flew for Techsecular, the gap between the ground and the Ruler opened a fraction wider. Her thumb hit the roll on reflex.

And then the distance between Techsecular and Yurie vanished.

That enormous body had been fired like a shell. The shell met Yurie's slight frame—and did not connect. The roll's invincibility had overlapped the impact. The moment Yurie came up, I spun her toward Techsecular and triggered the ultimate in the same motion.

A colossal giant of light rose at Yurie's back and drew a bowstring. With it came the aiming line that appeared on every aimed shot, though this one was not quite the usual kind. The instant the line touched Techsecular, the Ruler's body glimmered. Targeted. An enemy under that lock could never dodge the arrow the giant of light released. Land the target, and a single homing arrow was yours to fire. That was the defining trait of Yurie's ultimate.

The ultimate also counted as an aimed shot, and the weapon in Yurie's hands carried an aimed-shot enhancement—which meant the ultimate was enhanced as well. Bow characters bought overwhelming range by giving up the parry, by enduring the clunk of aimed fire, and by surrendering a measure of DPS. The ultimate of a maxed-out Yurie, bearing what amounted to her personal weapon, had erased two of those flaws at once.

Yurie's ultimate struck the boss. In the same breath, the boss closed the distance. Now the protagonist's skill had to go into that closing body, and the instant it landed she had to swap to Tequiel and jam basic attacks in, shaving whatever she could off the ultimate's cooldown. If the wyrmling pattern came up inside that window, it was over.

And the one it would be over for was me.

So she prayed, raw and desperate, and never stopped pressing the buttons.

Ninety-six hours and forty-one minutes after the Raider North American server opened, a player claimed that server's first clear of the Ruler, Techsecular.

Ninety-six hours and fifty-seven minutes after the Raider Japan server opened, a player appeared who had been the first to find the story route that lifted the level cap, climbed all the way to level 50, and became the first on the Japan server to defeat the Ruler Techsecular.

Once that level-cap route spread, the Ruler Techsecular—an impregnable wall until then—fell in short order, and First Clear proofs from the other servers shot up like weeds after rain.

And the glory of the first clear on any server went to a player named Märchen, who felled the Ruler Techsecular ninety-six hours and thirty-six minutes after the Raider Korea server opened.

She had done it.

Märchen had.