Battle Royale (4)
The Battle Royale had entered its final stretch. The rankings of most nations had already been decided. Only one question remained — who would claim first place!
By now, even the UK broadcast center had locked its cameras onto just two screens. Rachel with 35 kills! Baek Jinwoo with 34!
"Come on! He has to close that kill gap somehow!"
"That's Rachel for you! For nearly an hour now, she hasn't surrendered so much as a single kill of her lead! A monster truly is a monster!"
"Honestly, it's Baek Jinwoo who's the remarkable one! Once this league wraps up, I expect the world rankings are in for a massive shake-up."
The Korean commentary team's voices were already shot. They had no choice — their national team had been snatching up kills nonstop since the very first aerial battle.
▶ Hungyo, what are you doing! Just ONE more kill, please!
▶ Can't he just take out Rachel herself?
▶ fr, it's like they've got some pact not to fight each other. Doesn't seem like the time for that, though;
▶ But tbh, even for Baek Jinwoo, wouldn't going up against Rachel be rough?
▶ ^^^ Right now, not fighting is a hundred times better.
▶ Don't care about anything else. Just wanna know what the Battle Royale championship reward is lol
▶ Fact) Even if Baek Jinwoo wins, we're never finding out.
▶ True lololol
▶ Yep. Even if he gets it, it'll stay a state secret.
Britain was no different. The British public had no idea what Rachel's reward was either. If they had, wouldn't the whole world have known by now?
And so, while South Korea held its breath over the Battle Royale crown—
"...You're Jinugod's Training Instructor?"
Rachel and Hungyo had crossed paths. Both of them knew it — they had promised not to lay a hand on each other.
"AAAAAH! Rachel and the Training Instructor have run into each other!"
"What happens now?"
"Won't they just pass each other by again? If they actually clash, it's a massive disadvantage for us!"
▶ Exactly.
▶ Rachel's still got her main body and every summon alive, and Hungyo's all alone.
▶ He should dodge this one, right?
▶ The question is whether Rachel will let him.
▶ Ha, shit, of all times!
Grrrrr...! The Yellow Dragon — the summon coiled twice around Rachel's body — let out a threatening roar.
Shing! Hungyo drew his sword.
Rachel murmured, "I won't attack you. Go away."
Hungyo nodded — a gesture that he, too, would not attack.
Whoosh whoosh whoosh! And through it all, Ramba was still whirling her staff like a woman possessed.
▶ Whoa.
▶ They're really not attacking?
▶ fr, there really is something between them, huh.
▶ That's it, Hungyo! Hurry off somewhere else and grab some kills!
But Hungyo did not move. Sword in hand, he quietly began to tail Rachel.
"..." Rachel's brow furrowed.
"What are you doing? I told you to go away."
No matter how she snapped at him, Hungyo remained silent. He simply followed.
'No way.' Just as unease began pooling in Rachel's chest—
Rustle! A stir of movement came from the brush.
'A player!' Rachel's eyes flashed, and she pointed at the spot.
"KRWAAAAARGH!" The little Yellow Dragon blazed with light and charged.
But Hungyo was Hungyo. Kills came first, no matter what.
"D-damn it!"
The players in hiding were from Uganda. Two of them, no less. They'd tucked themselves away so carefully, hoping to snag even one more kill — and of all people, they'd been spotted by Rachel!
But that was when it happened. Moving faster than even the Yellow Dragon, Hungyo swung his sword in one clean arc — at a speed beyond all reason. So fast that the blade itself vanished from sight.
SHRRRRK!
In under a second, Hungyo had butchered all ten of the enemy's summons. He silently flicked his blade clean, then quietly returned to his post behind Rachel.
'Insane.' Rachel was floored. That speed just now was beyond even her senses to track. She genuinely wondered whether her own S-rank summon, the Yellow Dragon, could beat it.
Naturally, South Korea went into meltdown.
▶ Whoa, holy shit!
▶ PFFT HAHAHAHAHA
▶ Hungyo's actually insane?
▶ He's using the no-attack pact to farm kills?
▶ This is beyond kill-farming. He's just walling her off with overwhelming force lol
▶ Whoa, that's our Hungyo!
▶ Hungyo! Hungyo! Hungyo!
▶ We love you, Hungyo!
Everyone was chanting his name in a frenzy, and the commentators were no different.
"AAAAAH! A comebaaaack! It's a reversal! We've finally taken the lead!"
"Unbelievable! Hungyo, keep it up! If he keeps blocking her like that... locking in first place becomes a real possibility!"
"And in the middle of all that, Baek Jinwoo just picked up another kill!"
The kill gap they had struggled so hard to close now had them ahead by two — all off that single play. Even better, Hungyo was now openly, brazenly shadowing Rachel's every step.
The one being driven half-mad was Rachel.
'Wow.' This kind of play? A summon operating that far from its player, making this kind of call on its own judgment? Did that even make sense? Rachel was flabbergasted.
She knew, too — the Training Instructor's original rank. 'He was E-rank to begin with, right?' An E-rank being that strong already made no sense, and now he was clever on top of it? What was she supposed to do about that?
'Should I just attack him?' That was the awkward part. Did Hungyo's interference breach the terms of their alliance? Well, no. The secret pact contained exactly one clause: no killing each other before the round of 16!
'And it's a stretch to call it interference, either.' He hadn't intercepted the Yellow Dragon's attack. He'd simply charged in at overwhelmingly superior speed and struck the kill first. From Hungyo's standpoint, "I was heading somewhere, and that woman followed me" — and Rachel would have no retort. And frankly, that hadn't even been the player's decision, had it? It was the judgment of a summon boldly dispatched far afield. Pin that on Baek Jinwoo? A stretch, to put it mildly.
'Hold Jinugod responsible?' That was truly beyond absurd. All the more so because Rachel genuinely regarded Jinugod as a god.
"Ha." Rachel finally let out a hollow laugh. 'Fine.'
Truthfully, she couldn't have cared less about handing the reward over to Baek Jinwoo. She had simply wanted to give it her all. And that hadn't changed, even now.
"Come on, then. Try and keep up."
KWAAARGH...! With the Yellow Dragon's roar, Rachel tore off at blistering speed—
"Tah!" — and Hungyo latched onto her trail as if he'd been waiting for exactly this! His speed gave nothing away to hers.
▶ KYAHA!
▶ LOLOL Go, Hungyo, go!
▶ That shamelessness. Beautiful.
▶ I'm a Hungyo fan as of today.
▶ And isn't the fairy still whirling her staff back there just adorable?
▶ LOLOL Ramba's cracked too! Word is the attack speed buff comes from her.
SHRRK! Hungyo's swordplay turned a shade more blatant. Perhaps eager to hurry the league along, a few players came drifting toward the racket around Rachel—
—and every single time, Hungyo stole the final blow. It was precise to the point of disbelief, and maddening to the same degree.
"He takes it! Agaaain! Hungyo's snatched another kill!"
"The MVP of this Battle Royale is, without question, Hungyo! He's on a run that makes no sense whatsoever!"
"Look at Rachel's face! She's wearing a face like she's chewing dung! In the last three years, have we ever once seen that look on her? Truly remarkable!"
Worse, his already-blistering attack speed just kept climbing. By now, you couldn't even see him move.
"Ha." Rachel laughed hollowly. 'I've lost this one.'
The gap had already ballooned to five kills. How many players were even left to take down — thirty, maybe? This wasn't just a loss. It was a flawless, total defeat, all because of a single E-rank summon called the Training Instructor.
'How does anyone raise a summon like that?' And from his movements alone, she couldn't even begin to guess which runes he was running. 'At the very least, Unique-grade runes, fully enhanced and refined to the limit...' That was Jinugod for you. How had he readied such a monster in so little time?
Of course, she could feel it. If she went all out? She could handle those two summons, one way or another. She hadn't spent three years twiddling her thumbs, either. She'd monopolized every league reward there was, and climbed the Tower of Ordeal all the way to floor 50.
But she had no desire to break her word. Hadn't she been the one to propose the alliance pact in the first place?
"Okay." Rachel gave a cool, clean nod — and dropped onto the ground where she stood. "You win this game, Training Instructor."
The Battle Royale reward she could concede with grace. 'But.' The World League title? That one's not happening, Jinugod. Rachel's lips curled.
The feeling had arrived. 'This fourth World League is my last chance.' Her last chance to beat Jinugod! If the gap was already this wide now, then from the fifth league onward it would likely stretch beyond anything she could bridge. Her respect for Jinugod aside, Rachel refused to let that chance slip away.
Rachel: 35 kills! Baek Jinwoo: 50 kills! And so the Battle Royale drew to a close with an overwhelming margin.
"Ha."
Thud. Baek Jinwoo sank to the ground and looked up at the sky, sweat streaming down his forehead.
"...I won."
The number of remaining players has reached 100!
Ending the Battle Royale!
Laughter spilled out of him unbidden. How long had it been? Since he'd competed against someone with everything he had. 'That was genuinely fun.' It felt like returning, after an eternity, to the early days of Battle of Summoners — the game that had once been Baek Jinwoo's entire life.
"Master Jinwoo!" Thanks to his item's ambush effect, he had returned to Hwang Jiwoo's side, and she greeted him with a cheer. "We won! We really won! I knew it, Master Jinwoo! You're incredible!"
Hwang Jiwoo had passed beyond shock into sheer wonder. Baek Jinwoo flitting from place to place on item after item, claiming a kill with every hop, was astonishing — and so were Hungyo and Ramba heading off on expeditions elsewhere to farm up kills. She knew, because she'd tried it herself. Here in the Battle Royale, there wasn't a single easy opponent to be found, and in a straight one-on-one, fights inevitably dragged on for ages. Which was why you had to find teammates fast and score your kills by dog-piling targets...
'But Master Jinwoo is just... different.' He was a one-man massacre. One-on-one or one-against-many, it made no difference — he simply carved through them all. And among them had certainly been famous overseas rankers, the kind people called heavyweights.
"Right? Haha." Baek Jinwoo wiped his sweat on his clothes and beamed.
The player who recorded the most kills in this Battle Royale is 'Baek Jinwoo' of the Republic of Korea (50 kills).
A message unfurled in midair. And then came the one he had been waiting for most of all.
A 'Hidden Reward' will be granted to player 'Baek Jinwoo'.
Hidden Reward! Baek Jinwoo's eyes gleamed. What could it be?
Moving all players back to the Match Hall.
One hour of rest will be provided before group assignments.
Players, please wait in the Match Hall.
Flash! Before the Hidden Reward could be unveiled, every surviving player was summoned back to the Match Hall.