The Rising Super Rookie Streamer (5)
What extra strategy had he prepared this time?
I'd talked a confident game, but the sorry sight of him taking that hit on purpose, right out in the open, left me sure he still had a trump card tucked away.
Even so, he was probably breathing easier, pleased with himself for opening the distance so naturally—still without the faintest dream of the defeat about to play out in front of him, and unable even to imagine that the tiny slivers of damage I'd been stacking, little by little, would all detonate at once.
And in the middle of that, he started talking.
"Hey. You seeing this? Cooked up something fresh for this round."
He summoned an assault rifle. The unpleasant smile that spread across his face at the same moment dropped me straight into doubt, so I killed my charge and started listening to Soldier.
Hmm. What did he think he was going to accomplish by summoning a mere assault rifle? We were standing in a small forest spread across the wasteland. Even if he opened fire, there was cover everywhere; a gun wouldn't get much done here.
I waited anyway. Better for the stream, I figured, if he laid every card he had on the table and still couldn't win, than if I simply put him down.
The chat was worried about me. Mixed in were comments asking whether I was taking the match far too easy. My current attitude must have looked arrogant to the viewers.
Gutter rabble who can't tell courage from arrogance had never been in short supply, not even in the Heavenly Realm. There were always people who, without a clear grasp of their own ability, hunted yokai or wiped out bands of bandits just to inflate their fame. What waited for them was death, and even among those who lived, more than half walked away with their bodies in ruins.
None of that applied to me. I'd bitten down until my teeth creaked and endured on nothing but my fists, swearing I would survive somehow, get back to South Korea, and eat a meal fit for a human being.
While I was thinking it, his assault rifle made a noise, and its structure began to change. A moment later, the rifle had become a sniper rifle.
"A sniper rifle...? We're not even that far apart."
What was he thinking? A sniper rifle is, by nature, a weapon for supporting from a distance. He wasn't the type to miss a thought that obvious, so I turned it over carefully.
Ah. This was a game. There might be a skill that opened distance in a single instant. He meant to use a movement skill, put a tree between us, and shoot—and a sniper rifle's power would be nothing ordinary, either. Well, well. He really had been hiding something.
Impressed by the spirit of it, I gave him a big, sincere round of applause.
"That's certainly worth bragging about. Doesn't change the fact that it's the wrong read, though. You'd have been better off burying mines, you know."
"What......?"
"I mean, you should have planted the mines from round one only where you actually needed them, and come at me again. Then wouldn't I have assumed, because of how round one went, that you wouldn't bury any this time?"
I explained it kindly—where his tactics had gone wrong, just as I'd been thinking a moment ago, and how to fix them. What I wanted to say came down to this. In round one, I'd caught him burying mines and trying to force a specific action, and his own avenues of movement had been restricted at the same time. Wouldn't that naturally lead someone to guess he wouldn't use mines in round two? If he'd played on that psychology, buried only a handful of anti-tank mines this round, and induced me to step on one no matter the method, he could have landed at least a little damage.
Out of sheer pity, I clicked my tongue. Tsk.
Even the viewers were surprised. I'd only been speaking from the way I'd stayed alive this long.
Anyway, Soldier seemed to pull himself together, because he started leveling the sniper rifle at me. Unlike everything I'd seen from him so far, these rounds would be fast. I'd have to answer quickly. At the same time he used a skill that launched him backward, and the bullet that left the trigger came flying, so I slipped it by a sheet of paper. The moment I ran in, he opened the distance again.
Hmm. Let's see. Unless he was a fool, he wouldn't try the same attack twice—not after watching me dodge it in plain sight. While I thought it, another bullet was already in the air. But unlike just now—
Slower than the one he fired before. Then this time, opening the distance is definitely the right call.
—I caught that its speed was about twenty percent slower than a moment before. That meant he'd committed to a different attack. I moved my feet wide at once and cut left.
Then something astonishing happened. The fired bullet split into several paths and swept a wide area all at once. Impressive. Had the first shot been a plain attack, meant to lull me? The intent was far too obvious, so I didn't get caught. And yet, in the space where I'd dodged, Soldier didn't follow up at all. That could only mean a cooldown had started the moment he used the skill.
Judgment made, I flicked out a single One-Fist Bullet before closing in. Just as I'd expected, he didn't fire the sniper rifle. One hand lifted it while the other drew a pistol. The instant I saw it, I broke into a dead sprint. I had no intention of standing around and waiting out the cooldown on that rifle.
What followed was a clash where the One-Fist Bullet and the pistol's bang overlapped. Reading the brief opening exactly as I'd predicted, I raked my foot across the ground with a sharp shwaaak and kicked up a storm of dirt. With his vision gone, I—
"You've worked so hard lining that shot up. Wasted effort, of course."
—made it all the way to the tip of his nose.
For the record, I still needed to bank damage for the finishing blow, so the hit I fed him this time had to read as zero. I laced my fingers together, drove them straight down onto his head, and slammed his face into the dirt.
"Ghk—khhk...!"
No direct damage. There was damage from his face meeting the ground, though. In short, I'd sold it well enough that he wouldn't start wondering, the way he might have earlier, whether the hit had done nothing at all.
Soldier rebounded off the earth. This time I drove my right knee into him, a knee strike with real damage loaded in. Then I started pouring on the same chain of blows I'd used against Soldier's alt, zlzonchongjabi. The difference was that I mixed, with a craftsman's touch, fists that dealt true damage and fists that dealt none. One into the solar plexus. One into the ribs over his heart. When the hits kept coming into his shoulder and arm without pause, the whites of his eyes seemed to spread. Of course he wouldn't be able to pick out, in the middle of all this, which blows weren't hurting him.
The combo only ended once a full minute had passed.
One minute. Someone might mistake that for nothing more than a minute, but the number of punches thrown in that span was not something to take lightly. An earthquake that runs for a single minute already feels as if it has gone on forever. At any rate, under a combo that carried everything I meant, Soldier looked as if staggering upright was the most he could manage.
It was about time to end it. My victory was as good as decided.
I ran at him on the sound of splitting wind. Even then, Soldier forced a dagger free and leveled it at me. The blade came in, so I tapped his wrist with the edge of my left hand and made him drop it. The dagger struck a rock with a ting. Nothing left to protect him.
Fist clenched, I drew my right shoulder far back—farther even than when I'd used One-Fist Break. Around the fist I'd squeezed with everything I had, the air began to waver, as if it already knew the stored damage was about to be released. It had been heated white-hot. Explosive damage means tremendous heat. Soldier felt it too. I watched his eyes turn to my fist.
I drove it straight into his chest, and a thunderous boom filled the air around us. With a sound like steel being struck, he took flight. The impact of being launched smashed him through tree after tree, as if boards were being broken in a row. By the time he'd flown far enough that I could barely see him—
The mechanical voice declaring the winner of the Full Power Match rang out. Understanding that the match was over, I felt a vindication more exhilarating than anything else.