The World's Finest Means of Conversation (4)
My steps were wonderfully light on the way to choose my class.
How could my heart not race, when I was about to select the most romantic class in all the world? I already knew from the Heavenly Realm just how electric it felt to drop an enemy with nothing but pure body technique—the sweet shock of it singing through your hands. If you need a comparison, think of the tug a fisherman feels the instant a fish takes the line. And ever since I was small, whenever I sat down to a fighting game, I had always preferred the characters who fought with their bare bodies over the ones who swung weapons. That old fondness weighed heavily on the choice as well.
"But why is the mood like this...?"
I arrived at the Class Selection Center to find the atmosphere anything but ordinary. The stares were similar to the ones that had clung to me earlier, and yet something about them felt different. It wasn't simply the curiosity of people gawking at a rare female Fighter. A slightly different emotion was mixed in.
Why were they wearing such flustered faces? A Fighter's standard look was a dobok just like the one I had on. Was it because my style was too orthodox?
No one spoke to me directly, so I let it pass. I flung the door of the Class Selection Center open with a bang and made straight for the counter.
The one who welcomed me was a woman with her brown hair pinned up, her calm expression lending her an intellectual air.
"Welcome. Select the class you'd like here, and you can start enjoying the game right away. Is there anything you'd like me to explain further?"
I didn't need any further explanation. As I'd said before, I had already looked into all of it. The gist was that you could freely change your chosen class whenever you wished, and that you had to create your skills yourself.
At any rate, I told her I was selecting the Fighter class and made it plain that no additional explanation was required.
I headed back toward the Central Plaza to find someone to play with, only to catch the sound of people muttering.
"What is that person? Picking Fighter—the class nobody takes even if you hand it to them?"
"Just look at her. Chose an off-meta class so she can play queen bee. Truly hopeless. Absolutely hopeless."
"Does romance put food on the table? Running a class even the top ranks gave up on. Give her three days. That's me being generous."
People badmouthing me. They were chattering away as if they wanted every word to reach my ears.
Mocking the Fighter class—I could let that slide, if I yielded ten thousand times over. In most games, fighting with a gun or a sword is the default, so a fool might simply fail to grasp the superiority of the Fighter. Even so, I could not overlook the insult that I had picked an off-meta class just to play queen bee.
I hadn't even become a woman because I wanted to. Was I really supposed to stand here and swallow an accusation like that?
Still, a Fighter who had trained herself shouldn't let her fist fly first, so I managed, barely, to endure even that. But insulting the Fighter wasn't enough for them. The moment they declared that pursuing romance was meaningless, the thread of my reason snapped.
So I walked up to the cluster of three men.
"Excuse me, you gentlemen? Take one of my fists and you'll wobble like the tube man they plant in front of a discount mart—and yet all you seem to have bought is a mouth."
I had cleaned my language up as much as I could. In my heart I wanted something considerably more fiery, but if I had, I would have been no different from trash like them. Mastering your temper and keeping your conduct in order—that was a basic virtue of a Fighter.
Ah. I had wondered why you couldn't choose your class in the character creation window and had to settle it at the Class Selection Center instead. There was an interesting little fact hidden in that design. It forced contact between users and nudged them into PvP.
The moment those gutter rats opened their mouths to spit something back—
"Aigoo, you look like a newbie. Taking people like this on will only cost you, miss. Rather than play with these sorts, how about a light match with me?"
—a man dressed as a Western gunslinger cut in and stopped me.
Hmm. Once he intervened, the trash clicked their tongues and cleared out. The mood around us, though, was anything but calm. I hadn't expected that raising my voice a little would drag every eye our way.
Left with no choice, the gunslinger and I left the Class Selection Center and moved to the Central Plaza, where the fountain stood.
"Uh, you seem like a newbie. You do know how to actually play, right?"
"Yes, I know. In a normal match, rather than a Ranked Match, you have to go find someone who wants to play yourself, don't you?"
How kind of him. Going so far as to ask whether I even knew how matchmaking worked.
To spell it out once: normal matches and Ranked Matches were plainly different things. After the Placement Matches, a Ranked Match randomly paired you with people of a similar tier, the way other games did. A normal match was more like the old days—you made a room and played. And since this was a virtual reality game, instead of making a room you planted a wooden signpost in the ground. Stand near that sign, I had heard, and you were considered to have entered the room.
"Ah, then you can just play with me right away. I'll go easy on you, so how about using this to get a feel for things?"
In that instant, the suspicion I'd held a moment ago hardened into certainty.
The first reason I had doubted him was precisely that offer to play. Normally you had to select a class before you could make skills, and here he was, skipping the entire skill-creation process and urging me to jump straight into a match. That was hardly different from offering to fight a baby who hadn't even learned to walk.
The second reason was the way he had first appeared. When he stepped in to block the men picking a fight with me, I had definitely seen him trade a look with that group—for all of one second. No wonder his timing had felt a little too perfect. So this was the amusing intention he had been hiding.
To put it in a single line, this gunslinger had approached me in order to seal-club me.
The trio picks a fight, he swoops in looking cool and stops them, and that raises his favor with the newbie. After that he offers to teach her the game and seal-clubs a newbie who hasn't even made any skills.
An ordinary person would fall for it. They wouldn't imagine that the one who helped them was hiding a knife in his gut. Even knowing full well that you were supposed to make skills after choosing a class, an ordinary person would still be sweet-talked straight into it the moment a player who looked like a veteran made the offer. Judging by how brazenly natural he was acting, he was without a doubt a repeat offender who seal-clubbed without a second thought.
"Ah, yes. Then I'll be in your care. Haha."
I pretended to be fooled. Even if it was nothing but provocation, I wasn't the sort to dodge a fight that came to me. And a Fighter, by nature, could never walk past injustice. I would have to enlighten that foolish villain with my fists.
On top of that, as someone who enjoyed fighting games, I could never forgive him. In a fighting game like this, no matter how popular it became, newbies were precious. How could someone like this even exist in the world?
In that case, since I was about to teach a seal-clubber a proper lesson, I ought to leave a video record.
A live broadcast button...?
Was this how you saved a replay?
Thinking so, I opened the settings window and pressed the button without hesitation. More windows popped up asking whether I agreed, but I clicked through them without much care. After that I planted a signpost to make a room, and when a window asked if I wanted to start the game, I accepted on the spot.
In an instant, the ground beneath the gunslinger and me became a plain of green grass.
The moment the plain spread out, his attitude did a complete about-face.
"Well, well. You really are an idiot, aren't you? I tell you to play without even making skills, and you fall for it just like that."
He showed his true colors. Ah. He was such a third-rate villain that I nearly burst out laughing on the spot. Still, I had to keep pretending I had been fooled. The moment I put on a convincingly flustered face, he grew so delighted that he started rattling off a string of squeals like a pig getting its throat cut.
"Me? What I like best is seal-clubbing idiots like you."
"......"
"And on top of that, the garbage Fighter class that leans way too hard into realism? Today's gonna be a full-course meal, right?"
What an interesting fellow. How small a world had he lived in, not to know the greatness of the Fighter?
Watching him laugh like a madman, I could tell that in his head he was already picturing himself beating me. Right after that, he snatched one of the revolvers at his waist and leveled it at me.
"For five hundred seconds, I absolutely will not kill you. Not even if you beg me to end the game."
What a piece of work. The type who deliberately refused to finish you, just so he could enjoy watching you thrash. In an ordinary fighting game you couldn't harm yourself, so unless the players killed each other, the match would not end. He knew that fact well. Like a proper seal-clubber, he meant to savor it.
The moment he finished speaking, he opened up with the revolver in rapid succession. Three bullets came flying with a bang, bang, bang.
Dodging would have been the best option, but I chose something else—to show him just how overwhelming the gap in skill really was.
"Wh-what...!? You caught the bullets with your bare hands?!"
I thrust out my right palm. In the same motion I snatched, and I caught all three bullets perfectly. It was possible because I had spent exactly the right amount of force at exactly the right moment. For something like this, there was no need to go out of my way and make a skill.
The frog in the well hadn't expected someone who hadn't even made skills to show him a trick like that. He stared at me with both eyes round. And this was before I had shown even half of half of half my strength.
"Startled by nothing more than this? Unbelievable."
This foolish fellow was going to need my advice. Advice given with words, of course—and advice given with fists as well.
Having stopped the bullets, I put on the most benevolent smile I could manage and started toward him.