A New Battlefield (3)

The map this time was the heart of a city after dark. Light leaking through the glass of the towers, and the streetlamps posted along the roads, made it easy enough to read what was around me.

I threw myself into a roll, away from whatever was screaming in.

A thin whistle, then a solid thunk. What had buried itself in the roadside tree was an arrow. This opponent was an archer. Whether he'd had professional training, or he was the sort who carried several weapons and had simply chosen a bow for this map, I couldn't tell yet.

What mattered was that he'd committed to concealment, movement, and a guerrilla fight. I slipped at once into an alley where the dark had pooled.

This match is going to be a real pain.

A bow is a hard weapon to build any real skill with. I'd tried one myself, once — nothing else is as good when you need to drop a target without a sound. Of course, I'd quit almost immediately. Which was exactly why I understood, better than anyone, how dangerous this was.

An arrow coming out of the dark is lethal even to a trained mercenary, and a city map makes it worse. Streetlights, neon, and the glow ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠spilling from inside the buildings tangled together and threw broken shadows across everything. A city is a vertical battlefield, too. Reading a direction isn't enough to pin an archer down. This layout was going to turn him into a proper hunter and me into helpless prey.

First thing — find the sniper nest.

I broke from the alley and sprinted along the avenue. In that instant an arrow sheared past me along a Red Trajectory Line and went skittering across the asphalt. That was enough. His rough position locked in: eight o'clock off the tallest building. Factoring in a bow's usual range, he was inside two or three hundred meters.

Luckily, his actual skill is pathetic.

I zigzagged along the path the arrow had come from. Hunting a sniper is simple. They always cling to a safe zone — a clear view, a way out, and wind that doesn't shift. A few spots met every condition, but fortunately only one of them was anywhere near me.

Behind the rooftop billboard at the K-Denki electronics market.

Once I got close, I threw a stone and rapped the wall with the flat of my sword, making noise on purpose. I wanted him to give up the hide and move.

That was when a red line settled between my eyes. I snapped my head aside on reflex. The arrowhead slammed into the concrete, and cement dust slapped my face and burst outward in a cloud. Beyond it stood a man in a dark gray hooded jacket, a tactical vest fitted with light ballistic panels over his chest.

"Tch!"

Caught, the archer dropped straight off the billboard and vanished into a nearby high-rise. He meant to use the tangled interior, no doubt, and build himself another nest. But there was one thing he didn't know. Hiding — and the ugly work of tracking a fight through spaces this tight — was my specialty. I didn't hesitate. I started up the stairs of the building he'd gone into.

Hauling that much gear might make you ready for anything, but it costs you speed. From the moment I'd marked him, the archer was as good as taken from behind.

Walked himself right into a dead end.

I passed the fifth floor. Just as I started up toward the sixth, I smiled under the mask. A clean red line cut across my vision. Before he could even thrust, my sword was already waiting where his edge was going to arrive.

Figured you'd spring it right about here.

Steel rang. I beat his sword aside and, in the same motion, drew the dagger with my empty left hand and drove it into his thigh.

"Ghk—!"

I took him down as he was, jammed my right knee hard across his left arm, and set the point of my sword against his chest. Pain knotted the archer's brow. His lips trembled, and a rush of Japanese spilled out of him.

"Impressive... just as the rumors said. If you're willing, why not come join my guild? I'll promise you the very best treatment—"

What the hell is he saying.

I knew only the basics of Japanese. I pushed the sword in.

"Tch... h-hey, I'm talking, damn it..."

A sick sensation traveled up through my palm — steel parting bone. He shuddered in small spasms, then went slack. At the same moment a notification window opened in front of me.

"Ugh. My eyes sting. Focused too hard, maybe."

Go Tae-min hauled himself out of the capsule and let out a long breath. Sweat soaked him through. You didn't actually die in there, but a fight was still a fight, and every single match burned through him. On a contract he'd been lucky to see combat two or three times in a week. Set against that, Nova Arena was a brutally harsh place to be a participant.

And more than that—

What is this? They keep getting stronger. Wasn't the matchmaking supposed to be random?

For the first three days, the opposition had all sat at roughly the same level. Now every opponent was at least as good as the samurai he'd fought on day one, and some were better. He was still turning that sudden jump over in his head when Chae Geon-wook dragged a chair across the floor and came over.

"You out? You've gotta eat. What do you want?"

"Bulgogi burger."

Chae Geon-wook looked personally offended.

"A hamburger again? Eat something else for once, you brat."

"I do switch the menu."

Shrimp burger for lunch yesterday, chicken burger for dinner, and a rice burger this morning — the kind with pressed rice where the bun should be. Laid out like that, Chae Geon-wook's expression only got worse. Go Tae-min tipped his head.

How does anyone manage to dislike hamburgers?

A hamburger was a complete food. The split of carbs, protein, and fat was decent, it always tasted the same, which was its own kind of comfort, and it was dense with calories. You could eat it the moment it arrived. And above all, it was cheap. He could not understand why his senior hated the things.

"For crying out loud. Minimum order means I have to eat a hamburger too."

Chae Geon-wook glared at his phone and blew up at it. Go Tae-min snorted. He grumbled like this now, but the man Go Tae-min had first met had been a soldier carved out of stone. Their introduction had been a cold greeting at a temporary forward operating base near the jungles of Cameroon.

Back then Go Tae-min had been an operative of the Unit 9 Operations Group, a detachment so selective that only a handful inside the Defense Intelligence Command ever made the cut — a specialist who infiltrated and worked alone, as a cell, rather than as part of a team. Chae Geon-wook had belonged to the Command's own Special Mission Group (SMG), the unit that lived on reconnaissance and extraction. The tie between them had been knotted on an operation to cover Go Tae-min's way out of deep enemy ground and bring him home, and it had held ever since.

Honestly, he had never imagined Chae Geon-wook would come out of the service and set up as an information broker. The senior who had worshipped regulation and procedure, a broker on the gray market. People, it turned out, were impossible to predict.

A chime sounded at the door. A little later, the food Chae Geon-wook had ordered arrived. Go Tae-min tore into the burger and asked around a mouthful.

"You poke around about those guys who jumped me last time?"

"Them? They were dead serious. Looked like they threw a whole company at you just to bury you. Scrubbed it so clean there wasn't a trace left."

"That hard? Come on. What the hell was even in there, that they needed that many people?"

Go Tae-min let out a disbelieving laugh. Chae Geon-wook tapped the screen of his phone and went on.

"And lately the high-difficulty infiltration ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠jobs are pouring in. Exactly the kind you're built for."

"Laid the mousetraps out real pretty, did they?"

Go Tae-min murmured it, rubbing his chin. Thinking back on the radio chatter he'd caught at the end, there was no question they'd been aiming at him as well. For the time being, keeping on as a mercenary had gotten difficult. For a man who needed money, that only made the reason to climb into the Pro League more solid.

He tucked a fallen leaf of lettuce back into the burger and muttered.

"Who ends up the prey... we'll know, if we watch it all the way through."

The higher you climbed in Nova Arena, the more money you made. Fight purses, sponsors, ads, spectator counts — all of it scaled exponentially. Put simply, the more people watched, the more you earned. In that sense the Amateur League had the most participants ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and the least attention of any tier. As a rule, a match was lucky if its crowd even made it into double digits.

Lately, though, there was one fighter in the Amateur League whose matches opened with a thousand viewers at minimum.

Number 2,749. Go Tae-min.

The people who watched the Amateur League were, by and large, participants with their eyes on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the Pro League, and the communities around it had the same character — passionate fighters trading information and studying, all of it aimed at a Pro License. Under those conditions, word of what Go Tae-min was doing was bound to spread fast. And the news reached Korea just as quickly, a country parched for warriors who could fight at the top.

"You hear about it? Word is there's a participant in the Japanese amateurs stacking an undefeated record."

The man asking was Oh Hyun-seok, head of Nova Korea Arena — NKA, for short — and the question was for his secretary.

"You mean the participant they've already nicknamed the Demon? The one on an eighty-five-fight unbeaten run."

"That was yesterday. He fought two more today, so it's eighty-seven now. Damn it. Amagi Shohei's going to laugh in my face again."

Oh Hyun-seok pressed a hand to his brow and groaned under his breath. Amagi Shohei, head of Japan's NJA, had a sharp tongue and a genuine talent for needling the executives of rival branches. The secretary smiled, awkward, and added it carefully.

"That must be eating at you."

Korea was a country with world-class weight in esports and VR. Plenty of people had expected it to stand out in Nova Arena as well. Reality had been less obliging. This modern colosseum was not some simple virtual-reality game. It was a combat platform of another order entirely, one that demanded a real fighter's instincts and the limits of a body. The result was that Korean warriors had yet to produce anything worth mentioning there.

Not a single Korean in the Super League or the Master League. Barely ten or so still active in the World League, and that was the whole of it. NKA had spent years on every remedy it could think of — developing prospects, supplying gear, bringing in foreign coaches — and the results still weren't there. The promising ones who had risen under the spotlight hit the ceiling of their talent and broke, almost at once.

"We need at least one kid like that to come out of our side..."

Representative Oh Hyun-seok shook his head at the participant in the Demon mask on the monitor. Nova Arena was no longer just another piece of culture. Once BCI technology could reproduce combat without casualties, nations had started raising their combat talent inside Nova Arena instead of paying the price in military training and covert operations. Performance in the Arena had become a measure of national power.

Worse, Nova Arena had already left the old sports far behind — soccer, baseball, MMA, boxing. Super League ratings had surpassed a World Cup final, and the names of ranked fighters came up even in summits between heads of state. The number and the quality of high-tier warriors: that was what a nation's standing rested on now. Of course Oh Hyun-seok was starving for a Korean who could fight in the leagues above.

"Headquarters is even putting together a nations competition these days, aren't they?"

"Yes. I'm told the goal is a worldwide event big enough to eclipse the Olympics."

Both of them sighed at the same time. For a Korea without a promising warrior in the upper ranks, it was not an event to look forward to.

"Damn it. Number 2,749 should have come out of the Korean league..."

Oh Hyun-seok muttered it as he watched the replay of the man in the Demon mask. The silhouette moving like black lightning on the screen only made the taste in his mouth more bitter.