Dead Zone
I sat down in front of the computer with solemn, almost tragic gravity.
“Let’s go, let’s go~”
Today’s goal was to hit 20,000 grenade kills.
I’d already banked 19,580 by yesterday, so all I had to do was send 420 more people straight to heaven.
At first glance, 420 kills didn’t sound like much if I was racking up twenty or thirty kills a match by myself.
The problem was that the grenade only gave me one shot per life.
So the fastest strategy was to enter an 8v8 deathmatch room with a 100-kill objective, toss my grenade, die immediately, then respawn and repeat the whole thing forever.
Of course, if I died quickly and just kept killing myself for no reason, my kill-death ratio would tank, and that was absolutely out of the question.
In Dead Zone, KDA was pride itself.
It was your business card.
[Woniwoni>.<]
[Overall KDA: 67.1%]
[Assault Rifle: 63.4%]
[Sniper Rifle: 81.2%]
“Heh.”
My gorgeous kill-death ratio!
With rifles, it meant I took at least two enemies down for every death.
With a sniper rifle, I could comfortably send three or four people to the grave with a single life.
I wasn’t the type to resort to petty tricks like leaving a room whenever things got dangerous just to protect my KDA.
This was the result of improved reflexes and old-salt footwork, mowing through quick match after quick match.
And since I was more of a play-for-fun user than a tryhard, I didn’t play guild wars or ranked matches, which probably helped keep my KDA high too.
Anyway.
Today, the title mattered most, so the priority was simple: die fast, respawn, and recharge those grenades.
My beloved KDA would take a hit no matter what, but that didn’t mean I intended to throw it away for free.
After equipping the MF5, a very light gun often called the “M-ppa,” I sprinted straight into enemy territory, planning to secure the best possible odds in a multi-target fight by going for headshots.
At the very least, I’d take one or two with me every time I died and defend my KDA as much as possible.
Once the plan was set, there was no hesitation.
It was straight into action.
Whoosh—!
I pulled the pin, tossed it toward the route enemies used most often, and—
[Woniwoni>.< (💣) ClamIsDelicious]
After scoring one kill with the grenade—
[Woniwoni>.< ╓╦═─ (HEAD)Dragonsoo]
[Woniwoni>.< ╓╦═─ (HEAD)BangbaedongBulppatta]
I charged in headlong and hammered out headshot after headshot.
Then I died at once under the returning enemy gunfire.
Three kills for one death was the ideal exchange.
As the same pattern repeated, the other side naturally started using their heads too.
They must have reverse-engineered the route I was taking and figured I’d be rushing in from there—
“What if I throw it around here?”
Bang—!
[Woniwoni>.< (💣) Dragonsoo]
[Woniwoni>.< (💣) RonaldoHonaldo]
[Woniwoni>.< (💣) BangbaedongBulppatta]
[Triple Kill—!!!]
“Nice. That felt good.”
I was busily harvesting kills when a glance at the screen caught the chat window going wild.
[BangbaedongBulppatta: Oh, it’s this bastard again. A quick-match pub-stomper, lol. You’re so trash you can only live in here, huh? Still no tier, either. What’s the fun in playing if you’re a nobody like you? Unemployed bum.]
“Oh.”
A familiar nickname.
I wasn’t interested in ranked, so I mostly stuck to quick matches.
Maybe the game had its own rating system to keep newbies from getting slaughtered, because I’d run into similar guys fairly often.
And one of them was this so-called BangbaedongBulppatta.
He really lived up to his name. His temper was like a lit match, which made him entertaining.
If you poked him just right, he’d burst into flames all by himself and end up blowing up on his own terms.
For example—like this.
[Woniwoni>.<: You sure talk big for someone with that tier?]
A single line, and he’d practically start frothing at the mouth.
[BangbaedongBulppatta: What do you mean, “that tier,” lol. I’m Diamond and climbing Master, you coward. What kind of scrub can’t even touch ranked and still runs his mouth?]
[Woniwoni>.<: Wow, congratulations!]
I’d throw out nothing but short replies and quickly move toward the enemy base.
He’d be too busy pounding his keyboard in fury to calm down.
And in that gap—bang bang—!
[BangbaedongBulppatta: lololol this is what happens when you farm trash in quick match to feed your self-esteem, you little braindead m—]
[Woniwoni>.< ╓╦═─ BangbaedongBulppatta]
“Heh heh, this is fun.”
What a sight, getting hit while typing and then shrieking about how cowardly it was.
How can someone be that consistently simple-minded?
Every move he made was so obvious I could read him like an open book, so I happily enjoyed my long, leisurely date with him—sniping him with the rifle, gifting him grenades wherever he hid.
Thanks to that, though, I didn’t finish my grenade mission as much as I’d hoped.
Well. If it was fun, that was all that mattered!
Praying he’d remain an endless punching bag who never learned how to explode properly, I dove back into title farming.
Then, the next day.
I ran into BangbaedongBulppatta again sooner than expected.
At first I thought it was just a coincidence, but judging by the reaction, it felt more like he’d deliberately come looking for me.
[BangbaedongBulppatta: Hyo? lolol]
[IllIIlIllI: lol, is that the one?]
[YourBoyfriendSucks: His KDA is insanely high, T_T How many newbies has he killed?]
[MyMomIsNotHacking: We’re here to teach him a lesson for the sake of a healthy game ecosystem;;]
People I’d never seen before were chiming in, and when I looked closer, they all had [Strawberry Yogurt] attached to their IDs, meaning they were from the same guild.
W-what is this? Friends…? They’ve got a lot of friends…
I flinched a little.
What were they doing, swarming me like that? Were they stream sniping me?
It wasn’t peak time, and there weren’t many people in quick match, so it seemed easy enough for them to follow me in.
But what changes if they stream snipe?
It’s still just shooting, killing, dying. Same as always.
And if I didn’t look at chat, I didn’t have to care.
I figured it was pointless nonsense and nothing more.
But then—
[BangbaedongBulppatta: Hehe, we’re on the same team? Carry us, then.]
In this 8v8 game, the group split up, two-by-two, into the enemy team and ours.
The moment the always-fuming Bulppatta started giggling, I should’ve known something was off.
Beeeeeeeeeeep—
“Ah! Dammit! My eyes.”
He casually popped a flashbang right in my face.
And then—
Rat-a-tat—!
[IllIIlIllI ╓╦═─ Woniwoni>.<]
[IllIIlIllI: Trash user eliminated;; easy, hehe]
“……”
As if they had no interest whatsoever in winning or losing, the bastards kept trailing after my heels, blocking my path and throwing flashes.
Every time they did, the enemy team would appear like ghosts and shower me with bullets.
Just from how often grenades were being tossed along my route, it was obvious those guys were sharing my position with each other.
“You assholes…! Seriously, what the hell…….”
I was fuming at the sudden harassment, and the irritation kept boiling up.
I’d done nasty things to them, sure, but that was because they were enemies.
This was just bullying.
What kind of teammate trolls their own side?
So there were actually filthy, poor-sportsmanship scumbags hiding inside the game I’d been enjoying so much.
How many other people had these freaks ruined the game for?
My current KDA was [4 kills, 6 deaths].
Grinding my teeth, I decided I wanted to turn everything they’d done into wasted effort.
I focused all my attention on the monitor.
There were two of them trailing me.
They’d keep the flashbang ready, and whenever it looked like I was about to run into enemies, they’d pop it.
Or they’d block my path and interfere.
As for path-blocking, if I moved in a straight line instead of zigzagging around, I’d get there first anyway, so it wasn’t much of a problem.
Which meant there was really only one thing I had to watch out for.
I tightened my grip on the mouse, listening carefully through my headset.
Then—
Ting—!
The sound of a flashbang pin being pulled.
Now!
Without panicking, I recalled the map layout and shifted my crosshair ahead to the spot where the enemy was most likely to burst out.
Beeeeeeeeep—!
Almost at the exact same moment the flash detonated, I fired a predictive shot.
[Woniwoni>.< ╓╦═─ YourBoyfriendSucks]
And then I moved again, quickly.
Two bastards were stuck to my back.
To the ordinary players on the other side, it probably looked like three people were moving together in a pack.
So instead of taking the secret side paths, I deliberately pushed through open areas.
Bullets sprayed at me from the moment three people suddenly popped out in a wide open field.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat—!
[DeadZoneNewbie ╓╦═─ BangbaedongBulppatta]
Instead of me, whose movement was sharp, Bulppatta took the enemy fire and died.
I successfully erased one enemy from the front and another from behind, then sprinted toward their side.
Behind me, one remaining bastard was still making flashbang noises, and I kept my ears pricked for it.
By now the others are probably too busy to nail the timing precisely.
They’d likely just toss the flash roughly when their team said, “He’s here.”
And sure enough, a few seconds later I heard ping—! again, the sound of another pin being pulled.
This time I whipped the mouse around fast, spinning my body in a blur.
In-game, dodging a flashbang was just a matter of turning your back to it at the right timing.
As long as you knew it was coming, you could brute-force a flash or two with pure reflex.
Then I swung the mouse back to center.
Rat-a-tat-tat—!
I blew the face off the enemy who’d arrived a beat too late.
And that wasn’t the end of it.
The more desperate they got, the more frantic they became.
The first guy I’d killed would be sprinting in on the shortest possible route to help.
Respawn’s ten seconds, so he should be born back in by now…
Ping—!
This time I pulled out my own grenade and threw it toward the predicted spot.
[Woniwoni>.< (💣) YourBoyfriendSucks]
“Oh, nice! It worked.”
Once I shook off one pursuit, I was free until they found me again.
In the meantime, I killed as many as I could, then got interfered with again after every respawn.
After a while, I even adapted to it, and it felt like I was playing my own homemade hard mode.
Fresh tension, you could call it.
Running nothing but quick matches and grinding titles had been fun on its own, but this kind of change of pace was pretty great too.
There was a thrill to it.
My final score that round was [27 kills, 16 deaths].
Even though I’d been tripped up early and died twice as much as usual, I still proudly took first place on the team and won the match.
That alone was enough to make my blood race, but…
The real highlight of the day came in the next game.
[BangbaedongBulppatta: Huh, what? We’re enemies?]
[IllIIlIllI: Since we got split up two and two, it’s actually annoying to play now]
[YourBoyfriendSucks: Voice chat, go]
[MyMomIsNotHacking: Should I start farming kills? hehe]
All four members of Strawberry Yogurt had been matched onto the enemy team.
“You’re dead, you bastards.”
I immediately stowed the rifle in my equipment window and switched to the sniper rifle.
The time for hunting had arrived.
***
Angler, a Dead Zone streamer on the internet broadcasting platform Link.
As FPS game Dead Zone kept swelling in popularity, he was one of those mid-career broadcasters who’d jumped ship from other games.
His current tier was Master.
Given that only Grand Master and Challenger stood above it, that was pretty high up there.
But it was also one of those awkward tiers where you couldn’t really pin him down as a true expert.
So he ran a stream that leaned a little more toward content and entertainment than raw skill.
“Wait, there are guilds that do that kind of crappy stuff?”
―Yeah.
―If you run into them in ranked, they troll every time you cross paths.
―They’re everywhere too, so if you queue ranked you’ll see them all the time.
―What a bunch of freaks.
It was a quiet solo-rank day, since he didn’t have any content planned.
He’d been warming up with casual chatter and happened to hear about the nasty behavior of some toxic guilds.
Angler himself had been hounded by bad manners before just for being a streamer, so this immediately caught his interest.
“What’s their name? The guild name.”
―There are a bunch of guilds.
―The main one is Straw Yog.
―Yeah, Strawberry Yogurt.
―Oh, those motherfuckers, lol.
“Why would they name it like that?”
They’d dressed it up like a girl’s guild name and then turned out to be a toxic guild instead.
That alone was malicious enough.
Judging by the flood of chat from what was clearly more than a few victims, Angler mulled it over for a moment.
Maybe I should do a “Taking apart toxic users” thing? Could even upload it to YouTube.
He hesitated, wondering if he’d just be provoking the bad apples for no reason.
“I should check out that guild. I want to spectate and see what kind of nonsense they’re up to.”
From a streamer’s point of view, he couldn’t care less.
If they retaliated against him, even getting retaliated against would be good for pulling attention.
Just then, he saw that Strawberry Yogurt had twenty members online.
He clicked through the ones currently in-game and—
“Huh, four of them are in the same room? That reeks of something rotten!”
On top of that, the four were split two and two across the opposing teams.
The IDs had that same filthy, malicious vibe, too—barcodes, names like MyMomIsNotHacking.
Angler got excited at once, calling it guaranteed gold-content and switching into spectator mode.
“Holy crap, what is this? This person is crazy good.”
―Their overall kill-death ratio is in the 70s, damn;;
―How does a rifle stat even hit 63%?
―It’s possible if they’re pub-stomping in quick match, yeah.
―Nah, their sense is just insane.
[Woniwoni>.<], who seemed to be under focused pressure, endured the sabotage from all four of them head-on and still kept the team moving aggressively until they ultimately won the match.
“Oh, they’re going straight into another round.”
This time, every Strawberry Yogurt member ended up on the opposite side.
It was basically a guild war inside quick match.
And when he clicked each nickname one by one, they were all Master tier or higher.
“Looks like they were trying to play for fun, but couldn’t and switched to tryhard mode, right? Toxic bastards have this rotten built-in lifestyle, you know. It’s not that they can’t play.”
But when the match started—
―Whoa, this is brutal;;
―Damn, that sniper’s KDA is 80 percent.
―That looks like cheating on the other side. How is that even possible?
―Is this one cheating too?
―Oh… that’s insane.
As if to mock his words, Woniwoni’s sniper rifle began spitting fire.