The PC Bang Tournament
"Good. Quite the crowd we've got."
The PC Bang owner nodded, thoroughly pleased with himself.
This Eternal Battle tournament was being put on by a gaming-gear company. The signup numbers had been cutting it close enough to worry him, but the turnout, at least, looked like no problem at all. The shop was packed shoulder to shoulder—competitors, and fans who'd come just to watch in person. It hadn't even started, and already the feeling in the room was good. If the matches themselves gave people something to talk about, nothing could be better.
What was opening today sat a cut above the usual slapdash amateur cups. They'd gone so far as to bring in commentators from the pro circuit. Not a first-division broadcast, admittedly—closer to a semi-pro league—but still.
Time was nearly up. The owner turned to the part-timer beside him.
"Go tell everyone who's entered to log in."
"Ah—yes!"
An ambitious PC Bang tournament, with a total prize pool of three million won, was about to begin.
I left my computer on and watched the fuss on the other side of the room. From the look of it, they'd prepared proper commentary and meant to use it. I didn't know the details, but the caster and the analyst both had a professional air about them. The one commentator left over—a streamer, maybe? Not a bad lineup, I thought. They were busy introducing the tournament: which company was hosting and putting up the prize money, how the PC Bang's owner had not only offered the venue without a fuss but chipped in on the purse as well. Trivial chatter I couldn't bring myself to care about.
Only after a long while did the talk turn to the tournament itself. Today's matches, they said, would be played not on the regular servers but on the Tournament Server. Come to think of it, I hadn't even read the exact rules.
Battle royale is a hard genre to call a natural fit for esports. Set beside RTS or MOBAs, it's generally judged to lack what people call the pleasure of watching. The root of it is simple: far too much luck, and far too many players. Pure skill is awkward to measure, and the shape of a match is so tangled that it's hard to follow. Because of that, other battle royale games, however well they sell on their own, usually can't flex any real muscle in esports.
Eternal Battle was different. It had overcome the genre's limits with a precise observer system and a server built only for tournaments, and on the strength of that it had grown into the biggest esports title in the world, not merely at home.
The greatest difference between tournament play and the regular game was a faster pace, and survival cut down to size. That inflated the share of combat and shrank the luck, wringing out as much spectacle as possible. People said that if you were used to the regular servers and stepped onto the Tournament Server for the first time, it threw you. Fight into fight into yet another fight. The game moved so fast it was hard to keep up.
Needless to say, I had never played it. I wasn't a pro. You could switch the rules on in a custom game, but with no ranked mode attached, why bother? Of course, if I'd known a day like this was coming, trying it once beforehand wouldn't have been a bad idea.
"Everyone, join the room we sent you, right now! Do not leak it anywhere else!"
The part-timer dashed around the floor, shouting. Sixty-six entrants—managing that couldn't be easy. Anyway, all I had to do was focus on my own play.
Noon had come and gone, and another fifteen minutes with it. From the mood in the room, they were about to start. The moment I put the headset on, the noise outside vanished completely. The referee's voice came through it.
"The match begins in one minute. Cheating means instant disqualification, and a permanent ban from every tournament after. Keep that in mind."
A permanent ban. That was a vicious warning. Other things aside, these people had been good at catching hacks since the previous game, so in Eternal Battle the hack problem basically didn't exist. Strip that out, and cheating meant secretly watching another player's screen, or eavesdropping on the casters. Deny it hard enough and a case like that could stay murky. Even so, pulling it off wouldn't be enough to beat me. And if anyone did take first place over my head, they'd be an aspiring pro—no one like that would shoulder the risk of a permanent ban just to win a PC Bang tournament.
"Ah."
While I was lost in the thought, the game began. All sixty-six players were moved into the lobby. I checked the map at once and started sorting what I had.
First, the map: Red Wilderness. The weather held nothing unusual except strong winds. The fact that the time of day was night, though, was worth keeping in mind. Taken together, it wasn't bad. Good enough that I could call it favorable.
Now it was time to choose where to go. I picked without a shred of hesitation. The center. The place people crowded into most.
The strategy I'd set for today could be summed up in a single word.
Musou.
"All right. Let's go."
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was already at the spot I'd chosen. I got up at once and started searching for a main weapon. Normally I revised the plan on the fly around whatever I found first, because that was usually the best way to win. Today, though, simply winning wasn't the only goal. On top of that, I meant to pour out an overwhelming presence and brand myself into people's heads—not Bae Gaeul in the flesh, but Eternal Battle's Jjamppong Aficionado. My real self I wanted hidden, so I'd locked it down at the source: a black cap, a mask, the works.
Walking a little, I picked up a secondary weapon first. A secondary was exactly that—support. Unlike a main weapon, it had no Weapon Skill and no level, and its uses were numbered; burn through them and it simply vanished. Right after that, I found a Kar 98k.
First of all, nobody would deny it was an excellent gun. Call it the all-rounder of firearms. Red Wilderness in particular, as the name suggested, had almost no cover, to the point people called it a map built for ranged weapons. Common sense said you took it. No question. You could carry it all the way to the end and it would still do one full share of the work—a comfort-food gun, the kind you could always count on.
I walked past it without mercy. After smashing it to pieces, of course, so nobody else could use it. That thing didn't fit the persona I'd planned. Let's meet again in the next life.
What I chose instead was a different weapon.
"Oh."
This was exactly the weapon I'd been hoping for! I couldn't hold the excitement in. I picked it up, spun it, and drank in the pleasure of it. Right then, an enemy came out from behind a rock. A perfect chance to test what the thing could do. They were wary of me too, and drew a weapon of their own.
A modern riot shield. Unbelievable—snagging a weapon that broken the instant the match started. Born lucky. Among melee weapons, which carry a generally pathetic reputation, Shields are the only class rated even with ranged weapons, or better, because a shield is born with resistance to ranged fire. The damage is lacking, true, and the killing power drops. But in this game, staying alive matters far more than killing whoever is standing in front of you. In that sense no weapon offers safety like a shield, which is why people call them broken.
Maybe that was why ordinary players' resentment toward shields ran so deep. They didn't hesitate to hang slurs on shield users—faggot, gutless dog, and worse. The crown jewel of the lot was shieldroach: shield smashed together with cockroach.
Now look at my weapon. Look at that baffled face across from me. They didn't have to say a word; the eyes asked it plain as speech. You're seriously using that piece of trash?
Yes. The weapon I'd chosen was one of the worst in all of Eternal Battle, fighting for the very bottom.
The Trident.
As I'd stressed more than once, the single most important measure of a melee weapon is how it answers ranged attacks. Shields get called broken without even needing a Weapon Skill—the item itself has the resistance. And the Trident? Obviously, it had no ability at all to answer ranged weapons. You couldn't even say it held an edge in a melee duel the way a greatsword did. The verdict on it was cold. A looks piece. Handsome garbage with nothing going for it but the surface. Poseidon's (lol) ultimate weapon (a toilet). And so, at this point, treating the thing as invisible had become the meme. People would be staring right at one and still lament that there was nothing to loot.
But today it would be my other self, and it would sweep the enemies aside. Do that, and attention would snap onto me in an instant. Maybe even now, barely a minute in, I was already drawing eyes. Who knew—the casters might already be losing their minds over me standing there with a Trident. So I couldn't waste this chance.
I charged straight at them. On the Tournament Server, fights in the extreme early game were hardly rare. The rewards for farming and hunting had been cut, but the return on combat was enormous, so the experience from a kill was monstrous. My opponent startled and hauled the shield up, but at that sluggish speed they never had a chance. I kicked off the ground, leapt into the air, and went over their back. Before they could turn, I dropped low, hooked a leg, took them down, and drove the spear into the chest.
From the pierced chest, water flowed instead of blood. Clear water climbed the Trident and was absorbed straight into the weapon. I finished them off for certain, and a chime came through the Watch.
First Kill Secured
One down, for a start.