A Healing Survival Game
"All right, game two is underway. Which player has your eye?"
"Plenty of people showed out in game one, of course, but I keep coming back to Jjamppong Aficionado."
"Honestly, same here! And I doubt it's just the two of us. Most of the viewers are probably right there with us. Shall we take a look at how Jjamppong Aficionado is doing?"
The feed cut over on the back of that smooth commentary, and the scene that came up shut every mouth in the booth at once.
Small mercy, perhaps, that in-game voice wasn't going out on the broadcast. Even that got aired sometimes, if a line was funny enough and they judged it safe to put on the replay. Either way, they still had a job to do. They had to call what they were seeing.
"Right... So, just like last match, the fight started immediately."
"Jjamppong Aficionado is currently... beating her opponent down with her fists."
"And the opponent is, well. Holding a trident. Pure coincidence, I'm sure?"
Whatever the circumstances, the fight itself was a masterpiece. The concept was outrageous, that was all. Everyone already knew her skill was the real thing. Even so, the finish—laying the opponent out and pounding them where they lay—was genuinely chilling, chilling enough that you started to pity the person taking it. For that one stretch, even the casters couldn't make themselves speak.
The clip of her afterward, victorious, hoisting the trident and clearly loving it, tore through the community.
The concept was strange enough to climb the community's hot posts, and the tournament's viewership spiked along with it. The bait rolled, the people who saw it came running, and the people who saw them came running too. The loop fed itself until most of the board was already loud with talk of the Stardom Tournament still in progress.
Not everyone enjoyed it. If anything, plenty of people found the whole thing uninteresting, or disliked it outright.
Even so, a community belongs to whoever talks the loudest. Nurse a complaint and never say it, and the current simply carries you off. People with no particular opinion—the neutrals—got dragged along by that noisy few and joined the bait, and at the center of all that noise, of course, stood Jjamppong Aficionado.
Meanwhile, once she had the trident, she moved even harder than she had last match, cutting participants down wherever she went. The map and everything else fell in behind her, and she played as if she'd grown wings. The run was so dominant that even the official tournament broadcast kept the camera locked on her unless something extraordinary happened elsewhere. The other players might have hated it, but for the sake of the show, the organizers' position was easy enough to understand.
In the end, game two closed even more one-sided than the first. She had been slaughtering people since the opening minutes and snowballing the whole way, and there was simply no way to stop her. It was an overwhelming win, and the reaction was worse than last match. Too clean a case of smurfing, with no sense of danger anywhere in it. The bad ground from game one, the trash-weapon penalty—none of it had really shown. At the same time, taking game two locked her championship, and the tension that should have carried into game three died on the spot. The result was already decided.
On the community side, that vague excitement cooled, and what filled the space it left was a perfectly natural question.
Brilliant mechanics, and a concept that bordered on the unhinged. Curious people dug hard, and nothing worth inferring turned up. The account itself had only been made last week, so there was nothing to speculate on in the first place. Her identity stayed a maze, and the final game began.
The instant I stepped into the waiting room, I looked up. Not a scrap of sunlight in that dark sky. Rain sheeted out of black storm clouds, and a moment later a thunderclap split the world with a white flash.
Now that is some artistic weather.
I turned in a circle, and the map fit the sky as if the two had been made for each other. A smile pulled at my mouth before I could stop it. This was the very map I'd been aching for—the Sea of Enchantment. The original of the Abandoned Shipwreck I'd sampled in the Duel Arena yesterday, and the one battlefield people actually rated as a place where the trident did its job as a weapon.
I opened the Watch and checked my spawn.
An ocean map, by concept, and it diverged hard from anything ordinary. The space you could freely roam was severely limited. People can't breathe in the sea, after all, which is why a ship isn't optional on the Sea of Enchantment. There were quite a few little uninhabited islets, but the safe zone meant you had to cross the map eventually anyway. Six large vessels sat on the water, and each of them carried four lifeboats. In theory, then, the Sea of Enchantment held thirty boats. In practice, there was no world where everyone politely took one and called it fair.
So the heart of the map was simple. Take a ship. An endless war between the people trying to seize one and the people trying to hold one. Put more simply, it was Eternal Battle's own Age of Sail.
I spent a moment deciding where to spawn. The choices split into two. Come in on a ship from the start, trade blows until you owned a large vessel, or snatch a lifeboat and run. Or come in on an islet and build a boat yourself to get around the map. You could tell which was which just from hearing it. The first was dangerous, but it was a lottery ticket. Take a large vessel clean and you were already in championship territory. The second was as safe as it was unlikely to win. Even a tiny raft took ages to build, and once you had it the thing performed so poorly that a broadside from a large ship would sink you, and you'd drown on the spot.
The only variable was the trident. Obviously I meant to hunt one again this match, same as before. The question was whether I'd touch any other weapon until I found it.
"Okay."
That settled it. My spawn wouldn't be a ship. It would be an uninhabited islet.
I hadn't come this far to throw the concept away. But there was no telling when the trident would show, and dropping onto a ship empty-handed in the meantime was no different from trying to get myself killed. Too many people, too little space, all of them swinging—without a weapon it was simply too dangerous. So I'd start as safe as I could.
I came in on the most out-of-the-way islet there was. As expected, I was the only person anywhere nearby.
A healing little survival game, for once?
This was the Tournament Server, though, which meant the survival layer was nearly stripped out. I had to pour everything into building the raft. Even so, weapons came first. I indulged a pointless hope and dreamed of a trident, and of course nothing of the sort happened. It had dropped for me right away in the earlier matches. Honestly, I was disappointed. Hmph.
A lap around the islet turned up a crescent blade. I didn't pick it up. For this tournament I was holding the line: trident only.
All right. Time to build a raft.
First I gathered the branches and stones off the ground and crafted a crude hand axe, the standard survival tool. Then I put it to work and chopped wood like I meant it. Whenever hunger hit, I killed a rabbit with the axe and roasted it. When the axe's durability wore out, I made another and went back to splitting timber. A worksite of pure, repeating labor.
"Whew."
I wiped the sweat away and rested until my stamina filled back up.
So this is how those wilderness hermits live?
A peaceful life with no fighting in it might not be so bad after all. Of course, the moment I opened the Watch and saw my experience crawling up by a pathetic speck, that thought melted like snow. Eternal Battle really was a combat-first battle royale.
I chopped anyway. From here on out, feel free to call me Bae Gaeul, the Lonely Woodcutter.