Eternal Battle
Eternal Battle.
That was the name of the game I had spent five years tumbling through.
At its core the genre was PVP, though it split, underneath, into several modes: Battle Royale, Team Battle, and the Duel Arena. The most popular by far was Battle Royale—sixty-six players fighting until only one remained alive. That format had only just been catching fire as a genre in the moment before I was dragged into the game.
But Eternal Battle, EB for short, had something that set it apart from every other battle royale out there. Survival.
EB did not stop at fighting other players. It bolted on a system for staying alive in an environment from hell. Skip a meal and hunger gnawed at you. Skip water and thirst set in. Your body temperature rose and fell with the weather. Ignore any of it and your stats cratered, until you died without ever getting a proper fight in. Even after I was truly transferred and living the war, those survival systems were often far more urgent than any enemy.
Some people might like that sort of thing. Coldly speaking, though, I thought the drawbacks ran much deeper: it raised the barrier to entry and kept getting in the way of the actual fighting. So of course I had been certain the game would crash and burn.
Against every expectation, EB exploded and became one of the most popular games in the world. Coming back to reality and finding that out—can you even imagine how absurd it felt? From what I heard, a Japanese streamer was what made it take off. After endless targeting, a scene of some fifty players chasing that streamer around turned into a cult sensation.
Honestly, part of me had been praying it would flop. What else was I supposed to feel? I had been preparing my pro debut when the company announced a new title and completely abandoned the game I had been playing. Dragged into that damned world inside the game and scraping past death again and again for five years, I was bound to hate it even more.
When I returned to the modern world, I made one vow. I would never lay a finger on this game again.
Right. That vow had been in pieces for a long time. All that teeth-gritting resolve had gone somewhere, and what was left was me, logged into EB while I waited on a bowl of jjamppong, that spicy seafood noodle soup.
But what was I supposed to do? Gaming had been my only hobby my whole life. The game I used to play had already been left to rot for five years. Would you believe the patches came once a year, like some annual ceremony? And EB was, objectively, a finely made game. If the craft had been lacking, a worldwide hit would have been impossible.
Still, I could look myself in the eye. I had held out for a full three months. I had only started EB last week. Truly, I had endured for a very long time. And once I started, it was, of course, ridiculously fun. The sharp hatred I had been honing had, somewhere along the way, dulled into a blunt love-hate.
I will say it as many times as it takes: this was unavoidable. Five whole years. One thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days. Forty-three thousand eight hundred hours spent inside the game, living it firsthand. Nobody knew this game better than I did. I was confident even the people who made it did not. Which meant I was sure I could beat anyone. I never lose. That one reason was enough. The sweetness of victory is always a thrill.
I queued a normal match. There was not enough time for ranked. A single game of EB usually ran at least thirty minutes, and jjamppong, even on the long end, was done in twenty. So I would play a normal for fun and drop out partway through.
"Ah. It popped."
Once matchmaking landed, the participants gathered in a waiting room first. You were given thirty seconds to prepare, and in that window you could see the map and who your teammates were. Smaller details, like the weather, came through in advance as well. I had queued solo, so there were no teammates. All sixty-five people besides me were enemies.
The map was the Ruined City. Personally, one of my favorites, because this was the place where you could still feel the traces of civilization the most. Before I came back, if the battlefield was set here, I used to cheer.
When the prep time ended, every participant had to choose where they would start. It was not anywhere you pleased. Each match randomly offered a handful of points you were allowed to pick, and you chose one of them. This time I decided to spawn in the apartment complex. I was only planning to mess around and quit anyway, so I wanted a popular zone and a mess from the opening minutes.
The moment you chose, you were on the ground, already moved into that space. How the move happened was skipped. Not only in the game—in reality, too, you blacked out and woke already at the destination. The catch was that wake-up time differed with distance from the waiting room. The Ruined City's lobby sat at the lower left, so picking the northeast meant starting a little later than everyone else. The gap was not huge, but it was worth keeping in mind.
"All right. Let's go."
The first thing to do after waking was to farm a main weapon. Whatever that weapon was, the whole way you played the match had to follow it. For the record, EB never clearly settled on an era, and maybe that was why the weapons were a complete jumble: two-handed swords, katanas, muskets, even modern rifles. Arms from every age. The small mercy was that truly science-fiction weapons, or anything too high-fantasy, still were not in.
The main weapon itself was easy to farm anywhere. What mattered was the grade. In the unit right beside where I had spawned, I found mine: a common-grade bastard sword. Not bad. The grade was a shame, but melee weapons were decent enough in the early game.
There was still plenty to find besides the main weapon. Armor, especially, was close enough to the heart of EB to call it that.
"What was the bastard-sword set again?"
I dug through my memory and came up with leather armor. Wear gear compatible with your main weapon and a set bonus kicked in; lining that up made you much stronger. So you could not simply chase raw stats. Hunting set equipment was mandatory. Matching a full set was, of course, anything but easy. Put bluntly, completing all five pieces was so absurd that people called it Exodia.
First I equipped the black coat that had been lying beside the bastard sword.
Once you had a main weapon, what came next? There was no single right answer. If you had to divide it, the paths were two: hunting and farming. Hunting, here, did not mean other players. Combat was more efficient once you had not only a weapon but all of your gear, because lasting until you were the last one alive mattered more than knocking someone down. Hunting meant exactly what it sounded like—taking down animals and other NPCs. That got you meat, food, and, at a low chance, equipment.
Farming was the same idea, another way to get food and gear. It was much safer than hunting, and much faster for putting a kit together. But farming alone earned no experience. You needed experience to upgrade your main weapon and learn a Weapon Skill if you wanted to get seriously stronger. Farming was safe and fast, with a hard ceiling. Hunting was dangerous and a little slow, but it promised growth you could actually count on.
Between the two, the strategy I picked was simple. Combat. Hunting players.
Had I not just said that fighting in the extreme early game was a bad idea? I had. Normally it was wildly inefficient. But I had no desire to win this match. I was going to quit halfway, so I would empty my head and fight. And EB's controls were fine-grained enough that if your mechanics kept up, you could go on a rampage even at the very start, when the gear gap was almost nothing. In short, I was confident. Confident I could beat whoever I ran into, and easily.
As I had said, the apartment complex was a fairly popular spot, which meant a few other people had spawned nearby. They obviously would not be done farming. At most they would have a main weapon, the same as me. I left the unit and walked the long hallway. Nobody here? I was swinging the sword as I went when footsteps sounded overhead. I grinned and took the stairs straight up. Sorry. Just tell yourself you had bad luck.
Soon I met the one coming down from the floor above. Their gear was about like mine: a single pistol in hand, and one plain pot helmet. That was all. They had voice chat on.
"Hey, beat it. Don't get in my way."
Plenty of room in that tone. A low-level weapon would take forever to kill with, so don't waste the time—go our separate ways. That seemed to be the idea. For an answer, I lifted the sword lightly and leveled it at them. Only then did they seem to grasp how serious this was.
"Fuck. Stepped in it."
Bang! Bang! Bullets cracked out of the pistol at once. I did not panic. I swung the sword twice. Ting! Ting!
"...The hell. You messing with me?"
They sounded incredulous. Fair enough. How many people in an ordinary match like this actually used a Parry? I did not have time to dawdle. I leapt at them and swung.