Does This Even Make Sense?
Eternal Battle ranked among the most popular games in the world, and so it had planted itself, quite naturally, as a flagship title that neither esports nor internet broadcasting could do without.
A battle royale, by its nature, handed you a win only when raw skill and the circumstances of the moment both showed up. Every match shifted under your feet, and that kept the game from going stale.
Which was why, even with Eternal Battle streamers already past the point of overflowing, new faces kept appearing anyway.
And even in that red ocean, one streamer still sat comfortably at the top.
Hanjud.
He was no Heavenly Realm player, but his skill was respectable enough to keep him parked in Diamond, the tier people called the peak of the human realm. Love him or hate him, he was a streamer who had stacked his name steadily since Eternal Battle's earliest days, more on a quick, witty mouth than on anything else.
Today, as usual, Hanjud was locked in on his broadcast.
The only difference was that he was queueing normals instead of Solo Rank.
Same as always, chat was fully occupied with roasting him.
Once a chat's mood locked in, it almost never changed after that. Closeness and honesty were the upside; the downside was that the quality ran pretty foul, and every so often a message stepped clean over the line.
"No. Chat. If you railroad me like that, I'm the one getting screwed. Solo Rank's been torturing me, so I want a little healing—is that really so evil? And it's not like I'm on an alt or boosting somebody. I'm allowed to just queue normals."
On the Korean server, not many people queued normals in the first place. The whole mode was treated as a halfway stop: a handful of casuals who didn't care about rank, and newbies who hadn't ground out the level for Solo Rank yet, passing through on their way somewhere else.
Drop a Diamond player like Hanjud into that, and the ecosystem getting wrecked was inevitable. It was still a battle royale, of course, so he couldn't be certain he'd cut down sixty-five people and actually take the win. What nobody could deny was that he could enjoy the game about as comfortably as smurfing allowed.
The clock had already passed twenty minutes—generally the mid-to-late phase, when the farming was nearly done. And Hanjud had just maxed his main weapon. A staggering pace you simply did not see in Diamond lobbies, because a level-up threw a notification, and other players would contest you however they could.
"Kya! Would you look at that finish!"
He turned a satisfied look on his AK-47. It was already a busted weapon with performance you could count on, and with it maxed, you might as well call the win locked in. The viewers clicked their tongues on the surface, but almost nobody actually disliked a rampage this one-sided.
"With this I just go dudududu and everybody dies in one spray, you know. Ah—anybody around here willing to catch a few bullets for me?"
No matter how he turned it over, the win was already in the bag.
Was physical skill important in Eternal Battle? Of course it was. But that only held in the early game, before the growth gap turned severe. Push into the late game and start crushing people with stats built through growth, and the other side had no answer. He had even picked up two set-effect options. Right now—no joke—he was confident he could win even if a pro player walked into the lobby.
"All right, let's go. Let's go!"
Brimming with himself, he roamed without hesitation. Even so, he had to watch for gang-ups and third parties. His weapon was the insane part; his armor was only a little better than average. He never quite let the tension go all the way, and he kept hunting for people.
Ruined City was thick with cover—apartment blocks and the like—so sudden ambushes were especially common there. That was also why melee weapons were rated highly on the map. Not that ranged was bad. The AK in particular had such solid base performance that people called it a comfort pick on any map, a dutiful little workhorse. If you were the one on the receiving end, of course, the curses came on their own.
So Hanjud relaxed when he met an enemy out on a wide open plain with nothing in the way. They were holding a melee weapon, and even at a glance the level looked high. If someone hidden in cover had ambushed him, it might have been dangerous.
"Heaven's on my side. Poor bastard, though. Of all the places to run into me. Tsk, tsk."
The distance was there, and there was nowhere to hide. In that instant, the one holding the melee weapon might as well have had their fate sealed. What could you do? It was the karma of investing in a melee weapon with no versatility.
"Hey. Melee-bro. You crying? You crying?"
By the nature of the genre, a battle royale player always had to answer a swarm of variables, and judged by that standard a melee weapon started life already holding a disadvantage. The gap in range was one of those things no trick could close.
The developer had, of course, pushed through countless patches trying to balance melee and ranged. Name only a few and you already had Weapon Skills, armor set effects, and the rest. It would not be an exaggeration to say that every one of those unrealistic systems—still divisive among players—had been born for melee's sake. Eternal Battle had somewhat abandoned the realistic gunfights of other battle royales in pursuit of the fantasy. Thanks to that, you could use a sword, a spear, even knuckles with some strategy behind them, and still the welcome reserved for ranged weapons was a limit baked into the foundation.
So what was the point of all that long-winded explanation?
That the situation unfolding right now was abnormal to anyone watching.
"...What? A bug?"
Hanjud and the viewers were all thrown. He had clearly aimed and fired, and the opponent hadn't taken a scratch. They were walking toward him at an easy pace, as if nothing had happened.
But maybe he wasn't Diamond for nothing. He got his composure back at once and answered, flipping the selector to burst and aiming for the head of the figure closing in.
Dududu!
Three bullets left the barrel. The distance had closed since the last shot, and only then did Hanjud understand why the opponent was completely fine.
One of the balance patches meant to buff melee weapons. Parry. Time a counter right, and you could deflect ordinary bullets. Plenty of melee players had lost their minds with joy when that patch note dropped, but once it hit the live servers it became one of the game's favorite punching bags. The difficulty was so insane that "possible in theory" was the phrase that fit. Eternal Battle, on top of that, was a mad game that gave every weapon its own bullet velocity and its own ballistics. Possible in theory, impossible in practice—that was the level of it.
The opponent who had closed in was wearing a strange horse mask. A horse mask with a bastard sword: grotesque, and frightening in a way he couldn't name. Hanjud found himself backing away without meaning to.
This won't do. His instincts slammed the warning home. He had come to normals to smurf after six straight early exits in Solo Rank blew his mental, and now—with a max-level AK that had gone better than any run he could remember—he was going to get fully parried and rolled by a melee meme pick? It was obvious this would become a lifelong black mark.
It was still fine. Drop them here, and the whole thing would end as a weird little incident. From the look of it, this was some toxic player who had practiced parrying half-decently and then come to snipe him. And if that was the case, there was an answer that fit.
He snapped the selector to full auto and simply sprayed. Normally that was absolute taboo—brutal on ammo, and unless you were point-blank the rounds didn't even land—but against a one-trick parry player, it was the best response there was.
Dududududu!!
A baptism of bullets, plain and simple. Countless rounds in just two seconds. The opponent would obviously be a honeycomb in an instant.
...They should have been.
What on earth was this unbelievable sound?
Ting-ting-ting-ting-ting!
Bright parry effects chimed, and the horse mask was still standing there, perfectly fine. Only half their health was gone.
"......"
Hanjud had nothing left to say. The enemy swung the sword without interest, as if he weren't worth a thought.
And then, in the instant before the blade connected, the figure vanished without a trace. All that remained was one lonely backpack. A body disappearing on the spot, leaving only a pack, meant a force-quit or a yanked connection.
Standing alone and blank in the open, Hanjud muttered, hollow.
"What even was that..."
Riding the weight of Hanjud's name, the strange incident spread in every direction.
"Ha. Garbage PC. Here we go again."
Eternal Battle was well optimized, and it ran without much trouble even on relatively low specs. Still, a battle royale needed a baseline of performance. That much was obvious. Which meant the computer at Sua's house—where money was tight—couldn't even handle the game on the lowest settings without strain. Simple lag and stuttering, and on top of that it crashed at the drop of a hat. Getting properly immersed was a lost cause.
"Unni! Come down and eat lunch!"
"Okay."
It had been a light match, with no real hunger for the win, but the regret still stuck. If the lag hadn't hit at exactly that moment, I could have parried every single one of them clean. Enough. Clinging to it would only cost me. I let it go and headed down to the first floor for some jjamppong worth eating.
Steam curled off the table. A white bowl held a blazing red broth—the sharp smell of seafood prickling my nose, noodles gleaming with oil. The moment I saw it, patience died. I threw myself at it like a dog and inhaled the whole thing.
It tasted, as expected, like it had been worth the plunge. Slurping noodles, I made a serious proposal.
"Sua. We really should make jjamppong the main thing."
"That's a no."