The First Placement Match
It didn't make sense. Why was a menu sitting at a seat in the PC Bang—and why was the selection this absurdly wide?
I browsed it with a sour face, then came to my senses and turned the computer on. Even a shallow stash of trivia was enough to tell the rig was seriously high-end. Right before I disappeared, battle royale games had just caught fire, and PC bangs were already swapping in high-spec machines. Five years had passed. Of course they'd gone further.
Games stretched in a row across the wide desktop. A few I knew well. Most looked like fresh releases riding whatever happened to be trendy.
I looked for a moment, then clicked the icon I knew. Eternal Battle. What else was there? I had no interest in turning my eyes to another game just yet. Maybe I'd get sick of this one down the line. That would be a story for then.
I logged in. The load finished, and the default screen came up. The character dead center looked almost exactly like me in real life.
Eternal Battle wasn't built around a fixed character. You were supposed to customize freely. For some reason, though, I'd been locked into this appearance from the moment I made the account. I tried a sub-account just in case. Same result. I still didn't even know why I'd fallen into the world of Eternal Battle in the first place. Situations this unreal, I'd decided to shut my eyes and look the other way.
I queued at once. Battle royale again, solo—the mode I trusted most, and the one that felt easiest.
Ranked, or normals. I hesitated a second, then pressed ranked. It was about time I graduated from casual play and started the climb.
I'd returned to reality and picked Eternal Battle back up only last week. Days were swallowed by deliveries, so spare time was hard to come by—short sessions, and only late at night. In other words, I'd only just reached the level where ranked would even let me in.
Perfect timing. At home the lag was so bad I couldn't show my real skill. I was at a PC Bang anyway. Why not sit the placement matches?
"All right."
A light stretch, and the match locked in. Sixty-six players dumped into the waiting room at once, and the ping didn't spike at all. So this was a PC Bang of the peninsula. Impressive, as expected.
I looked around and frowned. The map this time was Silent Forest—the last battlefield I'd lived through right before I came back to reality.
I didn't like it here. Too many bugs and insects, enough to turn your stomach, and food was so scarce you usually had to eat those bugs to get by. The map event was just as grating. Hear it explained and you might ask what the problem even was. Live through it, and you'd learn it was nothing to take lightly.
The weather was blazing, too. This round, I might have to care more about survival than about fighting.
I weighed every factor and chose the spot best suited to staying alive: a small stream valley branching off the big river at the far south.
The instant I was moved, I opened my eyes and got to my feet. On any map, the most important thing at the start is farming a main weapon. This time, unlike last, luck didn't drop a gun in my lap the moment I landed. All I could do was search, and move as fast as I could.
"Oh."
A long walk later, a crate gave me a pistol and a hat. A revolver and a cowboy hat. Cancel what I'd said about bad luck. This was lucky—who'd find Set Equipment as a matching pair right from the start?
I put both on without a heartbeat of hesitation.
A revolver's traits were high damage, poor stability, and a slow rate of fire. Silent Forest, thick with trees, sat with the Ruined City among maps heavy on cover. Open, grinding fights mattered far less than ambushes and shots in the back. A revolver takes forever to reload and prefers a short engagement to a long one. Not a bad fit.
Something else mattered more right now. As I'd already decided, the heart of this round was survival. Food was scarce on this map to begin with, and with the sun this fierce I'd overheat fast, and my water would crash just as hard.
The moment I had the revolver, I headed for the valley and filled the waterskin that came equipped by default. Water was life. Drink it like this, though, and food poisoning was all but certain, so it had to be purified. Nothing complicated. A few leaves and a little time, and it was done.
I built the purifier somewhere hard to notice, then kept moving. Staring blankly until the water finished was a colossal waste of time. Farm and hunt through that window, raise your build, or you weren't taking first.
I picked up revolver rounds and prowled the area as if I were scouting it.
Bang!
A rabbit and a water deer went down. Hide, meat, and a pair of sneakers. Not a bad reward, though calling it a jackpot felt like a stretch. If I had to grade it: decent.
By now I ought to have been running into someone. They say even a tiger comes when you speak of it—and sure enough, something rustled off to the left.
I dropped into the grass at once and aimed the revolver. I hadn't finished growing, so dropping someone in a single shot would be hard. The same went for them.
I drew a slow breath and held it. The fine tremor in my hand vanished. I set my aim and listened as hard as I could. They walked into my line of sight knowing nothing. I didn't fire in a rush. I waited, steady, until the target crossed the point I'd already chosen.
Then—
Bang!
"Headshot."
A clean one-shot. This game was needlessly precise: any bare skin armor didn't cover was calculated at low defense. Same defense rating, you wanted the piece that covered the most area. In that sense the military cap hadn't covered the lower half of the head—the face—at all. A revolver round with real stopping power punched straight through the temple. Instant death.
I didn't let my guard down. I waited a moment in case another enemy was nearby. Once I was sure no one else was there, I came out of the brush and approached the body. I closed my eyes briefly and offered a little mourning. I knew it didn't matter in a game. The habit had already set in.
What I pulled from the inventory paid off nicely. The hat I didn't need—I already had the cowboy hat from the set, and the shot had dropped its durability—but the rest was solid gear, and there was plenty of it. The Royal Guard uniform in particular was such a high grade it might as well have been a jackpot. If I'd aimed for the heart instead of the head, they wouldn't have died in one hit.
Satisfied with the result, I went back to the purifier. Thankfully no one had cleaned it out. If they had, I'd have noticed first anyway.
I stowed the clean water in the waterskin and salted every piece of meat. Without a refrigerator, curing meat isn't a choice. It's a necessity. Curing takes the basics—salt, pepper, soy sauce—so if seasoning drops while I'm looting, I always take it, even if that means throwing away a sidearm once I'm at the weight cap.
Ordinary players want a game they can enjoy lightly, so they tend to care about fighting more than surviving. I understand that impulse, up to a point. For me, though, it hadn't been a game. It had been real. I had no choice but to treat survival as seriously as combat.
Scavengers I simply could not understand—players who ignore food and water entirely, think only about fighting, and stay alive by looting survival supplies off the people they kill. Think about it. You're one step from starving, you finally take someone down and search the body, and they're a Scavenger too. You die right there, no way out. Too many variables. A dangerous strategy I almost never attempt.
What matters is balance. The right equilibrium between combat and survival. A truth I'd reached after a hundred real fights, always starving for the win.
Survival doesn't end at water and food. Body heat and sleep matter just as much, and a hideout manages both at once. Until you're pushed completely outside the safe zone, it's better to work around the hideout you set at the start, even if the spot isn't perfect. That shrinks your range, so you might grow a little slower than everyone else. A simple problem to solve, if your physical ability sits far above theirs.
The match had moved into the mid and late game, and my main weapon had grown well enough, when my hideout was marked outside the safe zone. Fog would roll in. It was time to move.
I checked the Watch. Survivors were down to around twenty. I hadn't seen the deaths myself, but I'd bet about half of them hadn't died fighting. They'd died to the simple problem of staying alive. That was Eternal Battle. It was why people loved it or hated it.
I was studying the map, wondering where to put a new hideout, when a sharp sense of wrongness hit me. I shut the Watch at once and looked around.
"Hah."
The sigh slipped out before I could stop it. So it had finally started. Event time. The reason I hated Silent Forest.