A Sweet Delusion
Events break out at random, anywhere on a map.
They change with the map. In the Ruined City, true to the mood of the place, what you get is indiscriminate bombardment.
So what kind of event would hit Silent Forest, the map I was playing now?
Most events have something to do with the map's name. In that sense, Silent Forest's is fairly intuitive. Exactly as the name promises, every sound on the map vanishes completely.
Hearing only that, it wouldn't land very hard. It's hardly different from muting the game and playing on.
The reality I had lived through myself was on another level entirely. Can you even guess what it feels like to have one of your senses go dead?
You might think hearing matters less than sight or touch. But except when you're asleep, it works without a rest, all twenty-four hours of the day. Shut a sense like that off in a single instant, and anyone meeting it for the first time has no choice but to fall into a panic. You can't even hear your own breathing, or your heartbeat. How unreal that is—no one who hasn't been through it could ever really understand.
Of course, that's only the story once the thing has been carried over into reality. I won't deny that sound simply disappearing inside a game is a lesser shock. The developers knew that too, so they didn't stop there. They added one more piece.
The silence of the Watch.
When the event triggers, the Watch that had been feeding you every essential piece of information stops working, and the player is left with practically no information at all.
How much does the Watch matter? Put bluntly, you can treat every system except settings and inventory as living on that one device. The map, the player count, the state of your body, the time, the weather—all of it.
The worst of it is the map going dark, and the sudden blank of not knowing where to move. You don't know which way the fog is rolling in from, or even where the designated safe zone is. You have nothing to rely on but your own instinct.
Say it kindly, and realism shoots through the roof. Say it straight, and the game turns filthy.
So in Silent Forest, checking the map constantly and committing it to memory matters. If the event hits without warning, it's as good as essential—otherwise you lose your destination and start to wander.
If you're already inside the safe zone and have no reason to leave, that's the best case there is. Don't get clever. Just keep your head down and wait for the event to end.
But if, for any reason, you need to move, then the first thing to do is not to start walking blind. Settle yourself, and make a plan.
The best method in that spot is to confirm the fog with your own eyes. The fog always closes in as a clean circle, tightening from every side, so once you can read where it sits overall, you can make a rough guess at the safe zone too.
If there's no high ground nearby, the next best thing is to head for the center of the map. Of course the safe zone might not be the center at all. It might spawn shoved all the way out to one edge. But that's random in the end, and with no way to check it in the moment, all you can do is go to the center and wait for the event to finish.
And if you head southwest, only for the safe zone to be set in the northeast? You don't even get the time to try anything. The fog swallows you, you die, and that's the end of it.
"…Tsk."
I talk like that, but a worst case of that kind almost never actually shows. Today, of all days, the worst had unfolded anyway. If my luck stayed rotten, I might not even take first.
Just thinking about it was irritating, obviously. Still, there was a scrap of comfort I could cling to. Comparatively, this was the better kind of bad. If I lost not because of some random element, but because I was simply worse than the person across from me, that would be the thing to make me lose my mind and start jumping.
Anyway. To get to the center, I went back over where I was and started drawing the map in my head. I'd been in the valley to the southeast, so northwest would do.
On the way toward the center, I ran into an enemy. For the record, he didn't even know I was coming until I was practically on top of him. Fair enough. With no sound at all, picking someone out of a dense forest isn't easy.
I put three revolver rounds into him on the spot. With no gunshot to hear, the satisfaction of shooting wasn't really there. It was only my guess, but he seemed not to have noticed me closing in until his health was nearly gone. A truly pitiful, empty death.
A brief moment of silence, and then I went through the body. Situation or not, skipping the loot was not an option.
It paid off.
◈ Slot: Upper Body
◈ Set Piece for the Revolver
The name was a little unfortunate, but it was Set Equipment for the revolver—clothing I had needed badly. That made two pieces. Set bonuses usually spike hard from the third piece on. Find one more, and I'd be a step closer to the win.
I kept on toward the center, turning it over. Maybe it was about time for a mouthful of water. The quietly nasty part of an event like this is managing your body. Those numbers come through the Watch as well, so during Silent Time it's hard to judge how much water to drink, or when to eat. Food is the worse of the two. Eat too much and you tip into an overstuffed state, and your stats actually drop. In the end, all you can do is eat by feel, and get the amount about right.
I'd pushed through all of that and was nearly at the center when the event ended.
"That finished sooner than I thought."
The duration is random too, and in a bad case it can run for more than a day. When that happens, you check the Watch once it's over and find that nearly everyone is dead. That's how absolute the Watch's importance is in Eternal Battle.
I switched the Watch on at once and checked my state.
Only eight left. Silent Time hadn't even run that long, and more than ten people were dead. My condition, fortunately, was fine. Then again, where would five years of being ground through this as reality have gone? The safe zone was to the east.
If I'd stayed put in the southeast and never moved, I would have been closer. A little regrettable—but I didn't think heading for the center had been the wrong call. What I'd learned from actually grinding through it was that now and then you do have to make a bold decision if you want to win, but far more often, safe play with a reason behind it is what treats you well.
This time it would only cost me a little time. I could still make the safe zone before the clock ran out. Flip it the other way. If I'd stayed where I was and the safe zone had spawned at the far northwestern edge, I never would have made it in time. I was confident my play hadn't been wrong.
"Hoo. Good."
Sound was coming back, and the game definitely had life in it again. As expected, I don't much care for the Silent Forest event. The first time I'd met it in reality, it had nearly left a trauma on me.
After that, the match went the way these things go—too ordinary to need much telling. The game tipped into its late phase. Players who had each grown in their own way packed into the narrowing safe zone, fought, and in the end one last person was left alive to take the win.
Who was the winner?
Well. It couldn't have been anyone but me.
Not arrogance. It couldn't be helped. The bracket I'd been matched into, even at a generous read, would have been Bronze and Silver at best. Between the other rookies, only just sitting their placement matches, and me—five years of Eternal Battle lived as reality—a gap like heaven and earth was only natural. If I hadn't come in first here, that would have been the strange part.
A cheat, say. Or a pro on a smurf. Honestly, even against a pro, I was confident I could flatten them without breaking a sweat.
"Nnngh… hah!"
I stretched, working the stiffness out of my body, and checked the time. It was already past seven.
It's always like this. The moment I start up Eternal Battle, I sink in as if I've been dragged straight back into that world, and I forget completely how much time is passing. The second I became aware of time again, my stomach started raising hell for a meal.
I meant to keep dinner simple and handle it here. There was a menu this fine in front of me; not trying it would have been a shame. Noodles were off the table, for the record. Sua's jjamppong alone had already been more than enough of those. Today I'd eat something else.
The PC Bang's part-timer, Mr. Kim, was lost in awe.
First, he had been in awe of her looks. He had never seen a woman that beautiful.
Second, he had been in awe of the game she had chosen. Plenty of women played it, sure—but Eternal Battle was unmistakably a game full of men.
Third, he had been in awe of how she played.
He usually paid a great deal of attention to Eternal Battle, and he often watched guide streams and pro tournaments. Seen through the eyes of a fan that devoted, her play was something else. She hadn't shown off wildly flashy mechanics, but the judgment was clean and never once stalled, and the strategy didn't seem to have a single flaw he could pick at.
Was it just the crush talking?
Maybe it was. A game is relative, in the end. Set her straight against the Heavenly Realm and of course her level would come up short. Even so, her skill felt like it cleared his own at the very least, and he was Gold.
So he thought it. What if she started streaming?
Respectable skill. Looks that left you with nothing but awe. Debut as a streamer and it was a guaranteed smash—an unscratched lottery ticket with first prize already locked in.
In an instant, the clichés of internet broadcasting crackled through his head. She starts out with no camera, and that outstanding play gets her suspected of cheating. She turns on a hand cam to clear her name, and—oh no!—her face slips into frame by accident, and that insane beauty is out in the open. Just like that she becomes an enormous sensation, a streamer signed to a major agency, and gets her debut onto a pro team…
"Excuse me."
"…"
"Excuse me!"
"Ah—yes? Yes?"
He barely clawed his way out of the delusion and came back to himself, and his mouth fell open like a fool's. The woman who had been the heroine of that fantasy was standing right in front of Mr. Kim, the part-timer.
Whoa. Up close, she's pretty as hell.