After the First Broadcast (2)
Personal broadcasters who make virtual reality games their main content can be broadly divided into two types.
One is the gamer-type streamer who plays the virtual reality games themselves.
The other is the commentator-type streamer who, rather than playing, thoroughly observes and analyzes other people’s play.
In that sense, the personal broadcaster known as “Ecclesia” was a rather unusual type of female streamer.
At first she had focused on analyzing other streamers’ game footage and writing strategy guides, but once her viewer count rose she pivoted toward playing the games herself and uploading her own clear videos.
Yet more than anything else, Ecclesia possessed one extremely peculiar trait that set her apart from every other streamer.
“What? Is that actually true?”
Ecclesia shot up from her seat like someone who had just heard something utterly unbelievable.
“Someone cleared Ariandel in the tutorial? And on the first try?”
That peculiar trait was the fact that Ecclesia specialized exclusively in Powell Software titles such as the Dark Ring series and Nightfall.
Naturally, Ecclesia herself had cleared Nightfall long ago. These days she was pouring her energy into unusual missions and challenges that other streamers preferred to avoid.
And “defeating Ariandel in the tutorial” was one of the challenges she had been attempting over and over.
Ariandel in the tutorial was infamous for being nearly impossible to beat by normal means—surviving even thirty seconds was considered a feat.
Yet while the difficulty was murderous, the Powell Software developers had placed no systemic restrictions on killing him in the tutorial. So Ecclesia had kept challenging him.
A full one hundred times.
Despite all that effort, she had ultimately failed to take Ariandel down.
Past the ninetieth attempt she had managed to inflict a tiny wound on his body, but that was the absolute limit.
The moment she drew blood, Ariandel had praised her—“You possess considerable skill as a hunter”—and then casually taken her head off.
“No, seriously, isn’t this scripted? I suffered through over a hundred tries and the best I ever did was a fingernail-sized scratch on Ariandel. How the hell does someone one-shot him on the first try?”
[Winter Nightfall Live YouTube Video Link]
“…Still, I’m supposed to be the top authority on Powell Software games in this country. How did I end up in this situation…”
Even as she kept grumbling, Ecclesia obediently clicked the link and started the video.
It opened on the suspension bridge where Yujin faced five werewolves.
The claim that he was a complete beginner in virtual reality games didn’t seem entirely false. Watching him charge fearlessly toward a pack of five werewolves, Ecclesia frowned.
“Does this guy think Nightfall is some kind of musou game? This looks like footage from someone who doesn’t even understand the basics, and you want me to watch this?”
Seeing the chat that normally took her side now roasting her instead, Ecclesia pouted.
For now she decided to follow their advice and watch without further complaints.
And then—
“…Huh?”
The longer she watched Yujin’s footage, the more Ecclesia’s expression shifted.
In the early part he struggled against even a single werewolf’s attacks, flailing helplessly. Yet before long he was one-shotting them with astonishing ease.
In under a minute he completely dismantled the five werewolves infamous as the “Newbie Choppers.”
After that he entered a fierce, bloody duel with Ariandel, the tutorial’s final boss.
“W-wait, what?”
Facing an enemy he should have been completely outmatched by on paper, he fought him head-on as an equal. He even sacrificed both arms to create an opening, then drove his sword straight into Ariandel’s heart. The scene delivered a genuine catharsis.
“Th-this is…”
Having watched without even breathing, Ecclesia finally spoke with open awe on her face.
“This is really the play of someone who touched a virtual reality game for the first time today? On the first try?”
[Yujin First VR Game Login Proof Clip]
The clip that arrived with the donation clearly showed that Yujin’s virtual reality game history was completely clean.
There was no longer any room left to doubt or nitpick.
But from the beginning Ecclesia had never intended to show jealousy toward Yujin or force herself to find faults.
She herself had once challenged Ariandel in the tutorial a full hundred times.
Because of that history, she understood better than anyone in the world just how monumental it was that Yujin had defeated him.
Struggling to keep the pure admiration and awe welling up from deep in her chest from showing too openly, she rewound the video to the beginning and played it again.
“Hmm… First of all, it’s clear that Streamer Winter’s older brother is a genius at virtual reality games.”
“No, I’m not simply saying the person in this video is a genius. More precisely… he became a genius through the process of fighting. That would be the better way to put it.”
“If you look at the beginning of the video, this person moved extremely awkwardly, like someone unused to virtual reality games. He also misjudged distances and over-dodged a bit.”
As she spoke, Ecclesia skipped ahead to the later portion of the footage.
“But the older brother in the second half is a completely different person from the one at the start. Look at the way he swings the sword, the spacing of his footwork. It might look casual, but those are actually the optimal movements and paths for dodging the greatsword Ariandel swings.”
“Because I researched how to beat Ariandel in the tutorial myself, and I arrived at the same conclusion.”
After thoroughly analyzing Ariandel’s movements and patterns and running simulations based on that data, Ecclesia had concluded that moving this way would let someone dodge his attacks while minimizing stamina consumption.
But analyzing patterns through research and actually applying them in real movement were entirely different matters.
If she had followed the method she established, she could have reliably beaten Ariandel in the tutorial. In the end, however, she never surpassed him and stopped at merely inflicting a single small wound.
“But this person… he put into practice in reality the exact method I had only theorized. And while I ran a simulator to create this method, he simply realized it mid-combat through pure instinct and sense.”
“Anyway, he’s nothing short of a monster. Not only growing in real time during combat, but also establishing on the spot a method to take the opponent down, and then…”
If my eyes aren’t deceiving me, this man momentarily seemed to surpass the limits of the game system itself.
Even if he had used both arms as a shield, under normal circumstances that alone should never have been enough to block Ariandel’s instant-kill attack.
Moreover, no matter how she looked at it, the series of movements this man displayed near the end of the fight were far too fast and precise for a character that hadn’t leveled up even once.
Did his synchronization rate spike out of control for a moment? Some kind of in-game error? Or maybe—
Ecclesia considered a certain possibility in her mind, then immediately shook her head left and right.
No matter how much of a genius he was, there was no way he could use “that” on the very first day he started a virtual reality game.
So there was no need to bring it up.
There was no reason to deliberately dig up something that hadn’t even been clearly verified and create unnecessary controversy.
Besides, even setting the final scene aside, the fact that Yujin was a genius at virtual reality games was undeniable.
“…Anyway, if I ever get the chance, I’d really like to do a collab stream with this person.”
As she spoke, Ecclesia’s eyes gleamed sharply.
“Even if I’ve lost one point for now, I want to clearly prove who the number one player of Nightfall is in this country.”
And so the small stone Yujin had thrown was already sending ripples into many places without him even knowing.
But the real impact his stream would have on the world was only just beginning.