Streamer Soma (4)
In neuroscience, the limit of human reaction speed is roughly fixed at 0.1 seconds.
Even for elite athletes trained to the absolute peak of human capability, it meant they could not react to anything in under 0.1 seconds.
The reason was simple.
It takes a human a minimum of 0.08 seconds to receive an auditory signal and transmit it to the brain, and another minimum of 0.02 seconds for the muscles to respond to the brain’s commands.
Of course, that was only true in general terms.
Even among those who fell under the same category of “human,” physical performance varied wildly from person to person. One could not claim that absolutely no one was ever born with innate reflexes that surpassed ordinary human limits.
That was why, throughout human history, those who possessed abilities transcending those limits had been called by a certain name.
Superhumans.
Really… I feel like I’m going to lose my mind.
And right now, the general director who had just witnessed the absurd spectacle of Yujin dodging every single ball flying at him by a mere paper’s thickness was feeling, quite literally, as though he were about to go insane.
Even national fencing athletes had never cleared past stage five of the reaction-speed test, yet Yujin clearing stage seven was not entirely impossible. After all, it was not out of the question that the man standing before him had simply been born with reflexes far superior to those of any national-level athlete.
Fine. Superhuman reflexes that transcended human limits—he could set that aside for now.
But with a human body, was it truly possible for anyone to react to a projectile that had already reached the tip of his nose and still dodge it by the thickness of a single sheet of paper?
At first he had felt nothing but pure astonishment watching Yujin. Demonstrating physicality that reached the limits of humanity inside a virtual-reality game and actually witnessing such a scene unfold in real life were matters of entirely different weight.
Yet that feeling lasted only a moment. The general director suddenly realized his heart was pounding so hard the sound of it was thundering in his ears.
It could not be helped. Few things in the world made people cheer and go wild quite like coming face-to-face with a talent that shattered common sense.
…Damn it. I should have filmed that scene with a camera!
The regret was crushing. It was utterly lamentable.
If he had captured the moment he had just witnessed and quietly released it as a Nightfall making-of video, he could not even begin to estimate the uproar it would have caused. And as the public frenzy grew, Nightfall’s sales would have skyrocketed right along with it.
No promotion. No advertising. Nothing else would have been needed.
A game featuring a boss monster modeled after someone who had transcended human limits!
There was simply nothing else that could seize people’s attention so completely and make them open their wallets so readily.
Meanwhile, Winter, standing right beside the general director, was staring at Yujin with equally stunned eyes.
Crazy… is this actually something that makes sense?
Winter knew nothing about neuroscience or human reaction speeds or any of that headache-inducing nonsense. She had been a liberal-arts major who had built solid walls against anything scientific from the start.
Even so, she could instinctively tell that what Yujin was demonstrating right before everyone’s eyes was a feat impossible for ordinary people—no, for any human being in this world.
A few months earlier, Yujin—who had returned home after vanishing for five years—had spouted the ridiculous claim that he had actually been a secret agent the whole time. Of course, not a single member of the family had taken that bullshit seriously.
Yet now, watching him like this, Winter found herself entertaining the insane thought that maybe that nonsense had been true after all.
…No, wait. That looks like it’s beyond secret-agent level.
She had roughly pictured someone like Black Widow. But no matter how she looked at it, this was Captain America territory.
What the hell has that guy actually been doing for the past five years?
Just as Winter was staring at him with eyes full of suspicion—
…Hmm. My body’s condition isn’t too bad.
Yujin, savoring the pleasant sensation of moving at full power for the first time in ages, realized the gazes fixed on him felt somehow off and tilted his head.
What? Did I mess something up?
No matter how hard he thought, he could not recall doing anything wrong.
Isn’t this the sort of thing anyone who’s been properly trained can do?
Back when he had trained under the princess in the other world, he had endured far harsher regimens than this. Fighting starved magical beasts for three days inside a pitch-black room packed with blades, or being dropped off a cliff with both arms and legs bound—things of that nature.
Compared to those, a hundred baseballs flying in from every direction was nothing more than child’s play.
In fact, just now he had not even used the tiny scrap of mana still lingering in his body, let alone Uinyeom. He had simply moved with his own senses and the experience carved into his flesh.
“…Is something wrong?”
Unable to endure the heavy silence filling the room any longer, Yujin spoke first. The general director shook his head with desperate vigor.
“N-no, nothing like that. I-it’s just… looking at Sword Master’s results, further tests don’t seem like they’ll accomplish much.”
Everyone else in the room nodded as if in complete agreement. The general director was right. Putting a monster who could dodge balls fired straight at his face by a paper’s thickness through more reaction-speed or dynamic-vision tests would be nothing but a waste of time.
“In that case, we’ll scrap the remaining procedures entirely and begin collecting Sword Master’s combat data in earnest…”
“How exactly do you collect my combat data?”
“It’s simple. You just stand in the middle of a set with multiple cameras rolling and have a proper fight with our stuntmen while holding swords.”
At those words the faces of the gathered stuntmen turned paper-white in an instant.
If they had never seen anything, it might have been different. But they had already witnessed it clearly: the monster wearing a human skin called Sword Master leisurely dodging more than a hundred balls pouring in from every direction as though he were out for a casual stroll.
Fight that guy with nothing but a sword? I’m absolutely not doing it. No—I can’t.
Is this even balanced? I don’t think I can win unless you at least hand me a bazooka…
If I go one-on-one with that person it’s a guaranteed ten-second cut—no, five seconds. If I don’t want to get thoroughly humiliated in front of everyone, the smartest move is to stay perfectly still right here.
Watching the stuntmen desperately avoid meeting Yujin’s eyes, looking anywhere else or pretending to be busy, the general director let out a long sigh. Their behavior was unsightly, yet he could understand their feelings all too well. No one, no matter who they were, wanted to stand in front of an audience and get beaten senseless without even being able to lift a hand or foot.
Just as the general director was agonizing over which unfortunate sacrificial lamb to drag onto the guillotine—
“Um, Director… how about we try it this way instead?”
One staff member opened his mouth and let slip a truly devilish idea.
“Rather than having Soma fight the stuntmen one-on-one, what if we have all the stuntmen fight Soma at once?”
“…What?”
“Soma’s athletic ability and reflexes are so far beyond the norm that the stuntmen seem a bit… overwhelmed. Since things have already come this far, I thought measuring combat data in a many-versus-one format would be more efficient. Better than running multiple separate fights, right?”
It was a Copernican proposal in its purest form: since one-on-one would clearly end in a curb-stomp, why not just dogpile Yujin with the whole group?
Under normal circumstances the director would have snorted and told the man to stop talking nonsense. But with the out-of-spec monster named Yujin standing right in front of him, the suggestion somehow gained a strange persuasiveness.
Yeah… if we do it that way…
Not one-on-one, but if every single one of us jumps in at once, maybe we actually stand a chance?
No matter how much of a monster he is, he’s still only got two hands and two feet. If we all rush him together, how’s he supposed to win?
Watching the stuntmen’s expressions brighten with sudden hope, the general director ultimately made a choice he never should have made.
“All right. Let’s try it that way. It does seem like it would be more effective for collecting Sword Master’s combat data. What does Sword Master think?”
“I’m fine with it. Fighting that way doesn’t sound bad at all.”
Yujin nodded with an easy, unconcerned air, and after that every preparation proceeded at breakneck speed.
Yet among them all, only one person felt a nameless unease as she watched the scene unfold.
Only Winter.
One-on-one was hopeless, so now they were switching to human-wave tactics?
Well… it was a decent strategy on paper. The problem was that the opponent was simply too wrong for it.
Whenever Yujin got involved in anything, common sense stopped applying from that moment onward.
For some reason an old scene from a Marvel hero movie floated up in Winter’s mind. How exactly had the heroes dealt with the swarm of extras charging at them…?
“All right! We’ll begin collecting data in earnest!”
And whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, Winter no longer needed to struggle to recall that movie scene from her memory.
BOOM!
Because she had just witnessed one of the stuntmen who first crossed swords with Yujin go flying through the air like a home-run ball.