If I Get Hit, I'll Eat Shit
Bzzzzz—
“Ugh….”
A vibration buzzed nearby and I slowly cracked my eyes open. Being dragged out of sleep like that left a faint throb behind my temples.
Bzzzz—
I lay there dazed until the buzzing came again. When I turned my head, a thin ribbon of light was leaking up from the drawer right beside me.
“Hello….”
I half-sat up and just stretched out an arm, hooked the phone with my fingertips, and hit accept. The second I started lifting it toward my ear—
“Hey, where the hell are you right now!”
The sudden shout made me scrunch my brow. That middle-schooler-level yell could only belong to one person… Heukrangi.
“Me…?”
“Who else is on this call besides you and me!”
“Where do you think I am… home, obviously… Why? Are you coming over…? Are we already at the stage where we exchange addresses…? Feels a little early for that….”
I tilted my head and reached for the water glass sitting on the drawer.
Gulp gulp—
“I’m not trying to show up at your place, you idiot! The tournament starts in a little bit! You absolute dumbass—!”
“What!?”
I jolted upright and frantically checked the phone screen. The moment I saw the time, I froze solid.
5:25 PM
“……Huh?”
My brain just… stopped working.
If I remembered right, the Swiss stage group assignments and bracket draw were at five, and the tournament itself kicked off an hour after that.
Which meant I had all of thirty-five minutes left.
“Uh, uh… s-sorry…! I—I set like dozens of alarms a minute apart, I swear…! Th-this piece-of-shit phone…!”
“Save the excuses for later and just get your ass in here! We’re panicking!”
“Um, this might sound weird right now… but I feel kind of gross. Can I shower first?”
“……You crazy bitch. Do whatever you want.”
The call cut off right there.
“Hmm….”
I scratched my cheek and looked back and forth between the bathroom and the computer. Then I reached a conclusion.
“She said do whatever I want, so….”
Shower time…!
Ding—
“Hey, you absolute lunatic…! What the hell took you so long?”
The second I joined voice chat, Heukrangi exploded. I chewed my lip.
“W-well… H-Heukrangi told me to handle it myself… so I showered first….”
Which is why I was currently silky-smooth and fluffy.
“Wow, are you actually insane…? You think that’s what that meant? Have you never done social life before?”
“I haven’t… Back in school I just sat alone in the corner, and after the orphanage I only ever did day labor…?”
“Uh….”
Heukrangi stammered at that.
“G-good job… Y-you lived well….”
“Th-thank you…?”
“Bullet. Turn your stream on first. You have to be live to enter the tournament.”
“O-okay….”
Just like Aura advised, I went live first.
Surprisingly, the chat wasn’t drowning in pure hate. A few people were clearly seething, though. Probably my teammates’ viewers.
“Th-thank you for the ten-thousand-won donation…!”
I shot up from my chair and bowed over and over, then sat back down and opened my mouth. I needed to clear this up first.
“W-wait, wait…! I get that everyone’s mad…!”
I thrust both hands toward the camera in a “whoa whoa~” calming pose.
“But think about this coldly… W-who’s the biggest powerhouse on our team…?”
“You?”
“Bullet, right?”
“It’s Bullet!”
“Obviously Bullet!!”
My teammates answered one after another. I felt weirdly proud…!
“R-right? Realistically I make up fifty percent of our team’s strength… no, sixty… no, seventy… no!? Eighty percent. That’s me….”
“Your confidence is fucking disgusting….”
Heukrangi sniped, but I ignored it completely.
“Since I’m eighty percent of the roster, my condition has to be perfect, right…? That’s why I deliberately showered first. Call it a ritual purification….”
“A shower improves your condition?”
“I-it does for me…. After a warm shower I get all sleepy and relaxed, stress melts away, fatigue just dissolves anddddd…….”
“…You’re not melting right now, are you?”
“Tsk— n-no…!”
I hurriedly wiped the drool that had escaped the corner of my mouth. I’d almost fallen asleep on the spot. That would’ve been a full-blown disaster.
“I-I’ll go grab an energy drink….”
I pulled an energy drink from the fridge, dumped a handful of ice into a glass, and scrambled back to the computer.
“Alright… s-so who’s our opponent today?”
“Wow, she asks so fast. So damn fast.”
“Right?”
I heard Heukrangi sigh. Why all of a sudden? Was she getting nervous with the match right around the corner?
“The team we’re facing in round one is Peep Punch.”
Gulp gulp—
I downed some energy drink and opened my mouth.
“I-I don’t know if I should say this, but just from the name they sound like absolute trash…?”
Were we about to start the first round with a clean win!?
“They’re a top-eight caliber team with a sixty-four percent win rate.”
“Ah… so it’s not Peep Punch, it’s Phoenix Punch….”
I threw out the joke while carefully reading the room. My teammates said absolutely nothing.
My face burned hot.
“My mood just tanked….”
“Ky-kyaruruk kyaruruk….”
“Th-that’s actually hilarious…!”
The forced laughter made it even more miserable.
“S-still, sixty-four percent doesn’t sound impossible… W-we’ve beaten teams like that before, right…?”
“Look at this bitch changing the subject. You embarrassed?”
“……If you already know, just shut up and move on.”
“Got it~”
“Fucking bitch….”
Heukrangi’s snickering came through the headset. I bit my lip hard.
“But calling a sixty-four percent team ‘doable’… we’ve only taken set wins, never a full match win, right?”
“Except for Gaemangchi’s team, yeah, most of them went that way. And even that win felt kind of iffy….”
Aura and Momoru chimed in.
“Ah, um… this just popped into my head… What happened to Gaemangchi’s team…? Did they drop out of the tournament…?”
“Nope. From what I heard they actually met up, settled it with a Yacha Rule brawl, then sat down for pork soup and soju and dumped every single complaint they had.”
“F-for real?”
“Yep. After that their win rate jumped past fifty percent. Surprisingly, people are rating them as a solid round-of-thirty-two team now.”
What the hell.
I couldn’t even process that plotline. That sounded like something out of a Russian mafia story.
“Th-that’s wild….”
“Right?”
“Anyway, shouldn’t we start thinking about how we’re going to play this match?”
“Ah, yeah we should….”
I’d completely forgotten after that bombshell.
“So… what’s the map for round one?”
“Crystal Mining Area.”
“That’s a shame….”
We’d been scrimming mainly on Black Crystal Tower and Red Outpost.
Both maps revolved around barrier fights and holding the frontline, so practice efficiency was high. Plus nothing beat them for building chemistry.
“But of all things it had to be Crystal Mining Area….”
“We got hard-countered on both the bracket and the map pool, I’m telling you. When the initial matchups and stage assignments dropped I genuinely thought Peanut Man had been bribed.”
“What are their most-played heroes?”
“Sending them now.”
A full list of the enemy team’s most-played heroes flooded the voice chat. One look and I knew exactly what kind of team they were.
“They keep poking the flanks and backline to collapse the front. Especially specialized in harassing healers.”
Everything else looked standard, but their DPS duo was a little unique.
One of them only played Hagane Shinya. The other only played Astra. Both were secondary DPS with absurd mobility.
Astra feels a bit much for low ranks, doesn’t it?
Astra.
A utility damage hero whose main weapons were dual Cosmos pistols. She borrowed the mysterious power of the cosmos to leap through space and rewind time.
Low health, but ridiculously hard to pin down. Her nickname was “cosmic gnat.”
“We’re fine, but Bullet and Momoru are going to take a lot of pressure.”
Just looking at the hero picks made that obvious.
“I just checked some VODs. They snipe the healers first, collapse the pillar, then mop up whoever’s left. They love assassination plays.”
I tilted my head at Heukrangi’s words.
“They mainly do assassination…?”
“Yeah. Tons of clips of Shinya and Astra looping around the side or back, deleting only the healers, then dipping.”
“Uh… that seems kind of weird though…?”
“Why?”
“W-well… a-assassination only works if the other side doesn’t know it’s coming, right…? But if they already know… hmm….”
I paused for a beat, then spoke again.
“I-I don’t know if I should say this… but if you know it’s coming and still get hit… th-that just means the person who got hit is a d-dumbass, doesn’t it…?”
“Are you saying every team that lost to Peep Punch is a bunch of dumbasses!?”
“N-no, I mean… th-that wasn’t exactly the intent… j-just that getting hit seems weird…? If you use your brain you shouldn’t get hit, right?”
“So you’re saying every team that lost to Peep Punch is a brainless dumbass!?”
“I-I won’t deny it….”
I cleared my throat awkwardly.
“Then are you confident you won’t get hit? Absolutely? From start to finish? The whole way?”
“Yes… I-I’m confident….”
“For real!?”
“Y-yeah… b-but why is Heukrangi the one interrogating me…? W-we’re on the same team, right…?”
“Because I don’t want to go down with you? I’m running damage control.”
“Ahh… but you’ve already been to hell a few times, so why are you this scared….”
“You fucking bitch.”
“But Bullet. You really need to be careful. It’s already out there so nothing we can do now, but from next time don’t say such strong things.”
“Hmm….”
“If you talk that big and then get hit the exact same way, that’s an instant burial show.”
Aura gave me some advice. It was genuinely kind of her, but there was something they didn’t know.
“I-it’s fine… I really, truly, no matter what happens, will never get hit….”
“And if you do get hit?”
“I-if I get hit….”
I looked at the status window floating in front of my eyes and continued.
Ver 0.1 → 0.2
> Injecting New Module...
> Module Detected : WALL HACK Lv.01
> Status : ACTIVE ! ! ! ! !
“I-I’ll eat shit….”
Of course, that would never happen.
Because they couldn’t hit me.