Battle Island (2)
The voice chat was a racket.
The player known by the nickname StrongestJunho was running a match with his friends, and with a confident flick of the parachute controls, he touched down lightly on the roof of a house.
It was one of those buildings with no terrace, which meant there wasn’t a proper route from the roof into the second floor. But for someone of his level, sneaking in from a position like this was hardly a challenge.
With a bold movement, he smashed the window and rolled across the floor. A rustling sound came from nearby, telling him that one of his two chosen prey had to be searching the next room over.
Both of them were still undergeared, so if he rushed them now and forced close combat, the fight would be over before it really began.
He’d lost a little HP from the broken glass, but that was just a harmless handicap.
“Oh—lucky!”
Among the items in the room, he found a pistol and grabbed it at once.
A revolver chambered for .44 Magnum rounds.
In terms of single-shot stopping power, it was even stronger than a rifle.
A pistol was usually just a sidearm, not something you relied on as a main weapon, but in an early-game indoor fight like this, it was a perfect tool.
The short range, slow rate of fire, and small magazine barely mattered at all.
If they don’t have a helmet, it’s a headshot. Even if they do, a few body shots will still drop them.
Unless the other player had come in fully kitted out with a ballistic helmet and vest, a Magnum round fired at close range would tear through their life bar in no time.
Smiling as he decided he had this in the bag, StrongestJunho stepped out into the doorway and raised the revolver toward the next room—
Thud!
“Guh!?”
A stiffness shot through his body from the hit to his abdomen. In that instant, the soles of a combat boot filled his vision, drawn in a clean, merciless arc.
“Let’s see. First grab a gun, and then... huh?”
Following his son’s hurried instructions, Yeongho had sprinted up the stairs and started searching the rooms on the second floor.
He had also spotted the four players who were obviously enemies, so he did as the tutorial had taught and combed through the room for anything usable as a weapon.
What he found, though, was nothing but healing bandages, a first-aid kit, assorted ammunition, and a lonely military combat knife lying there by itself.
I’ll have to check the other rooms too.
In Battle Island, a melee weapon became practically meaningless once you’d picked up even a single firearm. Still, for the moment, it was better than going in empty-handed, so he had no choice but to take it.
Crash!
The moment he picked up the combat knife, he heard the sound of glass shattering somewhere nearby.
An enemy? Did one come down from the roof?
Yeongho immediately sensed an enemy in the room next door and tightened his grip on the knife handle.
Fighting a person for the first time made his nerves boil.
Then his hearing and tactile senses spread outward like a net.
This... was this the same sensation I felt in other games too?
The soft tread of footsteps told him exactly where the other player was.
The movement of air against his skin built a fuller, more three-dimensional map of the surrounding space.
It was like having a detector—places outside his field of vision were being carved into his mind with perfect accuracy.
It was the same sensation he’d felt while taking down the raider leader in Escape City.
Thanks to that, he could tell the player next door was coming this way with a pistol in hand.
It’s the same when I play with Seonhui, and I still don’t know what the hell this is... but
For now, it was helping him tremendously, so he’d use it as far as he could.
Moving as quietly as possible, Yeongho approached the door. Then he kicked off the floor and hurled himself outside.
The moment he did, the enemy’s face came into view—
constricted pupils, muscles tightening with tension, the muzzle of the gun turning toward him.
They were only about three meters apart, but the enemy’s trigger finger would move faster than his blade could reach.
At the same instant, Yeongho’s arm snapped out like a whip, and the military combat knife left his hand, shooting through the air like an arrow.
Thud!
“Guh!?”
The throat, the surest vital point, was hidden behind the pistol, so there was no angle to land the strike there.
Instead, the thrown knife drove straight for the solar plexus, another deadly target lower down.
In Battle Island, hitting a vital point didn’t automatically mean instant death. Instead, the character’s life gauge would decrease according to the set damage value.
So if the weapon didn’t have much destructive power, even a pierced vital point might not kill outright.
That said, even in a game, having a blade or bullet tear into your body and reacting like nothing happened would have been too unrealistic.
So the system calculated damage, impact location, and various status effects to inflict a period of stiffness.
Once hit, the body fell into a state where it couldn’t be controlled for a brief moment.
Whoosh—thwack!
Because of that, the enemy couldn’t respond to the follow-up attack and had to take the damage head-on.
The heel, extending smoothly along the turning motion of his twisting waist, struck the knife handle dead on and drove the wound deeper.
It was a clean spinning back kick, like something you’d see from a martial arts fighter.
“Phew. Good thing I took him out before he could shoot.”
Seeing the kill log pop up in the global message feed, Yeongho understood the fight was over and let the tension drain out of his body.
He’d spent a while wondering what to do with his ID, and eventually settled on SJ DAD, using the initials of each of his children’s names. Seeing that name appear in a system message in person made him feel strangely proud—though also a little embarrassed, in a way that made his face itch.
And this weird sensation again... Hmm, I can’t keep calling it weird or strange forever—
Since he couldn’t keep describing it as some vague bizarre feeling, he decided to call it Battle Sense for the time being.
It was a special ability that came out whenever he entered combat.
Either way, it was undeniably useful, though even Yeongho, who knew nothing at all about VR, could tell it wasn’t normal.
It might have been some kind of system error, and the idea that he could be exploiting a bug made him uneasy.
The VR Center? Maybe I should ask them about it. I’ll have to go there anyway if I want to switch to an officially verified account.
The thought of competing with other gamers made him even more certain.
He didn’t want to gain an advantage through dishonest means.
If what was happening now really was abnormal, then he should get it sorted out before it turned into a problem.
Bang! Tr-r-r-r-r-!
“Ah!”
But that was a matter for later.
Snatching up the revolver from the defeated player, Yeongho heard gunfire from below and hurried toward the stairs.
The moment he thought his son might be in danger, his heart began pounding hard, even though he knew it was just a game.
The instant he jumped down the stairs as if throwing himself over the edge, Battle Sense activated, and the situation around him plunged into his mind.
One player was down, on the brink of death, but not dead yet.
Two more players were nearby, though the repeated shock waves of gunfire made their movements hard to read precisely.
When he shifted his sensed vision toward the kitchen a little farther away, he could feel his son crouched in the narrow space behind the refrigerator.
Focusing on that area, he even sensed the motion of his son wrapping a bandage, as if he’d been wounded.
“You bastards!”
How dare they hurt our precious eldest son?
Anger flared hot in his chest, and Yeongho shouted as he raised the revolver toward the enemies.
Then the muzzle flashed.
One shot tore into the temple of the player spraying SMG fire toward the direction where his son was hiding.
One shot struck the eyes of a player who had just begun lifting a shotgun to his shoulder after helping his fallen teammate up.
One shot smashed into the back of the head of the unarmed player crawling along the floor, already at death’s door.
The .44 Magnum rounds, far too brutal for use on a human and more suited to hunting beasts, tore through the space with deafening blasts.
As he wrapped a bandage around his left arm, paralyzed by the gunshot effect, Jaemin listened to the enemies’ voices.
He had successfully stopped the first enemy who came through the door by landing a precise shot and neutralizing him.
But the downed opponent had been unarmed.
Realizing it had been bait, he turned his gun, only to have to duck into cover to avoid the fire from the two players who followed.
Still, I don’t know exactly what happened, but if Dad took one out, then if I can just finish off one more, we might actually have a shot.
A 3-on-2 disadvantage.
He had already brought one enemy to the brink of death, and with help from a teammate, that player would get back up before long.
If he could take down just one more before that happened, and if his father could join at the right moment...
Then maybe this challenge wouldn’t be impossible after all.
He was doing the math and looking for a chance to turn the fight around when—
“You bastards!”
A voice that was both familiar and somehow strangely unfamiliar, higher-pitched than the one in his memories and unlike his father’s usual tone.
It was the sound of his father when he was angry—something Jaemin rarely ever heard.
And then came three gunshots in rapid succession.
“Huh?”
Watching the kill log flash upward in an instant, Jaemin couldn’t hide his disbelief.
He was so stunned that, more than the fact that his father—playing Battle Island for the first time—had wiped out an entire squad by himself, he found himself more distracted by the absurd thought of what kind of sensibility would lead someone to choose a username like that.
“Son, are you okay?”
“Ye-yeah, uh... yes.”
That’s our dad... right?
But how?
Caught in the contradiction between what he knew and what he was seeing, Jaemin felt utterly disoriented. He took his father’s outstretched hand and let himself be pulled to his feet, still wearing a dazed expression.
—