Overwhelming Presence
[Name: SJ DAD]
[Kill Score: 16]
[K/D: Perfect]
[Headshot Rate: 67.8%]
[Pointshot Rate: 92.8%]
“That’s insane...”
“Hm? What did you say?”
“Oh, no. Are you going to keep going?”
“Hah, this is fun. If Jaemin’s okay with it, should we do one more round?”
“Y-yes... I’ll queue us up.”
Yeongho and Jaemin had turned a four-man squad’s attack back on them, then calmly finished looting without a hitch.
After that, they kept wiping out every squad they ran into, one after another, and in the end the two of them took first place with an excellent combined total of 24 kills.
As he chatted with his father, who somehow looked like he was in an unusually good mood, Jaemin casually turned his gaze back to the profile of the team member he had just been watching.
Whose profile it was went without saying.
Kill score: 16.
The kill score shown on a profile was a cumulative stat that recorded every match a player had ever played, but this was his father’s very first time touching the game at all.
In other words, he had taken down sixteen people on his own in a single match.
Of course, that was impressive enough—after all, it meant he had personally dropped 16 out of 100 players.
Still, Jaemin himself could rack up a dozen kills or more when he went into public matches and stomped weaker players, so it wasn’t exactly a record that should have left him completely floored.
Then there was the K/D score: Perfect.
It was the stat that showed how many kills a player averaged per death, a measure of their exchange rate in battle.
In his own case, his K/D sat in the six-point range, but since his father hadn’t died even once yet, the number was replaced with the word Perfect.
Even that, someone could argue, was nothing special—sure, you could clear one match without dying and get a Perfect label.
No matter how skilled you were, the more matches you played, the more your chances of maintaining that Perfect status would inevitably drop.
Jaemin couldn’t really argue with that, either.
But the real problem starts after this.
Headshot rate: 67.8 percent.
Exactly what it sounded like—the percentage of shots that struck the head, the body’s most vulnerable point.
Even players who gave up rate of fire and used only high-damage, single-shot weapons had never seen a ratio that broke 60 percent.
To put it more accurately, even among pro gamers, the players known for having an especially sharp eye for headshots were only around the 30 percent mark, if they even made it that far.
Of course, this was only a one-match record, and he had been using a revolver that fired single shots, so the number was at least possible.
It wasn’t something that could be compared to players who had run hundreds or thousands of games.
If his father used something like a submachine gun or a light machine gun next round, it wouldn’t be strange if the number got cut to a quarter of what it was.
In fact, the average headshot rate among Battle Island players didn’t even reach 10 percent.
But the thing that was really ridiculous wasn’t the headshots.
Pointshot rate: 92.8 percent.
Pointshots referred to hits on vital areas—head included, but also the neck, heart, and other critical points—and they increased damage, of course, while also carrying extra weight for status effects like bleeding and stagger.
Even if a target wore body armor, striking a vital point would rapidly degrade the armor’s durability, so the higher the pointshot rate, the stronger the case that the player was a genuine monster.
How is 92.8 even possible?
It was a number that made him doubt his own eyes.
Even if it was only one match, it was still absurd.
Battle Island was a VR game that came close to real combat, so even a regular shooting accuracy rate above 90 percent would already be freakishly good.
There were situations where you fired just to suppress an enemy you couldn’t see, so even professionals who lived and breathed guns would struggle to keep their accuracy above 90 percent.
And yet every single one of those shots wasn’t just a hit, but a hit to a vital point?
Isn’t that impossible no matter which pro you drag in from BAE Pro?
By all common sense, yes.
But there were moments in this world when things happened that people had once dismissed as completely impossible.
Maybe his father—an ordinary man, an amateur—had somehow stacked coincidence upon coincidence and, through a miraculous chain of events, produced this astonishing result.
Jaemin tried his best to rationalize it that way.
“Oh! Jaemin, we got a queue!”
“Okay. I guess we can check it out after we go in this round.”
“Huh?”
If this was an unreal record born from luck alone, then as the number of matches increased, it would eventually settle toward the average.
Deciding to see just how far this went before he called it real, Jaemin widened his eyes and followed after his father’s back.
* * *
“No, no—this is seriously ridiculous, I’m telling you.”
Excited, Choi Pinam slammed the desk with both hands and argued with his viewers.
“For all this time, the hidden boss in Chapter 2 was only beatable by using the special terrain in the abandoned warehouse, right? That’s because everyone thought it didn’t have any weak point you could hit with a gun.”
“But look here. The moment the boss finished mutating and rushed in!”
Watching the chat roll in, Choi Pinam zoomed in tightly on the boss’s body.
The cursor moved around for a moment, then stopped at one spot.
“See here? You can feel the difference from the other scales, right?”
“I ran the clip a few times and figured it out. I don’t have the raw video data, so I can’t say for sure, but there’s definitely a place where the scales part and leave a gap like that.”
Amid the uproar in chat, the video played at normal speed and the shooting sequence continued.
“All right, all right! This next shot is where the weak point really shows itself.”
A man rushed toward the boss, which staggered after the barrage.
Then the video paused again on another burst of gunfire.
The enlarged footage revealed the existence of a hole peeking through the gap between the parted scales.
It looked like nothing more than a tiny circle, maybe one to two centimeters across at most.
“See? You all saw it, right? This is GodFather-nim’s brand-new strategy for Increase Hand. Of course, I have no idea how many people can actually pull this off.”
Even after the method was laid bare, not a single person said they would try it.
At that point, it almost felt like the boss hadn’t been designed for players to conquer it at all, but rather as little more than an easter egg weak spot.
Since it was effectively impossible to bring down by targeting the weak point alone, it was reasonable to conclude that the abandoned factory route was the proper path for ordinary players.
On the flip side, that only proved how absurd the player in the video’s skill really was.
“So, today’s content! There haven’t been many fun games lately, so let’s fire up Escape City again after a while. I’ll carry on GodFather-nim’s will!”
In truth, the title of GodFather was something the viewers had come up with on their own.
But since the other party was an ordinary man with absolutely no public presence, there was no other name to call him by, so Choi Pinam had no choice but to use it too.
“Chapter 2 hidden boss. I’m going to crack it myself with GodFather-nim’s strategy!”
At Choi Pinam’s declaration, his loyal fans began stacking missions one by one.
Converted to won, the total climbed in an instant to more than one million.
Nice response. If I clear the mission, the donations will pour in too, and if I upload this to YouTube, it’s going to be delicious money.
Thanks to that, it looked like he’d be able to squeeze real profit out of a single strategy video.
Of course, he didn’t have the confidence to just copy the original with a pistol in hand, like the man in the video had done.
He intended to build his own version, using his own know-how to make something distinct from the original.
The important thing is that the weak point exists. I’ll make a cleaner, easier guide that other players can actually follow, gear everyone up properly, and go from there. But that’s separate from this...
Choi Pinam subtly turned his eyes toward one side of the screen.
The DM window where he had sent a message to someone else came into view.
Looks like she still hasn’t read it. I want to do something with them before some other guy pokes at her first.
The DM he’d sent to Ddororing, a streamer on the same platform.
It was a co-stream proposal aimed at her father, who had appeared as a guest.
He was sure it would be a good opportunity for both of them, so he didn’t think there was any chance she’d refuse.
But since she hadn’t even opened the message yet, he couldn’t help feeling a little restless.
“Hey, why are you all so impatient? I’m turning it on now, so chill!”
He figured the moment she checked the proposal, a response would come right away.
So Choi Pinam forced down his impatience and, following the chat that waited for him, launched Escape City.
* * *
[Name: SJ DAD]
[Kill Score: 45]
[K/D: Perfect]
[Headshot Rate: 61.9%]
[Pointshot Rate: 90.4%]
No, seriously, this makes no sense...
Jaemin stared blankly at the profile stats, and Yeongho’s voice reached him.
“Jaemin?”
“...Yes?”
“Should we stop soon? I’m starting to feel a little dizzy.”
“Ah, yes... Since you’re not used to VR, I used to get motion sickness at first too.”
“Really? Anyway, playing like this with my son makes it feel even more fun. We can do it again next time, right?”
“Y-yeah, of course. Next time, we can play again... haha, yes.”
Jaemin gave an awkward laugh, then glanced once more at his father’s record before ending the game.
It had dipped a little after three straight rounds, but the numbers were still unbelievable.
But apart from the sheer shock of it, a thought that had been nagging at him suddenly made his chest feel heavy.
“Haah...”
He had once dreamed of becoming a pro gamer.
Following that dream, Jaemin had set himself goals in stages.
He would reach the highest tier in Rewer.
He would prove his potential in matches against top-ranked players and receive an offer to go pro.
Then he would use that as proof to persuade his parents and win their acceptance of his future as a professional gamer.
And yet, now that he had sat beside his father and watched him produce a result like this on his very first day playing VR games...
Could I really make numbers like that, even if I tried as hard as I possibly could?
He had sworn he would reach his goal no matter what, but now his confidence had begun to waver.
Facing such an overwhelming result, he looked back at himself and could only feel small.
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