Five Rounds That Decide Human Rights

“All right, all right! Settle down already. You know there’s no way to check it right now anyway, right?”

At Choi Pinam’s words, the viewers’ excitement cooled a little.

He wasn’t wrong. In the game, there was no way to tell how many meters the shot he’d just fired had actually covered.

Only after the match ended and the full record appeared could they click into the kill log’s detailed view and check the weapon used, the bullet type, the hit location, and the shot distance.

“We still need to finish the game first, so Hyeong-nim, hurry up and move!”

“Right. We have to go... uh, we have to go...”

With the radioactive spread moving at an unusually rapid pace, it seemed a lot of players had been caught by surprise.

Of the survivors left, only five remained besides the two of them.

It was about time they headed for the safe zone themselves.

And yet, seeing Yeongho hesitate like that, Choi Pinam stared at him in confusion before his jaw dropped.

“No way. Is it because of the gun right now?”

“Haha...”

His hands were still clutching the Karchenko, but his eyes never left the Winchester he’d set down.

Watching Yeongho unable to bring himself to take another step, Choi Pinam slapped a hand to his forehead in disbelief.

Yeongho, who had fallen into a full-blown dilemma, glanced at the chat for a moment.

“Oh, come on, we really need to head down already, Hyeong-nim!”

Under Choi Pinam’s repeated urging, Yeongho finally squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the Karchenko into his arms.

And before all the chat reactions praising the rational choice had even fully appeared, Yeongho tossed aside the pistol he’d been carrying as a sidearm and snatched up the Winchester instead.

Normally, players carried two guns, a main weapon and a sidearm.

So choosing to use both the Karchenko and the Winchester was, in every sense, an absurd setup that would never come up in a normal situation. The chat was instantly plastered with laughter, and the stream chat began flying by like it had lost its mind.

“...Fine. Let’s go with that. Let’s go!”

“Yes. I’m sorry for wasting so much time.”

Choi Pinam looked like he had a lot more to say, but he gave up on stopping him, shaking his head as he headed down the stairs.

Following behind him, Yeongho carried a sniper rifle in each hand and moved forward with awkward steps, his balance off enough to make him look strangely unsteady.

* * *

Thwump—!

A heavy gunshot rang out, and the last remaining player collapsed to the ground.

There were no surprises.

The remaining enemies had been few to begin with, and they’d already secured a favorable position ahead of time.

Even with the bizarre setup of running nothing but two sniper rifles, Yeongho still delivered a performance more than enough to carry the game to victory.

“Wow, that was somehow a short match that still felt long, wasn’t it? Maybe because there were so many kills?”

Yeongho and Choi Pinam’s duo had set a ridiculous record, racking up more than forty kills between them.

Normally, numbers like that would have shocked everyone, but the viewers’ attention was focused on something else entirely.

Everyone was dying to know whether the 2-kilometer snipe had actually succeeded.

Yeongho manipulated the record window, selected the kill log from that moment, and checked the detailed entry.

Skipping over the unimportant information, his eyes landed on a single line.

The mission-complete alert rang out, and the chat plunged into a boiling frenzy of excitement.

Yeongho, who hadn’t expected much from a task that wasn’t even certain to succeed, checked the result and grinned in delight.

“Now that I’ve tried it, I guess it really is possible. Thanks for the great mission, BearScratches. Thanks to you, I got to feel the real kick of sniping, and overall it was a really fun match.”

The viewer who had set the mission made a cool response, along with a fairly hefty donation.

Just from one big spender alone, Yeongho had already received 11,000 coins.

When he added in the smaller amounts that had piled up every time something amazing happened, the total he’d earned from a single game had already crossed 15,000 coins.

Even after the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠platform’s cut, that was more than one million won.

Considering this was his very first broadcast, it was an absurdly good earning record.

When he checked the viewer count, the number that had hovered around two thousand had already climbed past three thousand.

Before they signed the contract, Choi Pinam had told Yeongho that he’d catch up to him within a month and then some.

At this rate, it wouldn’t take a month. It looked like he could establish himself at a comparable level in a single day.

Of course, he still had to hold on to those viewers and keep drawing in new ones.

But if he went by the game skill he was showing and the way the audience was reacting, it didn’t look like a temporary flash. If anything, he seemed more likely to grow bigger than to fall off.

“All right, let’s keep this momentum going and jump into the next round too!”

As everyone basked in the pleasant high, Choi Pinam shouted with full energy and hit matchmaking again.

Strike while the iron was hot. He wanted to keep the atmosphere this good and carry the stream forward without letting it cool.

Before long, the queue popped, and the two of them were transported to a new battlefield.

* * *

After the first match, they played two more in a row and managed to keep up a perfect three-win streak in placement matches.

By then, the viewers had started talking more and more about what rank the two of them would land after placements.

The first five ranked matches were called placement matches, and they determined a player’s starting tier.

Every player began with 1,000 rank points by default, and the tier from 1,000 to 1,499 was Bronze, the lowest class.

From there, every 500 points moved a player upward through Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and then Diamond.

That naming system was common in games that used tier-based ranking, so anyone who had played even a little would have found it familiar.

Normally, a player would gain around forty-something points for a win in ranked play.

Even if they didn’t win, as long as they didn’t die without doing anything, the points gained were usually greater than the points lost.

Placement matches were an exception, though.

The game didn’t display anything until all five were complete, but the winning bonus was estimated to be at least 200 points.

It was a system meant to push players quickly toward the tier that matched their skill, so the point allocation was very different from a normal game.

For that reason, countless gamers treated placement matches like a life-or-death ordeal.

“Ah, this one was satisfying too!”

“I almost feel bad for the other players because we won so easily.”

“Hold on now! What are you saying? For ecological pests like us, the polite thing is to post the best possible results and rise as quickly as we can!”

The viewers weren’t wrong.

The basic factors affecting rank points were kills and assists.

On top of that, depending on how much influence the game’s AI evaluation system believed a player had on the match, there were additional gains or losses.

Usually, if an account doing its first ranking run somehow managed to go 5-for-5 in placements, it would land somewhere in the lower end of Gold.

To earn upper Gold points, they’d need to average around ten kills per match and outperform the other players.

You could have one standout game where you did amazingly well, but posting more than twenty kills every single match was a number that was hard to believe.

If they won all five placement matches at this pace, the consensus was that Platinum would be easy.

“There are plenty of gamers who’ve spent six or seven years on Battle Island and still never hit Platinum, but Hyeong-nim’s going to make Platinum from the start? Kkhhhehheh!”

“Is that... a good thing?”

“Pfft! Yes, well. It is good, I guess. Though for us, it’s just a stepping stone on the way up!”

Seeing Yeongho ask so innocently, as if he truly didn’t know anything, Choi Pinam let out a laugh and rubbed his face.

Man, there were definitely some people out there getting personally offended by this.

For a complete beginner to land in Platinum through placements was, by itself, newsworthy enough to blow up the relevant communities.

And yet everyone was already talking as if Platinum was a foregone conclusion, which only showed how monstrous Yeongho’s performance was in their eyes.

The class name changed every 500 points, but within each tier there were also subtiers from 5 to 1 in 100-point increments.

The closer the number got to 1, the higher the tier.

Simply being assigned Platinum 5 in the first placement match would already have been impressive.

But the viewers were now chattering that Yeongho might reach Platinum 4, or maybe even Platinum 3, which would be the first record of its kind in Korea.

Just as curiosity over the placement results had driven the viewers’ interest higher and higher, Yeongho gave an awkward smile and opened his mouth.

“Um. Everyone, I’m sorry, but...”

“It’s about time for dinner, so...”

At the hint that the broadcast might be ending, the chat exploded like a volcano.

It wasn’t the best timing, but there was nothing he could do.

The only weakness of his ability to unleash superhuman power inside VR was this: mental fatigue made it impossible to keep playing for too long.

I think I could maybe squeeze in one more match. Still, this is probably the right point to stop.

In Battle Island, after about three matches, his head started to feel heavy.

By now he was somewhat used to it, so he could manage, but when he’d done joint streams before, his fatigue had peaked after only two matches.

Of course, from the perspective of someone aiming to become a full-time broadcaster, a short stream time was a serious weakness.

Three game matches came out to just a little over two hours.

Compared with the four-to-five-hour average of streamers who had started making a name for themselves, it was an unavoidably ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠short window.

Which was why...

“Ah, no, this isn’t the end of the stream. That would be way too disappointing, wouldn’t it?”

He had a solution prepared for that too.

---