The Final Match (2)
Bang!
The head of the enemy with the bullet lodged in his forehead snapped back hard.
But he didn’t die instantly.
All four members of the opposing team were wearing ballistic helmets, and two of them were also equipped with body armor.
There’s way too much of a farming gap here.
Was this another one of the organizers’ tricks?
If it was this blatant, he could have cried foul and accused them of rigging the drop rates, but he didn’t really feel like making a scene.
Honestly, compared to nudging the drop odds a little, his own abilities were closer to a cheat code anyway.
It was basically the same as using hacks legally, so he could laugh off little nonsense like this.
Maybe they’d decided that after he’d dominated two matches in a row in such absurd fashion, they had to do something like this just to keep the balance from collapsing completely.
Either way, as always, if one shot wasn’t enough, he’d handle it with two.
Bang!
Before the body could even snap back from the recoil, the second bullet drilled up through the enemy’s jaw.
One down.
He’d taken out the player with the assault rifle first.
With his superhuman perception, he could dodge most attacks, but a weapon that sprayed rounds in bursts was still dangerous.
Whoosh— bang!
Next came a sniper round aimed at his torso; he twisted at the waist and let it slide past, then a pistol shot drove toward his chest, which he avoided by bending his knees and throwing his body sideways.
His stance was already collapsing from dodging two shots almost at once, but even then, the revolver in his hand never lost sight of its next prey.
Bang!
“Ghk!”
The shotgunner, with a bullet punching clean through his throat, toppled forward.
Even so, just before he hit the ground in a hip-fire posture, the enemy still managed to pull the trigger.
Despite Yeongho’s evasive movement, one of the widely scattered pellets still managed to strike him.
Because of damage falloff at range, it barely scratched his life bar.
But even so, for a tiny fraction of a second, he was still forced into a brief stagger.
It just happened to hit his leg, leaving his lower body weak and making his momentum carry him forward.
Rather than wasting strength and time trying to correct his balance, he simply rolled with it, hit the floor, and settled into a seated firing position.
Bang!
Normally, the structure of the neck meant a ballistic helmet couldn’t cover it, but since this was a game, some damage reduction still applied.
So before the shotgunner could get back up after surviving the first shot, Yeongho put a bullet straight into his head and finished him off completely.
Bang! Bang-!
At the same time, two pistol rounds came flying in at rapid intervals.
Since they weren’t aimed shots so much as desperate sprays in the general direction, one bullet veered completely off course, but the other, by sheer luck, headed straight for Yeongho’s head.
Damn.
Yeongho clicked his tongue inwardly and, instead of dodging, spread his left hand to shield his head.
A faint sting pricked his palm as his life force dropped a little.
He could have avoided it, but he’d chosen to block with his hand because if he lost his stance again, it would be harder to respond to the sniper round that would come next.
He thrust the revolver out from under his raised left arm and pulled the trigger twice in quick succession.
Bang! Bang!
The first shot sniped the sniper’s bullet out of the air and deflected it, while the second buried itself in the chest of the player with the pistol.
“Screw— ah, this is so unfairrrr!”
While the sniper screamed in a face full of wounded grievance, Yeongho had already emptied the cylinder and was spinning it to reload the empty chambers.
Click. Click-click.
He was certain he wouldn’t miss, so three rounds were enough.
While he reloaded, the pistol user kept frantically firing, but not a single round hit Yeongho before the magazine ran dry.
“You freaking— just let me—!”
“I can’t— I can’t do thisss—!”
In the slowed-down flow of time, their screams sounded so pitiful that he almost felt bad for them.
He did feel a little sorry, so he might as well let them rest quickly.
Bang!
And to the sniper, who seemed to have given up entirely and tossed aside his rifle, he finished the job with two shots to the vital points.
“Huuuh...”
Once the fight was over and the tension drained away, time resumed its normal flow, and a slight wave of exhaustion washed over him.
Of course, he wasn’t so tired that he couldn’t move yet, so after catching his breath, he quickly looted the corpses and gathered what he needed.
The others... yeah, things aren’t looking great.
He’d deliberately stopped paying attention to the team voice chat and the party UI while focusing on the battle.
But when he looked back after it was over, Dokgo Jun was already dead, and the other two didn’t seem to be in much better shape.
The first two matches had been bizarre enough, but if they were the second-place team, their skill clearly wasn’t lacking.
It was only natural that three people would struggle to hold out.
If the gear were at least even, maybe things would be different.
Looking at the state of his own team’s loadout, he couldn’t help suspecting, with perfectly reasonable doubt, that the organizers had been meddling with the other side too.
“We’re done here, so I’m moving to you guys.”
He figured he should get back before any of his teammates died if he could help it, so Yeongho hurried his steps.
* * *
“Holy shit, seriously! Why the hell do they have full gear over there?”
“This is cheating, nyong!”
While Dokgo Jun and Kumonyong were loudly denouncing the organizers after seeing the opposing team show up with guns as a baseline and body armor on some of them too, Choi Pinam was seriously trying to figure out how to turn this mess around.
The gear gap is too huge. At this rate, we might not even hold out until Hyeong-nim gets here...
After a moment’s thought, Choi Pinam shook his head and changed his mind.
No. Coming this far and relying only on Hyeong-nim would be embarrassing.
He might have ridden other people’s backs to climb the tiers, as everyone liked to say, but he still believed he’d pulled his weight at least a little.
But once matchmaking put Crown against Ace, he’d been dying in almost every game and dragging Yeongho down with him.
It was true that duo squads were harder than normal matchmaking, but even so, the gap between him and Yeongho was simply too severe to make excuses for.
Hyeong-nim says I’m still doing fine, but... honestly, I know better than anyone that I’m way too lacking.
He didn’t want to just rationalize it away by telling himself that merely keeping up this far was already good enough.
He’d long ago accepted his own limits, and because he couldn’t bring himself to stand at the top, he’d given up on ever becoming a pro.
But these days, after playing with that brother of his, he kept having these little moments where he wondered whether he could have done even a little better.
Back then, he’d thought that if endless effort could only make him progress by a speck of dust, then struggling any further was inefficient and ugly, so he’d quit.
But lately, that speck of dust had started to feel unbearably precious.
And then, all at once, he understood.
I really do enjoy playing games with this brother.
He might not dare stand shoulder to shoulder with him, but if he could at least chase after his back, then he wanted to keep team-playing with him for one more match, and then one more after that.
And if that’s going to happen, then I need to prove myself too.
From the friendship he’d built after seeing the impossible physical talent of a man who didn’t look remotely believable as an older guy...
to a feeling that had become, before he knew it, something like fandom, or admiration, or whatever else one wanted to call it...
and because he still couldn’t quite let go of his own personal greed as a streamer...
“Who do you think I am?”
Choi Pinam muttered under his breath and moved to show a better side of himself.
It didn’t matter whether the target of that display was the viewers, that inhuman brother of his, or even himself.
He charged the enemies closing in to encircle them and sprayed shotgun fire across their ranks.
He controlled the recoil and tried to land as many pellets as possible, but of course it still wasn’t enough damage to drop anyone outright.
So he drew their attention, slipped out of their line of fire, and took cover behind an old pillar.
Rat-a-tat-tat! Bang! Bang!
A concentrated barrage tore into the spot where Choi Pinam had hidden, sending wooden splinters flying everywhere.
He was hidden well enough, but the pillar was in such bad shape that stray rounds still clipped him now and then, shaving down his life bar little by little.
“Jun-hyung! Rush them! Kumonyong! Over here!”
“What kind of rush is that!?”
“Eek, if I go out now I feel like I’ll just die, nyong!”
“Hurry!”
The two of them were baffled by the strange order, but they’d given him command authority, so they had to follow through with tears in their eyes.
“Yaaah!”
Dokgo Jun charged at the enemies with a mattock held out in front of him.
You filthy bourgeois bastards, hoarding all the gear for yourselves like that!
Feel the rage of the poor farmers!
Rat-a-tat! Bang! Bang!
“Ghk! Damn it! Ahh!”
The muzzles that had been trained on Choi Pinam swung around and spat fire instead.
Somehow, this situation felt weirdly familiar.
With a strange sense of déjà vu, he laid Dokgo Jun down miserably on the cold floor.
Meanwhile, while Dokgo Jun drew their attention, Choi Pinam burst out from behind the pillar.
He fired several shots from his shotgun at the enemies and moved to meet Kumonyong, who was running toward him.
“Eep!?”
But despite having no heavy load and running with nothing but her own body...
Kumonyong, all by herself, tangled her own feet and face-planted into the ground.
Choi Pinam, having finished reloading with deft hands mid-run, hauled her back up and then yanked her straight into his arms.
“Eek!? W-wait, what ar—”
“Hold on tight!”
“Hoeeh!?”
Still too flustered to form a proper sentence, she reflexively obeyed the command and tightened her arms around Choi Pinam’s shoulders.
What in the world was happening right now?
This was being streamed live—what was she supposed to do if he pulled something like this in front of tens of thousands of viewers?
But wait, what was with those muscles? They were rock solid!
Did this guy like me?
Still, wasn’t he being a little too reckless for someone who understood streaming this well?
His face wasn’t my type, but his shoulders are really broad.
I wonder if I could just reach back and touch that rugged back once?
“Graaah!?”
Just then, Kumonyong let out an utterly unladylike scream as a sudden ache shot through her from behind.
That was because Choi Pinam, still hugging her, had charged straight at the enemy front line.
Dozens of bullets hammered into Kumonyong’s back and even down to her hips, hitting every part they could reach.
“Aagh! W-wait, what!? It hurts, nyoook—!”
Kumonyong was a tiny, cute streamer with a sweet face that made her popular.
Because she weighed far less than other adult women, even Choi Pinam’s broad frame had no trouble carrying her while sprinting.
Thanks to the fact that he was wearing a level-one ballistic helmet and using a surprisingly good shield(?), Choi Pinam managed to close the distance to the enemy without taking major damage and unleashed a shotgun barrage.
Since it was a sawed-off shotgun with excellent portability that could be handled with one hand, it shone brilliantly in a situation like this no matter how wide the spread was.
In an instant, two enemies went down, and the others looked stunned.
Watching the remaining enemies frantically go through reload animations after emptying their magazines, Choi Pinam tossed aside the shotgun in his hand and charged with everything he had.
He was out of ammo too, and if he just stood around reloading like they were, there’d be no way out of this.
“I’m Choi Pinam!”
With Kumonyong’s dangling legs draped over his shoulder like a corpse, he gripped them tightly with both arms and shouted with authority as he slammed his shield(?) into the enemy who was hurriedly reloading.
Smack!
“Aghh—!”
Heads collided, and the sound of something cracking apart rang out.