Pro Players? These People?(2)
No matter how absurd Yeongho’s senses were, his body was still that of an ordinary human. In a concentrated barrage, there was a limit to how many attacks he could dodge.
And yet the reason his health wasn’t dropping all that fast under the enemy’s fire was, oddly enough, because their level had gone up.
Instead of spraying bullets all over the place, all four of them were now carefully aiming for vital spots.
Which, counterintuitively, made it easier for him to evade.
When bullets flew wide around his body, there were always a few unavoidable glancing hits while he prioritized dodging the lethal shots first.
But with the enemies’ accuracy and grouping tightened up, the space he had to work with actually increased.
So even though he was clearly fighting a four-on-one battle without holding back, it was the other side whose life bars were disappearing faster. The situation was bizarre.
Ratatatat! Click!
Yeongho emptied his magazine in an instant, then pulled a fresh one from his bag and started the reload motion.
Normally, reloading in a situation like this was basically the same as asking to get killed.
Unless you looked down on your opponent to a ridiculous degree, the sensible thing was to reload while taking cover and keeping your body protected.
FF Team was furious, hammering the trigger as if they were being trolled right in front of their faces.
But Yeongho slipped out of their line of fire with infuriating ease and changed magazines without breaking a sweat.
“Damn it! Why won’t it hit!?”
“What kind of bug is this!? I’m reporting you!”
“Fuck, stop cheating!”
If he’d really been exploiting a bug, there was no way he wouldn’t have been reported by now.
And there was no way he could’ve become a streamer whose viewers happily showered him with huge donations.
But they were too shocked to think that far, and the members of FF Team just screamed whatever came to mind, their brains failing to filter anything before it came out of their mouths.
Even though he was being cursed at by kids far younger than him, Yeongho just grinned and raised the submachine gun he’d just reloaded.
It wasn’t foul enough to warrant punishment for toxic behavior, and in a game like this, that level of trash talk was practically affectionate banter anyway.
Ratatatatatat! Ratatatat-!
One target from the emptied magazine was already down nearly 80 percent of his life.
The FF Team member who’d been marked ducked desperately behind a nearby tree and shouted for cover, but—
“I’m gonna die!”
“Reload!”
“Shit! Me too!”
The other players didn’t have a good answer either.
What were they supposed to do when the other guy could just dodge every bullet?
They sure as hell couldn’t stop him by throwing their bodies at him.
And on top of that, they’d burned through their own ammo, too, leaving a gap in their firepower while they reloaded.
In a professional squad fight, teams normally trained to stagger their reload timing so someone was always firing.
But because he was holding up the full barrage alone, they were so rattled that there was no room left in their heads for anything that organized.
Ratatatat!
[SJ DAD -> FF Natus (Near Death)]
In the end, the member who had been hiding and wrapping bandages around himself was cut down under Yeongho’s pursuing fire.
By then, FF Team had barely finished reloading and was pointing their guns at Yeongho again.
“We’re over here, you bastards!”
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!
Too busy focusing on one man, Choi Pinam had slipped out of their mark and circled around behind them, spraying bullets from the opposite direction.
It was a stupid mistake—panicking so badly that they completely lost track of one of two enemies they already knew were there.
If a coach or manager had seen this mess, they would’ve had every reason to report to the organization that the entire second-string squad needed a full rebuild.
Of course, whether that would actually happen was a story for later. Right now, they had to worry about the bullets hammering into their backs.
“Agh! Ahhh!”
“What the hell? You weren’t watching the rear properly!?”
“Like hell I wasn’t—what were you doing? Gah—!”
Normally, in a four-on-two fight, the side with more people would surround the smaller team and apply pressure from all sides.
But somehow, the two-man side had become the one chewing up the enemies from both flanks.
[Choi Pinam -> FF Stump (Near Death)]
[SJ DAD -> FF Dbshot (Dead)]
[Choi Pinam -> FF Hide (Dead)]
Even if they were second-stringers, they were still professional players.
But the FF Team, panicking under the full force of Yeongho’s abilities, collapsed in a way that was almost pathetic to watch.
The chat was going wild with all kinds of talk, but Yeongho wasn’t paying it any attention.
He’d gotten so used to activating Battle Sense lately that it didn’t wear him down much anymore.
Still, because he’d been playing longer than usual, a faint headache was starting to creep in, and he had to stop moving for a moment and catch his breath.
Hoo... I focused harder than usual because they were pro players, so I guess I got a little tired.
If the Battle Sense he used in a normal fight was level one, then the state where he intentionally raised his concentration, probed his surroundings more carefully, and sharpened his senses to the point where time seemed to slow down could be called level two.
It was only natural that the latter—his hyper-focused state—came with fatigue much faster and much harder.
That was why he usually used it in short bursts, only at critical moments, and tried to keep it under control.
The enemies’ attacks had come in so precisely that he’d actually thought they’d been easier than expected, but that was partly because he’d kept his concentration near its limit from start to finish.
“Hyung-nim? You’re okay, right?”
“Ah, yeah. Just a little tired, that’s all.”
“Looks like those jerks wore you out at the start. Want to slow the pace down a bit from here?”
“That sounds best.”
Seeing that Yeongho was getting exhausted, Choi Pinam carefully scanned the map and plotted the safest route he could.
Instead of rushing at every enemy they spotted like usual just to rack up kills, the two of them moved at an easy pace, skirting the radiation zone and avoiding any major engagements.
Whether that should be called good luck or not, the squads they ran into after that never seemed to have the same level as FF Team.
It was a little funny to call them skilled after taking them down so easily, but the point was that none of them were strong enough to demand serious concentration.
So because they’d spent the early game fighting a pro team, the viewers who’d been riding the dopamine high were now finding the endgame a little dull.
The chat had started to lose some of its energy, too.
By the time they progressed slowly through the match, the number of survivors had dropped to five.
Tat-tat-tat! Kaboom!
Thwooom—!
As the game entered its final stretch, the remaining players were drawn together within a confined area.
Dodging radiation and moving toward the safe zone, they could hear gunfire nonstop, which meant someone had gotten there first.
“Oh, looks like they’re fighting over there.”
“Hmm. This one’ll probably end pretty easily.”
Hearing the fierce sounds of battle, Yeongho and Choi Pinam glanced at each other with relaxed expressions.
There were only three survivors left besides them, and those three weren’t even on the same team—they were fighting each other.
It looked like the final victory would come as a classic case of picking up the scraps.
“Ah, so now I’m the only one left.”
“Whoa~ So this is Battle Island giving us an easy finish as a little congratulations for ranking up?”
When they headed toward the source of the gunfire and arrived, only one living player remained.
Just as Choi Pinam said, it had become a freebie of a match.
Thwoom—! Thud!
“Gah!?”
While he was looking around and checking the bodies of the fallen players, Choi Pinam got hit in the torso by a bullet from somewhere and lost nearly half his life.
Then he hurriedly backed off, plastered himself behind a half-collapsed wall, and fumbled out a med kit in a panic.
“Whoa, the one left was a sniper.”
“I’ll take care of him, so rest up.”
“Heh heh. Much appreciated, Hyung-nim!”
Choi Pinam chuckled and answered Yeongho’s declaration.
If the enemy was using a sniper rifle, Yeongho’s ability was the perfect hard counter.
Dodging the incoming bullet wasn’t difficult, and he could even shoot back and hit them first, so there was no real contest to begin with.
From Yeongho’s perspective, the most troublesome weapon was a shotgun spraying pellets into a spread that couldn’t be avoided even if you knew it was coming.
And the only thing that could still chip away at him was an automatic weapon, something that could at least pour bullets fast enough to threaten his health.
A sniper rifle, which poured everything into a single-shot punch, was nothing more than prey he could play with.
Since it’s come to this, maybe I should put on a little showmanship.
Even now, the chat was cooling off.
The final opponent wasn’t even a four-man squad, just a lone sniper. It was too easy a finish, and the viewers were bound to feel disappointed.
So he decided to add a little direction.
He was going to end the stream after taking down just one more person anyway, so even if he used up the rest of his concentration and got exhausted, it wouldn’t matter.
“Since the last guy left is a sniper, I’ll answer him with a sniper of my own.”
After saying it in a way that was clearly meant for the viewers, Yeongho sprinted out past the wall at high speed.
At the same time, he focused his senses, narrowing his detection network down to a line, imprinting the enemy’s position and movement into his mind.
Thwoom! Thud!
The bullet struck the ground, kicking up fragments of concrete.
Reacting to Yeongho’s movement, the opponent fired a fairly accurate lead shot—but by the time it came, Yeongho had already recognized it and slammed to a stop, leaving the bullet to blow apart nothing but the floor.
Like one of the chatters had noticed, Yeongho had abandoned the submachine gun from earlier and was now equipped with dual pistols.
Along with the Winchester Model 1894, it was a weapon with such low popularity that it was almost a signature only Yeongho used.
He extended his guns toward the direction of the shot and pulled the trigger.
On top of a five-story commercial building.
A bullet shot toward the enemy’s head from roughly 400 meters away.
You could talk about 400 meters as if it were nothing, but to the naked eye, a person at that distance looked so small they might as well have been compared to a fingernail.
So the viewers couldn’t clearly make it out at first.
But the bullet flew true and struck the opponent’s ballistic helmet with perfect precision, bouncing up with a sharp ting!
Only then did the viewers begin to understand what Yeongho had meant before the fight started.
He’d meant that against a sniper, he was going to drag the battle out at long range—with a pistol.
The lukewarm mood suddenly caught fire again, and the chat started racing faster and faster.