SWNOVELXO Chapter 187 - Another Unsung Secret
Chapter 186 – Another Unsung Secret
[General] Breaking news: Dice wins the 3rd round out of nowhere LOL
She’s not even happy, just blank-faced LOL
[All Comments][Newest First]
– What the hell is she doing? LOL
– Considering Yoo Jin and Keith took each other down, it’s understandable LOL
ㄴ Keith, you bastard, even here you’re flying high LOL
ㄴ He was in the top 10 in the finals last year
ㄴ Yeah, right ^forehead axe^
ㄴ LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
– I thought Yoo Jin would win, what a shame LOL
ㄴ Dice must have thought the same judging by her expression LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ True love for Yoo Jin, crazy LOL
ㄴ Get a hotel room!!!! Keep going until Yongsan burns down!!!!!
ㄴ Hey, don’t do this here, go to the yuri gallery
ㄴ Stop talking nonsense LOL
– The most absurd thing is the foreign pro gamers who got beaten up like dogs by those three, right?
ㄴ LOL seriously
ㄴ Overseas communities are on fire right now LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ They’re just scared! Crazy ones!
– Yoo Jin’s changed playstyle is really cool LOL
ㄴ This is ‘run and gun’
ㄴ So true
– If it weren’t for the MPX, she would’ve smashed everything, such a shame LOL
ㄴ People ran for their lives when they saw Yoo Jin, so she probably chose a light gun to chase them
ㄴ Anyway, she can catch up with full sprint no matter what she’s holding, so why bother? Just a thought
ㄴ Doesn’t she conserve energy? LOL
ㄴ Why would a human terminator need that?
– Korean dominance is so nice LOL
– Let’s go, let’s break Japan’s back and send 5 people to the finals~~~~~
[General] This is K-spiciness, any complaints?
Yeah, you still have to play nine more rounds against Yoo Jin~~~~~~~~
[All Comments][Newest First]
– The 3rd round just ended, so there’s still a long way to go today and tomorrow LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
– Confident expression<<<
ㄴ Saying it like this makes it really sad LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ We… prepared… really hard….
ㄴ Crazy LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
– Seeing it like this, she really is crazy LOL
– She should’ve skipped the preliminaries and gone straight to the finals
ㄴ Considering how she plays, it wouldn’t be strange if she had connections in the US LOL
ㄴ Not strange but she probably does LOL judging by her JTAC skills, it’s clear
– In today’s interview, they say all the foreigners look grim, go watch it, it’s a spectacle
ㄴ It’s true
ㄴ Why is it true LOL LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ Taiwan LOL ‘We did everything we could’ is so funny
ㄴ Two weeks were too short LOL
– Suzuran said ‘I didn’t expect Korea to hide such a secret weapon’ LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ We didn’t know either LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ No one knows except for her LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ Is this what shared suffering is???
– The other players getting depressed is legendary
ㄴ Tell them to try again next year LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ From now on, this place is ruled by ‘Yoo Jin’!!
– But other than Yoo Jin, the Korean players were all good
ㄴ Their skills improved like crazy, really
ㄴ It’s legendary that the competition for spots is tougher than last year
ㄴ LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ Only 3 spots left excluding Yoo Jin and Dice LOL
ㄴ If you were pissed, you should’ve impressed Snake Eye earlier LOL
– How am I supposed to wait for the finals after the Asia preliminaries, seriously, it’s already so fun!!!!!!!
ㄴ No, you can’t
ㄴ Collective three-month maintenance ON
ㄴ Ugh Yoo Jin noona, I’m dying bwoot bwoot….
ㄴ Crazy LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
ㄴ Honestly, am I the only one who always thinks about catching the tail and holding back? It’s really absurd, don’t make me the only pervert, seriously
ㄴ You’re a pervert, you crazy LOL
“Even Yoo Jin dies.”
A voice muttered, frustration evident.
But in the seemingly endless darkness, the Japanese team manager’s voice found a tiny ray of hope, easing the burden, if only slightly. Yet, this only meant it wasn’t much of an improvement.
The Japanese first team members sitting behind him forced their lips into smiles to lift the atmosphere. Only Keith, sitting at the forefront, maintained his usual serious demeanor – many had already realized. Korea was not the underperforming country it was last year.
Whatever miracle they had pulled off, their individual skills now surpassed the average of Japanese players. And at the center of it was Yoo Jin, who even Keith couldn’t guarantee victory against in a head-to-head battle.
Watching that match… no, the actual combat felt overwhelmingly intense.
However, shifting and maintaining the atmosphere was also the coach and manager’s job.
Words continued in the somewhat lightened mood.
“We can still manage. If two top-tier players team up, we can whittle her down and prevent her from winning.”
Of course, even that wasn’t easy. Certain conditions had to be met for it to work.
First, as many Japanese first team members as possible had to make it to the TOP 10 – this wasn’t a big problem. After Keith and Yoo Jin took each other down once, other countries would have noticed the possibility, meaning other countries were also likely to prioritize Yoo Jin as the top kill target.
Thus, the second condition of ‘including themselves, others must also prioritize stopping Yoo Jin’s solo domination’ wasn’t hard to meet.
So far, so good.
Though the reality for Keith was slightly different, the result was favorable.
‘It wasn’t a particularly hopeful situation, though….’
Since the match analysis hadn’t been completed, he could say this.
From his experience, Yoo Jin had the crazy tenacity to take at least one enemy with her even when she was on the brink of death. Moreover, what happened in the 3rd match was only possible because Dice was also in the TOP 3 along with himself and Yoo Jin.
Dice had already reduced Yoo Jin’s HP significantly with her shotgun, and thinking it would work out if she just survived after killing Yoo Jin, she charged recklessly. Up until the last moment, it seemed successful.
But getting hit by the final attack and being ejected to the lobby together was the problem.
Explaining it was another issue. The manager wasn’t entirely wrong, and Keith’s experience wasn’t wrong either. The truth lay somewhere in between.
Secrets about Yoo Jin were unraveling one by one. Yet, the difficulty didn’t decrease. Just like the Himalayan mountains weren’t easy to climb despite having routes – her consistency was impressive.
If this were a computer game, it would fuel the desire to challenge, seeing the final boss as grand, but what game allows real-time control of the protagonist against the final boss? From that moment, everything becomes a burden and fear.
Anyhow, the mood was quite encouraging.
They would base the next round’s strategy on this, gather data, and plan the following round… repeating until the day ended.
And already, half of the first day of the Asia preliminaries had passed.
“Good work. Hopefully, we can reclaim our original positions in the next match. Any other points to keep in mind?”
“Don’t think it’ll be easy. Even getting into the top 10 will likely require your utmost effort.”
“That’s right. Analysis is the domain of every human… For now, let’s start by kicking the ladder out from under the other countries so they can’t climb any higher.”
Instead of getting bogged down, they faced reality.
As always, it was not the strong who survived, but the survivors who were strong—and Japan could no longer afford any more variables.
It was 10 minutes before the start of the 4th round.
Of course, things didn’t always go as planned.
───Boom!
“Damn it.”
Next time, they would need to mention that Yoo Jin could easily evade the concentrated fire of at least two people.
Thinking this, Keith flew through the air after being hit by Yoo Jin’s kick and crashed outside the kill zone with a dented door.
It was truly an unlucky day.
“───Therefore, Korea is currently maintaining a stable first place.”
“Wow!”
“Is this a dream or reality? Is this Yoo Jin? Is she the god of AP? Is she a god?!”
“Quiet!”
“Oops!”
With rain comes shine.
Where there are trampled ones, there are tramplers; where there is darkness, there is light—and today, the latter belonged to Korea in the Asia preliminaries.
Unlike other countries, where it was hard to even utter a word and conversations were cautiously optimistic, the Koreans could blurt out anything—within reason—without facing much restraint.
This babbling was where their ‘nonsense party’ stemmed from.
The Asia preliminaries had long intervals between matches. In other words, the breaks were long. Unlike KSM, which focused solely on selecting national representatives, here, it felt much more like a festival.
In short, it was more about quality matches than speed.
The long breaks and analysis times had several advantages for the players—they could fully rest and recover their skills, and the coaching staff could verify whether the strategies used in the last match were effective.
If they were effective, they’d anticipate counters and further develop their tactics; if not, they’d analyze the match to find solutions and prepare new methods. The Asia preliminaries offered the thrill of witnessing new strategies unfold with each match.
However, this also came with the overwhelming drawback of “the wait time between matches being boring,” but even that had its own countermeasure.
The videos playing up front were exactly that.
-…If you closely examine this part of the skirmish, you can see that a high-intensity psychological battle took place on an instinctual level. For instance, if you look at Dice’s minor actions at this point, you can see that they converge with a specific purpose….
Analysis.
Everyone was busy after a match, even the casters and commentators. Their second role was to convert the complex skirmish scenarios, which were hard for the average person to grasp, into a form everyone could understand.
In a way, it was a beat slower than real-time commentary, but ultimately, it was beneficial for viewers. They could revisit the climax that had passed in a flash with detailed explanations.
These replay videos with additional commentary had their own appeal.
Meanwhile, the conversation continued.
Yoo Jin started it.
“The Asia preliminaries are definitely different. The real match time is fixed at 1x speed.”
“From now on, the viewer count will jump to tens of millions. With that many people connecting at the same time, applying the VR time acceleration function is worrisome. There was an incident during last year’s Asia preliminaries.”
A detailed explanation began.
To summarize, ‘the screen transmission function, which was fine until KSM, malfunctioned due to traffic during the Asia preliminaries, causing the real-time broadcast to break.’
“You know, right? The function that adjusts the frame rate so that real-life people can watch VR broadcasts transmitted at 3x speed in the same speed. Anyway, if more than ten million people connect at the same time, it reaches its processing limit.”
“I didn’t know the servers handling viewer connections were the same as those performing that function. Or maybe so many viewers connected that they had to use the capacity of the latter.”
“Exactly. They expand the servers every six months, and it’s still like this.”
…Is this the fate of a great game?
Anyway, since this wasn’t something I needed to worry about, I decided to change the subject. I poked Dice’s cheek with my finger, feeling the soft texture.
She made a sound and mumbled a word in a slightly distorted tone.
“Why?”
“Congratulations on winning first place in the third round.”
“Come on, that wasn’t a real win. I was biting my lips trying to win against anyone, and then suddenly they both just died like that, I was so startled.”
“Driving me to the point of fighting to the death can also be seen as a sign of growth. And skirmishes can’t be fully predicted.”
“Sigh.”
Though she still looked dissatisfied, what could I do? The world doesn’t work the way we want. No one can achieve a stunning victory that everyone cheers for every time, especially not in skirmishes.
Sometimes, survival is victory.
Anyway, as Dice glanced around, she added.
“I suddenly wondered, do manifested people have any advantages when playing games?”
“They have to. My physical abilities are proof of that….”
“That’s true, but there are hardly any manifested pro gamers, so I was curious. It must be tough without the senses to back it up. Still, I’m glad. If there were many people like Yoo Jin in the games or the actual military, it would be terrifying.”
“….”
“…Why are you looking at me like that?”
The actual military.
Dice had a knack for touching on my memories at the most unexpected moments.
But how she interpreted my reaction was unknown, as she suddenly began spouting imaginative nonsense.
“What, why are you suddenly silent… No way, is there really a snake-tail squad!?”
“There’s no such thing in this world.”
“Too late, you just looked super suspicious!”
Watching Dice add, ‘Is there really such a great… I mean, scary place with lots of people like that!?’ I had to resist the urge to flick her forehead.
Maybe my tail was emitting unknown pheromones.
With the fifth match approaching, I pondered whether I should go to the hospital to check, just in case.
“What do you think, Laura?”
“Don’t call me Laura, damn it. I’m already boiling over from being stripped of Delta against my will.”
“Okay. Then I’ll call you Pola… ugh, I’m dying…!”
“You bastard.”
Meanwhile, it wasn’t just the participants who were keeping up with the Asia preliminaries.