Chapter 4

Rozon gritted his teeth.

The problem was that the Main Carry had refused to follow his orders.

If they had just listened from the start, they could’ve secured the objective faster. Then they wouldn’t have run into the enemy Scout.

Rozon (Support): “From now on, you better follow my every word.”

No response. But judging by how quietly they followed, it seemed they got the message.

Rozon started farming with the Main Carry. They got pushed back in a 3v3 skirmish with the enemy Scout, but managed to escape without dying.

Good. If they could just make it to mid-game, it would be Rozon’s time to shine.

Thinking about showing off Isahyang’s firepower, Rozon joined the 3rd-tier objective teamfight, [The Transformed Laboratory].

A 5v5 fight, excluding the Outer Solo position.

Rozon, checking angles, dashed forward and unleashed his skills on the enemy Main Carry.

Now, all they needed was for the team to follow up, and the fight would be over. Rozon dodged enemy attacks as best as he could, waiting for backup.

‘What the…’

Rozon felt something was off. The team’s response was way too slow.

*Crash.* A giant ice hammer fell on Rozon’s character. It was the ultimate skill of the enemy City Core character.

Rozon’s screen turned gray, and he wore a hollow expression.

A moment later, the team finally joined the fight, but only managed to take down two enemies before nearly getting wiped. A 2:4 trade. Rozon frowned as he watched the retreating allied City Core.

The City Core is the heart of [Eternal World].

It’s a position that requires support, assassination, information gathering, late-game damage, and even playmaking.

That’s why City Core characters are notoriously difficult. They have to balance utility and damage, so the difficulty is cranked up to prevent breaking the game.

In solo ranked, most City Core players opt for characters with lower difficulty and higher practicality.

But the character Rozon was looking at right now was far from practical.

Golden hair shimmered like pure gold. Though he couldn’t see her face, her eyes were likely blue.

‘Thierry.’ A character often used as the City Core.

Her defining trait? Versatility. Thierry excelled at all the City Core roles: team support, assassination, information gathering, and late-game damage. ‘In theory,’ that is.

How was that even possible?

It was all thanks to Thierry’s unique character mechanics.

Thierry could freely use 32 skills derived from 8 different elements.

Normally, characters in [Eternal World] have 4 skills. Sure, newer characters have more complex skill effects, but Thierry was the only one with a whopping 32 skills.

And her skill combos were organic.

Skills derived from each element had individual cooldowns, except for the ultimate, which had a shared cooldown. So while you couldn’t spam ultimates, you could chain regular skills endlessly.

For example, you could dump three fire-element skills and immediately follow up with three water-element skills.

Just hearing about it, you’d think, ‘How does a character like this even exist?’ While everyone else is managing 4 skills, Thierry’s out here spamming 32. It sounds like the game would break.

But in conclusion, it worked.

The long cooldowns, the fact that individual skills were weak and required at least 5 to match others’ combo damage, the mana constraints preventing endless skill spam, and the sheer difficulty of using so many skills effectively—all these factors balanced her out. But the real kicker?

Thierry was a melee mage, a close-range damage dealer.

Frontline damage dealers usually have survival skills to compensate for their risky position.

In exchange, they sacrifice utility like crowd control (CC) skills. After all, a damage dealer can’t afford to give up damage.

That’s why melee damage dealers often take the Main Carry role.

The City Core requires too many abilities, and melee damage dealers are too survival-focused to handle it.

But Thierry was a City Core.

And that meant she was a melee damage dealer without survival skills.

Not to mention, she wasn’t even tanky. Being a mage, most of her stats went into attack power.

Sure, she had buffs to compensate, but… even with those, she was only on par with other melee damage dealers. She was a character built on pure fantasy.

Everyone who tried Thierry ended up quitting for the same reason.

After applying buffs, debuffs, and pulling off insane maneuvers to showcase Thierry’s potential…

All that effort would get wiped out by a single AoE skill, leaving players wondering:

‘What am I even doing?’

That’s why Thierry mains didn’t exist. You’d have to be out of your mind to play her.

Now, the only Thierry players left in the world fell into one category:

Those who couldn’t even utilize half of her potential and just ended up being a burden to the team.

From Rozon’s perspective, this Thierry player was no different.

Her username was… Han Yoorim?

Weirdly, it sounded like a real name.

Anyway.

Rozon wasn’t just nitpicking. This Thierry player had genuinely messed up the teamfight.

Instead of responding to Rozon’s perfect initiation, she just stood there, staring blankly from a distance.

And then, after the fact, she took out two enemies. That was the infuriating part. She probably thought she made a great play by killing two. If she had just followed up properly, they could’ve wiped all four.

Rozon’s blood boiled, but he held it in.

He was recording right now.

Even though it wasn’t a live stream, he had to edit and upload this to MTube later, so he had to keep his reactions in check.

Rozon pulled himself together and continued the game.

After a cycle of kills and deaths, they finally reached Tier 1.

An object has appeared.

Everyone gathered in a tense standoff.

Rozon bit his lip. The enemy’s range was too long. This way, their health was being chipped away one-sidedly.

The cause was Thierry. With Thierry, a melee dealer, stuck in the core position, the game wasn’t progressing.

Rozon fired a skill, but it was impossible to hit. Isahyang’s skill range was also too short.

What to do.

In this hopeless situation, Rozon glanced at the Main Carry.

Suddenly, Thierry moved.

Dodging the barrage of skills, Thierry plunged into the enemy’s center. Perfectly wedged between the enemies, Thierry clasped her hands. A black orb was summoned.

Black Hole. The ultimate skill of the Darkness element.

The enemies, bound by gravity, momentarily stopped moving. Seizing the moment, the entire team rushed in. Rozon also charged in, firing his pistol wildly.

And just like that, the team fight ended, and the final victor was decided.

Rozon stared blankly at the gray screen as the enemy destroyed their base.

The team fight was lost.

The reason for the loss was a lack of damage. Thierry had died under concentrated fire, leaving them no choice.

The enemy’s core was alive, and their core was dead. Winning a team fight under such circumstances would have been stranger.

[Defeat]

The two short letters disappeared, and soon the lobby appeared.

Rozon silently left the lobby and entered a stat-checking website.

Han Yoorim. A search confirmed that she was indeed a player who only used Thierry.

Her tier… Platinum 4.

He sighed.

The level of Platinum these days…

There had been a lot of talk about match-fixing, and now it had even happened to me.

This won’t do.

Rozon immediately started editing. It was a sense of duty. He had to expose the injustice he had suffered to the world. With that in mind, Rozon completed the video in a day.

There was also a hidden hope that it would get a lot of views.

[The Current State of Eternal World]

The thumbnail with white text on a black screen alone was enough to entice clicks.

The fact that it criticized the trending game [Eternal World] also played a big part.

The video quickly hit 5,000 views. A record-breaking pace.

Up to this point, it went as Rozon expected.

But the comments that followed were different from what Rozon had anticipated.

– Wow. You pick Isahyang, a Support as the Main Carry, and then talk about match-fixing?

– These days, even kids like this reach Platinum.

– You analyzed the replay and still don’t get it lol. Thierry initiated perfectly, but Isahyang’s skill shots were trash. If even half had hit, Thierry would’ve survived lol.

Amidst the flood of hate comments, Rozon twitched his eyebrows and hit the block button.

The comment section cleared up.

Only then did Rozon feel at ease and lay down on his bed to sleep.

Tomorrow is the weekend.

A day to go to work.

*

The platinum had turned into a radiant diamond.

Finally reaching my target tier, I checked the viewer count with a satisfied expression.

[0 viewers]

Alright. Let’s see who wins.

I changed the stream title.

[A Newbie’s Journey to Master]

By now, I knew. Solo rank streams of unknown people don’t attract viewers.

But there’s a limit. How come not a single person has joined in a week?

This must be a bug.

I grumbled and picked Thierry. Except for the first few games, I had been playing Thierry exclusively.

The reason was simple; I found it fascinating that Thierry looked similar to me.

At first, I thought there was some meaning to it.

[Eternal World] was a game where characters from numerous creative works gathered to fight, similar to [Heroes of the Storm].

So, there was an original novel where Thierry appeared… but no matter how much I read it, it was just an ordinary novel.

Well, we looked similar, but not identical. If anything, I was a far superior version.

Joining the early skirmish, I led the team fight to a great victory, and the enemy surrendered.

This part was truly fascinating.

I wasn’t originally the type to rely on physical skills in games. I won through strategy and mind games. My reaction speed wasn’t this good.

But now, my body didn’t tire, and my reaction speed was fast. Am I some kind of new human?

It’s comfortable, though.

I immediately queued up again. I needed to reach the highest tier quickly to attract attention, one way or another.

That’s when it happened.

―――

Let’s go to the apocalypse match lol Let’s go to the apocalypse match lol Let’s go to the apocalypse match lol Let’s go to the apocalypse match lol

0-viewer Hako stream shutting down in 3 seconds 0-viewer Hako stream shutting down in 3 seconds 0-viewer Hako stream shutting down in 3 seconds

Unrelated to this, but change your concept. It’s really annoying seeing everyone trying to attract newbie attention.

―――

The chat suddenly became noisy.

The number of viewers instantly skyrocketed to hundreds.

I blinked.

What on earth is happening?