Chapter 39 (2/2)
The image on the screen switched.
Very soon, a picture appeared before Tong Nian’s eyes of post-war London, utterly destroyed, with ruins of buildings everywhere. As she gazed upon the several people inside the scene, she suddenly felt as if her blood was roiling. It’s time to game! Clench fists! Must focus and play well!
97: Sister-In-Law’s cla.s.smate, come. I’ll take you along.
grunt: 97, you take southeast, I’ll take northwest. Sweep it clean. Don’t make trouble for me.
97: Screw you, punk. It’s you who shouldn’t make trouble for me. You’ve never been higher than me on the leaderboard, yet still so c.o.c.ky.
grunt: Whooooa. With a girl around, you’re acting tough now, you, the forever little bachelor.
……
Yaya had a feeling like she was utterly going to faint.
This sort of situation, where she was on the same team as professional gamers and was watching them as they took jabs at one another, was like… she had abruptly joined a professional gaming team and a professional eSports organization, that she was suddenly one step closer to that world. As a longtime eSports fan, she soon slipped into form, forcing herself to remove herself from those feelings of exhilaration and try her best to keep up with 97.
They had all left already?
Tong Nian tilted her head to the side to glance at the scene in Yaya’s screen. She had already run to the roof of a building?
Lolicat: Where are we going?
Gun: Open a separate voice chat.
Lolicat: Oh, oh, okay.
She accepted Gun’s invitation for a private voice chat.
In her headset, she heard the sound of typing, or that was what it seemed? He was using more than one computer? Working?
Lightly, Tong Nian asked, “Can you hear me?”
He gave a faint answer, then told her, “Follow my instructions. Move and control your character.”
Tong Nian immediately straightened her sitting position. “Mm.”
“See those ruins of that church on your left?”
“Yup, see it.”
“Walk over. Let me know when you get there.”
“Mm.”
She was still not very proficient at using the keyboard to control her character to walk, so she used her mouse instead. Hop after hop, she moved the character over and soon arrived at that place. “Alright.”
From within the headset, he seemed to hear that she was using her mouse. “Still don’t know how to use the keyboard?”
“… I’m still not very good at it… Seems the mouse is easier, right?” Why did she have to use the keyboard?
In the headset, after a long moment of silence, he realized that his task was actually onerous and extremely challenging. Of course, what was being challenged was his patience… “In front of you, there’s a flight of twenty-nine stairs. W is to move forward, s.p.a.ce bar is to jump. Pressing both will let you jump forward. One step at a time, jump up the stairs.”
0.0? This was different from what she had played last time, ah…
So…
Even when the game had come to an end…
Those opponents did not get to even see what corner the true G.o.d Gun was in and what he was doing.
On the southeast side, 97, with Yaya in tow, had encountered three enemies and a fight to the death had broken out. On the northwest side, grunt had easily finished off two opposing players, like he was cutting two blades of gra.s.s. Gun’s character, having nothing to do, sat on the steps with sniper rifle in hand, constantly adjusting his visual field and angle to see if there were unnecessary persons nearby while, at the same time, directing the kid beside him in learning…
… how to hop up a set of stairs…
[1] 卖女孩的小火柴. In Guo Jingming’s novel, 《梦里花落知多少》Never-Flowers in Never-Dream, there is a woman whose name in Chinese translates literally as “Little Matchstick.” She traffics women and girls and would often say she was “the little matchstick that sells girls.” That saying is actually a play on the t.i.tle《卖火柴的小女孩》, which literally translates as “The Little Girl who Sells Matches” and is the Chinese t.i.tle of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl. The saying more often now is used in a joking context.
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