Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Unprompted letters directly from high-ranking government offices are rare, so to say that there is a standard response would be stretching it a little. It can be inferred from the general reaction of each pro Glory player who received one, though, that Ye Xiu’s “shit, they found me” was nonstandard.

In fact, the reaction was shared by only one other person: Huang Shaotian, who was not, even to his own knowledge, being chased by anyone at all.

He’s just that kind of person.

Ye Xiu was absolutely being chased by someone. However, he greatly suspected (and was completely correct in thinking) that if the family and its associated department knew of his reaction, they’d lean forward on the mandatory large desk with their hands folded together ominously to say “we never lost you.”

But, given that he’d spent the last seven years playing games on his own, and his one “visit” home to fetch his ID—or an ID, anyway, since he’d had to borrow Ye Qiu’s instead—ended in a clean escape, he’d dared to hope he’d managed to give them the slip.

He was actually half right: Though his parents had their suspicions about the tyrannical and outrageously superior One Autumn Leaf for the name’s close relation to “Ye Qiu,” they didn’t know for sure where he was, those first years. Or even if he was playing Glory at all.

Because, in a move so excessive most no one in the general population would believe it, the Ye family had designed Glory for the main purpose of netting Ye Xiu back.

Well, on a personal level, they intended to net Ye Xiu back. Officially, they were using a game to ferret out highly-skilled operators from the massive Chinese public, claiming it was the fastest way to crowdsource improvements to the meta of remote-piloted battles and related equipment—and they weren’t wrong.

Just, the idea came from the fact that their eldest liked video games, and was sure to chase the proposed “Glory” so long as they made it good enough.

They justified this dual purpose with the belief that Ye Xiu was the best possible remote-operator the country could ask for, and three consecutive championships right from the start said they had a point. It was nice that the required signup meant they could be sure Ye Qiu’s ID was the one used for the captain of Excellent Era. They’d found their son, achieved rapid advancement in the ability and discovery of remote pilots, and even crowdsourced some excellent equipment improvements through the equipment editor.

All in all, a multilayered win.

The department was not one many would have heard of, which, given its responsibilities, was kind of the point. Though it had low exposure in society, it had high authority, being in charge of the aspects of national protection of which the public could not be allowed even a hint.

Most of the players went home for the summer and received a baffling letter from this government office telling them they’d been drafted, and must report to a given secure location within a certain timeframe. Ye Xiu received an unfortunate letter from this government office telling him he’d been drafted, and was required to return home. Now.

It was definitely a personalized letter. His father even signed it.

Ye Xiu sighed.

Gradually, the best players in the Alliance gathered in the assigned meeting place, a facility that looked completely average from the outside and completely unaverage from the inside, and discovered that not only would no one explain anything, they were now required to go through a “standard bootcamp” that was definitely only “standard” by the definition of this one, unknown department. The only highlight of their time there was that any agent running into Han Wenqing for the first time reflexively called him “sir.” It had been funny the first time, under casual conditions; now, on nearing the fifteenth, with Han Wenqing’s face set permanently in “murder” due to their less than optimal conditions, the harsh startle and barked response were fall-to-the-ground-laughing hilarious.

Of course, the falling to the ground and general giddiness may have had a lot more to do with their pervasive exhaustion than anything else, but the fact remained that watching their tormentors go pale with fright would always be amusing.

The only person not seriously suffering was Tian Sen, but Tian Sen was a bear of a man even as a teen. Obviously, he didn’t count. Han Wenqing and Zhang Xinjie did include workouts as part of their daily schedule, but the difference between “maintaining fitness” and “agent-worthy” was much too great. Even Zhang Xinjie despised their schedule, since it didn’t match his own. The emphasis on athleticism was completely unnecessary. They didn’t have any game time scheduled at all. Their activities included those that could damage hands.

In short, everyone was pissed.

Their combined disgruntlement (and Yu Wenzhou’s ability to figure out the weakest link) finally got them a response on how long this hell would last: “You’ll be able to move on to the next stage once Captain Ye Xiu shows up, which is why you need to put your all in now. It won’t be long before then, and you need to be prepared. He’ll undoubtedly be asking for more.”

This was both heartening and disheartening, in that their torment might have an end, but also might manage to get worse. To distract themselves from it, they talked about what their supposed captain’s somewhat-similar name brought to everyone’s mind: Where was Ye Qiu?

“He should definitely be here by now,” Zhang Jiale groused. Ye Qiu was the only top player who hadn’t shown up and therefore wasn’t suffering, which was just way too unfair.

“Yes, I can’t imagine they would have missed his ability,” Xiao Shiqin said, much more politely.

“Provided that the criteria for gathering us was, in fact, skill in Glory. Given that they have not asked us anything about the game, and Ye Qiu himself is not here, it may be that they were looking instead for public faces related to eSports,” Zhang Xinjie analyzed. “Or soon to be public faces,” he allowed, with a nod to the few there who hadn’t even debuted yet.

“But Mucheng isn’t here!” Chu Yunxiu refuted. As female rookies of the same year, the two of them had become quite close; naturally Chu Yunxiu would be concerned about her. “She’s obviously good enough on both fronts. You don’t think something happened to them on the way here, do you?” It was reasonable to assume they would have come together, since they’d likely be coming from the same place, so an accident that affected one would be likely to affect them both.

Unfortunately, they’d already used up their one chance at asking questions: The agent they’d pushed into giving them a response had been reprimanded and reassigned.

He was an asshole, anyway, scoffing at them for not wanting to waste their hands on pull-ups, or worse, punching. No one felt bad in the slightest.

The day finally came when they were gathered up to meet with their mysterious captain. Strictly speaking, it hadn’t actually been that long since they’d arrived, but with the schedule they’d been following it definitely felt interminable. The walked into the courtyard to find Ye Qiu talking to the man who’d been in charge of them this whole time, face blasé as usual. Less usual was the swiftly increasing uncomfortableness the officer was showing, but they forgot about it almost immediately.

It was perfectly normal for posturing people to end up feeling uncomfortable when talking to Ye Qiu.

“Oi, Ye Qiu!” Zhang Jiale called.

“Do you even know who that is?” one of their guards asked incredulously. “He’s willing to show up personally and you’re going to go around disrespecting him? That’s captain to you. And you’re saying his name wrong; it’s Ye Xiu.”

“Fuck off, you’re saying his name wrong,” Huang Shaotian piped up. “How long do you think we’ve known this guy? How often have you talked to him, to think it’s such a great honor? We talk all the time. We’re even pretty close. My captain isn’t any less impressive than him, anyway, so what are you going on about, huh? Is it just that you’re too low-tier to know impressive people? Is it? Is it? Is it?”

The guard was speechless. At Yu Wenzhou’s urging and due to his own general exhaustion, Huang Shaotian hadn’t previously subjected anyone to his usual prattle.

“They might have seen his twin,” one of the agents said, a largely amiable person who seemed to be mostly in charge of passing messages. “I only ran into the issue a few times when I was at the Ye Estate, but I’m pretty sure his twin’s name is Ye Qiu.”

Given that they would be meeting Ye Xiu himself, he assumed sharing this information wouldn’t cause any problems. After all, Ye Qiu had nothing to do with this side of the Ye family’s legacy, a fact oft-repeated to him when he started his work as a liaison between the main facility and the Ye family’s public domain. If he gave a message for Ye Xiu to Ye Qiu instead, there would be serious problems with a breach in security, so he was even able to tell the two apart under most circumstances.

It actually wasn’t that hard, though; they had completely different demeanors. If this group knew Ye Qiu so well, he couldn’t imagine how they’d have mistaken one for the other. Maybe it was just the stress?

“Ye Qiu had a twin in the military?” Lin Jingyan quietly asked the others in the group, dubious. It was the first he was hearing of it, but it wasn’t like they were particularly close, either.

“That sounds stupid,” Fang Shiqian said immediately. As someone who often argued meta on healers in Glory with Ye Qiu over the years, he had more background than most to draw a conclusion from. “Has that shameless bastard ever acted like someone from a military family? He barely has common decency, let alone military bearing.”

“He does know a lot about tactics…” Xiao Shiqin commented uncertainly. He and the two other tacticians who studied Ye Qiu had always felt like they were rushing to keep up with someone way ahead of them, on that front. Which hardly made sense, Ye Qiu wouldn’t have had any more schooling than them, normally speaking. Maybe a military family really would account for it?

The group traveled the rest of the way across the courtyard in various stages of disbelieving contemplation. Twins?

No way, right?

When they got closer, though, they had to assume it was a joke or some kind of misunderstanding: That was definitely Ye Qiu.

“Even the slightest amount of common sense would have told you no one wants pro gamers out in the field,” Ye Qiu was saying to the Lieutenant who had been in charge of their group. “You think the government bothers specially recruiting people for fun? Who’s going to take responsibility if someone’s hands get messed up due to your idiocy? Go call a medical specialist, immediately.”

“I—yes, sir,” the man said, saluting properly despite his humiliation.

“So, you’re finally here,” Han Wenqing said darkly. Or he was just saying it normally and his face did the rest. Hard to tell.

“Yeah, I was delayed by some other stuff,” Ye Qiu said blandly.

“So it is you!” On comfortable ground, Huang Shaotian’s voice could not be contained. “Did you know, they said ‘Ye Qiu’ is your identical twin? What kind of bullshit is that? Acting like we wouldn’t know who you were even though we’ve all had to put up with your smug face for at least a year—”

“He is.” Ye Qiu cut him off, knowing better than to let Huang Shaotian get on a roll when he’d decided he’d Experienced Grievances.

“He is…what?” Chu Yunxiu asked cautiously. She still hadn’t seen Su Mucheng, who she’d have assumed would be with Ye Qiu when he showed up. If he really had showed up. This seemed like him, but…

“Ye Qiu is my twin,” Ye Qiu—Ye Xiu?!—continued nonchalantly.

“So you have an identical twin that plays eSports?” Fang Shiqian asked incredulously.

“He’s not interested in games,” Ye Xiu replied offhandedly. “You all have your stuff together, right?”

“Yup,” Yang Cong said casually, raising the bag he held in one hand.

“Okay, then—”

“Are you the guy we know or not?!” Zhang Jiale yelled, throwing his arms up in the air. “What are you making it so confusing for?!”

“You’ve never met my twin,” Ye Xiu told them. “And probably still won’t, for a while yet. Come on, we’re going to a better facility.”

And with that, Ye Xiu simply turned around and started walking away.

“He didn’t actually answer,” Zhang Jiale grumbled to Sun Zheping.

“It’s him,” Sun Zheping replied with absolute certainty. “We’ve studied Excellent Era enough to know. Besides, look at Han Wenqing. He’s known Ye Qiu even longer, and he doesn’t have even the slightest bit of doubt.”

Wu Yuce, walking with Li Xuan behind the two, thought that it only made sense for two of the most aggressive and decisive players in the Alliance to have immediately come to a conclusion and stuck with it.

When Ye Xiu said “better facility,” he apparently did not mean “higher standard training,” but “a fully equipped villa for a full team of eSports players.” An Elysium, one could say.

“We could have been here?!” Fang Rui complained. “The whole time?! Captain Lin, why?!”

His pathetic wails may have been a little embarrassing, but everyone else couldn’t help but think the same thing.

“You couldn’t have, I was still setting it up,” Ye Xiu said blandly.

“That’s a lie, Mucheng was here,” Chu Yunxiu accused. Having finally found her missing friend, though, she was in a much better mood.

“Mucheng was helping.” Ye Xiu didn’t care.

“Is Ye Qiu really in charge of us?” Fang Shiqian asked Su Mucheng. He knew Ye Qiu was shameless; if he asked directly, he’d probably say “yes” no matter what. At least with Su Mucheng there was a possibility of a serious reply.

“He is,” Su Mucheng replied. “But it’s ‘Ye Xiu’.”

“You can think of ‘Ye Qiu’ as a stage name, if it helps,” Ye Xiu offered.

“Who uses their brother’s name as a stage name?!” Huang Shaotian couldn’t hold it in anymore. “No really, who does that? What kind of person would even think to? Why would you bother? Why not choose anything else at all, there are so many names in the world, so many things you could do, and you’d have all kinds of associations, too, taking your brother’s name would be so weird, what’s the purpose? What’s the point? Do you just like being confusing? Trying to annoy him? Is this the ultimate troll, the real long con? You want to act like a stage name is a good explanation, you tell me, who would do something like that? Is that a normal thing to do, that you’re going to say ‘just think of it as a stage name’ and be done?! Give that crap up, I’m not buying it, tell me the real reason right now!”

“It was convenient at the time,” Ye Xiu said, ignoring pretty much everything else he’d said. “Speaking of, this facility wasn’t originally designed for team living, so some of the rooms are definitely more convenient than others. If you want a good one, you might want to get a head start.”

“You think we didn’t guess that by the layout? Captain already went to secure us a room, you’re not getting rid of me that easy,” Huang Shaotian replied immediately.

Now that they were looking, it was true that Yu Wenzhou had disappeared.

Ye Xiu grinned. “Did I say they were two-person rooms?”

Huang Shaotian was gone before any of the rest of them could even process what Ye Xiu had said.

They met up in the unbelievably swanky common room, complete with multiple large screens, high-quality computers for gaming, and a ton of couches, to finally get their mission briefing.

“What are we here to do?” Wang Jiexi asked seriously. “Is there something they feel only we can combat?”

“Obviously,” Ye Xiu said.

“Well, what is it?” Fang Shiqian was not the patient type.

Ye Xiu raised an eyebrow at the unnecessary interruption. “Aliens.”

“Fuck off,” Fang Shiqian shot back immediately. “What do they actually want us for?”

“It could be aliens,” said Fang Rui from the side. As someone who hadn’t officially debuted yet, most people weren’t sure who he was, but the mere fact that he was there meant he had skill. The way he was closely following Lin Jingyan meant he was probably from Wind Howl.

His obvious familiarity with Huang Shaotian and Yu Wenzhou was a little weirder, but some of the captains who’d been on the lookout for new talent were aware he’d once been in Blue Rain’s training camp.

“No it could not,” Fang Shiqian said impatiently. “Ye Qiu, what’s your deal? If you’re supposed to be in charge of us, act like it!”

“It’s Ye Xiu,” Su Mucheng piped up from the side.

“Not exactly adding to his credibility, there,” Chu Yunxiu pointed out.

“Well, I’ve said what I can say,” Ye Xiu said, with an air of washing his hands of it. “If you don’t feel like believing me…”

“Who’s going to believe it’s aliens?!” Zhang Jiale yelled. “Don’t just dodge out of the question!”

“Look, it’s classified information,” Ye Xiu explained. “We can’t go yelling it out all the time, even if this place is pretty secure.”

“We still have to know what’s going on, or there’s no use,” Zhang Xinjie insisted.

“Well, you can take it as the country wants us to be very good at Glory,” Ye Xiu said.

This was hardly more believable, and yet such a step above aliens that most were almost willing to accept it.

Fang Shiqian was not ‘most’. “Why would this obscure military branch care if we’re good at Glory? Don’t think we didn’t notice the stupid bootcamp thing, this is definitely military.”

“Yes, well, remote piloting is the future of national defense. Mostly they want us for our hand speed.”

“Fuck, really?!” Huang Shaotian was not pleased.

“Well, except Yu Wenzhou. Unlike the others,”—with a significant look—“they want him for his brain.”

Huang Shaotian was speechless.

“Rude,” Sun Zheping commented, but he didn’t seem at all offended.

“No way, I got my mechanics this far just for Glory,” Fang Rui complained, absolutely offended.

“Well, they made Glory just to refine your mechanics,” Ye Xiu replied.

“They what?!” Everyone was thinking it, but it was Tian Sen who actually said something first.

“No…” The next to comment was, surprisingly, the as-yet-undebuted Zhou Zekai, who had been near silent throughout the entire time they’d been under the military’s jurisdiction. Whether it was because he wasn’t familiar with anyone or because he was naturally like that, he rarely even made noise, no matter how hard the training was or how the soldiers might have mocked him for being a “useless pretty boy.” He never seemed to mind anything, just diligently doing what he needed to and keeping his thoughts to himself.

It seemed even he couldn’t maintain his self-imposed silence in this situation. Anyone who loved Glory would be upset. Even Ye Xiu looked displeased, though he was the one saying it.

“Don’t worry, though, it really is just remote piloting. You all know how important weapons advancement is for the country, and this division is in charge of unorthodox defense measures. Things were always going to go this way eventually, and we still have Glory to play around in for now. As for later…well, we’ll see when it comes to that. We might be able to convince them.”

There was a collective, if understated, sigh of relief. The people here were all people who put their whole hearts into the game. For it to be nothing more than a sham was…too much betrayal to handle.

“In any case, we’ll have a schedule. We’re practicing to work together as a team, and some engineers will come in to help us out with Silver equipment as we go, too. I’ll talk more about what we’re expected to do tomorrow—for now, settle in, rest, probably end up on the computer anyway since I know it’s been a while for you.”

There were a few snorts, but no disagreement. It had been way too long since they’d seen a computer at all, let alone one with access to Glory.

The next day, Ye Xiu’s explanation of their duties began. “We’re essentially preparing for a tournament.”

“A tournament…with remote piloting?” Yu Wenzhou asked, skeptical. “Against whom?”

“The aliens, obviously.” Ye Xiu’s tone was way too blasé.

Everyone groaned. “Is it just that you don’t want to tell us?” Zhao Yang, a man with very little presence, finally asked. Even he couldn’t put up with this forever.

“I’m telling you as much as I’m allowed to tell you,” Ye Xiu said, looking completely genuine. “In any case, isn’t teamwork and development important no matter what? If we want to convince them to let us go back to our normal lives, we have to show them there’s no more ‘training’ that needs to be done. You can do that much no matter what, right?”

Everyone begrudgingly agreed.

Training started simple. Anyone who’d had something to say the day before about their computer setup, preferred mouse or keyboard, got their new equipment now. Everyone was also encouraged to try a different set provided by the government, said to be perfectly in line with their own preferences—and they were. Eerily so, even. It turned out that yesterday, Ye Xiu had been taking notes on their stated preferences as well as the data on their play to determine what he thought suited them best, and the technology had been developed overnight.

“This is really creepy,” Wu Yuce commented. As someone who hadn’t debuted yet, and was even treated coldly by his team because he refused to change classes from Ghostblade, he’d never had something like a setup that completely, perfectly catered to his preferences—let alone in ways he’d never even considered before, and in less than a day. Who would care so much about one random rookie, no matter how talented he might seem?

The government, apparently. Or maybe just Ye Xiu.

“Show some appreciation.” Li Xuan felt obliged, as his captain, to scold him.

Wu Yuce glanced over at him. “I just did?”

“Yeah, I got it,” Ye Xiu replied, sending Li Xuan careening into incredulity.

Morning was devoted to combination play, lunch to complaining about the facilities they were in before—“Nutrient packets! Actual nutrient packets! Who allowed that?!” fumed Zhang Jiale—and enjoying the normal food available, afternoon to individual practice or whichever scrimmages they might want to set up themselves. Ye Xiu suggested they look over their equipment and see what they might want to change about it if they could, since there would be R&D coming in soon to talk to them about weapon and armor upgrades. They would have time later as well, so it was entirely optional.

All of this was fine, if a little surprisingly lax, until someone realized Ye Xiu was logging into the actual game.

“Hey hey hey, are you going to steal bosses without us?! You’re pawning us off to do whatever while you steal resources for your team, huh?! Too unfair, I’m not allowing it. If you log on, so do I! Do you hear me?!”

Everyone heard him; it was, of course, Huang Shaotian.

“I’m not getting bosses, I’m raising a character,” Ye Xiu said nonchalantly. “It won’t be on the main game server, don’t worry.”

“How can you raise a character outside of the main servers?” Zhang Xinjie asked. Like everyone else who had played a pro match, they were aware that the servers that ran their offline arenas were not the same as the ones for the main game; there was no outside world, game content, nor experience to be had.

“It’s mostly new content. We don’t have time for me to level a character the normal way, but they can’t just automatically make him max-level, either—leveling is an important part of stress-testing and development of the mech. The content is a bunch of dungeons designed to test the relevant aspects of the mech as fast as possible, set in an environment similar to a Fixed Field arena so there’s no need to worry about scaling based on level.”

“So, a series of high-difficulty dungeons that give high experience.” Yu Wenzhou had come over as well. In fact, basically everyone had come over. “A single-player instance?”

“If it doesn’t even need a healer, how difficult could it be?” Fang Shiqian said derisively.

“Well, if it’s a class that can heal itself a little, it might be possible.” Tian Sen, as a Priest-class player, was well-acquainted with the use of what low-level healing skills were available to him.

“And dodging!” Fang Rui said, leaning obnoxiously over the top of the computer from the other side to try to see the screen. There were only so many people who could crowd behind Ye Xiu at once and still see the screen clearly.

“Mm.” Zhou Zekai, still a near-silent presence despite how flashy he’d been in group practice earlier, nodded his agreement.

“You’re infecting the younger generation,” Fang Shiqian hissed at Ye Xiu.

“I didn’t say anything,” Ye Xiu said, but it was amused rather than defensive.

“Ooh, just dodging is fine, who needs a healer?” Fang Shiqian mocked, talking over him. “I am surrounded by idiots.”

“Are you all seriously going to ignore that he just said leveling a character is for the mech based on it?” Chu Yunxiu asked, incredulous. “You’re just going to skip over that? Does One Autumn Leaf have a mech too? Do we all have mech?”

“Didn’t I say they want us for remote-piloting mech?” Ye Xiu asked reasonably. “Of course they exist, and are based on your characters. Otherwise why would I still bother training you with Glory? Or telling you to look into Silver equipment?”

“How does the healing work?” Zhang Xinjie asked, immediately interested. He had considered the option that they might have mechs for their characters, but he couldn’t understand how they could translate Glory skills into the real world, so he’d labeled the likelihood as fairly low.

“It has something to do with nanites, but how it actually does the repair was unclear.” Ye Xiu sighed. “If you’re really interested, the R&D group and the developers of the game should be coming by later; you can ask then.”

“The game developers are coming, too?” Yu Wenzhou already had his notebook out, but now he had a somewhat concerning gleam in his eyes.

“Yeah, they had to do something kind of unusual with the new content to make sure it would sync up with the mech design properly and I could still level it. They only recently came up with the update that made leveling the character viable at all, let alone trying it in a private dungeon.”

“But you’re already level 20!” Haung Shaotian pointed out, followed immediately by “What the fuck, you’re that high already?! You aren’t just starting at all, you definitely played last night, too! Letting us mess around while you get to play new content by yourself? What a selfish asshole! Where’s our new content, hm? Where’s your spirit of sharing, hm? It’s no good to be all by yourself like this, aren’t you always saying something about how you can’t play Glory alone? Hypocrite! You shove over, give me a turn.”

“You can just join me with Troubling Rain,” Ye Xiu said, completely unmoved by Huang Shaotian’s pushing. “I never said it had to be a single-player instance.”

“What, now you’re willing to add us?” Huang Shaotian was complaining, but he’d already settled in at the computer next to Ye Xiu’s. No one had even seen him move. “Why’d you bother hiding last night then? Did you think we wouldn’t find out eventually? Did you? Did you? Did you?”

“I was in a public practice room,” Ye Xiu pointed out. “Anyone could have come by and joined if they wanted.”

“It had a closed door,” Han Wenqing said darkly. He, like any other pro Glory player, was not pleased to have missed out on exclusive content.

Ye Xiu looked up at him in what might have been genuine surprise, but probably wasn’t. “Since when do you care about closed doors?”

At least, knowing Ye Xiu’s background, they now had some sort of explanation for how he was able to so comfortably ignore and even further provoke Han Wenqing’s perpetual aura of violence.

“In any case, the door is unlocked. If anyone wants to see me at night from now on, I’ll be in there, probably doing the boring planning and paperwork I was meant to do in the afternoons.”

“‘Was meant to’?” Lin Jingyan asked.

“Apparently afternoons are now leveling Lord Grim time,” Ye Xiu said with a wry smile.

At that point, Lin Jingyan noticed that Huang Shaotian was not the only one set up on the computer. Yang Cong was sitting on the opposite side of Ye Xiu, the game already loaded on his screen—once again, no one knew when he’d gotten there. Zhou Zekai had quietly set up a computer as well, next to Fang Rui, who was waving at Lin Jingyan and patting the seat next to him pointedly.

“…How many players to a dungeon?” Yu Wenzhou asked, since Ye Xiu still hadn’t given a specific answer. Whether or not Yu Wenzhou had a computer, Ye Xiu hadn’t explained how to join his part of the game yet. When he did, who actually joined would doubtlessly come down to reaction time—a battle Yu Wenzhou couldn’t help but lose.

“As many as I want,” Ye Xiu said with an amused lilt to this tone; he knew why Yu Wenzhou would ask. “It scales difficulty by number and class composition, though it still doesn’t know what to do about mine. That is the purpose of the testing, after all. It’s good I do have some heals, or I’d have actually had to ask a healer to join me. Like Zhang Xinjie.”

“Fuck you,” Fang Shiqian said, lifting a middle finger over his monitor to make sure Ye Xiu could properly see it; the computer he’d moved to was on the other side of the table from Ye Xiu’s setup, same as Zhou Zekai and Fang Rui, and he didn’t want Ye Xiu to miss it.

Zhang Xinjie, after all, was both a rookie and a member of the team that had just beaten Ye Xiu to a championship for the first time, whereas Fang Shiqian had argued meta with Ye Xiu through dungeoning together on various classes for years. If he wanted to call someone to help when time was of the essence and coordination essential, not choosing Fang Shiqian was an obvious personal slight.

“Your character is of a Priest class, then?” Wang Jiexi asked. He’d long since become used to Fang Shiqian’s attitude, and even Ye Xiu’s riling of it. In his opinion, it was best to ignore the whole thing entirely.

“No class,” Ye Xiu said nonchalantly, like he had not just blown everyone’s minds. “I have a viable Unspecialized.”

“Bullshit,” Sun Zheping said. “Weapon-switching took ages, Unspecialized is only viable against noobs. Everyone knows this.”

Those of the younger generation kept quiet about how blatantly they were left out of “everyone.” It wasn’t like there were only a few of them, either, but who was going to argue with Sun Zheping? It was barely a step down from arguing with Han Wenqing on the list of Widely Known Terrible Ideas, which was in itself not too far below “antagonizing Ye QXiu or Su Mucheng on purpose,” the uncontested top spot.

“I have a transforming weapon,” Ye Xiu explained, again like this was not big news. “So it all works out. You’ll see it in a bit. The dungeon I’m in is an exclusive part of the Heavenly Domain they loaded my character directly into to save time, but it should be available to all of you, since your characters are coded to mechs as well. Just go to a portal in any city, it should show up as a possible destination for you.”

It took less than a minute for the global chat of the Heavenly Domain to explode.

“Holy shit! Desert Dust is on Second Street!”

“I found Troubling Rain in Center Hall!”

“Windy Rain?!”

“What the fuck! Is this the end of the world? Are the gods coming to save us?!”

The few undebuted characters made their way to the city’s portals unmolested, while those of the pros famous enough to be called out just ignored the public’s nonsense as usual.

It was funny, though, that this time someone had accidentally hit on exactly the truth of the matter: The gods had come to Glory as part of their duty to save the world.

As one does.

The first bit of “leveling up Lord Grim” was actually just a bunch of pro players standing around, watching his weapon transform.

“And they think that’ll work in real life?” Tian Sen asked, dubious.

“That’s another reason they’re coming tomorrow,” Ye Xiu replied, sending the umbrella from spear to tonfa and back again, too fast to be believed. In the game it looked fine, but in real life? Separating and combining stably aside, how could it possibly be staying up?! “They’re not sure how we did it, so they can’t tell if it’s a bug. We have reason to believe that Glory doesn’t have any bugs at all, but they still can’t understand this.”

“No bugs at all?” Xiao Shiqin asked incredulously. Then again, thinking about it, he’d never heard anyone say anything about a bug in Glory. Ever. With a game that big, it was practically unheard of.

“As far as the system itself is concerned, yes. Especially the equipment editor, which was directly ported into the game,” Ye Xiu agreed.

“Ported? Who made it, then?” Yu Wenzhou noticed the choice of words right away.

“Aliens, as I understand it,” Ye Xiu said with a shrug.

“You really shouldn’t call foreigners that,” Yang Cong said, leaning sideways to look at Ye Xiu’s screen. “So outdated. Besides, since when do they have this kind of ability?”

“I don’t know much about the standards for or timeline of extraterrestrial technological development,” Ye Xiu said, unbothered.

“Will you give it a rest?” Fang Shiqian was openly derisive. “The aliens made our games, too, hm? And how did they do that, magic?”

“Well, more like sufficiently advanced technology,” Ye Xiu replied. “Which is basically indistinguishable, so if you want to call it that, go ahead. Your team does seem to have a history of it.”

Wang Jiexi gave him an unamused look.

“Are we playing this dungeon or what?” Sun Zheping groused. “There’s no point in just looking at the weapon.”

Han Wenqing didn’t wait for a reply, immediately pulling a mob of NPCs over for the pros to deal with. It turned out that when Ye Xiu said this was a difficult dungeon that would scale up if they joined, he had not lied—even as pros, dealing with that many enemies at once was nothing easy. Within minutes, Zhang Xinjie actually sighed audibly at the unnecessary pressure he was now under.

Fang Shiqian, in a stark contrast of personalities, began his cursing 20 seconds in and had yet to stop.

That evening, Ye Xiu hadn’t been working for long in that same room as the night before when Zhang Xinjie politely knocked on the door and came inside to talk to him. Zhang Xinjie, as a person and a tactician, was the type to want to cover all his bases, so it was no real surprise to Ye Xiu when he solemnly asked to know if he should be taking Ye Xiu’s talk of aliens seriously—and, if so, what was to be done about it.

“There’s not much to be done,” Ye Xiu said, pushing back from his computer with a sigh. “But yes, it really is aliens.”

It wasn’t an easy thing for the common person to accept. If Ye Xiu hadn’t been fully aware of his family’s unusual career from a young age, he might have been inclined to disbelieve it as well. However, he did have that background—and, if he was honest with himself, there were several hints. He just…hadn’t wanted to see them, even when they appeared right in front of him.

Ye Xiu ran away from home at 15. It wasn’t because he wanted to play games and his parents wouldn’t let him. In fact, his parents let him do most whatever he wanted, outside of his training and homework, and Ye Xiu always completed his training and homework. Nothing was less pleasant than forcing oneself through the agent instructors’ morning tests unprepared. His parents expected him to learn to balance his work, rest, and recreation himself, and considered the gaming he did, relying frequently on fast and precise reactions, interpersonal interaction, and quick-thinking as it did, to be a perfectly acceptable aspect of his development. Ye Xiu was already one of their top operatives, if still unofficial due to his age, and his parents were quite proud of him.

Ye Xiu didn’t really appreciate being a “top operative” at just barely 15, but he was resigned. He got to see what a normal heir looked like in his twin brother, who would take over the Ye family’s public side. This was a tradition of the Ye family, in which the gene for identical twins happened to run: The firstborn in the dark, sworn to serve the government and continue their family’s all-important role in its protection, the secondborn in the light, keeping the family as a whole relevant and powerful outside the service no one was supposed to know about.

Not every generation had identical twins, so it didn’t always work out so easily. Sometimes a single child had to keep up both aspects, sometimes the first child would be hidden from the world early on and their younger sibling would be the only one the public ever really knew about, to stop anyone from asking where the elder had gone. Sometimes they’d even arrange a marriage and allow the unknowing spouse to manage public relations while the Ye heir practically disappeared entirely from both the public and their spouse’s life.

Ye Xiu didn’t think his parents were necessarily bad people, but designed to raise children, they were not. For all that Ye Qiu was likely to take responsibility for the Ye family in the future, outwardly an unusual case of the younger twin’s being favored for succession, in their eyes he was a bit of a spare, and it showed. Ye Xiu did his best to be a good brother to Ye Qiu, but what could he do? He couldn’t make their parents pay attention to his brother, not that their attention was such a great thing in the first place, and he didn’t have the time nor energy to shower Ye Qiu with affection of his own. He could only do his best to keep up with Ye Qiu’s plans and dreams, so he’d feel like at least one person in the house understood him.

When he ran across the packed luggage, he knew he hadn’t done enough. In his defense, his parents had been more stressed than usual lately, and there’d been a corresponding increase in Ye Xiu’s training. From what he could tell, something big was happening, something that would require all current projects to be suspended so they could devote their resources to this new development instead. They’d been hinting that he might be drafted early, even, and now Ye Qiu wanted to run. Ye Qiu, who had neither street sense nor profitable skills. Ye Qiu, who registered as a spare to their parents on a good day. Ye Qiu, whose family currently could not spare any of their considerable resources to go looking for him, should he disappear.

What if Ye Qiu died? What if Ye Xiu were really drafted, and Ye Qiu thought not even his brother cared to look for him? What if Ye Xiu were drafted to face whatever situation could be so dangerous it had their crazy parents looking worried, and he died before Ye Qiu could return? Wouldn’t Ye Qiu be crushed? For all that he pretended at being annoyed by his older brother’s mere existence, if he never got to see Ye Xiu again, it’d be a regret he might never fully recover from.

What if Ye Xiu were drafted, and he had to face whichever insanity while he didn’t even know where his little brother was? Wouldn’t he be distracted? If he died and let the country fall to whatever threat his parents were so sure they were under, wouldn’t that make everyone unhappy?

Their parents would not devote much energy to stopping Ye Qiu from running under these circumstances, and Ye Xiu couldn’t even promise he’d do better, with how much their parents were focused on him in what little time they had outside of their official work.

Unless Ye Xiu were not there to focus on.

Ye Xiu had all kinds of survival skills. Ye Qiu had a safe life at home, and their parents would know not to let him run if Ye Xiu ran first. They could handle this “great threat” on their own; they didn’t need a child to help them. Ye Xiu was absolutely certain they wouldn’t push Ye Qiu, who had none of the necessary training, to take his place. They probably wouldn’t afford him much more personal attention than usual, but they might at least look at Ye Qiu a little more often.

And Ye Xiu could dodge the madness, live his own life, maybe just play games for a little while. Eventually he’d have to come back, but it might be nice to live as he liked for at least some amount of time.

So, what if? What if.

Ye Xiu took Ye Qiu’s luggage and ran himself.

His parents wouldn’t have the resources to devote to a thorough manhunt for Ye Xiu, and Ye Xiu knew how to pretty much stay off the grid, if he needed to. They knew Ye Xiu knew how to do that, so they might not even bother searching when they had something else so important taking up their energy and focus.

Ye Xiu liked to believe he’d made a fairly clean getaway. He’d been enjoying himself, living with the Su siblings, playing games for money, talking with whomever he felt like talking to. It was good.

He should have known there was something odd about Glory. They’d fixed the lag issue? Ye Xiu knew enough about technology to have laughed at that outright if he hadn’t seen it himself; it simply wasn’t how distributed systems worked. The realism Glory showed, in environment and even elemental interaction, was completely unrealistic in terms of what anyone could expect of modern technology, and the equipment editor—it wasn’t at all subtle in being beyond what could count as reasonable technology. Then there were the choices that were plainly odd for a game—no mounts at all, in such a sweeping world? And they refused to compromise on this point, earning more ire with every update. Visual effects couldn’t be turned down? Minute control of individual aspects of characters, even individual fingers if you had the skill to pull it off, which practically no one did? Characters that absolutely could not overlap in space, no matter what? Environmental effects that went beyond aesthetic and could genuinely hamper the character? A completely different way of using skills underwater?

Glory was too good to be true, but it was so, so good. Ye Xiu probably couldn’t have given up on it even if he’d tried. The world was so full and complete, who wouldn’t want to immerse themselves in it? All weapons provided by the system and skills used by bosses were ones that could be made with in-game materials or derivatives of what players had access to. Why?

Well, in fact, because what the “Glory devs” put out was what they had, and they couldn’t afford to keep anything back for bosses just to keep players guessing. What weapons they made were themselves made through the same equipment editor they made available to the public. The whole system was a highly advanced battle, environment, and equipment development simulator, based on the alien technology they’d been lent when they came to tell Earth they’d been selected for this prestigious tournament.

They’d come to China to give this information because Chinese was the language spoken by the plurality of humans. Their universal translator couldn’t be used for every single language appearing on a planet, that would be absurd—so they always just chose the most-spoken language and culture to deal with. They were very polite, and offered to allow Earth to borrow their technology to put them on a more level playing field against the other, more developed planets participating. How kind, yes?

Except it was a betting tournament with a high ante, and Earth had been drafted, not asked. Aliens in their society, they explained to the blank-faced Chinese officials across from them, would not do something so barbaric as just attack planets, even ones so poorly developed as the “base-level” Earth, which hadn’t even successfully made faster-than-light travel, nor met even one sentient species from another planet before this. No, though they were interested in Earth’s resources, they would politely give Earth a chance to prove they deserved to be counted as “owning” the planet in intergalactic terms. They just had to win the tournament, to show that they were an advanced and intelligent species.

Although they could borrow alien technology, the interest would accrue every year they spent developing from that instead of joining in the tournament as required. If the interest accrued to the point that even the value of their whole planet, the only “real” asset they had, could no longer pay it off, they would be considered to have defaulted on the loan, and their planet would be forcibly seized.

The technology they showed, the clear military force these aliens wielded, what could Earth do? To reject was to die, so of course they had to accept. Accept, and work as fast as possible to come up with a team for this remote-piloting tournament, to pit themselves against an unknown group of other aliens in a competition for which they were absurdly underprepared.

The alien ambassadors were thoughtful enough to provide them with some data on some of the other aliens and tech they might be likely to face over the course of the tournament—the basis for Glory’s nonhuman NPCs. The idea behind Glory was that the world had so many people, surely they could get them to unknowingly contribute the genius of ten thousand united as one to save the planet they lived on. Talent could be found in such unlikely places, and a “game” this good would likely draw in all kinds of interested talent.

They were right. And, although they’d put in some amount of effort to release globally, just in case, it was obviously China that had the best suited people when it came time to choose.

(Whether it had been a fair contest from the start was, in the end, irrelevant. It was what it was, and being able to use the universal translator with ease was probably enough reason to have justified only looking in China in the first place. The Chinese government felt they’d already gone above and beyond just by offering the chance to foreign players at all.)

How lucky, that the player considered the number one in Glory was from the Ye family? It all worked out so well for everybody, didn’t it? Except that the best of the best in gaming, and therefore remote piloting, happened to be a bunch of children, many of whom had never thought of devoting their lives to something so grand as saving the planet.

So it went.

Ye Xiu didn’t explain everything to Zhang Xinjie, only pointed out the obviously inhuman aspects of Glory as a game, showed him what evidence he was allowed, and answered any questions he could for the serious and determined 19-year-old. When he’d finished, Zhang Xinjie was quiet for a long time.

“Don’t worry so much,” Ye Xiu said with a hint of a laugh. “You can come by and work out strategies with me as we go, if you want, but we aren’t so unprepared as it sounds. We haven’t run out of time on the loan yet, so choosing to go now is obviously because they believe we can win. We wouldn’t bet the Earth on a whim, right?”

Zhang Xinjie exhaled quietly, then nodded firmly. He’d only come because he couldn’t leave a possibility unexplored, but he hadn’t really expected it to be aliens. Even now, it was somewhat hard to believe. He’d have to think it over on his own, and come up with some ideas of how best to handle this before he’d be of any use in planning things in the future.

Knowing this, he left to go to his room. It was, in any case, his scheduled bedtime. Zhang Xinjie never abandoned his schedules, if he could avoid it, not even in the face of the possible end of the world.

Meanwhile, in the common areas, the rest of the pros were decidedly not going to bed yet. All that time away from their beloved comforts had given them more than enough reason to indulge in them now. That first day, they’d fallen upon the computers like the starving on food, but it wasn’t the only thing they’d missed.

“Couch cushions,” Zhang Jiale groaned happily, sinking into them. “I’m making myself a fort and no one can stop me.”

“What if I want to sit on the couch?” Chu Yunxiu asked, leaning over the back to look down on his sprawled form.

“Which couch?” he said, gesturing expansively at the various pieces of furniture scattered across the room. “Realistically, you and Mucheng couldn’t possible need more than one, right?”

“Watch us take up four, now, just because.”

“Go right ahead,” Sun Zheping said, picking up a cushion from a different couch and throwing it on the floor near Zhang Jiale. “There’s still more than enough.”

In the corner of the room, Zhou Zekai was quietly making his own fort to hide in. Fang Rui sidled over and started adding onto it, making room for himself. Zhou Zekai didn’t seem to mind, at least.

“You want to make one?” Wang Jiexi asked Fang Shiqian, who was pulling cushions off the couch.

“I’m not a baby,” Fang Shiqian said. “Like those idiots. And you. Don’t think I didn’t see you eyeing their structures already, probably thinking about how you could make yours more stable than anything they’re coming up with.”

As if to back him up, Zhang Jiale managed to collapse his whole fort by trying to put a second story on it just behind them.

“But you just wanted to watch TV,” Wang Jiexi pointed out; not a denial, as anyone might have noticed.

“Then I can do it from in the fort, can’t I?” Fang Shiqian said, rolling his eyes. “There is such a thing as being too straightforward and self-effacing, in case you were wondering. I don’t need your support, I’m your support. Now get some of Lin Jingyan’s pillows before he can go soft and join that Fang Rui kid, as he inevitably will. Why the guy wants to build a back entrance out of his fort is beyond me, since we aren’t actually going to get into a pillow fight, but his soft-hearted captain is definitely going to end up helping anyway.”

“Pillow fight?” Su Mucheng asked, from where she was settled with Chu Yunxiu—notably, on just one couch—with their tea. “Now that actually does sound interesting.”

“I am watching TV,” Fang Shiqian hissed. “Did you have to try to keep a bunch of idiots alive so they wouldn’t lose experience in the only dungeon we’re allowed to use right now? Of course not, or you wouldn’t have even made such a suggestion. I am watching. TV.”

“I want to catch up on my drama,” Chu Yunxiu said with a frown. “That’s what we’re watching on this TV, okay?”

“I actually, at this point, do not give the slightest of a damn,” said Fang Shiqian. “The less of my brain I use, the better. Stop trying to steal our pillows!”

The last was directed at Huang Shaotian, who had darted in for the kill when it seemed Fang Shiqian was not looking: a miscalculation, as he should have known that, regardless of direction or tiredness, a healer was always looking.

“Shaotian, we don’t need any more,” Yu Wenzhou said. His steady structure was of modest size but very well defended, and also rather obviously already complete.

“Aw, but I wanted to make a nest on the inside,” Huang Shaotian complained, making his way back with seeming contriteness. Of course, “contriteness” couldn’t stop the sudden snag of a pillow from the Blossom Duo’s collapsed pile on his way back.

In the end, there actually was a pillow fight, but the corner of the room with tea and snacks was an acknowledged safe zone. Wang Jiexi’s careful guard over the nearby fort housing a dozing Fang Shiqian meant that it was essentially considered part of the safe zone as well. Going up against the Magician, even alone and in real life, was asking to get dizzied, and no one needed that at this point. It was just a bit of fun.

A bit of fun that involved Yang Cong stealing the bottom corner out of three different forts, Su Mucheng sniping two idiots who got between the safe zone and the screen in the head, and at least one case of Wu Yuce bodily running through a fort to get away from Zhao Yang’s revenge for an earlier attack, fully dismantling it.

“Going to bed” turned into a sprawling sleepover on a mess of cushions. Ye Xiu had barely made it into the room when he surveyed the damage, found Su Mucheng’s curled form amongst the piles, and sighed fondly before turning around again.

“I could carry them to bed,” Tian Sen offered uncertainly. “I know we were supposed to sleep…”

“And aren’t they sleeping?” Ye Xiu laughed. “You can come get blankets with me, if you want. Old Han?”

Han Wenqing was leaning against the wall by the door. “Let’s go, then.”

Which was how more than half of the Glory pros woke in the morning to blankets draped across the room like they’d been caught in some kind of storm.

But it was, in fact, very warm.

When the R&D team came to handle the pros’ Silver equipment, several of them were shocked to find that the core gods of R&D from their own clubs were there as well. For most of them, this was because the government had sent out developers to help advance the Silver equipment players were familiar with as fast as possible. Guan Rongfei, though, was just a lucky break for the government; obviously they couldn’t send anyone official to the club that housed Ye Xiu, because he’d recognize them right away. Who could have guessed such an expert would turn up there on his own?

For Guan Rongfei’s part, he didn’t seem to have particularly noticed that he’d even been moved.

“Old Ye!” he called, bounding over to Ye Xiu the moment he saw him. “They gave me unlimited materials to test with! I finally got to try out that new design for Evil Annihilation we were talking about, you’ll have to tell me how it works for you. After, though. They said you have a transforming weapon, why is this the first I’m hearing of it?”

“It wasn’t viable until recently, and then I already had One Autumn Leaf…”

“How could One Autumn Leaf compare?” Guan Rongfei asked impatiently. “Well? Where is it?!”

Ye Xiu was unceremoniously herded by the shorter man to the nearest computer. Some of the rest of them might have been amused by this if they weren’t currently flabbergasted by the familiar faces in an unfamiliar environment.

“Yang Li?” Zhang Xinjie asked, full of disbelief.

“Unlimited materials,” the man last seen in Club Tyranny crowed. “I finished your Silver equipment! Come on, let’s try it out. Oh, wait, can we get Fang Shiqian over here too? I want his opinion on this Cleric setup…”

As it turned out, agent or not, the R&D group was pretty much the same.

Lunch was spent at the computers, because none of the R&D or game developers wanted to stop working long enough to take a proper break. When they finally left, they’d come up with at least the general designs for full Silver equipment for every single character. The game developers were much more serious than R&D at first, coming to Ye Xiu with questions about the dungeon and how Lord Grim was progressing, but were absolutely shocked to find that more than one person on the team was interested in knowing about how they’d designed Glory.

“There really are hidden conditions involved in all the ‘random’ aspects of Glory?” asked Yu Wenzhou.

“Well, yes, randomization isn’t actually a normal aspect of the system.” The developer was startled by his clear interest in this rather mundane aspect of turning the technology into a standard game. “Like other systems, randomization has to be synthesized, but especially for this one we couldn’t change anything fundamental about the simulation or risk affecting the synchronization with the mech. Rather than change the modeling of how attacks work to make them completely random, we added conditions for when the result would trigger based on the method the player used and counted on player inconsistency and imprecision to make the result appear random. It was a bit of a messy fix, but it worked out.”

“So cool,” Fang Rui murmured on the side. As someone especially interested in misdirection and triggered events, this very much appealed to him. It meant the system was something you could figure out, and your opponent would never see it coming.

“I—really?” The developer had never been praised that way for his work before.

“Absolutely,” Xiao Shiqin said, looking up from his own notes. “And would you say this was the kind of thing anyone could learn, if they found the pattern?”

He blinked. “Well, I suppose so… It is more true to life than genuine randomness in a skill the character is supposed to understand fully, so we aren’t likely to change it. Any pattern can be discerned with enough time and effort.”

“Stop pumping developers for information,” Ye Xiu told the pros, leaning over from where he was working with R&D and about half of the game developers on his quickly developing Unspecialized. “You can pick apart the underpinnings of the game after they get us the new content we need.”

“Yes, sir,” the developer said, still bewildered, if somewhat flattered. “And we’ll keep running the material combinations you suggested, too. We should be able to give you an idea of what kind of special effects are possible when we come back.”

After their visitors had left, the pros set up their stations to run through more dungeons with Lord Grim. “Didn’t we just finish the Silver equipment?” Tian Sen asked, having already logged in himself.

“In terms of what equipment we want for what we can expect from Glory and general PvP, yes,” Ye Xiu replied. “But they weren’t able to model everything we’d be up against in Glory, so they’re doing their best to get some other simulations up for us to fight, and maybe find some effects that are good for countering the more problematic aspects. It won’t be enough to cover everything, but it’s better than nothing.”

“What kinds of things will we be up against that they weren’t able to model?” Wang Jiexi had already finished loading in as well.

“Alien things,” Ye Xiu explained with an overly serious nod. “That’d have to be most of it. Wouldn’t really fit in the game, right?

“Stop making fun of my captain or I’ll fucking punch you,” Fang Shiqian said pleasantly.

Zhao Yang sighed. “You can just say you don’t want to tell us,” he told Ye Xiu. “There doesn’t need to be so much fighting every time.”

“I don’t know.” Ye Xiu let his mouth pull up on one side in obvious amusement. “It seems pretty good for us to me.”

That night, the one to show up at Ye Xiu’s door was Chu Yunxiu.

“What’s with all this stuff about aliens?” she asked, closing the door behind herself and making her lazy way over. “Normally I’d just ignore you, but you’ve got Mucheng trying to tell me about it, too, and she actually seems serious. You know how much she values your opinion, right? As jokes go, putting these kinds of thoughts in her head really isn’t funny.”

“It’s not a joke,” Ye Xiu said, pulling off his headphones to face her properly. “Would I joke with Mucheng about something like this?”

Chu Yunxiu scowled.

Ye Xiu sighed. “You’re here because you already know the answer, right?”

“I’m smoking,” she said abruptly, tapping out a cigarette. “If you have any rules in here against it, I don’t want to hear about it.”

Ye Xiu shrugged and let her light up. She took a long drag, blew it out over her head, and then turned to look back at Ye Xiu. “Fuck you,” she said, extraordinarily vehement for a young woman who often kept her emotions to herself. “None of us asked for this. Nobody asked.”

Ye Xiu smiled bitterly. “Neither did I.”

“Yeah, but clearly you knew about all this,” she said, gesturing to the practice room that was somewhat set up as his office at night, papers spread around him that none of the other players had to deal with. “You were in this from the start. Me? I was just playing a game. And Mucheng? Mucheng could be a fashion model right now, no one would turn her down. She’s in Glory for you. I heard what she said about your family, Glory was made for you. What right do you have, to pull the rest of us in?”

“To be fair,” Ye Xiu said, leaning back in his chair, “I don’t think anyone on Earth wanted an alien invasion. It’s your bad luck, that you’re one of the best. What else should you do, leave it to someone less competent? Wait to find out only too late that there’s no Earth left for you to live on?”

Chu Yunxiu was silent for a bit, quietly smoking the cigarette she hadn’t been allowed around the rest of the team, earlier. “You’re a piece of shit, you know,” she said, blowing her smoke out in his face. Ye Xiu didn’t even blink, long used to it from his own habit. “Sounding so reasonable when we face down the end of the world, like we don’t even have room to be angry.”

“What use is there in being angry?” Ye Xiu laughed. “It’s a little more complicated, maybe, but for the most part? It’s still Glory. Glory with new content, and one tournament.”

“One ‘tournament’ that it’ll cost us everything to lose,” Chu Yunxiu griped. “I don’t want to have anything to do with that.”

“There’s no point worrying about losing. We can worry after it happens, when we’d have nothing better to do. But, Yunxiu—you may not know, since you haven’t had time to do it yourself, yet, but there’s nothing impossible about winning a championship.”

Chu Yunxiu gave him a long look, then sighed and snubbed out her cigarette. “You want me to win a championship, just like that?”

“I want us to win a championship.”

“And you know how?”

Ye Xiu grinned. “Statistically speaking, I’m the best.”

Chu Yunxiu snorted. “Alright then. I’m going to go watch two idiots fall in love after a bunch of stupid misunderstandings. All night. I hope you’re happy.”

Ye Xiu waved her off. “Use a computer if everyone else wants to watch something else. Not everyone has your stamina.”

Chu Yunxiu casually flipped him off as she left the room.

Ye Xiu huffed out a laugh. He liked Chu Yunxiu. In stark contrast to Su Mucheng’s outwardly accommodating personality, she was very unapologetically herself. And, likely due at least somewhat to her friendship with Su Mucheng, she was not even the slightest bit wary of him. Not quite treating him as an older brother herself, but still far closer than many of the other younger players. For example, Ye Xiu wasn’t sure Zhou Zekai had actually directly addressed him yet, even once.

Well, things would progress as they would. He still had some time.

“You’re telling me your aim is as good in real life as it is in the game?” Fang Rui enthused.

“Mm…” Zhou Zekai agreed hesitantly; he didn’t look like he knew what to do with all this attention.

“Little Zhou is the coolest! Let’s play Pitch-pot, I want to see! Which do you think is more accurate, your aim or my golden right hand?”

“We don’t have the materials for Pitch-pot,” Lin Jingyan reminded him laughingly.

“Sister Mu, is that true?” Fang Rui’s voice took on a whining tone. “Surely in a place this big, there must be something we can use. I want to play!”

“Since we’re supposed to be sleeping, you should be a little quieter,” Su Mucheng told him, laughing a little herself. “But I might be able to find something.”

“Sister Mu is the best!” Fang Rui cheered, as if he hadn’t heard her at all.

Chu Yunxiu returned to the room to find half the group tossing pencils into what looked to be a decorative vase. The group turned to her as one when she opened the door, more than a few staring with wide eyes like they’d been caught out doing something wrong.

“I don’t want to know,” she said, holding up a forestalling hand when she saw mouths open to explain. “I’m going to sit over here and watch things, and you will be quiet enough that I can hear them. That’s it.”

“Sure,” Zhao Yang said. “We’ll keep it down.”

Li Xuan snorted. They could try, but Huang Shaotian was playing too. Even Yu Wenzhou couldn’t keep him quiet for long.

They needn’t have worried, though; Chu Yunxiu immersed herself in her dramas and didn’t look away again before every single other pro had either gone to bed or drifted off then and there. Su Mucheng had leaned into her side to sleep, so Chu Yunxiu had settled a hand in her hair and left it there.

When Ye Xiu finally came in himself, she was still watching. “All night,” she said, before he could say anything else. “All. Night.”

“Go ahead,” he said peaceably, tossing a blanket over her and Su Mucheng. “Wow, these guys don’t even have pillows to blame it on this time.”

“Hopeless,” she agreed, shaking her head. “They want to pretend at following the schedule, but here they all still are when you come back to check. Their game didn’t even use alcohol penalties, they’ve no excuse.”

Obviously they wouldn’t involve alcohol penalties, being pro players, but Ye Xiu had to admit their sprawled forms did a good job of mimicking drunken revelry. “How much longer is that drama?”

“All night,” she reminded. “If I have to start a new one, I will.”

“I know, just don’t wake them up. You all do actually need to sleep.”

Chu Yunxiu nodded and tossed another sunflower seed in her mouth. “I’ll keep it down.”

Although her promise had exactly the same level of sincerity as the pros’ before, in a similar manner, by morning not a single one of the sleeping pros had been woken.

After normal morning practice, the average drills a pro player would put themselves through as well as various combinations of players in practice matches, Ye Xiu put away One Autumn Leaf and took out Lord Grim.

“Even if the mech are based on our characters, is this all we need to do? Are we ever going to learn about our opponents, or practice fighting them?” Yu Wenzhou asked.

“Sure, we’re doing that right now,” Ye Xiu said, blasé. “They look exactly like Glory’s NPCs.”

“Really?” Xiao Shiqin asked, looking at the strange, vicious little goblins that showed up at the start of the dungeon they were running together. There was a spider boss in here somewhere, too. Really?

“Eh, some of them, probably.” Ye Xiu shrugged unconvincingly.

Su Mucheng giggled at the flabbergasted expressions that popped up around them, some of the further pros putting emojis up over their characters to make it clear what they thought about that; Fang Shiqian put up his standard middle finger.

Really, would it kill him to take this a little more seriously?!

During dinner the pros had started a conversation about the meta for Glory play in different classes that ended up continuing over into the evening. These meetings of minds had happened less frequently as the Glory pro scene progressed, but now they were apparently on the same team, and they didn’t really have anything better to do, or anyone better to talk with. Ye Xiu eventually left to deal with whatever he did in the evenings with a halfhearted reminder for them to sleep, but the conversation continued regardless. One by one they would eventually slip away to sleep, so when Yang Cong left no one thought much of it.

Yang Cong had no intention of going to bed, though; instead, he went to find Ye Xiu to talk about his playstyle, and therefore his place on the team.

“Life-Risking Strike?” Since Excellent Era lost this year’s championship due largely to this skill, Ye Xiu obviously had a strong impression of it. “I haven’t heard much about the implementation yet, but it should be something like a partial-self destruct. It might even be a sonic attack, I’m not sure. You want to use it?”

“It fits my style better,” Yang Cong said with a sigh. “As the captain, I have my own responsibilities, but if you’re in charge of this team… Anyway, it suits me. Could it work?”

“You want to play more as a hidden danger, then, in concert with a partner of some sort to protect you?” Ye Xiu spun his pencil around his fingers thoughtfully. “Yeah, probably it could. We’re somewhat short on defensive players, but maybe Zhao Yang? If we had the Ghostblade duo too, that would be ideal…”

“I don’t have to survive the strike,” Yang Cong told him. “I’m aware of its downsides. The main point of not using it in the Alliance so far is that I can’t afford to be off the field after. It’s too dangerous. But if I’m not the tactical core, losing me wouldn’t be a problem.”

“I understand.” Ye Xiu tapped the end of his pencil against the paper. “It’s not that I wouldn’t want to use you that way, it’s that we don’t have nearly enough information on our opponents to plan a strategy around a trade like that. If we could determine who their healer is…” He sighed. “It’s hard to even do that. They won’t look like us, as far as I can tell; we don’t even know what materials their mech will be using, or what abilities they’d have. If you want to make a true tactical change, better to plan around a long-term partnership, more focused on living than dying, okay? If you have something to hide behind or a safe place to return to before you make your moves, that would be better. In any case, if you feel you’d be best not fighting out in front, I’d actually agree that it makes best use of an Assassin’s skills to do so. Talk to Zhao Yang about it tomorrow, see what he thinks.”

The two of them went over his options for a while longer, what differences there would be between doing this as a mech and doing it as a character in Glory—most notably, the correlation of damage to mech function rather than just lower health—and even what other skills might be of more use than usual in a real fight, like Vitals Strike and its possible ability to cripple an opponent.

Just before he left, Yang Cong finally asked. “Is it really aliens? I mean, actually, really aliens?”

Ye Xiu gave him a wry smile. “Actually, really, genuinely aliens.”

Yang Cong paused for a moment, just watching him, then gave him a sharp nod and turned back to the door. “Got it.”

As troublesome as Yang Cong was as an opponent, Ye Xiu really liked having him on his team.

At breakfast the next morning, Ye Xiu told them they’d get to try out their full set of what he called “standard” Silver equipment—the ones, he explained, that had not been altered to counter any specific opponent’s attributes, yet.

“So we’re trying them out like this for now because we don’t know what kind of things we’ll be up against,” Fang Shiqian began acerbically, “but later we might be facing aliens so that’ll all change?”

“Yeah, they haven’t finished modeling the alien content yet, so we’ll have to check that part later. And maybe think up some new things to safeguard against, if we can, since our information is limited.”

“You want us to just make up functions for Silver equipment so we can better face the ‘aliens’?”

“It doesn’t actually matter why, so long as you do it,” Ye Xiu pointed out.

“Yeah, why not aliens?” Fang Rui said brightly through a mouthful of steamed buns. “At least that’s interesting!”

“You.” Fang Shiqian suddenly turned on the boy with remarkable fury.

Fang Rui yelped and half hid behind Lin Jingyan. “OT! What’s with this aggro system? One sentence is enough to shift it?!”

“Two…” Zhou Zekai said from his other side.

Fang Shiqian ignored them. “You are the one taking all the buns with stuffing! Put them back!”

Fang Rui immediately leaned back over his plate to cover his absurd pile of buns with his arms. “I’m a growing boy! I need these!” he immediately defended, then paused as he looked over at Fang Shiqian’s place on the table, baffled. “You don’t even eat buns?”

“I don’t, but I’m not the only one at the table!” Fang Shiqian gestured at Wang Jiexi quietly eating beside him. “He eats stuffed steamed buns for breakfast, but I haven’t seen him do it this whole time we’ve been here! This is why, isn’t it?! Put them back!”

“It’s fine, there’s other food,” Wang Jiexi said calmly.

“Shut up, idiot, you don’t even notice that you eat half as much if you don’t get your stupid morning buns. Bad enough with that Huang Shaotian kid sniping all the buns without stuffing the moment you look away…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Huang Shaotian said righteously, and indeed there were none visible on his plate.

“Don’t put your food in your lap, it’s gross,” Yu Wenzhou said, nearly off-handed.

Ye Xiu looked like he was on the edge of helpless laughter. “I can just call for more…”

“Then he’ll just steal more! It’s the principle of the matter!” Fang Shiqian glared at him.

“I completely agree,” Wu Yuce said plainly, reaching a hand across the table to steal one of Fang Rui’s buns while he was distracted.

Thus another morning meal fell into petty squabbling, ending only when Han Wenqing finished his food and stood up like a massive tower of doom, saying he wanted to start playing now.

Reminded of the completely new Silver equipment awaiting them all, everyone hurried to finish up and rush after him.

The pros were too enamored of their new equipment to let it go at the end of the day, playing round after round against different opponents, figuring out where their limits were. They set up an ill-advised tournament amongst themselves with various snack prizes provided by Su Mucheng, who somehow had the ability to procure food at any time but wouldn’t say from where.

Zhang Jiale joined them too late to be part of the main event, and was a little quieter than usual.

“You okay?” Sun Zheping, as his close partner, noticed the difference right away.

Zhang Jiale was quiet for a moment, then asked a question of his own rather than answer. “Big Sun, we’re going to win, right?”

Sun Zheping didn’t know the exact context of the question, but he didn’t need it. “Definitely!”

It wasn’t the first time Zhang Jiale had asked this kind of question—not because he doubted their partnership or their capability, but because he liked hearing Sun Zheping say it. Sun Zheping was always so certain about his choices and his future, so decisive when he took action, it was enough to sweep anyone up along with him.

“Okay,” Zhang Jiale said, then again, louder, “Okay. Definitely!” His hands were clenched into determined fists under the table.

“Did you want to do a 2v2?” Sun Zheping asked him.

Zhang Jiale’s hands relaxed, and he shook them out as he pulled them up to the keyboard in front of him. “There’s basically no fun in that, right? Make it a 2v3, at least!”

Their playstyle, the Hundred Blossoms style, was considered one of the most difficult to beat or break in all of Glory. Today they’d spent a lot of time on their combination along with the new Silver equipment, and it was definitely in its best form. No matter how talented their opponents, if they wanted to beat Hundred Blossom’s pair off the cuff with a partnership any less developed, they would be waiting a long time.

Sun Zheping and Zhang Jiale settled together comfortably, ready to face all takers. The two of them together were never worried about victory.

When the first of the “new content” enemies showed up and everyone finally got to see them, they just stared in silence. It was…some kind of whirling, screeching madness made almost entirely of teeth.

“I can see why they couldn’t fit this in the game,” Ye Xiu said blandly. “Alright then, any thoughts about how to face it?”

“What do you mean, couldn’t fit this in the game?!” Huang Shaotian yelled. “What the fuck is this?! No seriously, what the fuck is it? Is this even an enemy? Can we fight this? The teeth spit venom! They make tornadoes full of fire and knives that go crashing around the arena! I think I’ve gone deaf just from listening to the screeching from here, you want me to do that with my headphones on? What is the point?! What is the fucking point?! You tell me, who wants to face this?!”

“Your suggestion of our own sound screen is noted, but we didn’t need a demonstration, too,” Ye Xiu said. “Anyone else?”

“Don’t ignore me!” Huang Shaotain shrieked.

“The poison works even on the mech?” Zhang Xinjie asked, ignoring him.

“Presumably. We aren’t sure what material the mech is made out of, but as far as we know all status effects are rendered faithfully. If it says it would inflict a poison effect, then it would inflict a poison effect. The mechanism for how might be different, but the result should be equivalent.”

“A paralyzing screech?” Yu Wenzhou asked. “Usually that’s supposed to have to do with an instinctual response. Would it affect the operator or the mech itself?”

“Hard to say, but we’re going to go with the belief that it’s the mech itself for now. Whether or not a screech capable of freezing up a player is capable of being relayed through our earphones is…uncertain. It might be caused by rattling the joints enough to freeze the mech.”

“The only part of this that takes any damage is the middle,” Wang Jiexi said. “I could fly close enough usually, but with all that wind…”

Discussion went on for a while, bringing up different issues and different possibilities to solve aspects of those issues. Eventually it petered out as everyone stared at the monstrosities, thinking of what they could do next.

“You’re all making great points and everything, but I just have to say,” Fang Rui suddenly piped up. “Do each of them actually have to be 18 times our size?”

No one answered, just staring at the jagged edges that filled the screen. Yeah, to be honest, 18 times their size did feel like a little much. There were already at least five of them; the size was just overkill.

Sun Zheping sat across from Ye Xiu and put his elbow in the middle of his desk in a way that absolutely could not be ignored.

“You could say hello,” Ye Xiu said, pulling his earphones off. “What’s up?”

“Do you want to tell me why Zhang Jiale has been a mess since he went to see you last night about the new effects on his weapon?” It was something both of them had noticed, that the light effects of his skills were a little different after he got his new Silver weapon, even though he hadn’t said anything to the R&D team about making such a change. For something so integral to his playstyle, Zhang Jiale obviously wanted to ask Ye Xiu what the discrepancy was about.

“A mess?” Although Zhang Jiale was a little quieter today, he hadn’t been any less capable in the test runs they’d done against the teeth monsters.

“He shouldn’t be so serious and anxious over some new Glory NPCs, no matter what you said to him yesterday,” Sun Zheping elaborated. “He’s insisting they really represent the aliens we’re going to fight, and he’s racking his brain trying to figure out how to counter them. I don’t know if you think it’s funny or motivating or what, but if this aliens thing is just teasing, you need to clear it up with him right now. And if you’re going to tell me it’s not, then I want to know absolutely everything about them.”

Ye Xiu sighed. “It’s not teasing.”

“Alright then.” Sun Zheping didn’t bother with questioning. “Tell me.”

“Are we fighting the shark teeth monster aliens again today?” Fang Rui asked over breakfast.

“The what?” Ye Xiu asked around a youtiao.

“You know, the things we were all drafted to fight. Aliens.” Fang Rui’s grin was irrepressible. “Unless we were drafted to fight something else, and you’re finally going to tell us about it.”

“Oh, yeah, that.” Ye Xiu went to grab another one. “No, it’s aliens. Totally. Definitely aliens.”

Sun Zheping rolled his eyes at him but didn’t bother commenting.

“Do they have a name?” Wang Jiexi asked. “If not…shark teeth monster aliens?”

“Mm, yeah.” Ye Xiu tilted his head consideringly. “Can’t say it, though. It sounded like a bunch of screeching metal. I’ve been calling them Overkill, though. For obvious reasons.”

Wang Jiexi hummed noncommittally and went back to his food.

“Sure, you just happen to be incapable of pronouncing the name,” Fang Shiqian grumbled under his breath. “We all absolutely believe you. Don’t listen to him,” he told Wang Jiexi.

Wang Jiexi was quiet for a moment, before finally saying, “I think, in these circumstances…”

“Not this again.” Fang Shiqian rolled his eyes.

Last night, Wang Jiexi told him that it might be the case that Ye Xiu’s insistence on aliens was not a joke. Fang Shiqian tried to convince him that Ye Xiu was just too lazy to come up with a better lie or actually fight over what should or should not be classified—he had, after all, seen Ye Xiu make blatantly false statements about who they were or what they were doing all the time when they’d dungeoned together; he knew what it sounded like—but in the end, Wang Jiexi had more dropped the matter than properly agreed.

“Look what you’ve done,” he scolded Ye Xiu. Su Mucheng choked on her soy milk at his stance, somehow reminiscent of an angry housewife. “You’ve got him buying your bullshit, too! Even though you’re all over the place with your ‘aliens’ story, half the time ‘oh Glory didn’t model them before,’ half the time ‘they look just like NPCs,’ you can’t even make up your mind! And now this lazy naming scheme, but you’ve got everyone so addled they’re still actually considering it. This is your fault, you know! Take some responsibility!”

“Okay, okay, it’s my fault.” Ye Xiu looked endlessly amused. “Let’s just go back to the game now, alright? It’s almost time to start.”

The words were placating, but the tone would make anyone want to punch him in the face. Fang Shiqian made the heroic effort to resist and counted it as his good deed done for the day.

In the end, they all had to agree that they just didn’t have the skill they needed to handle this. According to Ye Xiu’s suggestion, if they really didn’t have it, they should ask R&D to develop something based on what they did have.

“Paladins have a good number of skills that can block damage, but with the wind’s interference on movement and the poison debuff that strips all buffs, it’s just not going to work.” For all that Fang Shiqian complained about how Ye Xiu went about presenting these tasks, and what he claimed they were for, he tackled them seriously once they began. There was a reason he was known as the God of Healing, and it wasn’t because he was the type to slack off and whine about everyone else.

“You’re right,” Ye Xiu agreed; as much as he enjoyed riling Fang Shiqian, he was also completely serious when it came to Glory and his responsibilities. “I think we’ll have to go with something like Qi Guard, but with more effects on the environment, and possibly attached to another character rather than immobile. Like a combination of Qi Guard and Holy Shield with more emphasis on calming the surroundings, if possible. Would that work for you?” The last was addressed to Zhao Yang. It was Zhao Yang’s weapon, after all, so he would be the one using it.

“It’s a good plan,” Zhao Yang said, nodding seriously. “And I can think of several other instances where it’d be useful beyond just this opponent, so it’s no loss for my Mirror Moon to add it.”

Generally speaking, pro players wouldn’t spend this long thinking about something like which skill to add to their weapon, since it was so easy to change. However, Ye Xiu had made it clear before that these additional skills would not be like the skills in the game, added on with just scrolls. Their mechs didn’t have the same kinds of constraints, so this was purely adding whatever function they could manage to model to the equipment, at the highest level possible. When it came to defending the country, who was going to care about game balance? The game was just a recruitment tool, anyway. With R&D now allowed to do whatever they liked, they were very excited to see if they could add on more.

Unfortunately, everything that was in the game was in that way for a reason. If they wanted to keep the Silver equipment functional, they really couldn’t add more than one additional feature. This was the same kind of thing that stopped them from adding whatever skills they wanted to the characters now—the reason characters were divided into classes and could only use class-appropriate skills had to do with how much and what kinds of things the mechs could support at the same time, as well as just normal optimization. That was why they couldn’t just create a supermech with every single function, and the reason Lord Grim was still largely restricted to skills under level 20. To them, Lord Grim’s mere ability to develop to a higher level while still able to use so many contradictory skills was already a miracle.

Zhang Xinjie came by to talk to Ye Xiu about tactics and appropriate countermeasures that evening, as he had started doing as soon as he’d come to terms with what he and the rest of the pros would be facing. After he left, Yu Wenzhou made his way into the room, finger tapping thoughtfully on his ever-present notebook.

“You’re doing it on purpose, aren’t you?” Yu Wenzhou asked; always a promising opening, in Ye Xiu’s opinion.

“Hm?” He indicated mildly that Yu Wenzhou should go on.

“It really is aliens,” Yu Wenzhou elaborated, “but that’s too much for anyone to handle all at once, so you made it…something else.”

“I told everyone right from the start,” Ye Xiu said, mouth pulling at the side even as he suppressed his grin. “As ordered.”

“But who would believe it?” Yu Wenzhou shook his head. “You didn’t even try.”

“No need,” Ye Xiu said with an amused shrug.

“Better than ‘no need,’ Yu Wenzhou said, eyes full of sharp intelligence. Ye Xiu was reminded that there was a reason Yu Wenzhou was called to join them, despite his low physical ability and the near uselessness of his predictive skill against nearly unknowable opponents. “No one’s even panicked yet. Even though, at our age…”

“At your age,” Ye Xiu agreed. “Lucky, though, that most of you are still young enough to believe in your own invincibility.”

“You…” Yu Wenzhou didn’t seem to know what to say at first. “Are you okay?”

“Oh?” It wasn’t the question Ye Xiu had been expecting.

“It’s a lot to handle alone, and you aren’t that much older,” Yu Wenzhou pointed out.

“I’m not alone.” Ye Xiu grinned. “Don’t I have all of you with me?”

Yu Wenzhou hadn’t considered it, but maybe that would really be enough. Not a single-player game, wasn’t it?

In the end, no matter how it looked or what people believed from the outside, Ye Xiu never thought himself to be alone.

When Yu Wenzhou left, Ye Xiu still wasn’t done for the evening. Yu Wenzhou closed the door behind him, then turned around to face Huang Shaotian, who was hiding in the corridor.

“What are you doing?” Yu Wenzhou asked.

“Hide-and-seek,” Huang Shaotian told him. “We set up a whole jungle in the common area, just like I said earlier, right? There are blankets everywhere, and a bunch of different boxes, just a totally awesome environment. Since we did so much to make such a cool structure, wouldn’t we have to take advantage of it? Everyone agreed so we’re all doing that now. You’ve pretty much missed the whole thing!”

“…You’re ‘taking advantage of it’ by being in a different wing of the compound entirely?” Yu Wenzhou asked dubiously.

“Of course! With all the focus we put on the living room, who’s going to imagine I went somewhere else?” Huang Shaotian cackled. “Not to mention, everyone’s avoiding this room in case Ye Xiu comes out to scold us for not going to bed, as if that would ever happen. He’s not anyone’s mother! And in any case, haven’t we been so loud all the other nights, too? If he didn’t say anything when Zhang Jiale managed to knock over three tables at once and Fang Rui almost died of laughter or when Han Wenqing tossed that pencil into the vase so hard it exploded, he probably isn’t going to say anything if we thump around a little too much while playing a game, right? Right. So here I am. Anyway, how’d it go?”

Yu Wenzhou considered the talk they’d had, about what Ye Xiu was doing and what they were all facing. “As expected.”

“Damn,” Huang Shaotian replied, uncharacteristically short.

Yu Wenzhou’s pen tapped out a quiet but steady rhythm against his notebook.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

The next enemy the pros were provided was a pool of lava.

“Is this…an environment thing?” Xiao Shiqin looked at the lava pools uncertainly. They didn’t seem to be doing very much.

“Unlikely,” Ye Xiu said, sounding somewhat bemused himself. “I guess they don’t favor active assaults.”

“Health started dropping as soon as we entered the arena,” Zhang Xinjie commented. “It appears to be heat damage, but there seems to be a poison aspect as well.”

Lava in the game did a lot of damage and caught characters on fire if they touched it, but it didn’t act much like lava in real life. Lava in real life was too hot to get anywhere near, and certainly not the kind of thing one could fall into and jump out of in any meaningful way. Of course, if the characters were meant to simulate far sturdier mech, it would make sense for them to handle lava that way.

This, though, seemed much more like how lava would interact with ordinary humans.

“This species is apparently called Star Cores,” Ye Xiu told them. “We can probably assume that it’s not actually lava, but we don’t have much other information to go off of.”

“It’s moving,” Yang Cong said, eyeing the edge of the “pool.” “Or spreading, I guess.”

The lava stretched outward, slow but inexorable.

Ye Xiu hummed thoughtfully. “So it is. Well, any thoughts?”

Ice meant nothing to the Star Core, which ate through Ice Boundaries and passed through Blizzards without any sign of slowing down. Anything they threw at it disappeared within it, and still it crept closer, spread wider, took over more.

“We’re all gonna die,” Fang Rui said solemnly. “Each one of these things will be differently horrible than the last, and we’ll just expire here, at the edge of everything.”

“Stop being dramatic,” Wu Yuce said, rolling his eyes. They were, at this point, all backed up to the edge of the arena, but it was hardly cause for an existential crisis.

“It’s going to eat us all,” Fang Rui continued, and then, as an afterthought to Wu Yuce, “No.”

“I guess it is kind of eating,” Yu Wenzhou said thoughtfully. Swoksaar’s Chaotic Rain made the thing churn, but didn’t stop it. “I don’t suppose we could poison it.”

“I tried,” Fang Rui said mournfully. “It ate it just like everything else.”

“Then we eat it right back,” Fang Shiqian said, sounding incredibly annoyed. Having spent so much time fighting the continuous damage on so many fronts, he was not in the least pleased. “Lifesteal already!”

“Nothing we do gets close enough,” Yu Wenzhou sighed. His attempt to use Grasping Ghost, one of his highest-level skills, had gone…poorly, to say the least. When it started to come back to him it was covered in the strange, eating fire he’d cast it on, and he had to cancel the skill before it could touch him in fear of being consumed himself.

“Wave Wheel Slasher catches part of it for a bit, but the rest oozes around and it takes no damage,” Huang Shaotian reported.

The news was interesting to Ye Xiu for more than one reason—if Wave Wheel Slasher worked against something that ate most everything it touched, and the rest of the Star Core oozed around it, then the skill was probably a genuine dimensional rift rather than something that approximated one. In addition, if some of the Star Core could be separated from the rest and it didn’t take damage, then the Star Core itself was not a single entity, but a genuine pool of similar material with only the vaguest sense of intent.

“A dimensional boundary with lifesteal and freezing properties,” Wu Yuce suddenly said. As a swordsman, he was obviously familiar with Wave Wheel Slasher, so he knew its relevant attributes as well. “Can it be done?”

“That’s too many things at once,” Li Xuan said, but he didn’t sound scolding. “You have to make it a cohesive idea. What about a void boundary?”

“There’s such a thing?” Wu Yuce asked. Although he played a Ghostblade, he played as a hybrid rather than a pure Phantom Demon. He didn’t focus solely on boundaries the way Li Xuan did, so it wasn’t technically impossible for one he’d never heard of to exist.

“Not that we know of, but we could still ask R&D about it,” Li Xuan said. “Zhao Yang’s Eye of the Storm effect didn’t exist before, either.”

“A boundary that puts the opponent into a void dimension, almost like throwing them out in space, right?” Ye Xiu asked. “Except they’re still there, so we can still attack. Yeah, I can ask about it. All the individual concepts are in the game, anyway.”

By the time practice had ended, they still hadn’t come up with any other way to deal with the creeping advance of the Star Cores, so it had to be left at that.

Lin Jingyan showed up that night, looking a little uncomfortable but, if not determined, at least resigned.

“Can you talk to Fang Rui about the alien thing?” he asked. “It’s really not good to mess with him this way. He’s the type to always smile and joke about things, but I can tell he’s actually starting to get stressed. As a joke, even if you got him in on it at the start, by now it’s gone too far.”

“I didn’t get him in on anything,” Ye Xiu sighed. “But it’s not a joke. There really are aliens.”

Tian Sen, who’d just opened the door to the room, really, seriously thought about turning back around again. He’d really just come to talk about what they could expect for next season and interaction with their guild during this time; the subject of actual aliens was way too far beyond that.

But, if it was real, and he’d be involved no matter what…better to know than not, right?

Tian Sen blew out a single, heavy breath, then walked all the way into the room and closed the door behind him.

The living room was soaking wet.

“Mucheng,” Ye Xiu said, exasperated. As the enabler providing the rest with materials, whatever had happened, she’d facilitated it. “Was this really necessary?”

“Would I do something that wasn’t?” she asked, eyes wide and guileless.

Well, that was fair. He’d been asking the wrong question. “How funny was it?” Ye Xiu asked instead.

“Very.”

The overlay of similar skills—Wave Wheel Slasher, Ice Boundary, Grasping Ghost, Bloodthirsty, Blizzard—had not worked, but the new Void Boundary did. In a Void Boundary, allies walked unhindered by the world, but enemies were caught in an inescapable limbo, unable to move or affect others. The only drawback was the cast time, which was horrendously long in exchange for the overwhelming power and fairly large radius. Star Cores had very little directed movement, so it didn’t take them long to coast over these NPCs like there’d never been a problem at all, but for any other enemy it would be an issue.

“I can ask to put it on my Heavenly Crimson Lotus instead,” Wu Yuce offered. As the junior of his team and the one to insist on playing a class that overlapped with the captain, it would make sense for him to use his own Silver weapon for a necessary additional skill that wasn’t universally useful to free up Li Xuan’s Four Heavenly Wheels for a better one.

“Don’t be ridiculous. The cast time for me is already absurd, and I have that optimized. What would that look like for you?” Li Xuan immediately waved him off. The more he played with Wu Yuce, the more he liked this kid. He really did have some skill, and he was pretty smart, too. In any case, though, he was still undebuted, and played a hybrid Sword and Phantom Demon at that. Of course they wouldn’t put the Void Boundary skill on his weapon.

“Think about how you can protect him for the duration of the cast time instead,” Ye Xiu suggested. “If you can do that against any opponent, then the skill really won’t be a waste.”

Wu Yuce nodded seriously.

“You actually want to run two Ghostblades in the same team competition?” Li Xuan asked, surprised.

“Sure,” Ye Xiu said offhandedly. “Linking ghost boundaries is a good plan in the first place, if possible. But you’re also from the same team, playing the same class, so you should be able to coordinate fairly well. Having the two of you work in tandem definitely isn’t the worst choice.”

Li Xuan hummed thoughtfully. “Hm, yeah.” A drum of fingers on the table under Wu Yuce’s watchful eyes. “I guess it’s not bad.”

The Star Cores were not the last of the simulated entities they went up against by a long shot. No sooner had they completed one then the next appeared, though they got faster and faster at figuring out how to face them. In the morning with One Autumn Leaf, in the afternoon with Lord Grim, Ye Xiu led them through battle after battle against an absolutely bizarre array of enemies.

Their mornings had started the same way so many times, it was a surprise for some when Ye Xiu announced that they’d be looking over the data they had for the championship team, even though it was a few years old. At last, a few of them thought, they would be doing something serious.

But.

“This is just another group of NPCs,” Fang Shiqian said flatly.

Ye Xiu’s reply was just as bland. “Well-spotted.”

Fang Shiqian moved Wind Guard in front of One Autumn Leaf to make sure Ye Xiu would see when he filled the air above his character’s head with middle fingers.

Still, new opponents were new opponents, and they got down to the fight as usual.

They were absolutely thrashed.

Sure, they’d often lost before, but not like this.

“What the fuck was that?!” Huang Shaotian began, fuming. But it was Huang Shaotian, so obviously he couldn’t leave it there. “We’ve put up with a lot of things by now but tentacles is going too far! Tentacles is too much! You’re just making fun of us now, aren’t you? Aren’t you?! What other reason could there be for tentacles?! What is this supposed to be, a bad porno?!”

“Who cares about what shape the attack’s in? Did you not notice that the acid coating causes damage that can’t be healed?” Fang Shiqian complained, talking right over any further diatribe. “You can’t just nerf healers like that! Your stupid new NPCs are way too OP!”

“Perhaps the nanites are melted when they try to patch the damage,” Zhang Xinjie posited, sounding calm enough. Whether or not he actually was calm was anyone’s guess. “We can’t heal because as soon as they touch the acid, they’re taken out too.”

“Wash it off?” Tian Sen suggested uncertainly.

Xiao Shiqin sighed. “But it’d corrode the mechs all the way down.”

“What the fuck?!” Fang Shiqian reiterated with impressive vehemence.

There was nothing anyone could say to that.

“…So we need a specialized Silver weapon?” Zhao Yang finally asked.

Everyone groaned.

The answer was always a specialized Silver weapon.

Ye Qiu announced himself by calling “I finally found you, shameful older brother!” across the front courtyard, because apparently this house was one of the many guest houses owned by the Ye family, and he had not actually been informed that it currently contained anyone but Ye Xiu.

Ye Xiu, of course, didn’t care either way. “I wasn’t hiding, but hello to you too.”

“How were you not hiding?” In front of others, Ye Qiu initially intended to have a more refined appearance, but Ye Xiu always had a way of shaking his resolve. Though his voice had gone more proper, he still sounded fed up. “You finally come back home, but you don’t even show your face at the table before running off again?”

“I left your ID,” Ye Xiu pointed out.

“Not stealing my ID is the minimum! It took you this many years to give it back already, and you want me to praise you?” Ye Qiu wasn’t having it. “Even if our parents wanted you to work right away, you should have said something to me first. It’s been years, and you didn’t even say goodbye when you left!”

“Were you going to?”

Ye Qiu choked. Obviously he wasn’t…

“Besides, it seems I never actually stopped working for them. You could say this has all been one big away trip, like before.”

“Nonsense, we spent three years not knowing if you were dead or alive.”

“You didn’t know, and only because you’re stubborn. Our parents said I was fine, right?”

Ye Qiu had nothing to say to that. It was true that they had always been bizarrely sure of Ye Xiu’s ability to survive on his own, if extremely upset with his willful departure. After Ye Xiu had taken Ye Qiu’s ID, proving he was, in fact, fine, their parents had insisted it was good for him to keep it anyway, so they could track him. However, they never told Ye Qiu anything in particular about where to find him. Sure, Ye Qiu pretty much figured it out, in the end, but the reticence really was a lot like what happened in Ye Xiu’s frequent disappearances before he ran, too.

“What are you doing now, then?” he finally asked.

“Playing games,” Ye Xiu replied nonchalantly, inciting Ye Qiu all over again.

And that was how the rest of the pros finally got an idea of how Ye Xiu had come to be known as “Ye Qiu” all that time.

“Since our identical faces have managed to create a security breach yet again,” Ye Xiu told the pros later—“Yet again,” Zhang Jiale mouthed incredulously—“you are all allowed to call out today if there’s someone you want to notify of your relative well-being. Don’t mention what you’re doing in particular, but you can say you’re not in trouble and will be away for a while. You can really just say you’ve been drafted, or even called in as a consultant, it’s good enough. Or at a Glory training camp, if you want to be less alarming.”

With his family being the way it was, Ye Xiu didn’t have a lot of experience with toning down life updates. The closest he got was in keeping Ye Qiu out of all this, which had a lot more to do with riling him up than calming anyone down.

“How did the two of you end up so different?” Chu Yunxiu asked him later. The drama of the whole thing very much appealed to her.

Ye Xiu didn’t even have to think about it. “Different focuses. He got trained as a sophisticated heir, I got trained to take charge.” Then he paused as he considered what more he’d seen of Ye Qiu today, since he hadn’t otherwise personally interacted with his little brother in the seven years previous. “And our environment, I guess. He’s styled like someone who needs to make a point of how well he lives. It’s a very upper-class thing.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely not trying to make a point of that,” Chu Yunxiu said, eyeing Ye Xiu’s sloppy dress and generally casual demeanor.

Ye Xiu shrugged. “What audience do I have to make a point to? Everyone who comes by is also working or lives here with me, there’s nothing to see.”

Which was what made it so incredibly weird when Ye Xiu appeared the next day in uniform, looking well-groomed for the first time in pretty much anyone’s memory of the man. There were actually a few who thought his twin had returned, but even Ye Qiu didn’t seem to carry himself like this, like he was a man in power and used to wielding it.

It turned out Ye Xiu had let them all make their calls the day before because they would be moving out anyway. Ye Xiu’s scheduled report on their team’s progress—yet another thing no one else had known about—had ended with the order for them to move to the next stage of the project, a result Ye Xiu had clearly anticipated.

“You don’t have to worry, the facilities are still comfortable, and we’ll be doing a lot of the same things,” Ye Xiu explained casually. “This is just about officially registering as the remote-piloting team. I knew from the beginning you’d all be fine for it, but there’s still an order to these things, and it’s better not to officially count in anyone who might be a problem when things get serious later.”

“Can you tell us what we’re up against?” Fang Shiqian asked. Despite how he seemed, he was actually a fairly organized person who was quite good at compartmentalization, so it hadn’t taken him long to pack.

The edge of Ye Xiu’s mouth quirked up. “I can tell you it’s aliens.”

“Mm, go die.” For a conversational response, it sure managed to convey a lot of hostility.

Ye Xiu laughed. “You’re the one walking right into these, you know. Nobody told you to keep asking.”

“Nobody told you to keep saying it’s aliens, either,” Fang Shiqian groused.

“I have my orders,” Ye Xiu said solemnly, earning himself another half-hearted glare. For all he kept asking, Fang Shiqian wasn’t really expecting much of a response, anymore.

The implication of “I have my orders,” in Fang Shiqian’s mind, was obviously that Ye Xiu was not allowed to tell them. So he still managed to be immensely shocked when, upon meeting up with other uniformed people just outside of their new facility, the agents started throwing around words like “alien overseers” and “intergalactic tournament.”

“Are you serious?!” Fang Shiqian said. The pictures they were showing them were either incredibly realistic CGI versions of the NPCs they’d fought, or actual aliens. This was very clearly a military setup, though, and that would be quite a lot of effort to go to for a prank.

The man giving the presentation frowned at the interruption. “Captain Ye, you said you’d brief them? We could have done this presentation much sooner.”

“I did.” Ye Xiu didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed. Losing face? As far as anyone else could tell, Ye Xiu hadn’t even heard of the concept. “If he didn’t want to believe me, despite all this evidence, how is that my fault?”

“You—your delivery is so shitty,” Fang Shiqian hissed. “How is anyone ever supposed to believe you?!”

Ye Xiu sighed, sounding incongruously woeful and put-upon. “A little application of trust—”

“Get the fuck out,” Fang Shiqian snarled.

Grinning, Ye Xiu actually went. “It’s up to you,” he told the flabbergasted agent, patting him on the shoulder as he passed. “I have to go report to the general.”

“Uh.” The poor man didn’t seem to know how to get back on track. “Well. Can I…continue?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Fang Shiqian waved his hand dismissively. “That guy just likes pissing people off, I’m fine.”

Indeed, he seemed more disgruntled than actually horribly shocked, but the agent himself had to take a moment. “That guy” was the heir to the Ye family, who’d already made a name for himself in this department at fifteen. Absolutely nobody called him “that guy.”

Why did he feel like this group of gamers was practically incomprehensible already?!

Fang Shiqian was not actually the only one who hadn’t previously asked Ye Xiu about the alien issue, but he was the only one vocally against it. Among the others were those who understood Ye Xiu well enough not to need to ask, like Han Wenqing, those who basically respected him enough not to question anything, like Zhou Zekai, and those who’d come to their own conclusions but kept to themselves, like Wang Jiexi, Wu Yuce, and Li Xuan—although Li Xuan had a bit of not wanting to appear foolish either way mixed in. Zhao Yang had come to the somewhat unique conclusion that it actually didn’t matter, so long as he was doing his best.

Xiao Shiqin had seen Zhang Xinjie and Yu Wenzhou going to meet up with Ye Xiu in the evenings and hadn’t wanted to be left out, so he ended up joining them for strategy meetings. At first he still didn’t quite believe the whole thing, but over time he could tell that the other tacticians were absolutely serious. It was a little worrying, but honestly speaking, the three younger tacticians had long since grown used to learning from Ye Xiu and following his lead. If Ye Xiu didn’t seem particularly worried about all this, despite the stakes, then it must still be within the realm of what they could control, right?

Once he’d been sure it was really aliens they were up against, and ones far more advanced than humans at that, Xiao Shiqin had asked if the tacticians or even some of the others should join him for these evening practices as well. Ye Xiu only laughed and said that the schedule was very important, and set up as it was for a good reason. Other than when they wanted to come talk to him, they should continue to follow it as usual.

Ostensibly, this meant they should sleep during these evening times, since that was what the schedule said, but Ye Xiu obviously knew the pros usually didn’t. In fact, the schedule was designed that way to give the pros time to interact casually and, rather importantly, in a way that seemed outside of any formal plans. Natural interactions couldn’t be forced, and keeping up a constant atmosphere of stress would only tank their collective performance, in the end. If they wanted to stay up half the night having a water balloon fight Ye Xiu definitely knew nothing about, then they absolutely could and should.

Provided they didn’t damage the electronics, but honestly, these were pro gamers. Ye Xiu was completely confident that they would never dream of it.

And, if he was wrong, they could always get more. Unlimited government sponsorship sure was nice.

Though most of the pros had settled themselves emotionally by the time they were led into the base proper, there was a sick sense of vertigo that came with actually walking into this building they couldn’t so easily walk back out of, when they would leave having saved Earth or else, most likely, not at all.

They were allowed to settle into their rooms, set this time as bunk-like almost-pods instead of luxurious guest rooms.

“They’re good for constructive rest,” their guide explained. “And can fold out of the way when not in use to give you more space.”

More space for what, no one bothered to ask. Their rooms were not equipped with their own computer setup, irritatingly enough, which meant regardless of the answer no one was likely to spend any time there.

Once they’d done that, they were meant to meet up in a room where Ye Xiu could give them a better idea of what they’d be doing in the near future. Ye Xiu, they’d come to understand, was either the leader of the whole venture or of a similar rank to the leaders, so most of the departments were actually reporting to him. Those of the pros that had gone to visit him in the evenings might have guessed this from all the information he seemed to have to handle, and his ability to just order new Silver equipment whenever he liked, but nothing had ever been explicitly said beyond his being in charge of their team when it came to playing.

“Isn’t that Ye Xiu out there?” Zhang Jiale asked. The pros had to pass along a hall with large windows on the way to wherever they were going. None of them had any reservations about coming over to look out, since they knew from the time they’d spent outside the facility that the windows were all thoroughly mirrored.

It was, in fact, Ye Xiu, still dressed in the uniform he’d had on earlier with the addition of a sleek earpiece curving along his jaw to his mouth, speaking seriously to someone standing across from him. The person across from him seemed to be wearing something like a cloak with a high collar, but the back of their head was a single smooth curve streaked with color, as if someone had smeared a greenish dye across abnormally saturated yellow-orange skin.

Zhang Jiale had already stopped to look, so Sun Zheping did as well. “Seems so. Who’s he talking to, though?”

“That would be the liaison from the tournament’s organizers, and the person in charge of our loan,” their guide said calmly. With seven years to get used to the idea, no one on the project thought the alien’s appearance was anything to get worked up about.

“An alien?” Fang Rui asked, leaning toward the window with interest. After Lin Jingyan’s talk, he’d slowly settled back into his previous casualness about the aliens they were going to face, though how much of that was affected was hard to say. “What do you think they’re like? Is that their clothing, or maybe a hat? Oh, are they bald?!”

At that moment the person talking to Ye Xiu suddenly twisted in their direction, as if it could see or hear them, though they all knew that couldn’t be the case.

A few of the pros gasped sharply, stumbling back from the window in horror. The thing didn’t have a face at all, or even a front of the head. Instead there was a gaping void, almost like looking into the bell of a trumpet or the opening of a gourd, the inside completely hollow and nearly, disturbingly enough, translucent.

“Looks like a pitcher plant,” Wang Jiexi said musingly, as steady and unflappable as always.

“How apt,” Yu Wenzhou commented blandly. Indeed, from what they’d been told, this group would bait populations with claims of reasonable treatment and fair trades, or even with winning acclaim, into giving up their planets without a fight; very much like a pitcher plant in nature, humans mere insects before their superior means.

The thing turned back to Ye Xiu again. Ye Xiu cast a glance in their direction, but the way his eyes passed over their group, it was clear he couldn’t see them.

“This way, please,” their guide reminded them, and the pros continued on in an unsettled mood.

Ye Xiu could tell something was up when he came to meet the team later. Undoubtedly, it had to do with the time that the liaison had asked after his team, since it could tell they were there—not see or hear, but it just knew, which was always unnerving.

Speaking of seeing and hearing, the alien did seem to do so, though he could find no proper sense organs that did it. Where the vibrations came from couldn’t be certain—though the division had made some guesses about the species perhaps having liquid on the inside, in much the same way a pitcher plant did, that could cause them—but with the earpiece in what anyone heard from the plant was flawless Chinese.

Without equipment, none of them could properly detect any sound at all. At most, a quiet drone.

No matter how many pictures or simulations the group had seen, it wasn’t the same as truly seeing an alien in person; this, Ye Xiu understood well from his own experience. Though he had the training necessary to continue on without a hitch, it had still been a disconcerting experience. For the others, who hadn’t been put through increasingly bizarre experiences throughout their childhood, it was likely much worse.

“The matches will be set up the same way we’re used to,” Ye Xiu explained. “Three individual matches, the group arena, and the team competition. Tiebreaker matches will be handled through a single full-team Last Man Standing-style competition, meaning the entire team, rather than our normal 5-player configuration, will go up against the opponent’s entire team, and whichever eliminates the other first wins.”

“How likely is that to happen?” Yu Wenzhou asked. He hadn’t missed the fact that many of their practices were in a somewhat similar format, although it was undoubtedly useful to let them work together on figuring out the new NPCs and naturally form their own combinations instead of pre-selecting five-person groups, regardless. Which was to say, it hadn’t seemed out of place before, but the parallel to how a tie-breaker worked would explain why Ye Xiu didn’t force them into working with specific 5-person teams more often as their practices went on. Provided, of course, that it was likely enough to happen that they should be specifically preparing for it.

“More likely than we’d usually see,” Ye Xiu confirmed. “A ‘tie’ consists of winning one matchup and losing one matchup against the same team, rather than getting the exact same number of points. Cumulative points are still kept track of by team, but only in order to determine which team gets to be the home team first.”

“Only…?” Xiao Shiqin asked. Points were how the teams selected for playoffs were determined. Was Ye Xiu excluding that because it was obvious, or because it wasn’t the case?

“Only,” Ye Xiu affirmed. “The tournament itself is set up like playoffs, a home and away game against the same team determining which is eliminated, right from the start.”

The pros’ uneasiness increased. They already knew they couldn’t afford to lose this tournament, but this was really giving them no leeway at all. With an elimination format, it was all too easy to lose it all with a couple bad days.

No one liked losing the playoffs, but this was much worse—should they lose, they’d lose Earth, too.

“What’re you looking so grim for?” Ye Xiu said, breaking into the somber mood. “It’s just winning; it’s not that hard.”

There was a collective eye roll. Only Ye Xiu.

“It’s not just ‘winning,’ though, it’s winning every single round,” Xiao Shiqin pointed out. He was used to being the underdog, but that also meant he understood what it was to lose. He had no confidence in his ability to win every time, no matter how much they were underestimated.

“It’s winning every matchup,” Ye Xiu corrected. “But even if it were winning every round, so what? You remember season two, right?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Huang Shaotian said, unusually succinct. Obviously, they all remembered season two. A 9.2 average. It was just offensive. “This isn’t like that, we aren’t going in with cheat weapons or a clear character advantage.”

“I’m just saying,” Ye Xiu continued, still absolutely assured, “while we can’t be sure we’ll always win, it’s certainly not impossible. Every year, someone makes it through the playoffs to be champion. That’s how it works; it’s inevitable. This year, in that tournament, it’ll be us. That’s all there is to it.”

It was extremely annoying that, coming from someone like him, it actually wasn’t too hard to believe.

“I think it’s the uniform,” Lin Jingyan later said on the subject, thoughtful. “The aesthetic really does something for his words, you know?”

“Shit, you’re right, it’s totally the uniform. He looks completely different, I almost didn’t even recognize him. It could have been his twin, right? I mean it still could be his twin but I doubt it, they seem so different. And I think he said his twin had nothing to do with the military, anyway. But put Ye Xiu in a uniform and suddenly he really looks the part, right? Messing with our heads, that outfit is too strong.” Huang Shaotian never said just a few words when he could say a speech.

“Damn, when do we get ours?” Li Xuan said enviously.

Fang Rui slammed the table emphatically. “Right? I want to posture like a hero too!”

The next day, they did, in fact, get their own uniforms. Though they wouldn’t need to wear it normally, to register properly for the tournament and meet with the liaison, they were expected to look like a proper branch of the military.

The outfitting went better for some than others.

Tian Sen and Han Wenqing fit right in, and even Zhang Xinjie managed to look like some kind of officer.

Fang Rui, on the other hand, was unimpressed. “Why doesn’t it work?” he complained, twisting to look at himself in the mirror at different angles.

“What did you expect? It’s not like you work out,” Wu Yuce said. He looked okay in the uniform, but that was really the extent of it. It hadn’t done anything particularly magical for either him or Li Xuan, who was currently frowning and tugging at the hem to get it to settle better.

“Neither does Ye Xiu!”

“Tailored,” Zhou Zekai commented. Zhou Zekai, of course, looked great, but it had long since been understood that Zhou Zekai looked good in everything.

Fang Rui paused for a moment. “Okay, fair point. But I want to look at least as good as them, is that so much to ask?!” He gestured expansively at Zhang Jiale, who was excitedly posing in the mirror, fingerguns and all, and Sun Zheping, who was being pulled in to join him as well—fingerguns not included.

In fact, most of the older players looked fairly good in the outfits. The younger players largely didn’t have the right look to fill it out, since they hadn’t finished growing and weren’t particularly active in the first place.

However, it wasn’t to the point where the uniforms actually didn’t fit, just that they weren’t necessarily dashing in them, so the pros made their way to the same hall they met in the day before to get their instructions without further protest.

The instructions were simple, though, with the universal translator earpiece they’d seen on Ye Xiu yesterday the only truly necessary addition.

“This little thing will let us understand any alien language?” Zhao Yang marveled. It didn’t look like much.

“Not any,” Ye Xiu said. “Only the language spoken by the greatest number of people on the aliens’ home planet, unless they’re rich and developed enough to have added more to the universal language bank it’s connected to. For example, the Overkill aliens we researched before don’t speak the major language of their planet, which is why what they call themselves comes across only as metallic screeching.”

“Inconvenient,” Yang Cong commented.

“Lucky we speak Chinese.” Ye Xiu’s reply came with a wry twist of the mouth. “Well, that’s pretty much it. Show your face, register, be polite. Nothing more to it. Does anyone have any questions?”

“Yeah, I do,” Huang Shaotian said into the otherwise agreeable silence. “I’ve been thinking about this since yesterday and I still don’t know, so at this point I might as well ask, right? Is there a reason this place looks like a lecture hall?”

The room really was highly reminiscent of a lecture hall. A few rows of curved, tiered desks faced a large, slightly curved wall screen, a podium in the middle of the floor for a presenter—usually, in their case, Ye Xiu—to stand at with a swiveling monitor to control the screen on top. Even the seats set up at the long desks folded up when no one was sitting on them to make travel through the rows easier, obviously meant for quickly changing seating, as you’d expect of rooms meant for classes with short passing times. The overall aesthetic—elongated interlocking hexagon ceiling tiles to shield the lights giving the room a sleek and modern feel, with just a hint of sharpness behind it—matched well with the rest of the facility, but it still felt far more suited to a university than a military base. Maybe it was usually used for mission briefings?

“Obviously it was made for something else and repurposed,” Ye Xiu said blandly. “Any important questions?”

“No,” Yu Wenzhou said, cutting Huang Shaotian off before he could go into a rant about how rude Ye Xiu’s response was. “I think we’re good over here.”

The room really was well-suited for lectures, which Ye Xiu proved later in the day when he went over the actual designs of their various mech and weapons on the large screen, preparing them for the visit to R&D they’d be making the next day. The group’s interaction with the alien had been short, efficient, and absent of panic attacks, so it could easily be counted a success. The most unsettling thing about it, since they were already aware of the hollow head, was realizing that the “high collar” they’d seen on the cloak the day before was actually just in line with the rest of the alien’s body, since they didn’t have a neck-like structure.

It was odd, which features really drove home the point that this creature was entirely inhuman.

The creeping uneasiness of the interaction faded under the light of the big screen, though, showing them real versions of their beloved characters and weapons, familiarizing them with the design.

“Implementation doesn’t always look exactly like the game, because,” Ye Xiu explained, switching to a close-up of Dancing Rain’s futuristic but obviously functional Devouring Sun, “in the end, these conflicts are not in the game world. They are in fact, genuine, remote-piloted, mech battles, and there’s certain aspects of realism that the wide-scale simulator couldn’t cover—for example, low health means lower function. Damage to one part of the mech means damage to just that part, and even losing bits of the mech is not out of the realm of possibility.”

The slide changed to a magnified view of Dancing Rain’s shoulder joints, on which Devouring Sun would occasionally rest. Without it, Dancing Rain would be nearly useless. “Your mech is considered ‘dead’ when it can no longer move, regardless of the reason. From here on, we will be using a server the simulation team developed that will more accurately reflect the nature of the battles, so it’s a good time to become familiar with the realistic functions.”

“How different from the specs can we expect the implementations to be?” Tian Sen asked. One of the best features of an Exorcist was Spirit Guidance, their ability to throw their weapon without actually having it considered out of their control—meaning, no one else could pick it up. In addition, many Exorcist skills were Talismans: If he couldn’t rely on their effects, he’d be armed with only paper, and therefore practically useless.

“Not that different,” Ye Xiu assured. “The skills were created with use during these battles in mind: They wouldn’t have made a specification they couldn’t implement. The material our mechs are made of, and consequently what they can confirm our skills work on, is the industry standard for this kind of mech. It’d make more sense to consider any opponent on which our skills don’t work as having hidden resistances than the skills themselves failing in any way.”

“Will we know in advance about these resistances?” Zhang Xinjie asked. Planning around an enemy that didn’t match their own understanding of the game would be difficult at best.

“Other than what we’ve faced so far, no.” Ye Xiu brought up the the list of aliens and their NPCs they had data on; it wasn’t short, but in comparison to what they knew of the tournament’s scope it certainly wasn’t long.

Zhao Yang frowned. “That doesn’t sound good.” As a Qi Master, most of his ability relied on skill effects alone. A cloth armor class couldn’t afford getting physical, even if Qi Masters were in the Fighter superclass.

“It’s not ideal, but we’re working on it. For now, just think of it as new content. We have lots of practice dealing with new content, right?”

It was reluctant agreement, but they did agree. Beyond pioneering through Glory’s updates as most of them had done, their previous exercises together were obviously set up in a similar manner.

The feeling behind this and that were unavoidably different, but in pure execution, they had to admit it really was the same.

Though what they did for preparation had changed with their location, the blocking of their schedule itself hadn’t changed significantly, much to Zhang Xinjie’s satisfaction. Ye Xiu would no longer set himself up in an easily accessible room, since he had to physically attend to things more often—what things, he hadn’t said, but the general consensus was that it must be meetings.

Whatever it was, it had no bearing on their evening plans, and the night started out high-spirited. Ye Xiu had told Su Mucheng how to access the large screen, and everyone decided to watch a show with this fancy new setup; given they just wanted to experience the incredible immersive quality of the system, it didn’t really matter which. No one objected when Chu Yunxiu insisted they start this new drama she’d heard about but hadn’t been able to try before being dragged off to the military.

Actually, any arguments for a different choice that may or may not have existed were destined to go unheard, as Su Mucheng was the one in charge of setting up the system. She didn’t mind trying Chu Yunxiu’s new dramas together, so that was what they’d be doing. If Ye Xiu’s partiality made things a little unfair, well, Ye Xiu never claimed not to favor Su Mucheng.

In any case, Chu Yunxiu’s dramas should have been a safe enough experience for everyone. Which was why Ye Xiu was surprised to return from his duties to join what appeared to be a large-scale freakout in progress.

“What’s going on?” he asked, not particularly expecting a response.

“Ye Xiu! Save us!” came the nearly unrecognizable screech of Huang Shaotian.

“Hm, no,” he replied. Su Mucheng didn’t seem distressed as he settled down next to her, so it was probably fine.

With the clamoring of the other audience members around him and Su Mucheng’s occasional comments, Ye Xiu was able to determine that Chu Yunxiu’s drama leaned much more heavily toward “horror” on the spectrum of “supernatural romance” than anyone had predicted. The screen was a window into a pit of despair; around them, the soundtrack vibrated through the air like a living thing.

Ye Xiu glanced over to find Chu Yunxiu’s face completely dead as she shoved a handful of seeds into her mouth.

“I will see these two idiots get together or so help me—” was her response to his inquiring look.

“Alright then,” he said, grabbing some seeds to start shelling for Su Mucheng; her pile of previously shelled seeds was getting low.

Blood, gore, and anxiety radiated from the screen, driving several of the other pros to wail in despair, but Ye Xiu only focused on his task under the screen’s intermittent flashes of light. Being able to feed Su Mucheng had become a sort of focus for Su Muqiu and himself back when they’d all been living together, the reward for their work in turning gaming into money—for all their skill, still not the easiest thing. Her bright smile as they split their boxed dinner or handed over a snack to tide her over never failed to warm their hearts. Though they hadn’t been in any great need of procuring food in years now, the association was still strong.

Someone sobbed incoherently in the background, but Su Mucheng was smiling and, again—Ye Xiu had never claimed impartiality.

They met with the Glory devs more than once, as their practices moved from facing new NPCs to fighting in increasingly strange environments, along with getting used to the new style of simulation when it came to “health” and the functionality of their characters. The players and the researchers got along quite well, almost no complaints.

Almost, because of one little thing.

“Can you ask them to stop calling us Glory devs,” the head of the department finally asked.

Ye Xiu didn’t pause in his perusal of the reports he’d received. “Why?”

The man was stumped. If nothing else, it just wasn’t their name… “Well, it makes us sound like we’re just some normal game developers,” he finally said.

“And?” Still no interest.

“And we’re agents?” He didn’t even know how it ended up coming out a question. Of course they were agents! They were agents even before they’d been tasked with turning alien technology into a game!

Ye Xiu looked up, as if prompting him to go on.

“Doing important…agent work?” the man went on, baffled.

“Like?”

Here, the head of the department was on surer footing. “Research, simulation, weapons management, resource allocation—”

“Did you develop Glory?”

“…Yes,” he finally said. In fact, everything he’d listed was an aspect of developing Glory. He rallied. “But that isn’t what the department is called!”

“Is that the main issue?”

“Yes!”

“Just that?”

He paused. “Pretty much?”

“Are you under my jurisdiction?”

“Yes…?” Once Ye Xiu returned, he’d been put in charge of pretty much the entire operation.

“Your department is now called ‘Glory devs.’ Own it. It’s an impressive achievement.” Ye Xiu went back to the papers, satisfied that the problem was settled.

The man opened his mouth, then closed it again.

He was actually…surprisingly okay with that.

As the time of the tournament’s beginning drew nearer, training grew less focused on piloting in general and more focused on the competition in particular. Ye Xiu explained the match setup to them, though it didn’t take much explaining: It was all quite familiar. The same soundproof booths for competition, the same monitor for the rest of the team to watch the match on together, the same lack of voice communication within the game. The public and team chats were the same as well, and they’d been assured an impeccable real-time translator would allow them to see their opponents’ messages there in their own, native Chinese.

“How impeccable is ‘impeccable’ really, though?” Fang Rui asked. “If I used dirty slang, or Zhang Jiale tried to talk about fighting again—”

“One time,” said Zhang Jiale through gritted teeth. Was it his fault everyone thought his dialect’s word for arguing was something not suitable for public channels? Obviously not! This was discrimination!

“The yellow and red card system should be as usual, too,” Ye Xiu said. “This is your debut, though, so just remember to keep in mind that what you say is publicized. If you affect ratings, they won’t let it slide.”

No one felt that calling this the rookies’ debut was weird. In the end, other than the change of teammates, it didn’t feel that different from any other season in Glory.

“What’s the plan for the first round, then? How do we win?” Sun Zheping got straight to the point.

“We don’t.”

The declaration was followed by baffled silence.

“We’re going to lose,” Ye Xiu continued, not distressed in the least.

“What?!” Li Xuan’s outburst broke the veneer of calm.

“Think about it rationally,” Ye Xiu said placidly. “We don’t know what we’re going into, we have much less preparation than the other teams, we could be up against anyone first, even previous champions, and we know nothing at all about them or what to expect. We won’t win.”

“What the fuck is the point then?! From how you’re talking, we might as well give up now!” Fang Shiqian was furious.

“I’m telling you now so no one is surprised when it happens.” It wasn’t unusual in the least for Fang Shiqian to be the one to voice wider discontentment, so Ye Xiu was prepared for his kind of response. “Remember we don’t have to win every time; we have to win enough. For this first round, we need to go in with an information-gathering mindset, or we’re going to waste our time and fall apart. To that end, our lineup needs to maximize the data and experience gained, while anyone who isn’t going up should be taking notes and coming up with strategies.”

The overall idea wasn’t unfamiliar to the others: Over the course of their practices, they’d gotten very fast at analyzing, sharing relevant information, and coordinating with each other. They didn’t always win against new enemies, but they almost always were able to think of some sort of counter before the end of the match. Regardless of what they were up against, it never took them more than that first encounter to figure out their opponent.

“This is just like all the other new NPCs we’ve faced before,” Ye Xiu concluded, once they’d all agreed on a strategy and division of responsibilities. “The same pattern as always. We’re going to lose the first round—

“We won’t lose the second.”

The booth was a sleeker construction than the Alliance bothered with, overseen by the alien tournament officials to ensure there’d be no cheating, but on the inside it really wasn’t much different. A chair, a computer, a desk to hold it, soundproof walls, minimal ambient lighting. The air was cool and dry, the keyboard and mouse were the same ones R&D had designed for Ye Xiu at the beginning of this whole project, checked for alterations and approved before the match began. There had never been any doubt that Ye Xiu would be Earth’s first player; he never intended to push that responsibility on anyone else. In any case, it wasn’t something he felt he needed to run from.

They were here to gather information. Ye Xiu had given his pre-match talk to the team before he’d gone up. A quick reminder of what they should be looking for, how much attention they should pay to their own survival in order to maximize information gathering, a simple overarching idea: The second round started now. That was where they’d be counting wins and losses.

None of it was a lie, but Ye Xiu knew how pressing a psychological shadow could be. As their leadoff, his first priority would absolutely be gathering information to pass to the next player on their way to the booth, and the rest of the players after, but he had his own plans as well. If he could manage to win the first round, the morale boost would be exceptional.

Battle Mage was a good class for it, too, a balance of magical and physical damage, close- and mid-range fighting. No matter what he was up against, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Deep breath.

The slide of a familiar card into a familiar card-reader.

One Autumn Leaf loaded in.

His partner over these years, nearly seven years of Glory, stood tall and undaunted with the newest iteration of Evil Annihilation at his side. Flat ground loaded under his feet; in the distance, plain walls.

Arena?

Not quite, but close enough. Were the opponents looking down on them, or was there some other purpose? He wouldn’t rule out the existence of hidden attributes to the arena, but it really did look like the absolute basic. In One Autumn Leaf’s view came the opponent mech: an enormous, almost entirely featureless, metal sphere.

Not what he was expecting, but better than it could have been. At least it wasn’t visually aversive, smooth surface marred only by what appeared to be a series of intertwined etchings, and in fact it looked a lot like the training round of any given video game. Complete with, he now noticed, the huge weapons folding out from its surface, aimed at him in a way that obviously meant business.

The fight was a series of cataloguing notes—low general magic resistance, high CC resistance, outsides reminiscent of Glory’s plate armor, joints that held the extended weapons most vulnerable, was this seriously some kind of giant battle sphere—that remained strangely methodical. Ye Xiu knew why his own approach was so regimented, but what were their opponents planning? Each weapon rolled out in succession, each time he did enough damage or proved its ineffectiveness the “battle mode” would switch, it would almost feel like a tutorial if it did just a bit less damage, this fight was completely unbalanced. Too fast, too big, too heavy-hitting, this battle was nothing easy. But it had method, and anything with a method could be taken advantage of.

The moment the sphere pulled back to stow its previous weapon, Ye Xiu threw One Autumn Leaf into the air above it. Old weapon in, new weapon out—but before it could complete the extension, Ye Xiu stabbed Evil Annihilation into the opening. The weapon jammed, gun juddering in place as it tried to move, and Ye Xiu fired off the skill he’d added to his weapon: Petrifaction.

The concussive burst of the skill shook the sphere’s shell from the inside, rattling in place, and the mech ground to a halt with an unearthly screech.

Ye Xiu had seen Petrifaction work on other targets before, and it was truly a sight to behold. The shape of the target would freeze as its insides crumbled away, forced out by rapidly expanding nanites. Close to the opposite of a healing skill, the nanites pushed to rebuild what was already there, eating the original material and setting up shop instead, a perfect and useless replica of the original structure, completely solid. The remnants of old materials clouded and fell like ash around the target, creating the surreal look of an evil spell or instant decay.

Used inside the battle sphere, it was not nearly so impressive, but also significantly less comprehensible. Job complete, the nanites solidified as if turned to stone, and outwardly the mech only shuddered into uselessness.

One Autumn Leaf was a bare skeleton of a mech, but its core and its weapon had moved to the end. The logo Earth had chosen to represent their team spread across the arena, wings extended behind crossed blades. Glory. Ye Xiu had insisted on the logo’s inclusion; no political agenda could top the comfort Earth’s players would receive from this bit of familiarity. Indeed, even Ye Xiu could feel the tension ease out of him. Another game, another win, another battle to prepare for, same as always. On screen the image of a giant sphere spitted on Evil Annihilation disappeared as the system monitoring these clashes took the mech back. They didn’t get to see the mech between battles, so Ye Xiu would have to wait until the team competition to confirm that all damage would be reset before then.

Ye Xiu met Lin Jingyan on his way to play the second individual match and gave him the fastest possible rundown of his observations. “As a Brawler, don’t expect to win,” Ye Xiu concluded. “They’re too tanky, and they didn’t show us everything, there. They might also have specializations for each player, but with that look there’s likely outward standardization—expect customization to come with the weapon choice.”

Ye Xiu was right. The next opponent was another battle sphere, different specialization. With the limited ability to cause physical damage and his CC skills rendered largely useless, it was no surprise that Lin Jingyan lost. He returned to the team as calmly as he left it, not rattled in the least. This was, in fact, why Ye Xiu had chosen him to go second in the individual round: Lin Jingyan had the kind of steady personality that wouldn’t infect the atmosphere of the team, should he lose.

“It’s definitely methodical,” he reported. “But they aren’t feeling us out. They showed a new function even before I found a way around the old one. If I didn’t come up with a new counter within a certain period of time, they changed it, regardless of how much damage it was doing.”

“I thought so,” Ye Xiu said, looking up at the screen. Yang Cong was dodging his opponent with remarkable ease, using Air Jump to get “behind” the sphere and Cut Throat on the neck of the weapon—without a proper health gauge, it was hard to tell if it had worked at peak efficiency, but certainly Scene Killer executed the command. When the sphere’s weapon tried to retract after Yang Cong darted away, it couldn’t fold in completely. Regardless, the next weapon extended and turned on the Assassin.

As the Shadow Follows, Ankle Break. The gun swiveled brokenly on its joint as if dislocated before it swung back into something like alignment. Still, it couldn’t follow Scene Killer’s quick movements. The next weapon folded out to join it.

Another Air Jump, Diving Arrow to kick off the weapons and stomp onto the sphere’s top, and underneath the echoing clangs came the subtle whine of a skill charging.

The sonic boom shook the arena, rattling the two mech to bits. Yang Cong had charged Life Risking Strike to its maximum, a completely undirected explosion that dealt damage to both sides crumbling the area between the two weapon’s ports. Vitals Strike had analyzed the best place for him to hit, and it wasn’t wrong. The sphere fractured along the line that looked like no more than etching even as Scene Killer’s hand, arm, shoulder were wasted. Still, Yang Cong piloted the remains to take a stumbling fall off the top of his opponent, staggering a few steps away. The battle sphere slowly rolled after him before thumping awkwardly onto the opening in its broken shell, the twisted limbs of weapons it could no longer retract making any attempt to roll elsewhere impossible. The mech itself might have life left in it, but it was going nowhere, and it was out of workable weapons.

The third individual match went to Earth, based solely on the fact that Scene Killer was still, to at least some extent, mobile.

“An excellent use of loopholes,” Ye Xiu said approvingly upon the man’s return.

“Thanks.” Yang Cong grinned. “That was fun. Vitals Strike is really something.”

The moment he’d activated it, the image of the sphere had lit up beneath him, almost as if he could see all the way through. He knew then that his Life-Risking Strike wouldn’t be wasted, stress points and fissures right there in front of him, waiting to be exploited.

Huang Shaotian was first in the group arena. Underneath his bright and chattery outside, Huang Shaotian was a cold and ruthless opportunist, which was exactly the kind of person Ye Xiu wanted to field this first round. It was, in fact, the same reason he’d chosen Yang Cong as well: The assassin mindset was one that fit this stage, and Huang Shaotian was the most assassin-like Blade Master to ever have graced the Alliance.

They’d guessed that the map might be the same, arena-like one that’d appeared in every match so far, given that the flat planes were advantageous for the large, rolling mech, and they were right. However, from the beginning of the Group Arena, it was clear something about this match was different. The mech was larger, more weapons came out at once, and while Huang Shaotian searched for his opening—

“Are you testing?”

For the first time, a message appeared in the public chat. Not a single exchange had occurred with the previous three opponents, and a few of the pros startled at the sudden contact, having forgotten their opponents could communicate at all.

“We are testing,” came next as Huang Shaotian used all of his skill to try to escape the plethora of weapons focused on him. “How is this?”

Every single weapon darted forward or fired at once. Huang Shaotian used an Assassin’s Shining Cut instead of his usual Triple Slash, but it still only barely got him out of range in time.

“How is this?” the thing repeated, disconcerting in its strangely stiff speech pattern. The weapons extended outward rather than toward Troubling Rain, then bent all at once, and suddenly the Blade Master was forced to the ground under an immense, invisible pressure. For just a second he was down, and the bounced into the air, and the many weapons began firing, stabbing, or slashing in concert to keep him there.

“How is it?” Huang Shaotian suddenly responded; there was nothing he could do to escape for now, so he might as well. “Well actually, I have a lot to say about it you know? First of all, having so many weapons at once has to be some kind of cheat, nobody said we could get away with that, how cool would it be to wield a sword and a gun at the same time, or better, a bayonet, maybe a spear—”

Shaken by the continuous attacks, mech degrading with every second that passed, and typing out an absolute essay of a response, it was incredible that Huang Shoatian noticed the moment of hesitation his opponent had, let alone that he was able to take advantage of it.

“They’re collecting data,” Yu Wenzhou said, tone absolutely certain, as Huang Shaotian’s Falling Phoenix Slash crashed Troubling Rain into the surface of the sphere, sword a streak of cold light as it hit every weapon where they were weakest. “Not on us, but on themselves. They’re testing their ability.”

Yu Wenzhou’s main and most important job was to figure out the motivations and thinking pattern of their opponents, since they would be completely unfamiliar with both for every new opponent they encountered.

“The previous opponents might have been new; this one definitely has experience, and isn’t just going through its weapon options one by one. Still, they’re looking for data, and Shaotian gave them too much at once. It couldn’t process it.”

“Not only are they collecting data,” Ye Xiu agreed, “they have a strict process to it, and they aren’t willing to let any go. If it weren’t still trying to follow Shaotian’s monologue, it wouldn’t be doing nearly so poorly.”

Huang Shaotian was able to, just barely, edge out a win, but the close result meant Troubling Rain fell within moments of the start of the next match.

Xiao Shiqin, used to being the underdog, was up next. He was as calm and observant as Ye Xiu could have hoped, but it was his bad luck that their opponents didn’t seem the least bit fazed by any of his skills. Whether it was shooting them out of the air, off the ground, or outright ignoring skills that should have, by all rights, had an effect, the opponent completely steamrolled over Life Extinguisher and his robotic helpers. It was clear that in both technology and general mechanisms, Earth’s side was wildly outclassed.

Wang Jiexi stood up, a pillar of calm as always—one of the main reasons Ye Xiu had chosen him to anchor the group arena. His opponent was nearly full-health, but he showed no sign of anxiety as he took the stage.

“Electromagnetic coil had an effect,” Xiao Shiqin told him as they passed each other. “Not much, but it was there. Area of Effect skills should work fine.”

Wang Jiexi nodded, then settled himself into the booth and loaded Vaccaria. His opponent was at almost full health, but he didn’t hesitate. Lava Flask, Acid Rain, Frost Powder, he struck from unexpected angles and the sphere somehow managed to convey dizziness with its featureless body and swiveling weapons. The spheres’ operators were clearly logical, but the Magician playstyle followed no pattern. Vaccaria struck again and again, a dazzling array of attacks hitting before the Witch swooped away again.

It was an impressive showing, but Witches had low defense from the start, and the damage output of even a single attack from one of the spheres was nothing to scoff at. Wang Jiexi made it through about one and half opponents before Vaccaria fell.

All in all, they weren’t doing poorly, and the team competition would put forth a combination of players never before seen in the Alliance: Ye Xiu, Han Wenqing, Zhang Xinjie, Sun Zheping, and Zhang Jiale taking the stage together, with Su Mucheng as their sixth player.

The intent of this construction wasn’t so much balance—although it couldn’t really be called unbalanced either, a split of physical and magic damage, two long-range classes available if necessary and the main fighting force close-range powerhouses—but maximizing the level of synergy between the players and general strength of will. That the three most tyrannical players in the Alliance were fielded at once was no accident, that more than half were veteran pros even less so. They played together beautifully, able to anticipate and support each other’s movements through years of experience, but it wasn’t enough. The spheres were able to activate some strange kind of formation, feeding synergistically off of each other as they caught the players in a web of damage. Wang Jiexi had given them some idea of what it was like to fight against multiple opponents, what differences there were to take advantage of, but the spheres were really too hard to tell apart when they pinballed around the arena. In the end, Earth lost.

“What are you looking so down for?” Ye Xiu said to the others once the team retreated from their booths. As he’d hoped, none of the actual players had taken the loss too hard, although Zhang Jiale was walking closer to Sun Zheping now than he was when they’d walked up. “That went better than expected!” he reminded them. “Not only did we get all the information we set out to, an unusual result, but we even won a few points. Certainly they aren’t unbeatable.”

Yu Wenzhou nodded seriously. “I have the notes, Captain. We have a few different ways we could take this.” Yu Wenzhou was the only Master Tactician who hadn’t played, and thus the one with the best overall view of the match; aside from figuring out motivations, he’d been taking notes on their opponents’ strategy and possible counters.

“Good.” Ye Xiu clapped him on the shoulder before leading the way out of the team’s waiting room. “Let’s go plan our victory.”

They had a week to do it, and nothing better to do but practice against what simulation the Glory devs could cook up for them in time. In fact, though, much of their discussion was on map selection, and even more, player choice.

“Are you okay to go up?”

One that they’d all pretty much agreed on, despite how young and untested he was, was Zhou Zekai. A Sharpshooter would be perfect to target the joints of the battle spheres, their main area of vulnerability. Still, they’d put him in the Group Arena first, in the hopes that if he didn’t have the confidence to go up against the admittedly intimidating opponents with so much on the line, it wouldn’t necessarily doom them. They still had Wang Jiexi anchoring the end.

Aside from what was most practical, though, Ye Xiu wanted to be sure his overwhelmingly quiet teammate wasn’t being unduly pressured, especially now that it was almost time for the match to begin. If the pressure was getting to be too much for him, it wasn’t like Ye Xiu didn’t have backup plans.

Zhou Zekai just nodded, though, silent as ever.

“Nervous?”

Zhou Zekai was silent for a long time. “No,” he finally said.

Usually, a pause like that would be the sign of a lie, but Ye Xiu knew by now that he was just genuinely thinking about it. Zhou Zekai struggled with words, but his performance in Glory proved he wasn’t the type to waver.

“Good, you needn’t be.” Ye Xiu gave him a grin. “Play your best. For the rest, there’s us; your seniors are with you.”

“…Mm.” Zhou Zekai smiled a little, a small, sweet thing.

Ye Xiu nodded his approval. “Alright, then, let’s go.”

Zhou Zekai gripped Cloud Piercer in his hand and followed after him.

Ye Xiu won the first match, fighting in an enclosed space and knocking aside weapons before they could even aim at him. Battle Spirit activated and raised his stats significantly, battle aura glowing gold around him as he battered the enormous target beneath him. Due to his repeated dodging and careful approach in the previous round, Battle Spirit hadn’t had the chance to appear, so it took the opponent completely unaware.

With that win, the team could be assured that a win in the team competition would bring them overall victory, significantly reducing the strain on the other players until then. With the map advantage and the lowered pressure, Chu Yunxiu brought them a win, but Yang Cong brought a loss. As they’d thought, their opponents had studied them as well, and Yang Cong’s tricks were much less effective against an opponent that was prepared for them.

“We can expect some countering from the repetition, then,” Yu Wenzhou concluded. “But in cases of overwhelming skill or, I’d bet, a significant class advantage, it won’t affect the outcome too much.”

Since CC skills didn’t seem to do too much against this opponent, Yu Wenzhou’s Swoksaar wouldn’t be taking the stage this round, either, but he was as active with his analysis as ever.

“We’ll be relying on those of you that didn’t take the stage yet for the third round, then,” Ye Xiu said to the team. “Even if your class isn’t well-suited for the task, you’ll be joining the battle, so think about how you can be most effective. You might want to work in combination with another player to make up for each other’s weaknesses, or act as support to those who’ll have a class advantage. Against opponents who have an advantage, working in combination is the best way to achieve results.”

The players nodded seriously. If they hadn’t believed it before, the practices they’d done over the month before would have been enough to show them how necessary cooperation was. Without it, almost half of the new NPCs they’d been up against would have been unbeatable, no matter what skills they might add to their weapons.

Zhou Zekai was the first of the undebuted players to take the stage, but it didn’t show at all in his performance. He took down almost two whole opponents on his own, despite spending the second half of his second opponent navigating almost exclusively through Aerial Fire: The second battle sphere had pulled out, to everyone’s shock, an actual spinning saw and cut Cloud Piercer in half at the waist in a single motion. Before Cloud Piercer was truly destroyed, though, he got his revenge, blasting the saw off of the sphere entirely with a well-placed explosive shot.

Zhao Yang was their second player, easily taking care of the second sphere with a single, well-placed Flash Burst. Despite having some difficulty with using his largely mid-range attacks against a surprisingly nimble opponent, he was able to almost completely take out the third sphere before Boundless Sea became inert. When Wang Jiexi made it to the arena, he barely had to do anything at all to end the battle in their favor.

The team competition consisted of Ye Xiu, Zhang Jiale, Zhou Zekai, Wang Jiexi, and Fang Shiqian with his Paladin Wind Guard, with Su Mucheng again as their sixth player. There’d been long discussion about this setup for team play, Zhou Zekai undebuted and weak at communication, Wang Jiexi’s Magician style hard to coordinate with for most, but Ye Xiu was confident they could pull it off, and they did. Wind Guard acted as the hub of their team, a center of protection for the long-distance classes and a safe place for the midrange classes to return to, while One Autumn Leaf knocked back the enormous spheres with Evil Annihilation, almost looking like was batting them backward. His use of chasers changed his attributes in ways the opponents couldn’t quite predict, bombarding them with magic blasts that never missed.

The options other than long-range gunners and mid-range magic classes included sending out the two Ghostblades, but since CC skills were hit or miss, even with the elemental attribute, and the battle spheres were highly aggressive, they’d elected not to go with the rather low-defense Swordsmen. On the other hand, tanking might do them no good, and neither would largely support classes. The result was that everyone agreed to this mix of largely individual players as the best option, relying on Ye Xiu’s shotcalling and the split nature of their map, a series of cave systems the battle spheres were too large to properly enter, to make up for any deficiencies.

The battle progressed much better than the previous team competition. No matter how many times nanites tried to repair the spheres’ weapon joints, as they had the round before, Zhou Zekai unerringly shot them out again. Without their weapons, the attack power of the battle spheres was significantly reduced. Zhang Jiale and Wang Jiexi worked together to baffle the spheres’ sensors, bringing them damage they didn’t know how to counteract and isolating key players to avoid the overpowered formation they’d pulled out the round before. Ye Xiu guarded the cave entrances, rendering the spheres’ attempts to pull out their healer useless. When Vaccaria fell in the process of destroying the central tower and arsenal that acted as the battle sphere’s healer, Su Mucheng began working with Ye Xiu to provide screening and support, allowing him to take over the position as main attacker without worrying too much for Fang Shiqian’s safety.

Their opponents were clearly at a loss when dealing with this piecemeal setup and guerilla warfare, and it wasn’t long before they lost.

“You hover more than Jiexi when he’s being particularly annoying,” Fang Shiqian complained to Ye Xiu once they’d left the booth. “Do you think I don’t know how to protect myself? Paladins are not Clerics, you know! They are built for defense!”

“You’re just whining because you wanted to have a go at the battle spheres,” Ye Xiu said dismissively.

“Your lies are as dirty as your heart,” Fang Shiqian groused as they rejoined the team. “It’s not a crime to want to be involved.”

“So what I’m hearing is you want to go over what we’re doing for the next round, all against all, half our terrain and half theirs, right now.”

“And what I’m hearing is that you want to have a contest on who knows how to play a healer better. Paladin against Paladin, just grab a random account, shall we?” Fang Shiqian was always ready to fight, let alone get into a fight he knew he’d win.

“Your lack of planning—”

“Your insistence on limiting my contributions—”

“We can go sleep,” Wang Jiexi told the rest. “They’ll be at it for a while.”

“No planning tonight?” Xiao Shiqin asked, slightly apprehensive.

Yu Wenzhou laughed and stood as well. “No planning now. We can go over it tomorrow.”

There would be time.

It really didn’t take long for them to decide on what setup to go with, and they were fairly confident in it. It was a unanimous agreement, and they’d had no problem situating themselves appropriately and working together, so there wasn’t much they actually needed to be worried about. Still, there were some things that people can’t be expected to take calmly, and being pushed to win a war-like game with Earth itself on the line was absolutely one of them—especially since a format like this was one they were completely unfamiliar with.

Zhang Jiale was the first to give up on the serious atmosphere. “Let’s do something stupid.”

“I’m not doing hairdressing.” Sun Zheping’s reply was immediate.

“I said something stupid, hairdressing isn’t stupid,” Zhang Jiale said huffily. “Also, shut up.”

“No getting drunk,” Zhang Xinjie said firmly.

“Not that stupid.” Zhang Jiale rolled his eyes. They were all pro players, there was no question of casually having a drinking party.

“Do you have any suggestions?” Wang Jiexi asked, the topic somewhat odd coming in his incongruent, perpetually serious tone.

“Sugar high?” Lin Jingyan offered.

“Oh, that—That might be too stupid,” Yu Wenzhou said uncomfortably.

“No no no it’s a great idea, I love doing that, sugar highs are the best!” Huang Shaotian said brightly.

“I’m absolutely serious,” Yu Wenzhou continued around him. His eyes spoke of deep experience with the horrors of the world. “That might be too stupid.”

The good thing about bedding was that it blocked out noise. People might not think about that feature often, but it was truly an amazing, genuinely miraculous aspect of bedding, that it could block out sound. The lecture hall was now a wonderful nest: comfortable, cozy, absolutely no more echoes.

“Where did we get this much bedding?” Han Wenqing asked, looking over the mountains of fabric and pillows.

Ye Xiu was as blasé as ever. “Unlimited resources is not a joke.”

“No one asked?” With the amount of material he was seeing here, he couldn’t imagine anyone would let it pass unmentioned.

“We’re up against aliens. Does anyone dare ask me why about anything at all?”

“…Fair point.”

“He’s going for the caffeine!” Fang Rui shrieked in the distance.

“That’s your cue, Old Han.” Ye Xiu said. “Have at it.”

Han Wenqing sighed and went to bodily remove Huang Shaotian from the snack table yet again.

In the third round, despite taking a new format to the stage for the first time, the pros’ coordination was impeccable. They had a good grasp of the features the battle spheres had shown so far, and even if there were opponents they had yet to see, Earth hadn’t shown all its cards yet, either. So many spheres bouncing around were a little hard to keep track of, but not impossible. 25 versus their 20; it seemed their team was a good size, even if they were a bit outnumbered.

The opponent’s map was still an arena, just a flat plane that seemed to stretch on into infinity; Earth’s map was a craggy labyrinth, complete with trees. The Ghostblade duo turned the edges of the opponent’s field into their own domain, layered boundaries dyeing featureless gray with their own colors. The close-range fighters set themselves up between overlapping arcs, ready to block further advancement; behind them, a bit raised on slowly piling boulders, the mid-range—in the trees, their gunners.

Plain spheres, no matter how weaponized, didn’t stand a chance.

The weight of the world was a lot of pressure, but they’d practiced their group coordination this way so many times it was practically habit. They won, Earth saved, and they weren’t even surprised.

(They were relieved, though.

“We won,” fell out of Fang Rui’s mouth, almost giddy. “We won!”

“And we’ll keep winning,” Han Wenqing said, not a shadow of doubt in his voice.

“Of course,” Ye Xiu said with a laugh. “This is only the start.”)

Chapter Text

Tiebreaker rounds came midweek to avoid throwing the overall tournament off-schedule, so they didn’t have long before they’d be facing their next opponents. Riding the high of the previous round, they swept the competition.

The pros were in great spirits, but the military half of the operation was looking grim.

“We can buy information with the points we win each round?” Ye Xiu asked, somewhat in disbelief.

“We can,” the head of the department handling tournament procedure confirmed. “It seems like this is a normal aspect of the tournament, buying and betting as we go. They said they didn’t tell us sooner because it wasn’t relevant.”

Not a single person in the room believed it. Not relevant? Information was the difference between a win and a loss, most times. Even this round, Ye Xiu’s pinpointing the fatal weakness of the small, almost grasshopper-like mech’s strange, disturbing antennae was what gave them such an easy victory: These sensory rods were apparently so important that without them the mech could only go berserk. It was easy pickings. It helped that this was Earth’s home game—even in the team competition, their opponents were not hard to beat.

More importantly, although information cost many points, Earth had managed to rack up enough to buy something in little over one opponent. How quickly had they expected Earth to lose, that they thought they wouldn’t manage even that? Maybe they thought they could, at most, scrape a win twice before being eliminated?

In any case, there were no positive reasons for such a decision; at best, it could be negligence.

The information really was expensive, and they’d won against this opponent so handily, they decided not to act on this new development and save what they could now. Apparently, as the rounds went on, the information grew more expensive—but the points per match did not go up.

This turned out to be a mistake.

“Antigrav?! No one said there were antigrav maps!” Zhang Jiale was extremely offended: Without the normal arc that came with gravity, his Hundred Blossoms style was timed and delivered all wrong, making it completely ineffective. It was bad enough that the existence of “friendly fire” in the real world meant he had to use it differently in combination with Sun Zheping—the Berserker mech Blossoming Chaos was designed to take some hits, and the restructuring it did after damage even made its attacks more efficient, but it wasn’t like he could just wantonly attack his own partner, either—but to render him useless in the individual matches as well?!

No one had said there weren’t antigrav maps, of course, but Earth’s side definitely hadn’t thought to code up any themselves. Which race would want that?

This one, it seemed. For all they knew, they were known for it. They’d had a myriad of maps in antigrav environments, hallways and caves and asteroid belts. The mech that had seemed so primitive and bizarre the previous round darted through three-dimensional space with disconcerting ease, coming at them from multiple angles, ricocheting off walls, near entirely too fast to react to. If Earth’s players could even manage a reaction at all; what little they understood from underwater battles didn’t apply well here, where the vacuum surrounding them gave them nothing to push off of or swim through, and nearly all of their flying or movement skills required displacement to function. They struggled as if caught in a spider’s web from the start, their controls simply not designed for the more complex maneuvers necessary to reach and grab and swing themselves through space.

Ye Xiu had adapted fairly quickly, managing to use the minimal true expulsion of Falling Flower Palm to get himself wedged in a good position to damage the same sensory rods as before. The berserk flailing that came after was clearly better suited to 0-gravity, striking in all directions without getting caught on the environment, but he’d still been able to scrape out a win. The other players had not had such accommodating environments, and the team competition was in an actual void, nothing to push off of at all, nothing to use as a reference point in the surrounding dark. With nothing else to rely on and no experience to fall back on, it was no surprise that Earth lost. Now, they could only decide what their best option was for the future.

The information they hadn’t bought really would have come in handy, but at this point they only had the tiebreaker left, and the mech wouldn’t be any different. Since they were able to choose half of the arena, they didn’t need to fight in antigrav. Though the loss of the second round blindsided them, they concluded the environments they’d already experienced had given them what new information they needed and left it at that.

This, too, turned out to be a mistake.

They’d thought, after the battle spheres, that their team size was the usual. They thought 20 players would make them competitive on this level.

Apparently not.

Against their 20 were thousands, legions of the opponent, descending on their Earth-based map from their own space map like a true alien invasion.

“Positions,” Ye Xiu sent in the team chat, somehow managing to convey his firm tone through text alone.

The pros steeled themselves, shaking off despair.

Could they win?

It wasn’t a question to ask, when failure meant the demise of their entire world. They would win. They would win, or they wouldn’t have any room left for regret.

“If you can win against one, you can win against a thousand,” Ye Xiu sent. On its own, it seemed absurd, but somehow it was still comforting.

“Yeah! What’s a few thousand aliens to us? I can fight thousands in my sleep, single-handed!” Troubling Rain bounced in place, Ice Rain unsheathing in a largely useless swing and flourish before falling into a standard waiting position. “Bring it on! We’re ready!”

“All set, Captain,” Yu Wenzhou sent, much more sedate.

“Set,” said Zhang Xinjie, his character settling into the absolute stillness of his usual prepared stance.

“Set, Captain,” came Xiao Shiqin’s report.

“Let’s go,” Han Wenqing said, Desert Dust knocking his fists together in the doubled motion meant to activate his Silver equipment’s additional skill, Perseverance. A punch like a sonic boom with no recharge time and no limit on repetitions.

The aliens descended.

Their low-defense players were the first to go. It was impossible to keep that many opponents at bay, especially when they had no concept of self-preservation. Then the purely long-range fighters, then those with low mobility, as the encroaching army was cut down so were Earth’s players. On solid footing they far outclassed the aliens, and they’d done enough practice in the hastily designed antigrav maps that they wouldn’t completely fall apart in space. They were doing well, exceptionally well, at destroying the opponents’ mechs, sometimes even three or four taken out with a single, well-timed skill that the mechs had either no space or no inclination to dodge, but it wasn’t enough, not when their opponent had at least three orders of magnitude more mechs to send.

Mechanical carcasses piled up around them, building walls between them, but Ye Xiu ordered them blasted away into boundaries that worked in their favor instead. If they couldn’t be used as new obstacles to the encroaching rush, they would be rocketed toward incoming live mechs to see if they could cause an explosion without wasting another skill.

Because with this many enemies and a battle this long, how many skills they could use was a serious concern. Wish Prayer flew across the map as often as possible, but keeping up the health and mana of so many players at once was no joke. Their two healers were exhausted, and the loss of players to keep track of as mech went offline could hardly be called a welcome reprieve.

Xiao Shiqin brought down a shower of mech around him, pulling them out of the void with Electromagnetic Coil and slamming them into the earth; Yu Wenzhou set masses aflame, sent out Decaying Curses, used Grasping Ghost to steal material from the opponents to patch his own Swoksaar; Zhao Yang used Qi Guard and Dragon Wave and Flash Burst, crackling with the electricity of “qi” as he rendered the opponents impotent—but it wasn’t enough. They were falling. They were failing.

Huang Shaotian wove between the fallen before darting out to cause massive bursts of damage, but couldn’t hide forever from the tide; Zhang Xinjie’s rhythm couldn’t keep up with the opponents’ surging storm, method meaning nothing in the madness, and his physical guards could not last forever; Zhou Zekai wielded guns like knives, a triumph of close-combat skill in a largely long-range class, but it couldn’t change that a Gunner shouldn’t allow the opponent to close in—the end of the wave was in sight when they fell, but fall they did.

The last of the insect-like mech chose to attack in true concert, an overwhelming and properly coordinated wave, most likely consisting of those in this army that actually functioned as the “team” in a normal round, and their exhausted close-combat classes fell too. Wang Jiexi had survived far longer than anyone with such a low-defense class could expect, but his flight and his precise, unpredictable pathing had given him an edge the others didn’t have. Still, at this point Vaccaria had almost nothing left, and he’d been focused on by the enemy, a cage of death constricting around him.

“Don’t you dare lose,” Fang Shiqian sent in the team chat, seemingly incongruous; then Aweto stepped forward, arms spread as if welcoming the tide with a cross glowing midair between them, and self-destructed. Nearly out of nanites and with the end so close, Fang Shiqian had decided he would rather take himself off the field in a single burst of extreme damage than watch Vaccaria fall—and, at the same time, to activate the additional skill his weapon carried at his own repeated insistence: Devour.

Aweto practically imploded, drawing tens of mechs into itself as it went, and then abruptly expanded again in a drifting silver cloud that settled over Vaccaria before rapidly reforming the Witch’s original state. Devour was a form of lifesteal, fully consuming nearby mechs and even the user itself in order to fully replenish a single ally. Wang Jiexi didn’t waste a second in blowing the nearby mechs to bits and turning to reconvene with Ye Xiu’s One Autumn Leaf, who stood atop a mountain of the defeated and tossed his enemies into the heap below with darting flicks of his spear. Battle Spirit illuminated the air around him, not hard to activate to a burning, golden glow when there were so many enemies to attack at once. It lit One Autumn Leaf’s skeleton from the inside, turning him into a glowing spirit of the undead.

Star Ray cleared the path between the two, and Vaccaria swept the enemies out of the air around them.

“And he says we hover,” Ye Xiu sent in the moment’s reprieve—there were over a hundred mech remaining, and he was well aware that even steadfast and unflustered Wang Jiexi could feel dread. “Has he finally given up pretending he isn’t biased, then?”

Vaccaria landed on the petrified limb of a long-wasted mech a little below the trash mound’s peak. “Was he trying to pretend?”

Ye Xiu laughed, even though he knew Wang Jiexi’s question was completely serious. Of course Fang Shiqian didn’t like to admit that he favored his captain when they’d started off at such odds, but following the Magician and keeping him alive while the Witch shouldered more than his share of responsibility and took risk after risk was not the kind of thing that could be done subtly.

“I guess he wasn’t,” Ye Xiu replied, knowing full well that Fang Shiqian was probably cursing him in his booth; players out of the game could, of course, still see the chat. “Well, he gave us an order. We don’t dare lose.”

Magic Shield rose around One Autumn Leaf, pulsing a warning.

“Of course not.” Clouds formed around them, the two standing in the eye of the precursor to Acid Rain.

They came with their limbs like knives and sharp wings on their back; they came in a tornado of horror. Vaccaria hid Shadow Cloak in the fall of Acid Rain and bound the encroaching opponents beneath its effects; Hundred Dragon Meteor Strike spitted mech after mech from the air and turned them into scrap. Wang Jiexi used Broom Tornado when the opponents couldn’t be held back anymore, throwing Vaccaria into the fray to keep One Autumn Leaf from taking any more damage. With Wang Jiexi as unconventional protection and the two working in such surprising harmony despite the Magician’s lonesome style, they faced the last of the enemies together.

Magic Missile; Fire Chaser, Draconic Crusher. A clawed sweep—One Autumn Leaf’s legs were inoperable. Sweep, Star Ray to take down two and leave a third mech uselessly berserk, a rending strike laid Vaccaria open from hip to shoulder. Ye Xiu countered a pulverizing blow to One Autumn Leaf’s lower torso by using the last of Petrifaction on himself, turning One Autumn Leaf’s base to something like stone. Furious Dragon Strikes the Heart took out a mech in the back, which Ye Xiu had finally determined was likely the shot caller. Wang Jiexi released a blitz of attacks; Circle Swing came sideways to knock the rest out of the way, out of the air; corpses fell like rain. The battlefield went silent, two mechs now grounded, Stardust Extermination broken almost in half. Evil Annihilation stabbed into the pile to keep the largely-statue One Autumn Leaf upright.

Was that it? Was there another they’d missed?

Metallic wings burst over the screen, the words absent but the feeling clear to the waiting pros. Glory.

Glory.

They’d made it.

Ye Xiu sat back in his seat and flexed fingers numb and trembling. An hour of battle, twenty against more than twenty thousand.

Earth lived another day.

Though they’d pulled off another win, the atmosphere this time was solemn rather than jubilant.

“We can’t let this happen again,” Ye Xiu said to the gathered tacticians. His tone didn’t carry the same horror that pervaded the rest of the group, simple statements of fact despite his seriousness. He treated this strategy meeting the same as any other before, but there was no avoiding the greater gravity to his words. “Before, we were treating this final confrontation as our buffer. From now on, we want the team competition to be our buffer. We need to aim to have won before we even get there.”

They all understood the severity of that goal: It was why they hadn’t pushed for it earlier. Since points didn’t carry over between matches, winning before the team competition meant sweeping the individual matches and group arena entirely. If they won the team competition, even a single win previous would give them the overall win, and the pressure on a team working together was obviously lower than facing opponents alone. It was definitely less stressful to pursue wins that way, but if they lost even once…

Earth was not prepared to face an army. Twenty thousand battle spheres would have ended them without question.

From here on out, then, sweeping the individual matches and group arena would be their goal. In this tournament that involved using points to buy advantages, the team competition was always played, whether or not it would affect the match’s outcome. If nothing else, since this tournament was entertainment even before it was a sport, viewers liked it. There didn’t have to be a point to conflict for the audience to enjoy it.

This new goal in mind, everyone agreed on buying the information on their next opponent. The market for information was bizarre, though, charging separately for different categories. No matter what, though, they were required to first buy the name, and so they found their third matchup would be against the Horde.

At that point, though, came an unexpected dilemma: They already had the rest of this group’s information.

“The data for Glory’s NPCs is a little old now, but it was extensive,” the head of the Glory devs reported. “All of the skills and developments we’ve made were based on their technology, because it was the only one the ambassadors actually gave us simulations for. There’s…no one at all we know better.”

Ye Xiu scrolled through the virtual market listing, looking over the strange packaging of priced data. “Recent developments, then. It’s just a log of changes, right?”

“Last ten major changes to the team with timestamps,” the agent confirmed.

Things like recordings of their previous rounds might be more helpful, but even after only two matchups, the price was a serious deterrent. They could probably expect the same increase in price for information on future opponents, so they wanted to budget as much as possible. If this matchup was going to be easy, blowing their points on it would be an enormous waste they couldn’t afford.

“Recent developments,” though, turned out to be shockingly empty.

“Maybe…a stagnating team?” one of the Glory devs said uncertainly.

The data they’d been given before listed the Horde as an upper mid-tier planet, fairly affluent but only “normal” in terms of difficulty. That was, according to their liaison, the reason they’d been given that team’s data in the first place.

Most of the rest that they could buy would almost certainly overlap with what information they already had, and it wasn’t cheap. In the end they decided to check the less expensive information of their previous opponents against their experiences with them to see how accurate the kind of information provided might be in predicting the coming match.

The information was surprisingly comprehensive, even including what theme the broadcast would be using to present their match—all matches were broadcast, but the main channel chose one to focus on each round. The rest were evidently bid on by a multitude of different broadcasting stations, so of course the winner would have a concrete plan for what to do with the opponents they intended to show.

The broadcast plans alone told them a lot, though. They were a base-level planet: one that hadn’t even achieved interstellar travel. Each base-level planet was put in a different section of the bracket, because each eighth of the tournament was touted as holding a full range of planets, all of different means. Base-level planet matchups had a very niche viewership: those who liked to root for the underdog, and elitists there to amuse themselves with their struggle.

“At least we know no one we’re eliminating was in such dire straits as us,” Ye Xiu said with a sigh. They hadn’t bothered to look into that information earlier; they couldn’t afford to feel pity. Luckily, it seemed pity wasn’t necessary.

In fact, that first matchup was against a group of scientists who just liked using the tournament to test their designs in “real battle.”

“Decadent,” an agent commented. The price for entering the tournament was not low, but clearly this planet could afford it.

The match was billed as “high-tech versus low-tech,” and the projected viewership included those who liked following this team to see what they would put out next. It was hard to say if Earth was unlucky, to have faced a well-funded team with significant technological advancements first, or incredibly lucky, to have first fought mech as new and untried as their own. Or, perhaps, lucky just to go against opponents without an ounce of desperation in them.

The second matchup was against a group that had more of a need for wins: a species that bred quickly and was in desperate need of new resources each year. Apparently, before the tournament existed and a peace agreement signed, they used to launch themselves through space to colonize new planets. Somewhat like the locusts they might, if one squinted, resemble.

“They’re zerg,” Fang Rui said, almost awed, when Ye Xiu brought this information to the team. “We actually fought zerg.”

“They do have their own name,” Ye Xiu pointed out.

“Uh, space invasion-style masses of tiny, rushing aliens, fast-breeding, not actually that competent on their own?” Fang Rui ticked the points off on his fingers. “Please, they were made for this word. This word exists to describe exactly this type of alien. Let me have this.”

“What if a similar alien shows up later?” Ye Xiu asked, amused.

Fang Rui’s response came without hesitation: “We call it Zerg 2: Revenge of the Zerg.”

“Is he always like this?” Li Xuan asked Lin Jingyan. “I mean, look at my junior. He’s so well-behaved, never causes any problems.”

Li Xuan had managed to conveniently forget the massive problem that was Wu Yuce insisting on playing a Ghostblade no matter what.

“We got him from Blue Rain,” Lin Jingyan said, shaking his head. “It was too late before we even met.”

“Excuse me?!” said Fang Rui and Huang Shaotian, at exactly the same time, in exactly the same tone.

“Condolences,” Wu Yuce said solemnly.

Their win against the Horde was so crushing it left the audience reeling. While the Horde weren’t exactly high-level competitors, for a base-level planet to absolutely waste them…

“It was just like running a dungeon!” Fang Rui crowed. Ye Xiu had brought out Fang Rui, Wu Yuce, Chu Yunxiu, and Fang Shiqian as a Paladin just in case—should their information prove less useful than expected, choosing to bring in a group of rookies for a low-risk introduction to the stage could backfire terribly. But the information had done its job, despite the intervening years and general incredulity that over seven years of near stagnation inspired, and their sixth player Zhou Zekai didn’t even need to take the stage.

Zhao Yang nodded as he poured a glass of celebratory sparkling juice. His individual match had been like that as well. Even the Horde player’s decision-making matched the programmed behavior of the NPCs to an uncanny degree. The fight was absurdly simple.

“If the Glory devs weren’t confident in matching it that well, they might have done us more of a disservice than a favor by training us so long against NPCs,” Ye Xiu explained. Indeed, what differences were necessary to make the advanced simulation something appropriate for an MMO had disappeared in the dungeons they’d cleared to level up Lord Grim, but the players had barely noticed. “If they had completely different behavioral patterns, we might really have been in trouble.”

“They did have different abilities,” Yu Wenzhou pointed out.

“Yeah,” Sun Zheping snorted. “Ours were better.”

The Horde’s mechs were really nothing special, even less capable than Glory had made its NPCs, since the skills in Glory came from the greatest advancements the Glory devs could make with the base simulations given to them. The Horde, as a society, seemed…woefully incapable, when it came to technology. For all that they were listed as an affluent planet, that appeared to be a situation caused by their resources rather than their individual strength. No wonder the tournament organizers had felt comfortable giving them full data on them, and even example simulations of their mechs.

There wasn’t anything truly threatening about them at all.

The second round they changed things up a little, let Fang Rui and Tian Sen play individual matches to practice their less straightforward classes’ movements. Fang Rui’s discovery of his love of the Thief class was relatively recent; he’d been delighted when the military had explained it was Doubtful Demon he would pilot, as if validating his decision to play as Lin Jingyan’s partner rather than his successor, confirming that a Thief fit him better than his captain’s Brawler ever could.

Of course, that would hardly matter if Glory, having served its purpose, shut down after this tournament, but that was a problem for the future. For now, all Fang Rui needed to care about was making sure he settled well into his new class onstage.

Tian Sen was a little different, having already taken over Peaceful Hermit, but the uncertainties that came from transferring his class to a real-life mech form made him reluctant to play with Earth’s survival on the line. Whether or not it was an actual problem, if he wasted energy worrying about it, he wouldn’t be the best choice to send onstage. They couldn’t afford timidity and distraction, especially since it wasn’t like Tian Sen to act in such a way—it didn’t fit his playstyle at all.

The matches went well, though, and both left the stage feeling confident in their ability to play more often in later rounds if necessary. Earth sent Fang Shiqian out as a Cleric in the team competition to end the round sooner and move on to planning for their fourth matchup. Zhang Xinjie, in the meantime, was still going over the data from their past several rounds and the information they had on their opponents, determining which information would be the most advantageous to buy. They hadn’t seen fourth matchup prices yet, but they were unlikely to be good.

Without the need to fight a tiebreaker round, Earth’s team would finally experience getting a full week of preparation for their new opponents. The other master tacticians and several of the captains, including their usual group arena anchor Wang Jiexi, had been left out of the second round against the Horde to make sure they’d be able to face analyzing their fourth opponents completely fresh. The pros had already swept the Horde in the previous round despite its being their away game, so there was little worry they’d fail here. Of course, the Horde’s “home ground advantage” had been practically useless when all their maps would fit right in with the more fantastical of Glory’s options.

This round, though, was Earth’s home game, adding insult to injury for the already depressingly outclassed opponents. They didn’t stand the slightest chance.

Earth’s sweep was so unsurprising no one even commented on it. In fact, the pros as a whole had pretty much treated these two rounds as a break, and felt no need to waste any time “resting” before opening up the data they’d bought regarding their next opponents.

Once they did, though, there was quite a bit of regret.

“What is wrong with this species?” Li Xuan’s face was twisted in horrified disgust. “Who—who okayed this as a design? Does it even make sense or is it just creepy?”

The opponent was a grotesque perversion of usual form, twisted limbs and dripping skin.

“It’s a mech! Why is it dripping?!” Zhang Jiale didn’t like it any better.

“Apparently it’s some kind of oil slick, to keep all the internal joints lubricated,” Ye Xiu explained.

“Ugh.” Chu Yunxiu managed to convey the prevalent mood with a single, displeased sound.

“With the side effect of often turning the terrain into unsuitable or even impossible footing for their opponent,” Ye Xiu continued. “It’s very…slippery.”

“Nope! Nope nope nope, not okay, not alright, we shouldn’t have to deal with this, no way. I don’t even want to look at it, let alone figure out where the attacks are coming from. Fuck that.” Huang Shaotian’s portrayal of the overall mood was far more wordy but no less accurate.

Ye Xiu had been expecting an opponent like this, to be honest. He could tell from the initial briefing that aliens were not like humans, so there was only so much time before they ran across one that just completely offended human sensibilities. They were lucky it’d taken all the way to their fourth matchup.

That didn’t mean he was pleased, though, when the first individual match greeted him with slimy cave walls and the enemy’s gaping maw.

The battle was a series of limbs twisting in the wrong directions and scuttling movements that gushed and dripped, a disturbing contrast of sharp checks of motion and slides that were much too fast and smooth. The thing was so hard to pin down that Ye Xiu had to hit it with Petrifaction twice just to mitigate some of its wrenching and flopping. After that he hit it with every high-level skill he could while backing away from its determined continued ooze forward, not giving it a chance to do its weird, grinding reconfiguration process to start itself up again.

More than anything else, it was an incredibly mentally taxing way to fight. In the end, though, he got his victory.

The map choices—slippery, bouncy, even acidic—and unpredictable movements of their opponents, incongruously called Harmonies, took them off guard, but by the time the team competition came around they’d managed to rally themselves. Ye Xiu’s initial success meant a win in the team competition could give them the overall victory, and they didn’t want to spend another matchup firmly on the back foot when they’d finally gotten a taste of a clean win.

Their team consisted of Yu Wenzhou, Li Xuan, Wu Yuce, Ye Xiu, and Fang Shiqian as a Paladin. Chu Yunxiu was made their sixth player for her Area of Effect skills, because they could all tell from the data that getting close to the things was a bad move. Harmonies didn’t move the way they expected, didn’t take damage the way they expected, and to some extent seemed fully capable of continuing on through anything at all. Ye Xiu had offered to replace her with someone else if the disconcerting looks would cause a problem, but Chu Yunxiu cut him off before he even had a chance to complete the offer.

“I want to set them on fire,” she’d said, dead serious. “Please. I will be seeing these things in my nightmares, if I have to watch from the side instead of getting a chance to vent I will be extraordinarily displeased.”

So their team was set, and they’d planned their coordination long before they got to the horrible, pulsing labyrinth-type stage. It reminded strongly of a digestive track.

This analogy was only emphasized by the shocking appearance of a Harmony from some kind of hidden valve in the wall, directly into their area. The two Ghostblades were able to largely keep the terrain to Earth’s advantage while Yu Wenzhou controlled the opponents into their traps, but Fang Shiqian couldn’t tank everything at once, and Ye Xiu didn’t have the luxury of destroying each limb that churned itself into a new shape around his hits. Yu Wenzhou didn’t panic at the sudden change in plans, and was actually able to bait the Harmonies into the optimal position for their initial tactic before Swoksaar fell.

“It’s time,” sent Chu Yunxiu after loading in. “Let’s do this.” And then the whole map was on fire.

Yu Wenzhou’s control and the Harmonies’ disturbing oil coating had created trails of accelerant around the battlefield, and Windy Rain’s flame was far stronger than any Shadow Flame Swoksaar could put out. The strange amalgam of bolts and gears slathered in dripping oil were set ablaze in a way that both added to the horror and quite effectively ruined their attempts at movement.

“I feel much better now,” Chu Yunxiu sent after piloting Windy Rain down into their formation. A nearby Harmony juddered with a terrible grinding noise as it dripped fire.

“How is this better,” Fang Shiqian sent back. “How. This image is burned in to my mind for all time. How are you going to repay me for all the sleep I’m not going to get?!”

One Autumn Leaf blasted a burning mech frame to pieces before it could escape into a suddenly open wall valve. “Decide after, they’re trying to get away.”

Wu Yuce slashed through another mech, his sword alight with purple flames. “Found the sixth one.”

“Good,” Chu Yunxiu sent, surprisingly vicious as Windy Rain immediately raised Ravaging Wind. “I wasn’t done.”

The battle ended after an age of grinding down disgustingly persistent mounds of flaming bolts, map and carcasses blazing like a particularly ugly hellscape.

“Why was I back to playing Paladin this round, you play-it-safe ass,” Fang Shiqian complained to Ye Xiu once they exited the booths. “It would have ended so much faster and cleaner with my Cleric. For the second half we barely even needed defense, and your health was so high I was in danger of overhealing if I cast a single other skill! Don’t try to say Paladins have offensive skills too, I know you’re going to, but they’re nothing in comparison to the increase in aggression a good Cleric gives the whole team.”

“We agreed that with a largely low-defense team it made sense to use a Paladin,” Ye Xiu reminded.

“I know what we agreed, I’m just saying that maybe we should shift our stance on this a little—”

The two devolved into an argument about the ideology behind playing a healer, as the rest of the team had come to expect from them, so they filed out of the waiting area to go about the rest of their evening.

“Your problem is that you developed your sense of tactics without learning to rely on a proper Cleric,” Fang Shiqian said superciliously.

Ye Xiu laughed. “Apologize to Shadow.” Although Yin Xiong was no longer the player of Woven Shadow, older players had a habit of falling back on in-game nicknames to refer to each other, especially when speaking of the early days of Glory.

Fang Shiqian huffed. “I will not. Clearly he’s caused me no end of trouble.”

It actually didn’t take long for the two of them to run into the rest of the pros, who’d decided to give movie night another shot in the absence of any concrete planning to do. This time, due to either the salience of the topic or some latent tendencies toward masochism, the choice of a horror movie was actually intentional.

“This is…comparatively, so weak…” Zhao Yang finally had to say.

No matter what they chose to watch, nothing could match what they’d just borne witness to with their own eyes. Despite the immersive system and fairly impressive special effects, nothing was really working.

Their current opponents had three mouths, each one inside the next and folding outward in horrifying sequence, a grotesque and sucking maw. Their limbs contorted at disturbing angles, shifting like dislocation, popping weirdly into place again as the things pushed themselves to keep going and going. Even on the verge of destruction, onward they came, an inexorable threat.

What was going to top their slick gooeyness? The chittering sound of metal joints across metal joints? The way the frame screeched and screamed and twisted in damning fire as they reached their ugly limbs toward the players? Nothing.

“Genre ruined,” Zhou Zekai said sadly.

Everyone, depressingly blasé amidst the hiqh-quality suspenseful ambiance, had to agree.

With the map advantage and experience under their belts, the next round went better than the last. There did seem to be some effort by their opponents to counterstrategize against them, but Ye Xiu wasn’t so complacent as to actually use exactly the same pattern against their opponents. For the first time since the tournament began, Ye Xiu didn’t take the stage first, and the Harmonies’ decision to send a close-range fighter with greater bulk went ignored by Su Mucheng’s long-distance barrage.

“Yunxiu was right, I feel much better,” she said after she came down.

Ye Xiu just patted her on the shoulder. Su Mucheng had always had a bit of a terrifying air when it came to Glory, her absolute destruction wreaked with a lovely, unchanging smile, but her friendship with Chu Yunxiu had definitely intensified that trait.

It was probably a good thing, even if it did occasionally make him break out in a cold sweat.

“Right?” Chu Yunxiu said. “It was almost cathartic, really, I finally got to burn the harmonious crab to pieces. My many butchered dramas are avenged.”

“What, the censorship thing?” Fang Shiqian was aghast. “That thing should be censored, it has no leg to stand on as the arbiter of censorship!”

“It has more than enough legs to stand on,” Yang Cong commented. “It has too many legs to stand on.”

“It doesn’t…look at all like a crab, though…” Xiao Shiqin said weakly.

“It is called a ‘Harmony’,” Lin Jingyan mused. “And it has…so many mouths, with which to eat all the unharmonious topics…”

Zhang Jiale groaned into his hands unhappily. “Please stop.”

“Kill it with fire,” Chu Yunxiu said, patting him cheerfully. “It’ll make you feel so much better.”

The rest of the opponents’ counterpicks went about as well, and they did, in fact, reach their goal of winning before the team competition. Zhang Xinjie was as serious as ever when he took the stage, but, given how desperately they needed points for their future matchups, it wasn’t unwarranted. Su Mucheng and Ye Xiu made their way up together, Chu Yunxiu and Zhang Jiale not far behind them. Wang Jiexi was their sixth player, but they hoped he wouldn’t need to do much more than toss a few lava flasks when he showed up, if he had to show up at all.

It wasn’t that their opponents’ coordination was bad, but with Zhang Xinjie involved in the planning and Su Mucheng and Ye Xiu reunited at the forefront, they really couldn’t compare. They just weren’t prepared for how well Earth’s players could combine forces. Not to mention, their mechs’ very designs seemed poorly constructed for coordination as a whole, what with all the incongruous movements and twisted actions. Earth won.

The next matchup turned out to be against the aliens they’d called “Overkill” for lack of a more pronounceable name. Ye Xiu went up first, but the character to load in was Lord Grim. The spinning of the horrible teeth tornado slowed down for a moment after his appearance—from surprise? Did that mean that the spinning was manual?

Ye Xiu used the moment of confusion to launch himself into the air, several skills in quick succession to bring Lord Grim as high up as he could, jumping off the sides of the mountain pass that had loaded as their map, courtesy of the Overkill opponent’s choice. They’d bought the update log for Overkill, despite the expense, so he was aware that they now had an acid flood skill that made the ground unsuitable for most opponents. A complete terrain change from the moment they chose to use it, really, but Ye Xiu wasn’t the type to wait around for his opponent to lead the match.

He found an outcropping, not too high up, just as the opponent started up their unholy screech. Lord Grim froze, and the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella plummeted from his hand like a falling star. The alien’s cycle of teeth expanded and lifted as it rose to chase Lord Grim, unaware that a weapon would not simply fall from a frozen character’s hand, much less in a way so like an actual meteor. Star Fall, an Exorcist’s skill, but then the weapon shifted in the air as it aimed for the revealed fleshy center of the opponent, the control tower that reached filaments to each tooth like a tangled sea anemone. Spirit Guidance allowed the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella to slip by the increasingly frantic attempts at batting it away until the umbrella reached the center and opened its canopy with a single explosive movement.

Reverberant Shockwave, the name of the unique skill added to the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella’s canopy. The material of the canopy pulsed in a single beat, amplified by the domed shape of the umbrella, and damage exploded outward. The cords of the opponent’s mech strained against their moorings, but the skill wasn’t over yet. The next beat resonated with the first to create a massive pulse, and the next even larger than that. The first had already been strong enough to cause damage; by the fifth, the opponent had been blown to bits. The first match ended so quickly it was almost surreal.

“There was something off about that match,” Yu Wenzhou said as Ye Xiu rejoined them.

“I agree,” Ye Xiu said. “They were definitely expecting One Autumn Leaf, which hasn’t happened in any match previous. The fight didn’t last long enough to tell, but I think the opponent might have been larger than usual, too. They were expecting to face a Battle Mage.”

“They’ve studied us,” Yu Wenzhou concluded, tone grim. The Overkill aliens were never going to be easy for them to win against individually, especially since they’d improved in the time since their data had been acquired. If they were also specifically countering what abilities they knew Earth possessed, Earth’s chances of success had just drastically decreased.

The conjecture was proven when Zhang Jiale’s match ended almost as fast as Ye Xiu’s had, this time with a loss. They clearly knew exactly how Dazzling Hundred Blossoms played.

Luckily, their next player had not gone up so often as the others, Xiao Shiqin with his Life Extinguisher. The enemy didn’t understand what to do with the crowd of mechanical skills he let out shortly after loading in, but was satisfied when its screech froze them in place, causing robots to drop like flies. There was a moment of silence, and then a massive explosion, leveling the tiered spires that dotted the area along with the alien mech.

Detonator, the unique skill added to Flashing Shadow, was difficult to use because it required the character to stand perfectly still. The operator would instead pilot a tiny, floating robot with a narrow field of view until they chose to detonate it. Xiao Shiqin had timed the release of the robot perfectly against the screech, so it was free to get out but still sheltered by his mech’s frame and therefore unaffected. They hadn’t been sure he’d last long enough with Life Extinguisher completely frozen, given both the interval between activation and detonation and the sheer destructive ability of the Overkill mechs, but it was worth trying once anyway. Luckily, the opponent had waited before attacking him, possibly taking data or looking for weakness, possibly just gloating. Without the universal translator, it was impossible to tell.

Unfortunately, those two successes were predicated on surprise, which they couldn’t manage forever. For the first time since the second matchup, the round ended firmly in their defeat.

“Up until now, no one was taking us seriously,” Ye Xiu said in the post-match meeting. “This here is what we can expect the real tournament to look like, serious competitors who’ve done their research. Winning as the unknown doesn’t last forever, but we’re not a team of newly-minted rookies, either, to be stifled by something as simple as the opponents’ knowing who we are.”

The other captains nodded. All of them had spearheaded research into their opponents before, and all of them understood what it was like to be researched in turn. Certainly it mattered, but it wasn’t everything.

“Overkill is taking us seriously,” Ye Xiu continued, “but that only means we have to do the same for them. We have a week to come up with a plan for our win, nothing unusual, and we have just as much data on them as they do on us—maybe even more. Consider what we’ve shown in our battles already, and think about what we can do to counter them.”

They had to think not just about what they’d already shown, but what the opponents might learn from them over the course of the match. Winning was important, but the overall win more so than any individual one. They had to have a proper plan.

Zhang Jiale took the stage first, a quarry map that he was Aerial Firing up the side of almost before Dazzling Hundred Blossoms had finished loading in. Across from him on the—relatively, considering the size of the Overkill mech—small map, the alien spun slowly as it tried to figure out what was happening. Once again, the first match did not begin with the opponent they were expecting.

By the time it found Dazzling Hundred Blossoms’ figure, the top of the quarry was already shrouded in the light of Zhang Jiale’s signature style, skills firing off one after another as they plummeted toward the swirling mass below. The swirl of venomous teeth casually batted aside the incoming skills as the mech searched for a way to get to the Spitfire. Its screech had no use around the sounds of grenades, and its flame tornado didn’t do anything more than chip away the rock walls. Still, the Spitfire’s skills couldn’t get through to cause it any real damage, so it methodically searched for a way up until a flinch jerked through the mech. The swirling of the tornado slowed as the operator tried to figure out where the damage had come from, but it couldn’t pause for long under the barrage. It began to pull itself up the quarry walls, teeth sinking in between striking aside attacks, until again, a spasm wracked its frame, and it abruptly plummeted back to the quarry floor.

The pause was longer this time, the mech opting to take a few other hits to see if it could determine what had caused the failed connections. Unfortunately for the opponent, it didn’t have the level of understanding necessary to know which skills could and could not be ignored. A Stun Bullet hit its central circuits, shorting several functions already damaged by the earlier explosions—which had actually come from Remote Control Grenades Zhang Jiale had dropped behind the Hundred Blossoms style’s light screen, then piloted up again from below. It wasn’t the kind of damage that could take out a mech this big and sturdy in a single hit, no matter how it was placed—let alone when Zhang Jiale couldn’t properly see where he was putting it, nor even devote his full effort to piloting it—but it did damage enough.

Piles of teeth fell limp, and Zhang Jiale made full use of the opening. The tangled mass of wire couldn’t take the fluctuating temperature and various blasts of a Spitfire’s many elemental attacks and grenades, eventually losing function entirely. The first individual match again went to Earth.

It was a victory that was only possible due to the aliens’ overly thorough nature and the caution caused by Lord Grim’s previous overwhelming victory; had the mech ignored the minor internal damage to keep pushing toward Dazzling Hundred Blossoms, it would have been able to obliterate him long before he could get anywhere near destroying it. However, it easily raised the morale of Earth’s players: Not only was it possible to win one on one, even if the rest of them should fail, winning the team competition could now give them the overall victory.

The rest of the battles followed a similar pattern: Long-distance classes set themselves up in places out of reach and did their best to strike at their opponent’s center. Xiao Shiqin chose a darkened cave complex to make use of his Detonator again without giving away the nature of the skill. The force of the explosion collapsed the cave around them, but Life Extinguisher was far enough that he didn’t take fatal damage, crouched in an air pocket created by a chunk of the cave ceiling and nearby sturdier supports. Yu Wenzhou used Chaotic Rain in combination with Curse of Destruction’s additional skill, Permeate, to send the spinning of the teeth tornado into disarray and allow him to sever the inner connections.

By the time the team competition came around, the team was feeling confident about their rather risky decision in how to play it. In the last team competition, they’d borne witness to what the Overkill aliens could do in coordination, weaving their whirling teeth together to create an inescapable net of death. No amount of coordination would save Earth’s players when their mech were so much smaller and weaker than that, so, in the end, they decided not to try. They had their major killing moves, and if they could support each other in taking out about one each, so long as one of them managed to kill without making a full trade, they would win. Given how Earth’s team had played in previous rounds, obviously reliant on coordination, the Overkill team would never be expecting it.

The map was called Giant’s Castle, but the “castle” was either in ruins or actually a natural rock formation of tower-like structures in a forest of strange, wall-like trees. The “walls” had very little strength to them, but none of Earth’s players were expecting them to survive.

Spirit Reaches to the Rainbow, Shadow Clone, Air Jump, Aerial Fire, Broom Mastery’s flight, as one every single pro piloted their characters up the bottom of their own ruined tower. The ones with semi-intact “staircases” were used by the players with fewer ways to climb on their own, the ones that had degraded to the point of being mere columns of stone were taken by those who didn’t need to worry about using a clear path.

Wang Jiexi circled around the tower tops once they’d reached their positions, giving updates on the opponents’ positions in the team chat.

“Okay, start,” Ye Xiu sent once the Overkills’ movements had taken them close enough to the ideal locations.

Fang Rui canceled Doubtful Demon’s Stealth, appearing halfway up his tower, and Zhao Yang’s use of Dragon Wave to give him a buff ensured the Thief drew the attention of the Overkill team. One of them made its way in his direction, wary for a trap but unable to see how Doubtful Demon could pose any danger on his own, outside of their tornado of teeth. Indeed, a Thief didn’t have the long-distance skills necessary to get through a screen like that, but he wasn’t going to use a long-distance skill. The Overkill mech seemed to glide a little closer in his direction, but in fact the mech was grounded at its center—and, passing over the ground as it did, it triggered Fang Rui’s Shadow Trap. Doubtful Demon disappeared from the spire, called to the solid center of the mech, where Ambush struck the mech where it’d hurt most.

Doubtful Demon took damage from the poison in the whipping wind, but the Overkill’s mech took just as much, if not more. Passive damage over time could never match a true flurry of skills with a clear target. Inside the Overkill mech itself, the paralyzing screech wouldn’t be able to touch him without causing damage to both sides. One of the mech’s teammates broke formation with the rest to come to its aid, spiral of teeth expanding and opening up, a few tendrils reaching forward as if to reach it sooner.

“Healer spotted,” Yang Cong messaged. “Going in.” They’d seen the same motion in the round before, erasing what little damage they ever manage to cause within moments.

Scene Killer jumped off his spire, used an Air Jump to make it as far as Vaccaria and jump off him again as if from a floating platform. Their silhouettes overlapped in the sky, ensuring the confusion of any opponent looking to track the movement, before Scene Killer used Shadow Clone to get into position.

Two figures became three in the sky, two of which immediately plummeted. The Overkill mech Fang Rui was targeting was in too dangerous a situation for the healer to notice this series of actions, let alone react, and within moments Scene Killer had fallen through its lax defenses. Life-Risking Strike detonated with impeccable timing and, with the help of Vitals Strike, placement, blowing both Scene Killer and the Overkill team’s healer to bits in a single instant. On both sides, the sixth player loaded in.

The Overkill team’s attention was directed at the scene of their healer’s death and Doubtful Demon’s ongoing struggle, leaving Tian Sen room to take Peaceful Hermit up his own tower unobstructed. Doubtful Demon finally dealt the killing blow, but not before the mech he was targeting let loose their acid flood, dragging the Thief into death behind it.

Less than a minute from Ye Xiu’s command, both teams were down two of their players, leaving a perfect four against four with no healer for either side: an even playing field. The Overkill mechs wouldn’t fit atop a ruined tower, nor could it bear their weight, so they began to carve away at the support below. Due to the spread of Earth’s players, the Overkill mech couldn’t weave together their death net without leaving themselves open to attack from behind—which was in fact the point of the divide and conquer strategy today, and also the reason Earth’s team had foregone a healer. Any formation that made one useful would require more concentration of players in one place than Earth could afford.

Wang Jiexi piloted Vaccaria to Zhao Yang’s tower in order to receive Boundless Sea’s Eye of the Storm, then flew down to wreak his unpredictable destruction on one of the mech below. Eye of the Storm redirected environmental effects and, to some extent, damage around the target, leaving Wang Jiexi free to harass without repercussion so long as he was careful with his flying.

Ye Xiu and Tian Sen dropped their weapons simultaneously, using Spirit Guidance to target the middle of the same mech. The opponent was clearly warier of the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella, which had managed to cause massive damage in the group arena this round: They knew by now the skill it hosted was not a common one, and in fact had no room to come from Peaceful Hermit’s Death Savvy. As a scythe, the Exorcist’s Silver weapon obviously didn’t contain a canopy.

The two weapons darted around each other through the teeth, the concentration on denying the smaller and more agile Myriad Manifestations Umbrella leaving enough room for Death Savvy to reach the center and Hook around the mech’s tangled core. The scythe pulled back toward Peaceful Hermit, and the mech came along with it like a large clump of seaweed, center reeled in faster than the swirling teeth could follow. The Myriad Manifestations Umbrella returned to Lord Grim even faster, and Ye Xiu used Rotor Wing to land Lord Grim on the flailing mech’s core and begin what the team had come to call the Unspecialized blitz.

Peaceful Hermit joined him in the center, the tower he’d previously stood on crumbling beneath the overwhelming weight even as Ye Xiu and Tian Sen hacked sections off the mech with alarming speed. Zhao Yang used Qi Guard to protect the top of his tower and joined in the damage dealing from afar. With the three focusing at once on the least defended part of the mech, the battle ended before the tower had crumbled more than halfway. Tian Sen used an Aerial Charge to get Peaceful Hermit to the tower Lord Grim had previously used, while Lord Grim used Aerial Fire to direct himself to a further “tower,” this one almost certainly just a rock formation.

On Zhao Yang’s side, Vaccaria’s lack of distance from Boundless Sea’s tower meant two of the Overkill mech could focus on it at once, and by the time he refreshed the Eye of the Storm on Vaccaria there was almost nothing of the rock spire left. Wang Jiexi left for his own tower, but not before hitting the mech focusing on Boundless Sea with Ice Rain.

“Going,” Zhao Yang sent as his tower began to topple. He used Slipstream to land amongst the whirling tendrils at the opponent’s center, defenses slowed in the aftermath of Ice Rain, and the resultant shockwave rippled from the center to the whirling teeth outside. Zhao Yang didn’t wait for the ripple to complete before moving on to Flash Burst, then Sky Piercing Strike, with no thought for cooldowns he hit the control center of the mech with every skill he had. The mech flailed, unable to move properly under the Qi Master’s onslaught, and both players were crushed completely under the falling rock.

Wang Jiexi hadn’t wasted the last use of Eye of the Storm, ending his flight in his own opponent’s center and calmly causing damage as fast as possible, even as furious teeth lashed inward and the defensive effect began to fade.

Peaceful Hermit and Lord Grim were in better shape than the other two, both having access to the low-level heals available to the Priest superclass. Tian Sen pulled the same move as his teammates before him, plummeting into the waiting whirlwind of poisonous teeth with only his swinging scythe to protect him. The overkill mech didn’t bother to dodge its enemy so perfectly delivered to it, sinking teeth into Peaceful Hermit and sweeping him into the tornado, unaware of the umbrella hiding in the Exorcist’s shadow. The umbrella fell as if just another chunk of Peaceful Hermit’s debris, and by the time the opponent noticed its canopy spring open it was too late.

In the real world, there was no such thing as immunity to an ally’s attacks. Peaceful Hermit died under Reverberant Shockwave, but so did the final Overkill mech; round two of the fifth matchup ended in Earth’s favor.

The players drifted off to celebrate their win, but as ever the situation on the agents’ end of the operation was more serious.

“We can’t afford the next opponent’s data,” the officer said grimly. Since the Glory devs were mostly there to compare data and the players had already come up with which information was best to buy, parceling out points had fallen to a member of a different division of the military entirely. As it turned out, match data was not the only thing that could be bought with the points they won, and interaction with and study of foreign cultures was not the job of the agents’ division.

The operation as a whole was still under Ye Xiu’s command, though, so they still reported to him.

Although Earth’s matchup hadn’t ended yet, since they still had to play the tiebreaker round, their opponent had ended earlier and was already decided. Unfortunately, the prices for sixth matchup data was beyond what Earth had saved up.

Ye Xiu looked over the prices and their reserves before finally coming to a decision. “Bet on us.”

Normal rounds of the tournament allowed players to win points, but tiebreaker rounds, as “extra” rounds, did not. However, there was an aspect to tiebreaker rounds not present in others, which was that teams could bet their points on the round’s outcome. Any team could do this, but Earth didn’t have the information necessary to look at anyone else’s rounds, and they hadn’t understood the point market well enough to try anything on their last tiebreaker round in the second matchup. This time, though, there was nothing stopping them.

Betting always felt risky, but the officer would have to go with Ye Xiu’s decision. “How much?”

“Everything,” Ye Xiu said, like it was obvious.

The officer paused. “You… But what if we lose?”

“If we lose, we’re dead,” Ye Xiu said patiently. “No amount of points will buy us back Earth, but we absolutely can’t go into a competition at this level completely blind.”

The other branches of the military weren’t as used to this as Ye Xiu’s branch, which was founded on high stakes and unlikely scenarios. The idea of Earth’s continued existence being reliant on a battle tournament didn’t settle as easily for most.

“But, Colonel?” Ye Xiu said, prodding him out of his thoughts.

“Yes, Captain Ye?”

Ye Xiu grinned. “We aren’t going to lose.”

Ye Xiu rejoined the pros amidst a cacophony of terrible proportions.

“Why are we listening to this?” he asked, bemused.

“I just knew I’d heard that sound before,” Fang Rui was insisting, “but I finally remembered the name of the song, so I had to look it up. Listen, this part! This part was what the Overkill guys reminded me of!”

There was a pause as everyone took in the section of the song playing.

“It’s just incoherent screaming over a soundtrack of shrieking metal,” Sun Zheping finally said.

“Yeah! Exactly!”

Several pros groaned; Lin Jingyan settled his chin on his hand thoughtfully.

“I guess he’s not wrong?”

The groans got louder.

The Overkill team chose an enormous plateau as their tiebreaker map, complete with cliffs around the edges to be sure that their map would be comparatively tall: Clearly, they did not want to lose the height advantage again.

Earth, on the other hand, chose a seascape. When they loaded in, neither side could see the other at all.

The pros took their places with no anxiety, since they’d been prepared from the start to have no sign of the opponent, but the Overkill side seemed to be baffled by the ocean surface far below them. They tried dumping their acid flood into the water to no avail; the liquid floated along the surface, too low density to reach the underwater players. If they wanted to attack Earth’s team, they would have to go under themselves.

The tornado of teeth worked strangely underwater, the whirlpool it formed clearly more sluggish than usual, and the venom they spit diluted too fast to cause any real effect. The vanguards of the Overkill aliens pushed forward, searching for Earth’s players, moving around an underwater cliff face just in time to be greeted with Li Xuan’s Void Boundary.

The pros had discovered that, underwater, allies in the Void Boundary could move as easily as if on land, but retain their ability to travel freely in three dimensions. The close-combat classes descended on the mechs caught in a strange void dimension, unable to move or attack; so unprotected, and with the void eating the edges of their mechs into nothing, they didn’t stand a chance.

Although they couldn’t fight back while within the Void Boundary, they still had their team chat: The other Overkill mechs split up to surround the area in which the pros had gathered. The first to try to move past their sea cliff on the opposite side was met with a sharp gunshot before going limp. The additional skill on Wildfire, Cloud Piercer’s right-hand revolver, was called Bore. It gave a single bullet enough spin and speed to punch through pretty much anything, and in this case Zhou Zekai had aimed for the mech’s central processor. Due to how many of the pros had been able to strike directly at the core of the Overkill mechs last battle, they had been able to identify the lynchpin of their opponents’ construction. From a higher vantage and with an unsuspecting target, Zhou Zekai was able to take out an opponent with a single godly strike.

Bore had a long cooldown, so Zhou Zekai wouldn’t be able to take out another mech with the same method right away. However, the corpse of the mech he’d killed blocked the back passage around the cliff, making it difficult for any of its teammates to cross that way. They would have to give up on a full encirclement for now.

The other half of the encirclement, which was free to set itself up in more open space, had been interrupted midway by Lord Grim. Ye Xiu let a few of the mechs pass by his hiding space before swimming in front of the rest of the approaching mechs. The Myriad Manifestations Umbrella extended in front of him before inverting the canopy: Underwater, Reverberant Shockwave caused pulses of tidal wave proportions, flinging the rest of the Overkill team back out of the sea and into the cliff face. The opponents clearly hadn’t expected the skill could be used that way, as every previous usage had been done with Spirit Guidance, far from Lord Grim, and the canopy obviously curved inward. However, the skill came from the material of the canopy itself, and Ye Xiu had no trouble flipping it the other way to save himself from destruction.

Of course, a shockwave that big had an enormous recoil, and Ye Xiu rocketed into the two mechs he’d let pass earlier. They’d already turned back to focus on him when he came out, but their usual screech was too distorted by the different medium to trigger its paralyzing effect. Now they moved to surround him with their net of tentacles, unaware that Troubling Rain was lurking below, waiting for exactly such an opportunity.

Five mechs of the opponent’s fifteen-person team met their end within the first few minutes of the assault, and Earth’s side had yet to take any serious damage at all. One of the reasons Ye Xiu had been so confident in this tiebreaker round was the fact that Overkill’s full team consisted of only those fifteen players, likely a result of their being an unfavored minority on their home planet—even if they were the best, superior enough to be the representatives of their planet, lifting up a whole army of them would probably unbalance the political structure of their culture. In any case, it was none of Earth’s business if some other planet’s society wanted to weaken itself through politics and posturing; they could only capitalize on the effects.

Ten mechs left, all of them unused to underwater combat, and the springing of Earth’s traps had only begun. Not only did Earth win the tiebreaker round, they achieved a perfect victory.

The colonel from the foreign affairs department stared at their new pile of points, flabbergasted. “The return rate was so high… Even if you won, no one thought you could get a perfect victory, not the way you’d scraped together your wins before.”

“There are some uses in being the underdog,” said Ye Xiu, champion of three consecutive seasons in the Glory Pro Alliance. “Now, what data have we got on the sixth matchup?”

The sixth matchup was, in the end, better left forgotten.

In fact, if the pros could find a non-alcoholic way to scrub it from their minds entirely, they would not hesitate to do so.

And the temptation of alcohol was, despite the obvious negative effects on their long-term career, very, very strong.

(“My life is even longer,” Fang Shiqian hissed. “Give it to me.”

Ye Xiu would like it on the record that their facility didn’t even stock alcohol, so Fang Shiqian’s ability to find any in the first place made him more of a magician than Wang Jiexi could ever be.)

The seventh matchup was against the alien tentacle monsters they’d studied before, apparently called Slidelings.

“They want to trash talk, but it’s nothing big,” Ye Xiu said when he came down from the first individual match. “Their movements sort of went along with it, I think it’s just a normal distraction tactic.”

“It seemed pretty normal,” Lin Jingyan agreed. “Not like last round, where they—”

“Excuse me, no, we all promised, we do not talk about the sixth matchup, that will remain forever dark history, no more of that,” Huang Shaotian rambled over him.

“Judging by how they’re handling the match now, they’ve definitely studied us,” Ye Xiu said, “and they seemed more confused than interested in the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella, so it’s nothing obsessive.”

“Yeah,” Chu Yunxiu muttered, sounding disgusted, “unlike the last—”

“Even though they lost, they tried to keep up an aura of superiority the whole time,” Yu Wenzhou cut in smoothly. “They were almost insistent on it.”

“I half expected them to tell you they only lost because they were lagging at the end,” Fang Rui agreed.

“Their speed is no joke, though,” Ye Xiu sighed. “I barely had time to respond to anything they said.”

Ye Xiu’s barely had time to respond had done enough, though—he’d GG’d his opponent before blitzing them to death in a single combo. Lord Grim had taken some damage from the acid coating on the tentacles, but the system would restore him before the team competition so it didn’t much matter.

In the team competition, there was a bit more leeway for a proper “conversation,” although it was really just getting a chance to respond to the diatribe of “you think this game is so easy, you haven’t seen the full extent of the universe, your team is only here out of pity,” et cetera.

“We do only have the data we were given,” Ye Xiu said—a fact made obvious by their point expenditure, leaving this match an away game for Earth despite everything they’d won in the fifth matchup—“and it’s even old! It listed you as the champions, you know, but I guess it’s been…hm, maybe seven years?”

The translator was said to be impeccable, so Ye Xiu didn’t worry about whether or not his point had gotten across. And indeed, the Slidelings’ attacks saw a sharp increase in viciousness. Though part of that might just have been a reaction to Huang Shaotian’s irritating chatter flooding them out of the public chat.

“You’re so lowbrow,” one of the larger Slidelings disdained, setting off after Fang Rui’s sneak attack ended in a hasty retreat.

“Rude!” Fang Rui responded. “This is just normal playing. Isn’t insulting your enemies constantly the more uncultured thing?”

Huang Shaotian sent three other messages of irrelevant chatter before Fang Rui’s next message came through, as if he’d mistaken the chat: “Send backup, trying to lose in cave” along with his projected coordinates. However, when Doubtful Demon turned the corner, he crouched into a bush across from the cave and activated Stealth instead. The moment the Slideling turned away from him, Fang Rui launched Ambush.

“Dirty!” his opponent yelled in the public chat. In his booth, Fang Rui cackled.

“How could just that be dirty, did he lie?” Huang Shaotian announced his arrival on the scene: It actually hadn’t been a pointless message. “Did he, did he, did he? He wants to lose you in the cave, death is losing too, is this your first day playing? Oh wait, weren’t you champions once? Seven whole years ago, though, tsk tsk tsk, it’s probably that you couldn’t keep up with the advance in times. Tactics are always changing, you know, if you can’t keep up you’ll fall apart! Take some advice from your seniors, no, it should be juniors, take some advice from your juniors here and learn a little bit of adaptability!” With a final stab, the Slideling went limp. “Fuck I’m covered in acid,” he added, whipping his sword around and then wiping it on some nearby foliage.

“You couldn’t wait for me to cast a Holy Shield?” Fang Shiqian said in the team chat as he finally caught up. “It’s half the reason I’m playing a Paladin, you know.”

The other half being, of course, Wind Guard’s additional skill: Cleanse. Cleanse did something akin to a banishment of anything on the surface of a character, so at least the acid would stop burning more.

On the other side of the map, Yu Wenzhou used Chaotic Rain to wash the acid from a Slideling, leaving it defenseless to Lord Grim’s attacks.

“How despicable,” a Slideling disdained as Lord Grim’s target fell, separated from the others through Swoksaar’s impeccable use of CC skills, “aiming right for the healer.”

“Your team causes damage that can’t be healed, I don’t want to hear a single thing from you about despicable,” Fang Shiqian sent. “Do you know how much extra work you cause me, dripping your fluids all over the place? Gross. Have some shame.”

The Slidelings didn’t seem to have a quick response to that, but Earth’s team wouldn’t wait. The pros reunited, five against four, and didn’t feel bad in the least for the “unfair” beatdown that followed.

Fang Rui threw himself back into his chair. “Porn is ruined.”

Wu Yuce gave him a weird look. “Why do you even watch tentacle porn?”

Fang Rui sniffed. “I am looking for sympathy, not judgment, thank you very much.”

“Ruined,” Zhou Zekai said, looking up at the screen with data on their opponents.

Fang Rui startled. “You—Oh, you’re not talking about porn. Well, whatever, I’ll take it.”

“He’s not?” Li Xuan said, leaning around Wu Yuce.

“Of course not. Preemptively, no I will not explain, Wu Yuce, your unnecessary judgment has rendered you dead to me.”

Zhou Zekai was actually, of course, talking about the main topic in the room: What was going on with their opponents’ trash talk.

“Right, when we disrupted their narrative, they didn’t seem to know what to do,” Ye Xiu said in response to Zhou Zekai’s comment. “You could argue that they’re just bad at trash talk, which is probably true, but even a noob wouldn’t be that stubborn about a point to pick at, and these are former champions. Combined with the reference to ‘pledging all our points to you if you make playoffs’ we heard in the previous matchup—”

“Why were they our fans,” Zhang Jiale muttered, disturbed.

“—we’ve been able to determine that eliminated teams and even external sponsors are able to donate to playoffs teams,” Ye Xiu continued. “Which means that teams often try to please the viewers by playing into the broadcast narrative. This also contributes to the increasing price of information with each matchup: The more information you’re getting on your ‘storyline’ and that of your opponents, the better you can ‘perform’ appropriately. This round’s theme is ‘old champions versus new underdogs.’ We are the first base-level planet to ever reach this far, as you all undoubtedly remember—”

“Vividly,” Zhang Xinjie said, displeased at the reminder of their previous opponents.

“—so they’re focusing on how we’re ‘backcountry hicks’ to win favor,” Ye Xiu concluded.

“An adorable translation, I thought,” Su Mucheng said cheerily.

“They’ll want to play like a championship team,” Xiao Shiqin said. “Even if it’s not a good idea.”

Ye Xiu grinned. “Precisely.”

“Do we need to worry about our own image?” Zhang Jiale asked. “We didn’t know about this before, so we didn’t play up anything in particular. Should we be worried about the support we need to get in the playoffs rounds?”

“We’ve been lucky so far, or maybe just had a clever broadcast station following us,” Ye Xiu said. “‘High-tech versus low-tech’ and ‘colonization’ both weren’t in our favor, but ‘individuals against the Horde’ was well-executed, and the fifth matchup’s ‘preparation’ theme went well, too. For this matchup, an underdog does whatever it needs to in order to win, so we needn’t worry. If anything, it’d be good to try and throw the Slidelings off their game.”

Which was why, in the next round, Ye Xiu summoned a Goblin to take a hit for him, throwing his opponent into confusion as it was left holding a struggling little Horde mech instead of Lord Grim.

“Are you resorting to outside help, now?” the Slideling rallied. “Can’t win alone, so you’ll cheat your way up?”

“Of course not,” Ye Xiu replied. “But our team can recreate the design of any of our opponents after a single look, so why not make use of them? Sure, they’re a little slower than the original sometimes, but they aren’t far off. Shall I summon a Harmony for you?”

Of course, Ye Xiu couldn’t actually summon any of the other mech to the field; Lord Grim had too many other functions to summon an array of things, and they didn’t have the time to actually construct versions of their opponents that could take his commands and still act appropriately in the first place.

But the Slidelings didn’t know that.

They spent the rest of the round wary of suddenly appearing opponents, on unfamiliar maps, trying to posture despite its ineffectiveness against Earth’s uninhibited play.

They didn’t manage a single win.

With their victory in the seventh matchup, Earth had made it into the final eight teams of the tournament. As in the Glory Pro Alliance, there was a two week break between the “regular tournament” and the beginning of playoffs. Like the Challenger League, they would not be allowed to continue to play remotely in order to ensure there was no cheating going on. At this point, considering Earth was the first base-level planet to pass more than a few rounds, let alone reach playoffs, there was apparently a wide selection of viewers that were completely convinced the pros had found some way to cheat.

“So we’ll be headed to space,” Ye Xiu concluded his explanation. “For that reason, we’re going to be wearing a type of spacesuit; we already have everyone’s measurements, so it’s just a matter of trying them on later—”

“Holy shit holy shit fucking hell are you serious? Old Ye Old Ye tell me you’re actually serious, really really serious, we’re going to dress up like actual gundam pilots?! That’s so badass, we’ll be so badass, I’m telling you right now this has been a big thing for me since I was young, the actual fulfillment of impossible childhood dreams, I can’t believe you’re the one to bring this to me but I’ll fucking take it, that’s fine, anything’ll do if we’re actually gonna get to be in spacesuits like damn, can I take a picture?! Like maybe all of us or maybe just me I’m not that picky, I swear I won’t publicize it, maybe just save a copy or something but this is my impossible bucket list we’re talking about here you gotta let me have this, are they cool? Of course they’re cool, we’re representing China, no, the whole world, we are representing Earth we have to look like the epitome of cool, cool as hell, cooler than cool, ice fucking cold—”

Ye Xiu gave up on waiting for Huang Shaotian to take a noticeable breath. “They’re basically like a full-body compression sock.”

The hall fell silent.

“You’re the worst,” Huang Shaotian said sulkily, sitting down again. For a second that was all, and a few pros worriedly turned their heads to check if he was okay, but then the grumbling started up again. “Got my hopes up for nothing, absolutely nothing, do you understand how much I was looking forward to it—”

“How are we getting to the tournament location?” Zhang Xinjie asked.

“There’s a nearby relay station we’ll be teleported to, and from there we can cruise to the tournament station in orbit and dock properly,” Ye Xiu explained.

“We’re going in a spaceship?!” Huang Shaotian might still be sulking, but Fang Rui had no problem expressing his excitement.

“You could say so,” Ye Xiu said. “But it’s just a cruiser kind, it doesn’t do anything fancy, really.”

“When do we get to see it?” Chu Yunxiu asked, unbothered. She was more interested in the aesthetic of it, anyway, eager to see how well it matched some of her more futuristic dramas.

“Hm? Oh, right. Remember when I said this hall was repurposed from its original use?” Ye Xiu hit a button on his podium, and holo screens blinked to life along the edge of every desk in the “lecture hall”-like room.

“No fucking way,” Zhang Jiale breathed, reaching forward to touch the one before him.

“Yeah, this is the bridge,” Ye Xiu continued. A flash, and the screen behind him turned clear, showing the outside scenery of the forested mountains that hid the facility. “We’ve been in a spaceship all along.”

Ye Xiu was honestly stunned that this spaceship design was going to see use. Like many of the other things his parents and their department had designed “just in case,” really, but this one in particular had always felt absurd. Here they were, though; the joke was on everyone else. Aliens had come to Earth and China really did need to have a cruising spaceship handy. Even if they lacked the technology to do anything more impressive, it was enough to get them through.

The ambassadors hadn’t spoken of this requirement at all. They had seven years to bring it up, and yet somehow they’d never said anything. The ambassadors, it was clear to see, never had any belief they would make it to playoffs at all.

“I cannot believe,” Huang Shaotian began, full of offense, “you had the gall to call this a full-body compression sock.”

“That’s exactly how it functions,” Ye Xiu told him plainly, black helmet with red accents under his arm.

“Who cares how it functions, these are the coolest suits I’ve ever seen!” Fang Rui crowed.

“It’s like motorcycle armor but ten times cooler? It’s got the black base, red protection, the overlapping scales on the back, the gold Glory logo on the arm, I am living for this, this is even better that what I was imagining, look how sleek! Comfortable, fitted, functional, is this based on your spec ops suits? You guys are spec ops, right, I was never really clear on that, what do you do when you aren’t doing aliens, you can say right? Obviously you can, I mean we already know about the aliens, what more could there even be—”

“Right, about the helmets,” Ye Xiu said, ignoring Huang Shaotian entirely. “You’ll need them for when you’re outside, or in unfamiliar terrain, but you should be able to keep them off within our own ship and in the common areas of tournament station. We want to be able to interact with others comfortably, so they built an air filtration system into the neck of the suit. You should be safe from any alien viruses, but if you’d prefer to keep your helmet on at all times, that’s fine as well.”

“Is there a limit to how long we can keep it on?” Zhang Xinjie asked.

“Not really, since your air supply is usually still pulled from the surrounding atmosphere, but in cases where that isn’t possible you should have several hours of stored breathable air to use without issue.”

“Captain Ye.” A man appeared at the door, arm marked with a military rank rather than the players’ Glory logo. “We’ve been informed it’s time to take our stations.”

“Alright then, everyone, we’ll be moving to our own observation room now,” Ye Xiu said. “It’ll have a better overall view than the bridge, anyway.”

There was a little grumbling about “missing out on the action,” but on the whole the pros relocated smoothly. Once Ye Xiu knew they were set up, he left to have his own meeting with the other military branches and the team who’d worked with the ambassadors longest. Given the nature of the conversation to come, it was only now, when the alien organizers would be too busy with overseeing their transportation procedure to pay attention, that they could have this discussion.

“We’ve checked the data made available once we reach playoffs,” the head of the Glory devs said grimly. “Every single one is a team we already have data on. In fact, the majority of teams we had data on were significantly upper-tier teams, the kind that get seeded into different sections of the tournament.”

“According to the rules of the tournament they explained,” the head of the ambassador team said, “in order to give us ‘base-level’ planets a fighting chance, they’re required to give us ‘useful’ information, but they never expected us to get this far—all of these opponents would only help us if we made it through the first matchups on our own.”

“Especially since our own abilities are all based on the Horde,” the head of the Glory devs continued, “which apparently everyone knows isn’t a contender for the championship.”

“They want us to lose,” the colonel from foreign affairs concluded. “We don’t know why, yet, but they definitely do, and we have to find a way around it.”

“See what you can find out.” The general from foreign affairs was a new face, but not unexpected: For something on the level of direct interaction with foreign political powers, they’d want their highest authority there. “You’re going in as the face of Earth, so you’ll have to make use of it.”

The meeting went on longer than that, Ye Xiu going over with the others how they wanted to present China—and Earth—on an intergalactic scale, but it was that early part, about the sabotage from within they’d all expected but still hadn’t hoped for, that had Ye Xiu pausing on his way back to the team.

He stood alone in the hallway and looked down at his helmet, seeing his own face reflected in it, cigarette unlit in his mouth. There was a bit of distortion from the curve, but it was recognizably himself, looking back in the low light.

There was a flash, and the picture window beside him went from showing a nighttime garden to space itself, the alien transporter beacon a giant construction looming beside them. Around him, the hallway automatically adjusted its lights from nighttime lowlight to their standard brightness.

Well, it wasn’t much, right? Lead a team, grab a championship, put in a little research on their opponents and detractors on the side.

Ye Xiu knew all about how to do that.

The approach to the tournament station wasn’t instantaneous, leaving the pros plenty of time to get their rest along with the inevitable exclaiming over the foreign planet and its strange, murky atmosphere, the haze of a distant, unfamiliar sun, and the metallic loops and levels of the tournament station in orbit around it.

The ship docked in a transparent hangar on a distant arm of the station, evidently not a prime location. In fact, it was clearly usually a space for cargo, but none of the pros felt it was inappropriate for them to stay there—mostly because it was also the holding place for their mechs, the accounts they’d put so much effort into brought to life.

The mechs were taller than them but not extraordinarily so, reaching a little over a meter above their heads. Immediately after exiting the ship, the team split up to find their various mechs. Ye Xiu and Su Mucheng wordlessly headed in the same direction, for the least cohesive design of any of the mechs there.

Lord Grim, the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella. The weapon was in its closed umbrella form, but it was clear to see how sharp the ends of the spines were, how tough the folds of canopy. The pointed tip of the umbrella, gleaming the light, had nearly indistinguishable vertical lines down it, an indication of where it would fold back to show the muzzle of the gun within.

“Really incredible,” Su Mucheng said softly.

“Yeah,” Ye Xiu agreed. “He really made something amazing.”

When the two of them left, it was as tacitly and in concert as they’d come. Ye Xiu made his way to One Autumn Leaf, his partner since Glory’s launch all those years ago, holding Evil Annihilation. The Battle God stood tall and imposing, the spear wicked sharp beside him.

“Let’s get another championship, then,” he said, patting One Autumn Leaf’s arm companionably.

While Ye Xiu and Su Mucheng had been having their own remembrance, Huang Shaotian and Yu Wenzhou had ended up in front of Swoksaar, while Wang Jiexi and Fang Shiqian were stationed with Vaccaria.

“You have two whole mechs of your own you could be looking at,” Ye Xiu couldn’t help but comment.

“And yet, here I am, squarely in none of your business,” Fang Shiqian said, not turning his eyes away.

Ye Xiu laughed but left him to have his moment, turning around to find Han Wenqing leaning on Desert Dust casually.

“How is it, then?” Ye Xiu asked. “Does it feel more real in person?”

Han Wenqing snorted. “It’s been real the whole time.”

Honestly, yeah, Ye Xiu had really asked the wrong person. “I guess blatantly casual is better than tearing up,” he said.

Han Wenqing frowned. “Who’s tearing up?”

“Zhang Jiale,” Ye Xiu said without hesitation.

“You don’t know that!” came a call from a couple rows away, clearly choked up. “I could be fine!”

“It’s a very emotional moment,” Ye Xiu said blandly.

Han Wenqing glanced from Desert Dust to a player standing in the distance, helmet on, cataloguing Immovable Rock dispassionately. “…Okay.”

Huang Shaotian’s shift to Troubling Rain was marked by the beginning of loud and excited babbling.

“And now it’s over,” Ye Xiu continued, “and everyone can just appreciate how cool real versions of their accounts are without any emotion at all.”

Huang Shaotian’s flood of words did not pause for even a second.

“And a free soundtrack.”

Han Wenqing’s eyebrow twitched.

Earth was given a few different options for their guide around the station, the main being their usual liaison, but they chose a fairly neutral gelatinous blob alien instead. It had a name, of course, but it wasn’t one they could pronounce. Lin Jingyan suggested they use a nickname instead, and Ye Xiu settled it as “Babysitter,” before Fang Rui could even fully open his mouth.

“He looked like he wanted to say something?” Babysitter said curiously.

“You don’t want to know,” Ye Xiu said with a shake of his head, ignoring Fang Rui’s outraged “Hey!” behind him.

“…But I wouldn’t have asked, otherwise?” Babysitter seemed confused already.

“That’s true,” Ye Xiu said. “My apologies. I do not want to know.”

“Oh.” Babysitter didn’t seem much closer to getting it now, but they were willing to let it go—their tolerant nature was why Earth’s public relations team had chosen them in the first place. “If you’re sure.”

Ye Xiu internally lit a candle for their babysitter. Very soon, they would understand what folly they’d walked into.

“Don’t touch that.”

“Aw.”

“Don’t touch that either.”

An aggrieved sigh.

“Don’t— Aren’t you new to all this? I really expected you to be a bit less…” Babysitter eyed Fang Rui’s hand, which Lin Jingyan had just casually smacked away from a passing alien. “Outgoing.”

“We had sci-fi flicks,” Chu Yunxiu said, scanning the crowd of aliens, taking in their various forms consideringly.

“Speculative fiction?” Babysitter asked; it was likely the full context of “sci-fi flicks” didn’t quite come across, and their guide alien knew enough about cross-cultural differences to confirm rather than gloss over it.

“Yes, most cultures on our world have imagined what aliens might look like in different contexts,” Yu Wenzhou said.

“Really?” It was obvious that Babysitter was interested in what preconceptions a pre-contact planet might have. “How much did you get right?”

“Not much, really,” Xiao Shiqin sighed. They’d tried marathoning the sci-fi genre in their scheduled time off, but nothing really matched up with the wide range on display here. There was an animate crystalline. A pulsing star thing.

“What did you expect, then?” To Babysitter, of course the gathering of alien species appeared normal.

“The vast majority of our projections were more…humanoid,” Zhang Xinjie said.

“Mostly we thought you’d be more fuckable,” Fang Rui called forward from where Lin Jingyan was pulling him back into the group.

“What?” Babysitter seemed more baffled than offended. “Why would you be concerned about our level of procreation?”

“I don’t think it was about the kids,” Wu Yuce said blandly.

“Yeah, obviously it’s for the entertainment,” Fang Rui cackled.

“But…raising a child isn’t something you do for humor?” Babysitter was shocked.

“Well of course not, I’m talking about—oh wow, does your species not have recreational sex? I’m so sorry.”

“Ignore him, he’s just excitable,” Ye Xiu said. “You said this was where the high-tier planets would send people to mingle with the playoffs teams?”

“Right,” Babysitter said, sounding distracted. “Sorry, but could you explain how—”

“Not really, no.”

It was a gelatinous blob. None of the humans would even know where to begin.

“Oh. Well, then, we are just about here. Did you want to go over and talk to them?” Babysitter gestured—an inexplicable wiggle of motion that still, somehow, got the point across well enough—to a small, furred creature on a high stool, not unlike a hamster in appearance.

“Yes,” said Zhang Jiale.

“Is there a reason to see them in particular?” Yu Wenzhou asked.

“Well, it’s usually seen as polite to greet your previous opponents, if they come to watch playoffs,” Babysitter explained patiently.

“They were our opponents?” Tian Sen was pretty sure he’d remember fighting an opponent that made them feel bad for even entertaining thoughts of violence.

“You don’t remember the Harmonies?” Babysitter seemed surprised.

Everyone took a moment to digest that, before: “The what?!” Chu Yunxiu was horribly offended. “How are they—how?!”

“Didn’t you notice their mechs’ emphasis on the mouth?” Babysitter asked. “Mouths are very important in their culture.”

As if to highlight the point, the Harmony they were watching shoved an ice cube the size of its head in its mouth all at once. Its cheeks bulged for a moment, but then with a chittering noise deflated again, the ice apparently ground right through.

That could mean there was a second round of “mouth” inside its furred cheeks, but the feeling was completely different.

“But they’re so…cute?” Chu Yunxiu couldn’t let it go.

“Of course they are,” Babysitter said, surprised. “Didn’t you notice how they talked?”

Their fourth opponents had, in fact, sent messages to them; they had all, to a one, done their best to forget.

“It was very cute, right?” Babysitter prodded.

The pros were unwillingly drawn back to that first match against their fourth opponents. “HEWWO?” said the ghastly mech contorting its way forward. Smooth slide, harsh jerk; mouths gaped open, teeth inside teeth inside teeth. “HEEEEWWWWOOO” as its limbs flailed sharply toward them.

They had, on the whole, done their absolute best to ignore everything about the chat from there on out.

“I guess it could be considered cute, yes,” Ye Xiu said blandly. Li Xuan gave him an incredulous look.

“Their language is so beautiful,” Babysitter sighed. “It’s a shame their chirrups don’t come across as well through the universal translator. They put a lot of emphasis on their singing and harmonizing as communication.”

“Makes sense,” Xiao Shiqin said weakly.

“You all barely talk to your opponents, though,” Babsitter said, with an edge of lament. “For a long time, people thought you were really serious and stuck up. Your second and fifth matchups no one could blame you for, since no one can communicate with them, but only one of you really responded in your first one, and no one said anything at all to your third.”

There was an awkward silence.

“I guess it’s somewhat understandable, the Horde are a little…simplistic and repetitive. There are some who don’t like talking to them at all,” Babysitter sympathized.

Actually, it was just that they’d forgotten their “NPC” opponents weren’t spitting out scripted dialog.

“The Harmonies love to communicate, though! You’re lucky they aren’t the type to hold grudges.”

“Very lucky,” Su Mucheng said, smiling, as if she hadn’t been part of the “kill it with fire” contingent.

“If you hadn’t started speaking more in the sixth matchup, we might have thought you weren’t going to speak at all.”

Su Mucheng’s smile didn’t falter at the mention of the sixth matchup, because she was a very scary individual.

“It’s you! You’re here! It’s so great to meet you!” suddenly rang through the area, heralding the most painful enactment of “speak of the devil” any of the pros had ever experienced. Transparent skin, organs jiggling around, a wide, wide smile, all the better to eat you with, my dear—their opponents from the sixth matchup had arrived.

As people, there was really nothing wrong with them. Really.

And yet.

The alien ambassadors had left their ship after they’d reached the tournament station, secure in the knowledge that Earth’s group couldn’t make it home without their help. This meant that Earth’s full planning team could work openly now, sorting through the data they’d received on their various opponents, both in terms of their representative teams and their home worlds, as fast as possible. They were trying to determine how much the ambassadors had left out, and why.

“I met with the sixth matchup team,” Ye Xiu reported.

“Condolences,” the general of foreign affairs replied immediately, restraining a wince.

“They were friendly,” Ye Xiu continued.

“Very much so, as I recall,” he agreed.

“Tongues just should not be used like that,” the agent working nearby muttered.

Ye Xiu, for his own sanity, ignored the comment. “From them I was able to get some information on how the playoffs are run. The format of the matchups is completely different.”

“What?!”

“The rest of the team is already working on new strategies,” Ye Xiu assured. “More important is the difference in how the tiebreaker round is set up: Rather than a split map with each side choosing one half, the maps are completely new terrain, unfamiliar to both.”

“So you can’t prepare in advance?” The general wasn’t pleased at the idea, but the relevance to his own department escaped him.

“So the hosting entity has to provide new maps for the tournament,” Ye Xiu said. “As many as fourteen each season they host, and the maps have to come from somewhere; they aren’t simulated. At best, they’re occasionally constructed on a real base, or different pieces are teleported together. The real reason they’re collecting base-level planets that ‘don’t count’ as inhabited by intergalactically recognized species is to support the creation of new maps once they’ve stripped the planet for resources. Our ‘ambassadors’ are one of the big name species that pass off the tournament station every season, and they liked the look of Earth.”

The data center went silent but for the whirr of technology and occasional quiet beeps of the monitors running on their own.

All of Earth, reduced to a map stage, to be blown up and corroded and torn to bits by uncaring teams piloting even more uncaring mech.

“Well then,” the general sighed, “now we know. We already knew they were against us, so nothing’s really changed. We’ll take that into account from here on out, and get the data to you on your opponents’ most likely favored maps based on home environment. You can focus on the tournament and winning our freedom.”

“That’s not all, though,” Ye Xiu said. “The betting works a little differently than they explained. There’s no pot for us to win at the end, and Earth wasn’t our ante—

“It was our entry fee.”

The silence this time was even more profound.

“Shit,” echoed in the area, but no one moved to reprimand the speaker.

“If we don’t earn enough in the next three matchups to pay back the loan and buy Earth, even if we win, we’ll at best be considered a subsidiary of the ambassadors,” Ye Xiu continued. “Which would mean that they can push us to enter the tournament again, with Earth on the line, at any time. Likely, given their interests, they’d push for us to do it immediately.”

“They’d let us buy back Earth?” the general asked skeptically, face dark. At this point, it was hard to trust that the ambassadors would let them go at all.

“If we establish ourselves in the community first and pay back their loan, they won’t be able to deny our claim to Earth even if they want to,” Ye Xiu said. “Quite frankly, the loss of reputation won’t be worth it. They can easily choose another planet to cheat from its inhabitants. But we have to do it this season: If we’re accepted as a subsidiary of the ambassadors, buying our freedom will undoubtedly become a false goal that they keep dangling further and further away.”

“Can we get enough points to pay back the loan?” the general asked. “Do tournament points even translate into their currency?”

“They do,” Ye Xiu confirmed. “From the playoffs on, anyway, because people donate both points and money to allow teams to buy upgrades. If we can get enough sponsors and make do without the serious upgrades the other teams will be getting, we should be set.”

“As I understand it, though, the loan of ‘never-before-seen’ technology—in their words, the equivalent of many decades of our own technological advancement—was not cheap,” the general said. As someone only brought in to work on this operation when the team came together for the tournament proper, he hadn’t been involved in the initial “negotiations” related to the loan. “Where are we going to find so many sponsors to win over?”

“There’s an opening for us with our matchups,” Ye Xiu explained, loading the playoffs data on his data pad to illustrate his meaning. “The Infhillte have won the last two tournaments, and are in the opposite half of the bracket from us. The current favorite to overthrow them are the Dracomuirs, who happen to be aesthetically pleasing to most kinds of aliens.”

The picture loaded, what looked like a glowing sea dragon taking over the screen. “Due to this, they get a lot of sponsors, but they’re also very arrogant,” Ye Xiu continued. “We’re slated to meet them in the second matchup of the playoffs, our ninth overall, provided they win their own previous matchup. If we can make ourselves more appealing than them—or even just win, for those who want to see an upset—we should be able to take almost half of the late-game sponsors. As for establishing ourselves as our own political entity, that’ll mostly be up to you.”

The general looked over the data, then nodded. “Okay, I see what you’re going for. If you can get people interested in interacting with us directly, we’ll be prepared. But you’re going to have to do the legwork yourself: Right now, no one cares who we are.”

“That’s fine,” Ye Xiu said, closing out the data. “The captain of the sixth matchup team gave me an idea of how to handle our public image. They’re very interested in seeing a base-level planet succeed.”

“I remember,” the general said with an involuntary grimace. “If you think we can trust…them, then we’ll take your word for it.”

Ye Xiu nodded, but didn’t make any further claims. Whether or not they were generally trustworthy, they at least had fewer obvious motives against Earth than the ambassadors. In their situation, so low on understanding of the intergalactic political climate, that was about the best they could do.

As Ye Xiu made his way back to the team to join their strategizing, he thought it was a pity the sixth matchup’s team had such a vulgar name that no one was willing to say it.

The talk show Ye Xiu went on was popular for its ability to unsettle guests into showing their “true selves,” as their motto stated. It began with the host professing their desire to make him “more comfortable” by giving him a familiar form to talk to, and taking on Ye Xiu’s own face.

“Is this a little more suitable?” it—he?—said, leaning in closer to him with a wide smile.

“Sure,” Ye Xiu said easily. “There’s someone back home who looks exactly like me, too, so I’m pretty used to it.”

“There is?” The host’s face, still a perfect replica of Ye Xiu’s, raised a perplexed eyebrow. “Do you have shifters too? Maybe surgery? I’ve heard there are some devoted fans out there, and a man like you must be famous.”

“No, we were born like that.” Ye Xiu shrugged. “I have an identical twin.”

The host stared blankly. “A what?”

“Identical twin?” Ye Xiu asked. “Is your ratio of twins lower than ours? On Earth, I’d expect most people to have met at least five throughout their lives, we’re hardly unusual.”

The host put a hand to his universal translator earpiece, which had seamlessly moved with him during the transformation. “You were born as half of a child?”

“Of course not, after we split in half we grew back the rest of us. We’re two very different people,” Ye Xiu casually explained.

“So it’s like asexual reproduction,” the host said musingly.

Watching from the lounge with the rest of Earth’s team, Chu Yunxiu clicked her tongue. “I’m not saying I agree, but I think I see now why your boss is so mad he won’t deal with the media. Look how fast he turned this conversation to his advantage, it’s unreal. He even sort of comes across as charismatic.”

“The true miracle,” Fang Shiqian sniped in the background.

Su Mucheng laughed. “Even if he followed the Alliance’s rules and talked to the media, there’s no saying he’d bother to play nice.”

“Does nothing faze you all?” Babysitter asked, baffled. “I thought you said you weren’t that good at guessing what other sentient species would be like?”

“We don’t have to guess to be able to adapt,” Han Wenqing, the de facto leader in Ye Xiu’s absence, stated bluntly.

“Yes,” Yu Wenzhou agreed. “Humans are very good at adaptation. It’s probably our best feature.”

“But…even we have trouble with shapeshifters,” Babysitter said. “It doesn’t matter how long you’ve known about it; when you see it happen right in front of you, it always feels a little off.”

“Please,” Chu Yunxiu said, tossing a sunflower seed from Su Mucheng into her mouth, “stolen identity is one of the most common tropes there is.”

“Isn’t it your favorite?” Su Mucheng asked, munching on a handful of sunflower seeds herself.

“It’s definitely up there,” Chu Yunxiu agreed. “The misunderstandings, the insecurity, the pining…”

“You do it…for fun,” Babysitter concluded, flabbergasted.

“Oh, cool, is that alien carrying another alien in its rib cage?!” Fang Rui exclaimed in the distance.

“Kangaroo,” Zhou Zekai added quietly.

“You’re right, it’s a baby alien! Nice.”

“Don’t bother the nice skeleton alien lady,” Wu Yuce said.

“It might not be a lady, you don’t know,” Fang Rui said huffily. “They could be like seahorses. Or like, some kind of parasitic relationship, whatever, it could be a lot of things!”

“Our planet does have quite the biodiversity,” Zhang Xinjie told Babysitter.

“It’s not like ours don’t, but…” Even through the universal translator, Babysitter sounded distinctly helpless.

“Big Sun, look, those aliens have natural soulmates,” Zhang Jiale said. “That’s so cool, I want to be an alien…”

“Yesterday you said being an alien sounded too complicated,” Sun Zheping snorted. “And I’m pretty sure they’re more in a symbiotic relationship than soulmates.”

“Yesterday I didn’t know they had soulmates,” Zhang Jiale argued. “And symbiotic relationships are basically soulmates, don’t quibble.”

“Oh, what’s this, some kind of stationary nebula? A person? No response, maybe a light fixture? Or food, it could be food, I’m starting to get hungry but Mucheng didn’t want to share, rude—”

“Ah, wait, don’t touch that,” Babysitter called, gliding quickly toward Huang Shaotian. “What is it with all of you and touching things?”

“Maybe we need more than one Babysitter,” Lin Jingyan said thoughtfully.

“Shaotian just thinks it’s funny to see how fast they can move,” Yu Wenzhou said peacefully. “He’s not actually going to touch it.”

“Fang Rui is,” Han Wenqing noted.

“Someone should probably stop him,” Lin Jingyan agreed. He didn’t move.

“You’re terrible,” Fang Shiqian said; he didn’t move either.

Yang Cong sighed. “I’ll do it.”

After he’d walked away, the two exchanged a discreet high-five. Zhao Yang rolled his eyes.

Earth’s first matchup in the playoffs would be against the Atlantici, a species that looked somewhat froglike out of the water but absolutely divine within it, iridescent skin and fanlike extremities along an elegant central column. Their mechs had a similar form, although the fanlike structures had been replaced with propellers edged with guns: The Atlantici favored long-range fights.

Although they’d agreed that, strategically speaking, putting their strongest player fourth in the five-player group arena was the best option for gaining points, Ye Xiu still led the round with Lord Grim to test the waters.

Rather literally, it turned out: The map the Atlantici had chosen was a highly acidic water map, completely without place to surface. The corrosion began immediately. This was within their expectations, given the Atlantici’s home environment; less expected was the enormous whirlpool Ye Xiu’s opponent triggered soon after he entered the map. An upgrade they’d gained since the main body of the tournament, it seemed, and though Earth had received sponsorships of their own, they couldn’t afford to spend much, if any, on upgrades.

Luckily, their own technology hadn’t shown all its sides yet.

Ye Xiu used Reverberant Shockwave to disrupt the whirlpool, throwing the two opponents to opposite ends of the map, then closed his umbrella and set the water around him to boiling. Pulsar, the additional skill housed in the gun of the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella, shot directly through the left three propellers of the Atlanticus before it could even figure out it was being damaged through all the bubbling water.

Pulsar had a cooldown so long it could functionally only be used once per match, but the effects were extraordinary. Ye Xiu used Rotor Wing to propel himself through the still boiling water and began his Unspecialized blitz before the Atlanticus could properly stabilize itself. Ye Xiu took down his first opponent, but Lord Grim’s skills’ damage was still comparatively quite low, and the water’s acidity dangerously high: Not long after his new opponent loaded in, Ye Xiu had to leave the stage.

“There’s something unusual about the propeller blades themselves,” Ye Xiu told his team after he exited the booth. “I think they can reflect attacks, but I didn’t get a chance to see them properly.”

He was proven right in the next battle: Zhou Zekai was able to stabilize himself in the water despite the whirlpool by judicious use of his guns’ recoil, but any attack to the propellers was harmlessly pushed aside or fully reflected back onto him, while shots to the main body slid off like water on a hydrophobic surface. He used Bore to blast through the thin limb connecting the right front propeller to the main body, but Cloud Piercer fell without firmly establishing their lead.

Han Wenqing was their anchor for the group arena, using Perseverance to smash through the whirlpool that sprung up again from each new opponent. It was clear the Atlanticus was not expecting him the first time, although even their second player didn’t find a way to throw him off; Reinforced Iron Bones did wonders. In fact, if not for the environmental disadvantage, Desert Dust might not have properly fallen at all.

As it was, unprepared as they were, they lost the group arena by one point.

The team competition went much, much worse.

“How is this fucking fair,” Zhang Jiale complained afterward. “They can fly indefinitely, so they can just make the map a caldera, all lava, nowhere to stand? Really?!”

Apparently no rules were broken, and the few Atlantici they’d managed to drag down into the lava with them were not enough to win them the round. In the first round of the playoffs, Earth lost.

In the playoffs, every match had a press conference afterward. Ye Xiu calmly explained their lack of preparation, especially in relation to the chosen maps and their opponents’ upgrades, and expressed his congratulations to the Atlantici for their win. One of the reporters, what appeared to be a prismatic rock formation, kept pushing him to admit to some panic now that they were so firmly on the defensive against their opponents, but Ye Xiu unconcernedly brushed off their insinuations.

“No one’s panicking, right?” Ye Xiu asked when he rejoined the team.

“Why would we be panicking?” Sun Zheping snorted. “Didn’t we do this every matchup before?”

“Yeah! We just have to win next time, right?” Zhang Jiale said. “We’ll even have the map advantage!”

“Alright, just checking,” Ye Xiu laughed. “Let’s go practice our maps, then.”

The map they’d chosen for the group arena was a twisting cavern in the process of being mined for its crystalline structures. With their flying mechs, the Atlantici would have to move through the middle of the passage, while the pros could use the paths along the walls to get up above them without issue. The lowered light of the cave meant the Atlantici, a shallow-dwelling species, had difficulty seeing Earth’s mech along the walls.

Blossoming Chaos fell on the first opponent with an Earth Shattering Slash, pulverizing the spine of the mech. The propellers twisted desperately, trying to point at the thing on its back, but Sun Zheping ignored them entirely to hack at the opening he’d made. As soon as it was deep enough, he stabbed in his Greatsword, Burial Blossoms, and activated Blood of the Enemy.

Blood of the Enemy was his weapon’s additional skill, which, after being stabbed into the opponent’s mech, ate it out from the inside as a form of lifesteal. Berserkers as a class had a lot of blood-related and damage-to-strength skills, which translated to a lot of nanite usage as a mech; Blossoming Chaos, despite being a heavy-hitter, was one of the most malleable mech on the team. Damage seemed to pass right through him, and with his various lifesteal abilities, he was able to take on the second opponent nearly fresh.

The second opponent had learned from the first, staying much farther from the cavern’s walls, but Sun Zheping wouldn’t let that stop him. Soul Devouring Crimson Grip dragged the mech toward him, and Sun Zheping ignored the hail of bullets to land himself on its back again. It was a bigger mech this time—the first had been a nimble construction, likely chosen to counter Lord Grim—so it took much longer for him to render it inoperable. Still, he got there in the end, placing Earth firmly in the lead.

Lin Jingyan was their second player, facing off against the third Atlanticus, which had finally managed to bring Sun Zheping down. He strolled casually along the edge of the path, coming up to a large outcrop of the crystalline material that intruded onto the walkway. He settled there behind it, using the reflections and refracted light to keep track of the Atlanticus traveling below, waiting for it to move into position.

The change from inaction to action was abrupt. Demon Subduer slammed his hand into the crystals in a single motion, using the unique skill added to this weapon: Fracture. Fracture broke materials along their inevitable stress or fault lines, forcing the resultant pieces out of alignment at the same time. With a material like a crystal that had no support behind it, the strike was able to immediately turn the pieces into projectiles.

The fractured ends speared through the Atlanticus, jamming the bladelike propellers, as Demon Subduer landed on the Atlanticus’s back. The Brawler clawed at the Atlanticus’s central spine as both mech plummeted to the cavern floor; only Demon Subduer stood up again.

The next Atlanticus was a slow, heavy thing, with enormous, cannon-like guns at the propellers’ edges, clearly intended to act as their anchor and probably a reaction to Han Wenqing’s brutal close-range ability. It stayed high-flying to avoid the same issue of being ambushed from above that its teammates had met, scanning the darkened cavern in search of Demon Subduer.

Lin Jingyan passed from shadow to shadow so easily it appeared he was only walking normally, positioning himself below the mech before tossing a Molotov directly into the main propeller. The blades easily sliced through it, but in the case of a Molotov that didn’t do more than splatter fireballs in every direction. The skin of the Atlanticus mech was good at redistribution of force and resisting acid, but outside of the water it was rather weak to flame. The fire spread along the skin, burning steadily through the protective layer and toward the mech’s core. The mech dove for the shallow pool at the end of the cave, where Lin Jingyan was waiting.

In the end, Earth didn’t even get to their fourth player: They ended the group arena with a three-point lead.

The team competition would be played on a qanat map, in this case a complex of interlocking underground aqueducts. The teams spawned on opposite ends of the map, but Earth’s side made their way to the water’s source without giving any attention to the location of the Atlantici.

“Can’t you face us directly?” one of the Atlantici sent in the public chat, evidently frustrated by the kinds of battles they’d had to fight today.

“If you insist,” Ye Xiu replied, directing One Autumn Leaf to step around the corner and directly into the path of the leading Atlanticus. Evil Annihilation darted upward, hitting the mech with Petrifaction before it could even turn its guns on him. The mech crashed to the ground, blocking the lower half of the passageway and causing water to build up in front of it. Ye Xiu crouched and used Dragon Rises from the Sea to fling both water and the stonelike fallen Atlanticus at its following teammate, pinning both to the wall behind them.

“I don’t know that it’ll help you, though,” he added.

The Atlantici weren’t prepared to face Ye Xiu with One Autumn Leaf and his much stronger attacks; he hadn’t appeared in the group arena, so they’d assumed it would still be Lord Grim taking the stage.

“Old Ye, can you stop shaking the walls?” Huang Shaotian complained in the public chat. “Here I am, trying to meditate on the meaning of life to prepare for battle, and you’re just slamming around the place like its your personal bowling alley. Have a little care, hm? Not all of us get the easy job, facing the enemy right up front like that’s all there is to winning. Haven’t you heard of tactics? Or was it those guys who hadn’t heard of tactics, what’s that about? Didn’t they throw us into a damn caldera last time, was that normal? Is that okay? Is that any kind of way to treat your opponents in a fair fight? Where did they even learn the definition of ‘fair,’ shame on them, can’t you face us directly like they didn’t start this whole thing.”

“In position,” Yang Cong sent in the team chat.

Ye Xiu had thoroughly blocked the main duct with the corpse he’d made of the Atlantici’s frontliner while Huang Shaotian chatted. “Well then,” he sent in the public chat, watching the second one he’d attacked have its propellers regrown by their healer—the original ones had joined the corpse in damming the passage. “Come face us directly.” With that he piloted One Autumn Leaf back the way he came to meet up with the rest of the team.

Earth’s team had based themselves around the water’s source, where Zhang Xinjie’s Immovable Rock stood, performing a highly complicated cast. One Autumn Leaf and Desert Dust stood facing outward in the two main off-branching ducts, ready to defend the Cleric.

The remaining Atlantici, including their sixth player, split up to face Earth’s team, though the close quarters of the map meant they couldn’t start their assault at a distance. Ye Xiu and Han Wenqing engaged without hesitation, absolutely determined to ensure not a single bullet could get through to interrupt Zhang Xinjie’s cast.

A third Atlanticus entered a side passage to the source and readied its guns.

“Hypocritical!” Huang Shaotian sent in the public chat, Troubling Rain falling from an access well onto the Atlanticus passing below, sword extended. Ice Rain’s additional skill Quantum Blade could cut through anything, and with a single blow Huang Shaotian cut the Atlanticus in half. “Tactics only exist for your team, hm? You asked us to fight you directly and we delivered, but we ask the same and you come sneaking in from the side! How can you show your face in public if this is the way you act? You can’t rely on good looks for everything, people will eventually notice how you rot on the inside!”

Huang Shaotian was obviously speaking nonsense, given he’d just pulled off another overhead ambush, but he’d successfully drawn the attention of the Atlanticus, now flipped on its back due to the propeller imbalance. The guns focused on him, but he didn’t pay them any mind, slashing at the opponent like he couldn’t even see the damage.

Behind him, Immovable Rock finally finished the cast. His hands clasped together around Backlight Cross and then opened, light spilling from them and glowing around him in the beam that fell from the opening at the top of the mother well. The glow spread to the water around him, and then flowed in every direction at once, bringing the water to life.

Saint’s Blessing, the unique skill added to Immovable Rock’s cross, put the target material under Zhang Xinjie’s control. It could heal allies and corrode enemies, and in this case he’d been able to turn the water itself to his side. One Autumn Leaf, whose still-gaping bullet holes made it clear he hadn’t been treated after his earlier skirmish, began to heal at a noticeable rate, as did the other mech who’d taken damage since the arrival of the Atlanticus team.

The notable exception was Yang Cong’s Scene Killer, which had used Life-Risking Strike again. Due to the aftereffects of the attack, the mech couldn’t immediately be healed, but he hadn’t had a better way to block the two Atlantici who’d chosen his passage from interrupting Immovable Rock’s cast than detonating his self-destructive skill. Rather than healing, the water whipped around the guns trying to target him and pulled them away, eating at their exterior. Yang Cong didn’t wait out this period either, using his instant-movement skills to dodge and strike along with the water.

At the center of it all, the manufactured “Holy Water” surrounded Immovable Rock in foggy light, ready to block any damage that might try to interrupt the “praying” Cleric. Despite being involved in a battle on multiple fronts, he timed his assists in damage and healing so well that Scene Killer survived long enough for healing to take effect again: The team competition ended without Earth’s taking a single loss.

The post-match interviewers were as vicious as ever with their questions. “How is the mentality of your team, going into the tiebreaker round? Will it be hard to play on these new maps, knowing that your home world could become one of them should you fail?”

It was common knowledge that base-level planets had to use their own planet as collateral to enter the tournament, and what happened to those planets in the aftermath—it wasn’t the kind of thing that could be hidden at this level of the competition, but as no other base-level planet had made it this far before, the ambassadors hadn’t put any thought into the secret’s coming out.

Perhaps the reporter had been looking for a shocked or at least discomfited reaction, but they were looking at the wrong person for such a thing: Ye Xiu just shrugged. “Not really. None of us have ever doubted our ability to win this tournament.”

“You really think you have what it takes to stand up against the other teams?” another reporter asked, condescending.

“Did you see that win just now?” Ye Xiu laughed. “We more than have what it takes to stand on equal footing against the other teams. Really, are you trying to insult the tournament organizers, saying we fluked our way right into the playoffs? Is this competition a joke to you?”

The reporter immediately fell silent, glaring daggers. The top planets that took turns hosting this tournament were the kind of big names none of the reporters there could dare to offend.

Ye Xiu ignored him, finally answering the initial question. “The mentality of our team right now is, basically—we’re looking forward to what else there is to see in the next round.”

Ye Xiu took the stage first with Lord Grim, their best chance at reacting to a completely unfamiliar environment due to his wide range of skills. The map loaded with Lord Grim directly over a chasm and already falling, so it was a good choice. Ye Xiu used Rotor Wing to get himself onto the nearby ridge while looking over the landscape, what of it there was.

The map consisted of a few ridges and nothing else, actually nothing visible at all between them. There was no discernible sky, either, just an inky void, leading Ye Xiu to believe this was some kind of moon or other space object. Luckily, gravity seemed to work normally—though that could be unlucky, too, seeing as a fall meant certain death for Earth’s players while Atlanticus’s players could fly indefinitely. In fact, the mere starting positions were obviously in the opponents’ favor, given that any Earth player without the ability to direct themselves through the air on their own would suffer an instant defeat.

Ye Xiu was in good enough shape, though, with all of the different climbing, rising, and jumping skills of his Unspecialized class combined, not to mention Aerial Fire at his disposal. The Atlanticus wanted to keep its distance to kite him to death, but Ye Xiu was fully capable of chasing it, even without ground on which to follow. Still, he couldn’t actually fly himself, and riding the Atlanticus while he tried to kill it would be bad news with all its weapons enabled and Lord Grim’s weaker attack ability. In addition, his opponent was particularly nimble—likely the same one to have begun the group arena last round—and dodged any attempts to attack or get on its back, flying to inconvenient angles every time Ye Xiu landed. In the end, Ye Xiu switched to Pulsar in midair to get a clean shot straight through the central column of the mech, from head to tail, and used the last of his skills to launch himself onto the mech so he could continue to attack as he rode it into the abyss. Like that, he was able to confirm their win against the first opponent, but he also lost as he exited the map’s arbitrary range.

“Biased against us, but they want to appear impartial.” Yu Wenzhou shared his conclusions when Ye Xiu returned. “They didn’t choose a map where the Atlantici could use their whirlpool, but for a ‘random’ map so perfectly in their favor rather than ours to appear…”

“Definitely not random,” Ye Xiu confirmed. “They were a bit too obvious with their alterations: The spawn locations were off-center. It seems we can look forward to unfavorable matches during any tiebreakers in the playoffs.”

Luckily, tiebreakers allowed the teams to pick their players as they went, so there was a limit to how unprepared and unfavorable the maps could be for Earth. They may be forced to use long-distance classes against an opponent well-defended against such attacks, but Earth wasn’t completely unprepared for such an eventuality.

Zhou Zekai went up next, and was able to dodge well enough to allow Bore to come off cooldown multiple times. In the end, he was able to take down his opponent, but he lost enough health in the process that the trade was almost as even as Ye Xiu’s first. Still, he gamely started the next round in the hopes of giving the team a bit of an advantage.

“Can you do it?” Ye Xiu asked Su Mucheng, watching Zhou Zekai Aerial Fire out of the way of his opponent’s attacks.

“Of course!” Su Mucheng smiled at Ye Xiu. “You don’t have to worry about me. I know what to do.”

Zhou Zekai fell, and Su Mucheng took the stage after him.

Dancing Rain loaded into the map, slow, heavy frame incongruous to the precarious setting, but Su Mucheng safely guided her to the cliff without trouble. Once she landed, she carefully determined where her opponent was setting up shop at the edge of their guns’ range—at that distance, she could reach them, but they’d have too much time to dodge for her to easily land anything.

Dancing Rain made a snapping motion that ended with an upward point, almost a flick: a series of spheres too small to properly see were sent into the air. The Atlanticus began to fire, and Su Mucheng used Aerial Cannon to allow Dancing Rain to dodge in time without ever taking her eyes off the opponent. Seemingly out of nowhere, she canceled her skill, landed on the ridge, and clapped her hands together.

Moments later, a line of fire lit up the opponent’s location, missile after missile slamming into the Atlanticus.

Airstrike, Devouring Sun’s additional skill, required precise understanding of the enemy location and even more precise inputs to get the firepower exactly where it was needed, but Su Mucheng was a highly capable learner. The benefit of the long time between activation and full effect was that it was quite difficult for an opponent to pick up exactly what she’d done in order to achieve her result. Her Atlanticus opponent burned to nothing before they were ever able to understand how she’d done it.

The system kept their mech in exactly the same condition between opponents, so her mech still had some time left on the cooldown as the next battle started. However, the time between activation and effect meant the effective cooldown was actually relatively short, given the strength of the skill, so she wasn't worried. Not long after the opponent had settled into their ideal location—different from the previous opponent, as they seemed to be under the impression it had been a location-based attack—Dancing Rain made the same gesture as before, a snap and upward point. There was nothing visible above them for her to be pointing at, and no matter how the Atlanticus scoured the sky, it couldn’t find any reason for the action. Still, nearly a full minute later, Dancing Rain’s hands clapped together, signaling the raid to fall. The second of her opponents died as miserably as the first, far from Dancing Rain’s location but no less damaged for it. Dancing Rain, dodging as nimbly as she could on such a narrow ridge in her heavy armor, had taken very little damage from her opponents’ long-range attacks at all.

The last of the Atlantici had noticed the missiles came in a horizontal line all at the same distance from Dancing Rain, and so varied its proximity to her along with its attacks. It didn’t quite dare to close in, given its own long-range nature, but it was far more mobile than its predecessors. Still, when the time came, Dancing Rain made the same gesture as before. She timed her dodges carefully, and the clap came when she’d just about lined up with where she’d started, pulling her careful assailant in line with her. The strike came vertically this time, each missile falling along the line between the opponent’s furthest range and Dancing Rain herself; the opponent crashed and burned.

“Piece of cake,” Su Mucheng said when she returned, giving Ye Xiu a victory sign and a bright smile. Indeed, when she’d left the stage, her health was high enough to take on at least two more opponents without trouble.

“Well done,” he said with a grin of his own. When Su Mucheng told him he didn’t need to worry, she always meant it. If she said he could rely on her to do it, then she definitely would.

As in the previous round, Earth would enter the team competition with a full three-point lead.

Although there was some time given to the teams to talk about the map beforehand—or rather, the basic description of it they got in order to inform their player choices—it wasn’t nearly enough to make detailed strategic plans. At this point, the audience was used to that kind of planning from Earth, so when they just rushed the Atlanticus spawn point it was a shock for most.

On the other hand, Earth had a significant lead and could absolutely afford a complete trade, if they wanted, and that was exactly how they went about it—no need to hang around the map and see how it managed to be subtly disadvantageous to Earth. They’d been able to determine before that there weren’t any special features about the Atlantici that allowed them to become absurdly powerful when put together, so there was no reason to determinedly split them up: Su Mucheng announced their presence by razing the Atlantici’s location with Airstrike, and it really all went downhill for them from there. Earth’s team mobbed the Atlantici in a brutal melee that spelled destruction for both sides, but as the ambushing party Earth clearly had the advantage. It didn’t take long at all for the fourth Atlanticus to fall, securing Earth’s victory.

The reporters wanted to know what had allowed Ye Xiu to take such a bold risk in his strategizing, but there wasn’t much to say. “Why should we bother with timidity?” he asked, and no one had anything to reply. What could they say, “how dare you fight like a powerhouse when you should be an underdog?” By now, everyone had figured out that Earth didn’t consider themselves much of an underdog at all. This might be their first time in the tournament, but they were far from flailing amateurs.

“How do you feel, knowing you’ve only these few days to prepare to face one of the favorites to win the championship when they’ve had a full week?” someone asked instead. If Earth’s captain couldn’t seem to hold on to a sense of scale, they could always try to remind him of the severity of their situation.

Of course, their frame of reference was still all wrong. “Why would we only have started preparing now?” Ye Xiu asked in return. “As you said, they’re one of the favorites to win—no matter what the matchup, we’d have been remiss to not study them at least a little.”

Earth had, in fact, studied them a lot more than “a little,” but the information they’d gained was more useful in terms of determining the personality of their opponents than any specific abilities. Rich as they were on their own, and with so many backers, the mech actually changed their abilities and team composition as frequently as every matchup, specifically tailoring their mech to their opponents in an ostentatious show of wealth. Earth’s players wouldn’t know until they met with them onstage what abilities they might show.

The Dracomuirs were from a planet with an atmosphere so thick it might as well have been an ocean, and they coiled through the skies of their home world like sea dragons. Their map choices reflected this, a thick and yellow souplike setting that was hard for Earth’s mechs to even move in, let alone see through.

The Dracomuir came out of nowhere from Ye Xiu’s point of view, suddenly blasting him with a wave of something at extremely close range. He opened the umbrella into its shield form to block; when he tried to close it again, it wouldn’t go.

“What are you, without your toy?” the Dracomuir sent gloatingly. It curled through the air in front of him, leafy extremities dragging behind it in a beautiful display of posturing. “See, even you know you’ve lost. Tossing it away so quickly? Are you ready to prostrate yourself in front of true power?”

When they’d talked about the arrogance of the Dracomuir, they’d genuinely had to consider if it was some kind of front, or if they were actually like that. Rather unbelievably, it seemed they were actually like that. Because, given how often he’d used the combination before in the tournament, how could they not have known Ye Xiu was using Spirit Guidance? For what other reason would he ever throw away his weapon, no matter how useless it might seem?

Reverberant Shockwave pulsed from above, pushing down on the heavy atmosphere and flattening the Dracomuir mid-word, extremities fluttering helplessly around it. Lord Grim had jumped back to avoid the attack himself, only barely making it out of range in time due to the encumbering atmosphere. He continued to back away as the intensity increased, the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella lowering almost as if to follow him, before suddenly using several of his non-weapon movement skills at once to dart back toward the Dracomuir. No sooner had the last pulse finished than Ye Xiu leapt onto the Dracoumuir’s back, grabbing the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella out of the air as he went.

“This looks important,” he sent in the chat, focusing on the curve under the neck, the only part of the mech’s outer shell to have survived the assault. In fact, it almost seemed to be regenerating already. In his hands, the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella began to turn.

After that earlier wave, the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella really couldn’t shift its position anymore. Spirit Guidance relied on an external talisman, and Reverberant Shockwave was a part of the canopy itself, so it was possible to use both those skills. Rotor Wing, on the other hand, had many moving parts, so the spinning of the umbrella in his hands wasn’t quite that. Instead, Ye Xiu was making use of the manual inputs, fingers flying over the keyboard to whirl the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella as a whole and turn the canopy into a saw. The edges of the spines were sharp no matter where they were placed, so it was perfectly reasonable for him to be able to use them to attack, even if the size of his weapon limited how he could do so. He cut into the neck of the mech, exposing a glowing orb as the rest of the Dracomuir tried to wriggle away, then misappropriated a Fighter’s hand-to-hand skills to rip the sphere right out of the mech. The Dracomuir went limp, and the first battle ended in Ye Xiu’s favor.

The next began with a clearly displeased Dracomuir who was, for all the brutality of Ye Xiu’s win, no less arrogant. “I need not lower myself to your level,” it said haughtily, and rained Area of Effect magic attacks across the whole map from far higher than Ye Xiu could reach, especially with his weapon still stuck in its open umbrella form.

Losing the round itself wasn’t that irritating for Earth, since it was within their calculations that they might, but the constant arrogance of the Dracomuirs was really, extraordinarily grating. It wasn’t like the Slidelings, which were playing into a stereotype, and rather badly at that. The Dracomuirs were completely genuine in their condescension, and well-practiced at it, too, because they looked down on everyone.

Which was why, when the reporters tried to goad a response from Ye Xiu on that front, he essentially said as much. “We didn’t take it personally,” he said. “Everyone’s entitled to their cultural beliefs.”

“You think their superiority is a cultural belief?”

“Well, given the history of this tournament, it’s hard to call it an objective fact.”

The Dracomuirs, despite their deep pockets and ability to draw widespread interest, had never actually won a championship. Some of the reporters actually laughed.

“How about in relation to yourself?” a different reporter asked doggedly. “Do you think there’s any accuracy to their claim of superiority, given their win today?”

“They certainly had skills we weren’t expecting, but we were prepared for that going in, given their predilection for reshuffling skills based on matchup,” Ye Xiu replied calmly.

“You mean to say that their sponsorships are what won them the match?” The reporter’s voice seemed polite enough, but it carried a hint of displeasure in it.

“Their decision to choose skills based on their opponents is tactically sound, given their resources. If you mean to ask if I think it’s unfair,” Ye Xiu wasn’t going to let the undercurrent go unaddressed, “then, not really, no. The game is the game, no matter what your background, and everyone is doing their best to win. There’s no such thing as fairness in a fight in the first place, only resources and opportunities, and who can make the best of each.”

Though it was Ye Xiu’s genuine belief, the result of saying it was what they were looking for. Many viewers had a bias against base-level competitors because, essentially, they were no fun. With their home world on the line, of course they wouldn’t have the same view of this tournament as a “game” that regular players would, because to them it was a lot more.

Earth, though, was different. From the start, they’d approached this tournament as a game they needed to win. They prepared for it that way, they acted that way, they made plans that way. Nowhere did the same militaristic feel so many base-level planets carried in what little anyone saw before their elimination come into play.

Before the playoffs, many hadn’t even heard of Earth, let alone been interested in their playstyle. In their first matchup, their play could be seen as either desperate or cocky, depending on how one wanted to read into it, but this matchup had gained a lot more attention, and Ye Xiu’s words struck exactly at what the viewers wanted to see. Not resentment for the support, nor a resigned push toward a necessary victory, but properly playing the game and accepting their losses with grace. In one move, Earth gained quite a few fans.

It helped that the Dracomuirs, for all their beauty, really were cocky bastards, and if there was another decent option for pulling off an upset, especially since the Dracomuirs had never fared well against the Infhillte before…

The sponsors slowly began to shift their focus.

Earth’s map for the group arena was a dark one, a nighttime lagoon filled with bioluminescent waters. A small island rose from the center of the waters, lighting up the surroundings as waves rocked against its stony shores.

“Where are you, little cowardling?” the Dracomuir sent, flying lazily in circles around the lagoon. It was gorgeous against the dark backdrop, filled with its own slight luminescence—the main reason Earth had felt no qualms about choosing such a dark map.

“Here,” came Wu Yuce’s straightforward reply. Carved Ghost stepped out of a cave on the center island, glowing a bit with leftover traces from the water.

“Oh, so the plebeians can be taught manners!” the Dracomuir replied, spinning leisurely around to face him. “Though you could stand to be a little more polite to your betters—”

The message cut off abruptly, the Dracomuir’s head swinging from side to side. “Where did you go? Did the luminescence run out? Surely not.”

The luminescence was, of course, completely fine, but in approaching Wu Yuce the Dracomuir had run into his Darkness Boundary, concealed under the glowing waves. The Dracomuir was quickly enraged by this “sneak attack,” beginning to bombard the island with attacks based solely on its memory of the position.

Wu Yuce obviously hadn’t waited for it to figure things out, running behind the cave to pass the first attacks safely, but he wasn’t actually just running away. Carved Ghost jumped from rock to rock, climbing to the top of the cave mouth before taking a running leap at the thrashing dragon. The Ghostblade landed for only a moment on the trailing leafy extremities before leaping further up, onto the back of the Dracomuir, and then sprinting up toward the head.

With neither a visual cue from the drop in height nor any real tactile feedback from the mech, the Dracomuir had no idea it had been boarded until its power began to fall, Heavenly Crimson Lotus buried in the energy core hidden in the mech’s neck.

Wu Yuce’s additional skill, Negation Sword, was extremely powerful, but also extremely slow-acting. The Dracomuir thrashed wildly, running offensive magic over its skin and directing attacks toward Carved Ghost in an attempt to dislodge its attacker, but Wu Yuce had prepared for this from the start, settling in deep and clinging grimly on. The Dracomuir had absurd powers of regeneration, especially their energy cores; if the sword pulled out, not only would the skill end, the previous effects would quickly become useless. Stabilizing Carved Ghost through the storm of attacks wasn’t easy, but Wu Yuce knew what he was doing. The Dracomuir crashed to the ocean, splashing light into the air and across the water’s surface as the disturbance lit the water a vibrant blue.

Wu Yuce was able to take down two Dracomuirs this way, the opponents completely unprepared for the previously unshown skill, of course, but even Ghostblades as a class, and to some extent the map itself. That was where their lack of preparation ended, though: They’d actually changed their skill selections from the previous round to even better counter Earth’s players. They hadn’t been expecting Wu Yuce, but it didn’t take them long to adapt to the rest. Earth went into the team competition down a point.

“Save us, oh great Dragon Rider!” Fang Rui called as Earth’s team stood to take the stage. “Please, noble hero, you’re our only hope!”

Wu Yuce flipped him off without looking back.

“Look how you teach the children bad habits,” Ye Xiu said to Fang Shiqian, shaking his head with mock disapproval.

Fang Shiqian flipped him off too.

The Dracomuirs seemed to have chosen high magic damage, strong physical resistance, and a frankly unfair regenerative ability as their way to counter Earth’s team, which was bad enough one-on-one, but with the addition of the Dracomuirs’ healer, made them almost invincible. Luckily, there was still an “almost” involved, and none of the pros were the type to give up. Even more luckily, the Dracomuirs as a species were prone to underestimation and useless posturing, which left all kinds of openings in both personal play and overall strategy.

For example, when Earth’s team split down two parallel valleys to run from them in the team competition, the Dracomuirs scoffed at the idea that Earth had actually forgotten they could fly over the intervening mountain ridge and then split their own team to follow, leaving their healer skimming along the top to stay in range and support both sides at once. Obviously, Earth would not neglect such a basic fact as the Dracomuirs’ ability to fly: The healer was dragged toward the ridge by Li Xuan’s Ash Boundary, then caught tight in a Void Boundary it couldn’t possibly escape before it could think to turn around.

Of course, Li Xuan appeared to be alone, two of Earth’s damage dealers in one valley, Ye Xiu in the other, and the last, Earth’s healer—not even in play?!

Fang Shiqian had gone to the support zone to switch out with Zhang Jiale, who stood on a rise further down the ridge from the trapped healer and displayed the expert marksmanship that made the Hundred Blossoms style possible by directing every skill he had at the hidden core in the Dracomuir’s neck. In the valleys, the Dracomuirs did their best to come to the aid of their healer, but the players they’d been chasing suddenly turned around in full force to block their path. The Dracomuirs were able to push about halfway up the mountain ridge before the battle ran into the range of Li Xuan’s support Boundaries, giving Earth the upper hand. It didn’t matter how high the Dracomuir tried to fly, once they were over any of Crying Devil’s Boundaries they would be affected. Due to the rest of the team’s harassment and Zhang Jiale’s excellent positioning, it took them far too long to realize the main damage to their healer—who was itself bamboozled by the shifting layers of magic from both Li Xuan and Zhang Jiale—was not coming from anywhere near the healer’s mech.

The Dracomuirs on the side covered by Wu Yuce and Tian Sen immediately abandoned the attempt to fly up the slope, instead flying over the valley to lose their pursuers and approach Zhang Jiale’s location faster. Wu Yuce and Tian Sen made no move to follow them; instead, Wu Yuce used the shaft of Death Savvy under the control of Spirit Guidance to launch himself to the top of the ridge, joining Li Xuan below the Dracomuirs’ healer in dealing damage. Zhang Jiale didn’t falter either, unloading round after round into the core with every skill he could, utterly ignoring the approaching Dracomuirs and their incoming attacks until the Void Boundary completely faded; the energy core passed out of Zhang Jiale’s line of sight as the healer’s mech moved, but Zhang Jiale had already turned on his attackers, forming a light screen as fast as possible with his various explosions. As a Spitfire, he had some defense against their magic attacks, but not so much that getting closed in on was anything good.

“You tried so desperately to block us, but in the end it was worthless,” one of his attackers sent. “In just a moment your two defenders were swept off the ridge, and now our teammate will be joining us to finish you off.”

Indeed, Dazzling Hundred Blossoms had taken quite a lot of damage from the two of them, but Zhang Jiale wasn’t worried, even as the healer’s mech approached and began to cast. A moment later, the damage of the recent battle began to reverse—for Dazzling Hundred Blossoms.

Possession, Death Savvy’s additional skill, allowed Tian Sen to take over a system and use it for his own ends, provided it was largely intact but no longer piloted, in something like a more advanced form of Spirit Guidance. Due to the mech’s own mobile capability, the range was quite large; physically, Peaceful Hermit was currently sprinting with the help of a Speed Talisman near the foot of the ridge, even as the Dracomuir healer’s mech he now controlled used every healing skill it had on Dazzling Hundred Blossoms at once. He didn’t have perfect control over the corpse, but dumping the unused nanites to his ally was no problem.

The Dracomuirs were thrown into confusion, unsure if or whom they should attack. After a mech was determined inoperable, the pilot could no longer communicate with their team, so they had no idea that their healer had died. Even their sixth player, who should have immediately loaded in, had been a little delayed on choosing which support zone to appear in. The sixth player hadn’t said anything because pointing out faults, especially one’s own, was not done in Dracomuir culture, and nothing about what its teammates had said directly implied they didn’t know of their healer’s death—the sixth Dracomuir was also on its way to join them, so all of their messages could just as easily apply to its own actions, and it couldn’t see the healer’s mech flying lower on the ridge from where it had loaded in.

Tian Sen threw the healer’s corpse at the two Dracomuirs, who hesitated just long enough on attacking what looked like an ally that they were caught beneath its weight and collapsed downward. On the other end of the map, Tian Sen entered the support zone and Fang Shiqian came out.

“You better not be dead,” he sent in the team chat, already running toward Ye Xiu’s approximate location. Ye Xiu sent back his exact coordinates, the battle too isolated to know to send something sooner and too high-intensity for him to bother with more. The Ghostblades had jumped down to join him as soon as Tian Sen’s Possession took hold and the battle itself was out of sight of the rise where Zhang Jiale was fighting, so even if they’d had time to observe there’d be nothing to see.

Zhang Jiale took off back up the ridge the moment the two Dracomuirs were blocked by the healer’s mech, throwing up a light screen in front of the approaching Dracomuir before it could even register he was approaching. Although it couldn’t see his exact location, it wasn’t stupid, and the ridge wasn’t wide: It threw wide-range skills across the area and physically blocked the path. Zhang Jiale didn’t even slow, using a Slide Kick to pass under the attacks and Dracomuir itself in one motion; when the lights cleared in front of the Dracomuir, it found nothing there at all.

The two other Dracomuirs caught up quickly, so it didn’t take long for them to determine that Zhang Jiale had made it past their sixth player and pursue. Zhang Jiale backed his last steps along the ridge while firing at the incoming Dracomuirs, who closed in on a swinging scythe instead of bullets: Tian Sen had subbed in.

A Cleric would never be able to match up with an Exorcist with a Speed Talisman, so it took longer for Fang Shiqian to reach the rest of the battle than it had for Tian Sen to get to the support zone, even though the battle itself had moved a little closer since the Void Boundary ended. Lord Grim was in poor shape by the time Aweto arrived, having only his piddling healing skills to thank for surviving through his baiting the two Dracomuirs, blocking their path, and then handling their rage after their healer’s fall.

The difficulty was increased by the fact that he had to occasionally deal with the Dracomuirs’ attempts to seal the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella in a single form. Every time the attack came he had to counter it with his own skill before it could touch him—Rift, the additional skill in the spokes of the umbrella, only worked when their tips came to a point in the spear form. Rift was a localized dimension tear: When faced directly into a wave of oncoming magic, the magic would have no choice but to split around it, creating an envelope of safe space behind it. The cooldown wasn’t exceptionally long, but it did have a bit of a charging time, and Ye Xiu couldn’t help but leave an opening for the other Dracomuir while he was stuck using a specific skill in a specific location.

Luckily, whatever function they had used to seal the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella was either inconvenient or expensive enough that they couldn’t give it to more than one of their teammates—or perhaps they were that assured of their victory, that they would only give the skill to one player. Still, the cooldown seemed to be rather long, and he only had to defend from one side. The addition of the Boundaries as he got closer to Li Xuan, and then both Ghostblades themselves to split the focus of his assailants, meant he lived long enough for Fang Shiqian to hit him with a Holy Cure. Against assailants with burst damage as high as the Dracomuir, it wasn’t enough to make him absolutely safe, but it let him take at least as active a role as Wu Yuce; the hybrid Ghostblade had stepped forward as the main attacker in the intervening time despite his class’s low defense and his somewhat depleted health from his own stint as bait and blocker.

With Fang Shiqian there to take over as support, Li Xuan pulled back a little to begin his cast again. The Dracomuirs didn’t notice immediately that this cast was different from the others, until it came to their attention that he’d been at it a long time: In a moment, Li Xuan went from “ignorable” to “top priority.” Having seen the damage that could be done after being caught in a Void Boundary once, they knew any amount of health loss was worth being able to interrupt the cast.

Unfortunately for them, Earth knew its value just as well; no matter how many attacks they threw at Li Xuan, Wu Yuce was there to stop it. He’d activated Negation Sword to cut through any magic that came their way and stolidly blocked the rest with Carved Ghost’s own body. Ye Xiu directly attacked the mechs to interrupt the Dracomuirs’ skills, but they were too far apart for him to catch both: While he incapacitated one, the other prepared an enormous offensive burst.

Together, Ye Xiu and Wu Yuce would be able to block it—but Fang Shiqian could only save one.

Wu Yuce fell as Li Xuan finished his cast.

The Void Boundary was, due to its impassibility, a major defense for the allies inside it, so he’d want it to be close enough that they could all immediately enter. On the other hand, Tian Sen had sent “incoming mid 3” not long before, indicating that he’d exhausted his ability to withstand the three enraged Dracomuirs, and they were about to be facing a battle on two fronts. Li Xuan waited until the last second to place the boundary, catching both the low-health Dracomuir before them and the first of the speeding mid-health Dracomuir behind them in space and bringing the next two up short.

Before the other two could begin to maneuver around the boundary, the furthermost Dracomuir was swallowed in a burst of light: Zhang Jiale had made his way to the edge of the rise. It immediately turned back, ready to destroy a far easier target, while the other continued looking for a way to kill Li Xuan and destroy the boundary.

Li Xuan was not idle after setting the Void Boundary; he set a Sword Boundary for Ye Xiu and Fang Shiqian, already focused intently on the low-health Dracomuir, and a Darkness Boundary that the incoming Dracomuir had no choice but to circumvent as well. At the edge of the Darkness Boundary, a Flame Boundary: Through use of the trees and careful positioning, Li Xuan was able to set Boundary after Boundary, keeping the frustrated Dracomuir running in circles or pushing through to take damage while dealing its own up until the Void Boundary ended. Ye Xiu and Fang Shiqian, with the help of some overlap from Li Xuan’s boundaries, had been able to destroy both Dracomuirs caught inside.

Zhang Jiale’s “oneshot” in the team chat, despite providing the absolute minimum of information, managed to convey his extreme frustration before Dazzling Hundred Blossoms fell, just short of taking out his own enemy. The Dracomuir burst triumphantly from the trees to be met with Pulsar and sent crashing to the ground again, finally meeting its end under Zhang Jiale’s final instruction. Li Xuan had pushed Crying Devil to the forefront to give Ye Xiu the opportunity to fire, taking a blow a Phantom Demon was not designed to withstand, no matter how much Fang Shiqian tried to pour into saving him.

Ye Xiu immediately snapped open his umbrella, pushing until the canopy inverted, and braced himself against Reverberant Shockwave’s force. The Dracomuir began to disintegrate even as it was thrown backward—but its regeneration wasn’t just for show, and it struggled upward again in all its tattered rage.

Nonetheless, the distance the shockwave afforded them had been enough, and it fell under Lord Grim’s bullets before it could get in range again.

The valleys fell silent, mechs settling in the dust, Aweto and Lord Grim still standing after the flurry of motion before.

Earth had scraped through the round with a win by a single point.

“How do you and your team feel about how close you came to defeat today?” a reporter asked, leaning forward with morbid interest; everyone was well-acquainted now with the position of a base-level planet, originally a niche aspect of the tournament, now pushed in front of everyone as a genuine contender for the championship.

“There is no close or far, only winning or losing,” Ye Xiu replied calmly. “And we won.”

He grinned.

“We feel quite good about it.”

Ye Xiu had, in fact, made sure of his team’s condition after the match, but it was pretty much as he said.

“At this point, we’ve been in this position so often, how could we work up any stress about it?” Li Xuan laughed.

“The Dracomuir fall so easily for a little bit of prodding, it’s hard to think of them as a serious enemy,” Yu Wenzhou added.

Zhang Xinjie was blunter. “Their tactical sense is atrocious.”

Using support zones to teleport a player across the map certainly wasn’t a bad tactic, but it wasn’t an immediate winning move, either. The Dracomuirs had genuinely let three of their players be tied up with a single opponent that just wouldn’t die for something like half the competition; their pride was completely out of control, if that was all that had kept them there. Earth had had many other contingencies that never came into play because they were simply unnecessary—in fact, Earth had been set to win with four players left standing, if Zhang Jiale had been able to take down just a little more of his opponent’s health. Not that anyone blamed him, since no one had expected the Dracomuirs would be so sticky once they chose a target, and Spitfires weren’t designed for that kind of thing. In any case, Earth had had a decent enough margin for that win, no matter how dire it looked with Lord Grim half-destroyed. After all, Fang Shiqian was right behind him.

For all that they needled at each other, their coordination was really quite impressive; making sure the two of them survived no matter what had been Earth’s plan from the start.

The tiebreaker round came as quickly in the playoffs as it had in the regular tournament, but the preparation that could be done was much less. Of course, Earth had a bit of an unintended edge in that they were fairly certain random choices had nothing to do with their tiebreaker maps.

Zhao Yang went up first, Qi Masters versatile enough that it would be no great loss even if they were wrong, but they weren’t: The map loaded, a mountain pass shrouded in fog. Having fully expected it, he used One with the Wind without hesitation.

Zhao Yang had been sent up in their first round in the hopes of using Eye of the Storm to create a clear space in what they knew to be an inevitable thick atmosphere map choice. Unfortunately, Eye of the Storm couldn’t manage to create “clean” air where there was none, nor generate a different type of atmosphere, at least not on the maps the Dracomuirs had chosen—either the maps contained none of the clear elements Eye of the Storm would want to use, or they’d found some other way of restricting exactly this move from having the intended effect. Worse, the disturbance caused by the skill had alerted the Dracomuir, who seemed to find things in these low visibility conditions by following atmospheric changes, and escaping afterward was more than a little difficult.

Here the atmosphere had far more motion, fog pushing up over the mountain pass like a reverse waterfall, but was obviously still in the Dracomuirs’ favor. Nonetheless, One with the Wind gave Zhao Yang exactly the same ability to sense opponents, if not even better, and he avoided their sneak attacks with ease. In the meantime, he used long-range qi attacks and currents to churn the fog himself, setting up eddies and streams to confuse his opponent’s senses.

“This is cheating,” the Dracomuir sent when Zhao Yang drifted along in perfect time with the current, slammed the mech with Flash Burst, and then drifted away again in the resultant thrashing.

“Because you can’t see me?” Zhao Yang asked, and didn’t say anything more; he’d already made the sheer absurdity of the statement clear, coming from a species that did exactly the same thing and gloated incessantly about it.

The Dracomuirs’ regeneration hadn’t failed, exactly, but a Qi Master’s attacks in particular were good at disrupting complex mech functioning. Rather than straight electricity, it had a nearly magic quality that let it mess specifically with the inner workings of systems, highly beneficial in these kinds of fights where the complexity of the opponent’s system, the sheer level of technology involved, was so advanced. Due to Ye Xiu’s history of taking the stage first in uncertain group arenas, they were sure the Dracomuirs would send first their mech with the ability to counter the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella: A function that, from everything they could tell about it, was certainly extremely complicated. Crippled by the judicious application of qi and unable to find its opponent, the first Dracomuir fell without Zhao Yang taking any real damage.

The second opponent would have seen how he countered the first, and Boundless Sea was running low on mana, so Zhao Yang approached the fight differently. His opponent was carefully watching for a pattern to atmospheric disturbances that didn’t seem to come. It drifted over the area, watchful, waiting, until suddenly all the fog around it churned at once.

Eye of the Storm confused its senses, as integrated into the atmosphere as it was, so much that it didn’t react immediately to Boundless Sea’s presence—obviously close by, for the distortion to have happened around the Dracomuir. Zhao Yang hit the opponent with everything he had, fully depleting his mana under the protection of Eye of the Storm as the battle traveled around the map, the Dracomuir madly trying to damage him through the solid protection of the skill.

“Got it,” Chu Yunxiu said as she ascended the stage with a smile. “Thanks.”

Zhao Yang nodded with a smile of his own, satisfied with having done his part—with Eye of the Storm active and the battle’s seemingly wild movement, the rock formations and cliffs hidden by the fog were revealed to the rest of his team. It wasn’t perfect, but it was far better than drowning in a soup of the foggy unknown.

The match started with little to no movement from Windy Rain, a single motion of the Silver weapon Ravaging Wind lost in the flow of fog.

“What are you doing?” Her opponent sent, frustrated.

“Killing you,” she replied, nothing better to do.

“Just by standing there?” The derision was obvious.

In her booth, Chu Yunxiu’s smile was unnerving. “Pretty much.”

Corona, her additional skill, supercharged the atmosphere with damaging energy. It worked best in maps like these, with a lot of particulate to work with, and even better with an enemy that attuned itself so fully to the atmosphere, pulling it into itself as part of its anaylsis of form and current. Corona caused continuous damage and didn’t take much energy to use, once it permeated the environment, only needing to replace anything lost while attacking the enemy.

Real life didn’t have damage gauges, and there was nothing obvious about the skill at all: Her opponent died believing the battle hadn’t even started.

Her next opponent searched more actively, so Chu Yunxiu made use of what Zhao Yang had showed them, both about the terrain’s features and the usual flow of the fog, and Teleported directly into eddies, where the sudden change wouldn’t affect much. Another opponent fell without ever knowing how it happened.

“Come and face us!” the third screeched.

“Am I not?” she sent back. “I’m attacking all the time, can’t you tell?”

“Then where are you,” came a reply like a snarl, remarkably emotive through text.

“I’m anywhere.” Chu Yunxiu grinned vindictively. She Teleported away as the Dracomuirs’ flailing claw passed through where Windy Rain had just stood. “I’m everywhere.”

She baited her opponents with false currents from Falling Flower Palm, with the motions she took just before she moved to her newest location, pulling them into frustration again and again. Corona did its work.

They ended the group arena of the tiebreaker round with a four-point lead.

The team competition loaded them into a deep-sea environment with clouded waters.

“Ooh, you can taste the random,” Fang Shiqian sent; the map description had said “ocean” but not clarified “fully underwater” and “low visibility.”

With what they knew of the tournament organizers, though, Earth didn’t actually need them to. So long as it was advantageous for their opponents and disadvantageous for Earth, it was sure to appear.

Corona was difficult to control in liquid and didn’t distinguish between friend or foe, or they might have just flooded the map with that.

“Found them,” Xiao Shiqin said after a short time, followed by an explosion; Detonator had drifted invisibly along until it ran into the Dracomuirs, giving him an idea of their location without actually having to arrive.

“What trickery do you have now?!” one of the Dracomuirs sent in the public chat.

“It’s only trickery when you’re losing, hm?” Ye Xiu sent back; he was using his open umbrella to pull himself along with the currents, Fang Shiqian grumpily hooking his cross over Lord Grim’s shoulder so he was pulled too.

“You’ve made a mistake,” the Dracomuirs sent smugly, and made their way to the commotion in the currents—about halfway, they lost control of their mechs entirely.

Permeate, the additional skill on Swoksaar’s Curse of Destruction, made a skill particulate and pushed it through boundaries it might otherwise have found impassable. In this situation, he’d used it to suffuse the area with Chaotic Rain, hitting each of the Dracomuirs that tried to pass through. Their target, Lord Grim, approached the group of his own volition, Fang Shiqian still trailing behind.

“I rather think you’re the ones who’re mistaken,” Ye Xiu said, and launched his attack.

The commotion had been a feint, the obvious use of Rotor Wing to get into position drawing the attention of the Dracomuirs so they would pass through the affected area. Earth had the advantage, but not forever, even with a healer at their backs. It took some time for Xiao Shiqin, Yu Wenzhou, and Ye Xiu to get even one of them to fall, at which point even Fang Shiqian’s best efforts could only keep them at around half health.

Of course, if the Dracomuirs were a little more concerned with others, they might have noticed that was only four of Earth’s five players. As it was, when the water lit up around them and began to corrode, they were completely unprepared. Left at the spawn point, completely motionless, Immovable Rock’s hands clasped around Backlight Cross. Saint’s Blessing turned the ocean into their own territory; the Dracomuirs were lost.

With a four-point lead, it was no surprise Earth won, but no one had expected for them to win so thoroughly. Almost as if they knew exactly what each map would entail in advance.

Anything that wasn’t truly random had a pattern: Anything with a pattern could be taken advantage of.

The tournament organizers’ first mistake was in trying to sabotage Earth at all.

The words “the opponent played well, but we had better luck today” were standard in Glory post-match interviews, but for the sabotaging organizers, they couldn’t be more obnoxious. “Luck” was obviously supposed to be against Earth, but somehow they turned it into an enormous advantage.

For the reporters, that response wasn’t really much better: First, this was a playoffs match, so there should be a little more tension, especially with an opponent like the Dracomuirs who bred all kind of controversy; but second, had the Dracomuirs even played that well? Earth had such an advantage from the start, it was really hard to say.

“The Dracomuirs claim it was your increased sponsorship that allowed you to come out on top,” one of the reporters informed him. Surely, that would irritate him; anyone could see Earth had put a lot of thought into their wins, but they also didn’t seem to have changed much about their mechs. Compared to the Dracomuirs’ full outfitting specifically to counter Earths’ strengths, there wasn’t much anyone could point to to show Earth’s “sponsorships” at all.

“I did say we had better luck,” Ye Xiu replied, peaceably enough. “But in the end, no one can buy a victory, or everyone would do it. If the teams could buy victory, this would be more of a show than a sport, right? But we can’t, so it maintains its competitive integrity.”

With the advancement of the Glory Pro Alliance, Ye Xiu had seen many of the teams push for monetization, trying to change their competitions into a show, caring more about how it looked than victory. Of course, the gain in popularity was important to the government’s “Glory Pro Alliance,” which needed as many people to be interested in honing their talent in Glory as possible, but the teams themselves were separate entities that existed, to some extent, to make money. Scripted battles weren’t outside of what they might have liked to pursue, if it were just up to them.

Ye Xiu had never wanted anything like that. For him, Glory was always about the glory of victory, not how beautiful that victory could look. Money made it easier, but so long as there was competition, skill, luck, strategy, and hard work would always have their place when a team took the stage.

“Even if you have resources, you still have to work to make the most of them,” he explained to these reporters, who had followed this tournament for so many seasons but still didn’t really understand. The reporters, for their part, were somewhat baffled to be getting this lecture from a base-level planet’s captain. “Having a competition is having a competition; nobody knows how things will end until we have the match. That’s what makes it fun! If we could write down strengths and weaknesses on paper and determine the winner from there, there wouldn’t be much point in playing at all, would there?”

Some of the reporters were baffled, but a few others who were true fans of this tournament were genuinely moved. They always had to turn battles into stories, and the politics and betting behind every round could never be forgotten, but what drew them to this line of work in the first place was the competition, seeing two teams give it their all and find who came out on top.

Many of the fans and sponsors, too, were moved. If they wanted an underdog victory, Earth had now confirmed itself as the team they needed to support, and they could feel secure in knowing that this captain, at least, would not waste anything he was given.

“Good work,” the general told Ye Xiu when he returned. “As you said, the sponsorships have been pouring in.”

“Right.” For the most part, Ye Xiu had been speaking his own feelings, but he also knew he’d said exactly the right things.

After all, who could better understand the feelings of those who loved this sport than someone who was happy to make it his entire life, for as long as he could? Maybe he couldn’t connect with braindead fans and people who idolized the players, people who supported with everything they had but never wanted to play, nor thought of the players as free to make their own choices, but that wasn’t what Earth represented right now. Earth represented the underdog, the commoner, the truest “grassroots” team a tournament like this could ever have, with an entrance fee so high. Earth was the team making it through on ingenuity and hard work alone. Earth was the embodiment of “you won’t know until you play.”

If someone was willing to spend their money on Earth, it would be because they wanted to see the unfavorite win.

The Infhilltes had been the champions of the tournament the last two years, one step away from making history with a three-year consecutive win. In an elimination-style tournament, a few bad days could ruin everything: Winning so consistently was already a sign of their ability. In three seasons, up to now, the Infhilltes had never lost a matchup.

This was due, at least in part, to their nature as transformers.

The Infhilltes could become, so the claim went, literally anything they could think of. The recordings showed transformations that were fast and precise, planes bending and sliding across each other with remarkable ease.

“Art,” Zhou Zekai commented.

“Yeah, like paper folding!” Fang Rui said.

“There’re too many detachments for that.” Wu Yuce shook his head.

“It doesn’t have to be exact, they’re similar.” Fang Rui rolled his eyes at him. “Show some imagination.”

Wu Yuce gave him a flat look.

“There has to be a limit,” Yu Wenzhou said, looking over the recording.

“Does there?” Xiao Shiqin sighed. “Anything they can think of; so long as they know they need it, they can make it. There’s no limit to that.”

“But there’s a limit to what they can feasibly use with proficiency, or what they’ll be able to think up to accomplish whatever they need done,” Ye Xiu said. “Even if the number of possible transformations is enormous, they won’t bother to push it toward limitlessness, nor will they use them all at once. If we can find the general pattern in how they can think to counter us, then we can be prepared for the transformations they’ll reach for first. Predicting your opponent is halfway to defeating them.”

The tacticians nodded seriously; that was, of course, the point of preparation and tactics in the first place.

“What we need, then, is a way to push them to show their natural solutions to the problems we present early on,” Zhang Xinjie said.

They all turned to look at Ye Xiu.

He stared back at them for a moment, then realized what the look was for and laughed. “Of course I’m leading with Lord Grim.”

Another nod, and they went back to planning.

This wasn’t like the first round; they couldn’t afford to lose once just to get data, not when defeating the Infhilltes at all would be so difficult. If they didn’t take this seriously from the start, they wouldn’t have a chance to regret it after they lost. If nothing else, it was absolutely clear the Infhilltes were serious about both their preparations and their playing.

This could be seen even from their first map choice, a long bridge through an enormous tube-like hall, where light seem to come from every side through stained glass windows. It was visually confusing, limited lateral motion, and was greatly advantageous to the Infhillte, who could fly near indefinitely. It was an excellent map to use against Earth, especially if they intended to test their opponents—which they obviously did. The real struggle of using this round to collect data was that the Infhilltes would be doing the same thing at the same time. Whether either side could be considered to be playing as usual was debatable.

Ye Xiu shot Anti-Tank Missiles at his opponent in a triangle; his opponent turned into a spear to dart through them, then a gun midway to return fire. Ye Xiu opened the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella to block, then inverted it and used Reverberant Shockwave; in the distance, the stained glass windows shattered, but the Infhillte had turned itself into a receiving dish that harmlessly bounced and returned the effects. The battle went on like this, one form to another, faster and faster until Ye Xiu fired Pulsar through a gap in the speartip that had only barely opened, faster than any other usage of the skill before, and clearly outside of the Infhillte’s expectations. The Infhillte was fast, but not faster than light; with a hole melted through it, it could no longer change from the bladed and mirrored fan it was in when the shot hit. Ye Xiu immediately tossed out a grenade, lodging it in the hole while his opponent was still reeling, and the Infhillte was blown to bits.

His next opponent tried to keep its distance, but the width of the hall was only so much, and Lord Grim had an absurd number of movement skills that allowed him to dart back and forth along the length of the bridge, chasing every time the Infhillte fled. Since he wanted to see how they reacted to various classes, he had to make sure they were dealing with his various class skills, not just shooting steadily at a long-distance target. The pros that followed each had their own way of ensuring the Infhillte would have to stay still long enough to properly face them as well: Cloud Grasping Fist, Shadow Cloak, Soul-Devouring Crimson Grip, they dragged their opponents to the bridge to have at proper facedown. Perhaps the Infhillte were still being cautious, but when the group arena ended, Earth was actually up by one point.

In the team competition, they were completely unable to maintain that lead.

The Infhilltes plowed through them with insulting ease, perfectly prepared no matter what the pros threw at them. Every attempt at strategy by Earth’s team was deconstructed as soon as it could start, every counter Earth tried to employ bowled over or rendered pointless by yet another transformation. For the first time since the tournament began, Earth not only lost, they were totally and completely suppressed.

“Did you get them all?” Ye Xiu asked Yu Wenzhou when the team came down from the stage, subdued.

Yu Wenzhou slowly shook his head, gaze somewhat helpless. “Maybe? But I really can’t say just from watching once. Up until the end, they were pulling out new forms.”

Ye Xiu sighed. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”

In the post-match interview, Ye Xiu was calm and sincere. “This is our strategy,” he said.

The reporters gaped. “How?!” one finally asked. In what way was losing the first round against the defending champions a “strategy”?!

“It’s like procrastination,” he explained. “When you reach a certain point of stress your performance improves, and you can get it done all at once. Clever, right?”

There was no response. Every single reporter in the room, regardless of species or original culture, was struck speechless.

“How is he so full of shit?” Fang Shiqian asked, incredulous. Behind him, Zhang Jiale was wailing with either laughter or incoherent sobs. “Does he come up with it himself? Was he fed it a lot as a child? Where is it coming from?!”

“He’s always been like this,” Han Wenqing said, brows furrowed. “As long as I’ve known him.”

“Yeah,” Su Mucheng said thoughtfully. “Pretty much.”

“Look, they’re buying it!” Zhang Jiale gasped; probably laughter, then. “They’re just nodding along!”

“If we didn’t know from before that it wasn’t our strategy,” Wang Jiexi pointed out, “we might believe it too.”

Everyone stopped to think about it.

That…was actually, probably true…

Ye Xiu could tell them their strategy was for him to 1v10 the opponent and they’d be more concerned with how he was going to pull it off than whether or not he would.

“You’ve made me very uncomfortable,” Fang Shiqian told his captain. “I hope you’re fucking happy.”

“He wouldn’t lie to us about what the strategy was, though,” Yu Wenzhou said. “So that’s fine.” Ye Xiu valued teamwork, and also rarely, if ever, broke a promise. He actually said what he meant about 90% of the time, the remaining 10% being trash talk and strategic misdirection.

“When he’s on our team, anyway,” Huang Shaotian grumbled. “Which he usually isn’t.”

Yu Wenzhou gave him a look. “You thought he’d tell us his strategy flat out if we were opponents?”

Okay, fair.

“Actually, sometimes, yes,” Tian Sen said thoughtfully.

“Well, obviously. If he was always lying then he’d be giving you free information just as surely as if he always told the truth,” Chu Yunxiu said.

In this case, unbeknownst to them, Ye Xiu was only half lying. From the team’s point of view, the strategy was very, very much to win; backing themselves into a corner was too dangerous at this level of competition, when their opponent would be just as on guard as they were. However, on the agents’ side of things, the more betting rounds they had, the better. Earth was pretty much at the point where they could pay off the loan and buy back the planet, but complete independence was still a hint out of reach. It wasn’t at the point where they needed the betting round, since the disparity was small enough that they could hope for sponsors to fill it in, but winning the tiebreaker would put Earth in an actually fairly good position, intergalactically. They could buy a proper listing for Earth and the technology necessary to send themselves home without relying on the ambassadors that had run every aspect of their time in space so far.

Independence was freeing, but not at all cheap.

Of course, all of that would mean nothing if they didn’t win the championship and prove they were “worthy” of intergalactic recognition, despite their “primitive” technology. They had enough public clout now that they probably couldn’t be immediately annihilated without some blowback, but the ambassadors’ desire to avoid “some blowback” was a lot to bet their planet on. Only becoming a legally recognized intergalactic entity would give them any real security.

So, betting or not, the goal was, above everything else, to win.

“Did you find anything?” Ye Xiu asked when he finally rejoined the team the next day, his meeting with the military side of things over.

“Yes.” Though he was trying to seem unaffected, Yu Wenzhou’s voice carried a tinge of relief. “They’re mirroring, especially against Lord Grim or when they’re pressed to make a decision quickly.”

The tacticians had stayed up for a long time looking over the recordings they had, but they were finally able to pick out the relevant bits. “Even when there are better choices,” Xiao Shiqin continued, “the form they take is more than likely to be one the opponent just took, or at least just performed an action reminiscent of.”

Ye Xiu fired a gun; despite having moved forward enough that several other options could have worked, his opponent turned into a gun to fire back. Ye Xiu turned the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella’s canopy into a dish to fire Reverberant Shockwave, the Infhillte took the same shape rather than dodge or become clothlike to ride the wave backward. Later, Wang Jiexi used Shadow Cloak, when the skill ended his opponent became a cage to hem him in.

The decisions weren’t wrong, necessarily, they just… had a pattern.

And anything with a pattern could be taken advantage of.

“It’s salience,” Ye Xiu said, scanning over the examples they’d gathered. “When they’re pushed to reach for the first thing they can think of, whatever they’ve seen more recently sticks out first.”

Zhang Xinjie frowned. “Lazy.” He was of the opinion that analyzing every option and using the optimal solution was the best way to go about any fight.

“Maybe a little,” Yu Wenzhou allowed. “But it’s more like…they’ve gotten comfortable? No, complacent. They’ve gotten used to winning. If they were more worried about it, they wouldn’t take shortcuts.”

“So we lead them,” Ye Xiu continued. “If we plan out our fights right, we should be able to predict their next shift, or something close to it. The team competition, though…”

“There were many more variables,” Xiao Shiqin sighed. “Not only were they less likely to mirror whichever of us they were facing, they clearly had their own strategy they were following.”

“A shot caller, then,” Ye Xiu said. “One of them is better at watching the whole field at once, and that’s the one we need to target first. Either eliminate them, which may be hard to distinguish when they all look the same—or rather, equally different at any given time—or confuse them enough that they can’t give relevant orders.”

Behind them, there was a shriek and the sound of something heavy falling over, followed immediately by at least two sets of running footsteps. Yu Wenzhou winced.

Xiao Shiqin coughed. “At least we already have chaos covered.”

Indignant chattering broke out in whatever argument was happening in the other area. Something broke, loudly.

Covered, indeed.

Earth’s map choice for the group arena was a warehouse, crates stacked on and beside metal racks that went all the way to the ceiling. So long as Earth’s player knew what they were doing, there was nowhere on the map the Infhillte could go that was out of their reach.

Obviously, Earth’s players knew what they were doing.

Especially so for Lord Grim, who had more movement skills than any other player. He used Rotor Wing to get to the top of the stack, then opened fire on the approaching Infhillte, which turned into a set of spinning blades to reflect the bullets back.

As they’d hoped, mirroring.

Ye Xiu flipped the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella into spear form and jammed it between the blades, activating Rift. A magic wave would go around a dimension obstacle, but physical objects didn’t have it so easy: The Infhillte backed up with a somewhat metallic-sounding screech, one of its blades twisted oddly near the middle. Ye Xiu didn’t pause before using Sword Draw, sending a wave of light in the opponent’s direction, and they folded their blades inward at once to spear through it—but the injured one was a little slow, and the sword aura caught it at a bad angle, tearing it further back.

Like this, Ye Xiu led the battle step by step, one injury piling on another, predicting where the opponent would go next based on what it was most likely to think of first. Though it seemed from the outside like he just had extremely fast reflexes, they’d actually spent the week before the battle going over combinations that were most likely to remind the Infhillte of certain forms, and how to best press them to make a decision faster than they could consider their options. The warehouse, too, had few outward features that would bring to mind anything else for the Infhilltes, lowering the chances of making an unusual leap of logic. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough; Ye Xiu made it halfway through his third opponent before Lord Grim couldn’t go on.

The rest of Earth’s players didn’t have the luxury of changing their own weapon, but that didn’t mean they had no options. The third Infhillte was already fairly damaged, so Zhou Zekai handled it with his Three Step Gun Fu, not giving the opponent a chance to fly away again once he’d closed in on the warehouse floor.

The fourth opponent was obviously warier, staying as far away from Zhou Zekai as possible. The Sharpshooter didn’t mind, making his way to the top shelf of one of the middle racks in the warehouse, calmly dodging the lasers and major magic blasts on his way up. At the top, he used a Floating Bullet to knock one of the crates in the air and then Delivery Gun to send it crashing in the Infhillte’s direction.

Doing it from so far away, no matter how good his control, made actually hitting the Infhillte unlikely, but hitting it wasn’t the main point. When the Infhillte sliced through the crate as a giant blade, the contents spilled around it: a variety of heavy munitions. The Infhillte changed from a blade to a gun to return fire; the moment its barrel raised, a shot sounded.

The Infhillte exploded from within.

Zhou Zekai stood steadily in the middle of the warehouse, gun still raised to eye-level. He’d used Bore to shoot up the barrel of the Infhillte’s newly-formed gun, ending its battle in a massive internal explosion.

“What the fuck,” said Zhang Jiale, watching with the rest of the team; Xiao Shiqin nodded along mutely. “No actually, seriously, what the fuck.”

In the background, Fang Rui was laughing wildly.

The last Infhillte in the group arena was clearly their anchor, and Zhou Zekai hadn’t actually escaped the previous two opponents unscathed: It didn’t take long for it to finish him off, barely losing any health at all.

Su Mucheng entered the arena with a snap.

“Are you all going to play silently?” the Infhillte sent in the public chat. “Why do none of you ever say anything?”

“Oh. Hello,” Su Mucheng sent in reply, adding on a smiley face. “Little Zhou is just shy.”

The silence that followed fully conveyed the Infhillte’s lack of belief; a shame, since it was true, no matter how flashily Zhou Zekai played.

“And our captain was a little busy,” Su Mucheng continued. “But he’s polite enough, if you’d spoken to him he would have replied.”

The Infhilltes actually didn’t often initiate conversations, for whatever reason, but they usually didn’t have to. Most opponents were either concerned with playing into the broadcasting or had something personal to express to the defending champions.

Earth, of course, didn’t have any loyal fans to appeal to nor personal interest in their opponents, beyond people to beat. Most importantly, though, they’d planned this group arena around directing the attention of their opponents, and without a good understanding of the Infhillte’s language and how their translated text might come across, it was better to keep the chat clean.

“If you’d like, though, I can be a little more courteous,” Su Mucheng continued.

“You think you’ll be less busy than your captain?” the opponent replied, preparing to attack in the same flurry that took down Zhou Zekai so easily.

“Free enough for an invitation,” Su Mucheng replied, unbothered. “So, shall we burn?”

Dancing Rain clapped, and the entire warehouse exploded at once.

Really, the Infhillte should have guessed from that one opened crate that the warehouse was a bomb waiting for an excuse to go off. As it was, it didn’t matter if the Infhillte was fast enough to dodge Airstrike, since there wasn’t a single safe space left on the map. Dancing Rain and the last Infhillte were rendered inoperable in the same moment, bringing the group arena to a close with Earth two points in the lead.

Earth’s map for the team competition was a house of mirrors, fully enclosed to be sure the Infhillte couldn’t fly out of it. Earth’s players split up at their starting point and ran convoluted paths without error despite the distorted and recurrent reflections, but the Infhilltes had trouble getting anywhere at all, baffled by what looked like an army of themselves, movement in the distance that was only their own reflections turning corners to come back at them.

Each one of Earth’s players stopped at a certain point, not just around the corner from where the Infhilltes had made it to, but the last section at which their reflections wouldn’t reach the Infhilltes. Despite the complicated distances and angles involved, in a single step Swoksaar’s Chaotic Rain fell over the confused bunch, signaling the start of the attack.

With some of the mirrors showing distorted reflections that reversed directions, it actually took the Infhilltes a moment to realize they’d lost control of their mech. In that time, Earth’s players had closed in and begun their assault. The Infhilltes with their commander were very different from the Infhilltes alone, and they were ready to counterattack the moment Chaotic Rain ended—only to find Earth’s team already running away, each in a different direction. Rather than continue to try to travel the map on their own, the Infhilltes split up to follow.

Yu Wenzhou was the first to turn around, calmly facing the opponent who turned the corner to follow him. It tried to attack, but the attack reflected back, engulfing the Infhillte in its own offensive magic.

A reflection?

It backed up and looked the other way to see Swoksaar standing just as calmly at the end of the other passage, before turning to walk away. It gave chase, alerting its allies to the fact that the mirrors could reflect attacks as well—no wonder Earth’s team had been so careful not to hit any in their earlier ambush.

Just as it turned the corner to follow, Hexagram Prison fell around it, reflected back again and again in the surroundings, making it impossible to see Swoksaar at all. In the distance, gunshots sounded; Zhang Jiale had begun to face his opponent.

Curses fell on the Infhillte caught in the prison, corroding the mech at the edges and slowing it down. When it finally was free again, it raced around looking for Swoksaar, rushing forward the moment it found him with claws extended. It sent a tendril of magic before it to make sure there was no mirror there, but there was no sign of the magic’s reflection, so as Swoksaar began to cast the Infhillte increased its speed—and slammed directly into a mirror at an odd angle, breaking it into enormous shards that cut through the Infhillte’s mech.

The mirrors didn’t reflect attacks?!

Swoksaar finished his cast, and Grasping Ghost flew forward, ripping material from the still-damaged mech on the way through. This skill, the Infhillte knew, was an accurate predictor of the Warlock’s location, so it rushed at the Swoksaar standing in the direction it came from without hesitation, snapping its mech into the form of a gun despite the damage it had taken and opening fire. So angry was the Infhillte that it didn’t even notice its bullets creating perfect holes in midair, and it barely felt it when it crashed trough the pane of glass in its way.

Another mirror?!

But no, Swoksaar was still there; it had been plain glass, now covering the Infhillte that had barreled through it in little shards that meant every further attempt at transformation would cause it more damage. But it wouldn’t stop it from striking Swoksaar now, and it hit the Warlock at full speed like a bat.

Except that the Swoksaar standing there was an illusion that burst immediately into smoke; the real Swoksaar was now behind the Infhillte, using Grasping Ghost’s return to heal what little damage he had received from the bullets as he again moved out of sight, his form seeming to turn three different corners at once.

In its booth, the Infhillte howled in frustration.

The Infhillte following Huang Shaotian had received notice that the mirrors did not, in fact, reflect magic, so when the Blade Master darted behind one for protection, it didn’t hesitate to blast the most offensive magic it had as it flew forward.

The magic reflected.

In the public chat, Huang Shaotian continuously chattered his amusement. “You were right, that one was the real me!” he sent, continuing on from before. “But you have to watch out for those mirrors, you know, you can’t just ignore them. Oh, that one wasn’t me, your loss. Now think, think. Where have I gone now? What do you see?”

Nothing; unbelievably, given how many reflections there were down any given hall, there was no sign of Troubling Rain at all. The Infhillte traveled forward, searching everywhere, until suddenly: “Not that way!” in the public chat, and the Infhillte was cut in a straight line from behind with Downwind Sword Slash. Troubling Rain had reappeared, also from nowhere.

A step, grinding, the mirrors shifted: Troubling Rain was gone again.

“Is this all you have?” the Infhillte sent, incensed. “Petty tricks and running away? One-shots that would never work if we were expecting them? Are you really so desperate? You have to know this won’t work forever. Even here, however these mirrors work, we already know they aren’t immune to physical attacks. We might as well just blast them all to pieces!”

“Desperate? Where do you see us being desperate?” Huang Shaotain replied, appearing and disappearing around the corner.

The Infhillte smashed through the mirror and found nothing on the other side.

“I feel like we’ve been very methodical this time, don’t you think? Where would you get the idea that we were desperate?”

Yu Wenzhou’s initial use of Magic Mirror to make the Infhilltes think the mirrors reflected magic and throw his own pursuer off his trail, then again later with Permeate in order to pass the Magic Mirror through a wall and into the mirror Huang Shaotian needed when his opponent got too close—although they were in different areas of the map, the two of them weren’t actually that far from each other, physically.

“Now that’s just insulting, look at all the hard work we’ve done, how is any of this desperate, aren’t we just winning?”

Huang Shaotian again passed through the “door” he’d made in a mirror wall with careful use of Quantum Blade at its corner, instantly moving from one network of mirrored hallways to another, and landed another attack.

“Even if you win here, do you think you can win against us on even ground?” the Infhillte replied as it gave chase, smashing more and more mirrors—none of which showed any sign of holding up or reflecting back no matter what they were hit with. “With techniques as fragile as this? You’re trying so hard to get to a round you won’t have the ability to win, just because you need that victory so badly. You don’t care at all about what any of the other planets might have wanted or needed from this tournament, you don’t care about the long term, and you don’t care about the process. For you, winning is all that matters. How is this not desperate?”

“Winning is all that matters because winning is all that ever matters,” Huang Shaotian replied immediately. “It has nothing to do with your tournament, we’re always like that. Besides, you’re not talking about desperation anymore—isn’t that just utilitarianism? And if you want to talk who’s more utilitarian, wouldn’t you guys be the more likely bet? Think about it! Before we came here, we were all just playing a game, just like this, for fun and maybe money, but mostly for glory. Because that’s what it was, to us. Just Glory. We didn’t ask to get put in a tournament with high stakes, we just went with it because that’s what we got, but we aren’t players raised to reach this championship. Not like you, with your teams meant to represent your whole damn planet from the start, for whatever reason you wanted to do it in the first place. We didn’t get to study you all beforehand, we’ve got no idea who you are, how can we care what your goals are? And in any case, this is a competition, why would that matter to us? Just like it doesn’t matter to you, I don’t see you crying over our circumstances.”

A whole wall of mirrors shattered with the force of the Infhillte’s hit; Huang Shaotian attacked from the side instead.

“But you know what? We aren’t crying over it either. We’ve never doubted we can win, and this game is just like our game, for the most part, with a lot more content. Do you know why we become players at home? Because we love it. We want to be here. We want to play, even when our society didn’t support it, even when people looked down on us, even when we didn’t make the most money or have the most perfect skills for it.” Huang Shaotian’s hit was a little more vicious, thinking of Blue Rain’s captains—all of them, really, who were or weren’t what the Glory Pro Alliance wanted or needed as time passed, but had loved the game they came there to play, no matter what.

And before this match, Zhang Jiale saying “this could be the last match of Glory we ever play,” because after they won, why would the government keep the game going? What would they need it for?

“Don’t be ridiculous, we still have the tiebreaker,” Sun Zheping had immediately replied.

“Oh yeah!” Zhang Jiale had perked up, and no one pointed out that if they lost they wouldn’t get there, or that not everyone would get to play, or that one more round was nothing in the grand scheme of a pro’s career.

Here they were, at the end of Glory. Not just for the active pros, either, but for every single person who had ever played and loved the game, for all the friends who only met each other through a computer screen, for all the people who had no idea Glory had a single thing to do with aliens or saving the world but had thrown their hearts and souls into it anyway.

“The official name for this map is Hall of Mirrors,” Huang Shaotian said suddenly, slipping out of sight again. “But do you know what else it’s called?”

Quantum Blade struck through the wall he’d just passed, slicing off the edge of the Infhillte’s mech.

“A funhouse.” Huang Shaotian followed through with a Headwind Strike; the Infhillte retreated, the cage of sword light jumped to follow before his opponent could finish preparing its next shift. “We’re having fun here, you know? Aren’t you all having fun?”

“Of course!” Zhang Jiale replied immediately in the public chat.

“Obviously,” Sun Zheping followed.

“Yes,” Yu Wenzhou actually took the time to send.

“When am I not?” Ye Xiu finished the sound off.

The Infhilltes were baffled.

“See?” Huang Shaotian continued. “We’re having a great time. We’re having a great time, because we aren’t worried. We’re having a great time, because we’re going to win. So you look at the two teams here, in a map like this, with techniques as fragile as this—”

As one, Earth’s team pointed their weapons toward the walls instead of their opponents: With a crash, the center of the map shattered, leaving the Infhilltes bunched together in their small clearing and surrounded on all sides.

“You tell me who’s having more fun,” he finished. In his booth, his grin was as sharp as shards of glass.

The Hundred Blossoms style, finally freed from the constraints of an all-mirror environment, swallowed them in disorienting light.

The match hadn’t ended there, Sun Zheping falling first due to the use of Blood and Blossoms as it was originally created, with the Berserker firmly amidst the explosions. The damage they’d done in the meantime was absolutely worth it, though, incapacitating more than one of the Infhilltes. The captain of the Infhilltes, kept very busy by Ye Xiu and to some extent Huang Shaotian’s continuous chatter for most of the earlier match, was able to force them out the opening and back into the maze. They successfully met up with their sixth player, a feat on its own in a map so disorienting, but by then Zhang Xinjie and his impeccable grasp of angles and positioning had arrived to support Earth. With Earth’s superior understanding of the environment and the continued confusion of the mirrors around them, there was never a chance the Infhilltes would secure the overwhelming victory they needed to win the round. Earth had made it through to the tiebreaker.

There was even less that Earth’s team could do to prepare this time than the round before, quite certain the tournament’s organizers weren’t so stupid as to try to sabotage Earth again, given how it’d gone last time—and that Fang Shiqian’s comments about it were both public and not subtle. This time, if another round of unfavorable maps showed up, people were bound to notice.

So the pros were, instead, collectively enjoying the wonder of zero gravity.

“You’re not worried?” Babysitter asked, definitely worried enough for all of them. In the background, Huang Shaotian chattered excitedly over the view, bouncing from support to support. “You don’t need to prepare, or something?”

“Adjusting your mentality is an important part of preparation,” Ye Xiu said casually. “And it’s good for us to show our faces, right? So more people are familiar with Earth and its inhabitants.”

“Yes, but…most teams seclude themselves before important matches.” If Babysitter had hands, they would almost certainly be wringing them. “Everyone else in the playoffs has done that. Even the Infhilltes are secluded right now.”

“There, see? They’re scared of us. If they’re so scared, what do we have to worry about?” Ye Xiu laughed.

Babysitter vibrated with disbelieving agitation, but the pros were having a good time, spinning and nearly swimming and bouncing around in their suits.

“Except maybe injuries,” Ye Xiu added. “Fang Rui, seriously, don’t stick your fingers places you don’t know anything about!”

“It looks soft!” he complained, but obediently retracted his hand from the smokelike wisps trailing from the edges of the nearby structure. Lin Jingyan, his usual minder, had gone with Sun Zheping to keep Zhang Jiale from excitedly climbing his way into every single crevice he could find to get a better angle on the planet spinning below.

“I think I understand the name you gave me,” Babysitter suddenly said.

“Oh?” Yu Wenzhou was interested, and also firmly not paying attention to the way Huang Shaotian had set himself spinning. If he thought he was going to throw up, he’d probably stop. “Does it not translate well?”

“I thought it was a little incongruous,” Babysitter sighed. “But they are kind of like little ones, always wanting to engulf things they know nothing about.”

There was a long, considering silence as the nearby humans looked at Babysitter—who did not need a suit—and actually thought about how the jelly blob might work, as an entity. Was “engulfing” like eating, or just picking up, or maybe walking through…?

“Yup, just like that,” Ye Xiu said easily, and so the rest of them never had the chance to ask.

Chu Yunxiu tried to shove Ye Xiu in retaliation, but he dodged and her motion continued into Zhao Yang instead.

“What?” he asked, surprised by the sudden assault.

“You’re it,” Su Mucheng said from the side without hesitation.

And that was how the whole team got dragged into a massive game of tag, which went on until their suits started complaining at them about the serious lack of air to replace what they’d spent on all that movement and laughter.

They loaded into a map like a volcano, rivers of lava moving sluggishly down a slope, occasional vents of overheated air nearby.

“We looked down on you before; we apologize,” the Infhillte captain said, their first player this time. “I hope we can have a good game.”

“It seemed like more of a misunderstanding than anything else,” Ye Xiu replied. “So I’m sure we will.”

His opponent was absolutely serious this time, which maybe wasn’t the best thing for Earth’s easy victory, but it was a good sign for Earth’s reputation as a whole. If they were taken seriously, especially by a culture with as high a status as the Infhilltes currently had, then they were considered a culture worth respecting.

The Infhilltes actually did have their own reason to win the championship this year: It was a rule, never used but still existent, that any planet that won three consecutive championships could be made an equal partner in running the tournament. Not only was that an incredibly lucrative position to be in, it would allow them some say in changing the unfair rules the tournament involved, to make the game better overall and to help some of the planets continuously exploited by the current cycle. It was also the safest position for any society to be in, intergalactically, since to some extent this tournament had completely replaced “barbaric” wars.

Was it a good enough reason to want to win over Earth? Maybe to them. To Earth, of course, it couldn’t be.

But the pros were used to this kind of thing, which was why they’d never bothered to learn what motivations their opponents had. Not only did it not matter why someone else might want to win when they were standing in your way, but none of them would ever dream of throwing a match even in the normal season. Only one team could be champion; that was the nature of competition. None of them would sit around comparing who had the most valid reason to want to win.

If you wanted to win, you had to play better than your opponent. That was all.

The very first transformation of the Infhillte was into a form Ye Xiu had never seen before; rather than figure out what it might do, he skipped backward out of the way of the…blast? It seemed magic-related, in any case. In the next instant the Infhillte had become a chain, whipping forward to wind around Lord Grim. Ye Xiu opened the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella and used an updraft from a vent to lift himself out of the way. In an instant his weapon shifted again, Gatling Gun firing down at the Infhillte below, which immediately became a whirling vortex to avoid damage and chase after Lord Grim as if to eat him. Ye Xiu flipped the umbrella around and used Reverberant Shockwave, rocketing himself away and forcing the Infhillte to shift into a more integrated shape or be blown apart.

The two battled across the length and breadth of the map, forms shifting several times within the same second. Glory would never have a true Unspecialized versus Unspecialized match, but Su Mucheng imagined that if they had, it would have looked something like this. The Infhillte shifted again, crashing toward Lord Grim like a brick wall, and this time Ye Xiu flipped the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella around, the end gaping where he’d drawn the sword, and slammed the butt of the spear into the Infhillte.

Black Hole, the additional skill added to the sheathlike shaft of the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella, didn’t tear reality the way Rift did on the other end. Black Hole pulled at it, gathering it close, and had to be used in close range. Although it wasn’t quite a suicide skill, it was close to it.

The Infhillte’s mech and Lord Grim were instantly pulled into the point of contact, though the Infhillte, actually being the point of contact, more drew inward in an awkward crumpling completely unlike its normal fantastical changes.

“You had something like this?” the captain of the Infhilltes sent.

“As you can see,” Ye Xiu sent in reply, Lord Grim’s arm twisting unpleasantly, “it’s something I’d rather not use. But you’ve made a strong case for its necessity.”

With the hand still holding the sword, Lord Grim executed another skill: Wave Wheel Slasher. The crumpled Infhillte and Black Hole were neatly sliced out of reality, pulled into Wave Wheel Slasher’s alternate dimension and freeing Lord Grim. Ye Xiu cast a Small Heal on himself, since he had the time, then bombarded the caught Infhillte with attacks.

“Well played,” the captain sent, as Black Hole ended just before Wave Wheel Slasher, expelling the crumpled mech directly into the lava pit below. Ye Xiu returned the compliment; behind him, the system announced his win and removed the two mechs from the scene.

The moment the next battle began, Ye Xiu was already raising the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella to fire off Pulsar purely from memory.

“You aren’t even going to exchange greetings first?!” his opponent sent in the public chat; Ye Xiu had hit.

“Hello,” Ye Xiu replied. “Sorry, I’m a little low on time.”

Spirit Guidance and Reverberant Shockwave made another appearance as a combination. Although his opponent really was taking him seriously, it was obvious that their captain was their best player, likely sent specifically to counter Ye Xiu. It wasn’t at all the wrong move: About halfway though the battle with the second opponent, the system announced the Infhillte’s win.

Not only was the fight against the Infhillte captain taxing, Black Hole was a seriously powerful skill that couldn’t be defended against—not even by its user. Lord Grim was already an extraordinarily complex mech, more so than any of the others, for having so many different types of skills in it at once. To wantonly tug at those mechanisms with a fierce gravitational pull was asking for trouble; Ye Xiu might have figured out how to keep the skill from spelling instant defeat for its user, but he couldn’t make it without repercussions. With Lord Grim’s systems so out of alignment, lasting even half a battle afterward was already pretty good.

Earth’s second player was Zhang Jiale, who was able to blast the still confused Infhillte to its death through his customary lightscreen. The third opponent, though, was coming in fresh, and had faced Zhang Jiale’s Hundred Blossoms style in the team competition before. It thought it was prepared to burst straight through the lights, and was mostly doing fine, until it ran across someone within them.

The Infhillte jerked back, shocked, trying to dodge the swing of a sword that disappeared in the next light burst. Had it actually been there?

The light cleared and the Infhillte advanced, only to be met again with another sword slash—this time, it went tumbling backward.

It really was the Swordsman! It had to be, the partner from last time, definitely he was there in the center of the lights. The Infhillte went back in, determined to destroy the opponent, but none of its attacks managed to hit, even if the swordsman sometimes struck him back.

“You can’t gang up on people!” the Infhillte sent, confusing its watching teammates. Obviously the Gunner was alone?

After the Infhillte lost, it would try to explain to its teammates the Swordsman in the light, trying to justify its inexplicably “mistargeted” attacks. It wasn’t until the next Infhillte loaded in, though, that it knew what its teammate had meant.

There was definitely a Swordsman there!

The Infhillte, another one that had faced Blood and Blossoms the round before, backed up quickly, accidentally throwing itself into the lava. Zhang Jiale focused his fire as much as possible, dropping Mirage to save mana.

Mirage, the Silver weapon Hunting Seeker’s additional skill, made use of heat waves and light distortion along with expert positioning to create the illusion of another player within the lightshow of the Hundred Blossoms style. For the most part it was just Dazzling Hundred Blossoms’ own shadow, but it had a few well-timed explosions behind the distortion to give the illusion a feeling of weight. It wasn’t perfect, so they’d decided to keep it in reserve for opponents that had already faced Blood and Blossoms and would therefore be expecting someone to appear in the middle of Zhang Jiale’s attacks, even if they knew he couldn’t be there.

The skill had come about from the fact that Zhang Jiale’s Hundred Blossoms style had, to some extent, a bit of a hole in the middle where Sun Zheping was supposed to go. This was how he’d practiced the style for years now, so while obviously he could shift the true target for damage within the scattered explosions, there was enough space for someone to waltz through, if they understood the pattern enough. Ye Xiu had shown before that an opponent could analyze that pattern from the outside, and they didn’t want to take any bets on what aliens and their far more advanced technology might be able to accomplish. Rather than push Zhang Jiale to change his style enough to fill in the center, Ye Xiu had suggested he make use of it to further confuse his opponent.

They couldn’t take advantage of a space if it appeared, in their eyes, to already be filled.

Keeping up a mana-intensive style for this many opponents was possible if he left some calculated openings, but not ideal, and definitely not infinitely sustainable. Once he ran out, he had to leave the stage.

“Nice work,” Sun Zheping said as Zhang Jiale settled back in next to him.

Zhang Jiale gave him a cheeky grin. “Couldn’t have done it without you!”

Sun Zheping laughed and shook his head before turning back to the screen to watch Fang Rui’s battle.

What of it could be shown, anyway.

It was a largely flat field, but even without Zhang Jiale’s interference, the lava and fumaroles would ensure that there was a decent amount of distortion in the atmosphere and even steam cover. Fang Rui lost himself in this confused atmosphere, waiting for his opponent to come close enough to use his additional skill, Camouflage.

And, in the meantime, he would set traps.

Camouflage made Doubtful Demon disappear completely through every known method of monitoring, but not physically, so he had to stay in places his movements couldn’t be followed or heard. Still, it had far fewer restrictions and far more power than Stealth, and it meant he could venture completely out from cover once his opponent came close enough without worry.

Leaping Blade, Air Jump, Doubtful Demon seemed to bound upward as he abruptly stabbed into the Infhillte, sending it crashing down along with him before jumping away again. The Infhillte was caught in a waiting Spike Trap, and Fang Rui began his assault. Before the skill ended, he abruptly retreated back into the steam, crouching behind rocks and steam banks as he went. The Infhillte rolled forward to follow him, directly into an Inferno Trap.

Fang Rui’s opponent rolled again to get out of it, but in trying to launch itself off the ground rolled into yet another Spike Trap, this time over an active vent.

In a second Fang Rui used Shining Cut to return to where the Infhillte was, immediately beginning his assault. In addition to the damage from the superheating from the vent, the Infhillte found itself incapable of proper transformation before Fang Rui’s time ran out and he darted off again. It limped after him, but at this point, the battle was already decided.

The next opponent was warier, having seen Fang Rui’s methods, but Fang Rui was very capable of changing with what was appropriate for the battle at hand. They’d chosen to send him in the group arena this round for several reasons, but one of the major ones was his ability to shift as necessary along with the Infhillte’s changes.

“Are you here yet?” Fang Rui sent in the public chat; his opponent was immediately on guard, having recognized the pattern of Fang Rui speaking right before attacking from the previous battle.

The Infhillte shot at the most likely hiding spaces just to be sure, though it couldn’t see anything there, and received no response.

“Whoa, still so far?” came Fang Rui’s next message. “Do you need me to come a little closer?”

It was true that the Infhillte, due to moving cautiously, was still fairly close to its spawn point, but anyone watching the match would have trouble accepting this line: Fang Rui had used every quick movement skill available to him to get close to the Infhillte whilst under Camouflage, and was now crouched on the other side of a mound of lava, waiting patiently for his opponent to pass by. “So far” was a completely inaccurate descriptor of their relative positions.

“There’s no need, I’m coming,” the Infhillte sent, unconsciously starting to move forward a little faster.

Fang Rui’s position would soon become clear to his opponent since he’d long ago canceled Camouflage to save on mana, but rather than leave he peered around in the other direction, as if looking for the other mech. Then in a single instant of billowing steam, he used Shadow Clone Technique and Camouflage again in quick succession, leaving the crouching clone to be found by the Infhillte while he scaled the mound. The opponent turned when it saw him, preparing to strike at Doubtful Demon’s “unknowing” back.

“How unscrupulous!” Fang Rui sent, using the same combination of skills as before to land on top of the Infhillte’s form—currently a gun—and send it crashing down to the ground. Something they’d discovered the first round was that Infhillte, at least when surprised, didn’t have the strength to carry much more than themselves in the air. Most probably their “flight” had to do with their transformative ability, and they were either fairly light themselves or only capable of lifting as much weight as they transformed into. Through mech it was hard to tell, but since they could pack such a heavy punch even in midair—braced on nothing—Earth’s side had guessed it had more to do with their intent in transformation than anything physical.

In any case, so long as they were surprised, there was an opening, and Fang Rui was great at taking advantage of those.

As with the previous two rounds, Earth won the group arena.

Just as they’d intended to send Zhang Jiale for his ability to disorient and Fang Rui for his ability to generate opportunities for burst attacks—and therefore limit the amount that the Infhilltes’ transformation would factor into the fight at all—in the group arena provided the map wasn’t too unfavorable for them, so too did they have an ideal lineup in mind for the team competition: one that favored speed and an ability to adapt.

The map in this case was a series of overlapping bridges between halls and stairways, level after level layered over an open abyss. It wasn’t ideal, since there was still the option of falling to their deaths open, but there were many places to catch themselves and it was at least fully accessible to their grounded players. Ye Xiu, Yang Cong, Wang Jiexi, Han Wenqing, and Fang Shiqian loaded in.

The second thing Earth’s side did was identify the Infhillte’s shot caller, based almost solely on who went for Ye Xiu first. Ye Xiu dodged the captain’s assault, making his way to the room behind him; the captain followed him with single-minded intensity, prepared to pin Ye Xiu down for a one-on-one fight again, if it had to. Their last battle had already proven that they were an equal enough match on an open field, where Lord Grim could use his many movement skills to evade again and again. In an enclosed space, the Infhilltes’ captain was sure it’d have the edge over Ye Xiu.

The moment it was in, Ye Xiu used Shadow Clone Technique to get himself out again. Because the first thing Earth’s team had done was find out that the room they’d spawned into had a door that snapped closed rather spectacularly—from the outside.

“We could just leave it there by itself,” Ye Xiu sent in the team chat. It would rely entirely on how fast the Infhillte could think of a way to change into something small enough to slip out or, failing that, destroy the walls, but holding back the opponent’s captain for some time was already pretty good.

Han Wenqing’s reply was to use a Whirlwind Kick to hit the mechanism, closing himself in the room with the Infhilltes’ captain.

“You could literally just type ‘no’,” Ye Xiu pointed out, but he was grinning on his way back to the main battle stage.

“Aren’t you a close-range fighter?” the captain sent in the public chat. “Why did you choose such a bad matchup? You’re not the only choice your team has.”

“Because I won’t lose,” Han Wenqing sent in reply, fists already knocking together to activate Perseverance. “And I won’t step aside.”

For stalling someone as long as possible, there really wasn’t a better combination.

It wasn’t just Han Wenqing’s usual steadfast confidence, either: There was a reason they’d chosen Han Wenqing despite other, more versatile options.

Of the pros, Han Wenqing had spent the most time sparring with Lord Grim.

More than anyone else on the team, Han Wenqing had experience fighting an opponent that shifted into forms he wasn’t expecting. Not even Ye Xiu could match him there, since the man obviously couldn’t spar against himself. Even if he could, the changes could never be “coming out of nowhere” for one of the people who’d helped design the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella. Initially, Han Wenqing hadn’t known anything about the umbrella or what possibilities it contained, but he insisted on sparring with Ye Xiu anyway. Now, he knew the transforming Silver weapon quite well, but in the beginning he’d had to rely completely on experience and reaction time.

The Infhillte changed from form to form with blinding speed, but Han Wenqing didn’t back down for a moment, following it from gun to knife to whirpool to lattice to propeller to spear without hesitation. Perseverance struck true again and again, rattling the captain’s mech to the core.

In this like anything else, Han Wenqing refused to be left behind.

Back in the main room, Wang Jiexi was flying through the air, moving from target to target with the kind of speed that was dizzying for humans and, at the very least, threw the Infhilltes off balance. To keep track of so many opponents at once, Wang Jiexi was using Stardust Extermination’s additional skill, Spider’s Web. Spider’s Web worked best in enclosed spaces and wasn’t particularly strong, but once caught in it it was hard to get rid of. The web caused a nearly imperceptible drop in speed and sharpness of movement, which was already a pain for an opponent like the Infhillte that changed often, but every action the opponent took would also immediately come to Wang Jiexi’s attention, and he had a direct line to their location so he could reach them with the fastest speed.

Paired with a playstyle like the Magician’s, it was any opponent’s nightmare. Wang Jiexi darted from place to place, raining fire, destruction, and confusion in his wake.

Yang Cong was also using his Dancing Shadow’s additional skill, At Your Back, to contend with the Infhilltes’ varied abilities. Yang Cong, as the player of the best Assassin in the Alliance, was more than fast enough on his own to keep up with the Infhilltes’ changes. The real problem was their near-indefinite flying. Assassins could move quickly and had a few skills to help them get up high or jump out of range with due haste, but they could not fly.

With At Your Back, though, he didn’t need to. The skill allowed him to instantly move anywhere within a certain radius of its set target, as many times as the user wanted while it was still active. Conceptually, this would allow an Assassin to stay out of sight in close range of their target; functionally, so long as Yang Cong used it fast enough, he could follow a flying target through the air for as long as he wanted. The skill would deactivate once he left the set radius, and it didn’t keep Scene Killer fixed in space in relation to his target: Once he appeared in his new location, he immediately began to fall. Again and again, he teleported to a new angle, stabbed and kicked off of the Infhillte’s new form, not allowing it to cast a single skill on any of its allies—though it was hard to tell due to the Infhilltes’ somewhat regenerative shifting abilities, they did have a healer, and Yang Cong’s target was it.

So long as he stuck to their mech, there would be no healing from their side in this battle.

Ye Xiu rejoined the scene from below, climbing up the various levels to where the battle had reached higher and higher over time, the Infhilltes doing their best to evade the persistent humans. Fang Shiqian’s cross lit again and again as he supported the two attackers taking on four Infhilltes at once.

“Remember to heal yourself, too,” Ye Xiu sent as he joined Wang Jiexi’s heavily outnumbered side of the battle, intending to ease the damage he was taking a little.

“Do I look like my idiot captain? I know how to take care of myself,” Fang Shiqian found time to reply.

The Infhilltes’ healer was the first to fall, between Yang Cong’s unremitting attention—running along the top of a mech that changed unceasingly beneath him, kicking off gun barrels and slicing into writhing spiked chains without concern for his plummeting health, much to Fang Shiqian’s irritation—and Ye Xiu’s occasional help from the side with gunshots and targeted magic.

“Do you need any help in there?” Ye Xiu asked Han Wenqing through the team chat.

“‘No’,” Han Wenqing sent in reply, actually in quotes as per Ye Xiu’s previous message.

Ye Xiu laughed, and Yang Cong stalked away to find the Infhilltes’ sixth player as his new target.

The Spider’s Web was practically invisible, so the sixth Infhillte had no idea that it threw itself into the same tangled setting as its teammates when it joined them in the open space at the center of the map. Yang Cong had at least partially listened to Fang Shiqian’s insistence that he stay in sight, by at least not attacking until the Infhillte was likely to seek the map’s center to escape him.

At this point, Fang Shiqian was pretty much used to it, and would take the wins he could get.

Though the pressure on him as their healer was quite high, given the kind of damage the Infhilltes could put out, Earth’s decision to focus on speed above all else hadn’t been wasted; all of them were at least decent at avoiding damage.

All except one, anyway.

Several floors below, an explosion rocked the walls of the old stone structure; up above, a bridge broke, striking an Infhillte into the abyss as it fell.

In the crumbling remains of a doorway stood the skeleton of Desert Dust, fist still extended.

“Can you maybe stay out of sight until you’re functional again?!” Fang Shiqian sent in the team chat, cross already lighting with a Holy Cure rather than the longer Holy Heal as Desert Dust came into view up the stairs; the question was largely rhetorical.

He already knew the answer.

“No need,” Han Wenqing replied. “I can fight to the end.”

Desert Dust, already more complete than mere moments before, settled into the horse stance; Emperor’s Fist flew toward the nearest Infhillte, slamming it into the wall with a sudden gale.

When the end of the battle came, it was marked with the spread of metal wings.

“That’s it?” Zhang Jiale asked as they came down from the stage.

“That’s it,” Ye Xiu confirmed.

“We won?” he asked again, as if he hadn’t just seen it on his own screen, as their sixth player, even if they actually never needed him to load in. Fang Shiqian’s title as the God of Healing was for many things, but certainly his ability to keep his team alive was one of them.

“We won.” This time the reply came from Han Wenqing.

“Oh,” Zhang Jiale said quietly. “We won.”

There was a moment more of empty silence, and then Zhang Jiale began to laugh, slowly at first and then more, until it became clear that he was actually just crying. He sat down heavily and leaned on Sun Zheping’s shoulder as tears trailed down his face, letting his partner rest his hand in his hair.

Sitting at the edge of the team, Zhou Zekai’s face also bore the trail of silent tears.

“Why are you crying?” Fang Rui said. “Winning is good, right?” But he found his own eyes tearing up as well.

“Winning is good,” Yu Wenzhou agreed softly. He didn’t say anything else.

“Of course it is,” Fang Rui repeated to himself. “We’re done! We can go home! We can—We can go back to—to—”

“To what,” Wu Yuce said, lips pressing tightly together, and that was what all of them had been trying not to think, but there it was.

To what.

Glory was made to play this tournament, this tournament that they’d won. They saved Earth, which was great, which was amazing, but it was too large-scale. How could it ever feel real? Lose a game, and the entire planet loses their lives? Humans just weren’t made to process consequences so big. For them, Glory was a game first, and everything else was a surreal backdrop to it—but now it was over. It was over, and some of them hadn’t even known when they’d made their last appearance, had their last chance to play. Tiebreakers chose the players as they progressed, so none of them could know until the last moment if they’d appear onstage one more time.

But now it was over, and that was it. Some of them had never even debuted. What did they go back to? Some of them had already planned their whole lives around Glory. What should they go back to?

Su Mucheng stared down at her lap quietly, looking at Dancing Rain, who had never won her promised championship. Chu Yunxiu put her face on her shoulder and breathed slowly.

“I want a smoke,” she said, with a subtle hitch in her breath. Su Mucheng hummed her reply.

Yang Cong sat down next to Zhao Yang with a sigh. “It was fun,” he said.

“Yeah,” Zhao Yang agreed, rubbing a thumb over Boundless Sea. “At least we got here. And…it was fun.”

Ye Xiu and Han Wenqing had stayed standing after the battle, the two of them facing the rest of the team. Fang Shiqian and Wang Jiexi had already gone to sit down, the healer bent over and pinching the bridge of his nose, the Magician tapping Vaccaria’s card with a blank face.

“Captain Ye,” one of the agents called. Ye Xiu closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded his understanding to the agent.

“You aren’t upset?” he asked Han Wenqing as he prepared to go to the post-match interview.

“What’s there to be upset about?” Han Wenqing said bluntly. “You’re going to get us back Glory.” His voice was firm and forceful, without the slightest room for dobut.

Ye Xiu breathed in, then laughed a little like a sigh. “Yeah, of course,” he said.

“And we won another championship,” Han Wenqing added, somewhat like an afterthought.

This time Ye Xiu’s laugh was just a laugh. “We did, didn’t we? Alright, you handle the children, I have to go.”

“If they’re children, so are you,” said Han Wenqing, a full year older than Ye Xiu himself.

“Sure, whatever.” Ye Xiu waved a hand lazily, already walking off. “I’ll be a child as long as I like.”

Ye Xiu kept his childhood in games and dreams of championships won together, in families built on shared goals and siblings eating their favorite foods.

His youngest years didn’t hold a lot of childhood, but he could fight to have it now, for a little longer.

Maybe, if he played his cards right, he could even have it forever.

“How are you feeling?” the host asked, a completely normal thing to ask the championship team, but such a loaded question for Earth.

“Like we didn’t want that to be the last game we ever play,” Ye Xiu laughed, not a single sign of unhappiness on his face, telling the truth with every word. If there were more games in the tournament, but that was their last, it would have meant Earth’s destruction, the end of any gaming at all; without more of the tournament, it was the end of Glory, so far as the government was concerned.

“Well, we’d love to have Earth in our tournament again next time!” The interview this time was part of the wrap-up for the tournament, an actual kind of show with a single interviewer. Accepting the championship and the rewards they’d won were a part of it too, of course. “You have to defend your championship, right?” The host smiled conspiratorially.

“Ah, I don’t think our government will go for it until we have a bit more to bet than our whole planet,” Ye Xiu said with an edge of lament. “Development first, they always say. But after that, who knows? Maybe you’ll see us again.”

He played his part as he should, and the host laughed, perhaps genuinely charmed, perhaps playing into the role as much as he was. In any case, the audience wasn’t the host, nor the tournament organizers, but the intergalactic community.

Weren’t those games exciting? Wasn’t Earth so fun to see? You don’t have to help us develop, but we’d thank you to leave the way clear for us, hm? Isn’t that easy enough?

It was a little thing, but just sowing the seed of “let them grow” was enough. With the tournament’s end, Earth became the first ever base-level planet to use a championship to become a full member of the intergalactic community, properly instated and with all the rights that entailed. The matter of the entry free was handled with ease, repaying in one instant the “loan” they’d been forced to take with Earth as their collateral, along with the interest of seven years of borrowed technology, seven years of access to resources they otherwise never could have seen. It was expensive, but Earth had bet the right way every single time.

They could pay.

The pros, fully suited, were looking over the transportation technology Earth had bought with the funds they’d had left over.

“You seriously think this is safe?” Fang Shiqian asked dubiously.

“It’s not as fancy as the one you might have used to get here, but it definitely works,” Babysitter said excitedly; they were very happy Earth had managed to win.

“It sends us through…a wormhole?” Xiao Shiqin asked.

“Yeah! But it has coordinate inputs, it’s not just a standard connection. It can put you exactly where you want to go, down to the centimeter! No fuss about momentum, either, you’ll be fully stationary on arrival.”

“And there’s nothing dangerous about a wormhole?” Zhang Xinjie clarified.

“Well, it has a huge amount of crushing force, your spaceship has to be able to handle it,” Babysitter said thoughtfully. “But that’s about it! Very safe. You should be fine.”

“Alright, we’re not window shopping, this was all already figured out,” Ye Xiu said, herding them away. “We’re here to say goodbye, not interrogate Babysitter.”

“Bye, Babysitter,” Fang Rui said morosely. “I’ll really miss you.”

“Ah, little troublemaker.” The universal translator actually managed to convey “fond” quite well. “I’ll miss you too.”

“Yeah,” Fang Rui sighed. “So, as a going away present, I don’t suppose I could touch you at least once—”

“That’s all the words for you today,” Lin Jingyan said, hauling him away. “No more words to people. Thanks for putting up with us all this time.” The last was addressed to Babysitter, who did a quivering thing the universal translator helpfully interpreted as a laugh.

The pros entered the spaceship after saying goodbye and taking a last look around the place, committing everything about it to memory.

“I’m not really looking forward to going home,” Zhang Jiale said, sighing as he looked back yet again.

“Neither am I.” Fang Shiqian sounded significantly grumpier. “Massive crushing force, what the fuck.”

“I think you just like to grumble,” Fang Rui said. “The whole military operation thing isn’t gonna let us all die at the last second, that would be too stupid. You’re too caught up on trivial things, I’m not buying it.”

“Trivial?” Fang Shiqian asked incredulously. “Can you think of worse ways to die?”

“Look, talk to me once you’ve been swallowed whole and slowly digested by a clear—”

“We do not talk about the sixth matchup,” Fang Shiqian hissed.

They’d met with their sixth opponents after they won, to show off their championship trophy—which they’d all been pretty excited about once the whole tears of relief and grief thing had passed—and thank them for their huge amounts of help.

They were mostly trying to forget it, as they did everything that had to do with that particular group of aliens.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to get past those rounds,” Zhang Jiale said suddenly. “Ever. In my whole life. I think it’ll haunt me for literally the rest of my days.”

“Fucking same,” Fang Shiqian said with unsurprising vehemence.

“I mean, just the way they moved was bad enough, but then their mouths—”

“No,” Zhou Zekai said, covering Fang Rui’s mouth—ineffectively, since they had their helmets on, but it got the point across—with one hand. “No.”

Fang Rui made a rude noise. “Fine, whatever. I can still complain to you, can’t I, Captain Lin?”

Lin Jingyan gave it a moment’s thought, because he was at least outwardly a good person, and then said, “Hm, actually, no.”

Fang Rui wailed about his terrible abandonment, but no one was going to save him.

Not when it came to the sixth matchup.

The spaceship appeared, after a moment of complete surreality, exactly where it was before they’d left. Exactly. Down to the centimeter.

“Babysitter didn’t lie,” Zhang Jiale said, pressing his hands together reverently. They’d been allowed to watch from the bridge this time, to see the spaceship’s cruising and transportation in action. Whether or not that was actually a good idea given the terror involved was hard to say, but they’d done it—and it was, undoubtedly…inimitable.

“Of course they didn’t, Babysitter is the best!” Fang Rui said proudly.

“Oh shit I want to go outside, there’s real sun, can we go outside? We’re done, right, we got the whole debriefing, ‘don’t talk about this to anyone’ or whatever, can we go? We can go, right?”

“Sure,” Ye Xiu said. “You can at least go to the area right outside the facility, you’ll have to wait for anything further. This isn’t exactly a public location; there won’t be buses.”

“Sweet! Then I—”

“But you have to take the suit off first,” Ye Xiu reminded.

Huang Shaotian fell silent for a moment, and then: “I mean I guess I could…wait…”

“You have to take it off eventually,” Ye Xiu said, amused. “Do as you like for now, I have to go report.”

Not everyone could come on the trip, and Ye Xiu’s father was in charge of a whole department of operations too delicate to suspend randomly, so he hadn’t come along.

Not just the general, actually, but all of the military higher-ups would be involved. Intergalactic relations didn’t end with their championship: In fact, it could almost be called the beginning of the whole matter.

Ye Xiu received a commendation for his excellent control over the civilian assistants, which amused him greatly, and the offer of a reward of some sort, for both the “assistants” and, to some extent, himself.

“Glory,” Ye Xiu said without hesitation.

“A proper ranking?” one of the generals clarified. Ye Xiu was a special case due to the way his family worked, so he wasn’t actually ranked in the normal way, yet. “That can certainly be arranged.”

“No, the game,” Ye Xiu clarified. “That’s the civilians’ request. Glory. We want to keep playing.”

“You want to…what?!” The general was flabbergasted.

“Aren’t you tired of it?” another asked, incredulous.

Ye Xiu couldn’t help his grin. “I wouldn’t get tired even after a decade more.”

“It was an alien technology incubator,” one of the generals said, rubbing his face. “You had to play it like a death match.”

Ye Xiu shrugged. “It’s a good game.”

It showed what kind of personality the Ye family all had that Ye Xiu’s father, having been intent on making a game good enough his missing son couldn’t help but play it, was pleased at that.

“In addition,” Ye Xiu said, getting more serious, “we don’t know if we’ll be called back to the tournament again. Politics are never stable, especially in cultures we don’t understand and can’t predict, and rules can always change. High-level abilities take constant upkeep, and even then, this group of players won’t be young forever. If five or even ten years down the line, you need operators again, what should you do if there’s no one left to call on? The developers on my team should be amenable enough, and it’s no great loss to continue our weapons and technology development. I’m requesting an extension of this assignment.”

It wasn’t the request they were expecting, but the way he presented it, along with his report on the intergalactic community, made it sound extremely reasonable, even obvious.

The conclusion they came to was that Glory, as a game, would continue as usual.

“We were a little surprised the tournament was so short, though,” Ye Xiu’s father said. “It’s only been, what, maybe a week or two?”

Ye Xiu froze. “It’s been how long?”

When the pros stepped out of the facility, they had the same strange, queasy feeling they had walking in, an odd reaction to finally returning home victorious. It felt a little like they were walking too fast—or maybe too slow? They couldn’t tell—once they left the building proper.

“Wow, it’s hot,” Chu Yunxiu said, shading her eyes and looking up at the sun. “Shouldn’t it be winter?”

Ye Xiu was still in his suit, having forgotten to take it off on his way to see R&D. “How did you not notice the timestamps on the emails I was sending you?”

“In our defense,” said the head of the Glory devs awkwardly, “you didn’t notice that we were getting you updated technology literally the next day after you asked for it.”

“How should I know how efficient you are?” Ye Xiu asked, disbelieving. “But you, didn’t you need to eat and sleep? Shouldn’t you have noticed your ‘days’ were way too long?”

“Uh…” the devs looked from one to the other. “No?”

This was not the right answer.

Ye Xiu found and turned off the time dilation device the ambassadors had installed when Earth notified them of their intent to join the upcoming season. From what they understood from their connection to the intergalactic division, because they had that now, time dilation was a normal aspect of the tournament, so that all the different cultures and species had the same amount of relative time to play. This was also why the distance between the rounds was, very conveniently, an Earth week. The specifics of it were very confusing, and none of the aliens could explain properly because it was an aspect of intergalactic relations so ordinary not even one of them had ever bothered to think about it.

“So we have two weeks until season five of the Glory Pro Alliance begins,” Ye Xiu explained to the regathered pros. “Which is not an ideal amount of time to prepare, but way better than ‘season five didn’t happen on time’ or ‘season five will now never happen,’ so I, at least, am willing to take it. If any of you have suddenly decided you don’t care to continue in Glory, we can help you work that out with your team so there’s no penalty for breaking contract.”

Han Wenqing snorted, which the pros all felt encapsulated their feelings on that quite nicely.

“We’re really going back to Glory?” Xiao Shiqin asked, voice dripping his relief.

“Yeah.” Ye Xiu’s grin was insuppressible. “We are.”

Season five of the Glory Pro Alliance began with the announcement that God Ye Qiu would now be appearing for matches and interviews. The reporters were ecstatic, right up until they actually had to interview him—at which point they were brutally and abruptly not. Over time it came out that “Ye Qiu” was just his stage name, matching with his character, and “Ye Xiu” was his real name. This didn’t cause many waves; lots of people had stage names.

There were several reasons for this change, the major one being that Ye Xiu no longer had any reason to seriously hide from his family. Officially, though, having a false name and secretive personality wouldn’t do him any favors when it came to recruiting pilots later, should it come down to that. Of course, Ye Xiu mostly still didn’t do advertisements, save for those Su Mucheng really wanted to do together, or the ones Tao Xuan really, really needed, please Ye…Xiu, it’s just a picture of your hands—

So his image was largely maintained, and Ye Xiu patted Zhou Zekai consolingly on the shoulder when the Gunner’s face became a bigger and bigger deal and the poor, shy kid got more and more awkward about it. At least, though, Zhou Zekai’s relationship with the other top pros was already firmly established, and quite good. With a group like theirs and a secret that big, no amount of legally mandated discretion could stop the references.

Rookie chats, a single chat group devoted to just the new debuts each season, had always been a tradition, but over the years a new question became practically tradition as well:

“Okay but does anyone know why saying ‘the government wants to talk to you’ after you do something cool in Glory is a meme in the older gen players??? anyone????? they're all laughing I don’t know what it MEANS,” and variations thereof.

“Damn, Little Zhou, the government wants to talk to you,” Fang Rui called after Zhou Zekai shot his opponent straight up into the heavens.

Zhou Zekai gave a little half-smile; genuine amusement, Jiang Botao observed. But what on Earth was it about?

“Is it a code?” he finally asked, after a grinning Sun Zheping said it to a completely baffled Sun Xiang. “But then why would you say it to people who clearly don’t understand it?”

Zhang Jiale was cackling madly at Sun Xiang’s hilariously flustered and frustrated face.

“No,” Zhou Zekai said gently, patting Jiang Botao on the shoulder.

It was the one thing about Zhou Zekai Jiang Botao just couldn’t get a read on.

It drove him mad.

“These kids, really,” Lin Jingyan sighed. “Back in my day—ah, but you wouldn’t understand.” He waved it off with the air of an elder pardoning the uninterested youth.

Li Xun was very interested.

“It was the summer before season five,” Fang Rui told him, shaking his head solemnly. “You had to be there.”

“Will you stop that,” Li Xun groaned pathetically. “You didn’t debut until season five either!”

“Miss Wu, back me up!” Fang Rui called across to Wu Yuce. Wu Yuce flipped him off automatically, which had also become an injoke—Fang Rui laughed way too hard—and then said, as an afterthought: “Yeah, he’s right.”

“My own teammate,” Li Xun sighed. “My own teammate.”

“That’s just how it is,” Fang Rui said, faux comforting. “There’s just no talking about what happened in the summer before season five.”

Li Xun resigned himself to his tormented curiosity. Even the captain wouldn’t help him, he’d already tried; there was really nothing else to hope for.

The other big mystery, though much less mentioned due to the highly negative reactions and infrequency of its being brought up in the first place, was the unspeakable sixth matchup.

“Well, it isn’t so bad, really,” Fang Rui said in a match against Tiny Herb. “I mean, it’s nothing compared to the sixth matchup, so is there really—”

Fang Shiqian’s response was so violent he was immediately awarded with a yellow card.

“Fang Rui, please…” Lin Jingyan sent in the team chat. “I am also here.”

“Right, sorry Captain!”

Judging from Fang Shiqian’s face after the team competition, there would be no forgiveness, only murder.

“Anyone at all,” said the group chats. “Anyone. They’re using it like encouragement! Gao Yingjie, Lu Hanwen, it’s their own teammates and they still won’t explain the government thing, it’s been years, has anyone heard anything about it?!”

Sadly for the uninitiated, no one had.

(“Wow, it’s just like old times!” Huang Shaotian said excitedly, when they gathered for China Glory. “Meeting up, playing together, fighting for the country—”

“So,” Zhang Jiale cut in, grinning. “Are we fighting aliens?”

Ye Xiu sighed, showing every sign of disappointment. “You really shouldn’t call foreigners that; it’s very rude.”

The team went silent, half from confusion, half from disbelief, responses split perfectly on the year they debuted.

Su Mucheng giggled behind her hand.

“Seriously,” Chu Yunxiu said, shaking her head disparagingly—at Ye Xiu, at Zhang Jiale, it wasn’t clear. Maybe all of them, or even the reminder as a whole.

“The worst.”)