Volume 2 - CH 38

Playing Fish Trapped in Secret Room

Book 2: You’re Beautiful

Chapter 38

Ai Qing sat at the edge of the pool, wrapped in a bath towel. She dipped her feet in the water and let her mind wander.

Dt returned with her clothes and squatted down behind her. He put down the clean gauze and iodine on the floor, then he sat down legs crossed, “Let me disinfect your wounds first.”

“En.” She lowered her eyes to see his exposed knees under his shorts.

He did scrape his knees when he fell.  “Aren’t you going to disinfect and wrap your wound?”

He shook his head silently.  If both of them had bandages on at the same time, even if one is on the forehead and the other on a knee, it would look very strange to the others.  He didn’t want to cause her any trouble.

His clean fingers pulled out a cotton swab to wipe her forehead using disinfectant.

He disinfected and bandaged up her wound.

She kept her eyes lowered to avoid meeting his eyes.

In the quietness, she could feel every minute movement of his fingers.

After Ai Qing changed her clothes in the bathroom, they walked out of the room one after another.  They met Tatami and his friends in the elevator.  By now, most of the players from other countries had left the hotel.  Only the champion and runner-up clubs were still staying here.

Among these Koreans, there was a girl that kept staring at their direction, her eyes fixed on Dt. After these heavy weight players greeted each other, she nervously spoke to him in English, “Dt?  You are really tall……”

An awkward silence.

Suddenly, everyone burst into laughter.

The Koreans began to tease the girl in Korean.  Some players with better Chinese simply changed to Chinese.  “Wewe just flew out here from New York.  She almost cried because she missed your final match.  I can testify that her bedroom is full of posters of you which she made by herself.  She is a truly a super fan.”

“Too bad, you can only meet your idol in this kind of large tournament.”  Tatami laughed as he stretched out his hand to rub the young girl’s head.  “Dt, it was very enjoyable to have lost to you.  I hear that this is your last StarCraft competition?”

“Almost.”  Dt apparently felt more comfortable talking to a man,  “I’ll be playing Secret Room Storm in the next three years.”

“Me too, coincidentally.”  Tatami told him.  “These people here will all be playing Secret Room Storm, except Wewe.”

TUMA was the leader of the top three clubs in Asia.

Ai Qing quickly looked over the other players.  She didn’t recognize any of them.  Were all of them newcomers except Tatami and another StarCraft player?

“If you’re not leaving tonight, how about having one more game?”  Tatami was a straight forward person.  He directly challenged him for a battle.

Dt didn’t reply right way.

Tatami quickly spoke a series of simple numbers clearly.

It was a list of ranks from the Korean server.

Ai Qing instantly matched up the ranks with their ids.  Awesome!  During the exhibition tournament, the game was still in Alpha.  In other words, the invited players were all famous players from the more prestige clubs.

Famous players of other games wouldn’t necessarily be the top players in Secret Room Storm.

But now, two months after the Beta test, the rankings were already available.  It proved the above theory that too many hidden experts showed up.  The new game with new rules formed a new world.

Being able to play a game with TUMA before the Asian Tournament was an extremely rare opportunity.  Ai Qing quietly hid her right hand behind her back, trying to pull Dt’s clothes to give him a hint.

The feeling was kind of strange.  Oh, jeans?

She let go of her hand rapidly.

She forgot how tall he was……

“Ok.”  Dt answered suddenly.  “What time?”

“Tonight.”  Tatami smiled.  “Wait for my phone call after dinner.”

It was eight o’clock in the evening.

One heavyweight match of Secret Room Storm began in the twentieth floor of their hotel in Chicago.

Gun wasn’t no longer in the hotel.  Even if he was, Ai Qing figured that he wouldn’t think much of these people as to play an offline game with them.  Thus the line-up was 4 vs 4.  The Chinese side had K&K’s Dt and Grunt plus SP’s Ai Qing and Inin.  The Korean side was composed of four players from TUMA.

Ai Qing was preparing her keyboard and mouse, “What do you think of them?”

“Hard to say.  The data from the four major servers haven’t been standardized.  No one knows which server’s ranking carries more weight than the others.”  Grunt yawned and took off his glasses.  “I’m not in my best condition today.  Please bear with me.”

His spoke relaxedly like nothing was bothering him.

Ai Qing thought about what her sister had said then looked at Grunt.

According to her sister, the thing between Grunt and his ex-girlfriend had been going on for seven or eight months.  But other than that day, she hadn’t observed any abnormal behavior from Grunt.  He competed when there was a competition, trained when it was time for training, spoke with a sharp tongue when he felt like it, and joked when everyone was fooling around. He always hid his personal issues.  Nobody could see through him.

Actually…...everyone was the same.

No matter how many secrets were behind them, they always presented their best in public, doing what they should be doing.

That’s what living was.

They brought up the game on their screens.

She put on her earphones.  She saw Dt type message in the team’s channel: “Everyone, the top priority isn’t about winning or losing.  Do everything you can to understand their playstyle in preparation for the Asian Tournament.”

Inin replied: “Ok”

Grunt replied: “I’m not in good shape today.  Please bear with me.”

AI Qing wanted to write something.  She typed a couple of sentences but then quickly deleted them.

Finally,

Appledog replied: “May god be with us.”

This sentence------

Dt and Grunt looked at Ai Qing at the same time as she stared at the computer screen.  These were the exact words that Appledog used to say to her teammates at the beginning of each match when she was on Solo’s team.