Chapter 175: High-Speed Roaring Flames: Torque Burst Part1

When it comes to fighting games, my experience roughly applies to three sh*tty games.

The first is without a doubt “Berserker Passion Online” aka “Crap”. A game where the use of bugs and glitches was so frequent that losing your physical shape and becoming a convoluted mess almost caused me to lose my sense of pride as a human being. But thanks to that I was ready to face whatever atrocities would await me down the road eventually, so there’s that I guess.

The second game was called Animal Fights Online…… Commonly known as “GoriLion Online”. The basic premise of that game was that the player assumes the role of a wild animal and fights other wild animals. Even though the concept surely was original, poor optimalization and controls made it almost unplayable, not to mention other problems resulting from Full-Dive system changing a human being into animals of various shapes and sizes. The last straw was the fact that even though the game offered a wide variety of characters to play as, about ninety percent of playerbase was playing as lion, because he was so OP that it was unreal.

The patches did not help. The nerfs only made it stronger for some convoluted reason. Until the emergence of a Gorilla, who’s low kick spamming turned out to be the answer the players were al looking for. Why would a Gorilla be new king of animals I don’t know and I don’t care. But that’s how it all went.

Back then I was laughing my ass off at the prospect of fighting as animals. After all, it was something that would never profit me in any other game, right? Well, turns out that right about now that experience was quite useful in my current predicament.

Then there was the third game. The game that was so ahead of it’s time that the moment people come to understand its genius will most probably be the moment we shall all lay into the earth and die…… Or not. It was more like a game that only the absolute intellectual elites could ever hope to comprehend. The name of this game was “Capricio Online”, but everyone came to call it “Bakumatsu”. It was a fairly simple open-world game in which you could punch or slash virtually everything, be it an NPC or another player as you compete to obtain the highest score possible.

It was a game where you were thrown into the deep water right of the bat, into the open world styled after the Bakumatsu period Japan, with only a single sword and a whole lot of senior players who were more than eager to beat the living sh*t out of you. And after you somehow got away from that “baptism” rite, you’d end up being haunted by the NPCs that were relentlessly chasing you down until you didn’t drop dead or managed to stand your ground.

Then when you finally manage to catch a break, you’d stumble upon other new players like yourself, and you’d decide to band together in order to vent your accumulated frustration. And what better way to vent your frustration than to overthrow some local landlord, rob and murder a government official who just happened to be passing by, raze a whole village to the ground and turn the women into slaves? All of the above activities would give you tremendous amounts of EXP, so before you know it you were sitting on a mountain of EXP, items and skills, which would allow you to grow strong. And then you’d go to the new players spawn point yourself with your friends and practice the “baptism” yourself. It was a never-ending circle of life. It was a game like that.

Even though the game was set in the late Edo period, there was quite a bit of things that you could learn from it. Of especially great value was the technique of using the gaps in time. The thing is, there is a certain lag for every NPC when it comes to executing one action and then transitioning to the next one. So the players could force a certain actions from the NPCs and create time gaps that they could use in order to get free hits in. It is a technique that I would then use to capture many a sh*tty games.

It’s just like the rest period in music. Just when the tension is at its highest point it suddenly stops, and in that brief moment you could made your move and strike. Sometimes it would be enough to kill your opponent, but more often than not it would just result in a critical hit. There were other games with similar systems like that, but I can say that without fail “Bakumatsu” managed to train my interpersonal skills, making me good at estimating when you needed to defend yourself and when you needed to make a swift offense.

This “Beat Shifting” ability is something I think it’s crucial in fighting games. Faints, delays, and all of those other skills that only the end of Edo period could teach you, I’m sure it was going to come in handy someday. Silvia Goldberg may be the same type of gamer as me, but…… Her rhythm is different from mine, because instead of carefully looking for an opening, she tends to overwhelm her opponents with it, like a blast wave. That’s the difference in between us.

It’s only a guess on my end, but I bet that Katsu and those other players must have realized that fact and were adamant of studying that explosive rhythm of Silvia Goldberg. It certainly wasn’t a bad idea or a wrong approach, but seeing that Silvia Goldberg’s title of “undefeated” was yet to be taken from her, I’d say it was not a correct one either.

Silvia Goldberg’s strength lies in the fact that her rhythm is constantly shifting and changing. Think of it like Heroes awakening to new powers or a car changing gears. This means that you have to analyze her all over again and come up with a countermeasure. Most players are unable to keep up with a rhythm like that and fall behind quickly, which results in their imminent failure. So how do you fight a monster like that? Here the basics of fighting games comes into play. You need to narrow down your choices of actions and press the attack relentlessly.

It’s the best thing you can do against her, since countering seems not all that effective to begin with. But I can see why people thought like that, since counters allow you to prepare for the incoming attack and respond to it accordingly. It’s like putting a bird that used to live in the wilds inside of a cage. So if you want to beat a speeding meteor, you need to strike it first instead of allowing it to hit you.

「Kuh……!」

「Now do your best, my semi-circular canal kick!」

I lift one of my feet, making use of the ultra-fast turn and start spinning like an ice-skater again, turning my leg into a deadly weapon once more. It’s something I picked up from GoriLion Online, a technique that was the bane of Lion’s existence, but it could also be applied to other games, since it was so hard to deal with in general. Right about now I was like a fan with exposed wing, ready to slice everything that was in my path.

「S, so annoying…… Who the hell are you, anyway……!?」

「I thought it was obvious: I’m a mercenary. In order to get food and money I’ll take just about any kind of job!」

The spinning leg connects with Meetias’s face and he starts to be thrashed around the place by strikes he couldn’t see or do anything bout. I also suffer some damage because of the nature of this attack, but it should be obvious who is getting the shorter end of the stick in here. I just shake my head and try to brush the sense of shortening HP bar aside.

「I’ll get this Round! After I turn you into a Hero paste, that is!」

Flame bursts from the mufflers on my back and the lights on the front of my body all light up. Cursed Prison rushed towards Meetias, who was now cornered near a wall. There was no time for him to adjust his position or to escape. He could only hope to intercept it or to roll to the side.

「Sure thing, I’ll give you this round as a gift.」

And Silvia Goldberg chose to intercept it.

「But it is a Hero who always wins in the end. Best to remember that, Cursed Prison, my arch-nemesis.」

「That’s how it goes in comic books. But it is a game here.」

Clash. Even if we both receive damage, the bigger and more armored character is going to receive it in much less quantity than a Hero like Meetias. So if Cursed Prison’s HP bar gets almost completely depleted, Meetias’s HP bar would his zero for sure.