Legends Rise - Chapter 12 Interview

Li Ming was watching the end credits of the tryouts program that was being played inside his virtual reality gear. From time to time, he would recognize an ex-pro player’s name. He had just easily cleared the third stage. He had understood that this would be a endurance test as soon as he crossed blades with the first enemy.

Knowing this, he chose to play slowly, pacing his ability usage. Instead of taking fights immediately, he would take advantage of “On the Hunt” and it’s stealth ability in its entirety, waiting the full 4 seconds before making the next action. This gave him time to recuperate and plan ahead for his next battle.

He also knew that it would be impossible for him to face more than 9 enemies at once. In an online press conference, Leo Corporation had revealed that it would cause a game to lag if more than 10 characters used all their abilities at the same time. With all this knowledge, he was able to take it slow and easily clear the stage.

However, he was very bored. The process of trying different combos got old as soon as he had tried a couple of them, and the enemies proved to be useless against his stealth. Of course, had they been the real players, they would have been able to detect him in his stealth, but all of their stats were reduced by 75%, leaving them as sitting ducks waiting to be cut down.

Suddenly, he felt his arm being tapped on in the real world. Taking off his headset, he was greeted by a man that was slightly sweating and his face was very red. This man was, of course, Celeste. At this point, Celeste was very embarrassed. He had been silently insulting Li Ming without even giving the kid a chance. However, Li Ming rose above and beyond all expectations and was able to break record after record.

Thankfully, Li Ming did not know about Celeste’s opinions and previous bias against him.

“Mr. Li Ming, please come with me.” Celeste said nervously.

Unfortunately, Li Ming didn’t see Celeste’s tone as a tone of nervousness, but instead, he heard it as anger. This confused Li Ming. Had he broken a rule? What did he do wrong? He was pretty certain that he had not done anything to violate any rules.

“Umm… Did I do something wrong? Something to cause trouble?” Li Ming managed to ask.

‘Did you do anything wrong? Something to cause trouble?’ Celeste frowned, ‘Of course you did something wrong. You broke every single previous record by an unbelievable margin, and you still have the audacity to ask what if you caused trouble.’

“I guess you could say…” Celeste chose his words carefully, “You stirred the hornet’s nest, and now the emperor has come out to play”

—

The crowd erupted into a thunderous cheers and applause as Li Ming was brought onto the stage by a very tired Celeste.

“Welcome, everyone, the man to break all previous records, give up for…. ‘The Dawn’!’” an announcer exclaimed!

The crowd continued to cheer until they saw Recna211 pick up his microphone to start talking.

“Mister Dawn, why dont you introduce yourself for us all.” Recna211’s voice boomed across the convention center.

A mic was handed to Li Ming by a nearby recruiter.

“Ummm… My name is Li Ming, I’m from Japan, and I play a mage character under the name ‘Zephyrix’ on the Japanese server.” Li Ming said.

“Well then, tell us, what were you thinking today when you set up a your character for today’s tryouts?” another recruiter asked.

“Well to be honest, I didn’t even know that there were tryouts here today. I recently got here to this country to watch the Finals match of World Tournament since I had won the Golden Ticket from the stream.” Li Ming explained, “I was quite bored in my hotel room, so I asked an acquaintance for a place for me to play Legends Rise, and she told me I’d be able to play here. I was eager to play, so I just rushed in here without asking too much”

The exuberant cheering from the crowd had turned into absolute silence at this point. They had known that the player on stage would be an extreme one, maybe even a cocky one who regarded all those below him as people who weren’t worth his time. However, in their eyes, Li Ming had surpassed even that level! To declare that you weren’t even aware of this event yet you came here and completely blew every single applicant out of the water… Did you have to be so extreme?!?

Oblivious to the crowd’s incredulity, Li Ming continued on, “The acquaintance that told me that I could play Legends Rise here also had a teammate, and I had a pretty interesting discussion with that teammate that inspired my build today.”

“I see, I see, so what did you think of the tryouts today.” an analyst grabbed a microphone from a recruiter to ask, “As you heard earlier, you had broken all the previous records by quite a long shot.

With this questions asked, all the analysts sat up straight in their chairs and waited with baited breath. As such a performance was put on by such a youngster, they were worried that the tryout test itself had been too easy.

“Well it was quite easy. In the first stage, the AI wasn’t even close to reflecting the Seoul Gladiator’s Mato in terms of intellect. The second stage was similar, the two AI didn’t work together at all and played so far apart, it was more of a 1v1 happening twice instead of a 1v2.” Li Ming said nonchalantly, “And in the third stage, it had all the faults of the previous stages as well as having the AI at such a weak level made it a series of 1v1 matches yet again.”

“AHAHAHAHAHA!!!” Recna211 laughed aloud, “To think that there was such a flaw in the system, maybe you really are what my team needs! I see that you applied for the Seoul Gladiators, but what do you think about joining the Los Angeles Emperors instead? I offer you a 1 million dollar annual salary as well as bonuses for each match victory!”

“Eh?”