Legends Rise - Chapter 5 The Seoul Gladiators Pt. 1

Li Ming was dumbfounded. He had never expected this situation to arise as he was just in a very bad mood from the lack of food and the recent unfortunate events that had occurred to him. “Is that alright? Isn’t that where the rest of your team is too?”

“Of course! Its alright if I say its alright!” Mato was practically glowing at this point. “I can give you that autograph you wanted too!”

Li Ming found it hard to reject her, especially with the offer of food.

“I guess I’ll go…”

—

Li Ming sat at a dining table nervously. He had been brought directly to the Seoul Gladiator’s dining quarters. Mato had run off to her room to grab something, but she hadn’t returned for a while. Thankfully, she had reheated some of the dinner they had that day for Li Ming.

He was once again reminded of how well off these professional teams were. They had brought their chef with them to a foreign country, even though the chef wouldn’t be taking part in the competition itself. In fact, the amount of support staff in the practice rooms was quite shocking to him.

Apparently, every single person from the support staff all the way to the team’s players were all required to watch and analyze the practice games they were playing from day to day. This wasn’t the case until 2 years ago when a team, the Recife Spears, that was predicted to lose against a tournament favorite revealed that it was due to their team’s janitor realizing that their team had a single fatal flaw that wasn’t even connected to the game itself.

But upon fixing that mistake, that team had soared from a bottom tiered team to middle tier team. After that incident, every team started encouraging as many people as possible under their organization to help out, but of course, each team had different levels of success.

The Seoul Gladiators were of course one of teams who had grown prolifically due to this change. They already had a “B Team” designated for emergency substitutions that may be necessary during the course of a tournament, and they had also created a gaming guild that extended outside of the digital world.

They were the first team to provide scholarships to players who also played the game, as well as set up training camps to groom younger players into becoming stronger talents for the future. These contact points that they had built would prove to be extremely helpful to their main team.

After the incident with the Recife Spears, all the Seoul Gladiators had to do was start looking for candidates that were talented in the game that also possessed other skills such as management, accounting, or even cooking from their various contact points they had already owned.

“Di~ng!!”

The microwave’s bell rang out.

Li Ming proceeded to pull the dish out. It was a serving of kimchi fried rice with chicken kalbi. He sat down at the table and removed the plastic wrap covering it. The scent of the home cooked meal wafted up, making his stomach rumble.

Excited, Li Ming clapped his hands together. “Ittada-”

“Hey you!”

A man around Li Ming’s age barged into the kitchen and pointed at Li Ming.

“You there, whats your name?”

‘Eh?’ Li Ming was startled. He had not expected to be discovered so soon. As outsiders were not allowed to enter team houses or practice rooms, Li Ming would surely get booted out of the house! Right when he had gotten some food too.

“A-ah… My name is-”

“Ah whatever it doesn’t matter. I’ll probably forget it anyways. Anyways, what do you think of this?”

After abruptly cutting him off, the man roughly placed his phone in front of Li Ming. Li Ming could see a video playing:

Whoooosh~!

A man draped in red robes and a black cape dashed towards another man that was wearing a suit with a couple trinkets decorating it. The man wearing the suit tried to grab at the man in red, but halfway there, he noticed that it was too late, and reached towards one of his trinkets. Unfortunately, his had was too slow, and failed to reach the trinket, resulting in his death.

‘!!!!’ Li Ming was surprised! What he had just watched was a small recording of a practice match that had taken place recently! Not only that, but the man in the video that died was the Seoul Gladiators’s captain: Resonance!

Resonance was well known for being very conceited. He once declared in a public interview on a tournament stage that he would never lose to anyone but a high tier team or player, no matter what condition he was in, even if he only used half his abilities.

Such conceit infuriated many players, but also helped him gain many fans, eventually being dubbed “The Emperor”. Even though his character was of the support class, he was still outmatching many mage characters in the scene.

But that was 3 years ago, before the entire support class was changed so that they would do less damage while playing more of a healer/debuffer type role. Despite that, Resonance kept playing a major role in the team. His well timed abilities would disrupt the enemy, while he would still be able to heal and debuff enemies as usual.

“Here, watch it again. Then tell me what you think.”

Upon the second time watching the video, Li Ming noticed something odd. Resonance was wearing trinkets! This was a first. His previous style of play would revolve around casting well timed spells to disrupt enemies from long range, but this Resonance here was trying to depend on weak low tier spells to fight a fully armed assassin that was already closing in on him! Any professional player would never make such a mistake!

“Ummm… why not just back off and cast a bigger spell?” Li Ming suggested after some thought.

“Aahh???” The man sounded like he came straight out of a yakuza show. Li Ming could feel the man’s heavy gaze.

Li Ming panicked. Was he about to get thrown out even before he had a bite of his food?