Legends Rise - Chapter 9 Unbelievable.

Celeste was speechless. He could not believe his eyes. The youngster called Li Ming that had just created his character made Celeste want to resign from his job. Although it wasn’t well known, Celeste had been the Seoul Gladiator’s captain back when the team was first started. He had never won a tournament, but he was always rated as a top tier player during the early stages of the team. As the team grew into an organization, Celeste chose to take a backseat in the team, opting to become support staff and coach as he felt that he could not keep up with the younger talent.

Because of this, he was very confident in his game knowledge. He knew the ins and outs of the game like the back of his hand. He could name each of the abilities and their effects without breaking a sweat. He could redraw all of the competitive maps in which games took place with his eyes closed. Even though he knew that he could never match the youngster’s raw skill such as apm or accuracy, he was confident that he wouldn’t lose in a competition about game knowledge.

Therefore, when he saw Li Ming’s build, he couldn’t help but want to throw the kid out. At the inception of Legends Rise, a couple players had tried out a similar playstyle to what Li Ming was attempting. These group of players were dubbed the Swordmages, and they had enjoyed a period of time where they were quite strong.

Unfortunately, as the game grew and the players learning more and more about the game daily, the lack of synergy between one class’s skills from the next class’s skills made it nearly impossible to win a single match with this type of build. This was a trap that many players fell into when they first started out the game. If they didn’t look up a guide, they would choose skills from many unique classes that didn’t go well together, and that would lead to a catastrophic failure of a character.

In the current meta, about 78% of the players opted for builds with abilities from 2 classes. 13% chose to play with abilities from a single class. 8% of players opted to play with abilities from 3 classes, and the remaining 1% of characters were created by new players that had navely chosen abilities from more than 3 classes. They would eventually choose to ditch the characters to go make new ones.

He had been watching the kid since the beginning of the character creation process, and after seeing him pick a warrior’s spear alongside a mage’s trinkets and light armor, he couldn’t help but shake his head.

However, as soon as he saw Li Ming pick the “High Tempo” spell, he wanted to cough up blood. That passive ability was attached to a trinket too, making it weaker than the original skill which was already considered trash.

He had enough.

Celeste wanted to go back to his team to watch pros play. He was already sick of these people who came to the tryouts despite not being strong enough to compete with the top 5% of players. To make matters worse, he now had to wait and observe this kid who had no idea what he was doing.

He could already see what would happen: The kid would go into the first stage of the tryouts, which was a 1 on 1 match between the kid and a random AI that was modeled after the current starting players of the Seoul Gladiator’s lineup. As long as the kid could do more than 25% of the AI’s health within 10 minutes, it would be considered a pass. Of course, the AI would continue until one of the two were eliminated. The kid would surely pass, but only by a slight margin after struggling for the full 10 minutes.

However, the following matchup, which was a 1 on 2 situation where the kid would need to strategically plan out against 2 AI’s that were slightly stronger than the previous one, he would surely be destroyed. Of course, the goal of this stage wasn’t to beat the AI, but to survive for 5 minutes. This was the average amount of time that one would need to survive before getting assistance from their teammate.

Celeste was certain that Li Ming would not even make it to the third stage, which was a simple endurance test where he would have to fight endless waves of AI that were modeled after pro players of all the unique teams of the world, but with only 25% of the strength of the actual pro players. Although this test sounded easy, it was actually quite difficult. After surviving for about 10 minutes, the player would feel mental and physical strain, and would not be capable of continuing on any longer; succumbing to the swarm of AI.

Not wanting to sit through this any longer, he declared that the kid only had 1 minute remaining, even though he actually had 3. After seeing the kid pick his name, he could only sneer coldy at Li Ming.

‘The Dawn? What, did it dawn on you that your entire character setup was a mistake? Did it dawn on you that you wasted 90 dollars on this event that you won’t even make it to the second stage of?’ Celeste thought angrily, ‘Did it dawn on you that you’re just wasting everyone’s time just by messing around here?’

Not wanting to deal with the kid anymore, he quickly started the trials. After watching Li Ming drop into the first stage, he promply got up from his computer and left for his lunch break. He had missed breakfast on that day as he had overslept, and now he was starving.

‘Maybe I’ll try out that ramen from Or*chan R*men thats famed to be the spiciest ramen in town?’

He closed the door of his booth without even putting on the “away” sign, and left to eat as quickly as he could. He wanted to go all the way to L*ttle T*kyo and back before the next applicant showed up. Hopefully, his lunch could help clear up the bad taste he had from watching Li Ming’s character creation.