novelraw Chapter 155: Battle Royale (3)
Chapter 155: Battle Royale (3)
<🎧 Song Recommendation: Fight Back by NEFFEX>
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[MyLittleBrother: wtf did I just watch 🤬🥀]
[angrycommentGuy KINGSLAAYERS RUNNING THIS LOBBY!]
[yesToDrugs: RAT GAMEPLAY SMH. They literally camped in a tree! 😂 ]
The reality was glaring brightly on the right of Von’s screen. The Kingslayers were now sitting comfortably at number one on the leaderboard with sixty-one Cores, while Team Starfall had been knocked completely off the top spot to the very bottom.
Von, meanwhile, took off his headset and vigorously rubbed his eyes. He tried to comprehend the fact that he had just died to a guy hiding in foliage.
"Sorry bro, but I warned you anyway," Max said, walking up to Von’s desk and handing him an ice-cold bottle of water.
Von greedily gulped it down, the cold water helping to clear the frustration from his mind. He let out a satisfied, heavy breath and set the bottle aside.
"Don’t worry, boss," Von said, giving Max a reassuring smirk. "We’ll still win anyway."
He pulled his headset back over his ears.
"So, what’s the plan?" Aura’s voice came through the comms. Just like him, she sounded incredibly calm, completely unfazed by the sudden upset and the worrying feelings that many were currently experiencing.
"Oh, a plan?" Von repeated, leaning back into his chair. "Well, we’ll continue the usual way after I respawn. But this time we’ll go directly after the big dogs to get more Cores. It’s even better if we can find that duo before anyone else does. I’ll fight them much better this time."
"I like the sound of that," Aura giggled, matching Von’s confidence.
The twenty-second respawn cooldown finally ticked down to zero. The screen flashed white, and Von found his Phantom character slowly materializing back into the map.
He was standing on top of a wooden stall in what looked like an abandoned marketplace. But just before the spawn animation fully finished, and before Von could even take a single step forward, the ground beneath his feet lit up. His legs shone with a red light as a heavy slowing spell gripped his character.
He couldn’t move.
In the next few seconds, the feral, cat-like figure of OPVillain dropped from the marketplace awning directly into his field of vision.
The Kingslayers captain was already mid-air, his metal claws extended, slashing and tearing at Von with ruthless speed.
Von couldn’t dodge. The red hex completely anchored him. His health chipped down to zero in the blink of an eye.
{Ding! Player KingVon has been eliminated by Player OPVillain}
The screen turned gray, and Von found himself thrown right back into the spectator lobby.
"Damn it!" Von cursed loudly on the stream, his hands leaving his keyboard. He stared at the monitor, genuinely struggling to understand what had just gone wrong. How were they there?
"Wait, what just happened?" Max yelled from the couch. "Did they follow you?"
"I don’t know," Von muttered. "Let me try again."
He waited out the twenty-second penalty. The timer hit zero.
This time, Von respawned in a dark, narrow alleyway between two brick buildings. The exact same thing happened.
The moment his pixels materialized, the red hex clamped onto his ankles. The cat guy lunged from behind a dumpster, tearing his health to shreds before his screen even fully loaded.
{Ding! Player KingVon has been eliminated by Player OPVillain}
"Are you kidding me?" Von breathed out, staring at the gray screen.
As Max, Aura, and the explosive live chat frantically exchanged ideas of what to do and what kind of hack the pro players were using, something clicked in Von’s mind.
"They’re calculating my respawn point," Von said in a serious tone. "That’s crazy work."
"How is that possible?" Aura asked over the comms. "I thought the respawns in this game mode were completely random?"
"Well, it is... in some way," Von replied.
He leaned back, his eyes narrowing at the screen. In his past life, when Citadel: Breach first launched, this exact glitch had taken the developers a couple of weeks to fix.
The gaming community had figured out that the spawning system wasn’t truly random; it was mathematical. The algorithm used a player’s previous death coordinates to calculate their next drop point based on a fixed numerical grid.
But unfortunately, Von had no idea how to actually take advantage of the glitch. He had never played the battle royale mode enough in his past life to memorize the exact formula.
Von got lost in thought, deliberately choosing to hold his respawn. The ten-minute timer was rapidly running out, but wasting his ten lives blindly meant that Team Starfall would surely lose.
"Just open up Glitch on your second monitor!" Max suggested from the couch, pointing at the screen. "Watch through OPVillain’s stream! Aura can see exactly where they are standing and snipe them before you spawn!"
"That won’t work," Von shook his head shutting the idea down despite how valid it sounded. "There’s a mandatory thirty-second stream delay for all tournament participants to prevent stream-sniping. By the time we see where OPVillain is setting up his trap on the broadcast, I’ll already be dead in the actual game."
"Then what do we do?" Max stressed, grabbing his hair.
After a minute of intense thinking, Von spoke to Aura. "I know what to do. We’ll figure out the formula ourselves."
"How?" Aura asked.
"I’m going to drop in," Von explained. "Every time I spawn, look at the exact map coordinates on your grid before I die. Note the X, Y, and Z axis. If we look at enough of them, we can find the correlation between my death point and my next spawn point."
"So you’re going to sacrifice your lives?" Max asked.
"I mean... It’s the only way to get the data"
Von hit the respawn button and dropped in. Red hex, then claws, and he was Dead.
The cycle continued until he had only one live left.
The main broadcast casters were screaming in confusion, completely baffled as to why KingVon was seemingly giving up and feeding kills to the enemy team.
Finally, on his ninth death, with only one single life remaining, Aura spoke up.
"I have it," she said with a grin before sending Von a text.
{I’ve gathered enough data. It’s a grid shift. The algorithm takes your death location, adds four hundred meters to the X-axis, subtracts one hundred and fifty from the Y-axis, and adjusts the Z-axis to the nearest solid ground.}
Von looked at the numbers she pasted into their private chat. She was absolutely right.
"It’s crazy that the game developers would be this careless," Aura muttered. "But the battle royale just launched today. How did the Kingslayers have access to enough data to find this pattern before anyone else?"
Aura’s question was incredibly valid. Von stared at the screen, putting the pieces together.
"Maybe it sounds wild. But they did this to themselves for the sake of the formula."
"What do you mean?" Max asked.
"The Kingslayers didn’t fight anyone for the first five minutes of the match," Von explained to his viewers. "They sat at zero Cores. They were purposely killing themselves. They died over and over again to gather the coordinate data so they could weaponize it against the lobby."
The chat instantly exploded with a mix of awe and disgust at the sheer dedication of the pro players.
"Alright," Von cracked his knuckles, grabbing his mouse. "I have one life left. Aura, where is my next spawn?"
"Sector 7," Aura replied instantly. "Grid coordinates J-4. It’s an open courtyard. I already have my scope locked directly onto the exact pixel you are going to appear on."
"Let’s do this," Von said with a wicked grin. "Take out the illusionist first. Don’t let him cast the hex."
Von hit the respawn button for the final time
His Phantom character materialized in the center of the cobblestone courtyard. Almost instantly, the goblin illusionist stepped out from behind a statue, raising his staff to cast the red hex.
Pfft!
The massive, compressed sound of Aura’s sniper rifle echoed across the map. The heavy round tore through the air and struck the goblin dead in the chest, instantly deleting his health bar and shattering the spell before it could even activate.
{Ding! Player GreenGoblin has been eliminated by Player Aura}
"I’m free," Von called out.
From the roof of the courtyard, OPVillain dropped down, his metal claws extended, fully expecting to land on a paralyzed target. But Von wasn’t paralyzed.
Von sidestepped the falling attack with a clean, frame-perfect dodge. The cat character hit the ground, his claws sparking against the cobblestone.
OPVillain immediately tried to recover, lunging forward with a flurry of rapid strikes.
But Von’s movement was flawless. He slid under the swipe, fired his grappling hook directly into the brick wall behind OPVillain, and used the tension to slingshot himself forward at maximum velocity.
Von collided with the cat character, bringing his venomous dagger up in a brutal, sweeping arc that caught the Kingslayer directly in the neck.
{Ding! Player OPVillain has been eliminated by Player KingVon}
As the cat character dissolved into pixels, a massive fountain of glowing blue Cores exploded onto the ground.
Von casually walked forward, his Ghost character scooping up every single one of the sixty Cores they had stolen from him.
But Von didn’t forgive them.
"Aura, find out OPVillain’s next spawn point."
"Sector 9, Grid A-2," Aura replied immediately as if she had been doing this before.
"Let’s go hunting," Von smirked.
For the next sixty seconds, Starfall turned the Kingslayers’ own toxic strategy against them. Von grappled across the map, arriving at the exact spawn point just a second before OPVillain and GreenGoblin materialized.
The moment the cat character appeared, Von plunged his dagger into his back.
He did the same to the illusionist. They traced their next respawn locations, hunting them down like a relentless predator. After he killed them both for the second time in a row, the in-game notifications flashed on the screen, completely different from the usual elimination text.
{Ding! Player OPVillain has been PERMANENTLY ELIMINATED!}
{Ding! Player GreenGoblin has been PERMANENTLY ELIMINATED!}
Von let out a satisfied chuckle. They had indeed died eight times earlier to map out the algorithm. Adding these two deaths brought them to the ten-death limit. It was the absolute end for them and it was well deserved.
"Now, let’s continue where we stopped."
The remaining two minutes of the game quickly passed in a blur of smaller skirmishes and rapid Core harvesting.
When the digital timer at the top of the screen finally hit zero, their characters instantly became frozen in place. The deafening sounds of gunfire and explosions faded out, replaced by a triumphant, orchestral victory animation that rolled across the screen for all the surviving players.
Meanwhile, a massive, glowing holographic leaderboard lit up in the center of the Glitch main broadcast to show the final standings and the winners of the night.