WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Satori
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Healers Are Not Tools ◈
Chapter 12: Why Do They Play PvP?
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“Thank you!”
Im Harin picked up her chopsticks and thanked the part-timer from the single seat tucked into the farthest corner of the PC café.
‘I’ll eat this quickly, then get back to leveling...’
She began eating dinner with a little hum and opened the streaming site Pajijik with practiced ease.
After briefly wondering who to watch, she clicked on a random Lost of Fantasy stream. She was only planning to leave it on like a radio anyway.
“Oh... Damn, this person’s level is really high.”
Harin spent every break watching guides on YouTube and reading tips on community forums, eagerly waiting for her next chance to level up.
So it was no accident that she had entered SquirrelThunder’s stream, with its over ten thousand viewers and heated atmosphere.
“All right! Let’s go!!! Let’s goooo!!! Kill them all!!!”
- Hell yeah lmaooooooo
- These Coalition bastards were acting tough with their numbers at first, but they’re fucking trash.
- Now thaaat’s what I’m talking about.
- We’ve got THREE streamers on our side, assholes lmao
- Are we pushing into town? Let’s just go full genocide.
“...What are they doing?”
After slurping up a mouthful or two of noodles, Harin glanced around the screen, trying to understand what was happening.
‘This isn’t a dungeon, is it? What are they fighting? Why are they so excited? What’s going on? You’d think they were having a team fight in Legend of League.’
Harin knew nothing about open-world PvP.
Of course, as a high school girl who liked a good dopamine hit, she had watched videos like “The Top 5 Most Ridiculous PvP Moments in Gaming History.”
So she did know there was a history of fighting called “random PKing” in games like Thor.
Even she had heard of the famous Yats Liberation War.
“Isn’t there, like, a nexus? Huh? Something we can smash so it goes, ‘You win! Good work, everyone’?”
“Sky! I asked Guts about that. Apparently, if you push all the way into town, all the NPCs die, so they usually give up and go home.”
“Oh, is that how it works? Really? Well, sorry about this, then. Shall we push all the way into town? You’re okay with that too, Minseo?”
“Push! Push in! Earlier, three gunners were shooting from way over there and laughing! Kill them all!!!”
With three streamers’ voices coming through her speakers, Harin stopped eating and blinked.
‘Oh, so that’s what this is? This is what that YouTube video was talking about? PvP between factions? That thing called RvR?’
Remembering a thirty-minute video uploaded by a famous former pro gamer, Harin clapped her hands.
「UmUmUm donated 1,000 won」
[These Coalition assholes keep posting on the forum about how the Demon King’s Army is trash, so why are they getting their asses kicked in the actual game???]
「Anon donated 1,000 won」
[These cheap bastards hit level 35, then come to a level 30 zone to ambush people as rogues. Now a proper team fight starts and they get fucking wrecked lol]
「SoftNChewy donated 1,000 won」
[Squirrel~ Squirrel~ Let’s camp their corpses too, okay???]
The atmosphere in the game was just as heated as the incoming donations.
- Didn’t they say some streamer came to defend the other side earlier?
- Guess they’re short on numbers because it’s a level 40 zone lol
- Haven’t we basically won? Didn’t we kill all the guards?
- Absolutely fucking crushed them lmao
“Oh... I guess you can fight out in the world like this once you hit level forty.”
It looked pretty fun. Harin went back to slurping her noodles.
“Well, we’ve got way too many people. They’re no match for us.”
“Isn’t war all about choosing fights you can win?”
“Exactly, exactly. Sky’s right. And who started this fight? They did!”
Having killed all the Allied Coalition NPCs too, the streamers naturally began winding things down.
‘But what do you get for doing this? What’s the reward that makes them fight so hard?’
A natural question. An obvious thing to wonder.
Still, she was hungry, so Harin reached for a piece of pickled radish with her chopsticks.
“By the way, Thunder. We’ve killed everyone and finished up. Do we get anything for this?”
Harin laughed when Sky asked exactly what she had been thinking.
“Oh, that? Should I ask Guts? There didn’t seem to be anything she didn’t know earlier.”
‘Guts... Guts... Is naming yourself like that a trend now? Hana named herself like th...’
Still chewing her noodles, Harin’s eyes widened at a username on the stream that was familiar in a certain way.
“H-Hana?”
* * *
“It’s not like you’ve never watched a stream before. That’s what got you so worked up?”
“But you saw all those posts on the forums too! Everyone was talking about how good you are!”
Harin slapped the seat beside her in the two-person booth, pat, pat!
She’d sent me a message out of nowhere.
Actually, she hadn’t just sent one message. She’d bombarded me, telling me she was watching a stream and I was on it.
It was so cute it was almost ridiculous. Then she’d even started begging me to come play with her because she was at the PC café.
“I only came because you said you’d buy me a drink. Keep your promise.”
“Hana... How can you shake down a high school girl like th... Ow!”
“I said, keep your promise!”
Whack! I smacked Harin’s shoulder once with my left hand, sat down beside her, and logged in on the computer she already had running.
“But you don’t seem surprised at all.”
“It’s not like I never visit the forums. I knew people were talking about me.”
“Huh? Really? So you already knew about all those forum screenshots I sent you?”
“Yeah, I saw them. I’d read all the original posts.”
Was it okay to admit in front of a high school girl that I browsed the Lost of Fantasy forum?
Well, she was a gamer too. She probably knew what it was like.
“Wow... You’re practically a celebrity now...”
“It’s not that big a deal.”
There were just some guides on the forum, and sometimes I happened to appear on a stream like I had earlier.
“For one thing, I’m a healer. And while every other healer plays a priest, I’m a paladin.”
“Right. Everyone plays a priest, don’t they?”
“That’s why I stand out. There aren’t many high-level healers, and out of those few, I’m the only one stubbornly leveling a paladin.”
Actually, I might have been wrong about that too.
Maybe if I looked somewhere else, I’d find quite a few paladins like me.
“I don’t think that’s it, Hana. The streamers were talking about how you’d studied abroad and were really good at the game. They kept saying they hoped they’d run into you again for another dungeon.”
“It’s nothing like that.”
Once I logged in, I cleared away the friend requests, which, as expected, meant pressing Decline more than thirty times.
At first, I’d diligently declined them all. But plenty of people sent another request the moment I rejected them, so I’d given up.
“Hana, could you explain that thing from the stream to me again? You barely explained anything.”
“Well, if I’d gone into every little detail, the stream would’ve gotten boring. Besides, there’s an NPC who explains it.”
“Come on! How was that an explanation? I went back to the Demon King’s Castle and talked to them after hearing what you said, but they didn’t tell me anything.”
I immediately shrugged.
“Kill red things. Get points. Buy gear with the points. The end.”
“Hanaaa...”
Harin narrowed her eyes, reached over, and squeezed my waist.
“Ngh! What are you doing?!”
“You know all about the game’s systems. Please explain it to me. Please? I’ll die of curiosity if I don’t find out.”
Wait, I didn’t think we were that close.
Was she allowed to just touch my waist like that? A high school girl?
“A-are you some kind of pervert...?”
“What are you talking about?!”
Harin kept tormenting me, raking her fingers over my waist.
“N-no. Ngh...! Oh, thank you.”
Luckily, the part-timer arrived with perfect timing and brought my strawberry smoothie, letting me escape tickling hell.
“Anyway... What do you want to know?”
“You said there were honor points, right? Tell me more about them.”
“That was the whole explanation earlier. You really want all the details?”
“Yes. Are honor points like MMR?”
Shaking my head, I took Harin’s mouse, clicked on a soldier NPC, and opened the shop.
“Yes and no. First, if you have honor points, you can buy the equipment sold here. You don’t actually pay with points, though. You pay gold.”
“Huh? Wow... Whoa! What’s this? P-purple gear?!”
Like a true gamer, Harin’s eyes went wide. She took her mouse back and busily inspected the items.
Considering the item grades in Lost of Fantasy, I supposed a kid who’d only seen green and blue gear until now would go wild at the sight of purple.
“Wow, look at this combat power... That’s insane. So purple gear starts showing up at level sixty... Wow, it’s so damn good...”
“You earn honor points by killing enemy players. And you need those points to buy the equipment. Get the general idea?”
“Is that why you were doing PvP earlier?”
“No, the honor points are just a bonus for me. Momentum matters in this kind of thing. If you stand by while other members of the Demon King’s Army die, people gradually turn into total fucking sissies.”
“Pfft...!”
Harin suddenly burst out laughing.
“What did you say?”
“What? I mean, your own side is dying, but you’re off going, ‘I’ll just do my quests,’ instead of helping them fight, like some coward. We can’t let that become the norm. It’ll make things hard later.”
Whatever she found so funny about what I’d said, Harin kept snickering.
“So is that everything about honor points? Then why is that purple gear showing up in red? I mean, I don’t have enough gold, but things haven’t shown up in red in shops just because I couldn’t afford them before.”
“No, that’s... To put it in Legend of League terms, your rank is too low to buy it. In this game, earning lots of honor points raises your rank. Ranks are assigned during maintenance every week.”
“Oh, this game has ranks too?”
“Yeah. Your rank determines which of these purple items you can buy.”
Harin’s eyes shone as she seemed to get the general idea.
“Then, Hana, what about this? To farm honor points, you could kill, like, ten low-level enemies... No, wait. You could camp their corpses like earlier and kill them every time they revive...”
“That won’t work. Besides, killing the same person over and over doesn’t give you points.”
“Oh, really... They made it pretty complicated.”
“They’re telling you to do something honorable. Honorable things. That’s why they’re called honor points. You fucking pu...”
Oh, I’d screwed up.
“What? Hana? What was that? Fucking what? Hana? What were you about to say?”
“N-nothing. Forget it. It slipped out! I remembered something I saw on the forums, and it slipped out.”
“What were you going to say? Tell me.”
“No! I said it slipped out!!!!”
But come on! That was total pussy behavior!
Turning someone clearly weaker than you into a points vending machine just to get purple gear was pretty damn low, wasn’t it?!
Footnotes:
The Yats Liberation War alludes to the Bartz Liberation War, a famous player uprising in Lineage II against a dominant alliance.
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