WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Satori
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Healers Are Not Tools ◈
Chapter 17: I Wasn't the One Getting Sniped, But...
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“Hana, doesn't this seem really weird, no matter how you look at it?!”
Complaining as though she'd suffered the greatest injustice in the world, Im Harin took her hands off the keyboard and mouse.
“Damn it! This is seriously so fucking weird!! Who are these people? What do they want?”
Harin had every right to be annoyed.
“Ah, what is this... Seriously, this really sucks...”
The situation was bad enough to make even Kang Minseo, who was famous for always being cheerful, let out one heavy sigh after another.
In a way, I was used to this sort of situation, but even I couldn't help feeling sick with disgust.
“No, seriously, what's wrong with these people? What they're doing doesn't fit that system you explained last time at all... Seriously! Not! At! All!”
“You mean how you don't get honor points for killing the same person over and over?”
“Yes!!”
Harin pointed at the screen, which had turned gray.
Allied Coalition players filled roughly half of it. There looked to be more than twenty of them.
They even had quite a range of classes. Where had they managed to round up such a complete set?
“Aren't they even worse than the people killing that SquirrelThunder person last time? Their levels don't even match this zone.”
“Well... You're not exactly wrong. Forget level fifty. I even saw someone at level forty-five.”
“Ah! Seriously! I could kill a level forty-five with one hit...!”
No matter how low their levels were, that didn't make the crowd control skills landing on us disappear.
“We can't do anything against this many people...”
More than twenty enemies had suddenly swarmed us, and they had no intention of leaving us alone.
“Are they getting revenge for what happened last time? You pushed all the way through their town with those streamers, remember?”
“I don't know if it's revenge or what, but they've done the same thing. Killed all the guards and NPCs.”
“Ugh, this is so damn annoying...”
Harin grumbled, taking an idle sip of her coffee, which was packed with ice.
At first, I'd thought there were only one or two enemies. Then they'd multiplied like cockroaches until they filled half the screen.
Just like last time, their only goal seemed to be killing us. Corpse camping was a given, and they'd killed all the town's NPCs too. We'd even gone to the bathroom while we were ghosts and waited over ten minutes, but they still hadn't left.
“Damn it, I think they can see me.”
- They're not seeing you. They're obviously stream sniping you lol
- Minseo, Minseo, they're standing right where your ghost is.
- Our friends with too much free time are bullying Minseo again lmao
- But seriously, this game's a stream sniper's paradise. You don't even have to wait to get matched into their game lol
Minseo's mood was completely ruined. She'd already died more than five times.
If she died a few more times, I'd have to give her back some of the 100 gold she'd paid me earlier and call it money for repairs.
“Hana, what do we do?”
“It's not like there's no way out.”
“I knew it, Hana!! People don't call you a godsend and talk about how you studied abroad for nothing! Right?! I knew you'd come through!”
Her eyes shone so brightly that it was almost overwhelming. She took both my hands and squeezed them.
Now, look, it wasn't that I disliked a high school girl's warm, soft, sweet-smelling hands, but...
“Y-you're getting your hopes up too much. It's not that kind of solution.”
“What is it?”
“You can resurrect through a Spirit Healer in another zone too.”
In Lost of Fantasy, a character always became a ghost upon dying.
To play normally again, you had to either speak to an NPC called a Spirit Healer, which you could only meet as a ghost, or find your corpse and press the resurrection button. We could see a Spirit Healer on our screens right now.
“They think corpse camping is unbeatable, but even if they try to harass us with stream sniping, we can just go to the Spirit Healer in the Demon King's Castle and resurrect there. Then none of this matters.”
“Oh... So you're saying they can't keep harassing us forever?”
“Right. Though I imagine you were hoping I'd teach all these stream snipers a lesson in one go.”
Harin pouted for a moment.
“Don't you like doing that? I mean, this is fucking infuriating... We were leveling just fine, and they started picking on us first. We should get revenge. Revenge!”
“It's not that I dislike revenge. But look at things right now. They've overrun our town, and we're outnumbered, aren't we?”
Looking at it objectively, it was no contest.
It wasn't as though I didn't want to beat the crap out of them too.
“Twenty against three is too much. Even for me.”
“Shit...”
Unable to bring herself to admit it, Harin swung her legs up and down and threw a pointless tantrum in our couple's seat.
“Aaah~~~ I'm so fucking pissed~~~!!! I thought we'd hit the level cap together today!! What is this?! Seriously! They've been camping our corpses for over half an hour!”
“Well, you know how it is, don't you? Legend of League has stream snipers like this too.”
“...So you think they're stream snipers too? Right?”
It was a familiar enough story.
“I'm not sure there's much point in making the distinction, but some stream snipers are actually funny, and some are just complete pieces of shit.”
“Right, right. Exactly. Some funny people show up all the time and even give the streamer material for YouTube videos, but others know they're playing with a streamer and troll on purpose, don't they?”
“And some deliberately refuse to end the game so they can keep them trapped.”
The world was big, and there were plenty of stream snipers in it.
“Anyway... People who have no reason to be in this zone keep gathering here to attack us, and their numbers keep growing. We can't level here anymore.”
I wanted to teach them a lesson, but how should I put it?
I didn't have that much passion for it right now.
“Don't worry. There are plenty of ways to level.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. There are quests tucked away in remote places, and if all else fails, there are some amazing spots for grinding. We could also hole up in a dungeon. Kang Minseo's a streamer, so filling the DPS slots should be really quick.”
“That's true...”
Harin looked unhappy, but she sighed, giving in to reality a little.
“It's a shame, but... They wasted their time too. I guess we can call it even.”
“Right. There's no need to get too upset. Hang on. I'll type in chat...”
[Ssangmun-dongFireShield]
「Paladin」
「I think we're getting attacked because of me」
「I'll leave the party」
At the sudden messages, I looked at Minseo's stream. She'd hidden the game feed entirely and was typing with only her webcam showing.
[Ssangmun-dongFireShield]
「I'm sorry ㅠㅠ」
“Phew... As for the game today, um... I'll watch how things go for another ten minutes or so, then maybe call it a day.”
After leaving those messages, Minseo really did leave the party, still dead and in ghost form.
It wasn't a meaningless gesture.
With us no longer visible on Minseo's game feed, the people who'd been standing right on our positions wandered awkwardly around before trudging over to her.
“I guess that's what this is about.”
“What? What is it?”
“This game has achievements. One of them is for being the first person on the server to hit the level cap.”
《First and Best》
『Be the first on the server to reach level 60』
I immediately opened the achievement window and showed Harin.
“Once someone earns this, they're the only person who'll ever have it.”
“Oh, that. You know how there are quite a few streamers in the Allied Coalition too, not just the Demon King's Army?”
“Yeah. Rice and quite a few others, right? And in general, most people choose the Allied Coalition over the Demon King's Army.”
In other words, it came down to this.
“Some of them are probably stream sniping Kang Minseo just because they don't like her. But some probably want an Allied Coalition streamer to get the First and Best achievement.”
“Wow, so it's stream snipers and obsessive fans all swarming together? It looks like there are over forty of them now.”
“Earlier, Minseo said she had the highest level out of all the streamers, remember? She probably meant the Demon King's Army streamers... But even counting the Allied Coalition, her level was probably pretty high.”
The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. By joining my party and leveling along the optimized route I knew, Minseo had made herself a perfect target for their hatred.
And in open-world PvP, the side with more people always had the advantage.
Even with complete garbage stats, if enough people showed up and chained crowd control skills, someone would eventually finish the target off, no matter the level difference.
“...So Minseo more or less figured that out and left the party?”
“She wants us to keep leveling...”
Honestly, I hadn't known Minseo for very long.
All we'd done was run a few dungeons together since Lost of Fantasy launched.
I'd ignored every friend request she'd sent, and we'd never had a private conversation.
Today was the longest we'd spent together in a party.
...Yet instead of whining and asking me for help...
She'd decided she was causing us trouble, apologized, and left the party first...
“Hana... What are you doing?”
“Something like what I did last time... I can't stand losing, you see. Let's earn a whole bunch of achievements today. And tons of honor points.”
They'd started this bullshit because they wanted the streamers on their side to do well, hadn't they?
They wanted their side to get achievements and all that, right? They wanted the streamers they worshipped to get ahead?
“Huh? Huh? So what are you doing, Hana?”
[The Demon King's Army fuckers on Murmur are total scrubs lmao]
People kept saying their levels were high, but are they all just trash?
We cleaned out the whole Swamp of Torment, and not a single person shows up? lol
They were loud as fuck on the board, but turns out there's only a handful of them. yep
「???」
「These fucking bastards are back on the board starting shit again. Piss off already.」
『▶ Got killed in-game, so you're taking it out on the board? What, I can't even use this place as my own diary? lmao』
「You killed one streamer. What's with all the fucking bragging? lol」
『▶ Yep~ We flattened the whole town too, and still nobody's coming?』
「Swamp of Torment got overrun? Isn't that a really high-level zone?」
『▶ We put together a party with a few level forties and rolled right over it???』
“...Hana, you use communities like this too?”
“I mostly just lurk now and then. Anyway, bait them like this, and people will gather. We fought together once before, so they'll accept my party invites without thinking much of it.”
“Wow, so we're going to push all the way into their town too?”
“Nope. We're going even farther. Some enemy NPCs are called faction leaders. You get achievements for killing them, you know? Let's really steamroll them.”
“Uh, where are these faction leaders?”
“They're usually in each race's starting town. To put it in terms you'd understand, it's like a fountain kill.”
On a server where both sides had roughly equal populations, losing a faction leader was usually humiliating.
Footnotes:
A “fountain kill” means killing an opponent at their base's respawn fountain in games like Legend of League, a humiliating sign that the enemy has overwhelmed their home ground.
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