At the end of the Battle Royale, Maria’s squad was the last one standing with a whopping 11 squad elimination record. Maria had 21 kills which was the highest amount in her squad and the highest amount recorded in a 60-player Battle Royale match. She had literally wiped out a third of the players in the match and if it wasn’t because a few squads had already been eliminated by the other players, Maria would probably have killed every last one of them herself. With Emily and Lizzy’s help, of course.
In this match, Emily had 5 kills and plenty of assists while Lizzy had the second-most kills in their squad, which was 7. They made a clean sweep of the entire match and it was literally just them toying around and waiting for the other teams to come to them at the plains as the zones began closing.
“Haha, that was awesome!” Maria said as they exited the match after winning.
“Indeed, especially that last part where those 5 teams appeared from the last 2 zones! It got my heart racing!” Lizzy said in agreement.
“It was so chaotic...I didn’t even know who to hit…” Emily said with a tinge of exhaustion.
Maria received her winning rewards and Arena points before asking, “Wanna go again?”
“Sorry, but not right now, Mary. We’ve got a guild meeting later. You go on ahead. You should know what to do, right?” Lizzy said as she apologized to Maria.
Unfortunately for her, there was word that one of her guildmates had acquired a clue to the second planet’s main scenario questline and she needed to be briefed on the details before directing a team to go and follow up on those clues. The same went for Emily since she was vice-in-command of the guild. It was a bit regrettable but Maria had to say goodbye to the two for today.
She, however, didn’t stop and played a few more matches. Maria mixed up her loadouts and played around with them a bit, winning and losing some of the matches. Most of her wins were because she and her teammates communicated well and they prevailed in the end despite her experimenting with her loadout. The times when she lost was because her friends weren’t responsive and were a bit stupid. Naturally, if she used her normal loadout, Maria probably could have survived much longer by herself than with her dumb teammates.
Thankfully, not many of her matches were the ones where she was unfortunate enough to play with a no-brain player. Those were few in numbers and probably those that had just arrived on Gaia through level boosting. The veterans that actually played the game and were familiar with the environment and how to maneuver, use skills, and help teammates were the predominant ones that queued for the matches.
Thanks to them, Maria learned a lot of new combinations for her skills that she previously didn’t know of because she was so used to using the same set of skills that she normally used when battling against monsters and even made a few friends. For the next few days, this was all that Maria did and streamed because she still hadn’t gotten any news or received any information from the homeless goddess after the first time they met.
She would occasionally play with her friends in the Battle Royale or PvP mode to hone each other’s battle instincts and skills. With her many advantages, she would always come out on top. There were even some occasions where Maria would hold a random draw for the viewers of her stream that were already on Gaia, and the lucky winners would be able to team up and play a match with her in the Battle Royale mode.
It was the first time for her viewers to actually interact with her in-game other than through the chat so it was a very welcome thing. However, Maria would shut down the lecherous ones and kick them out of the party and stream channel for misconduct. She was fine with her viewers saying whatever they wanted on her stream but if it was anything too offensive, she would be strict in doling out the necessary punishment. With David, her butler, also there to monitor the chat along with a few other moderators that David had roped in somehow, most of the people watching her would have very good conduct.
She didn't ban anyone if they said something mean to her. Everyone was entitled to their own opinions, so she didn't really care about them. She would only ban those that tried to sexually harass her or said something in the chat or on stream that was inappropriate and against Switch's TOS. It was unpleasant to team up with those viewers but thankfully, she didn’t have to put up with it. Maria was known to do whatever the hell she wanted on her stream so if she killed one of those kinds of viewers and kicked them out, she would feel no remorse and her regulars and fans would support her decision.
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As more and more players began arriving on Gaia, the city became much more crowded and the NPCs had to expand it. A few weeks in IRL had passed by and Discordia had gone under a large expansion to accommodate all of the newcomers from the first planet.
With more players pouring in, the Colosseum Arena and all of the various battle modes began attracting the eyes of the Esports community and it wasn’t long before Universal Games, the company that made Unitale, decided to host its first-ever international tournament that invited the top 10 rankers on the Colosseum Leaderboards, famous popular streamers, and the known ‘hidden’ rankers to participate and represent their countries or organizations in the international tournament’s main event.
The tournament organizers seemed to lack in the naming department so they named this tournament the International Grand Colosseum. Every player in Unitale was eligible to participate but not just everyone could make it to the Grand Colosseum’s main event. There was going to be a one to two months-long preliminary round that would lead up to the main event and from the numerous hundreds of millions of Unitale Players, only 45 would be able to participate in the main event.
The organizers even put out a one million dollar prize pool that would slowly get bigger the more sponsors that joined in and even the players could help enlarge that sum by buying the International Grand Colosseum tickets that they would need in order to either participate in the tournament or spectate in it as part of the audience. A million dollars was not that much in Maria’s eyes since her family was rich and were worth much, much more than that, but the tournament meant fighting a lot of players and she wanted in on all that action.
She wasn’t going to participate to win or anything, she wanted to participate just so she could test her skills on all of the other skillful players of Unitale. Maria had been deprived of player interactions for most of the time she had been playing Unitale so she wanted to use this chance to see how her in-game abilities would fare against the other players. Since there were so many players that wanted to join in on the action, the tournament organizers had placed a level limit on those that could participate. The lowest level limit was level 100 so this weeded out a vast majority of the players.
When Maria saw this level limit, she cried out in dismay because she was only level 87 at the moment. Her level had stagnated since she had been spending her entire gaming time inside of the Colosseum Arena and had neglected to fight any monsters to grind for EXP to raise her levels. With so much EXP required to level up just a single level, the few weeks she had spent just playing around in the colosseum with her viewers had cost her a lot of time to get to level 100.
Now that the level cap for the tournament had been announced, Maria began to run around Gaia in search of high-level monster areas to grind for EXP. It was odd for the high-level players on Gaia to see a level 87 girl run around their playing field and smash apart the monsters that they struggled to defeat with only a few simple swings of the girl’s ax.
“Have to level up, must level up!”
The preliminary tournament for the final participants of the tournament would start in the following month which was only 2 weeks away and Maria really, really wanted to participate. Unfortunately for her, things just didn’t go her way. When the time came for the registration period to end, Maria had only managed to raise her level to 98 so she was 2 levels short of fulfilling the minimum requirements to participate.
Name: Maria Level: 98 Race: Fallen Ophanim - Awakened Variant Class: Dark Priestess
Subclass 1: Magus
Subclass 2: Queen Titles: Fallen Angel of Sin, Angel of the Apocalypse, The Unlucky One, Fallen Priestess, Fallen Saintess, Harbinger of the World’s End, Queen of the Dire, Species Eradicator A, ...
HP: 69,760/69,760
MP: 438,600/438,600
BE: 219,300/219,300
SP: 14,112/14,112
NE: 242/242
EXP: 9,764,000/9,800,000 REP: 110,000 ATK: 15,785 (+1800~2000)
DEF: 6,930 (+115~215)
M.ATK: 5653 (+1800~2000)
M.DEF: 23,793 (+15) STR: 1260 (+10)
AGI: 1680
VIT: 2520 (+8)
INT: 8,652 (+26)
LCK: 12 (+10)
SIN: 24 Free Stat Points: 425
With the registration period over, Maria cried when she saw herself only 2 levels short of being able to participate in all of the fun. She was already close to level 99 so basically, she was only 1 level away but that 1 level was all it took to decide whether she was participating in the tournament or not, and unfortunately for her, she wasn’t.
“DAMMIIITT!”