Maria had to watch a replay of the match when she found out that her friend had lost in the finals at the last second. It was such a lucky victory on Eos’s part but this meant that another player had arrived on the Awakening Leaderboards. She checked the leaderboards inside the game and saw that Eos’s name was there on the 3rd spot. Eos hadn’t checked it yet but his feeling of accomplishment for becoming an awakened player would greatly diminish especially since 2 other players were already there ahead of him.
When Eos displayed his awakening in the middle of his match, the players who witnessed his awesome might as he took down his opponent, Lizzy, with ease after being thrashed around by her made the entire UT community stir as players began looking up what Awakening was to a player other than the large increase in combat power. The devs shared a few of the details on the web as soon as Eos completed his awakening to show that the power-up he had acquired wasn’t some kind of cheat code or anything.
The specifics to the stats bonus provided by a player’s awakening were so huge that people began to feel that it was actually a cheat after all. There was just no way that Lizzy would be able to contend against an Awakened Eos. In a contest, it was all about balancing but with this being the first IGC, there was naturally going to be some odd cases like this that a powerhouse would appear and steamroll through the entire competition.
With there now being 3 people on it, the Awakening Leaderboards naturally had to be released to the public and for some people, it didn’t come as a surprise that Maria was already up there. The strength she displayed on the big screen during her Boss Hunting Event match against Primal Thor and the massive damage number she produced from one of her attacks was now explainable since she was already an Awakened Player.
As usual, no one knew when she had awakened but the [Awakened - Variant] that shined so greatly behind her name on the leaderboard showed that her awakening was rather special and perhaps even better than the awakening that Eos had experienced. What did come as a surprise was that there was an unknown player already up there along with Maria and that was naturally Sky. It was an unfamiliar name but when people remembered the dark horse of the FFA event who decimated her entire battlefield with a tsunami-like spell, everyone finally realized who this player was and why she was so powerful.
And speaking about Sky, the FFA tournament was next so everyone had all their eyes focused on her to see what she would do. Being an Awakened Player, it was natural that she’d have an advantage over the other players participating in the FFA and it showed immediately in the match.
Sky used her [Tsunami] skill to change the entire field into an underwater battlefield before she began easily decimating her opponents that managed to survive after being struck by the devastating attack thanks to the field advantage that she had set up for herself. She showed absolutely no mercy to her competitors as she not only used her [Tsunami] but also her summoning skill [Call of Charybdis] which spawned a large, monstrous serpent by transforming one of her numerous tails.
In the previous qualifying match for the FFA’s finals, Sky had only summoned one of her pets to assist her but she was actually able to summon two of these monsters instead which she naturally did in this time’s match. With the environmental advantage, these two creatures just swam around the battlefield eating up all of her helpless opponents who were struck by her [Tsunami] before digesting them inside of their bellies, killing them quickly or vomiting them back out with their armors completely eroded, making them easy pickings to Sky and her two creatures’ follow-up attacks.
It was such a one-sided battle right from the start and to the end, it wasn’t even a Free-for-All at all but a Sky vs. everyone else instead.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
The second highlight of the day was Sky’s overwhelming victory in the FFA competition, securing her a gold medal, and as funny as it was, Sky was the only person on the podium because she hadn’t let anyone else in the competition gain a single point in the finals match. In future IGCs, the committee needed to look into these kinds of players a little more and see whether they should nerf them by setting a limiter on the players’ power levels for future tournaments or not.
Of course, the eSports scene of UT was still in its infancy, and many things still required development, especially in regards to the competitive aspects and formats of any future tournaments where the players naturally want to show off the effort and fruits of the hard work they acquired from the game to an international audience.
However, fairness was still required so things needed to be balanced, or unexpected and ‘unfair’ cases like where Sky single-handedly decimated her opponents and upsets where a player who was on the verge of losing turned it all around due to a sudden power-up and not because of their skill. Despite all of the shortcomings of this IGC, the audience loved it, the player community loved it, the sponsors loved it, and the game company itself loved it so it could be said that this tournament was a great success.
The first IGC started with a lot of hype but the players participating in it were only doing it for fun with a little bit of competitive spirit being added to the mix. However, the format of the tournament leaned more towards showcasing and enjoying the events rather than pitting players against each other. This was only experimental as the devs had decided to put a more competitive aspect into future UT tournaments.
The events for the rest of the day continued until the final one ended. Unlike the first two events of the day, nothing too interesting like an Awakened Player suddenly appearing or anything like that happened but the rest of the events were still fun to watch and overall, very competitive, though a tad less hyped especially after what Eos and Sky had showcased to everyone.
Maria was there to attend the IGC’s closing ceremony. She appeared with the other celebrities, IGC invitees, and IGC participants as they walked together with their hologram game characters and paraded around the stage while receiving the cries and cheers of the audience inside the stadium, in the game, and those tuning in back at home. The awards ceremony started right after the player parade with the PvP winners being announced and glorified on top of a podium along with their game characters standing right beside them as holograms.
Eos, Lizzy, and Caedes were naturally the 3 who obtained this honor. Eos, IRL name Kim Sunghyuk, was a young man in his late-twenties with unruly long hair which further enhanced the ‘wild’ nature of this rather buff young man of Korean descent. For some reason, it didn’t come out as a surprise that the current strongest player in the game, at least according to the leaderboards, came from Korea, a country that was well-known for its rather prominent talents in the gaming sector.
Caedes, IRL name Blake Forrester, was a young man in his early twenties whose appearance was rather effeminate which naturally made him a fan favorite especially for the female audience and players who tuned in to watch the IGC. Origins coming from Australia, this young man had a perpetual smile on his face even when he had lost against his in-game rivals and received third place.
The funny thing was Lizzy who came up to the podium with them. Compared to these older and mature young men, she was still a child in her teens, and yet she was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them as one of the strongest players in Unitale. The three received their trophies before being sent down from the podium and up next came the winner of the FFA.
An African-American young lady who was similar in age to Caedes, whose IRL name was Aliyah William, walked up to the podium and proudly raised her trophy as she alone stood on top of the podium with a confident smile on her face as her avatar, Sky, stood next to her as a hologram along with 2 Charybdis monsters on either side of her. They had to fill in the other two places on the podium since no one else received an award for the FFA event besides her. After the FFA event winner came the winners of the other events of the IGC, starting from the individual categories before ending with the team categories.
The person who handed the rewards was the CEO of Universal Games, Dominic Fairsky. He had already shown up once during the Opening Ceremony so naturally, he needed to be there for the Closing Ceremony as well.
“Ladies and gentlemen, players and audience, with the final event of the IGC coming to a close…”
Maria had missed out on attending and watching the other events due to her eagerness to play Unitale but this time around, she didn’t miss the Closing Ceremony so she had to listen to Universal Games CEO’s closing speech. She just patiently waited for everything to end while she stood there and looked up blankly at the darkening sky with her hoodie on as the drone cameras moved around in the air inside of the stadium.
The speech was quite long and Maria couldn’t help but become a little impatient as she mumbled, “Ugh...I wanna get back into the game…”