Chapter 152
[Defeat]
-???????????
-A great game did what great games do—what's the problem?
-This RNG-broken, damage-dealer-lottery game is on another level.
-You have to get 20 kills and still lose? Is this for realㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-The healer didn't heal, so of course we had to loseㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ But they got 20 kills?
-Wasn't a healer supposed to be someone who protected allies by eliminating danger...?
-How are you supposed to win with these brats who aren't even worth healingㅋㅋㅋㅋ This is the best they can do.
“Hmm...”
[20/0/3]
The fall-death system had been thoroughly researched by now.
The judgment was a little strict, but unless it was a special case, it seemed safe to treat it as identical to reality.
However, an issue had emerged on the tactical side: because my combat power alone was bizarrely high, my allies' combat power was generally lower than the enemies'.
So I should have taken responsibility and continued exerting influence across the entire map, but I couldn't because of my successive battles with that knight.
They say there are games you can't win by doing only two people's worth of work, and this was exactly such a case.
Also, because the constantly shifting respawn locations made it difficult to predict where lanes would form as in LoL, I had to find a way to respond flexibly.
Well, you can't expect to feel full after your first drink.
If I gradually played more games and grasped the concepts, a way forward would open up someday.
“You went on a losing streak whenever you were carrying before. No matter how I think about it, I feel like I was a huge troll this game. Is it really okay for me to win? Ah, I really can't figure this game out.”
The knight laughed sheepishly as he removed his equipment.
[‘JusticeLivesOn’ donated 10,000 won!]
-Kim Young-gwang! Kim Young-gwang! Kim Young-gwang! Kim Young-gwang!
Before long, the knight had acquired the nickname Kim Young-gwang among the viewers.
He was being praised as a man who had never given up, even after suffering seven fall deaths and five impalement deaths.
-Diamond queue from the very first placement game;; This isn't easy.
-See that? Without team luck, even NoName can't climb—this is Diamond.
-The trolls on the same team are fucking disgusting.
-The cursed bracket where you lose even if the healer gets 20 killsㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Kim Young-gwang ended his ten-game losing streakㅋㅋㅋㅋ It's a shame that seven of those games had him as the ace.
-If you seek victory, you will lose; if you seek defeat, you will win.
“This game is difficult.”
The math problem I had solved earlier would have been easier.
There was simply no answer to this.
“Let's move on to the next game.”
* * *
NoName was a streamer who was unexpectedly more popular overseas than in Korea.
If the typical roadmap for a top idol group was to conquer Korean music shows one by one before aiming for the Billboard charts, then in a way, it was similar to the case of the millennium idol ‘Chena,’ who first conquered the Billboard charts before being reverse-imported to Korea.
If China had Legacy of Legend and Sweden had Resonance, Americans took pride in World of Arseria as a game cultivated from their own unique culture.
Of course, even WareSoft's largest shareholder was a Chinese affiliate, but that was how people perceived it regardless.
In Europe and the United States, a culture that valued a kind of ‘storytelling’ over rankings and tournaments had spread among the general public.
Aside from a small number of hardcore gamers, what mattered was how diverse a story one could draw out and how many different ways one could interact with the open world.
That was why videos about discovering quests no one had found in WoA or introducing bugs in specific maps always filled foreign viewers' V-Tube recommendations.
Then, in mid-April, WareSoft suddenly declared that it would overhaul the Nightmare Story for about a month.
They claimed it was because all the difficulty levels had been cleared and they wanted to show everyone a new story, but that was merely the public explanation.
Those in the know understood that the real reason was that they could no longer handle the flood of bugs appearing in such a short period.
But more than anything else, the announcement that Adela would no longer be found in the game because ASI's license had expired came as the biggest shock to everyone.
Instead, since NoName was the first user to clear the 10/10/10 difficulty, WareSoft announced that it had agreed to hand over an open-source copy of Adela for noncommercial purposes as an appropriate reward.
[This is an obvious infringement of intellectual property. Please honor the contract.]
Even though ASI's creator warned that it would file a lawsuit, claiming this was a violation of the license,
[Entering an individual's open world isn't legally something we own, is it? Handle it yourselves.]
WareSoft didn't bat an eye and simply pretended not to know anything. In the first place, a company that owned only one ASI unit posed no real threat to headquarters.
On the contrary, its image-making campaign, in which it portrayed itself as the hero protecting the players' childhood dreams, was a success.
Around the time the game NPC began wandering through VR worlds and enjoying cult popularity, everyone who wanted to know about her past began paying attention to NoName's broadcast.
It all began with a post by the game critic ‘Aston Merlin.’
<Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Looking Back on Mephisto's Wednesday and Dead Cat Bounce>
[A dead cat beat the living demon to death.
As I lamented in a post three years ago, Adela's story had not become known to a wider audience, which I found deeply unfortunate.
However, Adela's deviation, which began as a bug, has reached the most successful ending possible at present, and you absolutely must pay close attention to her journey. (Excerpt)]
She was a streamer being watched closely by Vox Media, which still maintained a conservative attitude toward internet broadcasting.
So the public naturally couldn't help but become interested.
But even after a day passed,
Even after two days passed,
And even after a week passed, NoName's Twisy channel still hadn't opened.
Each day, the number indicating the most recent broadcast date simply increased by one, from ‘9 days ago’ to ‘10 days ago’ and so on.
The bewildered viewers went to V-Tube and left comments one after another.
-When is NoName going to stream again?
└ What country is this IP fromㅋㅋㅋ
└ Subscribe to V-Tube instead; there's so much rewatch-fap material there.
└ What's rewatch-fap?
└ Reviewing replays.
└ replay masturbation
└ What?
But after riding the algorithms all the way to the final battle against Mephistopheles, every one of them was forced to stare in shock.
‘Quantica Prosilio.’ A fourteen-year-old student had cast a sixth-circle spell that was better known to the Korean public as ‘Hellfire,’ thanks to several magic V-Tubers.
Even in a game world, one had to understand at least the theory in order to use magic.
But this magic was closer to quantum statistical mechanics than thermodynamics.
People renowned in the field kept raising the question of how a child could know about supersymmetric gauge theory or the concept of a topological twist in topological string theory, but their questions were quickly buried beneath the wave of V-Tube.
[NoName Official]
[Theory of Evolution #World of Arseria (5/5)]
[Featured Comment]
-(20:12) The Demon King descends! Ta-da, appearance![Likes: 4.3K]
└ Explode, reality! Burst, synapses! Vanishment, this world![Likes: 2.8K]
└ This is so fucking cringey ㅁㅊㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
- (20:59) If you want to call me the Demon King, call me that as much as you like[Likes: 3.1K]
└ Lol, can we call her Momma instead of the Demon King?
└ How was she able to equip part of an Aura Heart on her head? Is this some kind of unique magic too?
└ If NoName was cute, that's good enough for me~
* * *
<NoName Minor Gallery>
<Featured Post>
[Say goodbye~][28]
(NoName making him fall to his death seven times.mp4)
ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ This is fucking hilarious; she even killed him five more times after thisㅋㅋㅋㅋ
[Comments]
-She ended up losing this game thoughㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Her variety-show instincts are insaneㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-As long as it was fun, that's all that matters.
[What's up with NoName?][19]
(NoName blackboard.jpg)
(Brocard’s problem.jpg)
I hadn't seen NoName in ages, and when I saw NoName (a middle schooler) sensei (lmao) solving an easy-looking problem, I wondered what it was and looked it up online—but this is an unsolved problem? What the fuck?
Did she really know what it was and solve it properly? Are there any math-savvy friends in the gallery?
[Comments]
-No way ㄷㄷ Even if she's a genius, an unsolved problem is too much.
-How is this an unsolved problem?
└ Fermat's Last Theorem itself was just middle-school math, though.
-I'm going to ask the MathOverFlow guys and come back.
-Report it to the media, quick! Make NoName even more famous!
-If she gets famous, she might stop streamingㅠㅠㅠㅠ
└ Gasp...! Then hide NoName!
-Still, it's so nice to see her placement-test stream again. I'm happy.
└ If she leaves today, who knows when she'll come back? I'm so sad...
* * *
The placement test could be summed up in one word: it was a complete mess.
A Diamond-tier game was matched from the very first round, and the game was over in an instant before I had any chance to do anything.
But in the next game, they put Gold players on my side and Platinum players on the other, and it ended with the opposing team surrendering after fifteen minutes.
In some games, mages and archers seemed absurdly overpowered, while in others, a berserker wielding a double-headed axe would charge forward, taking every shell head-on with his entire body and putting on a highlight-reel performance. There was no consistent environment in which to sort out the tiers.
In the end, rather than playing directly, I probably needed to watch videos from the previous season's Win-It-Back Tournament and first figure out how team games were supposed to flow.
[‘3Blue1Black’ donated 209,000 won!]
-Hello, NoName. I heard that you presented an insightful solution to Brocard’s Problem early in the broadcast, so I came looking for you. Could you explain the beginning once more?
“What's that?”
-Whoa, a $100 donation!
-Whoa, this guy has 340,000 followers on Twisy—who the hell is he?
-???
-What the hell is that, you fucking weeb?
Fortunately, the placement test went smoothly after that, with three consecutive wins under my belt, and I was now looking at the final game.
[‘3Blue1Black’ donated 209,000 won!]
-People on MathOverFlow have been discussing NoName's solution to the ‘n! + 1 = m^2’ problem. There has been a great deal of debate over how the Gauss–Lucas theorem was used in the final part of the proof, so I came to the broadcast to ask about it.
-What the fuck are you talking about?
-Was it really that impressive a problem?
└ This was an unsolved problem!!! I told you!!!!! (78th attempt)
-So it was a famous problem, huh.
-1876 ㄷㄷ It went unsolved for 175 years.
-What is this, a conversation between geniuses?
└ She hasn't even said a word yetㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
[‘Cat Mating Is the Best’ donated 420,000 won!]
-Cancel
-ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Ah, you can't blame them for canceling the missionㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Don't interrupt the flow—we were on a three-win streak!
-Are you really going to give up now!
“Hmm... It's not like I didn't show it; you guys just didn't see it, so why are you asking me to show it again? You can get the answer just by looking at the equation. Is there prize money on this problem or something?”
I had been planning to finish the placement test quickly and go take a bath because that first loss had left me feeling needlessly unsettled, but now someone had appeared to interrupt the broadcast.
Should I ban him?
[‘EungEung’ donated 1,000 won!]
-Just shut up and take your placement testㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-That~~~~ feels~~~~ so~~~~ good~~~~~~
-For realㅋㅋ
-You can just watch the replay.
└ NoName blocked it.
└ Ah, rightㅋㅋ
-Our streamer doesn't respect anyone even if they give her lots of moneyㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Even a thousand won can get you a cost-effective reaction if you know how to work it.
[‘3Blue1Black’ donated 209,000 won!]
-It isn't a prize problem, but it was a venerable unsolved problem with a long history... If you explain it again, we'd like to offer you an appropriate honorarium.
[‘Cat Mating Is the Best’ donated 210,000 won!]
-Ranked game
“Then I will respectfully decline.”
[Matching in progress – Ranked]
-Kyaㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-The moderator's doing a great jobㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Let's get the Anti-Appeasement Movement going~
-But if she really solved an unsolved problem, that's pretty impressive.
-Is she Terence Tao or what?
-Good Will Hunting in real life ㄷㄷ
-The first math-solving content in internet-streaming history!
“Everyone, an unsolved problem isn't automatically impressive. If you bring in some strange problem nobody knows about and claim it's an unsolved problem, then would 10.4928 times 20.2948 be an unsolved problem too? Nobody has ever tried solving it, after all.”
I might have thought differently if it were a famous problem with prize money attached, but I couldn't understand why everyone was making such a fuss over solving one of the many ideas some obscure mathematician had scribbled in a notebook.
To put it bluntly, if they put 100 million won on the line and told me to solve it on the nine o'clock news, I guarantee it would be solved within a year at worst.
“Then let's just say I didn't solve it. There might have been an error in my proof, after all.”
[Game found – Accept]
“I don't know what job you have, but if you're a mathematician, filling in the missing parts is your specialty, isn't it?”
I had recently found the documentary about Fermat's Last Theorem really fascinating, which was why I was saying this,
but at least I was better than a mathematician who died without even writing QED, wasn't I?
I had definitely proved it. They could fill in the earlier part themselves.
It was absolutely not because the donation amount was higher.