Chapter 285: Chapter 154: Reward Settlement, Double First Place! An Unexpected Special Match Contestant
Shen Fei had originally thought that Ethereum Punk consisted of just one person: 0. This one-woman army was the most unique team of all. But he never expected that while bored and browsing through various matches, he would see a matchup on a plains map: Ethereum Punk vs. Three Kingdoms Territory. Curious, he clicked to watch. Then, he was dumbfounded.
He saw the vast plains swarming with millions, tens of millions—even over a hundred million—Three Kingdoms Soldiers. All these Soldiers were shirtless, converging into massive torrents on the vast plains map. Led by a red Hero, they charged madly at 0.
Faced with this strategy typical of a Lord-type Game—where all the players had banded together to summon an unparalleled army of Soldiers potentially numbering over one hundred million—0 found herself in a frantic struggle. Overwhelmed not long after the battle started, 0 simply waved her hand. She summoned I, II, and her other counterparts, including V, to the four corners of the battlefield. 0 used her special Ethereum Editor technique to annihilate and block the Soldiers charging at her from all directions. Meanwhile, the other counterparts were rapidly searching for the players who were also shirtless and hiding among the Soldiers.
After a few rounds of competition, the Three Kingdoms Territory team had found its optimal battle strategy. It was to summon all their forces right at the start and order the equipped Soldiers to take off their shirts. Then, the players who summoned the Soldiers would also take off their shirts and hide within the massive army. This way, as long as the summoning players weren’t discovered and killed, their Soldiers wouldn’t disappear. They couldn’t be "decapitated" until their hundreds of millions of Soldiers were killed first. This created a simple ultimatum: either kill every last one of their hundred-million-plus Soldiers, including the Heroes, or wait to be buried by sheer numbers.
The Three Kingdoms Territory team, led by Wang Dapang, had a win rate fixed at around 90% using this tactic. Unless they ran into teams that used screen-wide poison, screen-wide Forbidden Curses, or screen-wide Skeleton Monster Summoning, they were virtually unstoppable.
Now, facing the one-woman Ethereum Punk team, they showed no mercy and employed their old tactic once more.
Faced with this horde of Soldiers swarming the screen, 0, who held herself to high standards, grew anxious. Her goal was to obtain an Activation Scroll and Wisdom Bestowed from the special competition. But 0 didn’t know the specifics of the special competition, so she could only do her best in the first two events. Her plan was to use any items obtained from the first two events to trade for what she needed, in case she couldn’t win the final one. After all, she had the Ninth World, a special place that supported trading.
With her current win rate at 90% and unwilling to lose a single match, 0 faced the nearly-cheating tactics of the Three Kingdoms Territory team and unleashed her strongest trump card.
Her clones weren’t just an ability she had inherited from the game. Much like how she was the only one to inherit the Ethereum Editor ability because she was already a master hacker, her clones had actually existed even before the game’s arrival. Before the apocalypse, the solo-working 0 found that being alone was not only lonely but also detrimental to gaining client trust and securing jobs. So, she used her super-hacker abilities to create AI-like intelligent programs—I, II, III, and so on—each with a different role to help her accept jobs, communicate with clients, and track projects. After inheriting her game abilities, these digital avatars were also Enhanced and became one of her trump cards in combat.
Now, facing the endless stream of shirtless Soldiers, 0 acted decisively. To quickly find and eliminate the players hidden among the hundreds of millions of Soldiers—and thus make their summoned armies vanish instantly—0 summoned I, II, III, VI, and V all at once.
The moment she summoned her clones, 0 had them disperse in all directions to help her find the targets. It was like an old game from before the apocalypse called "Find the Difference," where players had to spot a single different image among hundreds or thousands of pictures. Now, her clones had to find players hidden among tens, or even hundreds, of millions of shirtless Soldiers. If I and the others hadn’t been hyper-advanced AIs, finding all the targets so quickly amid such a massive amount of data would have been an impossible task.
DING!
[Player Skyrocketing has joined the spectator area!]
Just as her clones began to locate the players and she was about to lock on, 0 suddenly froze. She saw it—the one person she never, ever wanted to see her clones had just entered the spectator area.
An hour or two had passed. Shen Fei had only watched her battle for a moment at the very beginning, so 0 had thought it was over and relaxed a little. She never expected him to come back. To make matters worse, he had entered right at the moment she brought out V.
Needless to say, 0 knew Shen Fei must be freaking out—having a complete, hysterical meltdown.
"Screw it!" Wincing, 0 forced herself to refocus on the battlefield.
So what if he saw? What does it matter! That’s right, V is a version of me! She might be different, but she still counts as my clone! So what if you know!
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