Chapter 10: Maybe Eight or Nine

Rone laid down on his couch with some popcorn and pressed play on Max's recording, which he'd hooked up to his TV from his laptop. He laughed as Max instantly began to spout nonsense at some child before nearly tripping and falling over randomly.

'This is sure to be entertaining', Rone thought as he tossed popcorn into his mouth.

Max reached the archery range and met up with some cowboy, but Rone wasn't interested in that. What he really wanted to know was how this stupid guy managed to get a unique class. Those shouldn't be so easy to acquire.

His eyes bore into the TV as Max took his first shot. Then his second shot. Rone's eyes were already opened wide before he'd taken his third. 'S-so fast?'

Max's firing speed was insane. He only took two seconds to draw, aim, and fire. Rone watched as the 5m, 10m, 15m, 20m and 25m shots were all bullseyes, before spilling his popcorn when Max did the exact same thing with the 50m target like it was child's play.

"Hey, what the f*ck??" Rone moved closer to the TV and could barely see the arrow in the centre of the bullseye. "A perfect shot? At that distance?!"

He knew it. That bastard was secretly a monster! A monster pretending to be normal!

Max took a short break to read an online article, before whipping his bow out and sending another arrow flying toward the 75m target. Before Rone could even register what happened, a small thunk came out of his soundbar.

'Did he hit the bullseye?!' Rone sprung up and held the TV with both hands, pressing his face up against the screen as he scanned the pixels. He thought he could vaguely see the arrow in the bullseye.

"Ahh!! What the actual f*ck Max! You never told me you were this good!" Rone jumped around his living room, before he proceeded to lose his sh*t shortly after when Max humbly asked the cowboy to give him the archer class. It was like watching Einstein ask a fellow scientist for an apprenticeship position.

Before he could regain his composure, Max picked up the bow again.

"No. There's no way. There's actually no f*cking way."

The last target looked absolutely tiny from where Max was standing. Rone could put his thumb over it on the TV and it would be completely obscured.

Pew.

Max took slightly longer this time, 3 seconds, up from 2 seconds, as he fired his last arrow.

'...Did it hit?!'

Rone had no idea if it landed; he didn't hear anything, and he couldn't see it either.

He ran over to his laptop and toggled the recording perspective. Unlike the one available four years ago which only recorded first-person footage, Virtek's new recording module was also capable of various different recording perspectives, such as third-person, bird's eye and free-roam. The free-roam footage took the vast majority of the module's computational power because it recorded all the space around the player in what was essentially a 3D scan. Rone changed to this perspective as he dragged the camera to where the target was.

Upon reaching the maximum recording range of 100 metres, Rone stopped and gaped at the screen. 'Holy sh*t!!'

No wonder he got a unique class; this guy was a freak! A freak among freaks, even! Was he always this good? ...No, surely those had to be flukes, right?

Rone felt a compulsion to call Max, but that guy would be driving his car right now and wouldn't pick up. 'Okay, calm down. Calm down.'

He decided to watch the rest of the footage. If it was a fluke, that would be made apparent later on.

...

'IT WAS NOT A FLUKE.'

By this point, Rone had dragged his entire couch closer to the TV so he could see the arrows better. Goblins were dropping left, right and centre like flies. No, actually, flies would have had at least a chance at dodging; this was just a straight-up massacre. The goblins didn't even have a chance to scream as they instantly perished.

Not only that, but he was simultaneously sprinting through the facility like a possessed person. Was it because they had been racing? Rone felt depressed watching the footage, he really was like a toddler in comparison... How tf was Max hitting all those shots while running?! Rone cursed as he heard Max comment about low difficulty. 'It's not easy, you're just irregular!'

At the same time, He also felt some anticipation. He wanted to know how Max would deal with the dungeon boss.

When Rone fought the boss in the dungeon, he barely won. That fearsome goblin warrior had tossed him around like a ragdoll during the fight, making it impossible to concentrate on spellcasting. He prevailed in the end through accumulating damage, but his health had already been reduced and he was nearly crushed to death in the process.

The Max on the TV entered the boss room and fired two shots, before breaking into a three-second run and then stopping.

"Huh? Why'd he stop run-"

The goblin fell flat like a domino.

"..."

Rone wasn't even surprised at this point. He'd subconsciously been expecting it and just didn't want to believe it would happen. Looking to the side, Rone observed his empty bucket of popcorn and felt an affinity with it. It accurately resembled his emotional state, as all ability to feel had been emptied out of him. Nothing he saw from now on could even...

'Speed record? I don't remember anything like that.'

"..."

"..."

"..."

Over a million players would have challenged the starter dungeon during launch day. There was just no way. It simply wasn't possible.

Rone went to his laptop and opened up the game forums. Using the search function, he looked up speedruns for the dungeon.

After looking through a few hundred entries, the fastest time was 5 minutes and 2 seconds.

He took his phone from his pocket to use as a stopwatch and replayed Max's dungeon raid from beginning to end.

"..."

2 Minutes and 47 seconds.

...

...

Max pressed his head against the train's window. He quite liked doing this, as the train's movement would give a sort of vibratory massage which he found therapeutic in nature. Unfortunately, it was unlikely that he'd continue to commute by train, so he wouldn't feel this sensation again for some time.

As he gazed out the window, his phone started ringing. Without bothering to look, he pulled the phone out of his pocket and held it up to his ear, answering like a robot. "Hello?"

"Max..." Rone's voice came from the other end, "Is there anything you'd like to say to me?"

"To say to you?" Max thought for a moment. "I don't think so... Is something wrong?"

"Okay, I see, I see." Rone took a loud breath which was audible through the phone, "How would you rate your archery skills from a scale of 1 to 10?"

"From 1 to 10... Probably an 8? Or a 9? I've invested a lot of time into archery, so I'd like to think I'm near the upper echelons. Oh, right, I'm actually planning to try to get into prof-"

"YOU'RE NOT A F*CKING EIGHT YOU F*CKING M*R*N." Max nearly dropped his phone as Rone suddenly started yelling into the microphone. "DO YOU KNOW A SINGLE PERSON ON THE F*CKING PLANET WHO CAN SHOOT A BULLSEYE AT ONE HUNDRED METRES?! IT'S ZERO! NOBODY CAN F*CKING DO IT!"

Max hurriedly turned his call volume down as people started glancing at him on the train. "Hey, what gives?! Don't suddenly destroy my eardrums!"

"AAHHH!!! Do your boss and coworkers actually hate you or something??"

"No they don- Actually, I was fired so I don't have any."

"What? You were fired?"

"Yes. Are you calm yet?"

Rone hesitated before responding. "...Okay ...Okay I'm calm. Tell me what happened."

"One of the students went into school with a bow and took shots at his classmates. Nobody was hurt, but the club was held responsible and all the students pulled out of our programs."

"Woah! That's crazy. What kind of unhinged psycho just pulls up and starts shooting their peers?"

"Yeah, and what sort of unhinged psycho just calls up and starts screaming into their friend's ears? You still haven't told me what that was all about, you know."

"I'm sorry, but it's not my fault you're a freak."

"A freak? Since when am I a freak?"

"You tell me. How long have you been hiding your skill at archery?"

"I haven't been hiding anything. Is that what this is about? You think I'm some sort of secret archery genius?"

"You are though. You can literally hit a bullseye at 100 metres."

"That's nothing. Hero of Liberation has dozens, if not hundreds of archers who can do that."

"...So just to be clear, you're using NPC archers, in a video game, as your point of reference."

"Well, when you put it that way... yes. But I don't see how it would be any different from real life."

"How about the fact that the NPCs are based in an intense war setting that would force them to train as hard as they could every day for years, since their lives depended on it? And that their aiming ability is set by programmers?"

Max faltered for a moment, "W-well yeah, but modern archers today probably train close to that amount. Archers today also have longer lifespans, so they can train more..."

"Do you know what range competitive archers shoot at?"

"Probably somewhere from 90 to 120 metres. Maybe a hundred." Max guessed.

"It's 70."

"..." Max blinked, "Are you sure?"

"Dude, I'm positive. Check the forums, look at how the other players did on that archery test. Try to find one other person who did as well as you."

"Hmm..." Max didn't really believe it. After all, how could he? Others had trained their whole lives at archery, some even training for multiple decades, whereas he himself had only trained properly for a bit over 4 years. It was unthinkable that he could already contend with the best.

Max opened the forums and entered 'archery test' into the search prompt. He expected that most people would have trouble shooting out to 25m, but experienced archers should have no trouble hitting the 50m target, which would probably be around ~3-4% of the test-takers as a conservative guess. He read through the first entries.

—Just took the archery test and I want to die, did anyone actually pass it who can shoot me?

—Why the f*ck is the stupid archery test so hard??

—Theory: Someone assassinated one of the dev's firstborns with a bow, making them hate archery and want nobody to have the class

—Does anyone know if you can retake the test? I really want to play as archer, but I failed

—Fix the test or I'm refunding!

"Wow, these posts are really visceral." Max flicked through the thread. He was already expecting this, so it didn't really shock him. He kept scrolling to find the successful people.

—The pass rates for all the other tests seem quite high, why is it just us who have to suffer? And why is there only one attempt per target?

—The bow is hard to pull back?? It felt like my arms were going to fall off while aiming that thing

—Guys, Virtek are holding a post-launch press conference tomorrow morning! Keep posting so they can't ignore us!

Max furrowed his eyebrows. He'd been scrolling for a few minutes and hadn't seen any successful players yet. He changed the prompt to look for people who actually passed the test. The number of results dropped to the low thousands.

—People using this tag: Although I am unworthy, please make me your disciple

—I passed! I hit the edge of the target on 25m and nearly cried

—I also passed. I do archery but I could not hit the 50m target. The bow is heavy and does not have stabilisers.

—I passed by the skin of my teeth. For people wondering how close that is, teeth don't have skin

—Guys, I missed the first target and tried to shoot the NPC instead, but I missed again, and he killed me. Technically I still passed because I passed into the afterlife, right?

After scrolling for some time, Max did find people who hit the 50m target. Some had attached images, showing that they hit nowhere close to the bullseye. Max couldn't find anyone who hit the 75m target either.

"Are you convinced yet?" Rone was still on the line.

"...Just because I can't find sharks when I swim in the ocean doesn't mean they don't exist."

"Tch, being stubborn, I see. Go check the streaming website then."

"The streaming website?"

"DiveLive. It's where Virtek games are live-streamed. Check it out and compare the number of streamers in the archer category to the other categories."

Max found the website and checked the streamer counts for each of the game's main classes.

Warrior: 23,607

Rogue: 16,063

Archer: 1,167

Mage: 36,789

Healer: 9,524

"..."

"Well? You saw it, right?"

"I get it, not a whole lot of people passed the test. But that's only because the average person hasn't used a bow before."

"I know. I had another reason for showing you that. Basically, you know how you don't have a job anymore?"

"I am very aware of that actually, yes."

"There's your solution."

"My solution?"

"Become a streamer!"