[You have defeated participant '825'.]
[Victory!]
'Phew. That one was fairly brutal too.'
I let out a long breath, watching my opponent scatter into powder.
Over the years I have drifted through any number of battlefields and carried out every kind of contract.
VIP assassination, infiltration and disruption, hostage rescue, escort and close protection, intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, even materiel seizure.
The kinds, the methods and the difficulty were all different, every time.
So I had no choice but to pick up a wide range of skills along the way.
Knife work, urban combat, countering high-ground snipers, close-quarters fighting, psychology, and so on.
To survive I had to be able to answer any variable at all, so I learned and studied whatever came my way.
And yet......
'That wasn't easy.'
Even I was starting to feel the fatigue of handling the participants I had been matched with lately.
The ordinary-level opponents I had met over the first few days were nowhere to be found, and now every opponent I met was a fighter with at least 1,000 matches behind him.
You might say the level of the opponents I was being matched against had risen by leaps.
Since the phenomenon had been getting worse these days, I asked my senior about it the moment I got out of the capsule.
"Didn't you say random matchmaking was the rule in the Amateur League? Looking at it lately, the level of these guys is no joke, you know?"
But instead of an answer, my senior simply held out a hand.
"What's with the hand?"
"What else would it be. If you want information from an information broker, you pay."
He said it with a sly, oily smile.
I looked down at that hand with eyes gone flat and cold.
"How much?"
"Hmm, let's see. Sir, I'd have to ask you for about 100 million won?"
"What? 100 million won?"
Letting out a laugh of disbelief, I reached for the scabbard hanging at my hip.
Shhring—
The blade slid out, making a cold sound.
My senior reflexively waved both arms and backed away.
"Whoa, whoa- hey, this is a crime! Criminal Act Article 284, aggravated intimidation. Article 350, attempted extortion. Article 324, coercion! Every one of them fits you!"
"Your life is only worth 100 million won, hyung...... I think that's going to hurt my feelings."
"Hey, kid, you want to rot eating prison beans for the rest of your life?"
"The law is far and the fist is near, as they say. If your mouth isn't open by the count of three, I really will put a hole in you."
The moment I took one step forward, my senior squeezed his eyes shut.
"I'll tell you! I'll just tell you, all right!"
He grumbled and muttered for a while, and then a moment later he let the premium information out.
The conditions for taking a Pro License are a record of 100 matches or more, with a win rate above 70%.
Given that, apparently other amateur leagues occasionally produce what they call an undefeated promotion.
Exactly what it says: taking a Pro License without losing even once across 100 matches.
"Promote undefeated like that, and from the moment you enter the Pro League you get offers for upper-numbering matches straight away."
"Upper numbering? What's that now?"
My senior clicked his tongue at the question.
"The Pro League isn't a place where you can swing a blade whenever you feel like it. It opens exactly once a week, and the number of matches in a day is fixed at ten. So within those ten there's a hierarchy, is what I'm saying."
"Ah, so they're slotted onto the card in order of drawing power?"
He nodded.
Then he went on, folding down his fingers one at a time.
"Matches 1 through 5 are the lower numbering, 6 through 8 the upper numbering. Then 9 is the co-main event, and the great 10 is the main event. Four tiers, divided up like that."
"Ooh."
"From the co-main event up, the warriors taking part are called contenders. Do well there and you earn the right to fight a World League promotion bout. Getting a feel now for why undefeated promotion matters?"
It meant that if I took a Pro License undefeated, I wouldn't need to pass through matches 1 to 5, the lower card.
Hearing that, the corner of my mouth twitched up without my meaning it to.
"They'd pay that much more too, right?"
"What's there to say. The higher the numbering goes, the more zeros land in your account, don't they?"
My senior drew a zero in the air in front of my eyes with a finger.
When I came back to myself I was already wearing a beaming grin.
He spoke again.
"But here's the thing. There has never once been an undefeated promotion in the Japanese Amateur League. That's why your matchmaking is in the state it's in. They're all desperate to break your precious record. It's a kind of record hunting."
"Hmm. So what you're saying is that I've become a golden goblin?"
Now that I knew the story behind it, I sank deep into the sofa.
At last I could sketch a rough picture of how the situation was turning.
The matchmaking was random, all right. It was just that the strong ones had all massed into the hours when I logged on.
According to my senior, named participants were deliberately timing their matchmaking button to my access times.
Ordinary participants who were sensitive about managing their win rates, on the other hand, were avoiding me by shifting their access hours entirely.
'No wonder the difficulty jumped like that.'
I had been a little cowed, wondering whether the wall in front of the pros was always this high, but knowing it was artificial reverse-matchmaking actually put my mind at ease.
It wasn't that my skill was lacking. I was getting dogpiled.
That aside.
'Undefeated promotion, is it......'
My record right now stood at 91 matches.
Nine more wins and I could take a Pro License.
'Hunters, are they? Well, who's hunting who will come out soon enough.'
It seemed I had better brace myself properly.
***
Ichigaya, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo.
7th floor of the Palaceside Building.
Kajiwara Yusuke, chief of the Mainichi Shimbun's international e-content desk, called in his editing desk and his reporters the moment he got to work.
There was one reason.
The birth of the Japanese Amateur League's first warrior to promote undefeated was drawing close.
"So it's come to this at last."
"Who on earth can he be? There's no information no matter how hard we dig."
The day before, live spectator numbers for No. 2,749's matches had finally passed 10,000.
It wasn't just the people who had been watching the Amateur League. Ordinary viewers, social media and overseas community users had all come flooding in.
Kajiwara Yusuke smiled with satisfaction and tapped the photograph of the 'Demon' mid-swing.
"We can take our time peeling his identity open. What matters is the fact that the entire country's attention is fixed on that one phrase, 'undefeated promotion', right now. This is a huge scoop."
An undefeated promotion carries meaning beyond simply having taken a Pro License without a loss.
In the history of Nova Arena, the number of people who had achieved the record was a mere 50 or so.
Without exception they had gone through the World League and climbed as far as the Master League, and among them were even warriors who had reached the Super League.
Against that background, a Japan with no great number of top-tier warriors had no choice but to harbor a quiet hope.
Chief Kajiwara asked the other young reporters:
"Well? Do you think the Demon can promote undefeated?"
"Hmm...... honestly, I'm skeptical. Every community has gone into an uproar, and all sorts of named participants have started sniping him. Apparently even the famous 'Ninja' is running sniping matchmaking in the same time slot, saying he'll break the Demon's undefeated run."
"Oh, really?"
Ninja.
Participant No. 3, and a veteran of veterans who had been active in the Amateur League since Nova Arena's earliest days.
A 69% win rate, with a record that had passed a full 10,000 matches.
A strong man currently assessed as having no equal in the Japanese Amateur League.
Chief Kajiwara nodded with satisfaction.
"The Demon and the Ninja...... that's a fun shape for it to take."
The instinct of 20 years in journalism told him so.
This would land with the public. Hard, at that.
The truth was that from where he stood it didn't matter which of them won.
If the Demon won, he had only to emphasize the title of the Japanese Amateur League's first warrior to promote undefeated.
If the Ninja won, he could build the narrative of the strongest of them all climbing to the Pro League over a named participant called the Demon.
Chief Kajiwara, who had been tapping the table with his index finger, jerked his chin.
"Put the spotlight on this hard. Run it as a series if you have to."
"Understood."
The meeting ended on that exchange.
The reporters gathered up their notebooks and filed out of the meeting room in a crowd, and Chief Kajiwara, left alone, quietly savored the smell of a scoop he hadn't met in a long while.
And this mood was spreading fast, not only at the Mainichi Shimbun but at the other major papers and broadcasters too.
《Just 5 wins from an undefeated promotion...... how far will the 'Demon' phenomenon go》
《Japan's strongest amateur, 'Ninja', moves to stop the Demon》
《Participant 2,749 of unknown identity: we are witnessing the birth of a future top-tier warrior》
《Ninja vs Demon, the biggest match in Amateur League history announced》
《The economic effect of undefeated-promotion fever? "Advertising inquiries flooding in"》
《Overseas communities are watching too... 'Who is the Demon?'》
《Can the Ninja end the Demon's winning streak? Live streaming reservations surge》
The front pages of Japan's major dailies were papered over with a single word: 'Demon'.
Editorial desks swapped their headlines in real time and competed for clicks, and traffic on the online portals drew an explosive vertical curve from dawn onward.
The aftershock showed up in the Japanese Amateur League immediately.
From 2 p.m. onward, the number of matches plummeted.
The named participants of the Japanese Amateur League, by contrast, began hunting that time slot.
Within that deformed current, the Demon's matches turned into nail-biting bloodbaths every time, and those desperate classics were more than enough to send the viewers wild.
The Demon knocked down the opponents who blocked his path one by one and advanced toward the legendary summit of an undefeated promotion.
And then.
In Go Tae-min's last match before his Pro League promotion—
[Searching for an opponent......]
[Match found!]
[Participant No. 3 has entered.]
[Record: 11,812 matches, 8,266 wins, 3,546 losses (Win rate 69.98%)]
The two of them came to face each other.
***
[Bout type: 1v1 singles]
[Match class: Japanese Amateur League match]
[Victory condition: Kill the opposing participant]
[Map: Altar of Fallen Revelation (Small)]
[Current spectators: 104,936]
[Matchup: 2,749 vs 3]
[Match begins in 3 seconds.]
Ancient ruins with the dark settled over them.
Collapsed stone walls scattered about told me this place had been in ruin a long time.
"......."
Far across the way, a participant stared at me from inside a white portal.
A black cloth outfit wrapped around his whole body.
His face was entirely covered by a face-wrap, and a curved blade showing faintly at his waist gleamed coldly in the moonlight.
Participant No. 3, the Ninja.
The man called the strongest in the Amateur League was looking straight at me.
[Match begins in 2 seconds.]
Put that one down and I would finally be peeling off the wretched amateur label.
And not by the dirt-spoon route of crawling up from the bottom, either, but with a VIP ticket straight to the upper numbering in my fist, where the bundles of cash start raining the moment you debut.
And honestly, I was looking at this situation very positively.
The heavier the Ninja's name, the harder my own price would spike for having climbed over it.
[Match begins in 1 second.]
Shhring—
I drew my sword slowly.
A specially made blade, blacked out from the hilt to the tip of the edge.
Which meant its shape was indistinct in the dark.
From a distance it would look as though only a white mask shaped like a demon were floating in the air.
'The strongest in the Amateur League, is it......'
I raised the corner of my mouth under the mask.
'Let's see what you can do.'
[Match start!]
TMP-TMP-TMP!
The curtain of white light caging our bodies lifted, and the two of us kicked off the ground at the same moment.
We closed the distance in an instant and swung, both of us resolved to end the other in a single stroke.
CLAAAANG!
Sparks flew with a metallic sound that tore at the eardrums.
"......."
My grip tingled and stung.
Driven back three or four steps, I narrowed my eyes.
The Ninja's eyes, met in the darkness, were as cold and unwavering as a machine.
'So the record wasn't just decoration.'
This opponent was a monster of a different class from the participants I had met before.