translator: Oyen editor: Ciel
The score was shown on the big screen, with Xiao Han leading 1:0 for now. There would be a short break between the first and second games.
This time, it was Su Cheng’s turn to choose the map. Without hesitation, he selected ‘Dark Swamp’. This map was one that had appeared very frequently during the competition. As the representative of swamp maps, the influence of miasma poisoning and the disorderly arrangement of footholds made things difficult for close-combat players, but gave long-range players more opportunities.
Su Cheng’s goal in choosing this map was very clear—— he wanted to use his long-range attacks to fight a war of attrition.
The moment the game started, Xiao Han immediately used his sect’s qinggong skill to turn invisible, wanting to lurk around and grab the first opportunity. However, Su Cheng’s reaction was not slow. After counting the time and estimating that Xiao Han had entered his attack range of 22 metres, despite not being able to find the assassin, Su Cheng still decisively opened the group attack skill ‘Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank’!
The invisible assassin was indeed hit, and Su Cheng followed up with Sorrowing Over The Silk, Autumn Moon Over the Han Palace, and Mooring on an Autumn Night. The combination of these three skills directly cut Thousand Miles Ice’s blood volume down to 65%.
After this, Su Cheng immediately used another group attack skill, ‘White Snow on a Warm Spring Day’, to reduce Xiao Han’s blood volume to 50%!
In addition to the weakness state from guqin player’s skills, the three instant group attack skills stacked together did considerable damage. Just by making use of his attack range, Su Cheng had gained a huge advantage.
Despite losing half his health in the blink of an eye, Xiao Han showed no fear. After resisting this set of long-distance attacks, he immediately opened the skill ‘Thousand Lights Ghost Walk’, using the shadows to teleport for many short bursts, quickly closing the distance and reaching Su Cheng’s side. At the same time, he launched the combat stealth skill, ‘Shadowless Dragon’!
Su Cheng’s blood ran cold. All his instant skills were on cooldown, and he had no way of hitting the assassin out of his stealth state at the moment. Xiao Han had obviously calculated this. In addition, the weakness state had already ended, so Xiao Han dared to open a big move to close the distance.
Leaping, closing in, circling back—— Thousand Miles Ice completed this series of operations in one go, appearing behind Morning Breeze Lingering Moon’s back in an instant.
The bloody dagger in the black-clothed assassin’s hand sliced across the enemy’s throat—— Deadly Ice Silkworm!
In an instant, blood spattered across the screen. The double damage effect from Shadowless Dragon was terrible, cutting Morning Breeze Lingering Moon’s blood volume down to 40% in one fell swoop!
This one strike was followed up with a Meteor combo to further reduce Morning Breeze Lingering Moon’s blood volume…
This set of melee attacks really shocked the audience. In just three seconds, Xiao Han’s outbreak had instantly reversed the blood gap created by Su Cheng.
Although Thousand Miles Ice had only half blood, Morning Breeze Lingering Moon had been beaten until he only had 40% of his health left!
Moreover, Xiao Han also used the illusionary effect of ‘Phantom Dreaming’ to control his opponent.
After Shadowless Dragon had ended, illusionary flowers appeared on Su Cheng’s computer screen. The reality of VR perspective would cause the players to feel as if they were really standing in the middle of a flower bed. If god Han broke out another wave of attacks, the crispy guqin player would definitely not last even five seconds.
Su Cheng was very decisive. His fingers tapping on the qinggong skill key, he swung the mouse in his right hand sharply—— the guqin player in a dark green gown opened the sect qinggong ‘Fluttering Petals’, flying away as lightly as a leaf blown away by the wind. After three consecutive jumps, he landed accurately on a stone foothold.
The audience: “…”
In addition to God’s perspective, there were two windows on the live broadcast platform that broadcasted the contestants’ first-person perspective. At this time, Su Cheng’s screen was clearly full of flowers, but in fact, under his feet was an extremely dangerous swamp. He pressed the keyboard blindly while under the illusion state, jumping three times in a row with his qinggong skill, yet somehow still landed on the stone platform with incomparable accuracy!
After being stunned for several long moments, the audience finally came to their senses, offering a round of applause to express their respect for Su Cheng’s blinded operations.
Shen He, who watched the game backstage, couldn’t help but comment. “This operation is really powerful!”
Professional players relied on their memory of the terrain and accurate calculations of the distance to accurately position themselves when the terrain could not be seen. In fact, this technique was difficult to learn. Be it the angle of the mouse flick or the direction of movement; if anything deviated even slightly, he would have fallen into the swamp instead of landing on the stone——- but Su Cheng did it, and he did it perfectly.
“Xiao Han may lose this game.” Qin Mo replied calmly.
Shen He was stunned, looking back at his master. “Will god Han lose? But he still has half blood, while captain Su only has 40% blood volume left.”
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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Xiao Han braced himself to control his assassin to jump 10 meters forward, but was hit by the guqin player’s purple sound wave.
Players couldn’t release skills while asleep. Seizing this opportunity, Su Cheng opened another big move—— A Spring Flowing Over Stones!
The clear and crisp sound of the spring water caused Thousand Miles Ice’s blood volume to drop from 50% to 20% in a flash!
This level of blood volume was quite dangerous. After the sleep state was lifted, Thousand Miles Ice continued to jump forward, using ‘Rainbow Through The Sun’ while moving.
The higher the combo of Rainbow Through The Sun could be stacked, the higher the damage dealt. Everyone thought that Su Cheng would dodge, but the guqin player didn’t move, choosing to stay in place and burst out another wave of damage.
The bloody dagger was like a storm, slicing and cutting away at the guqin player, while at the same time, the guqin player’s sharp sound waves were also attacking the assassin. The blood volume of both players decreased rapidly.
Two seconds later, a prompt popped up on the screen—— Morning Breeze Lingering Moon has killed Thousand Miles Ice!
In fact, Morning Breeze Lingering Moon was left with only 5% of his health.
The reason why Su Cheng dared to fight like this at the very last moment, was obviously because he had calculated the amount of damage extremely precisely.
“Player Su Cheng must be very good at math,” Ye Chao hit the nail on the head in his analysis. “God Han’s big move was still in cooldown, and only ‘Rainbow Through The Sun’ could be used. Even if he landed a critical strike, god Han would be unable to kill him in 2 seconds. On the other hand, most of Su Cheng’s skills were in cooldown, with only ‘Dialogue of the Fisherman and the Woodcutter’ available. However, with the back-and-forth sound wave damage, Su Cheng would be able to kill god Han, who had only 20% of his blood left.”
The ‘Dialogue of the Fisherman and the Woodcutter’ skill had a unique trait. After the guqin player opened the group attack skill, the verdant sound wave first spread out to the surroundings. However, after a distance of 22 meters was reached, the green sound wave immediately returned to the guqin player’s hand at a wind-like speed. This special trait of ‘going back and forth once’ was equivalent to dealing damage twice with just one skill.
“No wonder captain Su didn’t distance himself at the last minute, and instead fought against god Han,” Liang Ru cried out. “The skill damage had already been accurately calculated!”
“People I know who study music are generally more literary-inclined or artistically-inclined,” Ye Chao mused. “Not many are good at math and logical thinking. Su Cheng is obviously a special case.”
After being transferred out of the competition map, Xiao Han sent a message in the room chanel. “This time, it should be you saying ‘you let me win’, right?”
Su Cheng sent a smiley emoticon: “You let me win.”
Xiao Han: “You’re too polite.”
The audience: “……”
Both great gods played fiercely during the match, which had been the most exciting game in the group thus far. After the match, however, the atmosphere was harmonious as they joked with each other.
In fact, Xiao Han and Su Cheng didn’t have a close relationship. Most of it was just sending and grabbing red packets in the WeChat group. However, Qin Mo was very fond of the captains of the two non-governmental teams, Su Cheng and Lin Shuangcheng. As the saying went, love for a person extended even to the crows on his roof; liking Qin Mo meant that Xiao Han liked whomever Qin Mo liked. Thus, he was polite towards Su Cheng.
***
Xiao Han and Su Cheng tied 1:1, so they could only fight the tiebreaker round.
Zhu Qingyue’s advertisement appeared on the big screen once again, causing the audience to be rather speechless. “Why is the little crying bag always appearing during the rest intervals after the games?”
“I have no doubt that the best soysauce player award in this individual competition will go to the great god Qingyue!”
“The little crying bag expresses that even if he cannot participate, he will make a strong impact through his advertisement!”
“Buy, buy, buy, great god Qingyue, will it do if I buy your product without question?!”
“Now, let us proceed with the tiebreaker game.” Ye Chao announced after the advertisement ended.
“For the tiebreaker round, the map will be randomly chosen by the system.” Liang Ru added. “In fact, luck is also an important element, right?”
“That’s right,” Ye Chao nodded. “Obstacles aren’t good for guqin players, while swamp and trap maps are disadvantageous for assassins. There aren’t really any obvious biases on the other maps. For now, let’s see what map the system will choose.”
As he said this, the rolling screen suddenly stopped. The map chosen was one everyone was familiar with—— Qingcheng Mountain Forest.
This map was used for upgrading tasks in the novice stage. It had a forest with densely packed trees, with sunlight shining through the gap between the branches and leaves. It was a comfortable scene, much like a paradise.
This kind of mountain forest map had no obvious advantage for either the guqin player or the assassin.
“This is a fair map,” Ye Chao commented. “The gap between their strengths is not big. It will depend on who can seize the opportunity first!”
“Let’s watch the final game!” Liang Ru’s cheers hyped up the mood.
After the map was loaded, both sides refreshed on a corner of the map.
Arriving at the middle of the map, Su Cheng didn’t see Thousand Miles Ice, which meant the assassin was once again in an invisible state. He decisively opened a group attack skill ‘Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank’, however, Su Cheng was still unable to catch a glimpse of Thousand Miles Ice after the skill had ended. His weapon ‘Broken String’ extended the attack distance by 2 meters, which when added to the original attack distance of guqin player’s sound wave of 20 meters, made up 22 meters. The group attack was released, but the assassin wasn’t hit, so there could only be one explanation—— the position of the invisible opponent wasn’t within the attack range!
It was impossible for Xiao Han to make the same mistake a second time. Last time, he was badly beaten up; this time, Xiao Han deliberately stopped for 2 seconds at a distance of 22 meters before Su Cheng released the group attack. As expected, he cheated his way out of Su Cheng’s first skill.
Realising that things were wrong, Su Chen immediately turned around to jump away, plucking his guqin strings to use a group attack skill– Autumn Moon Over the Han Palace!
Sure enough, Thousand Miles Ice appeared not too far away, attacking him at an extremely fast speed!
Using the sect qinggong skill, Xiao Han moved at a dazzling speed, releasing ‘Rainbow Through The Sun’ to cut Morning Breeze Lingering Moon’s blood volume down to 75%. Then, he used Meteor to leap forward, suppressing his opponent and further lowering his blood volume to 50%!
This roundabout sneak attack was reminiscent of the previous game, where Xiao Han used the same strategy to gain a huge advantage in an instant.
Left with no choice, Su Cheng used his qinggong skill to run away, opening another group attack skill at the same time.
Without protection from the front row, the guqin player’s reading skills could easily be interrupted. Su Cheng could only use his qinggong skill to gain distance and try to find opportunities for himself.
The ultra-high speed mobile warfare caused the players to exchange skills more frequently. With pleasant melodies and the sharp metallic clang of daggers continuously ringing, Morning Breeze Lingering Moon’s blood volume dropped to 30%, while Thousand Miles Ice’s blood volume was reduced to 70% by a long-ranged group attack!
The blood volume gap wasn’t narrowed; it seemed that Su Cheng was at a disadvantage.
“God Han should be able to win!” Shen He was very excited.
As if watching a movie, Qin Mo was still calm. “Not necessarily, take a look at his qinggong skill bar.”
——Releasing the sect’s qinggong skill in the game was linked to the consumption of a qinggong skill bar, which started off at 100 points of qi.
In the beginning, Xiao Han had used his qinggong skill to hide and circle around. Now, his qinggong skill bar had around 50 points of qi left, while Su Cheng still had about 80 points.
Staring at the values, Shen He realised what Qin Mo was trying to show him. “If Su Cheng continues to keep a distance and fight a war of attrition, god Han will eventually run out of qi points in his qinggong skill bar!”
The number of points consumed by the sect qinggong skill was proportional to the movement made. That was to say, the number of qinggong skill points required for Su Cheng to retreat 10 meters was the same that Xiao Han would use to advance 10 meters. Su Cheng had more qinggong skill points than Xiao Han, so he continued to drag Xiao Han with mobile warfare. Eventually, there would come a moment when Xiao Han could no longer use his qinggong skill, then Su Cheng could stand in the distance to counterattack!
Qin Mo thought that Su Cheng’s playing style was rational and smart.
Sure enough, Xiao Han’s qinggong skill bar was soon emptied and could no longer be used. His speed also correspondingly slowed down.
Seizing this opportunity, Su Cheng immediately widened the distance between them, opening his big move ‘Zhuangzi Dreams of Being a Butterfly’, which he connected with the weakness-inducing skill, ‘Sorrowing Over The Silk’!
Affected by both the sleep and weakness states, not only was Xiao Han unable to move and release skills, his defence was also reduced.
Su Cheng immediately used the reading skill ‘A Spring Flowing Over Stones’!
The original 40% blood volume gap was soon negated by this series of fierce attacks!
“Beautiful!” Ye Chao praised. “Because of this, both sides are in residual blood with 20% blood left. A series of consecutive attacks could end this fight right now!”
As Liang Ru was very excited, her voice was trembling. “This is the fifth time that god Han and captain Su have similar blood volumes in this match. The two of them are on equal footing!”
“The sleep effect will end soon, and qinggong can’t be used,” Ye Chao added, “everything depends on god Han’s final actions!”
As soon as his speech ended, the sleep and weakness states on Thousand Miles Ice disappeared. Xiao Han immediately used a skill—— Thousand Lights Ghost Walk!
The audience was stunned, because this time, he actually produced seven shadows!
Xiao Han usually produced up to five shadows with Thousand Lights Ghost Walk. This was the first time anyone had seen him control seven shadows in public. The amount of blue consumed by producing so many shadows was large, and the remainder of his blue fell directly to just a third!
Then, from God’s perspective, the audience saw seven shadows flying as fast as the wind toward the position where Morning Breeze Lingering Moon stood.
The distance five shadows could travel was limited, but seven shadows could travel a lot farther. Shocked, Su Cheng quickly used a group attack skill to eliminate this wave of shadows, only for Thousand Miles Ice to teleport before him at that very moment.
—— Meteor!
This skill also had a teleportation function, allowing the player to teleport behind the designated target.
Followed by—— Deadly Ice Silkworm!
The assassin’s hand rose and fell, the blade in his hand causing fear in the hearts of everyone who watched this moment. With the release of the assassin’s strongest single-target skill, emptying his blue, the guqin player finally fell at his feet.
—— Thousand Miles Ice has killed Morning Breeze Lingering Moon!
The moment the victory prompt showed up, Qin Mo, who had always been calmly watching the match from backstage, couldn’t help but wipe away the sweat on his palms.
He was calm on the surface, but in fact, he had been very worried for Xiao Han.
Su Cheng was a very strong player, and the match was very difficult. Still, Qin Mo was especially gratified by Xiao Han’s response at that critical moment.
At that time, his qinggong skill couldn’t be used, and Su Cheng would have won by controlling the distance. However, Xiao Han immediately thought of a way to use Thousand Lights Ghost Walk and the short-distance teleportation effect of Meteor to quickly close the gap, appearing behind Su Cheng to complete the final deadly strike.
Usually, Thousand Lights Ghost Walk and Meteor were attack skills, but Xiao Han chose to use them not for the damage, but for movement assistance.
At such a critical moment, many players might not have thought of this alternate method, but the mixed-race Xiao Han thought quickly. He had no scruples using two big skills for movement, and teleported behind Su Cheng to deal a critical hit. This sort of ‘last stand’ approach had enabled him to win the match successfully!
Thanks for the chapter
You’re welcome~ ❤
Hehe, as expected of Xiao Han! Of course, we all knew that he would win~ But wasting mana for attack spells, which he used to aid his speed instead, huh… cough, Xiao Han is really very smart and brave to take this risk ah! Su Cheng only won by a narrow margin in the second round tho… patpat to him to also being so good!
Thank you for the chapter~
Xiao Han isn’t lose in game, but in math lol 🤣
You’re welcome~
❤
God Han 666. Momo call him handsome and praise him~
just call him husband 🙈
Beautiful! Thanks for the chapter 😀 I usually imagine the fighting scene while reading this.
ikr, I also imagine the battle scene 🙈
You’re welcome~ ❤
–Xiao Han to Qin Mo–
Xiao Han: Wasn’t I handsome?
Qin Mo: ……–Xiao Han to Su Cheng–Xiao Han: You let me win. ^_^Si Cheng: …Hahaha… Yes, this mixed-race kid has a different brain circuit than normal people… Xiao Han, you’re so shuai!
Lol, Xiao Han mini theatre 👀
Thanks for the chapter! (´ ▽｀).。ｏ♡
You’re welcome~ ❤
It’s the first time I forgot about the update release ahh~ ๐·°(৹˃̵﹏˂̵৹)°·๐ Xiao Han is so smart~ In such a critical situation he could think of a way to change the outcome!~ And Su Cheng… even though he is a newbie in the professional league he could fight as an equal!~ I think the Interlude Team will be the strongest opponent for the Mojue Team… Hehe how Qin Mo was worried for Xiao Han~
Thank you for the chapter! ( ˊᵕˋ )♡.°⑅
Lol, he wants Qin Mo to praise him~ and Interlude is really not bad, Su Cheng can fight equally with Xiao Han who was a world class player 🤔
You’re welcome ~ ❤
Brilliant plays all around!!! That was something players can learn from throughout the ages!!
Thank you for the chapter!!!
My gosh! This match is so thrilling 😍😍😍😍😍😍