Chapter 1: I Came Here to Write a Legend2:44 PM, London.

  Henry hurriedly grabbed a can of Monster from the fridge and rushed back to his desk. The round table was cluttered with all sorts of gaming gear, dominated by six 34-inch monitors and three vertically rotated 21-inch screens, all glowing in the dimly lit room.

  The six 34-inch screens flickered with dazzling effects, sometimes completely obscuring the brutal battlefield behind them.

  "Get back to your position fast, the east side is being pushed hard! Shinn’s team is moving in to fill the gap. Push right fnk, right fnk! Henry, can you rally more people? Do we still have the budget to hire more grinders? We’re getting wrecked."

  Across the table, his teammate nearly screamed into the mic. Hours of shouting had left his voice hoarse.

  Henry took a quick swig of the energy drink and almost choked. He coughed a few times before burying his head close to the screen, his hands swiftly returning to the mouse and keyboard. A secondary vertical screen beside him was rapidly scrolling with chat messages from various groups.

  Their day had barely passed the three-hour mark. For the past two weeks, ever since Zephrania unched their Total Offensive campaign, they had been gritting their teeth, defending Asterith for an average of four hours a day.

  Henry gnced at the cn member list, which was now two-thirds grayed out, and felt a wave of frustration and helplessness. Most of their cn members, like many other pyers of this game, were regur people with their own lives. At 2 PM, they were either at work or in css. Cn leaders like Henry had even proposed paying those who could stay online for extended periods. About thirty people were avaible as a permanent force, while the rest could only take days off sporadically. Few could sustain this grueling schedule for two straight weeks.

  The Zephrania Empire had exploited peak online hours and time zone differences to the fullest. Chinese and Asian pyers made up a significant portion of Zephrania’s forces. The offensives were unched from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM Beijing time, the region’s prime online hours. Henry moved his mouse to shift his in-game camera downward, looking over the walls of Asterith, where a sea of Zephrania’s signature red armor stretched out as far as the eye could see.

  Asterith was now almost the st remaining stronghold of Estapha. If Asterith fell, only a single mountain pass would stand between Zephrania and Estaphalia, Estapha’s final city. If Estaphalia was conquered, the kingdom of Estapha would colpse, and the game would end.

  7:44 AM, New York.

  Gamers Assemble HQ, 7th floor.

  Helen half-walked, half-ran down the gss corridor, gncing down at the vast square outside. Even with the rexed dress code of a gaming magazine, her appearance today was borderline unacceptable. Her blond hair was still unkempt, strands hanging messily over her thick gsses. She wore a wrinkled t-shirt, loose-fitting khaki pants, and hastily slipped-on sneakers. “Oh well,” she muttered while grabbing a cup of extra-strong coffee from the pantry—a robusta blend her boss had recommended.

  "A little condensed milk will make it more patable." Her 44-year-old Vietnamese boss had once told her that, and he was right—condensed milk and robusta beans made for an unexpectedly explosive combination. But it wasn’t even 8 AM yet, and no staff were around to refill the milk trays. With no other choice, she took the bck coffee and grimaced as she sipped the bitter liquid.

  The entire office was empty. It’s not even 8 AM! she thought again. While her colleagues were still snug in bed or leisurely driving along Highway 87, she was already at work.

  "Oh well," she repeated to herself. "This is the climax of the Esta-doom campaign, and my tiny apartment doesn’t even have a ptop strong enough to run this game. Streaming on my phone? Not happening."

  As one of the reporters covering this game, she knew the offensives would start at 5 AM New York time and st about four hours. By the time Helen booted up her office PC and logged in, it was already 8:11 AM. Still in time, she thought.

  Valia was a cross-ptform game, meaning it could be pyed on PCs, ptops, tablets, and even phones. Helen had been monitoring the battle on her phone during her bus ride, but only her office PC could barely handle a livestream without gging.

  Today, like the past few days, there hadn’t been any significant developments on either side. After using the webcam to scan her face, she could finally control her in-game character. Due to the game's face-recognition login system and the one-account-per-person rule, Helen had unconsciously begun treating her in-game character as an extension of herself.

  Her avatar, Helena, had the same shoulder-length blond hair, the same 5'9" height, and wore the signature ivory armor of Estapha. Just like Helen in real life, Helena was an energetic, on-the-ground journalist appearing at every major hotspot, using the game’s Record function to broadcast the test events to the audience.

  Helena spawned at the West Gate watchtower of Asterith, her st logout location. Only through the PC’s wide screen could Helen fully grasp the scale and intensity of the battlefield. From the watchtower, she gazed down at the blood-soaked siege reaching its climax.

  "Zephrania’s red-cd legions surge forward from the East, West, and South like a broken dam, cshing head-on with the resolute, indomitable warriors in Astapha’s white armor. In these historic days, which will decide the fate of this game, every soldier has seemingly changed their armor back to its default color—an unspoken decration of loyalty and defiance."

  Helen began her commentary. This was a live stream. The view count instantly shot up to 200,000 across all ptforms. North American teens, these days, were waking up much earlier than usual.

  "And also, so they can tell friend from foe more easily," Helen thought but left unsaid. Large-scale battles required uniform colors. She continued narrating, though today’s scene was nearly identical to yesterday’s.

  Her viewer count was dropping. Understandable. Audiences had grown too familiar with this grand war spectacle.

  Then—

  "Grarghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!"

  A deafening roar from the game reverberated through the stream, shaking the screen violently. A white-hot inferno erupted below, and a massive silver dragon soared past Helena’s view. With the precision of a seasoned camerawoman, Helen swiftly swiped her mouse to track the creature. The spiked silver dragon executed a fwless arc in the sky before turning and unleashing another bst of fmes directly at Asterith.

  "Arcturus!""Mighty Summoned Arcturus is here!""A real Mighty Summoned beast!""And Cerluva too!""Cerluva and Bhaeta are here!""Three Mighty Summoners in action, and they still can't bring down Asterith?""Maybe just for content.""Why is everyone scared of Mighty Summoners? They’re overrated.""You're wrong. I once saw a Demi Summoner go all out. One of them wiped out an entire battalion of my cn! And that was just a Demi Summoner!"

  The chat exploded with discussions about the three Mighty Summoned Gods. Asian journalists had reported this two hours ago, but for North American viewers just waking up, it was still fresh news.

  "Oh! That’s right," Helen adjusted her camera for a full battlefield view while commenting. "Zephrania is getting serious. We know there are a total of eight Mighty Summoners to be reported in the game—six in Zephrania, two in Estapha. Today, Zephrania has deployed three!"

  "I thought Asterith would fall days ago. I’m logging in to fight!""Wait for me, bro!""Helena, why do you think Estapha has sted this long? It’s beyond expectation."

  Helen had the same question.

  With over a million Zephrania pyers throwing themselves into battle like relentless tidal waves, with thousands of spells, tens of thousands of arrows, and cannon fire blotting out the sky, and with three Mighty Summoners leading the charge—why was Asterith still standing?

  Many shared this question.

  And the answer wasn’t that complicated.

  5:14 AM, Airspace Over the United Arab Emirates (UAE)

  "The game’s self-bancing mechanism."

  "Huh?"

  He pretended not to hear the harsh question from his companion, zily stretching out in his seat and extending both arms. On the table in front of him, the tablet stood propped up, still streaming battlefield footage from Helen’s livestream—but muted. He had taken long-haul flights before when participating in international tournaments, but his body had never quite adapted to the torture of air travel. Fourteen hours in the air was pure agony.

  "Hey, expin it properly!"

  Sitting across from him in their private jet, the Korean girl with a high ponytail and oversized sungsses—probably a product endorsed by some idol group, Bckpink maybe? He wasn’t sure—leaned forward, smacking the seat armrest in frustration. Pouting, she spoke in a sharp, annoyed tone:

  "I told you, the Asterith fortress might fall before we even nd! But you keep insisting it won’t! Why the hell not? What do you mean by ‘self-bancing mechanism’?"

  As if the exhaustion wasn’t enough, now he had to endure her piercing voice drilling into his ears. He regretted forgetting to bring his noise-canceling earbuds. His eyes drifted toward the five other men on the flight. Like him and the girl, they were all dressed in bck suits and wearing sungsses, making the entire team look like they were auditioning for Men in Bck. Each one he gnced at simply shrugged as if to say, You’re on your own, buddy.

  He sighed. Well, there were still about twenty minutes left before nding. Might as well wake himself up with some conversation.

  "From the beginning, Valia was designed around a very simple self-bancing theory," he said, straightening up and reaching for a notebook and pen on the table. "Since this is a two-faction war, if one side gains even a slight advantage, that advantage will snowball into an overwhelming lead."

  "You mean snowballing?" The girl scoffed. "Everyone knows that!"

  Suppressing another sigh, he shot her a gnce over his sungsses, paused for a few seconds, then drew a circle on the paper. He started shading one half of it in bck until the darkened area almost consumed the entire circle, leaving only a tiny sliver of white.

  "If the bck side keeps expanding…"

  "You mean the red side!"

  (A brief silence.)

  "If the red side keeps expanding, taking over nearly the entire map, and uses that overwhelming advantage to attack the st stronghold of the white side—what happens next?"

  "Easy. The red side will crush the remaining white forces and end the game!"

  The girl cheered triumphantly, but he shook his head. Pointing his pen at the tiny white space left, he expined:

  "Remember, this little area will be where all the remaining white pyers gather. The pyer density in that region will be extremely high. The red faction may have an overwhelming numerical advantage, but no matter how many pyers they have, only a limited number can attack at once, right? Now, imagine that in each skirmish, the red side loses 100 troops, and the white side also loses 100 troops. The difference is that the 100 red troops will respawn at their nearest base, while the 100 white troops will respawn right at their defending point. If the white side keeps defending, respawning, and defending again, the red side will gradually lose its initial momentum, and their assault won’t be sustainable. If they fail to break through quickly, the battle will eventually return to a banced state."

  Through her sungsses, he could see Sara frowning in deep thought.

  Sitting across from her, a bald man with a long, gaunt face, a rugged beard, and a tattoo running down his cheek suddenly chuckled. His voice was calm and measured—almost gentle, a stark contrast to his intimidating appearance.

  "Ha ha, Sara’s used to brute-forcing her way through opponents. These kinds of analyses are tough for her. But Korea is a MOBA powerhouse, right? Try thinking of it like a MOBA game."

  Sara’s face lit up with excitement. She grinned.

  "A MOBA game! How did you know that Faker-oppa is my idol, Alex?" She gasped, then suddenly remembered something. "Oh! There was this super old match—so old that I wasn’t even in elementary school yet! But I was a die-hard Faker fan, so I went back and watched it. In that game, Faker’s SKT team had a huge lead, but no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t break into the enemy base. The enemy ADC farmed up to 1000 CS and eventually turned the game around!"

  Alex, the bald man, chuckled.

  "See? Makes more sense now, doesn’t it? There are differences, of course, but from a bird’s-eye view, Valia can be considered a massively scaled MOBA game. Naturally, it has to have an inherent self-bancing mechanism. In fact, many analysts predicted this situation nearly a year ago. But…" He paused. "There’s been an unexpected variable."

  "Not entirely unexpected," another man—chubby, sitting next to Alex—interrupted. "Everyone got it wrong… except two of us."

  He gestured toward him.

  He remained silent.

  "Huh? Huh?!" Sara couldn’t hide her curiosity. "What variable? What are you talking about?"

  "Why Asterith?" Alex asked slowly. "The final siege should have been on Estaphalia—the capital city of the Estapha Kingdom. Asterith isn’t even the kingdom’s st fortress. Why would Zephrania go to such lengths to publicly unch a massive campaign against Asterith? Didn’t they realize that by announcing such a rge-scale invasion, they would also alert countless veteran Estapha pyers and bring them back online to defend? Even if they conquer Asterith, will they still have enough resources and strength to storm Estaphalia, which will be packed with defenders?"

  "Nobody expected Zephrania to make such a strange move, right?" The chubby man grinned, revealing his yellowish teeth. "But two months ago, within our team, two people predicted this exact scenario—our Captain and this Vietnamese gamer right here."

  Sara looked at him, her eyebrows raising above the frame of her sungsses, unable to hide her curiosity—and perhaps a bit of admiration.

  "You made the same prediction as our Captain?" she gasped. "Our Captain that we are talking about! You’re that good? Hey, tell me! Why Asterith? How did you figure it out?"

  Annoying. Headache-inducing. He cursed under his breath. Could the Zephranian Emperor have come up with this strategy to unch an all-out assault on Asterith? Probably not. But that-guy could. He and that guy knew each other too well. If he put himself in that guy’s shoes, there was only one answer to breaking the game’s self-bancing mechanism—unching a Total War campaign against Asterith.

  Through his sungsses, reflecting the first rays of the morning sun, he stared intently at the tablet screen still dispying the brutal battlefield of Valia. There, gamers fought for survival, each struggling to carve out their moment of glory. Kingdoms rose and fell, greedy pyers struck it rich overnight only to lose it all, and countless people wasted hours of their real lives in this virtual world. And in that world, nobodies could become legends.

  Before Sara could bombard him with more questions, the cockpit door opened, and a man with slightly wavy, shoulder-length hair and a rugged, wandering look stepped inside. Lowering his sungsses, he scanned everyone on board before fshing a zy smirk.

  "Alright, my fellow frustrated, life-hating no-name gamers. Get ready for nding. Remember, we’re here to make history."

  His deep blue eyes locked onto him, and he stared back without hesitation. The Captain kept his unreadable smirk, but there was a hint of amusement in his gaze.

  He smiled back.

  It had been three years, and now he had finally arrived on the battlefield of Valia.

  The real world had taken everything from him.

  Now, he had come to Valia to take it all back.

  He had come to write his own legend.