Chapter 42: Minerva Nas
Although glamorous on the competition stage, the daily training of professional players was quite boring.
Among them, the youth training camp, which focused on “laying the foundation,” was the most boring. Essentially, it was about turning people into “fighting machines.”
In the early days of the e-sports industry, the prerequisite for entering a professional team was: reaction speed within 0.2 seconds, movement error within 3 centimeters, and attack landing point error within 1.5 centimeters.
In other words, a wooden dummy was generated in front of you with a red dot located at the heart position on its chest. You had to draw your sword within 0.2 seconds and accurately stab the red dot at the heart position, with an error of no more than 1.5 centimeters.
To reach this standard, it took at least tens of thousands of hours of practice. The process was not enjoyable, but torture.
Therefore, the difference between an e-sports player and a professional gamer was that the former was not playing games.
It was work.
“I can’t do it anymore!” After being knocked to the ground by Asker with another Lion’s Fang, Medea threw away her sword, her whole body limply collapsed on the ground, and she cried out, “I really have no strength left… I can’t fight anymore…”
With a clang, Asker’s sword was thrust into the ground in front of her: “If this was a real battlefield…”
“Then I would be dead! Dead!” Medea shouted in despair. “Dead, okay? Even if I’m dead, I don’t have the strength to move anymore! Are you human? You’ve been training me for half an hour, how can my body take it?”
“Don’t talk dirty.” Asker’s face darkened. “It’s just a few sparring sessions, and I’ve been hitting you with the flat of my sword…”
“Not a few times, but hundreds of times, brother!” Medea said tearfully. “Your sword is thick and hard, my weak body has been beaten black and blue by you! I feel like I’m dying!”
“I said, no dirty talk!” Asker saw the strange looks on the girls’ faces and could only cough awkwardly.
“How about this, I’ll go out and see if there are any suitable people to recruit. You help me watch over everyone’s training, practice each of the Eight Tactical Forms 1000 times, no one can slack off.”
“Can I use my psychic abilities?” Medea asked.
“Fine.” Asker thought for a moment. “But don’t overdo it.”
“Okay.” Medea nodded and activated a group mental suggestion. The girls around her immediately felt full of energy, as if they had endless strength.
“Hey, hey, hey, Medea, are you using suggestion?” Nuo was the first to notice something was wrong. Because she originally didn’t like this kind of fighting, but now she was inexplicably filled with the desire to practice swordsmanship.
“Lend me the book, I’m going out for a bit.” Asker said to her.
“Oh.” Nuo took out “Absurd Dreams” from her backpack behind her and handed it back to Asker.
Extending his spirituality and touching the door, Asker quickly returned to the real world. Leaving the ancestral home, he stood on the stone steps outside the door and began to calculate in his mind.
There were still two professions left to recruit, one was a long-range gunman, and the other was an Arcane Mage.
Relatively speaking, the team currently needed a long-range gunman more, because Arcane Mages were used to deal with monsters with high physical defense, and such monsters were after all a minority. Medea, who possessed the Fire I ability, could temporarily act as a mage.
Asker himself used a pistol, which could only act as a secondary gunman at close range. When the distance was far, the pistol’s accuracy was not enough.
In Constantinople today, there were four quests with potentially recruitable gunman NPCs: three of the NPCs were male, and one was female.
Judging from the perspective of malleability and future achievements, the only female gunman NPC was actually the best – she was killed by players as a wild boss during the open beta.
After Constantinople was captured by the Seljuk Empire, she was resurrected by an undead necromancer. Reborn as a banshee, she changed her name to “Minerva,” the name of the ancient Solomon goddess of war who punished evildoers.
However, players all respectfully called her “Minerva Nas,” in homage to Sylvanas from the famous game “World of Warcraft” in the last century.
In fact, Minerva Nas was much fiercer than the Banshee Queen, because Sylvanas used a bow and arrow after all, at least her firing speed couldn’t be too exaggerated.
While Minerva Nas used an automatic rifle… In the official version 1, when the Seljuks besieged the Siris province, Minerva Nas alone killed more than 3,000 players in the Battle of Chrysopolis.
According to the participating players, as soon as Minerva Nas appeared, the sound of gunfire was “da da da da da” non-stop, and then the players fell down in rows like dominoes. All the players who were shot were hit in the head, the bullet piercing through the skull with one shot, there was no extra second bullet hole.
Others might prefer to recruit other male gunman NPCs to balance the gender ratio in the team…
But again, Asker had no discrimination against women, everything was judged based on strength.
Go find this Minerva Nas.
He remembered that Minerva Nas’ quest appeared on the second day after the two princesses ascended the throne, which was today.
So, based on his memory of the forum battle reports he had seen in his previous life, Asker took the subway to the Golden Gate subway station and got off.
He walked a few hundred meters in the direction of the Seventh Hill and soon saw that the road leading up the mountain had been cordoned off by the police of the Constantinople Police Department. Three policemen stood in front of the cordon, vigilantly watching the passers-by nearby.
“Hey! You, you can’t go any further!” Noticing Asker approaching, a policeman immediately warned.
“What happened, officer?” Asker asked casually.
“Nothing.” Another policeman said, “A minor girl shot and killed a noble with a gun, and she’s running around in the mountains now. Our colleagues are chasing her inside. If someone rashly enters… they won’t be very happy.”
“Shot and killed a noble?” Asker raised his eyebrows. “I think the victim’s family would be willing to pay a lot of money.”
“Isn’t that right?” The policeman laughed. “50 pounds, the bounty offered by the noble’s father, so many mercenaries have already gone in.”
“You don’t stop them?” Asker asked.
“Stop them? Of course.” The policeman sighed. “But the Seventh Hill is so big, we can’t possibly surround the entire mountain with a cordon. Now, if you don’t intend to trespass our line, you can turn around and go back.”
Asker turned around and entered the mountains from another direction. As the policeman just said, they could only block the main road, and if players wanted to drill into the bushes, they definitely couldn’t stop them.
Passing through the dense bushes, Asker quickly found a small path. After trekking for about half an hour, he finally found a torn cloth strip on the bushes by a mound.
A player who came here in Asker’s previous life happened to have a dog in the game. So, with the help of the dog’s keen sense of smell, this player was the first to find Minerva Nas who had escaped into the mountains, and was unsurprisingly killed on the spot.
Even though she was still a living minor girl, Minerva Nas still showed an extremely high talent for shooting. According to the player’s account, he was headshotted on the spot, and didn’t even have time to take a screenshot.
However, Minerva Nas didn’t know about the player’s respawn function, so this silencing act was meaningless. Soon, her coordinates were posted on the forum, and in the end, she was killed by the players who came upon hearing the news.
Asker continued forward, taking the wrong path twice in the middle, but fortunately, he finally recognized it and went back. Between a few trees, he found the bodies of three policemen, still holding their police firearms that they hadn’t had time to fire, the magazines were all full.
All headshotted, killed with one shot. This accuracy… Asker clicked his tongue in wonder. It was hard to imagine that a level 0 little girl with no supernatural abilities could do this. If there was a skill level for NPCs in the game system, Minerva Nas’ shooting skill would definitely be maxed out.
Not far from the corpses, he saw a few small footprints, definitely left by a little girl. Obviously, Minerva Nas didn’t know how to erase her tracks at this time, so Asker followed the tracks and continued forward. After walking for ten minutes, he saw the bodies of two mercenaries, also headshotted, killed with one shot.
In the subsequent exploration, the corpses that appeared one after another were like road signs, indicating the location of the boss to Asker every certain distance. When he counted the twenty-seventh corpse, he knew that the other party’s bullets were running out.
The little girl was still naive after all, she didn’t know how to loot bullets from the corpses. How long could one magazine last?
Coming to a mountain stream, Asker saw the red water flowing down from upstream, as if someone was washing their wounds not far away. He drew his sword, went around the corner, and suddenly swung his sword upwards.
With a clang, he deflected the bullet aimed at his forehead.
Asker charged forward at full speed and saw a petite figure sitting by the stream, holding a gun steadily aimed at him, her calm eyes focused and without any distractions.
Another gunshot rang out, Asker raised his sword and split the bullet shot at him again. He was already level 2, and his physical strength could completely keep up with the speed of pistol bullets.
The third gunshot rang out, Asker performed an Eagle Cut, once again cleanly splitting the bullet in half. Three consecutive shots missed, the little girl’s face showed no anxiety or fear, she just calmly turned the gun around and stuffed it into her mouth.
The next second, the pistol was knocked away by the sword, spinning and falling into the stream in the distance. Asker’s sword was against her delicate throat, and she was forced to raise her head, her eyes still emotionless, just calmly staring at Asker.
“Do you want to die that much?” Asker asked lightly.
The little girl stared at him, her numb expression finally loosening: “If I don’t want to die… what else can I do?”
“You can be a mercenary with me.” Asker put away his sword. “With your marksmanship, you’ll have a bright future.”
The little girl was silent for a long time, and said: “I killed a noble.”
“What’s your name?” Asker asked.
“Miel.”
“Listen, Miel.” Asker said, “I have a good place, very safe, no one can find it, neither the police nor the nobles’ lackeys. There, you don’t have to worry about the threat of death. You just need to join my team and work for me, and you can enter that place and receive protection.”
He took out a contract from his bag and handed it to her: “Sign it.”
The little girl took the contract, her brows furrowed imperceptibly – Asker had just knocked away her pistol with his sword, and the force of the blow had broken her finger bones. Although her index finger was in excruciating pain, she still endured the pain and read through the contract page by page.
She’s a natural calm shooter, Asker observed her every move and couldn’t help but sigh in his heart. Names ending in “-el” were a typical characteristic of half-elves.
Just by looking at her appearance, one could also tell that Miel had half-elf blood. Her hair was a light pink, her eyes were emerald green, her features were delicate and beautiful, the tips of her ears were pointed, and her skin was so smooth that almost no pores or vellus hair could be seen, obviously not a characteristic that pure humans could have.
But because she had been beaten and had been on the run in the mountains for a long time, her current appearance was simply a mess.
Her hair was disheveled, her cheeks were dirty, her right eye was bruised from being punched, the corner of her left mouth was bloody and swollen, her clothes didn’t know how many times they had been torn by small branches, and the cloth fragments were clinging to the wounds, stained with blood, mud, and dust. It would be impossible for her not to get infected.
After signing the contract and pressing her fingerprint, Asker rolled up the contract with his left hand, grabbed Miel’s arm with his right hand, extended his spirituality towards “Absurd Dreams” behind his waist, and the two quickly disappeared from the spot.
Forty minutes later, the police arrived, only to see a small pool of blood on the stone beach by the stream.
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