Today yet again, as I leave my day dive, I get to the first step in my routine.
Before, it was simply going to the toilets and eating, but now, it is first and foremost checking the security footage.
The strangeness of the "thief" that visited me didn't escape my eye. He seemed more interested in information than he was in material goods, which is abnormal.
Not only is carrying around a weapon un-thief-like, not fleeing when being seen is even more suspicious.
It is obvious I would think he had some kind of backing that had him perform these acts. There aren't many people who would have an interest in me. Nominally, these could be in-game top rankers or my family.
With information about my link to my in-game persona leaking being unlikely and the fact that they were recently established, I doubt the top guilds would take such direct actions.
There may be a few backed by mafias and similar underground organizations, but they wouldn't have any interest in me. While I do monopolize the top spots of the leaderboards with my guild, from a financial standpoint, I am actually way under them. It does hurt a bit their prestige, but because no one can enter my guild, it does not put a single dent in their gross revenue.
By now, the top guilds have thousands of players, and even if they do not get everything that these thousands of players loot, they do get a small portion of every operation, I couldn't compete with merely 6 players against the kind of loot these guilds get.
If I had to guess, I'd say even just their elite teams could compete in gross revenues against my entire guild. There is such a difference in scale, after all.
Anyway, let's get back to my security issues.
Of course, after such a visit, I upgraded my security.
I replaced my old lock with one even the lockpicking fricking lawyer couldn't open within five minutes, even with the disc detainer pick that BosnianBill and him made. And that's a big statement.
I also installed several security cameras, and just in case someone came in unannounced, there are several sensors plugged into a dedicated computer to call the police and send me a notification.
I thought about using an additional budget to protect my installation against power outages, but thinking about it more deeply, a power outage would get me out of the game, and ever since I've been able to use Slow in real life, I am pretty confident I could win even against a gun.
Thinking of guns... I have some doubts about how I survived the original encounter. I am pretty sure I got fired at.
I even had the slow-motion moment where the bullet stops right before the head.
Slow... Motion?
Slow?
Oooooohhhh!
So this was the moment I got Slow, for some reason. Maybe it's because I risked my life, or maybe it's for some other reason. Whatever it is, I'll find it out eventually.
Anyway, if Slow was active, something with as much energy as a bullet shouldn't have been able to keep enough speed to knock me out. Does it mean I just fell unconscious by pure fear?
-...
Or was it that it was a side effect of getting the Slow skill and using it for the first time?
Let's just go with this.
Let me believe that, please.
I think as I finish reviewing the camera footage and get to eating. In the end, all the movement that was detected was nothing important.
Anyway, the truth is just what I want to believe, that's all.
Fuck. Now I can't deny reality anymore. I was just scared to unconsciousness.
Who expected me to get an answer so quickly.
And that voice... Is the system here?
Fuck.
Did I tell you its personality got worse with time? Well, it did.
[...]
There are various things I do at night, depending on my needs and my mood.
But what I do tonight can be simply summed up in two words: PvP night!
Ok, one of them is an acronym, but acronyms are words as far as I'm concerned.
There are still a few things in the back of my mind, such as what exactly is "Synchronization" beyond its name. Like how it works, or why it exists, but my number one priority right now is to have fun. I want to leave all these matters for later, and there's nothing better for that than farm some PvP.
Of course, if you want to be fully focused on the fight, you gotta play in ranked, which I do, without any doubt.
There are three kinds of people I can meet in ranked at my level.
The first are farmers. They simply leave as soon as they meet me, and start another matchmaking queue. I hate them the most, as I lose time against them.
The second are snipers. They follow the news of my sightings in the Arena, and come from time to time. They strategize heavily and keep tabs on what works best. Basically, they're opponents who constantly target my weaknesses. While they have the advantage of giving me a fight, it's often dragged on and annoying. While being given a challenge can be nice, and having your weaknesses targeted allows you to fix them, being constantly harassed by those gets really annoying. The worst is the pressure that should I lose, a video titled "I beat the #1 ranker in Paradise in a week (No Clickbait)" or "I trained an AI to beat the top ranker in Paradise" would get released, amassing a huge amount of views with no work behind it.
I thought about creating some content on my own eventually, and it's in the works. Who knows, I might get some nice money with these views.
Anyway, getting back to the three types of opponents, next are my favorite, and the first I met: fans and extremely competitive people. It's fair to say that anyone who isn't part of the first two categories must be one of those, as they must want to fight me, whether it is for the act itself or to try to get better at the game.
I respect those that want to use me as a training partner, and give them the opportunity to get better, while I enjoy the feeling of being liked enough to have people wanting to get a beating, so I give them a spectacle.
And the opponent I'm facing is level 18, so it might be the competitive type.
A nice fight coming, indeed.