Chapter 259: Ice Age

Spades puts the acid-filled metal box over the alcohol lamp, thumbs down the hole that holds it down.

The particles inside the box corroded and then turned into a viscous black liquid that flowed out along his fingers, like extremely dark colored blood.

The "blood" drops onto the outer flame of the alcohol lamp and is burned again, giving off a strange flame-colored reaction.

The original orange-red color of the outer flame changed to an unsettling greenish-purple, jumping restlessly as the liquid dripped from the box.

The dull cyan firelight reflected Spades' shadow shakily on the tent, which danced with teeth and claws, as if Spades had a monstrous soul inside him that was trying to burrow its way out of his body as the particles burned.

The liquid extinguished the alcohol lamp three times as it dripped, and Spades habitually lit it again, waiting until he was sure he had burned all the liquid out of the box before extinguishing the burning solid block of alcohol with his hand.

Packing the remaining alcohol and strong acid in a parcel, Spades changes clothes, crouches down to lace up his snow boots, casually gathers a punching bag, and rises to gather up an inventory of his other belongings, mainly the remaining strong acid, fuel oil, and solid alcohol, as well as some food.

--These supplies were bought and brought in by Spades at an outside store.

The store system is disabled in the game pool, but of course Spades generally doesn't use it, and doesn't need to carry food or a change of clothes or anything like that for himself.

Because he's always been a quickie, in the words of his new teammate, Judge of the Counter God's review of him - Spades likes to violently go through the game, which is fine, but it's also not fine because it destroys the integrity of the game.

Usually when Spades enters a game, the monsters don't even wait for him to eat his next meal before the game ends in his absolute victory.

This is the reason why, during the later stages of training, the Inquisitor of the Adversary was burnt out.

Killer Sequence, as last year's champion team, there's no doubt that the individual combatants are strong.

Last year, Killer Sequence was able to pick off all of the veteran guilds as a dark horse, and I have to say that none of the five players, not to mention Spades, was a top-notch ace who broke the mold.

When the long whip comes out, it sweeps in all directions.

Even the Deer Hunter's high-minded reformer had to grit his teeth and sigh, admitting that this guy didn't need any weapon modifications at all -

--Because a weapon is an accessory to Spades, an optional addition, and no matter what kind of weapon Spades uses, he, himself, is the most offensive weapon on the league field.

No remodeler has the guts to say that they can take existing Spades and make them into a better weapon.

Because Spades is already the best.

--This is the public knowledge of all players in the game, as unshakeable as the common sense of [The Earth is round], [The Earth revolves around the sun].

But Killer Sequence, a young championship team, has a rather fatal weakness - that is, the five players on the team are all primary attackers.

No shield, no control, no roaming, and the most outrageous point of all, no tactician on the team.

Last year's win was due to Spades' sudden and overpowering performance that caught the other teams off guard.

But after a year, this tactic of relying on one person in a group battle in the eyes of other guilds gradually had to become less of a bust than it was at the beginning when there was nowhere to start.

Because while Spades is perfect, his teammates are not.

After a year's worth of study and research, almost every guild's team has developed a large number of tactical guidelines based on the skills of Spades and their teammates, as well as their habits of working with each other.

The King's Guild's Heart even put their own tactics against Spades out in the open - a back-up nanny with double control.

This tactic won't wear down Spades, but it's enough to give the other four a drink.

Just as all the guilds were gearing up to give Killer Sequence's fledgling and determined team a real run for their money in the next tournament, Spades once again did something that blew everyone's minds - the

--He poached the Deer Hunter's tactician, [Judge Against God].

At that time, the entire game's forums were in turmoil for a dimensional week, all discussing this matter, and almost every player had typed question marks underneath the Slayer Sequence's announcement of accepting the [Judge of the Reverse God] announcement.

What type of player is Spades?

Anyone who has watched his matches will have a deep understanding of the "uniqueness" of this man, who is a fairly typical character of the main attacker, tripping, sweeping the line of troops, pushing the bottom of the boss, lightning to beat the opponent to win, and even in the semi-finals of the game played a ridiculous record of one to five.

In the absence of a tactician, Spades is the centerpiece of the entire team.

But as the centerpiece, Spades is again conspicuously remiss in his duties, as he barely communicates with his teammates during the match, and of course when other guilds' teams follow up with match replays, they have to admit that Spades really doesn't seem to need to communicate with his teammates.

Because if he communicated, his teammates wouldn't always be able to keep up with him, so he simply didn't communicate.

The guy who's in a thirty-two to sixteen match where his teammate falls down in front of him and begs for help and Spades can fucking misread it, stabs him with a whip before reacting to the fact that it's his teammate he's stabbing, and then immediately goes after the monster after apologizing with no sincerity whatsoever is going to take it upon himself to dig into someone else's house for a tactician?

But no matter how unbelievable the audience was, [Judge Against the Gods] still transferred to the Killer Sequence Guild as promised, becoming the only non-main attacker - tactician - in this outlandish battle team combination.

And the last people who wanted to see this scenario were the other guilds who had been preparing for the defeat of the Killer Sequence for the better part of a year.

Because they were incredibly aware of how much the addition of [Judge of the Reverse God] boosted a team with a player like Spades.

[Judge Against the Gods]'s skill is Prophecy, and he's the best tactician in the game.

The powerful combination of the best tactician and the best main attacker couldn't help but make all the guilds despair.

But soon that despair dissolved.

For they were delighted to find that the two best, however, did not work well together at all!

After [Judge Against the Gods] joined over, he quickly developed a brand new training program, but it's a program that's currently running ......

I can't say it's completely bad, I can only say it's a mess.

[Judge Against the Gods] restricted Spades' play, asking Spades to obey his command and not to randomly break away from the group to attack monsters or opponents until he gave the order, but Spades the man looked like he was listening very carefully, as if he was listening to him, and [Judge Against the Gods] then breathed a sigh of relief, and carelessly released the man directly into the game pool.

Spades came into the game like a wild fish out of water and disappeared in the blink of an eye.

After half a day of crashing and searching, the Inquisitor of the Adversary thought that something had happened to Spades when he fell into the game's trap.

In the end, he was dumbfounded to find Spades in the middle of a bloody mess.

Spades, hands taut, strangles a monster's head off with his whip, drops it and hides it behind his back, turning to look at them as if nothing had happened.

The blood on his eyelashes dripped down, but his face was breezy a trace of the ugliness of being arrested on the spot was not there, his voice was calm and slight: "Sorry, I just saw the monster, my body was uncontrollable all of a sudden, so I went to kill it, it didn't affect your training program, did it?"

Meanwhile, a briefing came through the systems of the other four:

[System notification: Congratulations to player Spades for leading the squad through the level! Game over!

Spades slow: "...... Ah, so that's a win?"

Judge Against God: "......"

Three other teammates: "......"

You're laughing aren't you! You were laughing because you won, weren't you!

Do you want to win by yourself so badly! Give me a little bit of team spirit!

Over the next few months of play pool training, [Judge Against the Gods] was painfully refreshed by Spades in the definition of group combat.

--That's a good group to watch Spades, it's almost as good as a fucking war.

Whenever, wherever, every second, while fighting a group battle, while painting monsters, while walking the main game thread, whenever any of the teammates didn't keep an eye on Spades, the guy was gone!

By the time the group scrambles to find Spades, it's usually followed by the system announcing that the game has been passed.

[Judge Against God] was tortured to the point of having a nervous breakdown.

Most of his forays into the game to unleash his prophecy skills were not to predict opponent movements or the main game thread, but basically to find Spades.

Spades is like a child whose attention is drawn away from his surroundings at any given moment, or a child who is a combatant, has the highest movement speed in the entire tour, and is very competitive but superficially obedient.

And he's the ungrateful mom and dad who can't control their kids, and have to spend their days and nights in tears, and then look for their lost child in the game like a cheap people-seeking GPS locator, or the vocal, human-voice broadcasting kind of thing -

Spades, where are you?

[Spades you come out! I won't force you to work with your teammates this time! It's my fault as a tactician! I didn't take into account your feelings of being the main attacker who wanted to take us to victory by himself! You're a good attacker, and it's all my fault!

Come on out! We're going home! We're not playing games anymore, okay?

After many times of this, [Judge Against the Gods] feebly stated that he wanted to be quiet, leaving Spades alone to wander, no, to train outside, and then he took the other three remaining members of the team to grind and train first, leaving Spades as a [Wanderer] to be dealt with on a temporary cool down first.

An invincible ace being placed on the cold bench like this by a new tactician would probably be disconcerting to anyone, but Spades takes it well, and he's really obedient this time around and goes off to train alone.

Spades is a very intuitive lead attacker, which is recognized by the audience, his teammates, including the prophet Judge Against the Gods.

And the personal training ground he chose to rely on his intuition was the replica of the Ice Age.

Spades vaguely sensed that there was something in this copy that drew him to it, as if the mission of his innate existence in the underworld drove him strongly to come to this world of ice and snow, and then to bring the evil things that lurked within it--

--Total Destruction.