Secret Room: Book 1 - Chapter 28

Playing Fish Trapped in Secret Room

Book 1: The Storm is Coming

Chapter 28

As a new game, there weren’t any existing tactics or classical play styles from popular competitions to follow.  The current ranked players were only from the alpha test, so there was no real list of top players yet. Everything was still unknown and everything was a challenge.

This was a game full of undiscovered potential.

------Just because of this reason, it was enough to make everyone’s blood boil in excitement.

After Ai Qing killed the last opponent with a short knife in the game……

The whole game screen was instantly frozen.

A storm struck; mountains collapsed, the earth split open, and the whole world was frozen.

All the battles were over.

IMBA.

The opponent’s captain, an id from Korea, punched these 4 characters in the message area.

IMBA, imbalance, was a term used by some professional players.  Here, it meant “twisted”.

It was obviously used as praise.

Players started to leave the game one by one.  Out of these ten players, five won and five lost, but regardless if they had lost or not, their mood did not dampen in the past whole hour.  They were saying goodbye to each other.  These two players from the European and American Servers who knew Dt even had a short talk about having chat with Dt in the competition site tomorrow.

Following had played for an hour; he pushed away the keyboard and ran downstairs saying that he was going to have a smoke.

Ai Qing was the only one left on the second floor.  Her hand cradled her chin with headsets on, doing the ending for the live stream,  “......Thank you everybody for your support tonight.  Our SP-LoL team members will be doing the live stream next week……”

She concluded in one minute and closed the chat.

She found out that she hadn’t logged off from the game yet.  And it wasn’t just hers, 97’s id was also still on.

She turned on the voice channel: “97?  Are you still there?”

“He went out.”  It was Dt’s voice coming through the earphones.

“Ah……”  He had contributed his time and energy for free tonight as the translator for her.  She felt compelled to chat with him in return as a form of appreciation for his efforts.  “Why didn’t you log in with your own id tonight?”

This had been on her mind for the entire night.

When the system was randomly picking players, she had looked over all the names in red and gold, but found no sign of Dt.

“I was there.  It was a regular id.”  Dt answered.  “I didn’t play in the Alpha test for Secret Room before, so I don’t have a rank.”

Ai Qing felt a little thirsty, so she walked over to the bar two steps away to look for drinks.  “I forgot to thank you this afternoon.  I couldn’t have won against Inin without your help.”  Because she was wearing wireless headset, she could continue their conversation.

“It was nothing.”

……

The king of awkward silence didn’t speak further, as expected.

Anyway she was used to it.

Ai Qing lowered her head and finally took out bottles of orange juice, mango juice, grapefruit juice and apple juice from the small refrigerator.  She also found ice cubes made by Baona in the freezer as well as the Boston shaker and a mixer Baona had brought to Korea specifically.

Non-alcoholic cocktails was her specialty.

He finally found a new subject to talk amid the sound of pouring drinks. “Are you drinking water?”

“En. I want to make some simple cocktails.”

“Alcohol?”

“No, it’s made with juices without any alcohol.”

“Oh.”

……

She then found several champagne glasses and continued to work on her drink.  She poured four juices into the Boston shaker and poured ice cubes into the mixer and turned it on.

The sound of crushing ice cubes filled the whole room.

“What are you making?”  He heard the sound of the mixer and asked.

“Punch.”  She turned off the mixer and said jokingly, “Actually, I should treat you to one as thanks for your help tonight.  Letting a professional player be only a translator for the entire game is truly a waste.  Unfortunately I don’t know where you’re staying.”  Though they were in the same resort, she really didn’t pay attention to where K&K club was staying.

He replied after a brief moment of silence, “I’ll come over, in ten minutes.”