Chapter 364 - 262: Studying the Strong Team’s Demo 2

Chapter 364: Chapter 262: Studying the Strong Team’s Demo 2

"That won’t be necessary. I’ll sign," Leon replied directly.

Then he turned to his parents and said seriously, "Give me one year. If I can’t make a name for myself, I’ll go back and focus on my studies."

"Excellent. A pleasure doing business with you."

The professional gamer path Grace laid out was truly professional. She even provided Leon with someone specifically responsible for handling all his affairs.

It was a role similar to an agent.

He then took a leave of absence from school; he needed to commit full-time.

The biggest difference between competitive gaming and other sports is that gaming requires a much higher volume of training than traditional athletics.

In other words, traditional athletes couldn’t sustain the high training volume that gaming demanded.

For professional gamers, training for over ten hours a day was common.

If a traditional athlete trained that long in a single day, they’d be half-dead.

That’s why it was so difficult for gamers to balance competitions with school.

There was no getting around it; someone who practiced for six hours simply couldn’t beat someone who practiced for ten.

For Leon, life as a professional gamer was entirely new and exciting.

He lived in a self-contained training facility, with dedicated staff responsible for his three meals a day.

His schedule became fixed: wake up at eleven every day, then go for a run to exercise.

Although gaming wasn’t physically demanding, he had to be prepared for a gauntlet of consecutive matches. He needed to build up enough stamina for seventeen high-intensity games—the worst-case scenario against the Devil, which would require him to defeat all five opponents in a clean sweep, with every single match going the distance.

After lunch was free-for-all ranked play. Around three in the afternoon, he would start training matches against arranged experts, playing late into the evening. Afterward, he would review the games under the guidance of his coach.

Leon finally met Toto, the legendary player he dreamed of surpassing. She was the coach who only ever appeared during the game review sessions.

Coach Toto looked tiny, and every evening when she arrived, she seemed as if she hadn’t gotten enough sleep, her eyes barely open.

At first, Leon thought the Zog Group had given her an impossible workload.

But he later discovered that wasn’t the case.

Because Leon gradually realized that many of the "experts" he encountered on the ladder with wildly fluctuating skill levels were actually accounts being boosted by Toto.

In other words, she worked at Zog’s place during the day, came here to be a part-time coach in the evening, and then went home to pull all-nighters grinding out boosting orders.

It was unbelievable.

Leon was moved by Coach Toto’s love for the game, so he also began training crazily during the late-night ranked sessions, striving to catch up to Toto’s total playtime.

However, he was misunderstanding Toto. It wasn’t the game she loved, but Gold Coins. The game just happened to be her fastest way to make money at the moment.

As the training days passed, the number of people at the facility dwindled.

Nearly twenty people had arrived here with Leon, all of them candidates for the final team.

They would be eliminated one by one until only five remained.

Some couldn’t handle the high-intensity lifestyle and chose to leave on their own.

The rest were forced out because their win rates against Leon were too low.

As the prospective anchor, Leon played the role of the "imaginary enemy" during internal training. All other candidates had to play against him, which served as both practice and an evaluation.

Because Red Alert was a one-on-one competition, there was no need to consider things like coordination or synergy. Those with high win rates stayed, and those with low win rates left. It was that simple.

It was here that Leon came to understand the cruelty of competitive sports.

When one person was eliminated, he was a blubbering mess, begging for another chance, saying it was his last opportunity to earn money.

Leon had considered going easy on them in the matches, but nothing escaped Toto’s eyes. Besides, it wouldn’t change the fact that someone had to be eliminated. Helping one person meant hurting another.

There always had to be a loser.

「On the tenth day at the base」, with less than twenty days until the official match against the Devil, the final five members were decided.

Now, they needed to compete for the playing order. According to the plan, Leon, the strongest, would be the anchor, while the second-strongest would be the starter.

The hope was to make a statement against the Devil in the very first game.

The prize money for winning also differed depending on one’s position in the lineup.

At this stage, even Leon’s position as anchor wasn’t completely secure. If someone else’s win rate truly surpassed his, then everything would be decided by performance.

But Leon was confident he could hold on to his spot.

At eleven o’clock, Leon woke up on time. He was now practicing until after five in the morning every day, getting less than six hours of sleep, but he had already grown used to it.

He flexed his faintly aching wrists, washed up, and prepared to go for a run.

"Leon!" The team leader stopped him. "Hold off on your workout for today. Use this time to go to the training room and get familiar with the new equipment."

"New equipment?" Leon was confused.

’Don’t you just need a sand table to play Red Alert?’

"That’s right. It’s called a home console. You guys and the coach each get one. It’s hard to explain, you’ll understand when you see it."

With that, he led him to the training room.

"You’re the first one here, so you can pick any machine you like. Not that it makes a difference; these are trial models the Zog Group gave us. They haven’t been officially released yet, and the specs are all the same," the team leader explained.

Leon studied the unfamiliar machine.

It looked a bit like a Magic Vision Device—a large box with a screen on the front. Unlike a Magic Vision Device, however, this box was also connected to another cylindrical object, which must have been another kind of Magical Device. Several tubes engraved with Runes connected the two.

"How do you use this thing?"

Leon stared at it for a long time but couldn’t figure it out.

’Besides, what does "console" even mean? The name makes it sound like it’s a class above other machines.’

"Oh, hold on. You can’t just turn it on directly. You have to connect a Magic Energy Stone first. It took me all morning to figure that out."

As he spoke, the team leader brought over a Magic Crystal Stone, placed it on a special pedestal, and then connected the pedestal’s tube to the back of the console’s case.

"The Magic Energy Stone for this thing just sits out in the open?" Leon asked curiously.

"Yep. According to the Zog Group, the Magic Energy Stone function is just temporary. In the future, Magic Energy will be piped directly into every household through dedicated lines. Then you’ll just have to plug the console into the line. Sounds pretty far-fetched, right?"

The team leader answered as he worked.

Leon tried to imagine a future where Magic Energy was piped directly into his home, but he couldn’t picture it at all.

’How many Magic Energy Stones would that take!?’

"Ha! It’s on! I knew it, I’m a genius with Magical Devices!" the team leader exclaimed excitedly.

"Didn’t you say you spent all morning studying it?"

"I did, but this morning I was following the manual. This is the first time I’ve turned it on by myself."

Leon shrugged, at a loss for words. It looked like turning it on only took a few steps.

"Hey! Don’t look down on me. This thing is extremely expensive. If you break it, you might be able to afford a replacement, but I can’t. Even Miss Grace has never used one."

"What does ’Window’ mean?" Leon ignored the team leader’s comment, instead pointing to the logo on the screen and the large word "Window".

"No idea. Who cares? It seems to be the name of the whole system or something. It’s not important."

The boot-up process took a full two minutes.

But Leon didn’t think it was slow at all. For such a complex Magical Device to be up and running in just two minutes was astounding.

Then the screen flashed white and displayed a beautiful image of a blue sky and grassy fields.

"Ta-da! The console is amazing, right?"

"What’s so amazing about it? Isn’t it just showing a picture?"

"Listen, this thing functions as a phone, a music player, a game machine, and has tons of other features. But we won’t need those for a few days. What we need today is this."

The team leader pointed to an icon on the sky-blue background.

"YouTube."

"YouTube?"

"You know how it is. The Zog Group always comes up with names that are hard to understand. Anyway, you use it to watch videos."

"Isn’t that just a Magic Vision Device?"

"It’s different. On here, you can choose what you want to watch."

As he spoke, the team leader began to operate a small device on the table.

"Right, this is called a mouse. It kind of looks like one, so the name is pretty fitting. You use it to control the console."

The mouse cursor moved over the YouTube icon and clicked.

Immediately, the cylindrical Magical Device let out a humming sound, and a light glowed from within.

After another minute, a new image appeared on the screen: a web page, but it was covered in pictures and titles. The largest one at the top was even animated.

The team leader used the keyboard to type in the search box.

"Red Alert Devil recordings."

Soon, a large amount of content with related titles appeared.

"This is what we’re going to use it for," the team leader said. "The game recordings of the Devils we’re about to face are all on this YouTube. It’s time to study them."