Gwanjongcheonma’s Game Broadcast - Chapter 182

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 182
‘I think I understand now.’
Alberto lay sprawled across the ground.
Da-hong’s eyes, fixed on him, were as clear and serene as a lake.
‘Just from the way he stands, I can tell.’
Da-hong had made a trade with Hae-rang.
In exchange for working as a chauffeur on the Survival Ground,
Hae-rang had agreed to copy any character she wanted.
She hadn’t held out much hope, to be honest.
Until now, Hae-rang had never played Iron Fist Nine,
and the character she’d wanted copied was Italy’s National Representative.
You might say she was grasping at straws.
But that straw turned out to be a golden rope.
‘So this is what Joint must have felt.’
Joint, who had faced Jo Sang-jin in the National Team Selection.
Through Hae-rang’s ‘copy’, Joint had been able to defeat a lifelong rival.
And now.
Da-hong was tasting that very same effect herself.
The figure before her was unmistakably Alberto.
Yet Hae-rang’s face seemed to overlap with his.
It was genuinely strange.
A faint smile played across Da-hong’s lips.
“Smiling?”
Alberto swallowed a scoff of disbelief.
Don’t look down at me with that composed expression.
That doesn’t suit a Korean gamer.
‘So the lucky shot worked. But there’s no way it happens again.’
He’d tried all sorts of things before and nothing landed, so she must have just taken a chance on a grab.
Alberto tightened his focus with certainty.
Rustle.
The instant he moved to close in on Da-hong,
her Kiroi reached into her own guard stance.
Alberto’s eyes flared as he launched forward.
Crack!
One of Kiroi’s signature techniques—the Staff Attack.
It was the kind of skill that caught people off-guard, coming from an unexpected range; one careless moment and you’d eat it.
But with his senses honed razor-sharp, Alberto leaped over the staff,
leaving only a long scrape mark across the ground.
“My turn!”
Against Da-hong, whose attack lag was still active,
Reina unleashed a lightning-fast Super Wind Fist.
A command that required input several times faster than a standard Upper motion.
Da-hong clenched her teeth and held her guard firm.
Bang!
“What, you blocked?”
Alberto’s Reina snorted and drove skill after skill into her opponent.
A quick-startup One-Two followed by a Low Combination.
Then a Mid attack that exploited the gap.
Da-hong’s Kiroi chose defense instead of counterattack, holding her guard solid.
But she couldn’t block everything; the damage accumulated as much as the grab had dealt.
Flinch.
For the first time, Kiroi showed signs of a counterattack.
Alberto moved laterally as if he’d been waiting for it.
Most of Kiroi’s skills are weak to lateral movement.
It was the weakness of Da-hong that Alberto had exposed to the world once before.
Of course, if she landed a grab during his lateral movement, that would be a problem,
but given Da-hong’s aggressive, charging playstyle, such calculated defense seemed unlikely.
Snap!
Once more.
Alberto’s vision spun like a windmill.
“What?”
Even Alberto’s composure cracked this time.
He’d been caught twice already during lateral movement.
The first time could be coincidence,
but happening twice in a row was no accident.
‘No way…….’
Had she changed her play style?
A stubborn player who’d maintained the same patterns for years?
The higher the skill level and the more established the style, the harder change becomes.
That’s why Japan’s National Team players all executed identical moves like robots.
But Da-hong’s movements now showed unmistakable variation.
The Barbarian who’d been charging forward like a madman wielding an axe
had transformed into a Knight bearing sword and shield in both hands.
Bang!
Crash!
An unexpectedly fierce exchange of offense and defense erupted.
Wary of the grab attempts, Alberto abandoned lateral movement altogether.
He judged he could win through head-to-head combat alone.
But then,
Bang! Crash!
‘What is this? Why is she…….’
so good at it?
No.
This wasn’t a matter of skill level.
She was countering every single variation he threw at her.
As if she knew the future a second ahead of time.
Though there had been incidents between him and Da-hong in the past, they hadn’t played many games together.
Yet now she was fighting him as though they’d exchanged hundreds of matches.
‘She sees it all. She sees everything.’
It wasn’t foresight or anything like that.
Just ‘a face she’d seen before.’
Thanks to Hae-rang’s perfect copy of Alberto,
Da-hong could sense from his opening move alone what attack was coming.
And more than that,
‘Close combat like this, head-to-head…….’
was Da-hong’s favorite flow before she’d been caught out.
In the desperate back-and-forth where even breathing was hurried,
Da-hong found the composure to attempt conversation.
“What’s wrong? Having trouble with something?”
“……!”
“Why’re you making that face? That’s what you’ve always done.”
[Warning: Please refrain from unnecessary conversation.]
“Ha ha! Got it!”
The referee’s warning reached Da-hong.
But she only laughed louder.
Returning everything Alberto had done to her before,
the satisfaction was like nothing else in the world.
For Alberto, it was humiliation like he’d never known.
‘Damn!’
He couldn’t use lateral movement,
and head-to-head wasn’t going well.
Worst of all, she knew his movements like an old friend of ten years’ standing.
Cold sweat trickled down the back of Alberto’s neck.
‘Focus! Remember the attack patterns she used back then……!’
The possible scenarios he’d encountered fighting her Kiroi before.
As Alberto braced his guard with those scenarios in mind,
she struck.
‘Again, again?’
This was already the third time.
Regardless of success, the mere fact that Da-hong had attempted the grab three times represented a dramatic departure from her usual approach.
If she could’ve, she would’ve asked.
‘Who are you?’
But what spilled from Alberto’s lips wasn’t a question—
only a strangled cry.
“Ugh!”

“……!!”
A development nobody had anticipated.
Even the on-site fans cheering for Da-hong forgot to shout.
[S… Victory! Ye Da-hong has defeated Alberto and takes the first round! Impressive, Da-hong. Your track record up to now pales in comparison to the brilliant gameplay you’ve just shown!]
Clench.
Da-hong clenched her gloved fist tight as she confirmed the K.O. signal.
‘It works……!’
Effort doesn’t betray you.
At least, that truth held in the Capsule Cup.
While her companions went out to play,
while the broadcast station beckoned,
while Da-hong could’ve chosen advertisement over training, she’d devoted herself to practice alone.
Yet the International Competition results had been no different from Singularity’s negligence.
A clean sweep of losses.
But Da-hong had finally wrought a miraculous transformation.
It works.
All the sweat she’d shed over time pooled together, pushing open the floodgates that had held firm until now.
She’d done it by shedding her pride and inferiority, by asking for help from her ‘mentor.’
“Haa!”
Bang! Snap!
Kiroi’s dazzling kicks struck home on Reina again and again.
In fighting games, there was something just as vital as skill itself—
and that was momentum.
Having confirmed that her abilities worked, Da-hong pressed forward with joyful fury, as if her feet had grown wings.
Meanwhile, Alberto—
‘Damn it.’
He bit his lip until blood came.
Never, not even as a joke, had he imagined this turn of events.
Worse, Alberto had stepped forward and declared he’d sweep the entire match single-handedly.
If he couldn’t even secure a single win, let alone a sweep?
Walking out of the Capsule pod would feel like stepping into hell itself.
A troublemaker silences the crowd when performing well.
But when they falter, their ridicule returns manifold.
“This can’t be happening!”
Crack!
Alberto’s Reina activated Blood Burst.
Da-hong’s health was over half, but his was barely twenty-five percent.
He was in no position to hold back, thinking of the next round.
“Kyah!”
With a sinister crimson aura blazing across his back,
Alberto thrashed his limbs with everything he had.
Bang!
Snap!
An exchange of offense and defense that dazzled the eyes.
It was the kind of movement that made you truly feel what ‘International Competition level’ meant.
The crowd watched in open-mouthed amazement,
but inside, Alberto was burning with a thousand flames.
‘Damn woman. Where the hell did you train? How did you get so good?’
Every so often, the urge to dash sideways swept over him.
It was the most effective feint against Kiroi—anything but a grab.
But Da-hong’s cold gaze never stopped tracking Alberto’s feet.
Go ahead. Try a lateral dodge.
Like someone laying a trap and waiting for prey to spring it.
‘…Waiting?’
In that instant, sparks flashed across Alberto’s eyes.
A strategy so brilliant it took even his own breath away had just occurred to him.
While trading offense and defense with Kiroi,
Alberto subtly shifted his foot to the side.
To any observer, it looked exactly like someone attempting a lateral movement.
‘She’ll definitely try to grab me.’
Toward the hunter laying the trap,
the prey shakes the net from outside, thrashing left and right.
Once the hunter grows excited and reveals itself,
it’s time to seize the throat and finish it.
Whoosh!
Right on cue.
Spotting the shift in Alberto’s foot, Da-hong raised both arms.
She was attempting to use a Grab Command.
‘Perfect!’
Crack!
Alberto forcibly canceled the lateral movement and dropped into a crouch.
It was a movement that pushed the limits,
but with Blood Burst still active, he managed to pull off the fake.
‘If the grab fails, she’ll launch an anti-air Upper, and then—’
He’d feed her a devastating Air Combo.
Alberto was thinking exactly this as he began to raise his head.
Boom!
In that instant.
Alberto nearly lost consciousness.
For what struck him were bolts of lightning—searing pain erupting from both sides of his neck.
Alberto’s body convulsed, and he stumbled backward several steps without thinking.
‘What attack is this—’
When both her hands rose, he’d been certain it was a Grab Command.
But he was wrong.
It was Twin Blade Strike, one of Kiroi’s two-handed attacks.
Normally a skill that strikes the solar plexus with both blade-hands,
but because Alberto had crouched to evade the grab, he’d offered up his neck instead.
“Hack! Cough!”
This couldn’t be happening.
It was impossible.
He could grant that even her previous attacks were manageable,
but wasn’t this attack pattern something she’d never shown before?
He had a thousand things he wanted to say,
but Alberto couldn’t utter a single word of protest.
“Die!”
Da-hong, suspended in midair like a beast, whipped around with a graceful spin and drove her heel forward.
Her foot found Alberto’s chin with flawless precision.
Crash!

A single exclamation mark bloomed above Alberto’s head.
The Tornado Kick she’d just unleashed had earned a Hyper Motion judgment.
Alberto’s body spun like a top, launching skyward.
And at the same moment,

An international competition victory beyond her wildest dreams.
The moment a circle—a long-awaited checkmark—was finally drawn on Ye Da-hong’s gaming record.
“I did it…!”
Da-hong lifted her gaze, her expression swelling with emotion.
Her eyes, glistening with tears, reached toward the glittering night sky.
He’s not watching Alberto, who has vanished, spinning like a top.
She traces the stars scattered across the night sky, connecting them into the shape of a single face.
A warm, tender face she has carried in her heart, day after day.
“Father.”
A clear, hot tear traces down her cheek.
With her fist clenched tight against her chest,
Da-hong gazed endlessly up at the sky, her eyes glistening with tears.
The face of her father that she had drawn in her mind
wore an expression of profound pride.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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