NOVEL NEXT WORLD 10: Zone Ten
“Killed again! Damn it!”
Nan Rongyu tossed his phone aside and flopped back onto the bed in frustration.
“What place did you get this time?” His twin brother Nan Rongzhou, who had been eliminated early from the same game and was sitting beside him, leaned over to ask.
“Ninth place,” Nan Rongyu replied listlessly, barely lifting an eyelid.
“That’s not bad! You made the top ten!” Nan Rongzhou encouraged him. “Before, we couldn’t even make the top twenty!”
Nan Rongyu unceremoniously rolled his eyes at his brother: “That’s because we were playing in thirty-player matches before! This one only had fifteen players!”
Nan Rongzhou: …
Seeing his brother fall silent, Nan Rongyu grew increasingly irritated. He rolled over on the bed and said to his brother with an annoyed expression: “It’s all because of this ranking match. I’m not in the mood to do anything else tonight. Call the bar and tell them I’m not feeling well, so the band performance is canceled.”
“Oh.” If Nan Rongyu’s gaming skill was that of a novice chicken, then Nan Rongzhou’s was an egg that hadn’t even hatched. Given this fact, he obediently went to contact their family’s bar on behalf of his brother, the theoretical band leader. After all, they were the nominal owners of the establishment, and no one could stop them from doing whatever they wanted.
Meanwhile, Nan Rongyu rolled over again, picked up his phone, and was about to exit the game to enjoy a mindless pay-to-win browser game instead. Just as he was about to quit, a private message from a stranger popped up.
Nan Rongyu casually opened the message. Someone with the ID “Lose All 100,000” and a profile picture featuring a large handwritten character for “loss” had sent him a message.
[Want to team up for ranked matches?]
Before he could reply, a friend request came through.
Seeing this message, Nan Rongyu raised an eyebrow. He had disabled the option for strangers to randomly add him as a friend, so the only way someone could add him as a friend in this game was by directly searching for his phone number. And this phone number was his gaming-dedicated alternate number, which supposedly only a few of his brothers knew about.
Was it a coincidence? Or was it someone he actually knew?
Before Nan Rongyu could figure it out, the other person sent another message: [If you doubt my skill level, why not experience it in the same game session.]
Then they sent a room number.
This felt like a direct challenge to his face.
Nan Rongyu was never good at suppressing his emotions, and this completely sparked his interest. He sprang up from the bed in one motion, joined the room, and then grabbed a pillow from the bed to throw at his younger brother.
“Alright, I understand, I’m very sorry—oww!” Nan Rongzhou was mid-call when he was suddenly hit by an unidentified flying object. He rubbed his head and looked back to see his twin brother, the culprit, sitting cross-legged on the bed waving his phone at him.
“Hang up the phone quick! There’s someone here challenging your brother! Watch your brother teach this show-off a lesson!”
“Okay, okay, I got it…” Nan Rongzhou replied helplessly as he hung up the phone and opened the same game. He thought to himself that with Nan Rongyu’s gaming skills—tyrannical in the newbie village but helpless beyond it—it was hard to say who would be teaching whom a lesson.
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The game Nan Rongyu had recently become obsessed with was called “Zone Ten.” As the name suggested, it was a multiplayer survival battle game.
Unlike the popular FPS shooting mobile games or MOBA team games, its backstory was an endless battle royale. The main gameplay involved players choosing characters with different abilities, collecting items in different areas of the map to enhance attack and defense values or recover stamina and health. If two players met in the same area and were discovered, they would begin attacking each other. Of course, players could choose to flee immediately, but as time passed in a game session, fewer and fewer zones would remain open, eventually forcing players to meet in the same area. At that point, players with lower-tier equipment would be at a significant disadvantage.
As for spending money, it was completely useless for game progression. In other words, even if you spent money on this game, you wouldn’t get stronger—you’d only acquire more skins.
Beyond this, different game characters had different abilities.
Nan Rongyu’s character, “Hacker,” had a particularly unique skill set that formed its own system in the game—this character had extremely low attack, fragile defense, and an ability that could detect whether someone was in a zone before entering it. This was useful in the early game when many zones were open, allowing him to avoid confrontation, but became useless in the late game when zones shrank—essentially highlighting a play style of extreme caution.
But naturally, a character wouldn’t be designed just to be useless. The “Hacker’s” special feature was that when he acquired the exclusive item [Computer], he could, according to the game’s lore, hack into the core program of the battle royale system, unlocking a hidden map—the central control room. And if he also possessed the item [USB with Crack Program], he could directly control the game program to kill all players except himself in that session!
In short, it was a character that would provide an extremely satisfying experience once successfully operated.
But… since leaving the newbie rooms, Nan Rongyu’s best performance so far was twenty-first place in a thirty-player match.
—He was eliminated before he could even craft the computer item.
But Nan Rongyu was stubborn. He was determined to play the Hacker and experience the joy of hacking the entire map. For this, he faced defeat after defeat, yet persisted… until now, his win rate had successfully dropped below one percent.
By the way, that single victory was in a tutorial match against AI.
So when Nan Rongyu entered the room sent by that person, although he told Nan Rongzhou he was going to “make that person cry,” he knew very well that he would likely be eliminated before the first zone shrink. His reason for agreeing to play with this mysterious person wasn’t to show off or out of anger, but to demonstrate with his actual skill level that “don’t team up with me, you can’t carry a player of my caliber.”
Thinking this, Nan Rongyu glanced at the room settings and saw it was an auto-matched battle session, further confirming in his mind that he was probably going to be eliminated in the first round. Before the match began, he specifically checked which character the person with the “Loss” avatar had chosen and found they had selected [Patient], which made him frown slightly.
[Patient] was another rarely chosen character. This character had low attack but high health, with room for development in the early game, but when the active zones shrank in the late game and everyone needed to gather for direct combat, this character’s low attack problem became apparent. So while this character could survive to the late game, unless extremely lucky with crafting attack items, it generally wouldn’t be the final victor.
Choosing this character basically meant aiming not for first place, but for the modest goal of surviving to the top three, since even being in the top three would earn reward points.
Additionally, this character’s ability was to lock onto one person and track their real-time location, basically a skill with little utility, making it almost as unpopular a choice as [Hacker].
Nan Rongyu wondered why this person had chosen the [Patient] character.
Meanwhile, Nan Rongzhou had finally opened the game and entered the room. His enthusiasm for the game wasn’t very high; he mainly played because his twin brother felt lonely failing alone and needed an even worse player to save some face.
Nan Rongzhou chose the character [Agent], whose feature was being balanced but unremarkable. His ability was to steal others’ items, but with a lower success rate for higher-tier items—a character only lucky players could use well. Unfortunately, Nan Rongzhou wasn’t lucky, and with his poor operational skills, his win rate was even more tragic than Nan Rongyu’s—he even lost the tutorial match against AI, resulting in a win rate of zero.
Nan Rongyu noticed that this person started the game immediately after Nan Rongzhou joined the room, as if they knew his twin brother’s account name and had been waiting for him to join. But only he himself knew that Nan Rongzhou played this game with him, so how was this possible?
Nan Rongyu shook his head, dismissing this speculation from his mind.
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The game began.
Nan Rongyu played as usual, already prepared to be targeted and eliminated. But very quickly, he noticed something different from usual.
—The attacks against him seemed to be interrupted at just the right moment every time!
And the person interrupting these attacks was, of course, the [Patient] character controlled by the mysterious player.
At first, Nan Rongyu could dismiss it as coincidence, but after the same situation occurred three times in a row, even he, slow on the uptake, realized something was off. After some consideration, he understood what was happening.
This mysterious person had reversed the use of their tracking ability, designating him as the target to locate—not to attack him, but to arrive on the scene immediately when he was under attack to provide support! Since players’ items were at relatively low levels in the early game, damage wasn’t very high, with a single attack taking at most one-fifth of health. Additionally, the [Patient] character started with high health and thick defense, allowing them to tank even multiple attackers for one round. This mysterious person was using these characteristics to buy him escape opportunities.
He suddenly realized the true intention behind this mysterious person inviting him to join the game: not to demonstrate their own victory, but to show that by teaming up, they could indeed improve the [Hacker]’s win rate!
But this was even more puzzling. This game was a weak social game, where players couldn’t even check each other’s character usage rates and win rates before adding as friends. And his current friend count in this game was 1—he had only added Nan Rongzhou.
This meant that, apart from his twin brother, nobody should know that he exclusively used the Hacker character.
Yet this person not only understood his character choice from the beginning but had even selected a complementary teammate character accordingly!
When the game ended, Nan Rongyu, for the first time as [Hacker], successfully hacked the program and became the ultimate victor, but he wasn’t as happy as he’d imagined. Instead, he frowned, sinking into thought.
Who was this person? And what did they want?
This person had specifically added his number, deliberately used exaggerated language to attract his attention, and finally successfully proven their reliability as a teammate. All of this was undoubtedly planned by this person.
He certainly wouldn’t believe that such a person was purely looking for a teammate. They likely already knew his real identity and wanted something from him—the question was, what did they want? Simple money? The support of the Nan family heir? Or… inside information, or something more…
After hesitating for a long time, he opened the mysterious person’s chat box and typed out a message, one character at a time.
[I agree to team up with you. What do you want?]
Author’s Note: The naive, easily deceived twins have appeared!
(Nan Rongyu & Nan Rongzhou: I hear someone speaking ill of us)
The game background is similar to Black Survivor, but I’m making up everything from character traits to abilities, so I hope players don’t come after me (though the JP island-bombing gameplay effect is really maxed out)