Chapter 4
An action-adventure open-world stealth franchise game, Assassin’s Dawn.
On its very first day, this game drew over 2 million viewers, and even now, a week later, it was still a hot topic on Trave.
In particular, this installment, Shadow in the City, had received rave reviews from day one for its unprecedented freedom and its focus on urban assassination gameplay.
People began likening it to the most perfectly crafted open-world game that had come before and started calling it Assassin’s Dawn: Breath of the City, or City Breath for short.
‘They say you can assassinate any way you want.’
When assassinating a target, no matter how high their station, they die in a single blow.
In exchange, players had to personally identify and decide everything: starting with the assassination target, then their daily routine and investigation, the assassination site, the infiltration method, assassination tools, and even the escape route.
This high degree of freedom enabled all sorts of brilliantly unorthodox assassination plays, which was why the fervor never cooled.
That was why, even now, a week later, it was still pulling in over 800,000 viewers.
[Download complete for .]
Just as the notification chimed, Seo-jun clicked the Start Broadcast button.
[Newbie streaming for the first time. First virtual reality game is City Breath. Anyone want to give tips?]
That was the title Tae-woo had chosen.
‘Although this isn’t my first virtual reality game.’
He’d written it because Tae-woo said that title would be irresistible to deep-sea veterans or god-tier game junkies, and gathering people like that should come first.
He wasn’t entirely confident about it.
When a message appeared saying the broadcast would start in five seconds, Seo-jun looked away from the streaming window and pressed Start Game.
In an instant, the lobby sank into shadow. In the dark, empty space, European-style buildings from the modern era began springing up one after another.
* * *
The starting point was a back alley.
‘Is this an auto-play intro?’
Seo-jun’s body was parkouring on its own.
He crossed a stinking street, scaled a wall, and climbed higher using window ledges.
Clatter.
“Who’s there!”
While crossing a clothesline, he knocked over a flowerpot on a balcony.
But his body simply ignored it and kept climbing, swinging across a flagpole attached to a house.
Once he reached the rooftop, he began bounding across buildings and running toward somewhere.
Gradually, the atmosphere brightened, and as he entered what seemed like a red-light district, the surroundings grew vividly bright and noise rushed in.
Ha ha ha.
Ho ho ho.
Glimpses of ladies in elegant yet practical dresses and dapper gentlemen, reminiscent of the Belle Époque, flickered into view between the buildings.
Then, at some point, before him stood a clock tower soaring alone over the city.
Seo-jun began climbing the tower’s outer wall without hesitation.
‘If I stay relaxed and let go, it feels like I’m moving on my own.’
But the moment he tried to force control, he realized he had none.
Like a climber hurling himself upward on a difficult route, he rose again and again.
Near the top, there were no more handholds on the outer wall.
Whoosh.
His stomach dropped in stages under gravity, his body pulled toward the ground, and the world began to spin.
Even as he fell, Seo-jun stayed completely relaxed and waited.
Then his body, in the middle of a midair somersault, stretched out his right arm at an incredible timing and fired a wire.
Clunk.
The hook caught on the top.
Zzzzzziiing!
With the sound of the wire reeling in, Seo-jun leaned into the line and raced up the clock tower’s exterior, climbing to the top.
Bong, bong, bong!
Right on cue, the clock tower rang out, and crows startled by the sound took off with a flurry of flapping wings.
On the cool night breeze sweeping in from above, laughter and the sound of string instruments from the red-light district he had just passed drifted up.
All the dissonance of the night scenery blended together, as if signaling the start of the game—
As if showing that this was the kind of city he would play in.
‘Nice staging.’
After taking a brief moment to gaze at the scenery,
“Hey, Dane. You could die on this mission.”
A beautiful voice spoke.
His body turned toward the sound, and a hooded woman stepped out of the shadows behind him.
Her blonde hair peeked out from under the hood, swaying.
“Heh heh, Christina. When has it ever not been dangerous?”
Seo-jun’s mouth opened.
But the voice was different from his own—likely the voice of the character Dane.
“Well, that’s…”
“If you’re going to kill someone, you have to be ready to die too.”
“Fine. But be careful. They might’ve caught on to us.”
“Don’t worry. Just get yourself to the tavern.”
Christina nodded in understanding, handed him a note, and murmured softly,
“There is no truth. Doubt everything.”
Seo-jun replied,
“Even chaos itself.”
Then he fired a wire, hooked it onto a nearby rooftop, and began sliding down the line like a zip-line.
Just before reaching the end, he let go, landed on a streetlamp, and jumped down again to settle on the ground.
The moment his feet touched the ground, a sensation of strength flooded through his body.
“Ah, ah.”
Is the tutorial over?
He could speak properly now, and his hands and feet moved as he wanted.
Ding—
[Tutorial Quest – Assassination Mission]
[Ettore is a mid-level manager and high-ranking noble of a secret society that supplies street orphans to the covenant and the Mage Tower.
The Assassin order has given the mission to assassinate Ettore to their member Dane.
Quest clear condition: Death of Ettore]
A notification sounded, and a game system window appeared.
A route to Ettore’s mansion and his location were marked on the map.
“So I’m supposed to assassinate him. I should head there first.”
Seo-jun was new to games outside of the AOS genre, but he had a rough idea of what to do.
He headed straight toward the blue indicator.
When his path was blocked, an on-screen alert popped up.
[Climb up the pipe.]
He grabbed the pipe and gave a little effort, and it felt just like when Dane had moved his body for him.
“Ah, so it gives you assistance like this.”
But when he completely relaxed, he slipped right down.
[Try jumping.]
It meant to leap across the building, so he got curious what would happen if he messed up.
He let himself fall between the buildings.
A faint pain spread through his body.
[Try using the line to cross.]
Hanging from the line didn’t take much effort, so he stayed dangling for a while.
After he’d hung on for a bit, he felt his strength slowly draining.
He fell to the ground once more.
Just as he was finding these novel experiences fun, Seo-jun finally remembered something he’d forgotten.
‘I’m streaming, right?’
But it hasn’t been long yet, so how many viewers…
[Viewers: 4]
The number surprised him.
He’d heard you could stream all day and still get zero viewers. Was it thanks to choosing the right game, or the stream title?
Hesitating, he turned on the chat window.
- Being this clueless makes them a real newbie lolol
- Ah lol this is why I watch newbie streams
- If this is acting, they deserve at least a Nobel Prize lolol
Oh.
The viewers were chatting among themselves.
Still, it felt a bit embarrassing to think they’d watched everything that just happened.
“Sorry, I just saw the chat now.”
- hehe
- it’s fine. Watching a newbie be amazed while jumping around was pretty entertaining too lol
Three out of the four viewers were talking.
[White Horse Bullet Man]
[The Best Defense is Winter Flounder]
[Public Restroom Brick Extortion King]
‘What interesting nicknames.’
They were funny but dizzying.
Were nicknames like that trendy here?
Setting that thought aside, Seo-jun recalled the advice Tae-woo had left him.
‘If there aren’t many viewers, don’t obsess over the numbers. Practice filling the sound. If there are viewers, try communicating comfortably as long as it doesn’t break the flow of the stream.’
The reason people came to streams with few viewers was usually because it was easier to interact.
In big company streamers’ chats, messages flew by too fast and were easy to get buried.
Seo-jun tried light conversation as he headed toward his destination.
- Streamer, are you really a newbie?
“Yes, that’s right.”
- Ah lol I checked the streamer’s history and it was completely clean. Account created only two days ago.
“You can check that?”
- yeah
- You should switch it to private.
“That sounds like too much trouble.”
Seo-jun didn’t feel the need to turn it off.
- Then how did you even manage to start streaming if it’s such a bother?
- so true lol
‘It’s good that everyone’s actively chatting, but is this okay?’
He felt the need to observe chat in other streams.
“Hmm, I’ve arrived already. What should I do now?”
- open the note
- If you open the note, you can see a 3D layout of the mansion
- Since it’s the tutorial, it gives you most of the info and an assassination route. Just follow it.
Surprisingly, they gave proper answers to questions like these.
Seo-jun opened the note, and a blueprint system activated, spreading a 3D view before him like something out of a movie.
He could zoom in and out on a point, rotate the angle, and even edit the map.
Not only did it show the mansion’s layout, secret passages, and enemy positions, but it also detailed a route to infiltrate all the way to where Ettore was.
Ettore was located in the innermost part of the mansion—the second-floor bedroom.
“There are twenty enemies. The weapons in the inventory are… an assassin’s gauntlet and a sword stick?”
A sword stick was a cane with a hollow interior that doubled as a sheath, hiding a slender blade inside, making it a suitable weapon for assassination and self-defense, drawn when necessary.
The cane itself also had a shallow edge embedded, so it could cut enemies. Its tip was sharp like a sword’s point.
The gauntlet contained a hidden blade that sprang from the back of the hand and a wire launcher in the wrist.
“Are the weapons a basic tutorial setting? Anyway, I just need to kill Ettore, right?”
- ye
- yes
- yep
Should I give it a try?
Seo-jun picked up the sword stick and walked straight toward the front gate.
But immediately, opposing chat messages popped up.
- Dude, I said follow the note
- Leave him. When others head for the front gate and die, they figure out to climb the wall on their own.
- Lord, here goes one soul
“Why? Can’t I go through the front gate?”
- giving tips is bad. The streamer’s a baby. Gotta let them observe.
- It’s fine. Yeah, hurry up and open the gate and go in.
- They’re fodder. One hit and you’re dead.
Their turnaround was masterful.
“Hmm, seems like going through the front gate is a bad idea.”
- Ah, streamer caught on, you jerks
- Lord, one soul was about to go but turned back
Seo-jun wondered at these reactions.
“But I heard you could do anything in this game. Why shouldn’t I go through the front gate?”
- I said you can, didn’t I?
- go ahead
- lololol these bastards stop picking on the newbie
A viewer who’d been quietly watching until now, apparently unable to bear it any longer, typed in chat.
- Normally, instead of assassinating by infiltrating, you just barge in openly and kill all the enemies. It’s called musou play…
The viewer’s explanation went like this.
In this game, when carrying out a mission, your target dies in one blow no matter how high their position, but if you’re discovered, you have to engage in hardcore close-quarters combat against many NPCs. So people generally try not to get caught.
But some veterans would toss the assassination plan out the window and charge right through the front gate.
So-called musou play.
Even without an intelligence gathering phase, musou play was far more difficult than regular assassination play.
Shadow in the City was praised for guiding players naturally toward assassination play through this difficulty adjustment while maintaining freedom.
“Then is it impossible to clear the tutorial with that musou play?”
- Dunno. No one’s cleared it yet.
- Streamers say it’s more profitable to play other things than waste time on that lol
- Someone tried for ten hours before giving up, saying they’d clear it after getting the first-round ending.
- Even the community veterans haven’t posted any news about it.
“So it’s not impossible, right?”
Seo-jun focused only on that point.
- yeah. Probably possible if you have Shin Ha-yeon level control.
- Theoretically, as long as you dodge all of Ettore’s attacks within the time limit and make every one of your own attacks hit only vital spots.
- So easy lolol Is Shin Ha-yeon just anyone, then?
“Shin Ha-yeon? Well then, let’s give it a shot. Why not.”
Seo-jun said confidently.
After all, even if it was an AI, a win was a win, wasn’t it?
- ????
- Do you even know who Shin Ha-yeon is?
- The jerk above who said Shin Ha-yeon is just anyone, get ‘em lolol
Seo-jun walked straight toward the front gate.
- Lord, finally he goes
- Ah, newbie… Do you really have to taste it to know if it’s shit or what?
- Five minutes from now, streamer (crawling on the ground): “If I do this, they won’t spot me, right?” lololol
- lololololololol