A Core Ship From The Start
Chapter 1089 - Chapter 1089 Chapter 749 Final Battle in Fuyuki_2

Chapter 1089: Chapter 749: Final Battle in Fuyuki_2 Chapter 1089: Chapter 749: Final Battle in Fuyuki_2 Since the professional league was quite popular at the time, many players stood with public relations in harshly criticizing the Bounty Hunter Union for being clueless about the bigger picture. But the Bounty Hunter Union got annoyed, “It’s my stuff, I can sell it or not, and if I don’t, you can’t just snatch it. Are you trying to push me around, thinking I can’t fight back?”

Then, after that professional team’s announcement, feeling that the timing, geographical, and human conditions were in their favor and certain of victory, they once again approached the Bounty Hunter Union with a professional team and a fleet of players for negotiations. The Bounty Hunter Union wasn’t scared and gave them the finger right then and there, and talks broke down, leading to immediate combat.

The scene was incredibly chaotic. In fact, at the time, it wasn’t just that professional team that wanted the equipment, but other teams as well. They figured that by combining the strength of the domestic professional teams, snatching equipment from a mere group of players would be easy.

The result was a half-month-long war, after which the professional teams were beaten so badly by the Bounty Hunter Union that they didn’t even recognize their own mothers. A whole bunch of equipment and warships that should have been used for league matches were either plundered or destroyed, and in the end, they could only swallow their pride.

On one hand, most of the Bounty Hunters were solo players, not competitors in matches. They had nothing to lose; if my stuff got destroyed I could just get more, but if you guys are wrecked, you can only go to the professional league naked. Plus, if I win, I can tell my clients, “We’ve beaten the crap out of team XX’s XXX”, which means not only more money for me, but also more business, right?

Who was at a loss was painfully clear.

Of course, it was impossible for the professional teams to swallow such humiliation. After their initial loss, many teams tried to save face with sponsored articles denouncing these solo players as lacking in sportsmanship and national pride, and even blaming their poor performance in the playoffs on the Bounty Hunter Union.

At first, there were quite a few voices suppressing them.

But they quickly died down.

On one hand, the majority of the Bounty Hunter Union members were solo contractors; bad publicity is still publicity, and you’re giving us free advertisements. Next time we get commissioned for a job, we can charge even more.

On the other hand–many of the big shots in the Union were actually sponsors of those professional teams, or they were the ones who funded the teams because they enjoyed playing the game. Then it turned out that the very dogs they fed bit back, and the bad gaming experience was intolerable, wasn’t it?

Of course not, they promptly withdrew sponsorship. Out of twenty-four league teams, six became orphans without a mother overnight and just disbanded on the spot.

For instance, the team that had caused trouble in the first place had a Glory Goddess Level Flagship blown up during the big battle, and coincidentally, that flagship belonged to the Crown Prince of the team’s investing enterprise. The Crown Prince, enraged, complained to his father about what kind of crap he had invested in, saying that his hard-earned flagship had been blown up for nothing. The father, hearing this, ended the investment talks with the sponsoring enterprise on the spot. The sponsor had painstakingly drawn in the investment and naturally didn’t want to see it go to waste. After investigating and figuring out the whole mess, they were at a loss for words.

What could they do? They could only sacrifice a pawn to save the chariot. Could a mere championship league team compare with the life-and-death situation of an international enterprise?

It’s just like in football, even if your club wins the Champions League, it’s useless if it doesn’t make money for the enterprise. The company would sell it in a heartbeat, no matter how many fans or followers you have.

This is also one of the reasons Duanmu Huai refused to go professional. He wanted to play as he wished, but as a salaried worker, he’d have to grovel like a grandson, no longer in control of his own destiny. Don’t look at how glamorous those professional players are; if the higher-ups say suppress them, they suppress them; if they order dissolution, they disband, no matter if you have tens of millions of fans.

After that, such blatant snatching incidents never happened again. Professional players kept their distance from the Bounty Hunter Union, fearing to accidentally provoke some Crown Prince who could cut off their team’s sponsorship or have their team throw them under the bus…

So you see, being a professional player isn’t that great.

In the later stages, the Evil God large-scale raids were all about team battles, and Duanmu Huai naturally knew quite a few strong combatants. If he could deploy his Innate Barrier and replicate those he remembered in the battle against the Chaos Evil God, wouldn’t that at least raise his chances of victory by twenty percent?

Certainly better than facing the Chaos Evil God alone.

But this Innate Barrier was indeed tricky. Duanmu Huai was discussing and experimenting with CASTER. Luckily, his plenty of Magic Power and Medea’s extensive knowledge as a Mage from the Age of God meant they didn’t take much effort to address the biggest issue.

Yet, theory alone wasn’t enough; his constructed Innate Barrier had to be compared to other people’s to be sure what was really going on. Fortunately, in this Holy Grail War, there was a Servant who also understood how to use Innate Barriers.

Moreover, he had indeed appeared before Duanmu Huai.

The silent night of Fuyuki City was as dead as ever.

The entire city seemed to be sealed off somehow, streets lit only by streetlights without a soul in sight. Duanmu Huai stood on Fuyuki Bridge, looking at the two-way road before him–on the cold winter night, not even a car passed by, as if all the people of the city had completely vanished.