Genius Archer's Streaming
Season 4: Chapter 232. War of the Gods (1)
«I don't think we can ask Treeana to get hit deliberately. That'd basically be staging the broadcast—and honestly, having her just stand there while Li Chengyuan beats her looks totally unconvincing.»
«Yeah...»
The production team was running into trouble. They thought the final scene would more or less follow the script, but they'd completely failed to anticipate this variable.
«Who knew a variable like this would pop up?»
The PD sighed.
But they couldn't ask either of them to change how they were fighting—especially not now, in the middle of what looked like it could be the most spectacular sequence in the season.
«We'll just roll with it. Whatever happens, that's what we broadcast.»
He made the call.
«Director, look at the viewer count—»
«I see it.»
The numbers were spiking. Their live stream had been sitting at around six hundred thousand viewers for the past hour. But it had been climbing steadily for the last few minutes—and now it had just broken seven hundred thousand.
It was heading for a record.
The reason was clear: the situation in the game was drawing real attention. Word had spread beyond the usual community and was pulling in people from completely outside their normal audience.
Meanwhile, in-game.
Li Chengyuan swung his bow.
He put everything behind the strike.
And so did Treeana.
She had been standing at the back line the whole time, always positioned for ranged combat—she wasn't the type who fought with a weapon in close range. But right now, she was charging forward to meet his attack head-on.
She held a short blade.
In her other hand, she had a shield.
It was the combat style most common among the faith-based warrior classes. Li Chengyuan had guessed she might make a move like this—but guessing it and being ready for it were two different things.
He read her angle, shifted his footing, and swung.
The collision sent a shockwave through the air.
Treeana's shield bore most of it, but the force still drove her back a step.
Good footwork.
She'd absorbed the blow cleanly.
Li Chengyuan was already thinking through his next move. Treeana was using a defensive build—high block efficiency, but physical attack output was probably weak. There was a trade-off, and he needed to figure out exactly where it was.
He came in again.
And again.
Her blocks were perfect.
Four more exchanges, and neither of them had dealt real damage to the other. Li Chengyuan was still reading her. Treeana wasn't just defending, either—she was working him, nudging him toward her preferred positioning while trying to pry open a gap in his offense.
This wasn't going to be quick.
The production team had gone quiet. They were just watching now.
They'd had this unspoken theory for a while—that a one-on-one fight between these two was probably the ceiling of what you could see in the current game. They hadn't planned to test it this season. It was supposed to be next season, or the one after that.
But it was happening now.
And it was everything they'd hoped it would be.
The viewer count broke eight hundred thousand.
Then nine hundred.
Then one million.
At exactly the moment it crossed the mark, every single person on the production team got a notification at once.
One of the assistants stood up and exhaled slowly.
«Seven years since the game launched,» she said. «First time we've hit a million concurrent.»
She was right.
This was a new record.
What had started as a scripted broadcast had turned into something else entirely—a real duel, unfolding in real time, and people outside the game's usual community were stopping to watch.
And in the middle of it, Li Chengyuan was still working through the fight.
He'd tried every angle. The defensive wall wasn't breaking.
All right.
If he couldn't find a gap, he'd have to make one.
He shifted his rhythm—slowed it down, changed the intervals, forced her to adjust to his timing instead of her own. She did. She was good enough to adapt.
But there was a cost.
The moment she shifted to match him, he accelerated back into her guard.
The strike landed.
Not a decisive hit. But a real one.
Treeana's expression didn't change. But she took a step back—a real step, not a controlled reset.
He had his gap.
Three moves later, her HP dropped below fifty percent.
The crowd watching the fight reacted. So did the viewers.
Li Chengyuan pressed the opening.
Treeana held on.
She was running out of room. Her positioning had deteriorated and she couldn't fully reset it—Li Chengyuan was too good at reading the field. She was left cycling through her defensive rotation at a disadvantage.
Sixty percent into the fight, she switched tactics.
She stopped trying to recover her positioning and went all-in on disruption.
She threw her shield.
It wasn't a real attack—it was a flash ability, a short-duration stun on hit. Li Chengyuan reacted instantly, dodging it, but the moment he moved to dodge, she was already closing the gap herself.
Melee range.
Now he was the one on the back foot.
The short blade was designed for exactly this kind of close-range work, and she was far more practiced at it than he was. He gave ground, bought himself room, and started reassessing.
She wasn't the same build he'd been reading.
Or—she was, but she'd been holding back a layer of her kit.
That was fine.
It just meant there was more to work through.
He looked at the scoreboard. Treeana was down to around forty percent health. He had eighty-two.
He could afford to take some hits.
He stopped retreating and let her come in close.
She landed two hits. Clean ones.
He absorbed both and let her think she had her footing.
Then he shifted.
It was a read—he'd seen the sequence twice now, and the third time she ran it, he knew exactly when the gap would open.
He caught it.
She took the hit square.
Her health dropped below twenty percent.
She didn't concede. She kept pressing.
But the balance had shifted, and they both knew it.
Four exchanges later, Treeana's HP hit zero.
The match was over.
Li Chengyuan lowered his bow.
He didn't feel anything dramatic. He was just processing the fight—going back over the places where he'd been slow, the reads he'd gotten right, the moments where he'd taken unnecessary damage.
It took him a few seconds to register the response around him.
The in-game crowd was going off. The viewer count, already at a million, had pushed higher—past one point two. The chat was moving too fast to read.
He heard his own broadcast clip running somewhere in the background.
And Treeana was talking.
«I wasn't expecting that.»
She wasn't being dramatic about it. Just stating a fact.
«Most people, when they fight me in the back line, they're trying to wear me down. You read the trade.»
He wasn't sure what to say to that.
«You're good,» she said. «I don't know exactly what build you're running—I couldn't fully read your weapon—but whatever it is, you know how to use it.»
That was the closest thing to a compliment he'd gotten from anyone in this game.
He thought for a moment.
«Your shield throw,» he said. «The timing on it. I should've seen it earlier.»
She looked at him.
«Most people don't recover fast enough to read it at all.»
It was a strange conversation to have in the middle of an in-game arena, with a million-plus audience watching. But neither of them was really performing at this point. They were just talking about the fight.
«Will you be at the regional next month?» Treeana asked.
«Probably.»
«Then I'll see you there.»
She left.
Li Chengyuan stood there for a moment, then turned to leave himself.
He still had the rest of the broadcast to get through.
The viewer count had stabilized. Not back to its earlier level—it had settled at just over a million. People who'd come in to watch were staying.
That was new.
He spent the next two hours running regular content—the kind of things he'd been doing before this season even started. He didn't do anything deliberately spectacular. He just played.
But the audience that had come in stayed. Some of them left, but new ones came in to replace them. By the time he wrapped for the night, the stream had settled into a new floor: roughly eight hundred thousand viewers.
That was the new baseline.
He logged out, packed up his equipment, and started going through his footage from the fight.
Somewhere around the fourth review, he started seeing the structure more clearly.
He hadn't been at his best. He'd been slow on the shield read, and he'd taken a few hits he shouldn't have. But the way Treeana had played—she'd made him work through every layer, and that had forced him to use angles he wouldn't have tried otherwise.
That was useful.
The next morning, he went to find his brother.
«Heard you hit a million,» Jin Chengshu said without looking up from his equipment.
«Yeah.»
«That was the Treeana fight?»
«Yeah.»
Jin Chengshu finally looked up.
«She's the best defensively. You won in straight sets.»
«It wasn't straight—»
«I know. I watched it. But you won clean. No prolonged mess-around, no running on empty at the end. You won clean.»
Li Chengyuan didn't say anything to that.
«There's a circuit heading into next month,» his brother said. «If you're going to be playing, might as well enter.»
He hadn't really thought about circuits.
«What's the setup?»
Jin Chengshu walked him through it. Regional qualifier, then district, then a national bracket. The game's competitive scene wasn't enormous—it was still a niche relative to the mainstream titles—but it was real, and it had real prize pools attached to it.
«The top three out of regionals go to the district level,» his brother finished. «You'd probably qualify.»
«Probably.»
«Don't do that.»
«Don't do what?»
«The hedge thing. You'd qualify. Just say yes or no.»
Li Chengyuan thought about it.
«I'll enter.»
His brother nodded.
«Good. Because I'm entering too.»
Li Chengyuan looked at him.
«When did you start entering competitive?»
«Since it started being worth entering,» Jin Chengshu said. «Which is now, because you're in it.»
That was a strange way to put it.
«You want to fight me?»
«Eventually. Not right away.»
«What does that mean?»
Jin Chengshu paused, like he was trying to find the right framing.
«You're better than me in a direct fight. You've always been better at reading live situations. But you have gaps—and I know what they are better than anyone else. So yeah. I want to fight you. But first I want to close the gap enough that it's worth watching.»
Li Chengyuan processed that.
«Okay.»
«Okay like you'll wait, or okay like you're acknowledging what I said?»
«Both.»
His brother nodded again.
The next few weeks settled into a rhythm. He kept streaming. The numbers held steady—not growing dramatically, but not dropping. He was building a real audience now, not just an occasional spike.
He ran into Treeana twice more before the regional qualifier—once in a team event and once in a pickup match. She played differently each time, adjusting her read of him the same way he was adjusting his read of her.
It felt less like a rivalry and more like a calibration.
The regional qualifier was a different format from anything he'd done before. It was a double-elimination bracket, fifty-six players, seeded loosely by recent performance metrics.
He was seeded eighth.
His brother was seeded fourteenth.
Treeana was seeded second.
The bracket was laid out in a way that meant he and Treeana probably wouldn't meet until the final rounds—if they both got that far.
He spent the morning before the event running warmup matches against lower-tier AI opponents, not to practice mechanics but to get his head settled. He'd done this before. The format was different but the core of it was the same.
Round one went quickly. His opponent was playing a ranged damage build without much defensive utility—readable, and Li Chengyuan finished it in under eight minutes.
Round two was harder. A hybrid build, physical and elemental combined, and the player clearly knew how to use it. Li Chengyuan made two errors that he noticed in the moment—he was lucky they didn't cost him the match.
He won, but it was close.
His brother also won his first two rounds. So did Treeana, but that was expected.
Round three.
Li Chengyuan's opponent was a player he didn't recognize from the rankings—seeded twenty-third, which meant they'd come up through the lower bracket after an early loss. Double elimination meant that bracket had produced some tough matchups by now.
The match was different from the ones before. His opponent had clearly done research—they were playing specifically to counter his usual patterns. The first three minutes were uncomfortable, and Li Chengyuan spent most of them just trying to establish where the counter was coming from.
It was the footwork.
They were reading his spacing and preemptively cutting off angles he'd been relying on.
All right.
He stopped using those angles.
It took another two minutes to find the new openings, but once he found them, the match turned. He won at sixty-four percent health remaining.
Close enough.
Semifinals.
His brother had made it, which meant they were going to meet in the bracket—not in the final, but in the semifinals.
Jin Chengshu had gotten there by winning three matches clean after his first-round loss had sent him to the lower bracket. He'd played steadily the whole way through.
The match between them felt different from any other match Li Chengyuan had played in the tournament. Not higher stakes—just different, because Jin Chengshu had been right. He knew Li Chengyuan's gaps.
He tried to close them before they opened.
Li Chengyuan had to improvise.
That was fine.
He improvised a lot during their childhood matches. He was used to it.
Thirty minutes. Longer than any other match in the event.
He won.
His brother said nothing immediately after. He just stood there processing it.
«You closed two of them,» Li Chengyuan said.
«I know. There were three.»
«Yeah.»
Jin Chengshu nodded slowly.
«Good.»
The final was Treeana.
She'd come up through the upper bracket undefeated. He'd lost a round—the early one where he'd made the two errors—but had come back up through the lower.
She had the seed advantage. He had the hunger advantage, if there was such a thing.
The match was longer than their first fight. Forty-five minutes. She had been watching him across the bracket and had additional data; he'd been watching her too.
The match unfolded in three distinct phases.
Phase one: he tried his old approach. She had countered it. They spent fifteen minutes neutralizing each other's standard setups.
Phase two: she switched. He read the switch and adjusted. Another fifteen minutes of neither side landing clean.
Phase three: it came down to a single sequence.
He'd been saving a specific angle all match—one that wouldn't work without the right setup, and the setup had required baiting her into a specific defensive pattern. He'd spent the last thirty minutes building toward it without being obvious.
It worked.
The sequence landed.
She took the final hit at six percent health.
Li Chengyuan won the regional qualifier.
The broadcast had been running the entire time. His own stream had been running alongside it. By the end of the match, viewer count was at one point four million—a new record.
He stood there for a moment after the match ended, processing.
Treeana approached him first.
«That setup in the third phase,» she said. «When did you start building it?»
«Around the forty-minute mark in phase two.»
She was quiet for a moment.
«I didn't see it.»
«I know.»
She looked at him.
«District bracket's going to be harder.»
«I know.»
She left without another word.
He stayed on the floor a while longer. His brother came to find him.
«I saw the third phase,» Jin Chengshu said. «The setup was from the childhood matches.»
«Which one?»
«The one where you kept feinting left to bait me into overcommitting right.»
Li Chengyuan thought about it.
«Yeah.»
«You've been doing that since we were kids.»
«I know.»
«It still works.»
«It still works,» Li Chengyuan agreed.
Jin Chengshu said nothing for a while.
«You're going to win nationals,» he said finally.
Li Chengyuan didn't respond to that.
«I'm just saying what I think.»
«I know.»
He picked up his equipment and started packing. The broadcast was still running. The audience was still there.
"Father... I'm going to grow up and become a Mad Hero too."

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