Chapter 7: Who Is Donk?

Thanks to the city courier’s speed, the computer parts Su Zhe ordered online arrived one after another the very next day.

With the help of Fat Bro and Little Light, it took them a little over an hour to assemble the desktop.

Looking at the graceful curves of the case, Su Zhe excitedly pressed the power button. As the fans slowly began to spin and that pleasant hum filled his ears, he silently vowed to stay with it for life.

After a tedious round of setup and parameter tuning, Su Zhe immediately opened the Perfect platform for a match.

Once matchmaking succeeded and the game began, he could clearly feel the difference of the new machine.

To ensure a better experience, he had even spent a fortune on the monitor: a 24-inch screen with a 240 hertz refresh rate. It made him feel as if he were playing an entirely different game from before.

Most importantly, the FPS counter in the upper right corner could now hold steady at around 300, making the game feel smoother by more than just a little.

As the match got underway, Su Zhe focused fully on the game.

After nearly half an hour of fierce fighting, he posted a 21/3/19 KAD record, but in the end, because his teammates were too weak, the match still ended in a draw.

Su Zhe could not help sighing that he still was not strong enough. Though he could make an impact in evenly matched games, he had not yet reached the level where he could open with three kills and then finish a 1-v-2 clutch.

When the post-match screen appeared, Su Zhe savored the course of the game just now.

There was no resentment left, only tears. What had he suffered through all this time, before?

Before changing his computer, the moment he saw an enemy in a match, his frame rate would plunge violently and the game would stutter, and then he could simply take out his phone and start scrolling.

Now that his hardware had been fully upgraded, Su Zhe could hardly wait to keep improving.

"Fuck!" Little Light’s voice suddenly rang out. "When did you get this close to B-plus?"

"Yesterday morning, while you were asleep," Su Zhe replied with unusual composure. He was no longer very satisfied with the B bracket; his current goal was to reach S, or even rise to the very top of the platform.

"Did Fat Bro help you play a few matches? Tell me he did! Hurry up and say yes!" Little Light’s voice was full of disbelief.

One’s own failure was painful enough, but a friend’s success was even more piercing.

Just yesterday they had both been C-plus scrubs, and now he himself had fallen all the way to C, while Su Zhe had silently and without a word made it to B.

After Fat Bro gave him a slight shake of the head, Little Light climbed dejectedly into bed.

At this point, I might as well sleep.

Seeing Little Light in that state, Su Zhe could not help laughing. It was exactly the same expression and posture he had worn after failing his own promotion match before.

Before beginning to grind with the new computer, he first checked the reward for his mission.

"Ding~"

Mission: replace and upgrade your computer configuration. Reward: D-rank reward.

Host has successfully completed the mission...

D-rank reward obtained, randomizing...

Congratulations, host, you have obtained 233 Rise Points...

Congratulations, host, you have obtained the skill insights of a professional player. Please choose one of the following players to receive the reward: Frozen, Elige, or Donk.

So it was a skill-insight type reward. Su Zhe looked at it and felt somewhat disappointed.

In the system shop, a skill insight only cost one thousand Rise Points. Compared with that, he felt he needed something like the Chosen One more.

But which player should he choose for the insight?

He knew Frozen. In the domestic scene, players called him the Cold King. By the age of twenty-one, he already had eight years of professional Counter-Strike experience. He became national champion at thirteen and joined a top-tier team at sixteen.

He was also Mouz’s third legendary fortress lord, after Niko and Ropz.

Such an almost fantastical resume would, if written into a novel, probably draw readers’ criticism for not knowing anything about Counter-Strike.

Elige was known as Chicken Bro. His formidable recoil control made spray transfers effortless in his hands. Of course, what left the deepest impression was his textbook posture and the great distance between him and his monitor, which also earned him the nickname "the esports civil servant."

These two were names he often watched in matches, but who was this Donk?

Su Zhe usually watched matches only for the spectacle. After all, asking a player who had been C-plus just two days ago to understand the tactical setups of the professional stage was asking a bit too much.

So he had never looked into it deeply; he only knew the more famous players, like Niko and S1mple.

But since Donk could appear alongside Frozen and Chicken Bro in the skill selection, he must surely have a specialty of his own.

That left Su Zhe painfully torn. A few minutes later...

Choose Donk?

Yes.

He had just searched HLTV for information on Donk, and discovered that this player was actually younger than he was.

Only sixteen this year.

And even more terrifying, Donk had the highest rating of the three players. Over the past month, his average rating had reached an astonishing 1.38.

Compared with the other two, the gap was enormous.

So Su Zhe wanted to see what kind of magic this sixteen-year-old boy possessed.

Activating Donk’s skill insights...

The scene before him suddenly turned hazy, then the surroundings went dark, leaving only a computer in front of his eyes.

He quickly realized that he was inside Donk’s skill insight. Donk in front of him seemed to be in the middle of a match.

The map was Nuke, and this round the opponents were on a half-buy as the attacking side.

The early standard map-control work had already been completed. As the defending side, he was holding an AK-47 he had picked up earlier, constantly jiggle-peeking along the short lane.

Suddenly, a terrorist swung out. Donk immediately crouched and began to control the recoil. Then two more terrorists swung out together.

Faced with three wide swings, Donk did not panic in the slightest. Instead, he chose to control the spray and dump the entire magazine of his AK to the bottom.

Immediately afterward, three headshot kill messages floated up in the upper right corner of the screen.

After getting the triple kill, Donk instantly checked whether any terrorists were pushing from the restroom on his right.

Finding no one, he looked back toward the short lane. The moment a terrorist emerged from the sewer opening, his crosshair snapped over in an instant.

Two tap shots secured another headshot kill.

During the kills, Su Zhe could clearly feel Donk’s mindset.

Confidence.

It was confidence—absolute belief that, with the advantage of his weapon, he could finish them all off.

That kind of confidence even made Su Zhe, who usually called himself a daredevil in game, feel a little ashamed. After all, when he played defense in ranked matches, he would never stand out in the open and trade shots on a main road.

But why, when holding an angle on defense, does one have to keep moving...?

Just as Su Zhe was puzzled, the scene shifted again.

The map changed to Mirage, and this time Donk was on the attacking side.

This round, Donk gathered with his team at A-ramp from the very start.

After waiting for the opponents’ first wave of standard defensive utility to finish, Donk immediately coordinated with his team and threw the jungle smoke in his hand.

Then, as the first man in, he pushed forward under the cover of his teammate’s flashbang, entering A-ramp and taking position on the site.

When he saw a CT showing half a body behind the triple boxes, his crosshair instantly slid across and the kill was made.

Then, upon hearing someone spam through the smoke at jungle from the right-side balcony, he traced the bullets and spammed back through the smoke, taking two more.

At that moment, he suddenly heard the sound of a grenade detonating in the smoke at connector, and realized the enemy might be about to explode through the smoke for a cleanup. His aim sharply turned!

When he saw the silhouette of a CT behind the smoke after the blast, his movement abruptly stopped, and he began an instant stop-and-spray. Triple kill.

From entering A-ramp to securing the triple, the entire sequence took only ten seconds.

The surroundings gradually became hazy, and the scene before Su Zhe’s eyes once more turned into the familiar dormitory.

At this moment, he was a little dazed, muttering under his breath: no stats, all parameters!