Ch. 13 — 13
There were a total of ten maps, but there were two preferred maps for 1:1 matches.
The more skilled the player, the fewer early-game movement patterns they had—never exceeding eight per map.
Highly skilled players choose the path with the highest win rate based on their weapon combination.
Along that path, I narrowed the safest spots down to two.
Since I hadn’t completely gotten used to the controls yet, I chose a defensive strategy rather than an offensive one.
It was very simple.
Since I knew the spot and timing the opponent would appear, all I had to do was hold my gun steady at that point and—tatatatat-bang!—shoot when they showed up.
Of course, it wasn’t accurate every time.
When that happened, I never got greedy and immediately moved to the second safe spot.
The second safe spot was a location that limited the paths the opponent could take to chase me to just two directions.
It was the same as the first time.
I just guarded those two directions, and when the opponent appeared—tatatatat-bang!
Since it was a strategy I had only simulated theoretically by watching videos of highly skilled players, I lost 3:5 in the first match—where the first to 5 kills wins—and then 4:5 in the second.
Honestly, if I had strictly followed my planned strategy, I wouldn’t have lost either match, but to prevent my pattern from being read, I moved differently in a few rounds.
The third match started when there wasn’t much lunchtime left.
Having accumulated enough data and somewhat hidden my patterns, I moved strictly according to my strategy in this match.
The result was a 5:1 victory.
Min-jun, who had been staring at his phone with a look of sheer disbelief, slowly raised his eyes to look at Cheol-jun.
Cheol-jun flashed a smirk at Min-jun and mouthed:
“Too easy.”
Noh Min-jun, who had been the best gamer at Hanyoung Private Elementary School, dropped his head, acknowledging defeat, while the three boys gathered around them cheered.
“Whoaaaaaa!”
By the window, Park Si-woo, looking at Go game records while wearing noise-canceling headphones, scowled.
Then, he shook his head with a pathetic look on his face.
*
*
*
“Epic! How did you get that good in one day! Unbelievable!”
Ha-rang made a huge fuss, while Min-jun stuck his lip out in a pout.
“If we played at a PC bang, I would win!”
“Yeah. Talkin’ trash like a true loser.”
“Ah, seriously!”
“Super triggered!”
Min-jun scowled deeply.
“Hey! Cheol-jjjuuun!”
Cheol-jun smiled brightly and turned his head.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s play again later at a PC bang!”
“PC bang?”
“Phones are basically just auto-aim! PC is the real deal.”
“Uh, I’ll have to ask my uncle later.”
“Uncle?”
“Yeah. I live with my uncle.”
Just then, Ha-rang chimed in.
“What, are your parents overseas too? Mine are!”
“No.”
“Then? Down in the countryside?”
“No. I’m an orphan.”
“……”
Ha-rang instantly shut his mouth and blinked.
It was his first time meeting a kid whose parents were both gone.
But, is it okay to say something like that while smiling so brightly?
He hadn’t even done anything wrong, but he suddenly felt incredibly sorry.
Right then, Min-jun nodded sagely next to him.
“Lucky. No mom and dad.”
Ha-rang looked at Min-jun with a horrified expression.
Min-jun tilted his chin with a ‘Why? What?’ look on his face.
And gave Cheol-jun a thumbs up.
“I’m serious. So jealous.”
Ha-rang elbowed Min-jun hard in the ribs.
“…Hey. Shh.”
“I mean it.”
“Wow, I know you’re my friend, but you’re crossing a massive line. I might have to cut you off for this.”
Min-jun scrunched his nose.
“Anyway, down for the PC bang? Ah, right. If your uncle says okay.”
“Yeah!”
Cheol-jun smiled brightly and nodded.
*
*
*
Si-woo absolutely loathed those three, who were being exceptionally loud today.
He gripped his pencil nervously.
He couldn’t focus at all.
‘What’s so fun about a game like that…’
Laughing and chattering over nothing.
As expected, simple and low-level kids become friends quickly.
Si-woo shot a side-glance at Cheol-jun, who was smiling brightly surrounded by the other kids.
“Wow! But how are you so good? You were a total noob just yesterday!”
“For real! It’s not something you can just get insanely good at in one day of practice! You were lying yesterday, weren’t you!”
“I wasn’t lying. I saw Cheol-jun trying his hardest yesterday. Plus, his movement looked similar to yesterday.”
“Ah, come on. Just tell us. How did you do it?”
Was the performance of his noise-canceling headphones deteriorating, or were those kids’ voices just that loud?
Si-woo found the intermittent sounds he could hear even more distracting.
So he just turned off the noise-canceling feature entirely.
Cheol-jun, acting triumphant after winning some low-level game, shrugged his shoulders.
It was a really unpleasant sight, but it kept bothering him, so he kept stealing glances.
“First off, the early-game behavior patterns of highly skilled players never deviate from eight specific ones. Because those have the highest win rates.”
“Oh. Did Min-jjun get acknowledged as highly skilled?”
“Quiet down. The great Cheol-jjjuuun is speaking! So?”
“Furthermore, the movement paths become even simpler depending on the weapon. Like, if you take a sniper in the Arena map, you jump up to the high ground first, right? Then if you can’t find me, you jump over the structures and circle to the left. Because circling to the right has too many obstacles blocking your line of sight.”
“…Oh.”
“Since I’m bad at controlling my character, I just wait quietly at the corner right next to the starting point. No matter how good you are, the person aiming and waiting is going to shoot faster than the person aiming while moving. If I miss that chance, I lure you to the next spot and…”
‘……’
Si-woo shook his head internally.
Coming up with a strategy like that just to play a stupid game?
He wondered what they were talking about, but as expected, it was all useless nonsense.
“Wow, are you a genius? How do you play the game while thinking about all that?”
“You just spread out a few variations of the same map in your head and respond to the pattern that gets applied. If your prediction is wrong, you just immediately bring out a different strategy and apply it.”
“…Huh?”
“Uh, it’s similar to Go. You hypothesize countless variations, predict the opponent’s response, and guide them in the direction you want…”
“Cheol-jjjuuun, you know how to play Go too?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s no fun, though.”
Si-woo’s brow furrowed.
Why the heck was he looking over here while talking about it being no fun?
Si-woo abruptly turned his head to stare out the window and gritted his teeth.
Just then, he heard Cheol-jun’s voice again.
“No way. It’s incredibly fun.”
Si-woo’s eyebrows twitched slightly.
“This game has ten maps, right? But Go only has one board. But the number of possible game variations on that single board is reportedly greater than the number of atoms in the universe.”
“…What? The universe what?”
“Two people take turns placing a stone one by one, but there will never be a completely identical game of Go played. Not once in all the time humanity has played Go.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. That’s why they say Go is a painting created by two people. A painting that disappears once it’s played.”
Si-woo scrunched his nose.
‘Like you know anything…’
Right then,
“I’m right, aren’t I? Si-woo?”
“Cheol-jjjuuun! He can’t hear you. See the earmuffs covering his ears?”
He heard it all perfectly, but Si-woo pretended not to hear, staring out the window and twirling his pencil.
Cheol-jun tilted his head.
He had been observing Si-woo’s body language the whole time, and he was definitely listening to their conversation.
Min-jun nudged Cheol-jun.
“Hey. You don’t have to pay attention to him. He’s a jatta.”
“What’s a jatta?”
“A voluntary outcast. He outcasts the rest of us. Quite the guy.”
“Ah…”
“Hey. Then if I take an assault rifle instead of a sniper, how are you gonna deal with me?”
“Well, then the patterns get a bit more diverse, but…”
‘Hah…’
Screeech!
Si-woo jumped up from his seat with a face full of annoyance.
He was suddenly incredibly angry.
He felt like he would explode if he listened any longer.
So he left the classroom and walked toward the restroom.
‘What? A painting? Does he have any idea how blood-drying playing a single match is…’
Si-woo ground his teeth.
*
*
*
Watching Si-woo walk away, Cheol-jun blinked his round eyes.
He definitely looked incredibly displeased again.
‘Why is he always so angry?’
Ever since he briefly talked to him yesterday, he hadn’t heard the boy’s voice.
When they were playing games, all the boys in the class had gathered around, but he was the only one sitting far apart.
When he walked into the classroom and said hello this morning, even the girls reacted, but Si-woo just turned his head away.
Cheol-jun narrowed his brow.
‘Did I do something terribly wrong?’
Cheol-jun couldn’t help but keep worrying about it.
Because his self-proclaimed first goal of ‘approaching the kid who is alone’ had failed miserably.
Well, since he had made friends named Min-jun and Ha-rang, the failure wasn’t a complete disaster.
Cheol-jun sneaked a glance at Si-woo’s desk.
That Go book was open again today.
But he noticed a pencil had fallen under the desk.
‘Did he drop it just now when he got up?’
He knew he shouldn’t touch other people’s belongings carelessly.
But once he started worrying about it, all his attention was drawn to it.
Sometimes, he would get fixated on one thing like this.
Cheol-jun fidgeted in his seat, unable to sit still.
‘I’ll just put it back in its place.’
Cheol-jun quietly stood up and padded over to Si-woo’s desk.
Then, he picked up the pencil and placed it on the desk.
In that moment, he caught a glimpse of Si-woo’s notebook.
It was a notebook printed with a 19×19 Go board grid.
And Go stones with numbers written on them were drawn densely across the intersections.
Yesterday, he had just thought it was a printed Go book.
But everything was drawn in pencil.
‘Is this what they call a game record (gibo)?’
He had just touched someone else’s belongings without permission, and peeking at someone else’s things was also bad…
‘The numbers must be the order the stones were placed, right?’
Realizing the meaning behind the numbers on the Go stones, Cheol-jun couldn’t take his eyes off the picture those stones created.
No, to be exact, the process of that picture being drawn was incredibly fascinating.
Cheol-jun’s round eyes sparkled.
‘Wow, this is like a universe too!’
The moment stone #1 was placed, all other possibilities vanished, and the moment stone #2 was placed, more vanished. Hundreds of choices accumulated to create this single picture.
The universe was like that too.
The moment the first particle formed after the Big Bang, all other possibilities disappeared, and this universe right now was the one actually chosen among countless possibilities.
Cheol-jun’s eyes began to analyze the game record.
19×19 grid.
Instantly a coordinate space.
Each intersection is (x, y).
The position of stone #1, the position of stone #2.
As the numbers increase, the coordinates accumulate to create a point cloud…
‘It’s not a simple function.’
A single input had multiple outputs.
Because the same move by Black could elicit several different responses from White.
A one-to-many relationship.
It was closer to a relation than a function.
‘Then to make this into a function, I need a condition…’
Limits?
As the match progresses, the number of empty intersections decreases.
When the meaning of the empty space converges to 0 within the rules, the match ends.
But it ended before reaching 0.
Because there were no more meaningful moves left.
In math, limits go on endlessly, but Go stopped the moment the meaning disappeared.
Judgment, not numbers, determined the end.
‘Wow…’
Cheol-jun’s brain kept trying to recall numbers and formulas to apply them.
However, it was a picture that could never be solved with math.
These numbers felt as if they were alive.
#1 is placed, #2 responds, #3 responds again.
This wasn’t just a list of coordinates.
This was a conversation.
A conversation exchanged between two people without a single spoken word.
The record of that conversation.
‘Wow, the Go I’ve played up until now was just playing around.’
Cheol-jun was incredibly curious about the temperature of this conversation.
There were hands behind the numbers.
There were people behind the hands.
They were building their own universes against each other.
This was a proof that could never be explained with the math Cheol-jun knew.
He had spoken far too lightly about such a fiercely trembling, intense picture.
Only then could Cheol-jun understand why Si-woo had been so angry.
“Hey!”
Someone came running—dadada—from behind, and Cheol-jun instinctively dodged to the side.
And, rushing past where Cheol-jun had just been standing, Si-woo stumbled and fell flat on his face.
Cheol-jun quickly apologized.
“S-Sorry.”
Si-woo, who had fallen on the floor, jumped up, huffing angrily.
He was about a head taller than Cheol-jun.
“Who told you to look at someone else’s stuff!”
Si-woo took a massive swing with his fist.
Cheol-jun dodged the punch easily.
It was too slow, and entirely predictable.
Min-jun and Ha-rang ran over.
“Hey, hey! Stop it!”
When Min-jun blocked him, Si-woo glared at Cheol-jun, huffing, then packed his game record notebook and pencil case into his bag and slung it over his shoulder.
Cheol-jun peeked his head out from behind Min-jun’s large frame.
“Uh, I’m really sorry for looking without permission. But, did you play that?”
There was no answer.
However, looking at the subtle change in his expression, it seemed like he did.
He felt truly sorry that he had made him angry, but Cheol-jun was just too curious.
The question mark that had just appeared was too large.
And yet, no other question marks followed it; his thoughts were completely blocked.
This was the first time this had happened.
So, unable to hold it in, he asked.
“Why did Black play like that starting from move 46?”
Si-woo’s eyes wavered slightly.
“I’m asking because I’m really curious!”
Si-woo gritted his teeth and glared at Cheol-jun before simply turning his body away.
His accumulated annoyance exploded.
He had no intention of exchanging words anymore.
Just as he was about to storm out of the classroom, fuming…
“Why did Black hold back?”
Si-woo’s steps halted.
“They wanted to keep attacking, but they held back, which is why they lost.”
In an instant, the words his dad had sighed out during their review yesterday flashed through his mind.
—If you decided to attack, you should have followed through to the end.
“Ah, damn it!”
Si-woo charged—udada—and threw a punch, and because Cheol-jun dodged it easily again, Si-woo stumbled and rolled onto the classroom floor with a crash.
Cheol-jun panicked.
It looked incredibly painful.
“I-I’m sorry!”
One of the girls ran out into the hallway.
“Teacher! The kids are fighting!”
The girl shouted, and…
“Everyone stop!”
Teacher Go Chang-ho entered the classroom with a sigh.
And, upon seeing the parties involved in the fight, an expression of curiosity, rather than anger, surfaced on Teacher Go Chang-ho’s face.
“Both of you follow me. Si-woo, leave your bag there.”
Speaking firmly and turning around, Teacher Go Chang-ho’s face was brimming with intrigue.