The duel between William and Gunz continued.

The two of them danced back and forth while shooting, counter-shooting, and counter-counter-shooting each other. It was a delicate fight of accuracy, reaction time, spacing, and outguessing.

William started the fight on the wrong foot as his Korean Cancel failed multiple times in a row. However, after taking a moment to reassess the situation and calm down, his next two KCs were a resounding success. He was getting the hang of it...!

BAM! A bullet flew at William, but he sidestepped it via KC and fired a swift counter.

ZAP! The counter was successful. The laser beam grazed Gunz's shoulder, catching the guy in the middle of a sidestep.

But, it was too early to celebrate, as Gunz has already readied his gun once more for a counterattack!

It was a swift shift from sidestepping to shooting. It’s as if the guy already figured he was going to get hit, so he cut his sidestep short in order to counterattack faster.

It was an inhumanly fast response. Before William’s beam even hit Gunz, the guy’s pistol was already locked on William, and it was ready to fire at a moment’s notice...!

William had no chance of sidestepping this shot via normal means. Also, canceling into a Dodge Roll was not an option either so long as the threat of Kraken existed.

Therefore, there was only one thing that could possibly save him here: Korean Cancel. He already buffered the input ahead of time as it was impossible to do so on reaction, not with how tight the input window was.

Will the KC come through for him this time? Or, will it fail miserably again?

Oh, it registered. William realized that his Droid started moving early, before his attack animation fully ended. Good. I’ll dodge this one and shoot back again.

He had this one in the bag. With the KC kicking in, Gunz’s upcoming shot was definitely going to miss... or, will it?

Oh, he's moving! Lars noticed just as he started pressing the left button. It gotta be that KC thing again, yo! I need to shift my aim just a little...!

Right before the bullet was unleashed, Lars tilted his mouse to the side. It changed the shot’s angle ever so slightly.

BAM! The bullet darted toward Winner!

WHAM! The bullet made contact. It grazed Winner’s arm, hitting him in the middle of his sick sidestep technique.

He still hit me...? William blinked.

This was supposed to be the part where William fires a counter-attack after finishing the sidestep, yet his fingers didn’t budge. The best response he managed was to backstep in order to get out of the enemy’s range and delay Gunz’s next shot, but that’s all. His brain short-circuited for a moment there.

I... I did a KC, right? William replayed the situation in his head. I definitely sidestepped enough to avoid getting shot. But, he still hit me and it didn’t look like a fluke. It was just for a moment, but it looked like his gun was following my movements.

William doubted his own testimony on this, but that’s what he observed in the middle of his sidestep.

He moved his gun just a little before firing. Did he actually react to my KC and shift his aim accordingly? That’s…

Absurd, to say the least. Pulling off something like this required a godly reaction speed that rivaled the most mechanically skilled pros out there. Did Gunz really possess a talent like this...?

No, it had to be a fluke, right? There’s no way he can do this consistently. William tried to reassure himself, but his confidence was slipping away.

Well, I can’t argue with the facts. William conceded. Maybe Gunz’s reaction speed is really good enough for pulling off stunts like this, at least every now and then. I mean, he’s not the first impossibly talented middle schooler I’ve come across this year. In fact, we have a much greater monster in our own club.

If a pro-level middle schooler like Young-jin was permitted to exist in this world, then it wasn’t a stretch to believe that a middle schooler with godly reaction speed existed as well. Not to mention, the last few exchanges made it clear that Gunz's mechanical skill trampled over William's.

If this were a tennis match, then Gunz would have likely been the type to rely on his speed and power. He’d deliver strong groundstrokes to maintain momentum, and he’d use his speedy reaction to catch up and return any ball that came his way.

To make things worse, Gunz was the one who got the initiative in this fight, so it’s like he was the server. And, breaking the serve of a force opponent like this was always an uphill battle.

Meanwhile, Gunz would counter most of William's stokes with relative ease. This guy relied on nothing but sheer speed, in both reaction speed and execution.

No matter how calculated William's strokes were, Gunz would trample over all that careful planning through sheer speed and instinct. He was the type who would often find himself in a difficult spot for returning the ball, yet he would still successfully pull it off by responding impossibly fast.

I'm more than familiar with opponents like this. William frowned. This is the kind of wall I’ve had to deal with many times before.

Back when he played Tennis, there was no shortage of opponents who had physical advantages. Some were taller and hit devastating smashes, others were faster and returned the ball from every difficult course. The further William advanced in tournaments, the more “unfair” matchups like this he had to go through.

There's always a player who is better than me at something. That belief rooted itself in his head after all these bitter experiences.

William couldn't be the fastest, strongest, and smartest player around. He had his own strengths and so did his opponents. Therefore, recognizing what his opponents excelled at and what they lacked was the key to overcoming them.

It all comes down to adaptation. William reminded himself as he stepped out of the range of Gunz's incoming shot. Even in this fight, I can see some openings. For one, his spacing isn't as tight as mine.

The two duelists continued dancing around the lane, gunning for each other. However, since William found himself at a significant HP disadvantage at this point, he slowed down his tempo and made the opponent chase him.

For now, I'll make you run around the court like a dog. William thought. And then, once you overextend...!

ZAP! A laser beam pierced through Gunz's chest the moment he stepped in!

"Dang!" Lars exclaimed. I overstepped, huh. Got a little careless there.

He responded by shooting back at his opponent, but the surprise of being hit out of the blue delayed his reaction a little. In that brief window of time, Winner had enough time to sidestep the shot.

In the end, all of it went according to Winner's plan.

This is what happens when your spacing isn't up to par. William criticized. You're stepping in too much, and it's going to be the end of you if you keep doing it.

As an integral part of his training regime, William made sure to study and practice the shooting distances of all the meta classes to the point of perfection. Thanks to that, he could accurately judge the distance between himself and his opponent at any time.

He utilized his experience to constantly place himself at the very edge of Gunz’s attack range. From a position like this, he needed less than half a step in order to get out of Gunz’s reach.

BAM! Another bullet darted toward William, but it fell off shortly before reaching him. Once again, Gunz failed to realize that Wiliam was at the very edge of Pirate’s attack range.

In response to the shot, William stepped in just a little and fired a counter. ZAP! It successfully grazed the enemy’s arm.

I’m sorry to inform you but my depth perception is quite the cheat, or so I was told.

Though William lacked in many ways compared to the strongest tennis opponent he faced, his depth perception consistently remained top-notch. It was the one tool he could always trust to back him up, no matter how tough the adversary was.

In fact, his acute ability to judge distances was probably the very thing that made tennis so hooking for him in the first place. It felt like a sport that played to his strengths, long before he even realized how impressive his depth perception was.

He had always been good at reading ball courses and adjusting his position accordingly. This talent, combined with his methodical playstyle, allowed him to counter many opponents.

But, that alone isn't always enough. William thought solemnly. Some opponents are just too physically gifted. No amount of planning and depth perception can compensate for a huge physical advantage, not in a sport like this.

Fortunately, Classmancers was a different type of game. Being physically gifted was helpful but not mandatory. There were countless ways to compensate for mediocre mechanical skill, so long as the player put in the time and effort.

Of course, godly mechanical skill and talent exist here too, as Gunz was exemplifying in this very fight. However, the gap those skills created wasn’t impossible to close.

ZAP! William punished another careless overextension from Gunz.

"Gah!" Lars jumped. "Dang, yo! This dude sure knows his spacing."

"Why, of course he does!" Vincent interjected out of nowhere. "He is none other than the Matrix Convoluter! He has the power to transform the world around him into a detailed 5-dimensional matrix and filter it down to all the important details!"

"Yeah, it's cool as heck, yo!" Not that I have any idea what any of that means, but dude sure got the spacing down!

"What is the 5th dimension in this case?" Yuel posed a difficult question. "I assume the 4th dimension is time, but the 5th is...?"

"Oh, um..." Vincent spouted all that stuff as if he thought everything through, when in reality it was a bunch of hogwash as usual. "It's... the filter dimension!"

“Excuse me?”

“After Winner observes all the possible 3D spaces across all the possible timelines, next he observes them through specific lens filters!”

“And, what exactly is he searching for?”

“That’s a very good question! It depends.”

“On what?”

“For example, by applying the edge detection filter, he can accurately estimate the distance between himself and his opponent at any time!”

“I see...” This makes absolutely no sense, but that’s par for the course. Vincent’s nicknames for abilities were usually over-the-top, and this “Matrix Convoluter” was no exception.

Thankfully, this wasn’t the first time Yuel listened to an attempt to explain this “Matrix Convoluter” title. Every time, Vincent explained it in a different bombastic way, so Yuel had a lot of information to work with, enough to piece together what this ability meant… probably.

Apparently, Vincent dubbed Winner as the “Matrix Convoluter” for the guy’s ability to acutely analyze the space around him. Basically, Winner was good at spacing, that’s all Vincent really wanted to say.

But of course, Vincent being Vincent, he had to complicate things and dial them up to eleven. That’s why he involved matrices, filters, and other random things.

I have no idea how he even knows all these terms. Yuel sighed. I remember coming across the term “matrix convolution” in regards to edge detection in images, so maybe that’s where he took it from?

No matter how silly the nickname was, there was apparently a grain of logic in it, as it was usually the case with Vincent’s nonsense. Indeed, AbsoluteWinner was a master of “edge detection”, so to speak. He had the uncanny ability to keep his opponents at an optimal distance as he shot them down.

Lars’s spacing is also usually solid, but there’s definitely a gap between him and Winner. 

Twice in a row now, Lars found himself overextending while chasing Winner down. And, both times, the enemy exploited the brief overextension in order to gun Lars down. It looked like an uphill duel for Lars, which was beyond rare.

“Heh, not bad!” Lars grinned. “That’s how it gotta be, yo!”

Winner had a somewhat slow start in this duel, but it looked like dude finished booting himself up. Now, he was playing at full throttle and his spacing was outta this world!