To the average YGGDRASIL player, the announcement of the official World Champion tournament was a call to glory—an opportunity to etch their names into the foundational history of the game's nine realms. To Joseph, it was a logistical problem with a highly profitable solution.
In the physical world, Joseph didn't shift a single muscle. He sat perfectly naked within his VR rig, surrounded by a three-tier-high barricade of empty nutrient soup cans, his real-world hands resting precisely on his custom mechanical split-keyboard. Through his illegal black-market neural splitters, his primary consciousness was divided like a highly structured corporate network: 10% running baseline system diagnostic checks, 10% dedicated to keeping his physical heart rate steady, and the remaining 80% split evenly between Shiraori and his eight macro-botting alternate accounts.
"Tournament Registration Interface: Open," Joseph mentally executed the command.
Nine separate holographic registration panels materialized simultaneously across his compound vision. Each panel corresponded to one of the nine distinct cosmological realms of YGGDRASIL, flashing with gold-leaf typography and strict, corporate entry criteria.
The rules enforced by the DMMO-RPG administration were rigid. A single account could only register for a tournament within a realm where they held active residency or had completed a specific high-tier regional questline. Furthermore, to prevent top-tier guilds from entirely monopolizing the bracket, the registration system used an advanced bio-metric scan to verify that each unique avatar was linked to an independent human operator.
Joseph let out a dry, clicking laugh through Shiraori's mandibles.
"They spent millions of yen developing bio-metric firewalls," he murmured, his fingers dancing across a custom macro-script that routed his brain's neural impulses through eight separate, delayed hardware emulators. "Yet they left a client-side packet loophole wide open in the regional transit logs. Shitty developers."
With a series of precise keystrokes, Joseph executed his registration loop, slotting one account neatly into each distinct realm:
[Shiraori] — Registered: Realm of Helheim Bracket.
[Alt 1: Gargoyle] — Registered: Realm of Midgard Bracket.
[Alt 2: Automaton] — Registered: Realm of Alfheim Bracket.
[Alt 3: Golem] — Registered: Realm of Jotunheim Bracket.
[Alt 4: Sahaugin] — Registered: Realm of Nidavellir Bracket.
[Alt 5: Insectoid] — Registered: Realm of Svartalfheim Bracket.
[Alt 6: Dullahan] — Registered: Realm of Vanaheim Bracket.
[Alt 7: Flame Elemental] — Registered: Realm of Muspelheim Bracket.
[Alt 8: Valkyrie-Automaton] — Registered: Realm of Asgard Bracket.
The system processed the packets. For a tense three seconds, the green security bars flickered amber as the server compared the incoming data streams. Then, nine simultaneous chime sounds echoed in Joseph's mind.
[REGISTRATION CONFIRMED. YOU HAVE BEEN ENTERED INTO THE REGIONAL SELECTION BRACKETS. PREPARATORY WINDOW: 72 HOURS.]
"Perfect," Joseph smiled, his crimson compound eyes narrowing. "A complete monopoly of the world tree's apex titles. If I can secure all nine World Champion class-seeds, the system's automated reward algorithm will be forced to grant a hidden synergy achievement. The absolute optimization of data."
But executing a nine-front campaign in a max-level PvP tournament required resources he didn't currently possess. While Shiraori was sitting comfortably at level 100 after vaporizing the Hydra of the Vast Abyss, his eight alternate accounts were hovering in the mid-90s. They were high-defense, high-stamina farming configurations, built to take a beating from dungeon mobs, not to counter the erratic, hyper-optimized builds of top-tier human duelists.
They needed gear. They needed levels. And most importantly, Joseph needed to calibrate his macro-scripts to handle real-world human behavior instead of predictable boss AI.
"Phase Two initiated: The Meat Grinder," Joseph commanded.
He didn't waste time hunting wild monsters for the remaining experience points. That was an inefficient use of the 72-hour window. Instead, Joseph decided to leverage the most abundant, self-replenishing resource in YGGDRASIL: the player base.
Using a secondary, anonymous forum profile on the official Nidavellir and Midgard regional boards, Joseph pinned a brief, single-sentence post containing precise coordinates to a volcanic plateau in Muspelheim and a frozen cavern in Jotunheim.
"The rogue Arachne hacker 'Shiraori' is currently transferring forty thousand units of unrefined Celestial Uranium through these transit corridors without guild protection. The inventory weight has reduced her movement speed by 80%."
It was a blatant, shameless trap. But Joseph knew exactly how the human psychological engine functioned. In a corporate society driven by scarcity and desperation, the mere mention of forty thousand pieces of Prismatic Ore was enough to make even the most cautious guilds throw their strategic handbooks out the window.
Within two hours of the post going live, Joseph's [Spatial Detection] grid on the Muspelheim plateau began to illuminate with an absolute swarm of crimson dots.
Three mid-ranking mercenary guilds and a loose coalition of high-level bounty hunters had arrived, their avatars glittering with enchanted gear, swords drawn, their eyes scanning the black volcanic ash for a slow-moving white spider.
They didn't find Shiraori.
Instead, they found a towering, level 96 Flame Elemental and a level 95 Dullahan tank standing completely motionless in the center of the basalt field. The two alts didn't possess lifelike idle animations; they stood frozen like eerie, abandoned statues under the crimson sky.
"Hey! Are these her alts?" a mercenary captain shouted through the area voice chat, his broadsword crackling with frost magic. "Where is the main spider? Break their armor and force the drop!"
The moment the mercenaries stepped within a thirty-meter radius of the statues, Joseph's real-world fingers slammed into his execution macro.
"Run script: Arena_Calibration_v1.4," Joseph whispered.
The Flame Elemental alt didn't lunge forward like a standard monster. It executed a frame-perfect, frame-canceled [Maximize Magic: Wall of Fire] directly behind the mercenaries' backline, instantly cutting off their path of retreat. Simultaneously, the Dullahan alt utilized [Abyssal Magnetism], a rare crowd-control skill that forcibly dragged the enemy casters through the dirt, pulling them directly into the elemental's burning aura.
"What the hell?! Their reaction time is zero!" a wizard screamed as his health bar began to plummet from the concentrated heat data. "He's not even looking at me! He parried my spell backwards!"
Joseph sat in his dark apartment, his unblinking eyes tracking the chaotic flow of the battle across four separate monitor views. He wasn't playing for honor; he was gathering combat telemetries. Every time a human player tried to dodge, feint, or activate a defensive martial art, Joseph's custom AI script recorded the exact frame-data, automatically adjusting the reaction parameters of his bots to counter the human behavior.
When a rogue tried to sneak behind the Dullahan for a critical backstab, the bot's code didn't rely on sight—it read the spatial coordinate update from the server packet and executed an instantaneous, automated shield-bash to the exact millimeter of the rogue's hitbox.
It wasn't a fight. It was a high-speed data harvest.
Over the next forty-eight hours, the volcanic plateaus of Muspelheim and the frozen caverns of Jotunheim became industrial slaughterhouses. Hundreds of ambitious players seeking a quick fortune were systematically ground into experience points and high-tier loot drops by a silent, mechanical shadow army that never missed a parry, never fell for a feint, and never typed a single word in the chat log.
By the dawn of the third day, a series of golden cascading prompts filled Joseph's peripheral vision.
[Alt 1: Gargoyle — Level 100 Achieved]
[Alt 2: Automaton — Level 100 Achieved]
[Alt 3: Golem — Level 100 Achieved]
...
[Alt 8: Valkyrie-Automaton — Level 100 Achieved]
Nine max-level accounts. Eight perfectly calibrated combat scripts containing the frame-data of over five hundred unique PvP encounters.
Joseph slowly opened Shiraori's inventory, looking down at The Eraser of Worldly Flesh, its crescent blade humming with that cold, monochromatic grey rot. He then opened his network map, where the official countdown timer for the tournament brackets had just reached zero.
[ATTENTION PARTICIPANTS: THE WORLD CHAMPION TOURNAMENT SELECTION ROUNDS ARE NOW COMMENCING. YOU WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY TELEPORTED TO YOUR RESPECTIVE REGIONAL ARENAS IN 30 SECONDS.]
Joseph leaned back slightly against his throne of soup cans, his fingers resting lightly above the keys like a concert pianist preparing for a dark symphony.
"Let's see if the nine realms can match the efficiency of a machine," Joseph purred.