An opponent to remember

Originally he only wanted to give his son an exciting weekend by letting Ye Xiu go to the All-Star Weekend of the Professional Glory Alliance. It wasn't easy to get a ticket for this event, however for him it was more than easy to do so. A few words here, a few words there and in the blink of an eye he had two three-day tickets – one for himself and one for his son. The plan was to get Ye Xiu out of his shell. Those who went to the All-Star Weekend were all fans of the online game Glory, though they weren't necessarily fans of the same professional team. What was his son's favorite team?

The first day of the All-Star Weekend was a Friday and the only event on said day was the so called Rookie Challenge. As the name indicated in this event some rookies challenged their seniors. For whatever reason the challenges seemed to be extremely exciting. He couldn't see anything special about them, though he also had no clue what was so great about Glory itself or why people seriously wanted to play a game as a profession. Instead of playing games they should go to school and then become a hard-working member of society. What would these people do after their career ended? Or were forced to stop playing because of an injury? Which company would employ a former pro player? Did they plan to play games until the end? As if this would be possible! Despite being adults, in his eyes they were just children that didn't know what to do with their lives.
Why he still let his son play games all day long and even bought a ticket for the All-Star Weekend? Because his son was smart and had no problems with keeping up with school works – and everyone needed some fun from time to time and he wanted his son to find a few friends. Maybe his thinking in this regard was a bit naïve – most visitors were here with friends and more interested in interacting with the pro players than other audience members, so the chances of Ye Xiu making any new friends here were relatively small –, but one could dream, right?

On the second day it was time for the audience interaction. Every year on this day a few lucky ones would be able to play together or better said against some of the pro players. To be exact there were two parts for this interactions. The first half was the Mini-Game part. For every Mini-Game one All-Star player selected five audience members and then the All-Star together with some other pro player, who were not selected into the All-Star event by the fans, but signed up for this event, together with the lucky audience members would play the Mini-Game and see, who would win. Of course the winner was always one of the pro players – usually the All-Star.
To be selected as All-Star, one had to be popular with the fans. Fans liked the strong player, so usually when one was selected one also was a quite skilled player – one at the top of the tops. Consequently, Cleric player were barely seen at the All-Star Weekend – Zhang Xinjie was one of the few Clerics that had made it into the All-Star list and he was quite high up in the votes as well. Maybe the reason was his status as Master Tactician or that he helped team Tyranny to beat team Excellent Era and therewith stop their consecutive win streak.
The second part of the interaction was the fight against a pro player. If one wanted to fight against a pro player, one had to press a button on the armrest of one's seat. Whoever was the fastest was the one, who could fight the pro player. Of course, more than one fight was held. So more than one person would have a chance. The pro player usually was a player from the hosting team and most of the audience members were fans of the hosting team.
Ye Xiu didn't seem impressed at all. He had silently watched the Rookie Challenge and even seemed a bit bored at the Mini-Game part. Not even when the fight against the selected pro player was announced did his expression chance. His father was a bit worried. It was not uncommon for Ye Xiu to look disinterested or bored, when he actually was taking in information or wanted to do something.

When Ye Xiu had been a small child, his mother often talked to him about the stars and the universe. To outsiders it looked like he had been bored by her words, that he wasn't interested at all. However, he listen quite attentive, so much that he had no time to care about looking interested. Even nowadays he still remembers her words and could repeat them.
Maybe he was expressionless because it was just too much to take in at the moment? There was a huge difference between watching the All-Star Weekend from a seat in the stadium or from the sofa at home. It was a totally different atmosphere. And the stadium was much louder. At some points both Ye Xiu and his father thought they would go deaf, due to all the cheering from the fans. Fortunately they were still fine.
"Is it not exciting for you? Do you not like the teams?", Ye Qiu asked his son worried.
He had thought he would do good bringing his son here, but seemingly this wasn't the case.
"It is. It's just so loud and crowded. The teams are good, too."
"So, you like the teams?"
He ignored the first part of his son's statement, simply because there was nothing to say about it. Though he was happy that his son hadn't run away, despite it being so loud and crowded. Ye Xiu never run away, no matter how loud or crowded a place was, as long as there was a good reason for him to be at that place, he would stay without complaining. However, that didn't mean that Ye Xiu didn't care, that it didn't affect him. Instead of running away on the outside, he run away inside. Deep inside Ye Xiu hid away even more, got more scared and isolated himself even further. Therefore, it was not a good idea to force him into crowded and loud places all the time. Ye Qiu had understood this by now and stopped most – not all – of his attempts to get his son out of his shell and into the world – still he worried a lot about his company. How was Ye Xiu supposed to be a CEO, when he was so shy and scared? Ye Qiu could only hope that someday his son suddenly changed. For now there was nothing he could do besides dragging his son to this Glory event.