5 The Seoul Gladiators Pt. 1 (1/2)

Li Ming was dumbfounded. He had never expected this situation to arise as he was just in a very bad mood from the lack of food and the recent unfortunate events that had occurred to him. ”Is that alright? Isn't that where the rest of your team is too?”

”Of course! Its alright if I say its alright!” Mato was practically glowing at this point. ”I can give you that autograph you wanted too!”

Li Ming found it hard to reject her, especially with the offer of food.

”I guess I'll go...”

---

Li Ming sat at a dining table nervously. He had been brought directly to the Seoul Gladiator's dining quarters. Mato had run off to her room to grab something, but she hadn't returned for a while. Thankfully, she had reheated some of the dinner they had that day for Li Ming.

He was once again reminded of how well off these professional teams were. They had brought their chef with them to a foreign country, even though the chef wouldn't be taking part in the competition itself. In fact, the amount of support staff in the practice rooms was quite shocking to him.

Apparently, every single person from the support staff all the way to the team's players were all required to watch and analyze the practice games they were playing from day to day. This wasn't the case until 2 years ago when a team, the Recife Spears, that was predicted to lose against a tournament favorite revealed that it was due to their team's janitor realizing that their team had a single fatal flaw that wasn't even connected to the game itself.

But upon fixing that mistake, that team had soared from a bottom tiered team to middle tier team. After that incident, every team started encouraging as many people as possible under their organization to help out, but of course, each team had different levels of success.

The Seoul Gladiators were of course one of teams who had grown prolifically due to this change. They already had a ”B Team” designated for emergency substitutions that may be necessary during the course of a tournament, and they had also created a gaming guild that extended outside of the digital world.

They were the first team to provide scholarships to players who also played the game, as well as set up training camps to groom younger players into becoming stronger talents for the future. These contact points that they had built would prove to be extremely helpful to their main team.

After the incident with the Recife Spears, all the Seoul Gladiators had to do was start looking for candidates that were talented in the game that also possessed other skills such as management, accounting, or even cooking from their various contact points they had already owned.

”Di~ng!!”

The microwave's bell rang out.

Li Ming proceeded to pull the dish out. It was a serving of kimchi fried rice with chicken kalbi. He sat down at the table and removed the plastic wrap covering it. The scent of the home cooked meal wafted up, making his stomach rumble.

Excited, Li Ming clapped his hands together. ”Ittada-”

”Hey you!”