Solo leveling AU where when the Rulers realized their god was an asshole pitting them against the Monarchs for entertainment they had the grasp of strategy suitable for people who’d been fighting a Forever War and went ‘the enemy of my enemy... also the Monarchs love to destroy shit’ and went ‘hey why don’t we destroy our jackass creator enemy of my enemy?’ and the Monarchs, some of whom had already had that realization and since they couldn’t do shit about it it made them want to break things even more, went ‘sure!’
And also had the brains to go, ok, we were literally built from the ground up to make conflict inevitable, and there’s all those grudges. Stopping fighting altogether is not going to happen. But. How about holding fights in preset battlefields where we can blow massive amounts of shit up without wrecking our infrastructure, and instead of killing mooks we select champions to battle and then don’t kill the loser so they can get even more skilled and come back for a grudge match?
You end up with a setting where it’s actually justified that literally everything revolves around this one sport/martial arts competition, because the psychology of the people in charge was literally designed to have them do the thing, which is ‘have entertaining wars/battles.’
So why do they care about earth? Scouting. You have the monarchs and the rulers creating dungeons, and giving mana/skills and other powerups to the people who beat them, in order to identify people they want to hire for their side/teams. No dungeon breaks bc then you’d have to rebuild the dungeon, and pissing off the humans you want to hire some of would be dumb, participants get knocked out instead of killed.
Sung Jin-woo remains weak af despite lots of dungeon runs since he’s not here to get an offer to move to another planet, he wants the power-up items to sell to put his sister through med school.
Then he does get scouted, by Ashborne, who wants him for his item farming skill. SJW knows exactly how to direct a weak undead army to maximize power-up acquisition from all those Level 0 dungeon runs, and instead of being greedy and keeping those power-ups for himself, he’ll use them for the benefit of others even if it means he personally remains weak, so like, he can be trusted not to embezzle or get greedy enough to cheat. You... you do not want to cheat... the terms of the competitions are the only thing restraining some pretty godlike beings from constant murder, losing the protection of the rules by cheating is going to result in horrible death as per Yu-gi-oh early manga.
In the war sim competitions, logistics is very, very important, as in actual war.
Trading players/hostage exchange is one of the things used to keep the peace, though, so once Sung Jin-Woo starts to get attention he has to not lose in order to not get forfeited to another employer who might not be willing to provide unlimited interplanetary transports. Beru requested to get forfeited to Ashborne’s players in order to serve Sung Jin-woo and learn from him bc very impressed~
While the rulers’ and monarchs’ teams are The Big Leagues, there are national and independent teams on various planets since, you know. Being good at this gets you superpowers, and with a team you can participate in more stuff than one-on-one, since ability to work with a team is one of the things team owners are looking for.
Baby!E-rank SJW stared at Ashborn, & cried a second later, & reached out to Il-hwan, asking to be saved.
Baby!S-rank SJW stared at Ashborn, & kept staring- No, wait. He didn't stare at Ashborn. He stared at Asborn's glowing flame-like purple hair.
& what SJW wants, that's what he will get.
(while Il-Hwan was busy calming his crying son, Ashborn was busy preventing hia heir from tugging and eating his hair. Igris & Bellion try to help Ashborn of course, but what can they do against baby!SJW?)
