The following week, the courier showed up with my clothes, my keyboard, my graphics tablet, the Osu! plushie, and—most important of all—the trophy.
It was a sweltering Saturday afternoon, the sun hammering down on the streets and turning the asphalt into a sizzling griddle.
I was in my room, hunched over my desk, lost in a scroll session on X hunting for Fortnite updates.
The feed was pure chaos of hype: leaks of epic skins, theories about meta weapons, memes about how the game was finally ready after eight years of delays.
Hashtags like #FortniteLaunch and #BuildingRevolution were everywhere, influencers posting countdowns and wild guesses.
The doorbell rang—a sharp trill that echoed through the whole house—just as I was deep in some X post.
Mom answered the intercom, and a moment later I heard her call from the front door: "Christian! Package for you from Japan!"
I bolted down the stairs, skipping the last two steps in one jump, heart pounding with a mix of excitement and relief.
The courier, a sweaty guy in a sweat-stained orange DHL uniform, handed me a neatly packed box stuffed with bubble wrap and covered in Japanese labels that looked like cryptic hieroglyphs—words like "取扱注意" that I had no clue how to read.
"I'd better figure out how to read stuff like this by the end of the summer, or Japan's gonna stay a pipe dream," I thought, staring at the characters while I picked up the package.
I carried the box into the living room, where sunlight slipped through the half-drawn curtains and painted golden stripes across the table.
I ripped it open, and there, nestled in layers of padding, were my treasures: the Wooting 60HE, the Wacom CTL-472, and the trophy.
Right at the bottom, under the Osu! plushie, was one last softer package.
I opened it, and inside were my shorts and my black short-sleeved T-shirt.
At last I could show the trophy to my sister, who had been begging every single day to see it, those big pleading eyes and little hands waving with excitement.
Nicole had been obsessed with the "shiny trophy", as she called it, ever since I told her about winning Worlds—describing the stage lights and the roaring crowd.
Every night before bed she would ask, "Christian, when are you gonna let me see the trophy? Can I touch it? Is it as big as the soccer one?" and I would promise her it wouldn't be long.
Now here she was, up on her tiptoes peering into the box.
"Thanks, Christian! Can I hold it for a bit?" she asked. She cradled the trophy gently in both hands, brown hair falling across her face as she turned it slowly, watching every glint of light.
"Sure, but I want it back later, okay? And don't drop it—it could break," I said, laughing as I ruffled her hair.
She nodded with deadly seriousness, like she had just sworn an oath, then dashed into the living room shouting, "Mom, look!"
Mom, in the kitchen chopping up a fruit salad to fight the heat, laughed and told her to be careful.
There wasn't much time to linger over the trophy: that day, July 19, I had not only gotten back everything I had left in Tokyo, but the Fortnite servers were finally going live after years of waiting.
The hype was off the charts—socials, forums, streams, everyone talking about this game-changing battle royale.
In Italy the servers opened at 3 p.m., so I went live half an hour early. My Twitch channel was pushing 35k followers now, thanks to the Worlds boost.
I started early to hang out with chat, which was already flooding with messages.
«Pantera Grigia on Fortnite? Epic!» Redco09 wrote, spamming fire emojis.
«Builds OP or trash?» Exodrxne asked, clearly skeptical about the game's signature mechanic.
«Squad with Osu! pros?» Guckii pointed out, recognizing Mrekk's and BTMC's voices in the background.
For that half hour I kept chat entertained, tossing questions at them and my friends, everyone chiming in like it was a pre-launch Fortnite podcast.
"Guys, what do you think about building? I can't wait to try throwing up towers mid-fight," I said, while Mrekk just chuckled: "I'm an Osu! guy—building? No clue."
Chat was throwing out theories: some said it would be Minecraft on steroids, others were already bracing for day-one server crashes.
We had ten people on the Discord server—a mix of friends I had met in Japan, on Valorant, and back in school—though that day we were down to eight.
John was still finishing the install, and Ivaxa was tied up with something else, but he had promised he would hop on by midnight Italian time.
We decided to split into two squads of four and move to private voice channels so we wouldn't talk over each other; the plan was to shuffle the teams every so often so everyone could play together at some point.
My first squad was with the friends I had met in Japan: Mrekk from Australia, Nijiro from Japan, BTMC from the US.
We had grouped together for two main reasons: first, they were the new guys on the server, so they felt more comfortable sticking with me since we already knew each other.
Second was the server region—my other friends wanted to stay on Europe.
Without meaning to, the four of us ended up from four different continents, so we had to pick a region that worked for everyone and kept the ping as low as possible to avoid lag ruining the games.
Out of the options—Europe for me, Asia for Nijiro, Oceania for Mrekk, and NA for BTMC—the NA server was the most central and the best overall: ping hovered around 100-150 ms, not low enough to stop anyone from raging, but good enough to work with.
At exactly three o'clock I clicked the game icon, and chat exploded with emojis.
The loading screen came up—Fortnite logo against an electric blue background, epic music pumping in the background and flooding us with adrenaline.
Then, suddenly, black.
The screen froze, and my heart skipped a beat.
"What the hell?" I thought, checking everything—fiber connection solid, PC running smooth, temps fine on HWiNFO.
Then the message appeared: "Waiting in queue for: 59:34".
"We have to wait an hour in queue?!" I said, completely baffled, my voice echoing in both the stream and voice chat.
Chat lost it:
«Server overload lol,» Cloopie wrote.
«I'm already in, it's insane,» Tempi05 posted, making me jealous.
«Mine's been two hours!» Yarnoo complained.
Fortnite had been everywhere the past few weeks—viral trailers on YouTube racking up millions of views—so of course half the planet was trying to play, the servers were slammed, and everyone had to queue.
While we waited, we had already gone through every weapon spec that had leaked on Twitter.
The two that looked strongest were the assault rifle and the pump shotgun—their epic versions were purple SCARs, legendaries were gold SPAS, both with high DPS and solid range.
Finally the queue ended and we got in.
The lobby loaded with my default skin front and center—a guy in a green shirt and cargo pants—and three empty slots for my teammates' skins.
Up top were the usual tabs: Battle Pass, daily quests, locker, item shop.
Drawn in by the item shop, I clicked it and a flood of cosmetics popped up: skins, pickaxes, gliders.
Mrekk didn't even hesitate—he dropped ten euros and bought a skin called Renegade.
It was uncommon rarity—green tier—and looked almost exactly like a default, just with a deep crimson outfit instead of military green.
Nijiro and BTMC jumped on it too, hyped.
"Let's all run the same skin!" Mrekk shouted.
"I'm sitting this one out," I said. "I'm not dropping any money on the game yet. Gotta see if I even like it first."
"You just won twenty grand and you're skimping on a ten-euro skin!" BTMC said, clearly not buying it.
We queued into the first match. We spawned on a waiting island where everyone connected.graphic
While we waited, I noticed the graphics were cartoonish but detailed—perfect for a game like this, in my opinion.
Then we got beamed onto the Battle Bus, a flying blue school bus that followed a random path across the map while the hype music ramped up.
"Where we dropping?" Nijiro asked, voice calm but buzzing with excitement, as we zoomed in on the map—a massive island dotted with POIs like Salty Springs, Retail Row, and Loot Lake.
"Pleasant Park looks solid to me," I said while scanning the map, eyeing the suburban houses and the soccer field.
We all agreed, so we went for it.
I aimed for a medium-sized blue house with a sloped roof and glowing windows.
Right next to it was a bigger one—twice the size, with a garage even—and nobody was dropping there, but it didn't feel as good as the blue one.
I landed on the roof, smashed through with my pickaxe, and dropped into the attic.
In the corner sat a rare chest, blue and silver, pulsing with that electric blue glow.
"Good call dropping here," I thought, satisfied.
I opened it and pulled a legendary assault rifle.
"Gold SCAR!" I shouted in voice chat, adrenaline spiking.
"Lucky bastard—that's supposed to be the best gun in the game!" Mrekk said, jealous, while he looted a green pistol in the house next door.
We ran into enemies—a full squad pushing from the north, all default skins.
From the roof I started shooting, lining up bursts with the SCAR—clean, precise.
One guy tried to throw up a wall for cover, mashing keys like crazy, but the build was slow, awkward—he couldn't pull it off and dropped in a spray of pixels.
"First kill," I announced, triumphant, looting his body for extra ammo.
The match rolled on and we had time to loot until the Storm—a shrinking purple wall that chipped away at your health if you stayed in it—forced us to rotate.
I tried building: hit Z for wall, X for ramp, attempting a basic structure.
After a couple of failed tries I yelled, "This is impossible!"
There were four building keys—one each for wall, ramp, cone, and floor—on top of the standard battle royale controls, demanding piano-level finger coordination.
My Osu! background—nothing but rhythmic taps on two keys—wasn't helping at all.
"No way you use this in a fight—you're dead before you build anything," BTMC said while trying it himself.
Unlike the rest of us, BTMC was playing on his home server with zero ping, which proved the issue wasn't lag—it was the mechanic itself.
"You're right, it's useless," Nijiro added while randomly throwing walls around the city's soccer field.
Then a full squad rolled up with rocket launchers. They locked onto me and fired four rockets at once.
Trusting the mechanic that made the game unique—and because it was my only shot at surviving—I mashed keys to throw up walls.
But just like the guy I had killed earlier, I died without getting anything built.
Red screen: "Eliminated".
BTMC got swarmed by the same squad next. He lasted a little longer thanks to the bit of shooter experience he had picked up in his spare time, but he couldn't take anyone down either.
While BTMC was getting pushed, Nijiro flanked around the city and positioned himself perfectly—pure Apex Legends muscle memory.
He dropped two players with his green AR, but in the end he went down too when the squad turned on him.
Finally Mrekk bit it: he had never touched anything like this, just Osu! his whole life.
"Osu!'s way better—this is chaos!" he yelled while sprinting from the rocket squad.
"It's gonna take way longer than I thought to get these builds down," I realized, hitting "Ready".
"I'm telling you, they're straight-up unusable. Epic's gotta patch this before builds are actually viable in a fight," BTMC shot back, and chat spammed «Fix build pls» in agreement.
The next few hours were just me dying over and over, desperately trying to make building work for me, but nothing clicked—I couldn't turn it into anything useful.
Even after I swapped teams and played with my Italian friends on European servers, I still couldn't figure it out.
The stream had climbed to five hundred viewers, donations rolling in—«Keep trying, Pantera!»—but the frustration was piling up.
By midnight it was just me, Bonzo, Diruz, and China—the old Frois crew, back together for a late-night grind.
Ivaxa, who had sworn he would spend the whole evening playing, dropped a screenshot in Discord: a five-hour queue.
«I'm going to bed, I'll try again tomorrow,» he wrote, giving up.
The three of them had already grabbed wins and unlocked the victory umbrella—a glider that looked like a battle parasol.
"I'm done forcing builds. I've been at it all day, and everyone's right—you just can't use them," I said, exhausted, rubbing my numb fingers.
"About time you saw it too. You gotta treat this like any other battle royale," China said, his voice carrying that veteran calm.
We queued up, and this time the squad was stacked: China, who could hold his own in anything; Bonzo and Diruz, who had put serious time into Warzone on top of Valorant.
And then me—starting to think this was the first game I actually sucked at.
Ever since I had picked up a Switch as a kid, I had always been above average: pixel-perfect jumps in Mario, high K/D in Overwatch and Apex, climbing to Immortal in Valorant, winning Worlds in Osu!... but here I was stuck.
The builds haunted me, and I kept failing.
In the end we won the match with fifteen kills total—only one of them mine, a lucky shot on some distracted noob.
"Victory Royale" flashed across the screen with virtual fireworks, and I unlocked the umbrella.
"Feels like a bot lobby," Bonzo said, sounding bored.
Diruz laughed. "For real, it's almost too easy against players this bad."
"Can't argue with that," China added. "Day-one servers, packed with casuals."
"No way!" I said, voice rising—probably loud enough to wake someone in the house. "There's no way this game got delayed eight years for a useless feature. There has to be a way!"
I played with them until four in the morning, ending the stream angry, wired, and let down by the game—but I wasn't ready to quit.
I wanted to prove the builds could work.
I shut down the PC with a heavy sigh, the night silence broken only by the low hum of the fans.
Summer had just started, and Fortnite could still become my next game to grind.