As Expected of Master!
"As expected of Master!"
"We… won?"
Ririyang's voice was a little dazed, as if the victory still hadn't quite sunk in.
"Yeah… we really did win, huh?"
Hak-chu added in the same bewildered tone, sharing the feeling.
The reason the two of them were talking like that was simple. Both of them felt like they had won the game far too easily.
The semifinals were a best-of-three. The first game had just ended in victory. One more win and they would eliminate Decal's team and advance to the finals.
They had only taken a single set, yet to Ririyang the whole thing still felt like a dream.
That was the side effect of winning the match itself so effortlessly. After being wound so tight with nerves, the victory had been oddly deflating.
In Ririyang's head—in every simulation she had run before bed—today's games were never supposed to be this easy.
Bloody teamfights, frantic orders and briefings, the practice they had poured in finally shining through, and Ririyang herself saving the team in a moment of crisis.
That was the tournament she had imagined. What they had now was… bland. Like plain bone broth with neither salt nor spice.
Not that she disliked winning. The feeling itself was good. Extremely good.
The rest of the team seemed to feel the same; excited voices started pouring in.
"Nice, nice! Great job, everyone!"
"Whoa. We won way easier than I thought? Everything just clicked exactly like the strategy."
"We've still got one set left, but the other side's gotta be hurting. Honestly, this is probably harder for them than before."
After an overwhelming first-set win, the momentum had clearly shifted their way.
Even pros often struggled to recover after dropping the opener in a series. There was a reason cocky rookies who couldn't hold their mental game just collapsed from there.
Mental, atmosphere, momentum—those things mattered in any game. In amateur matches, they mattered even more.
Once the win condition plan fell apart, a single snowball meant you never got to show any of the strategies you had prepared and simply lost.
Which was why the odds of taking the second set as well were high.
Of course, the one who had shaped the game and brought the momentum—the true MVP of the victory—was someone else entirely.
The one who had commanded the whole team and shaken the opponents with her own outrageous strategies. The protagonist of this match.
If there was an MVP, it absolutely had to be her.
The teammates waited for her to speak. Strangely, Kayack said nothing at all.
Her second disciple (who was a little disappointed she wasn't the first) found it odd and called out to her.
"Master? Did you go somewhere?"
The answer came only after a soft rustling sound.
"No… I've been here the whole time."
"Oh, you were. You were so quiet I thought you'd left, hehe."
"Ah, I just had something to think about for a second…"
Hearing that, Ririyang thought:
Is Master reviewing the last game's plays even after it ended?
Like the masters of go, chess, or janggi, Kayack might have been replaying the match in her head, giving herself private feedback.
Ririyang felt a little guilty for possibly breaking her concentration by calling out, yet at the same time a fresh wave of respect bloomed for a teacher who refused to get cocky even after an overwhelming win.
As expected of Master!
In reality, contrary to Ririyang's imagination, Kayack had simply been playing around in front of the cam.
With her Discord mic muted, she had been doing hand-shadow animals for her future viewers—this is a bird, this is a rabbit—showing off various creatures with both hands. That was all.
Having finished her one-sided communication through the cam, Kayack felt a quiet sense of satisfaction and finally spoke.
"You all did great in set one. Let's keep it exactly like this for set two."
She mentioned victory as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The teammates nodded with faces full of trust.
"There's no stopping Kayack's march! Behind the general leading the charge, countless officers are charging in!"
"Decal is trying everything to hold the line, but it's not enough! It's like she's saying, 'You can't stop me with just this!'"
"Ririyang snipes the opening! Oh, she hits it! Who would ever call this player a Bronze-tier free agent?! She's fierce—absolutely fierce!"
Just as most people had expected, set two also went to Kayack's team, wrapping up Group 1 of the semifinals.
From the moment the strategy worked in set one, Decal's team had already been rattled.
They never fully shook that influence in set two either; occasional flustered moments showed through. In a way, the loss was only natural.
More people had predicted a Kayack team win, but the majority had still expected a close three-game series. Today's matches had been rather one-sided.
The raw skill of the two teams was similar, yet Kayack's team's signature unconventional play completely neutralized Decal's side. That was the casters' assessment.
The official broadcast currently sat at a full seventy thousand viewers—and climbing in real time.
Between the scale of the tournament and the delay on the individual streamers' rooms, people were flooding into the official cast.
While the mods were sweating to keep the chat under control and Lee Hyeok-jin pressed on without a care, Kayack's stream came back online. Unlike earlier when the delay had been active, this time it was a normal live with no time lag.
"Hello."
Kayack's stream had no dedicated chat mods, making it prime real estate for trolls to run wild.
Plenty of them had already been banned from the other teammates' streams and migrated over here.
On top of that, Kayack had been named MVP on the official broadcast and soaked up every spotlight, so of course people poured into her room.
She simply sat there for a moment, seemingly unfazed by the troll spam, then—
Click— she pulled up someone's chat log and opened her mouth.
"Feel good winning with cheese? …Hmm, so rladydtn0921 thinks that was cheese. I carefully crafted that build piece by piece, but sure, let's call it cheese. Yes, it feels good. Winning always feels good."
Kayack continued answering the troll chats one by one. Hand cam was enough, she said. She could show her face or not—her choice.
Watching her respond only to the trolls, some normal viewers might have been tempted to spam troll messages just to talk to her, but most didn't.
Because the final destination for trolls was a ban. After answering, Kayack would ask if their curiosity was satisfied and then ruthlessly ban them.
Around then the chat finally started to stabilize. The trolls had flooded in harder than expected and spammed fast, but Kayack also had the ability to click and ban them one by one.
What followed was donation time that felt almost like a victory banquet.
That was one of the reasons streamers entered tournaments in the first place.
After successfully finishing a big event, a perfectly legal donation window always opened. The ironclad rule applied to Kayack just the same.
The tournament wasn't even fully over—they had only finished the semifinals—but the performance Kayack had shown today was more than enough to earn donations.
"Congrats on making finals… thank you. Thank you for the ten-thousand-won donation. Aigoo, another huge amount like this…"
"Hmm, reactions… yeah. Just taking donations feels weird. But it's a celebration so it's fine? Still, I should do something simple at least. Showing my face is a no."
After thinking for a moment, Kayack snapped her fingers with a sharp click, as if a good idea had struck.
"Ah, were you all in my room earlier? Did you see what I was doing in front of the cam?"
"Right, animals. Since I've already got the hand cam on today, I figured I might as well make some animals with my hands. You're saying this is the most baseless reaction ever? Well… but I don't have anything else to do."
She asked for the viewers' opinions, but every suggestion was something Kayack couldn't actually do.
So she simply wiggled her slender fingers in front of the cam the same way she had earlier.
And she kept doing it until the backlog of donations finally ran dry.