The Restraints Come Off
(Gallery Master looking pumped before the game even starts)
(Gallery Master screaming her lungs out less than five minutes after the game begins)
(Gallery Master, first-timer or not, bolting away with insane physicals)
(Gallery Master nearly cussing out loud after getting startled by a closet ambush in the alley)
…
(Gallery Master pulling off the ghost-side prayer-room entry tech that only veterans ever manage)
Horror game yesterday, tournament the day after tomorrow?
Gallery bros are dying of fullness… so happy…
Payday gallery bro here throwing a tournament celebration event
Guess the winning team + total round score correctly and I'll raffle burger sets for up to 5 people from the comments
Bonus: Nail every team's champion picks too and I'll throw in a chicken gift card. Stacks with the above, so you can enter both.
Whoosh—!
A single strike sliced through the air.
Sensing the attack, Camilla broke off mid-dance and bolted in a frantic scramble. There was a raw urgency in that movement that never showed in her usual play—no trace of the battlefield beauty, none of the subtle principles woven into her dance. The situation was that desperate.
As if to prove it, the heavy metal that came screaming in buried itself dead-center in the wall where Camilla's head had been a heartbeat earlier.
A massive shield, complete with a grip and a viciously pointed tip. She had thrown it so hard it was now wedged solid into the stone. Using a shield as a projectile—how savage could you get?
The sheer brutality of the sight made Nikang, the pilot controlling Camilla, suck in a sharp breath.
How is that a Holy Knight? That's a berserker.
Nikang's private assessment lined up perfectly with what the casters were saying right then—commentary she couldn't hear.
Having butchered Nikang's teammates with a one-handed sword and shield, now drenched in their blood and walking steadily this way with those signature yellow eyes glowing, the figure looked less like a Holy Knight and more like the living ideal of every berserker who had ever lived.
And that berserker-Holy Knight had just finished carving through every ally in front of Nikang and was charging in to claim her next.
"Crazy, crazy, fucking crazy…!"
A massive horizontal slash came sweeping in. Nikang spat curses without thinking, yet still used every strength unique to Camilla to cleanly slip the blow. It was an astonishing feat—something she couldn't even explain in words while she was doing it.
Her opponent clearly recognized it too. For a split second the figure froze, then gave a little shrug of the shoulders.
An interaction emote from Abyss. It looked exactly like someone saying Not bad, and Nikang found herself smiling without meaning to.
"Hehe…."
The reaction of a student who'd just been praised by her teacher.
There was a reason Nikang would break mid-fight to do something that random. The person standing opposite her right now was, for all intents and purposes, her master.
The enemy hero was the Holy Knight Alec. The pilot controlling him was Kayack—the one who had taught Nikang Camilla in the first place, the very reason she could play the character at all.
Yu-hye's team's strategy of sniping Camilla had worked perfectly.
Kayack's team had always drawn bans and priority picks on other heroes, but never once on Camilla. There simply weren't many players who could pilot her. So Kayack's side usually locked their other picks first—heroes the enemy might steal, or ones their own teammates excelled at—and left Camilla for last. Classic, textbook ban-pick order.
That made it almost trivial for Yu-hye's team to grab Camilla. Smooth as silk. After that, just as Yu-hye had planned, Nikang was the one playing her.
They had stripped Kayack of Camilla—cut off her arms and legs, in crude terms. Yet even so, had team captain Yu-hye expected it to still be this brutal?
It wasn't as if Platinum-tier Nikang was trying to outplay a Challenger-level Kayack. They had already stolen Camilla; the job for Nikang and the rest of the team was simply to hang on by the pant legs and survive.
Even that is hard…!
Somehow, even after losing her main champion, Kayack was putting up a performance every bit as terrifying as usual. In some ways she was even more difficult—like facing an enemy you had never prepared for.
Unlike the tier-5 Camilla, Kayack on a tier-1 hero felt exactly like the textbook high-ranker you only ever saw on V-Tube. That signature pressure that squeezed the air out of your lungs.
Kayack had always been nearly impossible to answer, but Kayack on a different hero left no opening at all. Nikang's face twisted into a small pout, a complete reverse of the smile she'd worn after the earlier praise.
Clank—
"Oh, she's coming. She's coming again."
The sound of plate armor from the Holy Knight Alec. Nikang muttered it out loud, so tense she barely realized she was speaking.
As if he'd heard her, Yu-hye's voice came through Discord.
"Nikang, hang on just a little longer. Our side's looking good, so just cling and buy time however you can."
Whether that was even possible was secondary—Nikang couldn't answer in the first place. She was pouring every scrap of focus she had into the fight, and she already knew that even at full strength she couldn't last long against this opponent.
Yet while Camilla kept dancing, bleeding through every step of the dance as the match slipped further into defeat, Nikang watched an unavoidable sword stroke come crashing down and thought:
Maybe… snatching Camilla in the first place…
The whole idea that it would give them the advantage.
Might have been a complete delusion. A mistake.