Is She Insane...?
A message from Hangang.
It was evening. I'd just gotten back from meeting Sihyeon, still deep in a long stretch of post-nut clarity. The moment I got home I fired up my computer out of habit, and there it was — a Discord message waiting for me.
Once I heard the full story, it went something like this.
Hangang had a bit of a too-much-talker streak, so let me summarize: a pro had taken an interest in my play and wanted to learn the craft.
A pro gamer, huh…
I sat with that for a moment. Truth was, the word "pro" still felt pretty foreign to me. Back when I'd first started Abyss — back when I was completely obsessed with it — the league could barely even stay afloat. Jokes like "Wait, this game has pros?" were just part of daily life.
I'd gotten pro offers myself. As a ranker who parked in the absolute top of the ladder as routinely as eating breakfast, of course I had. But I'd turned them down. Bluntly put, the game was dying back then. There'd even been a server shutdown notice. How it somehow clawed its way back into god-tier status after that, I still had no idea.
The reason I never went pro was simple. I figured I'd end up like a prince of a fallen kingdom — a pro with no league left to play in, stranded with nowhere to go.
I'd wanted it, sure. But not desperately enough, I guess. If I'd really wanted it that badly, I would've taken the offer when it came.
And now? Abyss was a god-tier game. The precondition I'd wanted when those offers first came in had been met. And yet… my heart wasn't racing at the words "pro gamer." It just didn't pull at me, somehow.
For someone who lived by whatever her chest told her in the moment, going pro was simply off the table.
But this particular offer was a different story. It actually interested me.
Even a pro gamer was coming to me to learn Camilla. Didn't that make me sound like some grandmaster who'd drilled into a single field until she'd completely mastered it? Most people already acknowledged that Camilla meant Kayak — but this felt like getting an official certification stamp from a legitimate institution.
If it came to it, I could even promote the stream as "the house where pros come to learn Camilla." That would need to be worked out with them, of course.
And then there was the most important part of all.
I might get to see Camilla play in the league.
From the early days when I'd actually bothered to watch pro matches, all the way through the three years since — Camilla had never once appeared in a league game. When I'd first heard that, it had hurt more than I expected. It felt like a label had been slapped on her: the character Ionic abandoned. It made me angrier than it should have.
If this went well — if I could successfully pass on the craft through face-to-face work with the pros — then maybe, just maybe, Camilla would get to take the stage in a pro match at least once.
"A spectacular debut and a funeral all at once…"
First and last. Debut match and retirement match in one. At this point, with no hotfix in sight, Camilla's nerf was a lock. So wouldn't it be better to go all the way to tournament play and burn her presence into everyone's minds?
An honorable death, so to speak.
Camilla would rather shine on the biggest stage and then die than just farm solo queue and get nerfed into the dirt. That was something I could personally guarantee, as the current Camilla mind-reader on staff.
She might get nerfed harder than she'd ever been buffed. I didn't care. Just like my username said — Camilla had always been a weakling from the start. No matter how hard they nerfed her, no matter how frail she became, I was never going to drop Camilla.
I accepted the offer.
"Yes!"
"What is it?"
"That thing Jun-hyeok hyung mentioned last time — learning the craft from the Camilla one-trick. Just got word. They said they'll put us in touch."
"…Really?"
Taewan, a trainee, pulled a drink from the practice room fridge with a distinctly unimpressed look on his face. His reaction made sense — he hadn't been around when Jun-hyeok first floated the idea of learning the craft, and on top of that, he couldn't quite picture what was so special about this so-called one-trick.
At the end of the day, she's just an amateur, right? A regular person?
Fusion Gaming was a prestige org. Years ago, the moment Abyss had started making waves among gamers, they'd moved fast to found the team — and they'd been putting up strong results ever since. Just last year alone, they'd swept ACK undefeated and taken the World Series trophy home with them. That trophy was sitting right there in the practice room, put on display to keep the players' morale high.
As a Fusion Gaming trainee — as a member of a prestige org — Taewan carried no small amount of pride. He was still just a trainee, and league regulations kept him from competing because of his age, but he had zero doubt that once a year passed, he himself would conquer the league.
In the internal scrims run within Fusion Gaming, Taewan regularly posted the best results among the trainees — and more often than not, he even outperformed some of the second-team players.
He was at that age when self-regard grows at an extreme rate, when you start believing the world revolves around you. Looking down on Kayak a little was, in a way, only natural.
Jun-hyeok hyung, seriously. Worrying about the weirdest things. She's not gonna be better than me anyway.
By the time he debuted, the team would be complete — an unstoppable force no other org could touch.
Holding that thought, Taewan let a faint smirk curl inside and asked his teammate,
"So what's this person like? When are they teaching?"
"Uh… says they're coming here?"
"Here? When?"
"Hold on, I think I need to talk this over with Jun-hyeok hyung. They said they're fine with whatever, though?"
"Hmm…"
Left alone as his teammate walked off, Taewan thought it over.
Coming here in person? To this practice room?
An org's practice room wasn't the casual place people imagined. They said the number-one team holding the top spot carried more mental pressure than the number-two team chasing it — and Fusion Gaming was exactly that. As long as they kept sitting at number one, the atmosphere during practice was brutal. On days with internal scrims or starter tryouts, it felt like walking on thin ice.
Of course, as an outsider, if she came they'd treat her politely and the mood would be reasonably warm. But only if she proved she belonged.
The second they decided there was nothing to learn from this one-trick, the temperature would drop cold. Everyone here was dead serious about the game — about Abyss.
Hope she gets here soon.
For some reason, Taewan found himself looking forward to the day Kayak visited the org.
At last, the appointed day arrived.
On the day of Kayak's visit, Jun-hyeok — the one who'd actually wanted to learn the craft from her — and a handful of players curious about the whole thing gathered at the practice room entrance to greet their guest.
And then they froze.
"Hello. I'm Kayak."
"Y-yes… hello."
The coach, uncharacteristically, went a little stiff. Behind him, the players started murmuring.
"Holy shit. She's insanely pretty."
"She looks exactly like Camilla?"
"Did she dye her hair just to play Camilla?"
"If I'd known a girl was coming I would've cleaned the practice room…"
Through all of it, captain Jun-hyeok stayed composed.
"I'm Lee Jun-hyeok. It's an honor to meet you."
"Hello, Jun-hyeok."
Kayak, for her part, looked completely unfazed even standing in front of a living legend — a world-class pro gamer. The two shook hands and headed into the practice room, but the buzz didn't die down.
Of course it didn't. A pro gaming org was basically a male-dominated workplace. A woman had walked into that no-women zone — and not just any woman, but someone as beautiful as a game character. There was no world in which that got zero reaction.
Only a pure gaming creature like Jun-hyeok could stay calm about it. Every other player was visibly buzzing.
And in that room, there was one more person who, like Jun-hyeok, wasn't celebrating with the rest.
What the hell. What is this.
Taewan. He was staring at Kayak with his eyes wide, looking completely dumbfounded.
A Camilla one-trick who looks exactly like Camilla? Did she deliberately dress herself up to match?
Hair, face — there wasn't a single feature that didn't line up. Someone who only ever played one game character, and whose real-life appearance matched that character almost perfectly. She couldn't have been born looking that identical, which meant she must walk around like this all the time — basically cosplaying in daily life.
And so Taewan had a thought that was, frankly, pretty rude to have about someone he'd just met.
Is she insane…?