Kayak Mun-cheol TV
At this point, the name Minwook was already halfway to becoming a full-blown meme.
I had a feeling people would still be calling it out long after today's stream ended.
Judging by his reaction, it really did seem to be his actual name.
Why the viewers were so obsessed with it, I couldn't say. Maybe a real name just felt more endearing somehow?
Either way, Minwook had bravely accepted the proposal. Whether that bravery was genuine courage or pure recklessness, I had no idea.
With a million won on the line, I could only hope he'd chosen carefully.
"Alright, since StrongestADCIsMinwook has accepted as well, we'll proceed with the Mun-cheol."
"Okay."
From there, just like any other Mun-cheol, we started by looking into the match in question.
"Is this the game?"
"Yeah, this one, but…."
Final score: 5 to 24.
The requester's side had five. The enemy team had twenty-four.
This hadn't been a close game by any stretch — it was a complete stomp. The kind of absolute thrashing you ran into all the time in solo queue.
Not that other losses didn't spark arguments, but fights broke out especially easily after games like this. A crushing defeat had a way of shredding people's emotions. The more seriously you took the game, the angrier you got, the more irritated, the more complaints piled up about how everyone else had played….
And that naturally led to in-game feedback. Why'd you do that just now? Why'd you use W like that? You're not even worth your rank — you boosted or what?
Players giving each other feedback on their own wasn't a bad thing. You were usually too busy playing to notice your own flaws, so having someone else point them out for free and help you fix them? You couldn't ask for better.
The problem was that it was almost never pure feedback.
Even if you set your gamer pride aside and tried to take the criticism, most of it was less genuine advice and more snide digs. Our national talent for cussing people out and tearing them down sideways had spread far and wide through Abyss too — a truly tragic state of affairs.
Anyway. Back on track.
Looking at their match histories, both players were sitting at higher ranks than I'd expected.
"Diamond 2 into Diamond 1… right below Master, huh?"
Not the bottom of Diamond that people mockingly called the gatekeepers or the Yetis — this was a range where you could actually start eyeing Master if you played well.
My internal evaluation of both of them ticked up a notch.
"At this level, you're top one percent of everyone in this room right now…."
"So, what should I focus on? Just run through the whole game and decide who played better or worse?"
"Going over everything would take too long, and we already thought about which segments were the problem."
As chat had taken to calling him, the rich client. And then came Minwook's words:
"The four-minute mark, the nine-minute mark, and the ten-minute mark…."
But this clearly hadn't been agreed on, because the client side immediately pushed back.
"What, you're including the early laning phase too? Just looking at the nine-minute pickoff and the ten-minute one after that should be enough."
"…."
Minwook went quiet again. Same as earlier — whether he just had a weak will or was simply introverted, I couldn't tell.
Worried things would drag out again, I stepped in to mediate.
"Hmm, let's do this. I'll look at the nine-minute and ten-minute situations first, and if that still feels insufficient, we'll go back to the four-minute laning phase. That work for both of you?"
"Yes."
"Great. Then I'll pull up the replay. Both of you keep watching the stream, and when I call you, hop back into the Discord."
A soft chime sounded.
Once both of them had left the Discord channel, I started the replay.
"Both of them are so fired up about the game that the tension is unreal, right? The future of our Abyss is looking bright. Players going at each other mid-match and then showing up for a Mun-cheol. Thinking about the old days almost brings a tear to my eye."
"Alright, alright, settle down. Starting from the eight-minute mark like you mentioned. Yikes, the score's already…."
Eight minutes in. Score: 1 to 13.
Jerome — that classic unstoppable snowball hero who became a nightmare once he got going — was running wild on the enemy team, and the requester and Minwook's side were scrambling just to hold him back.
The requester was on Theodora. StrongestADCIsMinwook was on Haven.
The bottom fort they were supposed to be holding had already been down for a while. The one silver lining was that their teammates didn't look like they'd completely lost the will to fight and given up on the game.
Everyone was still grinding, fighting hard to salvage a match that had already tilted hard against them.
I kept the focus on the two of them as the footage rolled, and then the critical moment appeared.
"This looks like the scene. A fight breaks out, just like you said. Small-scale skirmish. A pickoff. Best play a losing team can make. Haven uses his Arcane Engineering Grenade to lock the enemy down, chains into Theodora's skills… and they successfully cut down Dan, who was wandering alone."
With that, the kill count that had been stuck at one ticked up to two. A small victory, all things considered.
But the fact that they'd flagged a stretch that looked this clean meant the real problem came right after. And sure enough, the next segment they'd mentioned was the ten-minute mark immediately following.
After cutting down Dan, the Haven–Theodora duo moved up toward the top fort.
"Ah, pings are going off like crazy. On my way, on my way, Miriam ping. Haven — so Minwook — seems to be saying they should pick off the remaining Miriam too. There's nobody around her right now. But Miriam's farmed really well. Six kills, zero deaths. Items look solid too."
The chat was split every which way. Who was at fault, whether they should've even tried it, how there was no chance of winning the fight.
The critical engagement hadn't even played out yet and the chat was already seething.
"Hey now, no bad language. That's Minwook's real name. You trying to donate to him or what? Swearing's not okay even with fake names, but cussing someone out by their actual name is dangerous."
I banned the viewer who'd been fearlessly dropping curses. They might be frustrated now, but someday they'd thank me for it.
After handling that quickly, I hit play again.
"Theodora doesn't seem to want this at all. Hits the back ping about twice, but Haven keeps spamming pings so she reluctantly goes in — looks like she's looping around to hit from behind? Makes sense. For Theodora, catching them from the rear is a lot easier for landing stuns than diving head-on. Wait, hang on… what is Haven doing right now…."
The Haven labeled StrongestADCIsMinwook was walking straight forward, step by step. Right toward Miriam, who was busily tearing down the top fort.
Miriam backed off slightly, but Haven's footsteps never stopped.
If this had been a coordinated, planned play, there wouldn't have been a problem. But Theodora was still looping around and hadn't even gotten close yet — and Haven's positioning looked dangerously exposed.
Sure enough, Haven's paper-thin body couldn't tank the DPS of a well-farmed Miriam.
No — even if it hadn't been Haven, even if it'd been a bruiser, even if it'd been Camilla, there was no way anyone was surviving that.
Theodora arrived late, but by then Haven only had about a quarter of his health left. Haven died mid-autoattack.
Theodora had burned her dash and mobility tools rushing in. The fate of a support left alone was obvious without watching.
After Theodora died, a flood of question-mark pings lit up over her corpse.
The source of those pings: Haven. StrongestADCIsMinwook.
"Uh. Um. Uh… huh…."
"Everyone just sit tight for a second. Freezing the chat."
I quieted the viewers, then took a brief moment to figure out what I was even supposed to say.