Dead Serious
They were dead serious.
It was a thought that came a little late, but why exactly had Abyss become a god-tier game?
There were any number of conditions for that title. It had to be fun to play. It had to be easy to pick up. It had to stir up every kind of emotion in its players…
But if there was one requirement you absolutely could not leave out, it was this: the people watching had to have fun, too. That was how a league stayed alive, how a game kept growing day after day.
They say a sport without spectators cannot remain a sport. Abyss was a game that had felt the truth of that saying more deeply than any other. In fact, its league had been shut down even faster than the game itself had been headed for the grave.
In that sense, the Abyss of today fully deserved to be called a god-tier game.
A game worth watching. A game spectators could understand at a glance and actually relate to.
That was why Abyss sat at the top of the heap among broadcast-friendly titles.
Understanding and empathy came easy. If you had even a scrap of game knowledge, figuring out how the last teamfight had gone was not that hard. Of course, depending on your tier, the gap in how much of the finer detail you grasped could be night and day.
And so the people in chat had started to really relate to the situation unfolding on screen.
"Ahem. No verdict has been reached yet. Please hold off on the excessive criticism."
Still, as public opinion kept tipping harder against Min-wook, I had no choice but to freeze the chat again.
"Come on, I told you not to do that. I understand how you all feel, but you can't go through life saying only whatever you want. That's just how our society works."
I pulled up the replay one more time and checked the moment in question.
Honestly… looking at this alone, anyone could see it was Haven's fault. No need to even weigh percentages of blame. Pure ADC error.
But there was still that four-minute play he had asked me to review, and more importantly, if I slammed the gavel right now—ADC's fault, bang bang bang—the content would fizzle out way too flat.
So for now, I decided to bring the parties in and hear them out. Even in a real courtroom, you reviewed the outline of the case and then took testimony, didn't you? Depending on what they said, there might even be grounds for a reduced sentence. Knock it down from a million won to five hundred thousand, maybe.
With that, I called the client on Theodora and Min-wook, who had been playing Haven, back into the Discord room.
"I've gone ahead and watched the eight- and nine-minute replays you mentioned."
"Yes, yes."
"Whoever has something to say, feel free to go first."
The client, with his deep, heavy voice, spoke up as if he had been waiting for exactly that.
"As you saw… anyone can tell Haven played that wrong. Cutting down Dan at eight minutes, fine, I'll give him that. But at nine minutes, this dive to pick Miriam? Honestly, I don't even understand why he went for it. Unless the two of us land a perfect skill combo right away—and even if we do, it's still razor-thin."
There was something bitter and long-held in the way he said it, and chat stirred. Of course, with only emotes allowed, that just meant a flood of startled Twish emoticons and little characters nodding along like, mm-hmm, that's right, that's right.
"So what you're saying, Theodora, is that this fight shouldn't have happened at all?"
"Yeah, basically. But Haven kept pushing to take it, so I went. Not that he waited for me—he dove in before I even got there."
"I see."
"And then once I die, it's all 'why'd you path around like that,' 'why didn't you use your E right away,' pinging like crazy… So we end up fighting, and that's how we got to a Mun-cheol."
Theodora's statement laid out both the outline of the incident and how it had started.
The moment he finished, Haven's side opened his mouth as well.
"Can I say something too?"
"Go ahead, Haven."
"So at this point I'd already used my ult to take Dan, right? In the same way, I figured if we picked Miriam too, we could swing the whole tempo of the game—"
Unlike earlier, when his voice had been small and he had looked short on confidence, the moment it came time to explain the intent behind his own play, Min-wook spoke with real fluency.
He had clearly been watching the stream. He had to have seen the chat turning against him, had to have confirmed that the vast majority of viewers were tearing into him. And yet he showed no sign of shrinking back.
He must have had his own way of playing. Call it a gamer's pride, call it a stubbornly clear set of principles—at the very least, other people's opinions did not seem to shake how he played. That was a quality I rather liked myself.
"Even if their Miriam was fed, even at one-and-a-half items, I figured if the two of us collapsed on her it was more than doable—"
"No, how do you look at that and see an angle? I'm telling you, even two of us could never win that."
Theodora cut in then, in a tone that said he genuinely could not understand it, a thin edge of irritation in his voice.
"I'm talking right now, so please listen."
"Yes—Haven is speaking. You'll get another turn in a moment."
"Ah, sorry. I got a little worked up…"
Min-wook answering calmly, Theodora apologizing.
Hmm. This might actually shift the room a little. Cutting someone off mid-sentence was a bit of a minus factor, after all.
Not that public opinion was the only thing that mattered.
"Honestly, it's not like I had zero feeling it might not work. But the reason I still tried to pick Miriam was because I figured if we didn't do something like this, there was no winning the game at all."
"Oh, so that's why you went for the try?"
"In a losing game, you have to take on risk."
"That's true."
He wasn't wrong.
At the very least, he understood what you had to do to win a game. He seemed to have the execution to actually attempt it, and the mental fortitude not to tilt off the face of the earth even after getting absolutely dog-walked.
But the words that came next shattered every bit of trust he had just built, all at once.
"Anyway, so I tell Theodora we're taking Miriam and I go in right away. And he's pathing around from above. See, if I hadn't gone in first, it would've been an angle where only Theodora dies and Miriam just walks out. That's why I went in first."
"Even if I ate the damage first, if it'd linked with Theodora's E, I honestly think I could've won that. But he never put it on me."
"I was out of range. I was spam-clicking from over there and the buff still wouldn't apply."
Theodora's E skill. Virtue of Radiance.
A shield that blocked enemy damage in proportion to an ally's missing health, plus an attack-speed buff—an essential teamfight tool.
Haven was saying he had lost because that buff never landed on him.
"You should've just walked with me instead of looping around."
"I was holding topside vision so you wouldn't get collapsed on while you farmed, and then you suddenly called for it."
"Then at least ping me back. Or ping that your E was out of range."
Then came a voice thick with disbelief.
"…You're Diamond and you don't know Theodora's skill range?"
"I've only ever played ADC."
"So when you lane against other heroes, the threatening skills—Jerome's pull and stuff like that—you just play the game with zero idea of the ranges?"
"I know them roughly… just not in detail."
"Then that thing at four minutes, was that also—"
"Yeah, I didn't know our Alex's skill cooldown. But shouldn't you be the one pinging skill cooldowns?"
"Uh…"
Theodora shut his mouth as if he had nothing left to say.
That was about when I made up my mind.
I watched the two of them spar a little longer, and once the heat had started to cool, I spoke up.
"First of all, I respect both of your passion for the game. In particular, Haven's point that going for Miriam was about flipping the game—that was right in a lot of ways."
But.
"Looking at the whole picture, and asking who played worse… I'd say Haven played worse."
I pulled up the problem moment again—the nine-minute play—and kept going.
"Knowing other heroes' skill cooldowns and ranges is, in its own way, part of being good at the game. Plenty of people actually track cooldowns and play around them. But if you don't know any of that and then turn around and ask why he didn't put E on you…"
"…"
"In my view, you can't do that. Not if you want to climb any higher."
A suffocating silence.
Even so, I gave him one last chance and asked the strongest ADC Lee Min-wook one more time.
"Well? Any last words, Haven?"
At that, the quiet Haven opened his mouth again.
"No, but for real, if he'd just pinged the range—"
And with that, the Mun-cheol was over. Victory for Theodora.
A week later, I heard an update on Min-wook from a viewer.
"Min-wook hit Master?"
He had not been shown any mercy. The result had been him handing a full million won straight over to Theodora.
Honestly, that final chance to speak had been me telling him to plead a little, to at least try to knock the settlement down—but Min-wook, as it turned out, was a no-take-backs kind of man who did not know the meaning of the word.
Hearing the news now, though, I could only be stunned. He had hit Master. After throwing away a million won like that, he had kept playing?
I could not hide my shock.
Chat felt the same way I did.
"Min-wook is… actually dead serious about this game."