A Temporary Alliance, Just for Today
I headed for top first. That bastard had gone mid, and the only thing I needed to do right now was shatter the enemy top laner with overwhelming skill.
"The opponent is... Lion Knight."
Lion Knight. Translated as plainly as the name allows, it was a lion of a knight — a champion carrying an obscene, fuck-you amount of swagger. And for the record, the kit was every bit as bullshit-broken as the swagger.
"These damned Elven Knight, Dark Knight, and Lion Knight — who even knows when they're going to eat a nerf."
Those three simply refused to be nerfed. If they ever were, maybe my Light Knight could finally catch a little light... A truly lamentable state of affairs.
Anyway. Enough bullshit. Time to focus.
There weren't even minions yet. Normally you'd chip a few of them to build energy, top it off again with Q, raise your crit chance, and only then take the fight. That was the standard trade.
But...
"Today, I'm playing for keeps."
First, the bush. Hide before they arrive, and land an auto the instant they step into range. With my attack speed already juiced by runes, that much was nothing. A sliver of Critical Hit Energy filled, and I threw Q immediately. Critical Hit Energy shot to 40 in a flash.
Which meant—
"You're dead. Fuck."
Hard from the very first second. I put my faith in it and stepped back in for another auto trade.
Thwack—!!
A critical hit, right on the spot.
Lion Knight wasn't about to roll over, of course. Lion Knight's Q — the level-one skill people call bullshit-broken. In short, a brutal straight-line area strike whose animation swings both swords twice in a row. Between that Q and a single auto, more than 300 of my health vanished in an instant.
I didn't flinch. Faith, as always, is just that kind of thing.
CRACK—!!
Another critical hit. Somewhere in the middle of it, my Critical Hit Energy had already climbed to 50.
If you looked only at the fight so far, the opponent still seemed ahead. But this was worth remembering: we were in the Master and Grandmaster bracket. Trash champion or not, once they watched two crits at 50 Critical Hit Energy carve off as much health as I'd just lost... As expected, something felt wrong, and they started backpedaling.
But.
"Where the hell are you going."
I popped the movement-speed spell on the spot, chased the fleeing bastard, and threw autos. And then—
"Critical—!"
"Critical—!"
"Critical——!!!"
Chain-critting, I killed the enemy top laner before the minions had even shown up.
A first kill taken in a straight-up fight — nothing like that piece-of-shit Paper Knight.
Our jungler had a question.
Our jungler clearly didn't believe me. But numbers are the truth. One kill the enemy had picked up because Paper Knight inted, and the one kill I'd just taken. Yeah. Numbers don't lie.
Put that way, the jungler seemed to believe me. And then—
A top-jungle alliance — something the entire history of Knight of Fury had deemed impossible — was forged. With that, we'd secured one weapon against the mid laner's trolling.
"Good. That leaves bot..."
I had no idea how bot would play it. Fortunately, they fell in with us too.
Bot and support were in. And with that, the anti-troll squad was born.
So.
"Good."
We smash them from the laning phase.
Sixteen minutes after the game began.
"..."
I stared at the KDA and swallowed, hard.
The chat's reaction was anything but calm. Well... thirteen kills at sixteen minutes was a monstrous achievement, so of course it was.
And then—
"Just now, three of them jumped in at once, and they still won that, right?"
Just like chat said, the play had been absurd. If I tried to put it into words... Light Knight had been split-pushing top when the enemy mid, top, and jungle collapsed on them all at once. And Light Knight did not step back. They flashed forward instead, stunned the jungler with E, and right there — Critical Hit Energy sitting at 60 — they gambled.
The enemy jungler died in four autos. Light Knight was running attack-speed runes and holding an armor-pen item besides, so the jungler was gone in a blink, without ever getting the chance to try anything.
Then Light Knight cast W and vanished. W, the smoke bomb: stealth inside the blast, at the cost of a full sixty Critical Hit Energy. That's why people who play Light Knight almost never press it. The cost and the risk are simply too high.
But.
"Is that even... possible?"
Forty Critical Hit Energy. A forty percent chance to crit. Whatever faith was moving them, TSGoDie walked straight back into an auto-attack brawl.
Thwack—! CRAAACK——!!
The enemy mid laner died right there. Watching their own well-grown mid die in a way that made no sense, the enemy top laner broke and ran. Sixteen minutes of stacked fear drove the backpedal out of them on pure instinct.
But.
"They chased straight away with Q..."
The stealth on Q comes with a small burst of movement speed. Light Knight mixed that with the speed spell, ignored the tower, ran the target down, and unloaded autos.
The result.
They'd manufactured a result so absurd that neither I nor a single person in chat could believe it. And that result came back around as yet another gain.
The moment enemy top, mid, and jungle died, our jungler smelled the window and neatly swallowed the bot-side objective together with the one on the top side. Just like that, our top and our jungle began to grow past anything the enemy could have predicted.
That was when it happened.
Just as the donation said. From the mood of the game alone, a win looked possible. Bot was even swinging our way.
While the enemy mid and jungle poured everything onto top, our jungler trusted top without reservation and sank completely into growing the bot lane.
The moment the enemy bot and support dropped to a sliver of health, our jungler went straight for the dive. Our support and I rotated in at once. One kill for me, one for the jungle, and bot's first tower came down clean.
That was nineteen minutes into the game.
Just as chat had said, I started pushing for bot's second tower without a second thought. The Elven Knight I'd picked tore the tower down fast, every bit a Tier-1 champion of Knight of Fury.
Right after, we recalled home. Enemy bot and jungle, late to the party, started shoving the bot lane the way you mend a barn after the cow is already gone. They shouldn't have.
"Whoa, what even is that..."
The instant the enemy jungler came down to put weight on bot, another kill popped on top. That put the enemy top — Lion Knight — at 0/9/0. They hadn't even farmed. How hard do you have to be choked to be sitting on forty CS at twenty minutes? The game had barely crossed the twenty-minute mark. No matter how Tier 1 a champion is, once your growth is shut down that badly, climbing back takes time.
In Master and above, the game was being stamped flat on raw mechanics. At twenty-five minutes, full build finished, Light Knight had the nerve to solo-push all the way through the enemy's twin towers in base.
The enemy, of course, came scrambling to stop it.
But.
...What was that.
For a second I even forgot to move my mouse. It went past amazing. I felt the gap in caliber. Was that really a person?
"Th-that person... what do they actually do?"
I couldn't just let it slide. Chat answered.
Every single one of them reacted the same way.
And then—
"..."
A madman who had climbed to Grandmaster on one of Knight of Fury's three great garbage champions.
...A true artisan doesn't blame the tools.
I couldn't help agreeing with what the donation said.
Top and bot had turned into highways. The twin towers were gone, and the only thing the enemy still had standing was a single mid lane. That mid lane, of course, was the real problem.
"Haa..."
Paper Knight was still trolling. And the method—
—was a live briefing of our team's every move, broadcast through all-chat.
What kind of mind does it take to brief your own team in all-chat? It was a person I simply could not understand.
But.
"It doesn't matter."
Right. It didn't matter. Because as things stood, we held an overwhelming advantage.
The moment Paper Knight started a Bungtang, a message from TSGoDie came up right after.
A 50/50. A term that shows up constantly in fighting games, for when you build a situation where the other side has no choice but to commit to one of two options. TSGoDie's point came down to this.
"Twin towers are down too. If they fail to hold even one side, the enemy's finished."
Top tower, bot tower, and the twins — every one of them had fallen. To stop us split across both sides, the enemy would have to split as well. And the way I saw it, top was...
We'd try it their way. We broke for top and bot and dropped straight into the split push, charging in without a glance at the minions. The enemy, as expected, split their numbers to stop us.
But.
Top exploded again. TSGoDie, soloing two champions once more.
Which meant our side...
Sure enough, the remaining three tried to recall home on the spot. We were not about to send them off. Our jungler threw themselves in with everything they had.
Hold these three, and TSGoDie could take the castle. I nodded and ran in without a shred of hesitation. They were not getting that recall off. Not a chance.
Of course.
The enemy weren't idiots, and they were going to get home however they could. Which is why I—
"AAAAAH——!!"
This was the moment. A chance to throw my weight behind the win, and at the same time to teach that piece-of-shit troll a proper lesson. I burned every skill and every spell I had and ran them down.
The result.
One down. The other two had our jungler and support latched on like mad dogs, dragging the seconds out.
Which meant—
"It's happening————!!!!!"
Victory was right there. TSGoDie — Light Knight — was beating on the castle. One blow, then two...
"WAAAAAAAH————!!??!!?"
The enemy castle came down.
The victory was ours.