How Do You Deal with a Stalker?
So how exactly are you supposed to deal with a stalker?
Choe Seohyeon was split-pushing bot, the epic monster left completely abandoned.
"Oh."
I caught his intent at once. If they weren't taking the objective anyway, he meant to shove towers himself. Knight of Fury, when you got down to it, was a game you won by knocking towers over.
"Now this is getting interesting."
I grinned. I could already see exactly how far top lane was about to be pushed.
Down in the bot lane, Choe Seohyeon's Elven Knight took two of them with him and died a glorious death. The rest of our team was still cleaning up the fight.
"Nobody coming back means that turret is mine."
The turret. Bring that down, and the final minion spawns — the Knight, last in line after the Page and the Squire.
"Beautiful."
I punched a highway straight through, turret and all. A glance at the map showed the enemy team finally starting to rotate back.
"Yep. Already home. Good luck."
I recalled on the spot. Played like that, there was nothing the enemy could do. Give up one epic monster, open a highway through top, and shove bot as far as the second tower — as trades went, it wasn't bad.
"The real game starts now."
I bought items built for splitting and sprinted straight for bot, leaving a single line in chat as I went.
Nothing more needed saying. Top was already shoved in, so from here I only had to push bot. I headed down, and the rest of our team — Choe Seohyeon included — got herded mid whether they liked it or not. The game went completely to hell.
"Even better."
I filled my Critical Hit Energy to one hundred. Aside from a single item, the build was armor penetration from end to end.
"Three of them?"
They must have decided I was the problem, because three people came to shut me down. Fine. Three. I checked my spells — Cleanse, and Teleport — and my condition was perfect.
"Come."
First up was their mid laner. Dark Knight, the most disgustingly broken piece-of-shit champion of the century, came charging in like I looked easy.
"This bastard's taking crit as a joke."
I threw E on the spot. E, put simply, was a stun: a short dash forward that burned a full forty Critical Hit Energy and stunned whoever it connected with for about half a second. Honestly, half a second of CC in Knight of Fury was held in such low regard you couldn't even call it good, and the range was miserable on top of that.
"Plenty of people drop their guard over exactly that."
So I used it. Think about it — firing the skill together with Teleport. A gimmick. Cheese, the kind everyone talks about. But the enemy was already careless, a trait had my attack speed up, and I had faith in my crit behind me...
Clang—! Clang—! Clang—!
"There it is—!!"
This. This was the high that kept me from ever dropping Light Knight.
Two of them were still standing, of course. Fortunately, watching Dark Knight die in a blink seemed to make them hesitate to jump me. For me, that was a fine situation.
"You chicken-shit cowards. You won't come, so I will."
I cast Q and filled my Critical Hit Energy. The instant stealth broke, I was in their face with an auto already flying.
Clang——!!!
In a flash, nearly half the enemy jungler's health vanished. And I'll say it again — my crit chance was already at one hundred percent, with armor penetration fully online beneath it. So what did that mean?
"Crit——!! Crit——!!!!!"
Three crits in a row.
The second one went down too. Instant. All of it, in under ten seconds.
"Good. Good."
Somewhere in there, the shape of the fight had changed. Their support decided this wasn't it and peeled straight back. In that window our team, shoving mid in a two-versus-four, crushed the second mid tower — then the third, and the turret along with it.
"Yeah, yeah. Our Choe Seohyeon is doing just fine, isn't he?"
Before I knew it, the game was mine and Choe Seohyeon's to run. And just like that, every one of the enemy's turrets — top, mid, and bot — was smashed to pieces.
"......"
Every time I watched it, I still couldn't believe it was real.
Chat was having about the same reaction I was. That stretch just now, crit after crit chaining off a sixty percent chance, had been something else entirely. And that wasn't all. The moment I watched two champions currently sitting in tier one get deleted in under ten seconds off nothing but crits, I caught myself thinking this must be how people find religion.
Somewhere in the middle of it, the bot turret was cleaned up as well. Not only that — we picked someone off in mid, and the only one left was their bot laner. For the record, that one had been growth-starved by me and wasn't even putting out damage.
"......It's over."
Even Dark Knight, first in line to respawn, still had more than twenty seconds on the clock. In that span, the turrets had fallen on all three lanes.
"GG."
Just as I'd expected. Dark Knight came back, and there was still nothing he could do. More precisely, it looked as if the enemy had lost the will to fight against TSDropDead's Light Knight — against that absurd play — and slammed the surrender on the spot. The game ended there.
With it over, I naturally pulled up Light Knight's damage.
"Hah."
A damage score pushed to the extreme by crits. The damage they'd dealt through critical hits this game came to about nineteen thousand. Nineteen thousand, in a thirty-minute game. Even I, next in line, had only managed fourteen thousand.
"......Is this a game?"
A match decided by crit probability. There had been some strategy in how it was piloted, sure. It still wasn't anything close to a normal game.
The viewers agreed with me. That was when it happened.
Had a lovely time, they said. And left.
......I couldn't find a single word.
The viewers, faced with how thoroughly unchanged this person was, just spammed lol. At this point I was so far past words that a hollow little laugh slipped out of me.
"......Well. It's far too late to kick them out now."
"Exactly. Anyway, let's queue another."
Since it had come to this, I figured I'd just run another match, and I hit queue. But...
You could tell from the way chat reacted. The moment I queued, there was the Light Knight pick, and I knew.
Ah. This asshole came in today with a plan.
"......Haa. They're doing this because I came back to Knight of Fury, aren't they?"
"Haa......"
Words failed me. Well, this person's eccentricities weren't a one-day affair, so I understood, but still.
"......What should I do."
"If it could be figured out, would I have been getting sniped for seven years?"
"Anyway, this isn't a problem I can solve alone. So I need your help... if ever there was a time for a brainstorm, it's now."
Fortunately, the moment I asked, a few viewers reached out a hand.
"Those of you who know, know. That method doesn't work on this person."
"No. If anything, they backseat me and tell me to knock off the pointless mind games. For the record, last time I was flat-out badmouthing them, and they still sniped me."
A handful of viewers, bless them, genuinely tried to help. The problem was that the other party had spent seven years climbing to the absolute pinnacle of sniping and bungtang.
And that was the conclusion. Every solution that surfaced in chat was something I had already tried across the past seven years. Every one of them had failed.
"Even if I dodge, that person waits. There were times they waited over an hour."
"And those of you who know, know. We once ran a bet on stream about exactly when I'd hit queue, and that person nailed the timing four games in a row."
"Which is why I actually tore the house apart once."
"And amazingly, there was nothing that looked like a camera. Which makes it even scarier."
Not a person. Sharp enough that even a ghost would have to yield a move — at that point, you almost had to call them a beast. And so, in the end.
"......Let's just play."
There was no way forward except to run the game.
"Ah...... what a fulfilling day."
A sweet day off, and three snipes in a row on top of it. Better still, three games straight I had carried from top and handed him the wins.
"This much ought to have helped the stream, right?"
I figured it was plenty of a contribution to his broadcast. So I fired off one last donation.
Asking if the points tasted sweet.
And his chat—
Chat was booming.
Of course, contrary to what I thought, Choe Seohyeon seemed to feel differently.
And with that, the stream ended.
"Phew."
It had been a while since I'd played with him, and I'd enjoyed it. My mood was excellent, so now...
A chime. I lit up my phone to see what it was, and there was the convenience store owner.
"Hmm."
A cover shift. Honestly, it wasn't something I couldn't do. But today I kind of wanted to rest...
Night-shift work. A night-shift job came with no shortage of upsides and downsides. First, there were a fuckton fewer people than during the day. So what was the problem? Day and night flipped — your sleep went sideways, and the exhaustion set in. That was why people didn't like working nights.
"I'm different."
Maybe becoming a woman had blessed me with the stamina of those TS heroines in web novels. Strange as it was, night shifts didn't wear me down. If anything, nights were easier. Not much to do, fewer customers than the daytime, and this wasn't even a high-traffic spot. So as far as I was concerned, the whole thing was a ridiculously good deal.
"All right, then today as well......"
Seven years into the convenience store job, I was second in seniority only to the owner himself, so in the deep hours of a dawn like this, with no customers, I usually put a movie on and took it easy. I was just pulling my tablet from the laptop bag when the door chime rang.
A customer? Well, it happened. I didn't think much of it and lifted my head.
"......"
It was Choe Seohyeon.
Face faintly flushed, he gave me a small bow and headed straight for the cup-noodle shelf. I stayed quiet behind the register. About a minute later he came back with three cup noodles and a drink.
"Checkout, please."
I rang up what he'd brought without a word. He didn't look like he had anything to carry it in, so I asked, carefully.
"Would you like a bag?"
"Ah, yes."
I pulled out a bag and finished the sale. I thought that would be the end of our brief encounter.
"......Um, excuse me."
He was speaking to me. I wondered what he could want, and waited.
"......I know this is a really rude thing to ask. Could I ask you just one thing?"
Just one thing, he said. Honestly, I was a little thrown. But—
"Go ahead."
It didn't take me long to answer him easily. In seven years he had never once done anything strange to me, and as a viewer of his stream I knew what kind of person he was. I didn't think he would say anything odd.
But.
"......What?"
The question he put to me was one I never could have expected.