Looks Like I've Hit Master

An unexpected kill angle. The chat started lighting up.

Aatrox had his mobility-slash-escape tool, E / Infernal Chains, charged to its maximum of two stacks. He still had Flash. He still had his ultimate.

And he died anyway. His opponent must have been just as stunned.

Jin Gyeo-wool didn't stop there. She went straight for the complacency.

A second top-lane gank, this time with her jungler already climbing up from river. Just as expected, the careless enemy started idling right in the middle of the wave.

The allied jungler burst out of the brush he'd been waiting in after walking up the river — and at the same moment, Gyeo-wool stepped out of the upper brush where she'd been hiding.

A back-to-back kill. No room for doubt.

Everything was clicking. All she'd done was have a conversation with Hon Gyeo-wool and pick up one solid insurance policy — and she hadn't even used it yet.

Suddenly the game started flowing like water.

After that, her bot lane won their laning phase and locked down the enemy ADC in the process. Gyeo-wool took that as her cue, shoved past the enemy's first tower, and started overfarming while toying with her opponent.

While the chat laughed and joked, Gyeo-wool quietly drifted back to her proper lane position. Drag it out too long and the enemy team might swarm up to rescue their collapsing top laner.

Kerberos would be spawning soon enough. Playing it safe here couldn't hurt.

Scanning the map from near her tower, her eyes caught Aatrox again — trudging back to lane, step by heavy step.

Pitiful. But pity had no place here. If you wanted to climb, crushing the person in front of you was the bare minimum.

Every pro gamer worthy of the name had cut down hundreds, thousands of opponents on the way to where they stood.

"Going for the triple."

Whether he'd lost the will to fight, whether the chain of deaths had shattered his focus, or whether — like Gyeo-wool herself once had — rage had burned out his reason entirely…

Aatrox walked mindlessly into the wave that was shoved deep toward Gyeo-wool's side.

She checked that her Flash cooldown had just come back up, then without a shred of hesitation used Q / Bladesurge off the low-health melee and caster minions to close the gap on Aatrox.

Irelia came flying in like lightning arcing along a conductor. Startled, Aatrox spun around on pure reflex.

And right on cue, Irelia's ultimate — Vanguard's Edge — launched straight ahead. Aatrox managed a short hop with E / Infernal Chains, but Gyeo-wool had checked her Flash for exactly this moment.

A bang of Flash, Irelia rocketing forward — and Vanguard's Edge firing from precisely one and two-thirds Teemo-lengths away.

The distance calculation was perfect. Six blade tips, diving like a stooping hawk, kissed Aatrox square in the back.

At the same instant, a barrier of dozens of blade fragments sealed off Aatrox's escape route. The tower was still a long way off, and the slow from the wall made simply running a miserable prospect.

Aatrox finally turned his head and chose to fight.

But after two kills, Irelia already had her core item — Trinity Force — sitting in her inventory. Setting aside the pilot's mechanical skill, even the champion's baseline combat power had started to overwhelm him.

Knowing that gap, Aatrox immediately popped his ultimate and went for an airborne with Q / The Darkin Blade. But Gyeo-wool had all the room in the world — she slipped through it effortlessly with Q / Bladesurge, and at the same time planted one blade of E / Flawless Duet on the ground.

The placement was so exquisite that her opponent, terrified of catching the stun and the Bladesurge mark that came with it, had every nerve in his body hijacked by the need to dodge.

That was how Irelia managed to stack Conqueror again before the Vanguard's Edge wall faded — and in that span, nearly thirty percent of Aatrox's health evaporated.

Using every second until the second blade of Flawless Duet came online, Gyeo-wool drove him to the brink.

At last Aatrox burned the one ability that could most disrupt a chase — W / Infernal Chains. Gyeo-wool had been waiting for exactly that, and dropped the remaining blade of Flawless Duet.

Two blades flying toward each other's origin points. A sharp metallic ring as they crossed and carved through Aatrox. The stun landed, and with it the Bladesurge combo mark flared to life.

The position Aatrox had been backing into sat just outside the airborne range of the Infernal Chains he'd planted to cage Irelia in.

Gyeo-wool reset Bladesurge's cooldown instantly off the mark still on his body and slipped free of the shackles that would have hindered her movement.

By the time Aatrox's stun wore off, his health was already in the twenties. Beating a full-passive, full-Conqueror Irelia who still had more than half her HP was simply impossible.

A flurry of rapid auto-attacks, and Aatrox detonated.

The entire chat went slack-jawed.

"Yeah. That's more like it…!"

So what if the opponent was a one-trick? So what if he was a battle-hardened beast who'd survived this elo for years?

What did any of that matter? It wasn't as if Gyeo-wool had put in less work than them. It wasn't as if she was worse.

The only reason she'd stacked two losses was the occasional emotional spiral from Soul Assimilation's side effects.

"See? In a promotion series, you've got to keep your temper in check. Am I right?"

Gyeo-wool was practically bubbling over as the words poured out. Even the viewers who'd been gleefully needling her earlier found themselves impressed by how completely different — how calm — her play had become.

This was nothing like the first two games, when she'd been curled in on herself. Right now, Jin Gyeo-wool had thrown open the wings she'd folded away in anxiety — and she was roaring.

From there, the game tilted naturally toward Gyeo-wool's side.

Unable to endure her pressure any longer, the enemy Aatrox abandoned top and went to help other lanes. Despite being outnumbered, her main squad cut down the enemy jungler and mid for a clean two-for-two trade — and in that window Gyeo-wool shoved the top wave all the way down for a calculated free win.

Then, the moment she spotted Aatrox recalling to base and heading back to lane through a melee minion's vision, Gyeo-wool's Irelia Teleported bot. The enemy bot duo, still complacent after a round of trading, got cheerfully deleted by Gyeo-wool and her bot lane.

And that wasn't all.

With the enemy bot duo down and the wave shoved to their second tower, Gyeo-wool tanked tower shots just to beat Aatrox into the dirt.

It was a kind of showmanship — using the already yawning growth gap to fully knock out an opponent who was still trying to hang on.

A perfect one-on-one win that made the Stopwatch she'd been holding since earlier look completely pointless.

Once the top-lane matchup collapsed, even a simple three-on-three standoff from the main squad was enough for both enemy side lanes to unravel on their own. She wasn't even applying excessive pressure.

Thanks to how hard Gyeo-wool's Irelia had blown open the top gap, the moment Irelia so much as appeared on a lane the enemy scrambled into a panic just trying to stop her.

Aatrox ran into her on the lane a few more times after that. Even the tower couldn't protect him.

If once was hard, what was twice? Every time the enemy main squad's position was spotted, Gyeo-wool charged like an enraged bull.

Hiding under tower — what good would that do? They were the red team. The tower itself was already the color that set a bull off.

The teammates who'd ribbed her at the start of the game for sitting on two promo losses were now just laughing at a top gap so wide it could never be closed.

With Gyeo-wool tormenting the enemy from one side of the map, her team used the numbers advantage in her absence to casually snag the Peacock buff.

And the moment the Peacock kill message appeared, the enemy finally cracked and surrendered.

A complete mental demolition of the enemy top laner, and a win that shook the entire structure of the game. Jin Gyeo-wool's victory. And — in a situation where anyone could have gotten heated, where she'd instead stayed calm and methodically broken the game open — Bae Do-hyun's victory too.

Above all, it was a precious win clawed back from the brink of a two-loss promo elimination.

But she was still sitting at one win, two losses. A long road remained.

"Alright, alright — let's keep rolling! We finish this today!"

Gyeo-wool's partner for the fourth and fifth games was Aatrox.

The champion she'd practiced more than any other, the pick she was most confident on right now, and an all-rounder she had absolutely no reason not to lock in when she was in form.

Luckily the enemy didn't snatch Aatrox first, and Gyeo-wool won the next game as smoothly as water flowing downhill — making it crystal clear to everyone watching that her skill had improved by a wide margin.

And then the fateful final game. Riding the momentum from game four, the top gap opened wide again.

With victory right in front of her, Gyeo-wool roared.

"Yesssss. At last—!"

By the time the last game of the promo series was winding down, word-of-mouth had drawn in enough new viewers that the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠live count sat near two hundred — almost triple her usual. The chat was scrolling noticeably faster than before.

The energy of the cosmos was gathering. A cosmic storm was rolling in, shoving Jin Gyeo-wool toward Master tier — toward the nebula.

Viewers would later say: there had been crises, but in the end it was a remarkably smooth promo series. Across five games, you could watch her grow in real time.

The promotion screen after the game ended.

"I'm Masterrrrr!"

Watching the Master tier emblem flash into place, Gyeo-wool seemed to hit a physical wall — she sank completely into her chair and just sat there breathing hard, wordless, for a long while.

Thanks to the Warm Spring Breeze effect, Gyeo-wool's consciousness from invading — that is, the full rage-uncontrollable state — had been automatically blocked. But holding her emotions down until that point was entirely on her.

Even with five chances, constantly stopping Hon Gyeo-wool's runaway-train instincts from exploding was never going to be easy.

If she hadn't kept it under control, she could have burned through all five chances by the fourth promo game.

And right as a completely limp Gyeo-wool was sighing there — a loud, rumbling growl from her stomach.

"Ah, crap. I didn't eat lunch."

The viewers marveled at the mic quality, of course — and then immediately started roasting Gyeo-wool's hardcore gamer instincts for locking into a promo series past three in the afternoon without eating a single bite.

"Ah, come on! I told you I'm not opening donations!"

Gyeo-wool shouted, flustered, and shot to her feet. She was genuinely starving. If she didn't shove something into her stomach, she might actually starve to death on the spot.

"Anyway, I'm going to eat. Thanks for the support today… wait, was it support? Whatever it was — thanks for sticking with me! I hit Master because of you guys! From now on, don't call me Diamond-1 ValKyrie. Call me Master ValKyrie. Wahahaha!"

Without even ending the stream, Gyeo-wool kicked the door open and yelled at Jin Ju-yeong.

"Hey! Turn the stream off for me!"

The viewers who already knew that Devil Maiden's channel manager was her own older ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠brother had no choice but to explode with laughter at that booming shout.