Gong Je-hyeon / Loki_MID (2)
War Council 1v1.
Truth be told, a one-on-one laning match wasn't a particularly good way to measure skill. Basic champion matchups meant the disadvantaged side walked in carrying all kinds of problems before the blades even crossed. Of course, to offset that, each player could pull three ban cards. Once you'd snuffed out the counters to your main picks—or the champions you simply refused to face—the game at least started on something resembling even ground.
There were three win conditions: hit 100 CS first, land the first solo kill, or take the first turret.
"Ready?"
"Yeah."
Picks were blind, so all you could do was look at the ban cards the other side submitted and make an educated guess. Jin Gyeo-wool locked in Johnny, a champion with serious strengths in a 1v1. Gong Je-hyeon took Lucian, fast at clearing waves and excellent in early skirmishes.
Once they loaded into the game and confirmed each other's picks, Gong Je-hyeon spoke up.
"Johnny? You barely practiced him recently. Feeling confident?"
A provocation so transparent you could see straight through it. Jin Gyeo-wool hit back with something sharper.
"Yeah. Figured I could beat someone like you even without the practice."
"…Ooh. Look at you, talking trash."
Gong Je-hyeon didn't take the bait that easily. He'd been hoping a little mental warfare would keep her from playing calm and clean, but for now it had failed. This kid had solid mental fortitude.
Johnny ran the poke-specialized magical Aery rune, with biscuits to replace potions as a secondary and the Time Warp Tonic passive to amp potion effects. Lucian, apparently planning to go full aggression from the jump, took Conqueror with a Manaflow Band secondary. For Council Summoners, Johnny took Heal and Flash; Lucian took Cleanse and Flash. Lucian was fragile enough that catching a bad CC could end the game on the spot, so Cleanse wasn't optional—it was mandatory.
The first wave of minions rolled in, and the laning pattern settled into place on its own. Through the first wave, both sides cleared at roughly the same speed. But once Jin Gyeo-wool started prioritizing Q/Twinkle Star poke over wave clear, the Aery-empowered damage started landing hard enough to sting.
Two hands and four eyes stayed locked on the lane. The verbal sparring between two mouths kept going right alongside it.
"Hey, stop hitting me and eat the wave. The wave."
"Mm~ You go ahead and eat plenty."
Every time Aery came off cooldown, Jin Gyeo-wool dished out auto-attack poke without a shred of restraint, stacking bonus damage into Lucian like she was giving it away. And since she'd invested runes into potions and biscuits, she threw skills around just as freely. Lucian, chronically short on mana by design, couldn't afford to spam the same way. The gap in clear speed widened bit by bit, and once the cannon minion died on Lucian's side first, the wave started shoving toward him.
Johnny hit level three first and learned E/Sleepy Star. Jin Gyeo-wool set up her play.
He'll dodge it, obviously.
To apply sleep pressure, Johnny predicted Lucian's pathing and lobbed a Sleepy Star. A soft little star sailed through the air, then burst with a pop, blanketing a wide area in rainbow light.
— Piyororong~
And then—what the hell. Lucian walked straight into it, stepped on the sleep zone coating the ground, and slipped under like a light going out.
Jin Gyeo-wool didn't waste the opening. She poured on the damage and muttered like she couldn't believe what she was seeing.
"Are you stupid?"
Even a Gold player wouldn't make a mistake like that. Gong Je-hyeon had done something idiotic, then refused to even answer the "are you stupid" dig, and Jin Gyeo-wool found herself thrown off.
What is this…? Is he baiting me on purpose?
But Lucian's health was already below a third. He'd eaten E/Sleepy Star into passive auto into auto—of course it looked like that. No matter how she ran the numbers, her win rate sat at about ninety-five percent certainty.
Why the hell did he take that?
She glanced sideways at Gong Je-hyeon. He was locked onto the game with a rigid expression. Whether he'd simply gone quiet or was deliberately sowing confusion, Jin Gyeo-wool couldn't tell. She was thoroughly unsettled.
A potion brought Lucian back up some, but his health still hovered in the sixties. After barely clearing the wave under tower, Lucian slowly walked forward again. A balloon-tagged minion appeared—the kind you needed to cast W/Magic Thief—and Johnny's first Magic Thief pulled a Barrier spell. The real pressure started then. Jin Gyeo-wool took the shield without hesitation, marched forward, and beat Lucian like a drum.
There's no way I lose this… What is it. What's he hiding…
The Magic Thief spell that dropped from the next wave's balloon was Ignite. Johnny kept the pressure on and set Lucian on fire. Eventually Lucian's health hit the limit, and he had no choice but to take a recall timing. While he was gone, Jin Gyeo-wool hammered the tower and needled Gong Je-hyeon.
"Your play looks pretty pathetic, huh? You actually trying?"
Still no answer came back. Before long the CS gap had blown open—Johnny at 70, Lucian at 55.
"Hey, Gong Je-hyeon. Game's gonna end like this."
If she just held this level of pressure and farmed cleanly, the game was over. To avoid a CS loss, Lucian absolutely had to be the one to engage first. By this point even Jin Gyeo-wool was baffled. What exactly was he angling for, sitting in silence like this?
It's not like he's showing a weakness…
The weakness she'd picked out of Gong Je-hyeon's VODs hadn't been anything dramatic. He was extremely strong in lane—and because of that, he tended to take overly aggressive positions and expose himself. It was the same pattern she saw in bot laner Yu Min-jae, a common flaw among most amateurs who'd climbed to the top ranks on pure aggression. They leaned so hard on laning that once the lane fell apart, they got swallowed by the flow of the game.
But the Gong Je-hyeon in front of her was completely different. Instead of playing aggressive, he was meeting her with a perfectly passive, defensive style—like he was ready to just take the L if he lost the CS fight. And that was exactly what Gong Je-hyeon, who'd been watching Jin Gyeo-wool's videos for a long time, had intended.
The mid laner Jin Gyeo-wool he remembered never backed down from a fight, no matter how far ahead she was. A thoroughly bloodthirsty player. Top lane might have been a different story, but mid-lane Jin Gyeo-wool always preferred talking with her fists. Right now he was deliberately wagging his tail, trying to bait her into a deathmatch—so that the moment she couldn't hold back and dove in, he could crush her in a single fight.
Just as expected, Gong Je-hyeon's weak look snagged Jin Gyeo-wool's combat instinct. More precisely, it snagged the mid-laner instinct of Hon Gyeo-wool, embedded deep in this body.
She still had both Heal and Flash up. Even if she just went home, bought, and stacked CS carefully, she won. Under the perfectly natural judgment of one fight should be fine, right?, Jin Gyeo-wool came back with items and threw down on Gong Je-hyeon without hesitation.
Their health bars drained at roughly the same pace—then Lucian fired his ultimate first. Light rounds sprayed from the twin pistols in a rapid barrage. Johnny weaved and used her own ultimate to dodge this way and that, neatly packing passive damage into Lucian the whole time, and she didn't forget to pop the W/Magic Thief (Ignite) she'd pocketed earlier. The moment Lucian Cleansed the fire off his body, an E/Sleepy Star came sailing in. The star's debris burst across a wide area and cut off Lucian's escape route.
Gong Je-hyeon, silent for so long, finally opened his mouth.
"Ah—I can't run like this!"
"Just fight me!!"
At last, with half their health remaining, the deathmatch began. If Lucian could just dodge Johnny's poke, there was a real chance the strongest AD carry—who almost never lost a straight trade—could take it. Health melted off both sides at speed. Johnny, still waiting on skill cooldowns, bounced cheerfully after the fleeing Lucian.
Gong Je-hyeon didn't miss the window. E/Relentless Pursuit into bonus-damage auto into Q/Piercing Light—the combo shredded Johnny's health to a sliver in an instant. Not even one bar left. One more bonus auto and Gong Je-hyeon won.
— Bang! Bang!
Lucian flashed forward to close the gap. Johnny flashed with him like she'd read the timing cold. But there was one thing Lucian, blinded by the kill, had missed.
"Ah—!"
The spot he'd flashed into was inside the range of Jin Gyeo-wool's turret. A slow turret shot arced through the air. The magic cannon burst with a thud—and somehow, miraculously, Lucian survived.
Johnny's health: 37. Lucian's: 46. One auto would decide everything.
Here, Gong Je-hyeon chose to disengage. Johnny's passive auto was an instant attack; Lucian, with every skill still on cooldown, could only fire projectiles. Trading from this state meant a guaranteed loss. And knowing that, Jin Gyeo-wool played her final card.
From a distance that should have been hopeless, Johnny used her ultimate—Portal—to close one step of the gap. Right there on the ground lay the fragment of the Council Summoner Flash Lucian had just used. Johnny snatched it up and leapt again with W/Magic Thief (Flash). In a blink, the distance between them shrank to the range of Johnny's passive auto.
From the fingertips of a brightly smiling Johnny, a laser fired with a cheerful pew.
ValKyrie▶Loki
"Aaaagh!"
Lucian was the one who died. Gong Je-hyeon was the one who screamed.
At present, Jin Gyeo-wool's Soul Assimilation ability sat at 2nd-Class Stage IV—roughly mid-Grandmaster by tier.
At this level, I shouldn't lose a 1v1 to anyone on the team, at minimum.
After taking a clean 2–0, Jin Gyeo-wool had to admit she'd been underselling her own skill. Because the ability kept growing and her game sense kept climbing, she hadn't had real confidence in where she stood. She'd never reached a height like this in her life. But as she grew more comfortable in the highest ranks, tested herself against real talent, and looked back on what she'd absorbed, Jin Gyeo-wool was steadily becoming a growth-type monster who actually understood herself.
Gong Je-hyeon, accepting total defeat, handed over the drinks he'd bought as a forfeit gift and asked,
"No, but if you're that good on mid champions, why do you play top?"
No special reason. The pilot currently driving Jin Gyeo-wool's body simply preferred top-lane matchups and was more comfortable there. Being able to pilot mid champions well enough to win a 1v1 didn't mean Jin Gyeo-wool herself was fully at home in high-elo mid-lane dynamics yet.
"A 1v1 doesn't prove raw skill on its own. If it did, there'd be no reason tournaments wouldn't just run that format."
Faced with that thoroughly principled answer, Gong Je-hyeon muttered with a sulky look,
"If my friends find out I lost a mid 1v1 to a top laner, they're gonna roast me forever…"
"Nothing to be embarrassed about. Someday you'll be proud you almost beat me."
The words were as arrogant as they came—but the ease on her face was more than enough to work on Gong Je-hyeon.
…She really is pretty, though.
Drawn in by that lovely face, Gong Je-hyeon locked eyes with Jin Gyeo-wool in a daze—and in that instant felt a nameless terror try to swallow him whole. Staring into those composed, unhurried eyes, he got the strange sensation of a hand closing around the back of his neck. His body locked up like sleep paralysis had hit him mid-day. Startled, Gong Je-hyeon twisted and thrashed, trying to break free, but somehow not a single finger would move.
Completely unaware of the state he was in, Jin Gyeo-wool added one more line.
"Later on, you'll be glad you ended up on the same team as me."
In that moment, Gong Je-hyeon saw something hidden in the faintly smiling depths of Jin Gyeo-wool's eyes. Something demonic, staring straight through him with dead eyes. He squeezed his own shut, thinking he'd imagined it—and when he opened them, the terrifying presence was already gone.
I've been gaming too much lately… Now I'm seeing things.
He'd occasionally seen ghost-like things since he was a kid, but Gong Je-hyeon didn't believe in ghosts. So he decided what he'd seen was Jin Gyeo-wool's enormous talent given form.
Only when Jin Gyeo-wool looked away to drink did his body, frozen solid as ice, finally thaw and melt. Barely free of the paralysis, Gong Je-hyeon thought in pure terror,
…I absolutely cannot go to another team.
Unless some other prodigy showed up who could put Jin Gyeo-wool in her place, the best path to a career high right now was to stick to her side like glue. Demons might not be real—but Jin Gyeo-wool clearly carried a talent that would make even a demon cry.