KeG Presidential Cup — Seoul Regional Qualifiers, vs Team CroMagnon
Every match was a joyride for Jin Gyeo-wool.
First game. Gyeo-wool locked in Ornn.
Choi Do-yun picked Zac, and together they tore through the front line with a double-shoulder engage composition while Azir and Kai'Sa vacuumed up damage and kills through kiting and poking, snowballing freely. The team handed Gyeo-wool a pristine 1/0/10 scoreline and closed out the win.
Second game. The enemy stripped Ornn away from her, so Gyeo-wool picked Cho'Gath with the express intention of chaining their Ornn to the top lane. The plan worked beautifully. Ornn spent the entire game getting dragged around by Gyeo-wool's Cho'Gath and never properly joined a teamfight. In the meantime, Yu Min-jae's Kai'Sa vacuumed up eleven kills and, alongside the mid-lane Vladimir, demolished the map. Smooth game. Over in a mere twenty-seven minutes.
And just like that, on day one, the eight teams advancing to the Seoul Qualifier quarterfinals were decided.
Confirming that CroMagnon was on that list — and that a quarterfinal win would mean facing them in the semis — Gyeo-wool spoke to Park Su-ho on her way out of the PC bang, already shifting focus to tomorrow's matches.
"Prepare well. Looks like we'll be seeing each other in the semifinals."
A bright, refreshing smile followed. And yet somehow it carried a chill that made the skin crawl.
After she disappeared, Jeong Tae-yang, standing behind Park Su-ho, muttered,
"Yo, what was that? Something going on between you two?"
Something was going on, all right.
Park Su-ho had completely forgotten the kindness Gyeo-wool had once shown him. He was firmly on her hit list now.
Unaware of any of that, Su-ho just shrugged.
"Uh… dunno? Nothing except me going over to say hi earlier."
"What the hell. You networking already?"
"Hyung, that's a nasty accusation."
"I'm serious, man. I just said hello."
His teammates needled him with jealous looks and slapped his back, but they had no idea what they were talking about.
The person scheduled to suffer the most tomorrow was none other than Park Su-ho.
The next day — Sunday — brought the third match of the Seoul Regional Qualifiers, and the quarterfinals. Gyeo-wool picked Ornn again.
Once more, her strategy was to raise the team. While Choi Do-yun's Nocturne demolished bot and mid, she clung to the enemy top-lane Sion so he could never escape, then tanked properly on the front line in every fight. Every time she stood at the head of the pack and let out a deep horn blast, the enemies scrambled in blind panic across a battlefield gone dark.
KDA 2/0/7. Her second deathless game.
And then came the long-awaited fourth match.
Gyeo-wool faced CroMagnon again — her first scrim opponents, and one of the teams rated among the strongest in this Seoul Regional Qualifier.
Already-eliminated teams refused to leave the PC bang, sticking around however they could to watch the Winter Army play. Most of the quarterfinal players had clustered around the computers set up for recording, which told you everything about how much interest Gyeo-wool commanded among guys her age.
A female Challenger was rare enough. The fact that she was also disgustingly good at the game sealed it.
Teams she'd crushed were equal parts stunned and awed by her skill, and squads who'd caught wind of her — inside the PC bang and out — kept feeding fresh updates to the LoC Gallery. Stories about Gyeo-wool had been hitting the hot board in real time since yesterday, and today she earned the distinction of claiming a full third of the Gallery's featured posts.
Gyeo-wool herself paid it no mind, but across the two days, dozens of photos of her had already been taken.
Meanwhile, the scrim rematch between the Winter Army and CroMagnon — the semifinal — got properly underway.
"They banned Rakan. Guess they're not running Xayah."
"Ban Shen. Their support's been practicing him a lot lately. Morgana too."
"We're sniper-banning their support again this time, right?"
"Obviously."
CroMagnon's voice chat lit up.
Before, they'd coasted through draft. This time a national finals berth was on the line. And the enemy top laner was a sudden rising star — a female Challenger, no less. Jin Gyeo-wool. Not a single person on the team wanted to lose.
"Swain's banned."
"Figured I'd be the one on him. Blind-ban Taliyah? She's annoying if she gets through."
"Call."
"They banned Nocturne for us? Thought for sure they'd take him."
A pick too stressful to actually play blind, but a headache to give away — so Nocturne got banned. CroMagnon followed by banning Taliyah, and the first pick phase began.
Aatrox was the first face to appear in the Winter Army's blue-side pick slot.
"…That's top, right?"
"Hasn't ValKyrie barely touched Aatrox lately?"
"If they play him, it's probably mid."
"Ugh… I hate fakes. Let's just go for something safe. But they might still send him top, so I'm taking Zoe. If they grab Zoe too, it gets miserable."
"Go."
On red side, CroMagnon locked Zoe, then Alistar right after.
But then, shockingly, an unthinkable pick popped out of bot lane.
"…Vlad?"
"What. Is that top and mid?"
"Wait. Last pick's Pyke."
Truthfully, it wasn't entirely unforeseeable.
Early June 2018.
When League of Council rolled out patch 8.11, the meta convulsed — and non-ADC bot compositions began surfacing one by one, starting with the pro teams.
The newly added rune system for the 2018 season — Fleet Footwork and Overgrowth in particular — had extended the ADC-centric meta that had already been enjoying its golden age through 2017. For Myart, LoC's operator, who had been patching specifically to break free of that ADC-centered meta, it was an unwelcome development. Every team wanted to scale their ADC as hard as possible into the late game, and the side that won the ADC duel almost always took the victory. That much was locked in.
The absolute peak of those bloated games had come early in the season — the ninety-minute marathon between Hyeonseong Universe and OnAir Bluewings that set the record for longest match. Convinced that if the league kept dragging on, broadcasts would be carpet-bombed with potato emotes from bored viewers, Myart finally made a drastic midseason call.
The so-called "ADC Assassination" — patch 8.11.
Dropped right before the start of the Summer Split after the mid-season invitational, the patch threw the entire CCK Summer standings into chaos. A parade of nerfs hit all at once: Fleet Footwork gutted for marksmen only, crit item price adjustments and effect reworks, base-stat reductions across ADC champions. The bot-lane laning phase underwent a total revolution. Aside from a handful of survivors — Ezreal, Xayah, Lucian, Kai'Sa, and a few others — marksman champions were effectively retired.
In their place, AP mages and melee bruisers with faster power spikes and solid late-game carry potential rose as the alternative. And one of those alternatives was Vladimir.
In the thick of summer, the bloodthirsty mosquito had stretched its reach past top and mid all the way to bot lane.
"Couldn't that still be mid, though?"
"…Still, I think we have to read it as bot for now."
"Tae-yang's right. Let's grab Yasuo too. Yasuo-Ali is fine."
"Do it."
So CroMagnon locked Yasuo.
Both sides chained bans through Darius, Gangplank, Quinn, and Kennen. CroMagnon was narrowing the pool of top-lane answers available to a Winter Army that had clearly picked Aatrox and Vladimir with the intent to swap — and trying to make whatever Park Su-ho ended up on a little more comfortable to play. The Winter Army, for their part, simply banned whatever looked annoying out of CroMagnon's remaining options.
"Taking Mundo."
"Yeah. Not bad into Aatrox."
CroMagnon's fourth pick: top-lane Mundo.
A safe, currently beloved pick. Nothing special — neither particularly good nor particularly bad. Against Jin Gyeo-wool, it didn't matter whether you drew a blade or a tank. Neither worked.
But Gyeo-wool was always one mushroom ahead of Park Su-ho.
"Oh shit. We're screwed."
"Whoa, that pick. Didn't that show up in Council Rivals?"
"Yeah. Wait — so Gnar top… Aatrox is mid?"
"We're so dead~."
Gnar popped onto the screen. Park Su-ho's PTSD came flooding back.
Gnar. Mundo was going to get poked and kited until the day he died. The top-lane hellscape taking shape in his head was already vivid.
Gnar — TOP — Mundo
Trundle — JGL — Kindred
Aatrox — MID — Zoe
Vladimir — BOT — Yasuo
Pyke — SUP — Alistar
Both sides locked their junglers as final picks, and draft was done.
By every measure, the Winter Army held a trendy, blatantly strong composition that was favorable on matchups and solid through the early and mid game alike.
"Ah. I've got a feeling about this one."
"A losing feeling?"
"Yeah. A we're-fucked feeling."
CroMagnon's damage-tank balance was fine, and Kindred's ultimate — Lamb's Respite — could manufacture an invulnerability swing. But they needed to maintain long siege standoffs, and more than anything, Gnar had come out specifically to snipe Mundo. That was the problem.
Could Park Su-ho actually hold against Jin Gyeo-wool?
The situation was a guaranteed question mark — a missing ping waiting to happen.
Game time: six minutes. After parking the self-sustaining Vladimir alone in the bot lane, Ha Jeong-uk began rampaging through the enemy jungle on Gyeo-wool's orders.
Active playtime, granted at last to a man who had always been passive.
Pyke called Trundle into the enemy red jungle. Then he hooked CroMagnon's jungler Kindred — who'd been strolling up on autopilot — and clubbed him to death. A clean first blood. With top-side jungle locked down, the Mundo that Gyeo-wool's Gnar had been cheerfully thrashing in lane was suddenly exposed to a dive.
Gyeo-wool drew tower aggro and the top dive followed. Mundo dying was a given — and the top tower crumbled with him.
From that point on, the game followed the exact formula the Winter Army always won with.
Gyeo-wool, never dying, locking down a single lane and running an endless split push. And the other four members of the Winter Army, trusting Gyeo-wool's teleport, moving as a four-man unit and continuously manufacturing leads.
By the twenty-five-minute mark — the watershed of most games — the global gold difference was already four thousand. In the massive teamfight that broke out after they took the top tier-two tower, the Winter Army traded four for one and claimed the Peacock. They rode that momentum straight through to end the game.
Park Su-ho's Mundo? He hit things diligently and still couldn't manage anything beyond the role of the neighborhood idiot older brother. Hardly surprising — Gyeo-wool's Gnar had tormented him mercilessly throughout the entire laning phase. With the CS gap, the item gap, and the growth gap that created, the Winter Army had the luxury of ignoring Mundo entirely and deleting CroMagnon's other champions first.
The Mundo left standing at the end could only die alone.
Kill score 15:3. From the moment they seized the initiative, they never gave it back once. The Winter Army had ripped CroMagnon apart by the hair.
Twenty-seven minutes thirty seconds. Game over.
The Winter Army players shot to their feet with a roar of triumph.
People aren't always sharp, but most of them can sense a crisis just fine. Whether that's survival instinct at work or not, there's a saying for a reason — why is a bad feeling never wrong?
Park Su-ho, who had smelled doom before the game even started and spent the entire match getting dismantled, sat there wearing a look of pure desolation. Jeong Tae-yang was offering him some empty consolation when Gyeo-wool appeared in front of Su-ho as if from nowhere.
"I told you, didn't I. You habitually push the wave in the timings when you need to pull it."
Arms folded, she rattled off three of Su-ho's mistakes in that clear, bright voice, then vanished toward the counter. A moment later she returned, set a drink down in front of him, and said —
Of all things, it was the energy drink that was all the rage lately. Literally translated, the name meant monster.
"If you don't want to get eaten by a Monster, you'd better get your head on straight. Right?"
Gyeo-wool tugged the corner of her mouth into a faint smirk and headed back to where her team was sitting.
Jeong Tae-yang, who had been staring after her the whole time, muttered,
"She is seriously, ridiculously pretty."
The younger guys beside him laughed and agreed. There was even talk that, as painful as the loss was, at least they'd gotten to see Jin Gyeo-wool up close.
Park Su-ho alone couldn't lift his spirits.
"I've never suffered through twenty-five minutes like that in my life…"
Was she really not a monster?
Or maybe — just maybe — she was some untouchable, unknowable being wearing a monster's skin.
Gyeo-wool was beautiful, and the feel of her hand from when they'd shaken still lingered. But Park Su-ho had felt it anyway — the vast, impassable energy of an entire universe radiating from her.