KeG Presidential Cup Finals — vs Gyeonggi (1)

The KeG Presidential Cup finals were held under the watchful eyes of cameras and a full broadcast crew.

That alone gave the match an atmosphere not so different from a pro game. Through the semis, everything had played out below the stage — but the finals were on it. The dreaded hour of stage fright had arrived, the kind that could make even unshakable players start to tremble.

And inside the Seoul team, a patient was already presenting with a full-blown case of stage jitters.

"H-hey, kids. D-don't be nervous! Let's ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠go fight!"

"……."

It wasn't one of the players. It was the coach.

"Um… are you okay, Coach?"

"Y-yeah. I-I-I-I'm fine."

"You just said 'I' four times."

"I-I-I-I-I-I'm fine, I said."

What kind of grown man was this, honestly.

Jin Gyeo-wool's normally round eyes narrowed halfway into a look of pure disbelief, but the mountain of a young man just clamped his mouth shut and kept shaking.

"Coach, are you gonna be okay for ban-pick like this?"

"Yeah, seriously."

Gyeo-wool answered the worried players with her usual bluntness.

"We'll just handle it ourselves. Same as scrims."

"I mean, yeah, but… I feel bad for Coach."

Sticking Coach Chae with the guys all this time had clearly paid off — the team had started looking out for him without anyone asking. Gyeo-wool let out a short breath of relief.

A moment later, the background music signaling the start of the broadcast kicked in, and the casters' voices rolled out over the venue.

"The 10th Presidential Cup Amateur E-sports Tournament! And now, for the final event of the official lineup — the long-awaited League of Council grand finals! I'm your caster for today, Lee Kwon-min, joined by analyst Go Eun-gyu! Hello, everyone!"

"Hello! Great to be here."

Caster and analyst bantered about the other finals earlier in the day, warming up the room, until at last the signal came for the players to enter.

No amount of pep talk from the rest of the roster could fix Coach Chae Hojin's broadcast anxiety. In the end, Gyeo-wool stepped in.

She walked over slowly and set her hand on Chae Hojin's back.

A gentle warmth began to seep into him.

"…Huh. Uh…. Hmm?"

An inexplicable calm, warm and steady, wrapped around his whole body. The sticky, smothering dread that had been choking him a second ago simply blew away. It felt like high-pressure water blasting through a pipe caked in damp moss, scouring it clean in a single pass.

When Chae Hojin came back to himself and turned to look at Gyeo-wool, she was just watching him with a blank face.

A feeling he couldn't quite name settled over him.

This sharp, brilliant kid who was also absurdly good at the game. Who could turn prickly in a heartbeat but cared about her teammates and friends more than anyone. And yet she carried a sickness of the heart that only quieted when Lee Do-jin was near. He couldn't make sense of it.

Jin Gyeo-wool — was she an angel? Or a gift dropped straight from the sky?

Either way, what did it matter.

She was the golden dragon that had descended upon Chae Hojin.

Once his hammering heart had fully settled, he planted himself in front of the players.

"Kids. Let's go up there!"

The sudden transformation left the roster tilting their heads. Gong Je-hyeon thought, Has she tamed even Coach now? He still believed she possessed some kind of mysterious power.

"What are you waiting for? We've got a match to win."

The Valkyrie of the battlefield tipped her chin toward the stage and led the way. As if on cue, the players roared and climbed up after her.

"Yeah! Let's go!"

"Let's go! Winter Army!"

The Presidential Cup finals were the only best-of-three series in the tournament. They were also the only League of Council match being broadcast. Not that a broadcast automatically meant a flood of viewers — the venue had about four hundred seats, and fewer than half were filled. Unlike CCK online streams that regularly pulled tens of thousands, an amateur tournament maxed out around two thousand viewers on a good day.

But the moment word got out that Jin Gyeo-wool was playing, the LoC gallery caught fire, and everything changed.

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The gallery went feral over a single camera pass of her face. And over on the official stream—

The chat was scrolling at a speed that rivaled a CCK broadcast. CCK was still running at the same time, but it was a bottom-tier matchup, so everyone had poured over here instead. The fact that the so-called Gold Cup game between those two teams had just ended in a nail-biter didn't hurt either.

A rare female LoC player. Challenger-tier. Amateur tournament finalist. Somehow, Jin Gyeo-wool had collected every "scarce commodity" title available.

"And here are the two teams meeting in today's finals! Expectations are through the roof! This is the first-ever Presidential Cup LoC broadcast, so a lot of you fans are probably seeing these players for the first time."

"That's right. But… if you look at the end of that lineup — a little surprising, isn't it?"

"It is. I've cast a fair number of matches, but this is my first time seeing a female player on a tournament stage."

"Same here. But this player — brace yourselves — she's ranked 174th in Korea's League of Council ladder. Challenger. Right now, she's the strongest player on the Seoul roster."

"Seoul's other Challenger is their mid laner, Gong Je-hyeon — also Challenger, but ranked 285th."

"Exactly. A Challenger at 174 means she could go toe-to-toe with actual pro players. Fans haven't seen the VODs, but I have — and from yesterday on, she's been putting up plays that fully justify that rank. I genuinely think she might be the first female player to shock the entire country."

"Yes — Jin Gyeo-wool, a high school sophomore this year… we'll be watching closely to see what kind of play she brings. Next up, Team Gyeonggi!"

Being a rare specimen meant the casters spent an unusually long time on her. The camera had already moved on to the next team, and they were still talking about Gyeo-wool before finally, belatedly, giving Gyeonggi a short rundown.

The analyst praised Gyeonggi for running a clean, CCK first-team-style operation — but Gyeo-wool's presence on camera had been so overwhelming that the commentary basically got buried.

And then came the Set 1 ban-pick.

Gyeonggi locked in Red side for the first set, putting Seoul on Blue. The moment the camera caught top laner Jin Gyeo-wool — who also handled first ban — the chat exploded into wall-to-wall spam.

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The flood caught the broadcast mods flat-footed. The high-intensity spam kept looping like mad right up until Gyeo-wool banned Morgana in the first ban phase, and only then did the bans start rolling in late.

In the middle of it all, the camera briefly cut to the audience — and caught Han Yeo-reum cheering for Gyeo-wool, which set the chat off all over again.

The second she realized she was on camera, Yeo-reum hoisted the placard she'd been clutching to her chest and started shimmying her hips like she was dancing. Her frankly excellent figure rolled like a wave, and the chat lost its mind a second time.

The camera director hadn't planned it, but the cut gave Gyeo-wool an even wider stage for her name to spread. Male fans who lost their minds over pretty faces falling for Gyeo-wool and her two friends was basically destiny at this point.

Even as chat scrolled by in a blur, ban-pick moved fast. Seoul systematically shut down Gyeonggi's key picks. Gyeonggi's bans had a similar feel.

Swegin, the off-meta pick Yu Min-jae had pulled out. Yasuo, who'd been a mess yesterday but still carried Gong Je-hyeon to a reverse-sweep win. Akalin, a nightmare whenever Gyeo-wool locked her in. Joni, one of Je-hyeon's signature picks who always created early jungle chaos. And Talon, who'd blown up mid in the Round of 16. Five champions banned in total.

Trying to lock down Gyeo-wool's pool was basically useless anyway — better to gut Gong Je-hyeon's options, the one who caused the most accidents, and give their own limited mid laner some breathing room.

With both sides' bans complete, the pick state looked like this:

Seoul's Aatrox was a top/mid flex. Gyeonggi's Poppy was a top/support flex — brought in specifically to counter Seoul's dive-comp concept.

"Looks like Seoul already knows Poppy is support."

"Agreed. You can feel it from the bans."

"Gyeonggi locks in MontBlanc."

There was talk that MontBlanc could draw counters like Malzahar, but Gong Je-hyeon calmly picked up a standard Ryze. Kai'Sa went to bot laner Yu Min-jae to close out Seoul's draft, and Gyeonggi finished on comfort with a final pick of Canis.

"Alright, drafts are locked in — let's break down the full picture."

"First off, the pick designed to chain down Taliyah is Seoul jungler Choi Do-yun's Olaf. Seoul's bot lane is a combo that struggles to show strength early — it needs time to come online. So Olaf's going to have to put in a lot of work. Plenty of bot-side coverage needed too."

"Come to think of it, this is the first time Jin Gyeo-wool has pulled out Aatrox in this entire tournament — prelims included. What's your read?"

"I don't think there was some grand master plan. Once the national finals started, Gyeo-wool began locking in so-called carry champs a lot more. But since she had to pick first here, she went with something safe and flexible like Aatrox. That's probably the cleanest way to read it."

"Got it. So to sum up — Gyeonggi needs to find a way to shake Seoul early, no matter what."

"Exactly. If this goes to a clean even-scaling late game, Seoul has the advantage off comp alone."

Roam pressure and the tools to snowball the early game sat with Gyeonggi. Seoul knew it, which meant their job was to hold the fort and survive the early-to-mid game.

Gyeo-wool, who almost never talked before a match, got on comms for the first time in a while to fire everyone up.

"Alright~ let's win this!"

She was buzzing. Every player on the roster was, but Gyeo-wool more than anyone.

Six years of grinding as a nobody. Wanting to play on broadcast. Wanting to compete in tournaments. Wanting to go pro. She'd busted her ass, died, come back, and finally made it here.

How could she not be thrilled.

A bank of cameras turned their lenses toward her, catching the light.

"Oh. And if we lose, you know what happens, right?"

So defeat was not an option. A clean 2–0 and a proud walk home was the only future the Winter Army was allowed today.

After that pumped-up "let's win" came an immediate death threat for losing, so the players — who had a lot on the line — had to force out their fight-chants in slightly queasy voices.

"F-fight!"

"Fight!!"

Gong Je-hyeon, whose hair was specifically on the chopping block, shouted the loudest of all.

"Let's win! Let's wiiiin!"