A New Era Seems to Have Dawned (3)
Hyeonseong Universe's academy was famous as an elite institution.
The competition to get in was correspondingly brutal. Just as throngs of applicants flocked to well-paying conglomerates, countless boys who dreamed of becoming pro gamers set their sights on the Hyeonseong Academy. The trainees who clawed their way through those odds were always treated like royalty.
Excellent dorms and meals were among the practice facility's proudest features. And that wasn't all — Lee Do-jin, the idol of every boy who aspired to go pro in LoC, was on this very team. Simply being able to train while looking up to the player they admired was an extraordinary opportunity in itself.
The affiliated players honed their skills while waiting for a first-team debut. Thanks to the Hyeonseong Academy's reputation, it wasn't uncommon for other organizations to extend offers and give them that debut elsewhere.
So how on earth had an academy of Hyeonseong's caliber ended up scrimming against an amateur squad like the Winter Army?
The unexpected scrim had its roots in the abysmal results Hyeonseong had posted in the 2018 CCK.
The fans tore into them. Was this really the same team that had lifted the CWC trophy back-to-back in 2015 and 2016? Was this really the team that, after the heartbreak of a runner-up finish in 2017, had sworn to grind itself to the bone and come back stronger? The barbs kept flying.
Taking hits from the outside would have been bad enough — the rot was festering on the inside, too. As the November free-agency period unfolded, the noise inside Hyeonseong never stopped.
Everyone declared free agency, including Ban Bae Tae-jun and Bolf Lee Ju-wan, who had entered the organization alongside Lee Do-jin in 2013 and held down the bot lane for five straight years.
Once the players who could no longer bear the ever-heavier weight of the Hyeonseong name had left, the only ones remaining on the first team were Lee Do-jin and the support who'd been called up the previous year — Kiffort, Lee Yunho.
Nothing had been formally announced yet, but Hyeonseong, actively navigating free agency, had a fire under its feet.
It might seem strange for a prestigious organization with three CWC titles to its name to be suffering a talent shortage, but the truth was that plenty of players wanted to join Hyeonseong and were simultaneously terrified of it.
The sheer weight of the Hyeonseong name.
The intimidating pressure of Lee Do-jin's thick, unyielding concrete fanbase.
To overcome those two things, you had to trust your own skill, ignore the eyes on you, and just play the game.
Whether veterans or young players, not a single one of them was willing to step forward lightly under that kind of burden.
The timing was terrible on top of everything else. The collapse of CCK. The fall of the Hyeonseong dynasty. Who was going to casually dive into an atmosphere that heavy?
Most players wanted a salary large enough to compensate for the pressure. But even though the Hyeonseong front office, at Coach Kim Donggyun's request, had mobilized a historic war chest to chase free agents, they had locked down only a single contract so far. Two holes still gaped in the first-team roster — jungle and bot lane.
The Korean Cup was only a month and a half away, yet the front office refused to overpay for mediocre stopgaps.
Coach Kim Donggyun had no choice but to look inward. If any of the trainees were ready for immediate first-team duty, he wanted them called up — and that was how the scrim against the Winter Army had been arranged.
Confirming the academy players' skill level was the primary objective, of course, but Coach Kim Donggyun and Coach Bae Jeong-ung had one more purpose in mind for this scrim.
Was she really as extraordinary as the rampant rumors claimed? They wanted to see Jin Gyeo-wool's skill with their own eyes. If the gossip circulating through the LoC galleries and among industry professionals turned out to be true, they intended to start laying the groundwork early to recruit her after the Korean Cup.
Apparently wanting a closer look at the early skirmish, Coach Kim Donggyun rewound the spectator feed a little.
Aatrox was level three. Choi Do-yun had taken the topside scuttle and invaded Hyeonseong's blue-side jungle. At the same time, Hyeonseong's jungler was clearing the raptors on the opposite side of the map, setting up a bot-lane dive.
With the playback slowed, the top-lane situation unfolded at a crawl. He focused on the movement Jin Gyeo-wool's Aatrox was displaying.
Before a proper fight had even begun, the Kanil that Poyan had picked was already down nearly thirty percent of its health. The reason was simple: Aatrox's primary ability — Q / The Darkin Blade — was landing on Kanil with insane precision.
Jin Gyeo-wool used her short-cooldown Q to clear the melee minion wave while landing that same Q every single time Kanil, whose wave clear was relatively slow, stepped up to last-hit CS.
It wasn't that Poyan was playing poorly. A laner had to collect CS, which meant he inevitably had to edge forward and test the spacing — and every time he went for a last-hit with W / Precision Protocol, Aatrox hammered Q damage into him in succession.
Even when he hit level three and tried to force a favorable trade with an E-Q combo, Aatrox casually slipped the stun with E / Infernal Chains's dash counterpart — E / Darkin Blade's sweep into Umbral Dash.
Aatrox, who had no mana to manage, kept siphoning health through her passive and showed solid sustain. Kanil, already low on both health and mana, had no choice but to avoid a direct confrontation.
But was Jin Gyeo-wool the type to leave someone alone just because they were running? Even with the wave shoved under Kanil's tower, she flung out poke the moment an opening appeared.
Choi Do-yun happened to be clearing the raptors, so there was no real reason to back off.
Poyan was under crushing stress. The second he let the tension slip even a fraction, Jin Gyeo-wool's greatsword came flying at his body.
Fail to dodge cleanly and you died. The wave kept pushing. The CS pressure never let up. On top of that, a warning ping from the enemy jungler who seemed poised to gank him at any second.
He hadn't dismissed them for being amateurs, but he'd still figured it would be easier than facing pros. That was definitely what he'd thought before the game started.
And now? Barely into the laning phase, he was completely on the back foot.
And that was when Jin Gyeo-wool sprang her trap.
When the pressure that had felt like it was about to kill him eased off for a moment, relief loosened his body. The extreme tension drained away, and his posture naturally went slack.
Aatrox made a move that looked like she was heading mid and vanished from Poyan's vision. Right before the ward Poyan had planted between the river and the blue-side jungle expired, it also caught Choi Do-yun heading toward mid.
A pro would have anticipated that it might be a setup and stayed even more alert. But Poyan was still just a trainee, after all.
A touch of complacency pulled him toward the center of the lane. They're shoving the wave and rotating mid. I can't join the fight right now, so I'll drop a danger ping, shove this wave fast, and recall.
Poyan started pushing the wave hard, dumping every ability except his mobility skill, E.
And that was what dragged him into the mire.
Like a man tilting his face to the sky to drink the first rain after a brutal drought — a terrifying Darkin greatsword came screaming out of the topside brush.
Jin Gyeo-wool had only pretended to rotate mid. Using Poyan's blind spot, she had been hiding in the brush above the top lane the whole time.
Even so, up to that point he still had an out. If he used E / Hookshot, he could ride the terrain below, swing around through the river, and escape toward tower. If Aatrox had her ultimate, the movespeed differential would have caught him — but she was still level three, and neither of them had boots. He could have gotten away.
But as Kanil flew toward the wall, Jin Gyeo-wool's Q-E combo arrived as if it had been waiting. Accuracy beyond human limits. Kanil, mid-flight toward the terrain, was shot out of the air and crashed to the ground.
With her mobility gone, Aatrox followed up with W / Infernal Chains and the second hit of Q. The chains coiled around Kanil's body and seized her by the ankle, and the greatsword tore a massive chunk out of her health.
Poyan wanted to live by any means necessary. He was, after all, the chosen top laner of the prestigious Hyeonseong Academy, wasn't he?
His team was about to cash in on a bot-lane dive. He had to hold on a little longer.
For a desperate escape, Poyan spun through the calculations at high speed.
In a second the Infernal Chains will drag me to the center of the zone. Aatrox will be waiting to drop the third hit of Q. So I Flash to stop the pull and dodge the third Q at the same time. Plan locked.
For a guaranteed dodge, Poyan timed it down to the instant before the chains yanked him in.
With a twin fwoosh-fwoosh, Kanil Flashed toward the river.
But why did the Flash sound fire twice?
Because Jin Gyeo-wool had reacted to Poyan's Flash and Flashed to the exact same spot.
He'd thought using Flash would keep him clear of the third Q — and yet the Darkin greatsword etched a small concentric circle into the ground and launched Kanil's body into the air.
Seoul Jin Gyeo-wool ▶ HSU Poyan
The judgment and reaction speed were absurd.
Jin Gyeo-wool had known from the start that Poyan would read her play and Flash. There was no other way to produce a response that instantaneous.
A play that drew admiration even on a second look. Coach Kim Donggyun poured out exclamations, remembering the first time he'd met Lee Do-jin, while Bae Jeong-ung shook his head and sighed in awe.
"That reaction speed is genuinely insane."
"Right? She's eighteen, but watching her play, she feels like she's sixteen."
"Terrifying player. And her game sense is like someone who's already been pro for about four years."
"For real. This is ridiculously interesting. It's blowing my mind."
According to Lee Do-jin, until last year she had been stuck in Platinum — just a girl with decent mechanics.
Do-jin himself had judged that her fiery temper and inability to sit with frustration made a pro career absolutely impossible… though he'd recently revised that opinion, apparently.
It happened from time to time — a player who felt walled off, hitting the ceiling of their growth, suddenly soaring up as a top-tier competitor overnight. Not just in pro gaming, but in sports, the arts, any field where talent was decisive.
Just what had happened to her this year? As Do-jin had put it — had her friend's death been the catalyst for an awakening?
Piecing together Do-jin's account and the stories from the LoC galleries, the picture was clear.
Jin Gyeo-wool had been playing games alongside Lee Do-jin since she was little, and even at school she must have been looping tournament VODs endlessly, analyzing match after match.
And she would have practiced without stopping. At the charity tournament held at Hwasong High, she'd been caught dozing at the venue after cutting into her sleep to grind.
Whatever the reason, though, it amounted to a golden opportunity for Hyeonseong.
A few agencies had already taken an interest in the male players on the Seoul team and tried to approach them. Their answer had been unanimous: wherever they went, they would go with Jin Gyeo-wool.
Unlike the male players who were easy to recruit and develop, Jin Gyeo-wool was still someone most teams preferred to avoid. The Hyeonseong front office's position wasn't all that different.
But the consensus already circulating across the industry was that if anyone was going to sign Jin Gyeo-wool, it would be Hyeonseong. Lee Do-jin, who had known her for years, was there, and the dorms were well-appointed enough that bringing a female player on board wouldn't create problems.
The fact that every other player on the Seoul team wanted to stay with Jin Gyeo-wool meant something else, too: sign her, and you could pull a whole cluster of talent into the organization in one stroke.
Thanks to Lee Do-jin, they had gotten their hands on this chance faster than any other team. Kim Donggyun could no longer hide his delight at the thought.
Through the upcoming Amateur World Championship and the year-end Korean Cup, Jin Gyeo-wool would make her presence impossible to ignore.
The moment industry opinion solidified that she was ready for immediate first-team duty at a pro organization, the atmosphere among the teams that had been hesitating and eyeing each other over her recruitment would flip overnight.
Every player on the Seoul team's contract expired at year's end, but contact was allowed well before that. So Hyeonseong was in a position to reach out sooner than anyone, and the instant the Seoul municipal contracts lapsed, extend offers to join Hyeonseong.
Even if Do-jin himself wasn't sure which team Jin Gyeo-wool wanted to join — was there any real reason for her to turn down a Hyeonseong offer? And bringing her in meant picking up the other prospects for free.
Fill the vacancies at Hyeonseong — the ones everyone found too burdensome to take — with prospects who were relatively cheap but extraordinarily gifted.
It would make the money-driven front office easier to persuade, and at the same time give both the front office and Coach Kim Donggyun cover. A two-for-one opportunity.
Serving as the lightning rod in place of the players had long been Kim Donggyun's specialty. With all the key players gone, he had resolved to plant his feet and play the long game — to brazen it out.
And hey, if the Jin Gyeo-wool and the prospects he signed performed so well that results came in year one, even better!
The real issue, after all, wasn't worrying about Jin Gyeo-wool and the players' skill — it was whether the front office would grant Kim Donggyun's request.