IeSF World Championship / Group Stage, vs Macau
There were four teams in the group, and the group stage ran on a single round-robin format.
Each team faced every other team once, and the top two finishers advanced into the tournament bracket.
Two teams would be drawn from each of the eight groups to seed a Round of 16, and as luck would have it, the two sides widely regarded as the strongest in the entire tournament had landed in the same group.
On site, the prevailing reaction was that this was a finals preview.
Ban Phase 1 was a careful probing exchange, each side stripping away the other's signature picks.
The Korean team, on blue side, wasted no time locking in Akalin as their first pick.
"Noona. Showing off from game one?"
"No harm in breaking their spirit early. These guys are supposed to be the best, right?"
"Thinking back to CWC, Akalin is disgusting if you play her right. With Winter noona on it, we can trust the pick."
There was a story behind the Akalin pick they had been running so often in scrims.
In the recently concluded 2018 CWC, Korean teams had failed to make proper use of the remade Akalin and taken a heavy hit in draft as a result.
Jin Gyeo-wool had found that deeply frustrating.
The Korean laners who competed could have played her just fine — but the prevailing mood in the CCK at the time was to avoid high-risk champions at all costs.
Akalin could destroy a game if she got ahead, but if she fell behind, clawing back took an enormous amount of time. That risk was the whole problem.
Korean teams preferred stable macro and a calm, methodical snowball, so she simply was not a favored pick.
But as 2018 CWC had made painfully clear, Korean teams were falling behind the new meta — and Jin Gyeo-wool hated that.
Having the tools and refusing to use them because of the risk felt, to her, like something less than a man would do.
If you were a man, no matter how big the risk, the default response was supposed to be, I'll take that risk and go for it — stepping up with real guts.
So Gyeo-wool locked Akalin without a second thought. She would make herself the target. Even if the enemy tried to starve her lane, she would hold the line and scale.
"What do you guys want to do? Want to run some top-mid-ADC swap mind games?"
"Sounds good."
"I'll take the Akalin."
Gyeo-wool's declaration that it was her champion was absolute. Chae Hojin flinched hard enough to make his whole body twitch.
Still, they needed the mind games if they wanted to tangle up the enemy draft. He spoke in a somewhat drained voice, almost pleading.
"Alright, for now… lock Lucian. They took Atroc. Winter, you're fine if the Atroc goes top, right?"
"Yes."
"Je-hyeon?"
"Same here. Want me on a safe Jake?"
Jake was not a safe pick. He was every bit as aggressive as Akalin, and nearly as high-risk.
Calling that "safe" was a pretty good sign that Gong Je-hyeon was not entirely in his right mind either.
After Ban Phase 2, the pick order swung back to blue. Gong Je-hyeon hounded Ha Jeong-uk until Jake was slammed in as a blind pick.
"Noona locked Akalin. No way I'm playing something comfortable."
"You really save your pride for the dumbest things…"
"Ah, just watch! I'm showing them mid Jake!"
Looking back and forth between two players already blood-crazed with the idea of crushing the other side by pure force, Chae Hojin sighed and muttered,
"Fine…. Just remember — isolated deaths are minus three points."
"You hear that, Gong Je-hyeon?"
"What about you, noona?"
The sniping continued. Choi Do-yun had been reading the room, wondering whether to mediate — then promptly joined in.
"Let's blow up top and mid!"
Of course, as always, ganking Gyeo-wool's top lane was off-limits. A man's top lane did not need jungle intervention.
"Don't come top."
Gyeo-wool's top-gank refusal landed as if it had been booked in advance.
Gong Je-hyeon fired right back.
"Don't come mid either."
Both of them had fire in their eyes, dead set on securing solo kills, looking for all the world like racehorses with blinders on.
Naturally, Choi Do-yun only really listened to Gyeo-wool, so Je-hyeon's demand was ignored on the spot.
"Then I'm ganking mid."
"I said don't come?!"
"Nice one, Choi Do-yun."
While they bickered, the draft locked in. Both sides had committed to all-in compositions, so the early-to-mid skirmishes and the mid-to-late teamfights were both shaping up to be worth watching.
The Korean national team's historic first match on a foreign stage was about to begin.
Oddly enough, the snowball started rolling not from top or bot, but from mid.
On paper, Jake had the matchup advantage — but it was still a lane where the pilot's skill mattered a great deal.
Gong Je-hyeon, though, played like he had been sharpening his blade for this exact day, and he beat the opposing laner senseless.
The same Gong Je-hyeon who usually kept the team laughing with his trolling was, from laning phase on, utterly dismantling the enemy Atroc and opening up a CS lead of more than twenty.
Whether the one-million-won solo-kill prize money was really that tempting or not, every aggressive move he made turned into a winning trade.
And through it all he ran a clean, mistake-free laning phase that actually managed to surprise Jin Gyeo-wool.
"What the hell are you? Have you just been sandbagging this whole time?"
"There's money on the line."
"What kind of— you're not even the type who plays for money."
"I literally play for money? Gaming is the thing I'm best at, so I'm trying to make money off gaming. Is that a problem?"
As if he had jumped into this world from day one with cash as the goal, Gong Je-hyeon cackled and charged the enemy Atroc all over again.
Game time: 7 minutes 30 seconds.
Gong Je-hyeon sent Atroc packing back to base — and forced out his ultimate to do it.
The mid tower's health was shredded in an instant, and once the mid pressure got that heavy, invading the enemy jungle was a given.
Xin Chao, mid blue-buff clear, was suddenly swarmed by the Jake–Jargal IV–Brown trio and had to blow his ultimate just to escape.
"Want to look at Atroc?"
"Let's go."
After snatching the blue buff, Choi Do-yun floated the mid gank. Ha Jeong-uk gave the okay — Gong Je-hyeon shut it down on the spot.
"Ah. I need the solo kill."
But majority rule was 2-to-1 for the gank. Je-hyeon, bitter about it, spammed danger pings toward mid, but Do-yun and Jeong-uk's pathing did not change.
The enemy Atroc panicked.
Flash had already gone on cooldown minutes earlier while getting beaten down by Jake, and the straight retreat path toward tower was cut off when Brown popped out to block it.
The only escape left was the brush above mid.
"I'm flashing ult."
"Hey! Wait. Drop it when he uses his dash."
Even Gong Je-hyeon was calling out detailed orders. A smile spread across Gyeo-wool's face as she farmed her lane.
She was simply grateful — she had only ever pushed them, and somehow the teammates had grown on their own.
Apparently Coach Chae Hojin had not just been sitting around either. Even Gyeo-wool herself had never asked them for teamfight calls that accounted for synergy quite like that.
Dash gone, Flash gone. The fleeing Atroc was trapped on the shattered ground Jargal IV had cracked open with a shouted national battle cry, with nowhere left to turn.
Brown's flying Q — Winter's Wedge — and Jake's accelerated Q — Charge Burst — closed in together.
KOR Loki ▶ MAC Errorr
The crisp first-blood alert filled the Rift.
And for the first time in a very, very long while, Jin Gyeo-wool handed out praise.
"Not bad. Keep it up just like that."
The completely unexpected compliment left both Choi Do-yun and Ha Jeong-uk stunned — and their shoulders lifted in spite of themselves.
Only one person misread the intent. Gong Je-hyeon.
"Wow. She just wants the solo-kill points for herself. Actual devil. It's always the people who already have it good who pull this stuff."
Gyeo-wool, who had genuinely meant nothing more than a clean compliment, shot him a look of pure disbelief.
"Want to add one more rule to our solo-kill bet, just between us?"
"…What?"
"If you lose to me on points, I pull out a hundred of your hairs."
"……."
Gong Je-hyeon was silent for a long beat before finally staking his own condition.
"If I win, I get to pull a hundred of noona's hairs too?"
The moment she heard that, Gyeo-wool's voice turned ice-cold.
"Go ahead and try."
Was that permission or a threat? Somehow it felt like pulling even one would get a thousand ripped out in return.
Only then did Je-hyeon realize the entire wager had been designed solely to torment him, and he groaned.
"Noona, I'm sorry. Forget what I said earlier—"
"Mm~ not a chance~."
It was already far too late. Gyeo-wool had no intention of letting him off.
Tears welling, Gong Je-hyeon roared as he turned on the Atroc returning to lane.
"Atroc. You're mine. You son of a bitch!"
Gong Je-hyeon's mid pressure climbed past anything resembling common sense, and the enemy mid laner, Errorr, was living a nightmare.
Jake cleared waves at light speed, then kept prowling toward bot, forcing the enemy jungler's every movement.
Because the bot tower had fallen so early, the lane swap happened fast too. They picked up a dragon along the way, then four of them camped top, shoved the tower, and took Cerberus in the same breath.
All that remained was the mid tower — and its health was already down to a third.
Game time: 17 minutes. The Korean team released Cerberus down mid and floored the accelerator.
One crash — mid tier-one tower gone.
A second crash — mid tier-two tower left hanging by a thread.
Gyeo-wool had been pushing a side wave from bot, far enough away that the enemy tried to force a fight with Siver's ultimate up.
Even at a 4-to-5 disadvantage, the Korean team retreated with total composure and baited out nothing but the ultimate.
The fed mid Jake casually shredded enemy health bars with accelerated Q pokes whenever he felt like it.
Akalin was shoving bot alone, and as an immortal champion who simply refused to die, nobody even dared try to catch her.
Bot had not even blown up early, so Lucian was healthy too.
Both sides had dive compositions, but the longer range belonged to Korea — and of all people, it was Gong Je-hyeon, the longest arm on the Korean roster, who had gotten obscenely fed.
On top of that, the current meta was no longer the old turn-based style. The side that was ahead could keep banking advantages indefinitely as long as they refused to make mistakes.
"Lock him down with Siver ult and all-in mid?"
"He have Flash?"
The Korean team was ruthlessly efficient in exactly that kind of play — a team optimized for the meta itself.
Kill score already 6–2. Over and over they chained combos that only worked when they were ahead, stretching the lead further each time.
And every single time, Ha Jeong-uk and Jin Gyeo-wool cross-checked the enemy summoner spells, so every setup landed clean.
"No Flash."
"Siver Flash has over three minutes left. Engage — I'm taking the teleport."
"Call!"
As if he had been waiting for exactly that, Jargal IV came flying in from range on a banner-lance combo and slammed his ultimate down right beside Siver.
— Demacia!!
With no Flash, Siver had nowhere to run. All that was left was to stand there and die.
KOR MJLow ▶ MAC TakTak
Macau happened to have their top and mid laners split to top and bot for wave management, so they could not even contest the fight immediately.
And Siver had been cut down right in front of the mid inhibitor turret, so the front line collapsed in seconds.
The difference in raw power was overwhelming.
While the twin turrets fell, Gyeo-wool's Akalin laid down a smoke screen and put on a mad display of shuriken acrobatics inside it, completely sealing off any approach.
Watching it, Gong Je-hyeon muttered a single line.
"Man, for real. If I'm in solo queue and the enemy top has ValKyrie on the tag and locks Akalin, I'm dodging the second the game starts."
It was both a declaration that he never wanted to face her on the opposite team, and a genuine tribute to her absurd champion mastery.
"Feel that power gap?!"
"This is way too easy."
"Undefeated run. Absolutely doable."
Among the players high-fiving with thoroughly relaxed faces as they packed up keyboards and mice, Jin Gyeo-wool's composed expression — calm, almost lofty — lit a long-dormant fire of passion in Coach Bae Jeong-woong's chest. He was due to enlist soon.
Even with no crowd, a stage was still a stage.
One of the reasons amateur players were so hard to promote straight into the pro roster was stage fright — and yet, just as they had in the Presidential Cup finals, this team showed not a trace of fear.
Exactly as Director Kim Donggyun had expected, every single player on the Korean national team was ready for immediate deployment.