That's What a Team Is
Time rewound for a moment, back to the Eternal Fox versus Blue Bird match.
"Abandon the left."
"What?"
"Give them the left epic. There are three of them over there."
"Juseong, push mid. Everyone else, hit the right epic."
"What about you, hyung?"
"When the setup looks obvious, you throw in a play that isn't."
He glanced at his teammates' faces after he spoke. Their expressions had gone subtly stiff.
He wasn't the one who called the shots. Why is he suddenly doing this? That was the look.
Their reactions are funnier than I expected.
After positioning his teammates, he slipped into the rubble along the approach path to the right-side epic monster and hid himself.
Blue Bird was a team that excelled at vision control, so they had almost certainly seen Eternal Fox moving.
Sure enough.
They looked like they had taken the long way around, trying to herd Eternal Fox back toward their own side of the map.
"Juseong, get ready to join. I'll go in first and create the angle."
"Uh, hyung! Wait—!"
Before Juseong could finish, Crasher burst out of the rubble pile and charged straight into the heart of the enemy formation.
Shadow Assassin dealt bonus damage when attacking from outside an enemy character's field of view—from their blind spot.
He successfully caught the Blue Bird players from behind, and the hits landed clean.
With his teammates flooding in right after, they took down three of the five and seized a decisive advantage.
Miraculously, no one on their side died in the process.
He had gone in prepared to die, but Blue Bird had frozen harder than expected.
That was design... right?
His teammates still looked unconvinced, though.
The vibe said we got lucky. They had every reason to look visibly thrilled, yet they remained withdrawn.
And for good reason—the team's atmosphere had been abysmal.
The coach had already announced that a youth player would be starting in his place, and yet somehow he was back in the starting lineup.
They were putting on a show of composure, but he knew what they were thinking: Today's result is already written.
This team had no one who would start a fight.
Every player pulled his own weight—but that was all they did, and that was the problem.
They only did what they were told.
So most of the aggression had always started with him.
They moved when he moved.
The whole team had grown used to that rhythm.
Then he shut his mouth and started playing scared, and disaster set in for the rest of them.
They still tried hard to find their own way to survive, but it looked like no tactics at all.
Tactics only work if someone understands them.
Eternal Fox had the plays memorized cold—but they were a team that needed a leader who could flex and adapt those plays to the moment.
The coach couldn't intervene mid-game.
Which left... well. The most experienced player on the roster. Him.
After his conversation with Cha Jinyeong, he had told the coach he wanted to start.
The coach didn't reply for a long time.
He understood. The youth call-up had already been decided by the manager.
And this looked a lot like open defiance.
With the youth player already deep into preparation for the match, there was no reason for anyone to welcome the request with open arms.
But the organization knew the truth, too.
The youth call-up was theater, more than anything.
A club-level gesture meant to soothe fans whose criticism had grown savage.
In this business, fan attention was a serious matter.
If they put him back out there and he lost again?
That would be a genuine catastrophe.
But putting the youth player out would produce the same result.
The rookies' flashy movement had kindled a brief spark of hope, but the pattern had been read almost immediately.
And they had never experienced the weight of an official match loss.
The pressure bore no comparison to practice.
A single death could collapse a mental game in an instant.
In the end, the coach gave him the chance.
And so he stood here.
"Hyung, you're too deep!"
"I'm not too deep. Even if they catch me, I can get out."
"No—you're alone over there...!"
"That's why I came in."
"What?"
The look on his face said, Are you out of your mind?
"Juseong, take my entire lane."
"Huh? Then what about you, hyung?"
"I'll kill them and level off that. So just take everything for now."
"Farm the mobs hard and get your ultimate up."
"Ah—got it."
Juseong's player name was Patriot.
He was the team's youngest member, but he was a genuine talent holding down the mid lane—the line where the most fights broke out.
And most importantly: he listened.
"How far are you from ultimate?"
"Two more waves."
"I need that ult after one wave. Take the epic, too."
"Uh... then Changhyun-hyung's pathing gets wrecked..."
"If you don't get the ult, we get wrecked. Changhyun, deal with it."
Changhyun, the second-oldest on the roster, didn't answer—just gave a dissatisfied nod.
"Hyung, ult's up! Uh—! They're all swarming that way!"
"Juseong, this is where your job really matters. Open a wormhole on that rubble pile where I planted the beacon."
"Opening it!"
"I'm going to hold as long as I can from here. The second that wormhole opens, bring everyone and join."
"There are three of them, and their skills should all be down. If you get here in time, we can wipe them."
"Wormhole's open! Just hold a little longer!"
He slipped past the enemy skills by a hair's breadth.
Even he wasn't sure how. "I just did it on instinct" was probably the honest answer.
Dodging one attack bought him that much more survival time.
Then he used a leap strike to shed a ranged skill as well.
Maybe three more seconds?
His attacks landed on all three targets at once, briefly breaking the enemy formation.
One more second bought.
"Hyung! We're here!"
"Wipe them!"
"I've got the left-side DPS!"
"Hey, Juseong—save hyung first!"
"One cut!"
Everyone piled in with a line of their own, and the team voice channel filled to bursting.
The result was a total victory.
It was, for all practical purposes, the decisive engagement that seized the game.
From that point on, his teammates seemed to find their confidence.
All five of them were driving toward the same objective at once.
Someone was leading them!
"I'll take the right epic."
"Hey, there's no vision over there. What are you going to do if they swarm you?"
"Then hyung will dive in again, right?"
Laughter spilled through the team voice channel at Juseong's words.
This little punk... already starting to mess with me?
"Come on. What am I, a suicide bomber?"
"You don't die, hyung. You kill everyone and come back."
"It was close."
"But you did it."
It might have looked like pure insanity from the outside, but there were rules to his play.
He actively exploited the fact that the enemy's attention locked onto him.
If only two enemies were visible, he went to kill them.
If three were visible, he pinned their feet.
If they were all clumped together, he scattered his teammates to farm resource advantages.
After eating that a few times, Blue Bird switched to a pure stalling game.
"Hyung, they're not splitting up."
"Even better."
"Want me to start a fight?"
"No. This time, you guys do it."
"Us?"
"They're obsessed with me and nothing else. Their vision has gotten extremely narrow."
"Juseong takes the left. Changhyun links in after."
"And you two utilities, put the buffs on."
"What about you, hyung?"
"I'll take the very front."
He deliberately moved in a clumsy, solo-looking path, and Blue Bird took the bait.
A string of ferocious attacks slammed into him—attacks that screamed kill him and only him.
There was nothing to be done about it. Taking that kind of damage in the late game meant death was a given.
"Hyung!"
"Don't look at me—kill all of them!"
Blue Bird wiped without even landing a real response.
"Everyone did well."
"You died, hyung."
"You lived. I trusted you."
"..."
The team voice channel went quiet.
Now they handle it without me even having to say anything.
One match couldn't settle everything—but this one was clearly going to be a good turning point for them.
If someone messes up, you clean it up together.
If it's the right call, you push together.
That's what a team is.
"What the hell is he doing!?"
Oh Jeongseok, coach of Eternal Fox, clutched at his chest as Crasher once again dove into the enemy side of the map.
"He's lost his mind."
Getting his form back was good. Fine. Great, even.
But this was a little much.
He looked like a bear thrashing to get into a fight.
If he died like that, they could still throw the whole game away!
I know.
Who just said that?
Well... at least only Crasher was swinging the blade. The rest of the kids were staying calm...
And not long after, Blue Bird's Warp Gate went down.
Eternal Fox wins.
Oh Jeongseok wiped the cold sweat from his brow.
The match had been packed with brawls that had nothing to do with stability.
But the result was good.
More than anything, the team looked different.
As Crasher's play shifted, the team's color shifted with it.
Oh Jeongseok was happy about the win—and his head was a mess.
So it wasn't a decline in skill after all?
Crasher's recent record had been catastrophic.
He was significantly older than the younger players, so Jeongseok had assumed it was an aging curve.
But the movement he'd shown today didn't fall short of his prime in the slightest.
If anything, it was more aggressive—almost frightening.
Which meant it had been closer to a slump than anything else.
Really? He'd just tripped over a small stone?
Oh Jeongseok felt something swell hard in his chest.
After the match they won on the back of Crasher's monster performance, Eternal Fox's form began to recover.
They still weren't the overwhelming force they had been when they sat at the top of the league—but they were no longer a team that just lay down and took the beating, either.
Eternal Fox had started fighting again.
And at the center of it all was Crasher.
And that very same man was now...
I checked the number and the nickname on the monitor over and over.
Next to the nickname sat an official verification badge proving it wasn't an impersonator.
No! Crasher-ssi!! You can't just drop that out of nowhere!!
"Whoa whoa!! Everyone calm down! Don't trash the player! Harass me instead if you have to!!"
The viewer count skyrocketed like it had lost its mind.
...Excuse me?
Did an extra zero just attach itself out of nowhere?
The moment Crasher appeared, a massive wave of viewers started pouring in.
"Guys, you're going to get yourselves in real trouble. If you spread false information I can't protect you, so ease up on the wild jokes."
The chat accelerated even further, past the point where I could control it.
I thought I should have hired a manager—but who could have predicted the scale would blow up like this all of a sudden...
"Ah—ahahaha!! Crasher-ssi, thank you so much for the donation!! Of course! Look forward to it! I'll produce a Crasher mad movie so sweet you'll feel better just watching it!!"
"Ah—don't say weird stuff!! I do NOT grow fur!!"
"Crasher-ssi has a tendency this time to dive in without thinking about the front or the back. From the standpoint of long-term activity as well, a style like this carries a heavy fatigue load, so I hope you'll also consider other approaches."
After that, Crasher left a few more donations and then exited the stream.
The total amount he left behind.
A man who says he has to earn money—where did he even get this kind of cash...
Well, hell... I'll take what was given and be grateful.
Absolutely filthy nice.
"We're not related at all. He probably just watched the video and dropped by..."
"Haa. I told you to keep it moderate. You—mouth sealed."
Even after Crasher left the stream, the heat refused to die down.
Even accounting for the viewers who had filtered out, the count was still holding steady in the eight-thousand range.
"Who are you people to decide that!! I said no!!"
While I was still going back and forth with the chat...
Huh? Now that's a novel approach.
Hmm. Judge who was at fault...
That is kind of my specialty, isn't it?