If You Dream It, Does It Come True? (7)
There was not a trace of hesitation in her movement.
When a merciless blade comes for you with perfect precision, the people who can keep their cool are few and far between. Watching her vault from Silver Thread to conifer and back again, using them like stepping stones through the air — it was the stuff of a mage's nightmare.
But Crow was a necromancer who had clawed his way into the semifinals. That alone put him a long way from ordinary.
Even now, the assassin's clone never left his mind. One wrong call — one moment of falling for a feint — and a blade would be buried in his throat and heart.
Was the real body hidden inside the smoke? Or was what he could see the truth?
Thinking it over would not produce an answer. The smartest move was to cover every possibility.
Sending Death Knights into the smoke was the worst option. Pinpointing the assassin's exact position in there was impossible, and he would only burn precious undead for nothing.
That left one solution.
Burn every ghoul I have left. No point holding anything back now.
The griffin released every ghoul it was carrying. Its role complete, the griffin itself became nothing more than a flying bomb.
Corpses detonated. The whole area turned into a screaming hell of blood and fire, a storm that shook the ground. At the same time, the Death Knights locked onto the assassin and closed in.
That the assassin's mobility was exceptional was beyond dispute. But he had stacked enough heavy slow debuffs to smother even that advantage. A frenzied Death Knight finally locked onto her back. A rusted spearhead punched through the petite female frame — through abdomen, through heart — and came away… clean. No blood. The shaft slid free as if it had cut nothing but empty air.
An illusion with no physical hitbox at all.
The clone was identified. By process of elimination, only one place remained for the real body.
She survived that bombardment as an assassin? Unbelievable.
How? Crow filed the question away. He could satisfy his curiosity later, once he pulled the match footage.
The moment his antique staff struck the ground, the Death Knights wheeled around. The smoke would not last much longer. After detonating even the griffin, the assassin's health had to be nearly gone — and at that point, finishing her would be simple.
That was as far as Crow's calculations got before a raw, animal unease slammed through his skull. He had seen something he should not have seen.
"Why… hasn't the clone disappeared?"
"Because it isn't a clone. It's the real one."
Inside the clearing smoke, there was nothing. His undead had lost their prey — and the blood-soaked girl had found hers. Two daggers cut the necromancer's throat.
The day after both semifinals had ended, match-analysis streamer Yurang went live.
He opened with the usual small talk — greetings, a little catch-up with chat — and then, as always, a slide deck of prepared material filled the screen. Centered on the display was the footage from day one of the semis: Gawol versus Crow.
"Yeah, around here feels right. Gawol, game two."
"Because… there's nothing to say. She just fought well. What am I supposed to analyze? Let's just watch game two."
He said it boldly enough, but he was clearly watching chat. The video timeline crawled a little slower than usual. Fortunately, not many people flipped the table over skipping game one — which is to say, a few did, and most of those were handles he recognized. As far as Yurang remembered, they were the type who flipped tables for the fun of it.
Only then did the timeline jump forward. Just before the analysis desk, the casters were still gushing. The rewind showed the assassin in tatters, then a brief flash of the indiscriminate bombardment. A little further — all the way back to the opening of the match — and there was the griffin picking up ghouls.
"There. Game two, you can't not talk about this, right? The bomber-griffin meta. As you all know, it got tuned in the last patch. Honestly, I don't think it was ever going to work in the pro scene, but in ranked it was way too strong."
Ghoul bombs falling from the sky. The scene had hit everyone watching with a fresh jolt of shock, and of course it lit up people's curiosity. Maybe I should try that once — and suddenly the necromancer class was drowning in attention.
It did not last long. Classes with no real answer for it flooded the forums with complaints. The unpredictability of an off-meta class can put life into a game, but an extreme meta always starts eating the environment alive. Once a patch slashed the griffin's air time, counters multiplied overnight.
Crow, the man who had kicked up that whole storm, brought a bone-magic-heavy build into game three and got crushed. He left the Arena drawing even more eyes than Gawol, the player who had beaten him.
In Yurang's view, that was inevitable. The counter Gawol had pulled off was simply too hard.
"I know a lot of you have tried this yourselves. I gave it a shot yesterday and recorded it. It's pretty damn difficult. But it does work."
The match footage froze. A click, and another clip loaded into the presentation — Yurang's own character moving in perfect overlap with a clone.
An assassin's clones come in two broad types: ones with a physical body, and ones without. The physical clone is treated as a summon. The non-physical clone has no hitbox at all — a pure illusion in the strictest sense. Swing a weapon through it and the blade passes with zero resistance; set the path wrong and it will even phase through objects. Naturally, you can also move while overlapping with one. Most of the time there is no reason to.
"Want to watch this together? It's a little embarrassing, but it should be funny."
Yurang left his own clip running and played the match footage alongside it for comparison. On the left screen, Gawol burst out of the smoke. By that point, the real body was already moving stacked on top of the clone — planting a foot on pre-set Silver Thread, launching upward, catching a conifer trunk and swinging into aerial movement.
Yurang hit pause.
"The path she took here was really meticulous too. See? Up to this point she never once touches the ground. Because if the real body steps down, it leaves footprints."
"Of course she can. There isn't a pro who can't. Checking footprints when an assassin pops a clone is basic."
"You little shit. I did it, I did! I was reading the footprints too! I just reacted too slow to stop it! Anyone who says I'm not a pro gets a one-week ban."
Of course they had to poke the sore spot. Yurang grumbled and started handing out bans. Only after a brief bloodbath did the footage roll again.
The moment the clone and the real body split was right as she skimmed under the conifers. Shadow Step — almost no effect, almost no delay — fired, and a Death Knight speared Gawol's clone. A thick black aura was wrapped around the Death Knight at the time; an assassin's skill effects would not have shown through it at all. So the misread was inevitable. Crow had checked thoroughly, or so he believed, and left himself no room for doubt. It was also a play that only worked because he trusted his opponent not to gamble — to make exactly the same read he had.
If Crow's strategy had been a demonstration that a necromancer can run this kind of setup, Gawol's had been a demonstration that an assassin can run this kind of trick.
Game three, in the end, did not have much that needed covering. Against Gawol's assassin, a plan that amounted to simply dodging or batting her away was never going to work. The match was just one more proof of a fact earlier players had already proven a dozen times over.
"Well… that's everything for day one of the semis. Now that I've actually laid it out, there wasn't much volume. No need to drag it out — let's jump straight to day two."
The slide advanced. With the matches over, a full results summary packed the broadcast screen.
Day 1 — Gawol 3:0
Day 2 — AT Kelberos 3:1
The light had set.