What I'm Good At (3)
"Oh, come on! Protect me a little!"
"…"
On the screen, the ADC champion Ashe crumpled without getting a chance to do anything.
What a waste.
Park Jimin still wasn't used to SOL. Even so, he could tell this was the kind of death that felt deeply unfair to the player involved. When he played with his friends, he'd always heard that the ADC was the one you had to keep safe at the back.
"Huh? It's already eleven-thirty?"
Binge-watching Yu Dahye's YouTube videos had eaten up the whole evening without him noticing.
[The Promised Third Core — Did It Again.]
His fingers never stopped. Jimin queued up the next video at once.
This is fun.
At first he'd wondered why someone with a face that pretty was wasting it on games — but the more he watched, the more hooked he got.
"Get out of here, you bastard."
"…"
Her mouth was a little rough, sure — that was part of the charm. Plenty of girls at school talked like that too.
"Aaaah, seriouslyyyyy!"
Her emotions ran hot; she was practically screaming. She'd just killed the enemy ADC, only for the enemy jungler to gank bot lane and take her out.
Weird.
The chat window floating over the video. Everyone was watching this stream because they liked this nuna, right? So why were they happy when she died? Shouldn't they all be grieving together? Was he the only one who wanted her to play well?
"You only farmed bot and now the top half of the map is cooked?"
The game had suddenly swung in their favor, and Yu Dahye — who had been wearing a grim face — lit up with a triumphant look.
The game was going well and the streamer was smiling — yet chat was getting mad. Jimin couldn't make sense of it, but Dahye didn't seem to care in the slightest.
"Ah…"
On impulse he started digging through her channel info. Recorded videos were fine, but when did she go live?
It didn't take long. Evenings, luckily. At least during break…
"Right. I dropped out."
For a moment Jimin had completely forgotten what had happened that day. Whether she streamed in the morning or at night had nothing to do with him at all. A faint melancholy settled over him — and then:
"Bot carry that survived the gank!"
On screen, Dahye's bright, beaming face filled the frame in a close-up.
"Haa…"
At the same time Jimin clapped both hands over his face again.
Cute cute cute.
Whatever happened to that sulky look from earlier? Now she was puffing up with pride. Was a woman older than him even allowed to be this adorable?
It wasn't as if there had been no pretty girls at school. But the woman inside his phone existed on an entirely different plane. Hours of staring at her face and he still wasn't tired of it.
"Guys, I won because I played well, so type something nice in chat."
Did she play badly?
Jimin didn't have much experience yet, but he didn't think Dahye had played that poorly. Even through a beginner's eyes, had she made any real mistakes? The enemy ADC hadn't looked especially good either.
"When she goes live, I should type in chat too."
He still didn't understand why everyone wrote such mean things. Didn't that hurt her feelings? On stream day he would show up and cheer as hard as he could.
"…"
The remaining videos dwindled. The clock already pointed past one. His mother was surely long asleep by now.
Jimin's eyes drifted to the YouTube comments under the video. Plenty of jargon he couldn't parse, but it was cleaner than live chat. Slowly, he began to leave a comment of his own.
He typed a long comment straight from whatever came into his head, half-hoping she might actually read it.
"…"
Today had been a strange day. Too much had happened to fit inside a single day; too many feelings had come and gone. When was the last time a day had stretched out this long?
Terribly sad, then a little lighter, then good, then sad again.
He'd been staring at his phone on impulse, and now that he'd turned off the light, quiet seeped into his chest.
"Haa…"
No matter how he turned it over, dropping out was not a pleasant experience. It felt like a swamp whose grip on his ankles he couldn't even begin to measure. The hardest thing of all was his mother's grieving face. Just imagining it left him with no answer, so he turned his head to the side and lay down. A miserable reality where the only option seemed to be looking away.
"…"
SOL. Static crackle.
And yet, at the same time, joy had arrived with it.
Jimin, you're insanely good.
I think you've got talent for SOL.
His friends were happy for him. They recognized him.
We won! We won!
She existed only inside his phone, but the pure joy on her face — he found himself smiling like an idiot.
Maybe he was being a little childish. Dropping out of school one day and falling into a game the same night, watching hours of videos of a woman he'd never met.
"Ah…"
If you don't know what you like, just keep focusing on whatever sparks even a little interest. And people like what they're good at — so if something seems like you're even a little bit good at it, keep working at it.
Teacher.
The words his teacher had spoken that day rose to the surface. Something he was good at. Something he liked. At least for Jimin right now, the answer wasn't hard to give.
"Whoa — when did you get here?"
Lee Jonghyun and Yoon Sangcheol of Daesang High's second year arrived at a franchise café famous for being cheap.
"Not long ago."
Jimin — who had dropped out just yesterday and had already been sitting there for fifteen minutes — answered.
"Yuseok and Jaeyeong had other plans."
"Ah…"
Jonghyun filled in the whereabouts of the two friends who hadn't made it.
"So what did you want to talk about?"
"Well…"
Jimin carefully explained to Jonghyun and Sangcheol.
"That's it?"
"Huh?"
Jonghyun asked, puzzled by the answer. Jimin nodded.
"Is that weird?"
"No, not weird — you just said it so seriously all of a sudden."
"I thought something actually happened."
Sangcheol piled on after Jonghyun, equally surprised. Was deciding to properly learn SOL and climb solo queue really that strange?
"Yeah, if you're gonna play, better do it right."
"Ah, but if you play SOL just to climb, it ruins your personality. Jimin's not gonna go dark on us, is he?"
Sangcheol — currently Gold, but convinced his pure skill was Emerald at minimum — snickered as he said it.
"How high do you want to climb?"
"Me? Up to Diamond."
"What?"
Once again both friends looked startled.
"Why the sudden fixation on Diamond?"
"You trying to go higher than Jonghyun here?"
"Is that it?"
"No! No!"
Jimin waved both hands in frantic denial. Of course he couldn't say he wanted to run into a certain girl streamer in-game. At his age, admitting that the motive for all this effort was a pretty woman's attention was still too embarrassing. Sangcheol already knew about Dahye-nuna — and because he knew, it was even harder to say.
"Like Sangcheol said, climbing isn't easy. Just being good isn't enough."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Ah… how much of this do I even need to explain?"
"You'll climb a lot eventually if you keep at it, Jimin, but doing it fast is another story. Lots of people play SOL these days."
"I see."
I should've tried this sooner.
Jimin briefly forgot the past in which he'd never had the headspace to fall properly into SOL. Right now, though, Summoners of Legends was enjoying the greatest golden age in its history — and the player base was huge with it.
A few years earlier, the greatest superstar Maker had retired. Plenty of people had declared Season 17 the death of SOL, but things hadn't gone the way they predicted. The reason was the studio behind the game, Lion Games — or, in crude terms, their "god-tier management." Knowing what to cut and what to keep, lowering the barrier to entry without forgetting the game's soul: that delicate course correction had made SOL great all over again. Some Korean players joked that if Lion Games had been an IT company instead of a game studio, they might already be the greatest company on earth.
"Especially our server — best in the world. And the pro scene is still the strongest."
"Strongest? We haven't won Worlds two years running. And last MSL we got stomped by China in the finals."
"Hey, SCK is still the first division."
Sangcheol bristled at Jonghyun's dry cynicism. After surrendering the Worlds title to China's SPL two years in a row, SCK no longer had quite enough to confidently call itself the strongest league in the world — at least not at Worlds.
"And last year you guys lost to a Japanese team, not even China?"
"Japan isn't the old Japan."
The most shocking moment of last Worlds hadn't been China's second straight title — it had been Maehwa Life Esports, Korea's SCK first seed, getting eliminated in the quarterfinals by Japan's Sensekai Gaming. A day of enormous glory for Japan's SOL league, SCJ. Japan had already been building popularity around streamers for years; that match lit a full SOL boom on fire. For an SCK that failed to even send a team to the Worlds finals, it had been the ultimate humiliation.
"Anyway, Japan or China, most of the players who actually perform over there are Korean."
"That's always been true, so it doesn't mean anything."
"…"
Sluuuurp.
Jimin just quietly drank his two-thousand-won coffee, fascinated by the conversation.
"Jimin, let's just hit a PC bang first."
"Huh?"
Seeing was better than hearing a hundred times. Jimin wanted to dig into SOL for real — and from the perspective of future SOL addicts, the only thing left was to show him with action.
"If you want to climb, you should at least be able to play three roles."
"Ah…"
"Don't rush it. Three or four champs per role is plenty for now."
"Yeah. Even in Diamond plenty of people only play one or two. Boring as hell, but still."
"Got it."
"First, try a one-on-one with me."
"With Jonghyun?"
"Yeah."
Jonghyun's good, though…
Jimin scratched his head. Among their friends, Jonghyun was the best SOL player by far.
Still.
At the same time, his rank was about the same as Yu Dahye's. Motivation surged through Jimin all at once.
"Jayce is perfect to learn first."
"Jayce?"
"Yeah. Ever played him?"
"No, never…"
"It's fine. He's hard, but you'll pick him up fast."
Jonghyun glanced at the flustered Jimin. Jayce was a champion who didn't get hard-countered by matchups, and at the same time a champ whose performance swung wildly depending on the pilot's skill.
This should suit him.
For someone born with mechanics like Jimin, Jonghyun was sure it would fit.
"Same champ for both of us?"
"Yeah. Let's do a mirror match."
Jimin skimmed Jayce on the wiki for a short stretch, practiced the skills in the training mode, and then it was time — a one-on-one. Both Jimin and Jonghyun locked in Jayce.
Sangcheol had been about to watch some streams, but with all three of them there he chose his conscience instead.
Jonghyun always loved first-picking Jayce, didn't he?
Sangcheol watched their duel carefully. A mid main who was also solid on top and ADC, Jonghyun preferred first-picking Jayce in both top and mid. Even to a friend, his mastery looked considerable. Of course, one of the reasons for that mastery — that Sangcheol himself always insisted on playing full-AP carry junglers — never crossed his mind.
"Huh?"
"…"
At first Jonghyun was clearly ahead, and Sangcheol thought, well, of course. But as the minutes ticked by, Jonghyun's brow started to furrow deeper and deeper.
Was Jimin really playing Jayce for the first time?