Tournament Practice Period (7)
Gulp.
Park Jimin just sat there and listened in silence.
A crying woman's voice, and another woman's voice layered over it.
Even the streamer he was watching right now—his own team captain—wasn't saying a word.
Everyone took a turn speaking around the girl who was crying. Even in that short stretch of time, you could feel how solidly their bond had been forged.
What do I do.
Jimin had no idea how he was supposed to handle this. Something similar had happened before—when Yu Dahye got angry, it had been a mess of misunderstanding tangled up with his own mistakes. This time, though…… he had provided the spark, but he hadn't done anything wrong. If anything, there was nothing more he could have done.
Back then the fear that Dahye might end up hating him had been crushing. Right now, that wasn't the case.
Hwata had just found a roundabout way of saying he didn't really know him that well.
Either way, pushing the scrim further in this state was out of the question. Team captains Hirose Haruka and Render, along with coaches Oryx and Hwata, would meet and figure out how to move forward. With streamers this big gathered on Jijik, glossing over something this size was simply impossible.
When a bunch of streamers got together, a two-on-two conversation was never going to stay secret. Jimin decided to keep listening.
"……"
It wrapped up earlier than he expected.
For now, the scrim would resume. Before they started, every participating streamer would issue a firm warning on their own broadcasts: cut the hate chat. No trash-talking other streamers, no excessive abuse. Everyone already knew that, of course—but cooling down an overheated atmosphere came first.
"Ah……"
Jimin went quiet, feeling like he was the reason a problem had blown up. His teammates, though, were still closer to a joking mood than anything else.
Render spoke up.
Diyul—the opposing top laner—joined their Discord.
There hadn't been any formal agreement, but Diyul had decided to come into Render's team room and apologize. Whatever else was true, failing to manage her own emotions was a serious mistake for a professional streamer—at least, that was how she saw it.
Render's team was still laughing.
"Huh? Y-yes. Yes."
Jimin stammered. A grown woman's voice like a songbird—something he almost never heard at school. He still wasn't used to it.
"Thank you."
"Me?"
Jimin couldn't think of a single thing to say. He couldn't tell if she was joking or serious.
"Yes. Understood."
"It's nothing."
"……"
Crying one second, laughing the next. From where Jimin was sitting, female streamers seemed to have truly spectacular mood swings as a general rule.
Diyul left. Giving your all in a game wasn't a crime—but because she had cried, the whole situation had somehow twisted into one where he felt faintly at fault. The last thing she had done was apologize to Jimin.
"When she asked me to teach her, that was a joke, right?"
Park Solmi, who actually knew her, translated the dialect of Diyul-speak for him.
"Ah……"
"Sorry?"
Hwata, who hadn't said a word until now, cut in.
"……"
Him teaching someone? Jimin couldn't even picture it. Honestly, just imagining it made him feel awkward. Still—Hwata wasn't the type to say meaningless things. At least not when it came to SOL.
Captain and coach had split opinions.
"I'm fine with it."
When coach and captain disagreed, the coach took priority. And Render trusted Hwata's judgment quite a bit—though when it came to anything involving Jimin, he still had a few lingering questions.
"Yes."
The teammates were a little skeptical too—but more than anything, they trusted Jimin's carry power. This was a kid who always found a way to surprise them. And besides, this was practice. Boldness was part of the point.
After all the twists and turns, Render's team and Hirose Haruka's team locked into scrim set three—the set that would decide the series.
Top: Akali vs. Ornn.
Jungle: Graves vs. Lee Sin.
Mid: Neeko vs. Ahri.
Bot: Abelius–Lulu vs. Lucian–Nami.
Neither side's support was comfortable on tank-style picks, so the bot lane options were limited.
"……"
Unlike sets one and two, the opposing top laner had locked in a tank. But Akali was a champion with real strength from laning phase on. As the carry lane, Jimin aggressively looked for trades.
Confidence and caution from the bot duo. Abelius and Lulu took the early trade advantage and got another strong start.
Park Solmi on Neeko was getting shoved in by the enemy Ahri. Even if Neeko was decent into early Ahri, the skill-shot versus targeting skill duel still exposed the tier gap.
Ahri and Lee Sin linked up, and Neeko went down.
Neeko died, and Graves sprinted in to start vacuuming up the mid wave.
"……"
Up in top lane, Jimin's eyes flashed for a split second.
Ornn's wall-slam missed. A free window opened for Akali to unload without fear. Ornn's health plunged early, and Akali earned the absolute right to dictate the lane.
Shuriken that landed like targeted skillshots. A shroud unfurled at the perfect moment. He hadn't faced that many champions yet, but with Ornn's stock so high as a tank in recent high-tier games, he'd actually piled up a lot of data on him.
"Got it."
The enemy jungler was visible. Jimin's body was already leaning forward—but he'd hit six, and he was confident he wouldn't die.
Ornn's horn blast rang out. Jimin dodged the ultimate, and when Lee Sin closed in, he used his own ultimate to peel back out.
So close.
If Lee Sin hadn't shown up, Jimin was certain he could have forced a solo kill within a minute. Was that the play they were going for—not to kill him, but to stop Ornn from dying and the entire top-side balance from collapsing?
"……"
You have to play the way the opponent hates. The depth in what Hwata had told him seemed endless.
A jungle skirmish over the grubs. The Lee Sin in a Master jungler's hands moved with a sharpness that was anything but ordinary.
Both tops rotated down. Ornn's horn blared again.
Graves miscalculated the damage and died to Ornn and Lee Sin.
Both mids cleared their waves and started moving. Neeko was a little late.
"……"
But the enemy Ornn and Lee Sin weren't in clean condition either—they'd burned resources melting Graves so fast.
Movement and skillshots that almost seemed to laugh at the opponent's kit.
For how light Akali's body felt, her damage was brutal.
"Got it."
Ahri was almost there, and Jimin had burned every escape tool he had. He chose Baron pit as his exit. Shuriken Flip was still on cooldown. Ahri flung every skill she had to try and pin him down—but Akali danced through every skillshot. The moment Shuriken Flip came back up, he vaulted the wall and was gone.
If Ahri still had her ultimate, he would have died. She'd used it earlier shoving Neeko under tower.
"Hoo……"
He'd focused hard enough to dodge everything, but Jimin felt like he'd just aged ten years.
Laning phase ended and the mid-lane standoff began. Lucian and Nami stepped a little too far forward for a second—and the bot duo snagged a duo kill off them.
Yapang's roar—she was playing very well this game.
With both top and bot completely smothered, the game got easier by the minute. Neeko could start leaning into her utility, and Graves wasn't getting his growth choked out even against a strong enemy mid.
Akali was still shredding Ornn on the side lane. Apparently they couldn't watch it anymore—the matchup swapped to Ahri.
While his teammates were focused elsewhere, Jimin solo-killed Ahri in front of the Tier 2 tower.
"I'll keep pushing."
Teamfights were fine, but Jimin still preferred the one-on-one geometry of a side lane.
From mid-game on, every objective went one way.
The broken balance only sank deeper. Akali took Ahri again on the side, and her level in this game pulled absurdly far ahead of everyone else.
A teamfight that could flip the fourth dragon. The enemy dove Graves, but he didn't melt fast.
Neeko's flash ultimate. Abelius's Moonlight Vigil, then the forward march. It was a perfect teamfight script.
But the enemy wasn't a scarecrow, so it didn't land perfectly clean. The Lee Sin darting all over the place was the most annoying piece on the board.
Render said it and immediately locked back in.
A few scrapes from Akali and Lucian was gone. Even with Nami stuck to his side, there were simply too many champions that needed saving. Once the ADC was dead, even the slippery ones couldn't stop the one-sided slaughter.
Akali took a double. Abelius closed it out with a triple and owned the fight.
Graves had been half-dead going into the fight and got knocked out early, but he was still alive—so taking the big objectives was easy.
Fourth dragon. Then Baron. The game was already locked.
What unfolded at the end was pure Akali showtime.
"No, it's fine!"
Jimin wasn't particularly interested in pentas.
Three games, three wins—a perfect scrim day. A team nobody had even thought of as a contender had just become the storm of the scrims.
"Even so, you still need a promised start time."
Dahye turned on her stream with a laugh. As always, she was later than her usual start time. But it had become so thoroughly routine that even her regulars didn't bother flaming her for it. Now it was just material for jokes.
"Huh? What are you talking about."
Making someone cry was one thing—but another?
Dahye scrolled slowly through chat. People were telling her to check her café post.
"Hmm……"
Content that had gone up on the Jijik community—copy-pasted straight into her café.
"Ugh, see, this is why you people need to stop flaming. If someone's a little lower in tier you should cut them some slack."
Dahye clicked her tongue. She couldn't understand how people could curse someone half to death just because they had a rough game.
"Ah, but."
Dahye suddenly snorted a little laugh.
"Jimin must've been pretty shocked."
Knowing the Jimin she knew—if he watched a female streamer he'd just demolished start crying, he would have been completely flustered. Just picturing that face made her want to laugh.
It was an event drawing a lot of attention. Dahye had name recognition on Jijik, and she was a pretty solid player herself—so she was more than capable of doing it. Of course, she'd never really done casting before.
"……Should I?"
Somehow, that actually sounded fun.