Let's Duo
After I picked off one of their healers, the rest of the match was a straight-up highway. The enemy team, blindsided by the sudden pick, started scrambling in a panic, and all the while our payload just kept rolling forward.
From their side, they had no choice but to get close and stop the cart, so sitting back wasn't an option — which meant a team fight was inevitable. Normally, the smart play would've been to wait for the healer I'd cut down to respawn and regroup. But this was Bronze. They didn't care about any of that. They just charged straight at us.
Naturally, I joined the fight. In a five-on-four, there was no world where the team with the numbers lost. And once I hopped in and started pumping out the main damage, the kill feed turned into a shrine to my name.
The second our teams collided, I carved through several of them with Swift Strike, flung a volley of shuriken to secure a kill, and the instant the cooldown reset, I dashed in again for another burst. I swept their whole team.
And just like that, once I started racking up an absurd kill feed, the McCree who'd been calling me a Genji one-trick went very, very quiet. Of course he did. All of a sudden I looked like I was carrying. One glance at his username told you he was desperate to crawl out of Bronze — no way he wanted to get kicked off my bus.
I left my team to push the payload and went ahead on my own again, found their Mercy wandering around lost, and casually dove her for another kill. In the meantime, our team leisurely rolled the cart into the first checkpoint. The enemy must have decided they couldn't just let themselves get highway'd, because they all grouped up and piled in for a second fight — but right before it started, I picked their healer again. They couldn't hold. They crumbled.
Our ultimates were about to come up, so I'd given the Zarya a heads-up in advance. A mic would've been ideal for this kind of thing, but apparently this world's me didn't use one — there wasn't even a headset in the house. I'd already typed out the plan, though, so all I had to do was follow up when the time came.
Zarya's ultimate fired a Graviton Surge that sucked the enemy team into one spot and locked them down. Even a sloppy throw would gather at least two people. There were always players who got greedy trying to catch all five and ended up wasting the ult entirely, which was why I'd told them to just throw it when they saw an angle. I had to trust they'd listen.
Sure enough, the moment the next fight broke out, the Zarya did exactly what I'd asked — dumped the ult the second the angle looked decent. And it was a jackpot. All five of them, bundled up in one neat little package. An angle like that, and I was supposed to just sit there?
I popped Genji's Dragonblade on the spot, swapping my basic attack from shuriken to a sweeping sword, and carved through the entire clump. One slash, a Swift Strike to cancel the animation, another slash — anyone with a standard 200 HP bar died in a single combo. The only one left was their Reinhardt, who melted under our team's focused fire before becoming the final flourish of my blade.
Even without my own ultimate, the rest of the team had theirs, and I kept opening every fight by cutting down their healer. The enemy never even managed to properly stop our payload. They handed us the last checkpoint without a fight.
Four minutes thirty left on the clock... yeah, this one was in the bag. And if you were going to win anyway, you might as well talk a little trash.
The McCree who'd called me a one-trick at the start and flamed me for pushing ahead had gone completely silent somewhere along the way. I gave the knife a little twist.
Heh. Tucked his tail all on his own. Appreciate it~
Now it was our turn to keep their payload from reaching the checkpoint. Honestly, there was no real reason to stay on Genji from the defense side, but it had been so long since I'd gotten to fly around like this that I queued up on him anyway. And the other team, the same one we'd just highway'd on attack, tried their hardest to break through...
What were they supposed to do? I was here.
Every time they tried to push up, I picked off their healer first, so a real team fight never even happened. Eventually the healers stopped healing altogether and just focused me down the second I came into view. I must have been living rent-free in their heads. Which, frankly, was perfect.
If the healers weren't healing, how were the tanks and DPS up front supposed to survive our damage? And even if they were aiming at me — did they really think I was going to stand there and eat it?
Bronze healers who couldn't even land their shots on me as I danced around watched their own team collapse, then handed me the kill themselves.
And just like that, my first match in the gender-reversed world came to a close with a very satisfying win.
When the match ended, the Play of the Game was mine, obviously. I'd gone a full massacre without a single death — of course it was. The replay showed that Zarya ult combo where I'd carved through their entire team, and I sat back and enjoyed the show. Whew~ no idea who's playing, but they're slicing people up.
The POTG wrapped, the screen flipped back to the waiting room, and I was just about to queue another ranked game when a whisper popped up.
Huh? A whisper from that McCree. Guess they had something to say.
Called me a Genji one-trick right off the bat, and now that they'd seen me play they wanted to duo? It was a little ridiculous — but watching them flip to full deference that fast was pretty funny too.
That said, being called sis felt a little weird. Back in my original world, people usually just said bro. I guessed over here there were way more women playing games, so sis was the default?
I started to type that I was a guy, so call me bro — then I stopped. Wait. Did I even need to tell them I was a guy?
Something about that sounded like a hassle...
In the world I'd come from, the second a girl mentioned she played Overmatch, thirsty creeps would latch on and start sexually harassing her in chat or over the mic. I doubted this world was any different — except here, men would be the ones on the receiving end. Even I wasn't thrilled about the idea of getting sexually heckled, so pretending to be a girl was the smarter play. Not having a mic might have actually been a blessing. If I'd had one, I probably would've started calling shots out loud without thinking.
Which left the actual question: did I duo with this person or not?
Thinking back on the last match, if I had to judge whether they were actually bad... honestly, they weren't. Not more, not less — they did exactly one person's job. Aim wasn't terrible, but they kept dying because they couldn't hold a position. That might sound like a decent player. It wasn't. In a solo game you'd get by just fine playing like that, but Overmatch was a five-person team game, which meant if all you could do was your own one-fifth, you were finished the second someone on your team couldn't even manage that.
As a certain anime sage once put it:
Which was exactly why doing your one-fifth wasn't enough to climb. You needed to be better than that. The reason this person was stuck in Bronze was probably that they were a DPS who didn't know how to carry — meaning they were heavily at the mercy of whoever got queued with them.
Still, queuing with someone who could at least do their job was a lot less stressful than rolling the dice on a random troll. Might as well try a duo.
Not like they'd ever see a guy coming.
"Please... please play with me, sis~~~"
I clasped both hands together and begged with everything I had. When I'd first looked up their match history, they looked so bad I wasn't sure they were even human — a complete bot. Then we got into the game and they started stomping the lobby so hard I had to check if this was even the same person. I almost wondered if they were a booster.
But none of that mattered right now. Because I had a mission sitting in the top right corner of my screen, and I had to clear it.
Reach Silver today
Reward: $100
Some girl who'd written me off as never making Silver had put this up like it was a safe investment. "Today" only had about two hours left on it. Under any other circumstances this mission would've been impossible — but if I duo'd with that player, I had a feeling I could actually do it. That was why the second the match ended, I'd whispered that sis and started begging.
"Shut up! The mission doesn't say I can't duo, so it doesn't matter!"
Okay, fine, my conscience twinged a little. Whoever posted that mission was probably talking about climbing in solo queue. But who had principles when there was money on the line? All that mattered was clearing it, one way or another. And if I could squeeze some content out of playing with someone like this, even better.
"Ah, please, sis... duo with me~~~!"
Maybe the prayer actually got through.
They said yes!
Nice!
With someone like that, as long as I didn't int my brains out, hitting Silver in two hours didn't feel impossible at all.
The pro sis went quiet, probably looking up my stream — and then, right in that lull, my chat suddenly exploded.
Uh... I was about to ask what they were on about, and then I realized they were talking about that sis's username. Not a name a guy would ever pick. I'd just been calling them a master — I didn't think "master" would actually be in the username.
Who cared what someone's username was. All I needed to do was hop on this bus and cash in the mission!
And that pro sis's carry potential blew every expectation I had right out of the water.