The Wall
Giving up comes easier the farther you are from your goal.
For me, that was a normal life.
The moment I lost an eye and had a foot amputated, I already thought, Ah. That's it. My life is finished.
If I'd never had those things to begin with, I might have adapted. If I'd been born a girl from the start, Father and Mother might never have treated me the way they did. But when something you once had is taken away, disappointment and despair come with it.
Grandmaster tier felt the same way.
If I'd never had the skill to reach it at all, I would have quit long ago. I would have stayed in the lower ranks, blaming my team every day and playing purely for fun. But as I kept going, my LP climbed. Before I knew it, I'd scraped together the bare minimum qualifications to become a Grandmaster—and that made quitting so much harder. It made me cling that much tighter.
"Ah. Sorry—I was too focused on the game. I'll keep an eye on chat too."
Loss. Win. Loss. Win. Loss. Loss. Win. Win. Win. Loss. Win. Win. Loss. Loss. Win. Win. Win. Win……
By win rate alone, I was clearing sixty percent. But ever since the one time I'd cracked Master 400 LP, my score had been sliding right back down, stuck in the same place.
If I'd never reached that number, maybe it wouldn't have mattered. But failing to take even one more step past it left me feeling like my blood was drying up in my veins.
Was getting there just luck?
What am I doing wrong?
What exactly am I missing?
The problem was that I already knew the answer.
Even outside the pro scene, you start running into players who make you feel like you've slammed into a massive wall. People who have carved out their own path in this merciless top lane. The truly feral ones you almost never met in Diamond or Master—and right now, those were the only top-laners I kept getting matched against.
The tightrope act of charging in with a blade no longer worked. I could trade evenly, dance that razor-edge blade waltz with my opponent—and that was all. I couldn't dominate lane anymore.
So once laning ended, I never seized the initiative in side-lane play. My decisions got dictated by my teammates' movements, and wins and losses hinged on whether I got paired with someone who knew how to use me.
Is this my ceiling?
From here on, do I just have to pray for team luck every game?
That kind of doubt had started to creep in.
In every fight before this—every loss—I'd always been able to review what I could have done differently to win. I'd compiled that data for so long that my play had grown steadily sharper.
But now……
Even if I leveraged champion matchups to seize the high ground, that was as far as it went. The moment my teammates fell behind in skill, the gap got filled right back in.
How am I supposed to climb over this wall?
I'd been so lost that I'd tried tank champions, tried playing around my team—but maybe because none of it was what I'd always done, the results weren't great either. No matter how many times I turned it over in my head, I couldn't get even a glimmer of what I needed to play better. That was what made me so restless.
I feel like I've done everything I can.
What did I miss?
……Maybe I'm overthinking it?
But my laning had always been built on pure calculation. The data I'd stacked up countless times since Silver. Spacing, damage math—the kind of numbers that never show up if you don't dig for them. I'd grown by devouring players who charged in on nothing but baseless confidence, the ones who thought, Yeah, I can take this fight.
And now that's all useless?
……Except the gamers I was facing now had stacked that same data. They knew it, and they never gave you an opening when the angle was bad. They'd put in just as much experience as I had. If I could see a line, they almost certainly knew it in their heads—or felt it in their guts.
So I'd been thinking about it wrong.
It wasn't about walking into a fight only when the math said I'd win. It was about fighting—and forcibly creating the angle where I win.
People's movements weren't readable anymore. Was the other lane already backing them up from behind? Or was it a bluff? Without information, I started shrinking back. Was this the moment to throw a gamble, or not?
Until now, I'd simply avoided the fight in situations like that. Even that, I had to learn to win through combat.
To take down beasts who had carved out territories of their own, I couldn't keep using my head. I had to become a beast like them.
I wasn't the hunter anymore. Unless I shed my skin and became a higher predator than they were, I couldn't grow past this point.
So I willingly tore my old playstyle apart.
It wouldn't be as dramatic as a hawk shattering its own beak, breaking its talons, and plucking out its feathers—but habits don't rewrite themselves overnight. It was going to be a miserable road. I might eat a string of losses just from the awkwardness of it.
But if I wanted to look higher, tearing my play apart and rebuilding it was the reality I had to face.
So I kept queueing.
With a slightly different heart than before.
The first game, of course, I lost. One match wasn't nearly enough to stack experience or digest what I was learning. Broken beaks and talons don't grow back that fast.
Ah—actually, I heard hawks don't even do any of that and get along just fine. But what did that matter to me? I was the one who had to shed my skin and grow.
Next game.
Reflecting that I'd dragged the previous one out too long, I played more aggressively. Naturally, the enemy jungler used that against me, ganked with their top-laner, ate me alive, and closed out the win.
The viewers must have noticed my play didn't look like usual, because the chat filled almost immediately with worried messages. But I felt like I was finally starting to get a feel for it, and I didn't want to stop here.
I'd lost this game, sure—but there's that famous line, isn't there? Kneeling now is just so you can build momentum.
If all I'd wanted was to stamp Grandmaster on my profile, I wouldn't have queued again. But my goal was to get better at the game. Losses like these were something I had to accept.
Even if it burned, it was nothing compared to getting beaten in real life. LP was something I could recover anytime as long as I had the skill. Growing that skill came first.
Three losses. Four.
Under the streak, the LP I'd barely scraped up to the Grandmaster floor had slid all the way down to 300. A full hundred points farther away.
But on the flip side, I was starting to feel the shape of it—so I was completely calm.
"I'll drink when I hit 500."
Mission: Hit 500 LP → drinks and snack money on me
The viewers seemed to take it for empty bravado; their reactions were still a mix of skepticism and concern. Well—once I proved I was right, their attitudes would change on their own, wouldn't they?
"I really feel like all I ever do is explanation streams. Do I have to spend my whole life proving myself?"
And then I did it.
I won, clawed through, won again, won again—and finally strung together a five-game win streak.
Five in a row wasn't rare for me even before, so the chat didn't make that big a fuss. Honestly, with decent team luck you could pull that off anytime.
And this was the branching point.
Whether it was the shift in mindset, or whether I'd simply stacked enough experience to grow—even when I faced opponents whose movements I couldn't read, it no longer felt like a towering wall.
People say top lane is a battle of momentum, don't they? Once I stopped flinching and just engaged, confidence that I could win started coming back. And once I'd completed that molt, I could keep doing what I'd always done.
The kind of top-lane tyranny people call playing like a menace. Smash the first turret and refuse to rotate to your team. Come get me if you want—you spend the tempo dealing with me. I will not take the loss.
The moment the conditions I needed to win a game fell into place, the wall at 400 LP crumbled.