Huh? A Snipe?
Huh? A snipe?
He had hammered the join button until his fingers ached and finally forced his way into the room—only for that to be the first thing he saw.
"You're Diamond 3?"
Streamer Masok stared at the tier tag stuck beside Woniwoni>.< and let the doubt show.
Tail of the ladder or not, he himself was a proper Challenger. The longer he sat with it, the harder it became not to wonder whether the viewer who had just donated him into this lobby was, in fact, a troll.
He had no interest in being remembered as the tone-deaf Challenger who raided a fellow streamer mid–win-streak content.
"Really? Tsk. Fine, I'll look."
As if you could ever take a chat at its word. He pulled up the ranked record himself.
Current Tier — Diamond 3 · 62 LP
Season Peak — Diamond 3
Ranked Games — 29 matches · 27W 2L (89.7% WR)
MVP — 24
Win Streak — Current 8 / Best 13
Avg Kills — 24.1
Avg Deaths — 6.6
Avg Assists — 3.8
Overall KDA — 4.21
Sniper Rifle — 88%(372K / 51D)
Assault Rifle — 69.1%(221K / 97D)
Pistol · Grenade · · ·
"Oh… what the hell? These numbers are straight-up Challenger force…?"
He said it flatly, but he flinched all the same.
Even when I was boosting my smurf, I never put up numbers like this…
Granted, he hadn't been sweating those games, so it wasn't a perfect comparison. Still—this was a terrifying record. No two ways about it.
"Huh? Taeyeon-hyung?"
That hyung wouldn't get farmed by some Diamond or Master.
"Alright. So you're actually good."
While they waited in queue, the chat and viewer count began to climb. Masok's stream was the kind of quiet, skill-focused broadcast where a single message every minute was average—so this was anything but normal.
He didn't do community drama and didn't care about the scene at large, so he'd written Woniwoni off as just another popular streamer.
He only wanted to focus on the 1v1. Chat refused to leave him alone.
"A girl…? For real?"
Apparently there was still room left to be surprised. Honestly, more than anything else, the gender was the part that got him.
Ah. I really cannot lose this one.
The thought that he'd been debating going easy on her now felt ridiculous. Forget losing—even a fifty-fifty series would hit his image harder than hers.
Masok decided then and there: he would rather be the guy who beat a girl than the guy who got beaten by one.
A rare crowd had shown up, and a gamer's pride was on the line. He took hold of his keyboard with something close to reverence.
The moment the answer landed, the map swapped to the dedicated 1v1 arena—Dead Line—and the match started at once.
Dead Line was a classic 1v1 map, the traditional stage snipers used when pride was on the table. And as it happened, it was the map Masok trusted most.
I've played this place more times than I can count.
Whenever trash talk flared in ranked or guild scrims, this was where he dragged people. He warmed up on it constantly, too.
(Dead Line map)
A faint premonition of victory settled over him as he pressed Tab.
Woniwoni's weapon, just as the chat had said, was the Winchester (Win34). Charming gun—no argument—but in high-elo queues he had never seen one, for the simple reason that it was far less practical than the Etap (AWL). Down in the lower tiers, people ran it for love or for style points.
And in a pure sniper duel? Don't even start.
True to streamer form, Masok gave chat a quick primer on the matchup.
"If you cancel the Winchester's reload, yeah, you can shoot faster. That's true. But the timing has to be razor-sharp. Miss the window and you're actually slower."
It was a fraction of a second—under a full second by feel. Closer to half a second, maybe.
"Plus this is a sniper map, so the quick-reload advantage barely matters. At best you get one shot off and hold first. But up in celestial elo, holding angle isn't automatically better, so even that edge basically disappears."
Was it because chat was this lively for once? He felt a little swell of pride.
"First principles of a sniper 1v1: knife check. You use the knife because it's the fastest move speed in the game."
He kept talking in that easy lecture cadence, pretending he still had room to spare.
"Hug the wall and peek just enough to show an arm, then pull back—or commit to a long dash and cross all the way to the far wall. The point is to read their position and bait a shot."
Talking had made him a beat late on the rotate, so Woniwoni would already be holding. Safest play: a short knife check, just the arm.
In high elo there are psychos who react-click the long peeks, so…
Better keep it tight. In and out.
"So, like this—"
He faced the enemy side, slid out sideways—then started to pull back.
BAAANG—!!
Woniwoni>.<︻デ═一MasokSNiper
"What—!"
It had barely been a sliver of a peek, and he still ate the bullet from Woniwoni's hold.
Chat buzzed, but Masok's eyes never went there.
A prefire?
Snipers did that all the time—holding an angle, then throwing a predictive shot as they repositioned. Bad luck. The timing could have just lined up.
But if that had been a reaction…
That's animal-level. Or did I mess up? Maybe I peeked a little long.
His words dried up. The second round loaded, and he sprinted immediately—he would take mid first and hold.
Luckily the other side didn't force a frontal open, so he claimed the spot cleanly.
"Sssseuuup…"
Every nerve wound tight, he settled his scope on the wall face Woniwoni would come from.
Then something poked out past the edge—
Masok's finger almost flinched the mouse on pure reflex. He barely stopped himself.
A barrel?
Not a knife check. The long snout of a sniper rifle.
Out—in. Out—in. On loop.
Was this a joke?
He tried to ignore it and haul his focus back up, but—
Ah, damn it, should I just shoot?
Every so often the barrel overextended a fraction, and the right hand gripping the body of the gun came into view. If he glued his crosshair to the wall, he felt certain he could clip it.
In the end he couldn't take it. He pressed his aim even tighter to the wall, and the next time the barrel looked long—
Bang—!
The round punched the wall behind the hand instead. Woniwoni burst out in the same breath and stole the angle.
"Ugh. Come on."
I should have held. You idiot.
At this point, credit where it was due: the opponent who had taunted him with a method he had never even heard of had simply played it better. Now he was the one who had to break the hold.
Masok's character froze. Two rounds in a row had already left the taste of a lost fight in his mouth.
How do I peek this time?
The first-round death still refused to make sense, and his brain only spun slower for it. Knife check again? What if that really had been a reaction? Was there another option? A straight duel? Just micro-peek to bait the shot? Commit to a long jump peek?
In the space of a heartbeat he was juggling half a dozen choices—when
tap.
"Huh?"
On a 1v1 sniper map, footsteps you almost never heard—
step— step— step— stomstomstomstom—!
The sound swelled. He whipped his barrel toward the entrance, but that same annoying long muzzle poked out first.
BAAANG—!
Woniwoni>.<︻デ═一MasokSNiper
"What…! A sniper rushing—"
He didn't finish the sentence. It would have looked ugly.
He just stared up at the pink rabbit character spinning the Winchester in silence over his corpse. Even the death effect was something else.
"You were an excellent (target)!!"
"How do you even put that combo together."
This was pissing him off.
Masok flicked a glance at chat. For focus, the right move was not to look. He knew that, and yet—
Shit. What do I do.
His mental was already cracked. There was no time to recover—round three started cold.
"What…! What is this?"
Woniwoni came sprinting in with a pistol, hopping around in the most unhinged movement he'd ever seen. A couple of pistol shots clipped him down to 40 HP.
This is a sniper map.
Through the long corridor, weaving rooms and the center boxes—he thought maybe she was trying to finish him with the pistol.
Bang-! Bang-! Bang-!
Once the distance closed, she swapped to the Winchester and dumped a rapid fire that was practically pistol-speed. Woniwoni threw prefires and shaved angle after angle.
Bang-! Bang-!
Woniwoni>.<︻デ═一MasokSNiper
"…."
He lost the shot fight clean.
From there Woniwoni kept running the same pattern—aggressively using cover to close distance, then splitting angles. Masok's prefires lucked into two rounds, so he scraped two wins of his own, but
DEFEAT
5 : 2
Final score: 5–2.
A clean loss.
Rather than cling to the 1v1, he typed something friendly. Might as well build a little rapport.
I don't want to do that again…
Why the reaction.
"Huh? Viewer game?"
What was that supposed to mean?
"What kind of catastrophic thing are you saying."
Trying to pin a streamer-sniper frame on him—absolutely not. It was a joke, surely, but Masok typed in a hurry.
Not a sniper-raider, he kept saying. Following the conversation was getting difficult.
Just answer vaguely and leave.
Masok's gut was screaming. Get any more tangled up with this person and something ugly was going to happen. So he tried to extract—
"What does that even—"
He was still trying to parse Woniwoni's words when—
"What the hell is this."
A pack of absolute lunatics poured in all at once.
Woniwoni's chat cleared them out almost immediately—but still.
What on earth is this person raising over there.
It had been one hell of a day.