A Beating Teaches You a Thing or Two

"WHAT THE FUCK!!!!"

Deep inside a sprawling building in Gangnam, a furious shriek shattered the quiet of a private practice booth.

The roar was loud enough to resonate through the entire facility. Hearing the commotion, Jansen, team captain of Alien Tech Gaming, shoved the door wide open and glared inside with unvarnished irritation.

"Bro, shut the fuck up. We are guests here."

ATG was an overseas esports organization headquartered in Europe. With one season behind them and the next still looming on the horizon, the off-season had left them with time to spare, bringing them to South Korea to compete in an exhibition tournament. Crashing at another team's headquarters as courtesy guests made this kind of unhinged howling a blatant breach of etiquette.

"Just—just look at this shit!"

Jansen let out a weary sigh and directed his gaze toward the monitor Grape was furiously pointing at. The solo queue client for Path of Night filled the screen. Glaring back at them from the center were two vivid red words: DEFEAT.

"Yeah, you lost."

Failing to see the point, Jansen replied dryly. To a professional gamer—hell, to anyone who touched competitive games—defeat was an old acquaintance. You won some, you lost some. It was the most fundamental truth of the ladder. Why the hell was this guy having a full-blown epileptic seizure over it?

Granted, Grape had always been prone to violent mood swings, but this particular meltdown seemed absurdly severe, even for him.

"This fucking build!!!"

The next moment, as the post-game summary popped up on the monitor, Jansen squinted.

The first thing that caught his eye was the gruesome scorecard posted by his own teammates, an utter embarrassment considering these were their signature classes.

"I mean... you just inted."

Confronted by such damning numbers, Jansen could hardly be blamed for sighing again.

"Shut—Aaargh!! Not me! Look at the top lane! Look at the Watchtower!!"

Perhaps Jansen's deadpan censure managed to pierce his hysteria, because Grape forced himself to swallow his fury, the veins on his neck bulging as he waved an agitated hand at the upper bracket of the scoreboard.

"Sigh..."

What else could there possibly be to see? Still, as the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠captain, lending an ear to a teammate's grievances was part of the job description. Jansen quietly followed the trembling tip of Grape's finger.

Only then did Jansen's eyes reach the very top row, where the Watchtower lane match-up was logged.

"Wait... what?"

Seeing a Priest slotted into the Watchtower lane was bizarre enough on its own. But what on earth was that flawless KDA, untouched by a single death? Meanwhile, the enemy Berserker who had squared off against this supposed support class had been handed an utterly humiliating 0-6 scorecard.

Sensing that something was profoundly twisted, Jansen yanked the mouse from Grape's hand and pulled up the detailed build tab. Yet all he found were talent masteries and primary-secondary armament pairings whose tactical purpose defied any rational comprehension.

"...Where's the replay."

Suspicion battle with an odd flicker of anticipation within him. Pulling up a chair beside Grape, Jansen watched twenty-odd minutes of replay footage in stony silence.

A Priest's prayers came raining down from an absurdly unnatural distance. Every single time, Grape and his lane partner found their feet glued to the cobblestones by an unseen tether. Trapped as if wading through wet cement, they were picked off and sent back to the fountain again and again. Not once. Not twice. The exact same suffocation had choked them out for the entire duration of the match.

Only now could Jansen begin to comprehend why Grape had suffered a complete mental breakdown.

"Ha."

A dry chuckle slipped past his lips, tangled with disbelief and sheer bewilderment.

"Now you see?!"

Having finally cleared himself of the accusation of simply throwing, Grape sank boldly back into his ergonomic gaming chair, yelling in righteous indignation.

"Is this the standard in Korea now?! Fucking toxic!"

Still half-crazed with lingering rage, Grape glared at the monitor as though he wanted to bite through the glass. Yet Jansen paid him no mind, quietly rewinding and replaying the key sequences over and over.

"Wait here."

"Wait for what?!"

Pausing the screen mid-frame, Jansen spun on his heel and strode briskly toward the corridor.

"Shut the fuck up and wait."

His hurried footsteps echoed through the hall, bound with urgent purpose toward the team's head coach, Hermann.

People often threw around the phrase true calling. A vocation bestowed by heaven itself, tailored perfectly to one's very constitution.

"Mmh."

Perhaps, I mused, being a streamer was my true calling.

To someone like me, who had spent years playing games in absolute isolation, having chatters curiously dissect my every mouse click and decision felt genuinely novel. In other words... it was actually kind of fun.

The Waterway functioned a lot like the jungle from that one league-based MOBA everyone used to play. The main difference was that both sides shared a single line of neutral creep camps. Come to think of it, that league... I had an absolute blast playing it back in the day. Who could have guessed it would go belly-up overnight like that?

Having picked up a kill during the roam, I channeled my recall and started marching right back toward the ramparts while answering the viewer's question in chat. Because I had vacated the lane, the enemy minions had pushed in, leaving my allied Watchtower under siege, but that hardly mattered.

That was precisely why I had gone out of my way to bail out our allied Waterway. Anyone sitting in the server's highest matchmaking tier ought to possess enough game sense to grasp the macro flow. As if on cue to validate my thesis, our team's Rogue utilized his mobility to sprint up from the subterranean canal directly into the Plaza. He vaulted clean over the stone parapet, materializing right behind the opposing ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Knight.

Pincer-attacked from front and back, the enemy Knight was dead where he stood. Not only was it a clean two-on-one, but our duo consisted of a Priest armed exclusively with crowd-control chains and holy prayers, paired with a burst-oriented assassin Rogue.

After securing the kill, resetting the collapsed front line took zero effort. And since the Rogue was already up on the ramparts anyway, he was able to pivot back downward to reinforce the central Plaza on his return trip, killing two birds with one stone.

With the scales tipped entirely in our favor, claiming victory was merely a formality.

I was right here personally demonstrating the absolute efficacy of my build, yet they still looked upon it with squinted eyes of suspicion.

"Tsk."

Even without seeing their faces, there was zero doubt in my mind that these people were monumentally terrible at the game.

Good grief. Out of the entire server's mere three hundred Challengers, how on earth were there so many gathering in a modest broadcast of seventy viewers where barely ten people were even typing? Raising an eyebrow at their barefaced fabrications, I exited to the post-game summary window.

And there I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠sat, staring blankly ahead. My screen remained anchored on the score tally, refusing to budge.

Watchtower Priest was merely one out of dozens of builds I had engineered over the years. But the sole reason I stubbornly clung to this ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠particular playstyle was painfully simple: there was no better setup in existence for getting under the enemy's skin.

Even if their queue times weren't as agonizingly long as mine, Challenger players still spent an eternity staring at the matchmaking timer just to find a single match. To endure that endless wait, only to spend the entire match being suffocated into utter impotence without pressing a single meaningful button? How could anyone not lose their goddamn minds?

"Sigh..."

Yet, contrary to my fondest hopes, the post-game chat room—populated by seven active professional players aside from myself—remained as dead as a graveyard. Given that these people could ignite an internet-wide controversy over a single wayward syllable, their silence was only natural. Even so, it was a massive buzzkill.

The sudden deflation of excitement was impossible to hold back.

As far as I was concerned, their complaints were utterly unfair. Managing to squeeze in three whole matches within five hours was nothing short of a divine miracle on this server. Under ordinary circumstances, five hours was barely enough to finish two. It was only because foreign pros visiting the Korean server had been handed fresh accounts—accounts that hadn't had the time to blacklist me yet—that my matchmaking luck had held out so well.

Letting out a disappointed sigh, I reached toward the 'End Broadcast' button, only to pause when a particular message popped up in the scrolling feed.

My hand hovered. I glanced sideways at my analytics: concurrent viewers, then total follower count. Seventy-six viewers. Fifty-eight followers. Taking those numbers alongside the tip jar tally, I had earned precisely three thousand won from my very first stream.

It was actually pretty fun, too...

All I had done was play the game the way I always played, and money had somehow materialized from it.

Under these conditions, there was hardly any reason to say no. Musing over what hours might make for a decent regular schedule, I cut the feed and turned off the PC.

However, despite that earnest promise...

"Aaargh, fuck me..."

A woman's body was a pain in the absolute ass.

Struck down by an agonizing torment that visited for the very first time in a month, writhing in the misery of a wretched, unbidden dampness, three whole days slipped away without me even dreaming of turning on the broadcast.

The day I was finally liberated from that visceral torment was the very day Path of Night's premier off-season tournament raised its grand curtains.