Our Team's Biggest Problem
“……….”
We were clearly five people on voice chat, and yet not a single one of us opened our mouths. None of us had the presence of mind for it.
“W-we lost to this? We couldn't even take a single set!? D-does that even make sense? It was Red Outpost! Red Outpost…!”
I pulled up the NOVA Syndicate stats site on my screen and vented my outrage.
First Point Captured → Set Win Rate: 75%
Second Point Captured → Set Win Rate: 77%
“Look at this! We took the first point first in both sets! That means our win probability was over seventy-five percent! And we even won the first fight in both games! But—but— AAAAAAARGH—!!!”
I hammered the desk without any particular aim. The rage boiling up from my gut was simply beyond containing.
“P-please calm down…!”
“Huk—right now the viewers are saying they're smashing Carrier's windows and pouring soy sauce all over the place!? I-if that's the case, maybe this isn't the time to be practicing…!”
The support duo fretted and fidgeted.
“That's obviously a bit. Don't worry about it.”
Heukrangi, on the other hand, couldn't have cared less.
“Haa….”
Aura just kept heaving heavy sighs.
It had been a match where we'd actually glimpsed a chance—and it had still ended in total defeat. Of course everyone was rattled.
“We've still got a scrim left with Pizza Beer Team, so let's throw everything into that first! We did see a real possibility this time!”
“Exactly! Honestly, until now we couldn't even picture a win, but this time we saw a little something!”
As the support duo shouted “Let's go, fighting!” and dragged the mood upward, the deflated air in the room managed to stir a little.
Thank god for those two.
So what if they were a bit bad at the game? With personalities like that, you could forgive almost anything.
“It's still too early to throw in the towel. Personally, I think we lost on Red Outpost because of the composition difference.”
“Pizza Beer Team ran a textbook comp, and we just did whatever we felt like. Trying to win like that is straight-up thief mentality.”
“And our skill level is lower too. Which means we need a proper composition even more.”
Heukrangi backed Aura up. Every word of it was painfully correct.
“We saw a possibility. So let's all dig in! If we put a real composition together, we'll have a shot.”
“Let's go, fighting—!”
“F-fighting…!”
A southeast wind was rising…!
Southeast wind my ass.
The enemy flag was planted atop the castle. A second later the entire screen flooded blood-red.
I bit down hard on my lip at the letters floating in front of me.
“……….”
Silence settled over the voice chat. Not even breathing broke the quiet.
The enemy team left the lobby the moment the scrim ended. They hadn't typed anything special, but I could almost hear them laughing at us anyway.
Sure enough, the chat was full of stream-hoppers ferrying over the other team's reactions. It could have been bait and fabrication—but that felt unlikely.
I'm not popular enough for people to go to that much trouble….
There had been a time when more than ten thousand people watched my stream. But the moment the apology broadcast ended, seventy percent of them vanished, and as the losses kept stacking up, even the ones left peeled off one by one out of boredom.
The result: barely two hundred viewers still hanging around my room. And even those probably hadn't settled in as regulars yet.
I've shown too little and spent too little time with them for that.
Besides, this was not the moment to care about viewer counts. I didn't have the luxury. The team was about to implode completely!
I haven't even gotten a proper chance to shine yet—if we blow up here, I'm completely fucked…!
What if the teammates lost all motivation and it just ended like this? Then I'd become nothing more than “the girl who stepped out for a tofu errand and came back to find she'd been written out of the story.”
That could not happen. That future, at least, had to be stopped. The timeline had to be twisted.
“I-I think there's no point running more scrims right now… O-our skill is so lacking that the efficiency is terrible for both us and them….”
“…I agree.”
Aura's voice was thoroughly dejected.
“W-we can't hire a coach, right?”
“Right. People might be getting coached behind the scenes without anyone knowing, but it's banned for the Swiss stage. Fairness issues….”
“So in the end we have to find the problems ourselves and fix them….”
That was not going to be easy.
Improving your fundamentals required knowing where the problem was in the first place—and for a mid-tier team like ours, that was the hardest part of all.
Because none of us can see ourselves objectively.
Everyone was doing something. But without real understanding, they didn't know why they were doing it. Or they half-knew and executed it weirdly.
“Let's all watch the replays together and study for a bit. If anything seems off or you think you messed up, speak up.”
“Got it.”
I kept screen-sharing and hit play on the replay. We started with the first fight on Red Outpost.
The moment we met the enemy, every ally charged straight at them. At the same time my Odin transformed into an armored vehicle and smashed through the enemy's barrier.
The enemy tank still had a sliver of health left, but Aura's Phantom finished him off beautifully. After that we hunted down the rest and claimed the capture point first.
“U-up to here, the flow was good. We caught them off-guard cleanly, and everyone did their job.”
A clean, no-waste victory.
The problem started from the second fight onward.
As I had said more than once, Red Outpost was a map where defense held a massive advantage. The reason was simple: there were only two paths into the central point.
One forced you into a long detour that ate time, and the other was so narrow you got focused down the second you poked through.
“L-let me share what little knowledge I have… Personally, I think we just need to draw a hard line at this entrance and only punish anyone who crosses it….”
I rewound the footage.
Our team in the replay was a complete rabble.
Heukrangi's Roadgrim and Phantom charged forward, while the support heroes lagged behind and just stood around gawking.
And me?
I was right in the middle, dumping firepower into the enemies. That was Odin's job, after all.
Frontline doing its own thing.
DPS doing its own thing.
Supports doing their own thing.
“W-we're all playing completely separately—there's no way we win like this…! N-no, trying to win like this is a crime against conscience…! S-so what happens next?”
The enemies first cut down the overextended Heukrangi and Aura, then slaughtered the rest of us.
“A-and after that?”
Once we lost the point, we couldn't even approach the entrance before getting put down like stray dogs.
“Ah, this is un-bear-a-ble~~~~~~~~!!!”
“Shall we look at the second round too?”
We won the first fight again. Everyone charged the enemies together and wiped them clean.
We even won when the enemy tank and DPS had picked hard counters to me!
“See? We won here, right? So what do we do next? Obviously we draw a line right here and go, ‘You come in first.’ And if they cross it, we punish them.”
I traced a line near the entrance as I spoke.
“But what do we do!?”
Once again, without fail, Heukrangi and Aura body-surfed forward, got isolated, and died. Then the point got cracked open, and it was the euthanasia ending all over again.
“For an hour and a half straight, this exact picture has been looping. Over and over.”
I slammed the desk.
“This—this isn't NOVA Syndicate! We're just headbutting into each other! And the two healers are just giggling in the back—!”
“……….”
I let out a long sigh, then opened my mouth again.
“So… does anyone know what our team's problem is?”
“…We're playing too separately?”
“…We're playing without thinking?”
“No.”
I shook my head firmly.
“Then what the hell is our team's biggest problem…?”
I answered Heukrangi's question.
“That there are five girls on it.”
5 Girls can't Win. That was my conclusion…!