Challenger Is Hard
"Whoa..."
I had finally hit Grandmaster. For someone who had been stuck in Master for what felt like ten thousand years, a miracle like this was almost too much to believe.
The chat was buzzing, but almost no one was actually watching the stream. About twenty people. Still, that was a lot compared to the first day.
Giddy, I typed into chat.
I queued up at once. The way I felt right now, Challenger seemed well within reach. The queue popped; I put on my most confident face and hit accept. With my skill as it stood, why wouldn't it be possible?
Several dozen minutes later...
The match is over.
I stared at the defeat stamped across my monitor and had no choice but to swallow the fury. My hands trembled. I was so angry I thought I might cry.
The higher the tier, the better the opponents. That much was obvious. Master hadn't been enough to slam me into my ceiling, but the moment I climbed into Grandmaster I could feel a wall. My mechanics and my movement were still alive. My brain, however, was not keeping up.
Even that last game, the lane phase had gone fine. Then the mid-game arrived, and in every team fight and objective fight I hemorrhaged advantage. That was when I felt, with painful clarity, the limits of this baby body. My brain was still soft. It simply could not keep pace with my hands.
Once upon a time I had been versatile enough to take every role. My skill, though, had never been exceptional, and I had never climbed all that high. Even now the ceiling had risen, but it still wasn't the kind of talent that belonged at the very top.
So the plan had to change. From all-roles Master to all-roles Grandmaster.
You could scour the entire world and you would not find a ten-year-old who had hit Grandmaster on every role in League of Relics. It was safe to say no such person existed.
The me of right now could do it. I had the time, and I had the mechanics. All that remained was effort. With that thought, I pulled out another alt. Jungle's turn.
"Hoo..."
I was riding a winning streak that refused to break. Ask people which role in League of Relics was the easiest to carry from, and you would get a different answer from every mouth.
Mid was the shortest lane, and the easiest place from which to project your power across the map, so mid carried best. No — jungle was king, because in the early and mid game it could pour strength into every lane and erase the enemy jungler's presence entirely. Top, too: crush your opponent, then take that lead downstairs and flip the table.
Opinions splintered every which way, but mine was settled. Jungle was the easiest role to carry from. Being able to touch every lane in the early and mid game, right from the opening of the match, was better than anything any other role could offer.
And if you counter-jungled — if you starved the enemy jungler out — the effect doubled. Shut their jungle down and it was as good as making them play the game with four people.
People in the lower tiers lacked both patience and grit. The moment my ganks kept landing, the enemy top laner declared the lane open and started sprinting for mid.
If I had been worse than the enemy jungler, the situation would have been exactly reversed. But in this Platinum bracket, there was no way I was losing. I had pulled out Lee Sin and was brutally beating down a jungler who had locked in Amumu.
Hanaboraharu1 was top. Hanaboraharu2 was jungle. And so on, all the way to five accounts. I intended to take every one of them to Grandmaster. The skill was there.
I grinned as I watched the enemy Nexus blow apart. Thirty-five wins and nine losses, and I had walked into Diamond I without much trouble. It was a fresh placements account — a so-called clean-slate ID — so the LP climbing was visible to the naked eye.
Lose, and you shed only a little LP. Win, and you gained a great deal. That fresh account had strapped wings to my back. Tonight, too, I was gaming straight through till morning. At night I turned the stream off and just ran solo queue. I planned to switch it back on once the audience grew.
Streaming, it turned out, was quietly exhausting. No mic, no cam, and still I had to keep one eye on chat the entire time. Maybe it was because I was glancing at the chat window with the same focus I needed for a split-second call in a team fight or in lane, but my play was nowhere near what it should have been.
The gap between my skill with the stream off at night and my skill with it on was stark. Perhaps because the body was still young, both my stamina and my mental endurance were pathetic. It was a problem that would vanish as I grew. The trouble was how long that would take.
Trying to run the game and the chat on a single monitor also made the screen feel painfully cramped. I was beginning to understand why streamers preferred dual monitors.
"Too cute..."
Kim Sehee murmured it as she carefully stroked the frame that held Hana's photograph. Ever since she had met Hana, everything had been one long ascent, and perhaps because of that Hana looked impossibly lovely.
She dropped by the lab now and then, and every time the urge to kidnap Hana and take her home burned like a chimney fire. The little thing brimmed with so much charm that she was starting to understand why parents could never win against their children's affection.
Winning against a creature this cute was impossible on its face. She had the momentum to conquer the world with cuteness alone. No — with Hana's abilities, actual world conquest might not be out of the question.
Even now, Kim Sehee was drinking Starlight Green Tea. It didn't merely bring out the flavor of the green tea; it was good for all sorts of health besides. And despite a price of five thousand won a tea bag — enough to make your eyes pop — it was selling like wildfire.
Whatever they produced, the market swallowed. Hana's hair had grown so much more potent that they could now make up to a million bags a month. Set against the roughly three hundred thousand of the early days, that was nearly triple.
At launch, stock vanished the moment it reached the shelves. Lately, though, enough remained to build a modest reserve. However wealthy the people of Korea might be, they did not drink five-thousand-won green tea the way they drank water.
Which was why, recently, she had begun to fret just a little over what to do with the surplus. Of course, discounts and the usual promotions would be more than enough to move it.
I want to go see Hana...
If not for the meeting booked that afternoon, she would already have gotten in the car and gone. Today they had to discuss a new product idea.
She steadied herself. A president had a reputation to protect. She headed for the conference room.
The mood inside was warm. The results were higher than anything they had ever seen, and President Kim Sehee herself was no longer radiating the cold aura of before.
Seated, Kim Sehee endured the tedious greetings. Then she waved a hand.
"Let's start the meeting proper."
Neither the factory nor the company was anywhere near conglomerate scale yet, so the room held only a handful of people. The company was on an upward curve now, but only a few months ago it had been riding a steady downward one for years.
The aftershock was a shortage of staff. They had only recently begun recruiting to fill the gaps. Fortunately — or so it seemed — Starlight Green Tea's hit meant hiring new employees was no trouble at all.
Launching a new product at Starlight Food, where seasoned staff were still scarce, was nonetheless a bold move. Perhaps that was why it had taken so long after the tea began to sell before they had the energy to release anything new.
Even on the sites that rated companies, Starlight Food was being named one to watch — a firm whose future looked bright. A red carpet lay unrolled before it.
The main subject of this meeting was a new product launch. First up were several improved versions of Starlight Green Tea.
Most people were perfectly satisfied with a single bag. A not-insignificant number, however, steeped two.
The reason was vitality. It was mostly people ground down by brutal hours in finance, or people working shifts, who drank their tea that way.
The effect was unmistakable. Even when you had no strength left, it restored your vigor somehow. Once it wore off you would go home and collapse, but if you thought of it as an energy drink, that was fine. And the side effects were milder than an energy drink's.