Thinking
BS still looks like the favorite, yeah.
(Screenshot of streamer Eunha's broadcast title.jpg)
Wait. This is real?
(A gif of Byeongsik staring blankly at the screen)
"Eunha's in too? Oh, don't bullshit me, lol."
"For real?"
"...Haa. How many points is she on?"
He starts a sigh of relief the second he hears her score, cuts it off halfway, and goes right back to queueing.
People keep saying her win rate is in the eighties, so a month is plenty. You do realize that's a win rate she's been stacking since placements, right?
Even with all the coping about team luck, her win rate after Immortal sits in the sixties. And this is Chaser. Even if she queued ranked all day, every day, for a full month, I don't see it.
Also, she's a high schooler. She still has school on top of it.
That was the line I heard most often from my coach, back when I was a pro.
I've said it before, but my old style was aim and nothing else: leave the fine print to Spax's calls, live inside the duel, and play brainless. Coach Yoo Seonho wanted something else from me. He wanted a player who could read a round and decide for herself, and through the early days of my debut I spent an entire season under a barrage of his scolding.
"Eunha, get over here. What was the read when you did that?"
"I told you. Always move with a reason. Did you come here to solo queue?"
"Think, think, think! I said keep thinking. About what you have to do, and what they're about to do."
And Coach Yoo Seonho was the kind of man who hit you with nothing but being right. The same kind as my father, the person I feared most. Or rather, the person I used to fear. Until I got used to him, the sound of that voice alone was enough to make me flinch.
All of that is an old story now. I've taken in most of what he taught me.
That made it one against one. Judging by where our Snake had died, KAY/O was somewhere toward A main.
"KAY/O, A main. One hundred."
The call locked the position, and I took the round in. The spike was already down. Every second we stalled favored us, and enough time had passed since I'd killed their Reyna that they couldn't be sure where I was. They had to respect both possibilities: that I was still holding CT, and that I'd come back through the sewers into Picture. Snake had planted in the open, so even a defuse could be picked from range. Every condition on the round was smiling at me.
"Don't just think about your own play. Think about how they'll move."
Right. If I were KAY/O... His gun was a Ghost. The kill log had shown it when he took Snake. He might have scooped a weapon off the ground, but he'd come back to A main through mid, and that possibility was thin enough to throw out. Starting gun: Ghost. Confirmed.
Which left him 300 credits, and with 300 he could buy his C, the FRAG/ment, or his Q, the flash. Most players would take the 250-credit flash. A FRAG/ment wasn't impossible, though, so I kept it in mind. What would KAY/O actually choose? It was a pistol round. No reason to save the gun. His first job was to defuse and steal the round, and to do that he had to find the only enemy still alive. Me. Fade.
No flash had sounded from main, so he was still holding it. And that flash was going to be the biggest variable on the round.
A sharp click. The defuse. From here there was no way to know whether he meant to ride it out on nerve or had only tapped the spike. Then a pop off the right-hand wall, KAY/O's flash knifing in out of nowhere. The defuse sound had been a fake, just as I thought. People called that short flash the hardest thing to react to after Phoenix's Curveball, and thrown blind like a bang it was nasty even in the highest tiers.
I'd only slipped it on reaction because I'd already been waiting for that flash.
"Whoa, shit."
"What kind of reaction is that?"
I'd beaten the flash on reaction speed, but the play had only been possible because I'd already pictured what he would do. You hold every choice they can make in your head at once. Do that, and even someone with slow hands can answer sharp.
"Great Eunha! Great Eunha! Great Eunha!"
"Pfft—!"
Ack.
"Cough, cough...! I really didn't think I'd hear that out loud..."
I'd seen that chant in chat more times than I could count. Hearing it in a real voice was, somehow, embarrassing.
They ought to have been used to it by now. They were still gasping at the play. I skimmed the chat once, then gave them the line that had become my stream's trademark.
"This much is basic."
We won the pistol, and the second round opened on the gap. To roll the game on that credit lead, we decided to spend everything we had and play a full buy. If I'd been the entry I would have bought a Spectre, ugly in a close fight, but we already had enough bodies going in: Jett on the first line, Phoenix on the second. No need to force onto the site.
I took the other Spectre instead, the one that still worked at range, then a medium barrier so a stupid death wouldn't happen and enough utility to finish the buy with room to spare.
"We've got guns, so we're going B."
If they were playing it straight, this was their eco. Buy a gun and lose it, and the round after that was likely gone too.
"Okay."
On an eco their guns would be a classic, or a Sheriff at best. We won that range fight by a mile, so we took B, where the long duels lived, as the round's target.
"Careful. They might push up and force a fight."
"I'll throw a Curveball on the way in."
What they could do this round was sit a Shorty in some narrow throat like B back site, or push up and drag us into a mess. Either way, the point was to knock the guns out of our hands. And either way, we needed to win the round clean.
"Haunt going out. Wait for it."
Last round I'd thrown the Haunt on Jett's entry timing. This round was different. The gun gap already said we'd win the fight, so cutting variables mattered more than forcing one. Hitting B, the variables were simple: they all pushed up on defense, or somebody waited on back site with a shotgun.
And one of those, a Haunt could erase for certain.
The eye opened, and their positions flashed into view all at once. It had dropped on a rooftop along the long lane into B, and every one of the five running B main was marked. Just as I'd feared. They'd meant to push B main, force a scramble, and manufacture a variable.
"They're pushed up!"
An all-in defense like that is a gamble. The moment someone sees it early, the play is worth nothing.
"Wait, I'll flash it. Double swing, go go."
What that meant, from their side of the round—
—was simply that they were finished. They'd already walked the long lane, so they couldn't fall back, and the guns were too far apart to fight.
One skill. Their whole idea died with it, and the round came with us.
A round that showed, as cleanly as Project A ever does, how much of the game is just information.
"Nice."
"God, our team luck is disgusting. This game is way too fun."
"Nice."