Revenge (Project A)
We had queued in to teach a cocky little brat a lesson. The snipe landed. Unfortunately, we were not on the same team.
Maybe landing it was enough to be satisfied with. If this one had failed, I was honestly ready to quit. Getting interrupted had pissed me off, sure — just not enough to burn queue after queue hunting her down out of pure spite.
"How's the sync? We lined up?"
"Mm... about three seconds?"
Set Eunha's queue timer on the stream against ours, and the gap was roughly three seconds. That was more than enough to play off the broadcast. Covering the minimap still couldn't cover the whole screen, so reading her position was laughably easy. All I had to do was duck my head and look at the phone, and her location was mine.
"There won't be any throwing this game... right?"
That young voice came thin through the phone we'd left on her broadcast, afraid, it seemed, of running into us again. It was more than enough to poke at a protective instinct. Then again, we were men in our twenties with our blood still running hot. Backed-up orders had us shut in a room all day, queueing match after match, and contact with an actual woman stayed a distant dream.
"Honestly, I do feel a little bad for her. We weren't even sniping her last game. She just got unlucky, right?"
"That's... fair."
Thinking it over again, she did seem a little pitiful. Right now the high-elo MMR on Project A's Korean server was a complete mess. She hadn't even lost to skill. Drop your rating to something that absurd, and of course your mental would snap.
One of the others, the one who had failed to snipe her and had been sitting in silence, finally couldn't stand it.
"Hey. So what, we throw and tank her score even further? Even a snipe account has to keep its rating."
"We're already buried in backlog. You trying to make more work?"
"Yeah, well. I want to sleep early tonight. This doesn't even feel like a life..."
"Shit. We hit one big score, then drop Project A before the ban lands. That's the move."
We had never meant to keep abusing for long anyway. Back in the dead-game days, when it couldn't even crack the top ten for PC-cafe share, maybe. Project A now sat unchallenged at number one. Rioat's follow-up would come a lot faster than it used to, and the whole point was to milk every last drop and bounce before the suspension hit. Eunha was pitiful, sure, but this wasn't our first day on the job. I told myself not to mix personal feelings into the work.
I hardened my resolve. We'd landed the snipe, so win it fast and get back to the job. That was about when the chat came through.
"...For real?"
"Oh. Hey. They caught the snipe."
One line from the guy watching her broadcast, and that was it. Eunha knew we had sniped her.
"Wow. We made the names barcodes, and somebody still has nothing better to do than look them up one by one."
"Well. Girl-streamer simps would hand over their liver and their gallbladder. That much grunt work is nothing to them."
She might not have known whether we had sniped her on purpose. She had at least figured out that last game's us were on the enemy team.
"Yeah? How's she taking it?"
I wanted her reaction. Take a malicious, intentional throw like last game, then meet those same throwers on the other side — what do you even do?
"Our team is all normal people, right?"
Afraid of getting thrown on purpose again, she was asking whether her own side had abusers on it too. The fluster was pretty cute. If she broke down and begged us to stop sniping, we might even lay off the stream—
"...What?"
Eunha's usual voice fit a fresh seventeen: bright, lively. The whole concept of the broadcast was a fresh-faced, cheerful high-school girl, and game skill that did not belong to that face at all.
This was not that bright voice. A tired way to put it, maybe, but it was cold enough to freeze the air around us.
"D-did I hear that wrong? Did she just tell us to drop dead...?"
For a second I doubted my own ears. It was that shocking. No way that Eunha had said something carrying open contempt and open hostility. I asked the others, and—
"I... heard it that way too."
So I had heard it right.
"Ha. Crazy bitch."
She'd looked pitiful, and I'd been about to go easy. Looked like we needed to do the job properly.
"Tonight I make this bitch cry, then I sleep."
"You think she'll cry just from dropping rating?"
"If the points you stacked for months got buried in a day, you wouldn't cry? And women are moody. They cry easy."
Not exactly solid information. I was pretty sure a book I'd read once had said so.
"Ha. Yeah. Whatever."
Teammate: "Ground, can you hawk-check A main?"
Ground: "Ah, sure. If you're pushing up, want me to go with you?"
Teammate: "I'd like that."
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The buy timer ran out.
"Jett's holding an off-angle on B main. Killjoy's turret is with her."
An off-angle turns into a death trap the moment someone knows you're there. She was walking into one anyway, which meant she didn't know we were playing off the stream.
"Okay. Flash and Raze double-satchel, we take them in one go."
"In that showmatch she was dodging short flashes and everything else. You sure this is fine?"
"Then we fake it. The second she turns her head to dodge, I one-tap. That's the play."
A fake flash: you send the hawk and deliberately never pop it. Anti-flashing means you have to turn your camera, and the trick is to use that against her. Feed it to a player who can't even react to a flash and all you've done is throw a skill away. Against a freak of reactions like Eunha, a fake hawk lands beautifully. It's common enough in the pro scene that players lean on it.
"Okay, going. Three, two, one..."
Ground's hawk knifed toward the off-angle on B main. At the same time—
Raze kicked off a Blast Pack and flew for the same angle. Land, and put a hole through Jett's head. That was all—
Bang!
"Eh?"
Eh?
"What? Why did you—"
Bang!
"What are you guys doing?"
Her voice came through my teammate's phone, and it sounded like she was mocking us for getting torn apart while we stream-sniped her. Blatant mockery. There wasn't even room to get angry. My head was too busy reconstructing what had just happened.
What had happened? Eunha's Sheriff had one-tapped both of us. And what had I been doing? Peeking the angle where she was hiding, with my teammate's Guiding Light behind me. Ground's E, that Guiding Light, had been a fake. We were certain she would anti-flash.
She didn't. No — she started to, and stopped. When her Jett came up on my screen, her head was clearly turned away.
Put it together. She had been anti-flashing the incoming hawk, and the instant she saw me she snapped her head back my way. She one-tapped the airborne Raze with the Sheriff, then one-tapped the Ground behind him.
"Shit. She is actually insane."
Two one-taps in a row were not, by themselves, shocking. Anyone in a normal Chaser lobby could do that much. The problem was everything before it. She turns her head to dodge the hawk, then the moment she sees me she whips back and puts the crosshair on me? On my head?
That aim correction was nonsense. Why was someone like that only a streamer... No. This could just be luck. I had been flying in on Raze's Q, so it probably wasn't even an intentional headshot.
Yeah. Coincidence. Just coincidence.
Eunha's broadcast, playing on my teammate's phone, kept mocking us. As if she wanted us to hear it.
"This fucking bitch, seriously—!"
"You gonna sit there and take that?"
"Take it? I'm gonna fuck that bitch, one way or another."
I was furious, and it didn't matter. Our main entry was dead, and so was the second player, the one with the flash. A real execute was impossible.
[Enemy] Jett ☠ [Team] Killjoy
With no entry, the hit was never going to stick. We handed the pistol round over for nothing.
Flawless, on top of it.
Even if we bought guns next round, we were likely to lose. All we could do was grit our teeth until the round after.
"Eco the next one. We see them on the buy round. That thing dies. No matter what."
"Copy."
We lost the second round flawless too. That was fine. The whole team had saved through the eco. Not dropping a single enemy gun stung a little, but the real fight started now. This round, we were buying rifles.
"Where's that bitch?"
"B main. She's on a Marshal."
A Marshal was a threat down a long lane like B main. If we had shields up, though, one body shot was something we could always live. And through the stream we could see exactly where Jett was. Know the spot, and a rifle could contest that range just fine.
"Flash, steal a timing, tuck behind the structure."
"Copy."
However fast her reactions, dodging a flash still meant turning her head. In that window we could get off the B main mouth — the most dangerous ground — and behind cover. Once we were tucked, there were three places to peek B main from. Both sides, and up.
"Where is she?"
"On the screen. Looks like she wants a one-tap with the Marshal."
She was up on the screen on B site, a straight look down B main. A spot where you could see the enemy perfectly, and where the enemy could catch you just as easily. A position only Eunha, sure of her own skill, would take.
"Okay. Sending the hawk."
Pop!
We detonated it clean and made it behind the structure. One timing already lost, and Eunha was still holding the exact same angle. Whether that was confidence or arrogance, you only found out afterward.
"On three, we double peek. Just in case one of us gets got."
"Okay, I'm counting. One, two... three!"
Bang!
Not a bad plan. A double peek was a high-percentage fight, the kind that showed up all the time even in the pro scene.
"Huh?"
What they hadn't accounted for was simply this: Eunha's reaction speed sat outside every range they had imagined.
"The fuck, with a Marshal—?! Why didn't you trade!"
"You didn't see her Tailwind out? Shit. You got caught before you could even react."
Grown men, spraying filth because a high-school girl several years their junior had gotten under their skin.
They had meant to stream-snipe their way into an overwhelmingly favorable spot, use it to kill Eunha, and drag her rating down with her. That wish never came true. However many times they tried, all they did was pile up as her kills. It looked exactly like them last game, throwing themselves into the Killjoy.
The fuck. Raze and Ground are abusing.
Stop running it down.
Their teammates decided the two of them were abusers, feeding themselves to the enemy Jett. See only the kill log and not the round, and mistaking it for abuse wouldn't even be strange. And they were abusing. So it wasn't wrong.
In the end, the ones who had sniped her just to screw her over couldn't put together a real answer. They only kept dying. Three games. Four. Queue after queue, with no sense of their own place.
The miserable part was this. Across all four snipes, they never once landed on Eunha's team. They met her only as enemies, died, and died again, and all they managed was to shove her rating sharply upward.
"Ha... shit. Hey, let's just give up and eat. What the hell have we even been doing for hours."
They hadn't screwed Eunha. They hadn't eaten. They had only sniped, over and over, and the only thing that fell was the rating on the snipe accounts.
"Ah, looks like another all-nighter. When are we supposed to climb all this back."
Whether that was good news or bad, they no longer had any need to repair those accounts.
On the ones who had strutted around as if this were still the old Rioat, the hammer had already come down.
"What...?"
Hello. This is Rioat Korea.
First, we sincerely apologize for the delay in taking action against users engaged in misconduct.
We recently received reports of users in Immortal and above who used multiple accounts to throw on purpose and raise rating by dishonest means. Our investigation confirmed a large number of users inflating rank points through abnormal methods across many accounts.
The twenty-three accounts identified so far have been permanently suspended under our operations policy. We will widen the scope of the investigation and carry out further reviews and actions in sequence.
In addition, pursuant to the anti-boosting act introduced in 2018, we plan to pursue criminal charges against users who engaged in boosting. Through regular monitoring, we will do everything in our power to ensure this never happens again, and that all of you, our agents, can compete in a fair environment.
Thank you.