The Placement Exam
Today I will be summarizing yesterday's broadcast from Lady Eunha, the idol of the Project A Gallery, who just carved her name into legend.
For the gallery-goers who still don't know who Lady Eunha is: she is the benefactor who took Yangjeon—public enemy of every single person on this gallery—and beat him into literal paste, ten to one, and the hero who brought the great age of smurfing to a close.
But Yangjeon, that world-famous outrage against heaven and earth, tried to drag her under with him before he went. Aren't you a smurf rat, same as me? Idiots and chaos-trolls, bewitched by that dead-serious bullshit, marched straight off to raid Lady Eunha's stream, and in the end she chose to kill the broadcast.
Right up until then, every one of us assumed Lady Eunha was an alt-account smurf, no different from Yangjeon. Then, just yesterday, a single post went up on her community...
Lady Eunha's true identity: an early Project A player, and one of the top-tier users on the Asia server who later migrated to Korea.
She would go into the details on her own stream, she wrote, so if you had questions, come and ask them. That was where the statement ended.
Naturally, even at that point, the gallery's feelings toward Lady Eunha were anything but warm. The moment she went live, more than two hundred trolls piled into the channel and began a vicious spam raid.
smurf rat smurf rat smurf rat
COME ON IN, SMURF
WASHED WASHED elo hell
We did not know it yet. We did not know that these spam bots, chanting washed and come on, smurf without end, were about to convert into Lady Eunha's most fervent viewers.
NOONA NOONA NOONA
PARADISE
NOONA I'M GONE
This is the chat the instant Lady Eunha switched her mic on. Heads, collectively, exploded.
Everyone was stunned that the streamer they'd taken for a smurf rat was a girl born in '07—a soon-to-be high schooler—with a good voice and the mechanics to match. What stunned them even more was everything Lady Eunha did after that.
She had turned the stream on, in practice, to clear her name. The viewers still roared for Just Chatting, and Lady Eunha happily gave them exactly what they asked for.
As if to prove she was no donation leech, donations were not even set up. A viewer had to teach her how, and she met the lesson with a wide-eyed, guileless charm.
It was then that Lady Eunha left us this immortal line: "Wait—do I have to set something up for this?"
The Just Chatting ran like a Q&A. When someone asked what tier her main account held on the Asia server, Lady Eunha said she couldn't be specific, only that it was above Master. Chat immediately broke into a fight over the S.H. rumor—the woman streamer said to hold the highest tier of any woman on the Korea server, Immortal.
Talk between viewers can slide into a full-blown shitstorm if you let it, and the subject just happened to be another streamer, so the whole thing could have turned ugly. Lady Eunha handled it in the most stylish way imaginable.
And here comes another of her classics: "Don't just talk among yourselves. On my stream, you talk to me."
That pure, still-in-school honesty was more than enough to soothe Project A Gallery souls worn raw by the grind and the trolls. From that day on, the gallery appointed Lady Eunha its idol.
Sadly, though—citing Yangjeon—she said it probably wouldn't look good if the broadcast showed anything that resembled smurfing, and she announced she would not stream Project A until her account reached Diamond. Even now, the Project A Gallery is doing nothing but waiting. Endlessly. For the moment Lady Eunha goes live.
And with that, I conclude this summary of yesterday's Lady Eunha episode.
I had decided to start streaming because I couldn't think of any other way to make a living that I was actually fit for.
My father is the chairman of a conglomerate anyone would know by name. My mother is a famous actress, the kind whose name everyone knows. Money was never going to run short in that house, and my brother was already being raised as the heir who would take over Father's company, so there was no need for me to carry anything forward inside the family either.
Even so, I had no wish to live like a parasite latched onto the family's wealth. That was why I chose internet broadcasting—the thing I had already tasted during my life as a pro.
Streaming, to me, was only a job. I chose it because I thought it was the work that suited me best, the work I would actually be good at. A job I picked for no better reason than that there was nothing else I could do. And the life of a streamer, I found, was a duller occupation than I had imagined.
That was what I believed. If not for yesterday.
Yesterday I had gone live to clear the smurfing controversy Yangjeon had hung around my neck. In truth it was the sort of bad-faith smear that wasn't even worth answering. But if I left it alone, I could already see the future clip: hey, aren't you that person from the smurfing thing? Better to kill it now than get dragged for it later.
Fortunately, the viewers believed me. The chat was livelier than I had expected, and on the strength of that I tried a Just Chatting stream for the first time.
Just chatting. Talking with the viewers. It was more fun than I had thought it would be. I didn't have to run anything at all. More than three hundred of them matched my mood for me and kept the broadcast alive, so thoroughly that I could feel every one of them actually fond of me.
I don't think of myself as a child who grew up unloved. Even so, affection like that felt like an oasis far too sweet. Maybe, across the four years I spent as a pro gamer, I had been wound too tight.
"Alright. Let's grind some competitive."
I got up off the bed, powered on the computer, and launched Project A.
I did not go live. After Yangjeon, streaming the competitive matches of an account that had not even played its placements felt like too much weight to carry. I didn't want to leave them any room to tie me to him, so I had announced that I would not play Project A on stream until I reached Diamond.
Some people would call Diamond too high a bar. My account's MMR, right now, was high Gold. Project A tracks MMR in unrated as well, and that same MMR carries straight into ranked—into competitive. So the account had not played a single placement, and it still sat at high-Gold MMR. Gold into Platinum, and one tier above Platinum is Diamond. Thought of that way, it didn't feel so far.
I wanted to climb quickly and watch the viewers lose their minds. You hit it already? They seemed convinced it would take me more than a month.
The queue did not take long.
Project A tells you, along with the loading screen, which map the fight will be on.
"Map is... Ascent."
Ascent is one of Project A's earliest maps. Where most maps give you two ways onto a site, Ascent has only a single main lane into A or into B. What it has instead is a mid—the ground between the sites—far wider than on other maps, and so many angles from that mid onto either site that the fight for the middle is one of the bloodiest in the game.
Player 2
Player 3
MilkyWay
Player 5
This was not unrated. It was ranked—competitive—where the score actually moved, and maybe that was why nobody on the team reached for an agent too quickly. If it had been unrated, the Jett and Reyna instalocks would have been out before the screen finished loading. These people wanted the win. They were thinking about the comp...
Jett
Player 3
MilkyWay
Reyna
Yeah. Of course not.
Wherever you go, Jett and Reyna are the popular ones.
Sentinel. One of Project A's roles: the defensive specialist who takes ground and protects the team. Killjoy, the one I had picked, holds space at the highest level through her E, the turret, and her Q, the alarm bot, and a Nanoswarm setup on her C is brutally good at stopping anyone trying to walk onto a site.
Still, because the first pick and the third pick had actually coordinated, the comp came out clean.
We were starting on defense. Ascent favors the defenders, so this was a round where we could take the early momentum.
Round one hands you 800 credits. In unrated I would have bought a Sheriff on the spot. This was competitive. I had to take it seriously too. Two hundred credits went to Nanoswarm, my C. Out of the six hundred left, five hundred bought a Ghost.
The turret, my E, fires on its own the moment someone enters its sight. Its recognition arc is a fairly generous hundred and eighty degrees, so I set it to sound the moment anyone showed on B main, and I laid the Nanoswarm in the alley that feeds onto the site.
Fade's E, Haunt, confirmed it. At least four of them were on A main.
Ordinarily I would have pushed up B main and taken their space before they could. Killjoy's setup stops working once you step beyond a certain range of it, so I had to stay on B. Reyna, who had been holding mid, broke into a run to back up A.
Everyone but me was defending A. The turret watched B. I watched mid. The entire defensive side was stacked on A, and the enemy chose to rush A anyway. From our side of the round, you could not have asked for better.
But Project A was a game in which a fight always kept a variable in its pocket.
I had no idea what had just happened. Everyone who had been on A, except our Jett, was dead for nothing.
In the space of a blink, it was two against four.
The spike was already down on A. If Jett died too—the Jett who had already fallen all the way back toward CT—the enemy could simply run for CT themselves, and then there would truly be no answer.
I asked her over voice not to force it. Just don't die. She must have understood, because she held her angle instead of stepping onto the site.
I was cutting in behind them, a little at a time, careful, when our Reyna's voice came through.
And why does that matter?