Chapter 126 — PCK CL: SC vs JG
JG. Jone Gaming.
Jone Gaming was an organization that had been in the PCK since Project A's earliest days. If my memory was right, they had been a perfectly respectable mid-to-upper side even in the first division.
By history alone they were older than KZ, the domestic No. 1, and they carried plenty of veterans who had come up in other FPS games. The team that housed their franchise star and ace, Forest, was JG.
So a team like that was in the second division?
"Why is JG in the second division?"
JG had never been strong enough to chase a title. They also hadn't been weak enough to deserve getting dropped. In the messy early years of the Project A pro scene, when teams appeared and vanished, they had held their ground like old blood. That was JG.
The viewers answered before I had to go looking. Forest had been hurt. Then it made sense.
A roster could be packed with pros from other shooters and it still wouldn't matter, because this game was Project A. Players who had spent whole careers thinking about nothing but aim did not adapt easily to something that stitched a MOBA and an FPS together. The entry was worse. Diving a setup by leaning on movement abilities was a role other FPS games had simply never had, and that made it harder still.
In the early pro scene, the team with the stronger entry won. Almost without fail. In Korea, of course, that had been me.
For a JG that was desperate for a real entry, Forest had been rain in a drought. Once they had him, they climbed from the bottom of the league until they could put a hand on the strongest teams at the top.
"Without Forest... yeah. That could happen."
Someone might ask whether it was fair for a first-division team to drop just because one player was gone. Turn it around, and it was a statement about how much the entry mattered. On attack you went in first and ate the bad gunfight. After Chamber's nerf, defense stuck you with the Operator on top of that. Attack or defense, the entry was the one left holding the weight.
SC's weakness was the same absence. Pola was playing entry, but no matter how I turned it over, the role didn't fit him. Wrong clothes. He was only in it because there was no one else on the team who could take it.
"SC on the attack first. That's good. Honestly, their defense is just too shaky..."
Heaven leaned toward the attackers besides. A defense had three sites to cover instead of the usual two, and that made the attack much harder to keep out. The round count was the same in both halves, but momentum was not something you could ignore. For SC, weak on defense, taking the attack first would sit easier on the nerves. Bank rounds while they had the spike, and the defensive half would play a little kinder too.
The casters were right. Put it coldly: if SC couldn't beat a JG that didn't even have Forest, they should forget the first division altogether.
So play well. I was sitting here cheering, wasn't I.
They had sent Killjoy out to C Main to check anyone pushing up, while the other four eased toward B. Not a silhouette, not a footstep — they gave the defense nothing, and slid all the way to the lip of the site. Then—
SC's Omen threw Paranoia across the site, and with a sharp rush of air Jett flung himself in.
JG's Alarmbot, already planted on B, tripped. The Nanoswarm waiting behind it went off a heartbeat later.
The Jett who had taken the site was ground up by the swarm. Literally.
"Why would you put a molly there?"
The ground Jett had taken was the top of the structure on B. Tailwind and Updraft both burned for the entry — a path only a Jett built for mobility could take.
"A Nanoswarm, on top of the box..."
JG's Killjoy had set it directly on the structure Pola climbed. If he hadn't gone there, it would have been two hundred credits thrown into empty air.
From where Pola was standing, it was a miserable way to die. Worse, a second Nanoswarm was already laid across B Main, so the second and third players in the execute could barely reach him. Step out of the smoke and he was fighting however many defenders were waiting, alone. Stay in it and the swarm chewed him apart.
It was grief, plain and simple. SC had lost the main entry who was supposed to be the heart of the attack, and they had lost him for nothing.
"Play it like that and JG should be swallowing SC whole... huh?"
What is this?
If the round had been shaped the way it looked, the teammates coming in with Jett should already have been committed to B. That would have loosened the attack's grip on A Main and C Main, and the defenders posted there would have taken the ground. SC should have been besieged on all sides.
But their Killjoy was still on C Main. They hadn't given that lane away. And that wasn't all.
Two shots cracked.
Ground had stepped out of Garage to swallow the SC players stacked in front of B Window. Nebula had been waiting, and he put him down. The angle looked like he had been waiting for Ground and no one else. Jett had clearly gone into B. So why was Nebula here?
Ah.
"They're really playing it like that?"
"That read is a knife, Nebula."
They hadn't been forcing a B rush. C had been the target from the start — or, more cleanly, B was the first option and C the second.
Look at where Nebula had been standing. If Jett hadn't died, SC would have planted on B and been done with it. But JG had called Pola's landing and cut Jett off with the Nanoswarm, and the moment he died, Nebula let him go. B was no longer a site they could take. He took the second plan instead: C.
Ground was dead, and with him the defense through Garage into C had gone thin. SC's Killjoy was already pushing out of C Main, and the rest of the squad was coming through Garage behind him. Leave it like that, and the Breach still on C had nowhere to move.
In a blink, SC had turned a B rush into Garage-to-C. Breach, stuck on site, tried to slip out through CT.
Two more shots.
The Sova had arrived a step earlier. The back of Breach's head came apart.
The Nebula I knew wasn't pushing like that because he trusted his aim. It was closer to this: he already knew where they were.
Killjoy was on B. He had confirmed it. He had just killed Ground in Garage himself, which left three — Jett, Omen, and Breach. Trace the Concuss back to where it had been thrown, and Breach was on C. He wasn't going to be holding A alone. Breach and Killjoy could both stall an entry, and stacking the smoker on the same site would have been a waste, so Omen belonged on A. A had two ways in. Omen couldn't hold it by himself, and if Jett was there with him, C had nobody left but Breach.
He could afford to be reckless. Even if he died, someone was glued to his back, and that someone would trade it.
"So the plant on C... three against four."
There had been a time when Nebula guarded his life more than he needed to, as if some quiet part of him believed the game was finished the moment he died. You barely saw that now. He had grown.
SC had taken C cleanly and planted at once. Up four to three, they set themselves to meet whoever came to take the spike off the ground.