She's Better Than Me
Once, a streamer who used to love Project A said something like this.
It was a little more than ten seconds of talk that ought to have passed without a ripple. Instead, the remark of an ordinary Diamond streamer — not a pro, not even a Chaser — hardened into a conundrum the whole of Project A still hasn't put down.
In Project A, is it aim that matters? Or strategy and tactics?
No amount of argument among players ever produced a conclusion. The spread in skill was simply too wide for a real answer to have anywhere to stand.
Even lining the question up against professionals who already sat at the peak of both aim and strategy failed to settle it. Those pros were the kind who treated aim and strategy as equally indispensable.
Gather ten players of perfectly equal ability, give one team to people who played for their aim and the other to people who played for their plans, and you might tease out a result — but that experiment was all but impossible. The premise of perfectly equal skill was not a condition anyone could easily meet, and so the proposition never showed the slightest sign of being solved.
The nearest it came was at home. KZ, matchless in the completeness of its strategy and tactics, began posting meaningful results on the international stage, and opinion tilted, little by little, toward strategy. The claim that tactics mattered more than aim was slowly turning true.
Then that same tactical KZ was shoved aside by Lord's extreme one-point breakthrough, and the conundrum that had been closing on an answer snapped back to the start. Did aim matter more, or strategy? It stayed unsettled, in either direction.
Lord had broken KZ by raw force, yes. But Lord was not a team that used no tactics at all, and so the question remained what it had always been: a doubt in Project A that would never be put to rest.
At least, not until now.
The crowd that had come for the PCK final, and the casters calling the exhibition match, were watching a moment that sketched the answer in faint outline.
Pop.
Echo's Stun Bot, the E, thrown in as support, and a Jett peek stacked on top of it.
If the nearsight beam caught someone clean, Jett could simply take the kill. Even if they never ate the blind and shot the bot out of the air instead, the shake left in their aim lifted Jett's odds in the duel. And it didn't stop there. Lose that fight anyway, and the Echo who had used the bot was already peeking in behind to give the trade: a plan C, waiting.
Three branches, one for every way the opponent might answer. BS's team had built the play with all of them in mind. Three shots were enough to tear the whole design apart.
Yes. Eunha's three pistol shots.
Pop. The first blew apart the Stun Bot tossed in toward CT, and BS's opening plan — BS kills whoever eats the blinding beam — died with it.
Pop. The next one-tapped the Jett peeking into CT, and the second plan — BS kills the player whose aim shook while shooting the bot — failed just as cleanly.
Pop. The last one-tapped the Echo who peeked in after the Jett, and BS's final plan — even if Jett dies, Echo trades it back — failed with the rest.
Three shots, and every layer of the design was ruined. What they had left was a brutal deficit.
Of course the plan had never been perfect. They hadn't needed to push all the way into CT. All they had to do was wait for the other team to come and defuse the spike.
This match was only an exhibition, thrown to mark the release of a new agent. To show off what the newcomer, Echo, could do, BS's side had reached for a slightly reckless bit of strategy, and the result was a disaster.
Put plainly, BS's strategy had collapsed in front of Eunha's violent aim.
The underground parking garage at PCK Park.
No one but Rioat staff was allowed to park there, and the space was packed with people in navy. Matching navy uniforms, every one of them, with a large KZ across the back.
"Everyone got all their bags?"
"Yes, sir."
"Seungtaek, go get ready for the interview. The rest of you, loosen up in the waiting room."
"Okaaay."
They were the Project A team playing today's final — KZ, the org the scene still called the Domestic No. 1.
"Coach."
"What."
"Before I warm up, can I watch the exhibition for a minute?"
What kind of insane thing was that supposed to be? The coach meant it.
This boy in front of him — he knew the team's entry, Foxy, was an odd one. He had not expected it on the doorstep of a final.
"And what is that supposed to mean?"
"A streamer I like got invited to the exhibition. I just want to see their face for a second..."
Yoo Seonho didn't bother hiding the sigh. He let it out and spoke low.
"Jaeseong. Did we come here to mess around? Go warm up before you catch a hand."
He had no real intention of hitting him. Foxy was eighteen. He himself was in his thirties. An adult laying a hand on a minor would bury them in a scandal, and he knew it.
"Urk... Sorry."
And of course, for a young pro who didn't know that, the threat worked beautifully.
A sharp smack cracked across a back.
"Aagh!"
"You crazy bastard. Are you in your right mind or not?"
The part about not being allowed to hit him, of course, applied only to the coach.
"Ow — Seungtaek-hyung, use your words! Words!"
Foxy, smacked across the back by Kim Seungtaek, the captain and the eldest. Watching it, Yoo Seonho felt a quiet satisfaction.
"Not being nervous is a good thing. That doesn't mean you get to let go of it entirely. Keep an edge. We came here to play a final, not to sit and watch an exhibition. You know that."
"Who said I was going to mess around... I was just gonna look for a second."
"So tell me what watching an exhibition has to do with getting ready for a final."
Spax was itching for a second round of violence. This time he decided to talk the kid down. An injury on the doorstep of a final was the last thing they needed.
Foxy, though, still hadn't come to his senses — or else he meant every word of the absurd thing that came out next.
"When I see that person, the motivation just comes pouring out."
"Motivation?"
What the hell kind of bullshit was that? Had he fallen for some broadcaster at the exhibition at first sight?
What Foxy said next was enough to clear the question. Enough, too, to undo the brief misunderstanding.
"I mean, you know. Eunha."
"Drop it. I'm pretty sure she's got a boyfri—"
"No, not like that! When I watch her play, something in me just catches fire. I want to beat her."
"You want to beat her?"
Foxy was willful, and there was no telling where he would bounce. He was a weirdo past anything you could imagine.
KZ left a kid like that alone for a reason. His competitive drive was monstrous. Find someone he felt was better than him, and he would stay up through the night to practice. And in the end, he would pass them.
That unhinged hunger, stacked on innate talent, was how Foxy had come to share the title of the country's best entry with P1's Seya.
"This Eunha is that good? Good enough that you feel it?"
He knew she was good. He also knew she was letting the talent rot. But she was an entry, and from a different role he couldn't casually judge what she would look like on a pro stage. Foxy, unexpectedly, had an eye for exactly this kind of thing, accurate to the point of being uncanny.
After the business with Nebula, Spax had started doubting his own eye. He wanted to know what Foxy thought of her.
"She's better than me."
The answer was not the one he expected.
"What?"
Ordinarily, even against someone clearly above him, the kid would not put his pride down. If I play it like this, I can win. I'm better at that. And yet he had admitted it outright.
"Until not that long ago... I mean, back when you were coaching at that streamer tournament, hyung, she wasn't at this level. It was just, oh, that person's pretty good. That was about it."
Foxy scratched at his head a few times, as if turning over a past that wasn't even old, and went on.
"But something must've happened in between, because her form right now has shot up to a ridiculous place. Or maybe she was always this good."
Was it only the mistake of a pro who was still young and naive? Some nobody, and Spax would have let it pass. This kid was Foxy, KZ's main entry. Outside the game he was a lazy cat with no bottom to his idleness. Inside it, he turned into a reckless beast.
Come to think of it, wasn't that Eunha's image too? Do the good entries all have something animal in them? Spax turned it over.
Either way, if that was why Foxy wanted to see the exhibition, there was no reason to stop him. If watching it did his play any good, the right move wasn't to hold him back. It was to shove him between the shoulders and tell him to go look.
"Go on, then. Watch for a bit. I'll tell the coach."
"For real? Yes!"
Foxy took off at a run toward the arena, bright enough to bounce. For a second Spax wondered if the kid had played him. He wiped the thought just as quickly.
That one wasn't the type to lie.
"Better than him, he says..."
A buzz.
"Hm?"
"...Look who's telling who to hang in there."
The one who actually needs to dig in is somebody else.
He sent the junior walking the same road a message with what encouragement he had in him, then went into PCK Park with Coach Yoo Seonho, toward the room where the interview was waiting.
His seventh finals interview. By now he felt he could have recited the questions without hearing them. How did he expect the final to go. How would they handle the other team's ace. Which players he was wary of, what score he had in mind, and — seventh final, was he even nervous. Something like that.
He already had the answers. Play it the way we prepared and it ought to be an easy win. Score, 3–1. We don't go out of our way to mark someone just because they're the ace. That would do.
Nerves... honestly, he didn't have them.
They had spent the last few days preparing for today. That was true. But the future he and his team were looking at had never been something as small as a domestic league title.
That didn't mean they looked down on the other teams at home, or took the seat of Domestic No. 1 as a given. They were only looking at what was real.
"Yaaawn... Seungtaek-hyung, where's Jaeseong?"
"Went to watch the exhibition. Come on, let's go loosen up our hands."
"What? I don't get to go watch?"
"Go, if you're ready to get chewed out by the coach. Anyway. You're not nervous either?"
"Not really. It's whatever."
Coldly speaking, there was no one in the country right now who could stand as KZ's equal.