Hollow
Win the pistol, then win the second round on a full buy of Mad Dogs and Spectres, and round three is usually a bonus — you simply run it back with the guns you already have.
If the other team spent round two on an eco, saving every credit they could, they walk into the third with rifles: the Pillager and the Phantom, the ones everyone just calls the AK and the M4.
Same as them a round ago. Even if we lose, the round is profit so long as we knock as many of those rifles out of their hands as we can.
Round three was a must-win for them. I bought nothing but a medium shield and my utility, and headed for B.
Fade's Haunt caught four of them pushing A Main. Premium information from the opening second — all four positions, handed to us. I could have stepped up and taken a wide bite of B Main, but I didn't. Killjoy is built less for claiming space than for holding space you already own.
Reyna took the aggressive mid push in my place and opened the map up wide.
The clock slipped under a minute. Last real chance for the attackers to rotate. Maybe my Nanoswarm had chewed them up too badly the round before; whatever the reason, they hit A, where three of us were waiting. A straight execute — the shakiest choice imaginable for a team that could not afford to drop its guns — and they took it anyway.
The fight formed in an instant, three against five. Short on guns and short on bodies, the defense was never going to hold.
A filthy scramble, and still the three holding A managed something real: two rifles on the ground.
Two against three now. I'd rotated late off B and was up on Heaven; Reyna was on A Main — the exact same posts Jett and I had held on the pistol. The round was not the same round. I was still on the Mad Dog I'd bought the round before, and Reyna, dead last round, had bought a Sheriff and a light shield just to keep her money in line with the team's.
Rifles posted in every corner of A. Barring a variable, the round could not be won.
And the variable was in my hands.
The sky over A washed green.
In Project A, every agent has abilities. C and Q, bought with credits. E, given to you free. And the ultimate, X, paid for in ultimate points. Each agent demands a different number, and the stronger the ultimate, the more it costs. You earn those points a few ways: one for an orb lying on the map, one for every kill, one when you die, one for planting or defusing the bomb.
Which is why, in round three, they never expected to see Killjoy's Lockdown — an ultimate that asks for eight.
Lockdown. Killjoy's ultimate, and one of the most expensive in Project A. Cast it and her lockdown device drops where you stand, and a field blooms out from it. The field shows itself in green light and holds for fifteen seconds. When those fifteen seconds end, every enemy still inside is Detained for eight — unable to do a thing.
In Project A, an ultimate's line plays for the enemy too. That is what my Killjoy sounded like on their side of the wall.
Get off your angles. Get off my site.
For an ultimate that looks that broken, the counter is surprisingly simple. Use the long fifteen-second windup to break the device — or just wait the cast out, then walk back in. They couldn't make the call fast enough. From their side there were two choices: take me on Heaven and destroy the device, or drop into Wine off A Main and wait Lockdown out. They split. Chamber and Omen left site to get outside the field.
Sova came up Heaven alone to kill me, and died on the way. The path from A up to Heaven forces a jump. A sliver of his head showed, and I didn't miss it.
Two against two. Three seconds before Lockdown ended I dropped from Heaven onto site and threw my C toward Wine.
The line that plays when Lockdown catches no one. Both of them were in Wine. No other read existed. I had their position, so I put a thumb on the defuse and didn't make a ceremony of it. Of course they showed themselves to stop me. And I handed Chamber and Omen the present I'd been saving.
Area grenade out!
From their side it had to be why is she still holding that? Killjoy usually dumps Nanoswarm the second the round starts. But I had been sure they were hitting A, and even if they went B I trusted myself to get it down in time — so I had saved it.
One choice left. Fight me through the swarm, or stand there and watch the bomb come apart. Their choice was already made. Health peeling off under the Nanoswarm, they double-peeked, and a two-on-one began.
I took Omen with me and died to their Chamber. That was fine. Nanoswarm finished the Chamber who was already one-shot.
Die with the bomb still down and the attackers win — but unfortunately for them, we still had one left. Reyna sprinted in and defused it a breath before it blew.
If she had peeked earlier and helped the fight, I might not have died. We won, so I didn't say a word.
"Nice — we took every gun they had."
"Killjoy, that ult read was actually insane."
Ahem.
They piled praise on the play at a ridiculous volume, and something in me lifted anyway. Well. They say even a whale will dance if you praise it.
Back in my pro days, I could put out a play I thought was the best I had, and people still answered cold.
From there the game ran away in one direction. The team that had needed to win round three dropped every gun and lost on top of it, and their money dried up. Forced into an eco on round four, they bought rifles again on five, lost that too, and their mental simply left.
A surrender. From the end of round five on, it's an option, and in competitive every player on the team has to agree. Which meant every one of them had already broken.
Everything left on the clock was forfeited with it. We took the first game 13–0.
There wasn't time to sit in the afterglow of a win like that. The road ahead was still far too long.
After streamer Eunha's clarification broadcast, a single notification reached the people still waiting for her to come back.
She had said she wouldn't broadcast until she hit Diamond, and people had made their peace with not seeing her for a while. One day later, she turned the stream on.
"Ah — can everyone hear me?"
"It's just... playing by myself felt a little hollow. Usually you all react every time I get a kill, and without that..."
Chat went still for a moment.