Episode 140: Thrash (Project A)
The gasps came through the headset, my teammates unable to help themselves. On any other day I would have kept my face still and still been smug about it on the inside, tossing out That's just the basics until they got sick of me. Right now I couldn't manage even that.
"Ahem."
A minute ago I had been the one getting carried away at a mere event match, planting a kiss on my mouse for the crowd. My face was not thick enough to turn around and fire off my stream-only reaction like nothing had happened.
Not that the celebration itself was a crime. Pros do the same thing when they clutch a round or rack up an ace. But I was not a pro. I could be standing in a booth at the arena where the PCK final was about to be played, and I was still, strictly speaking, a streamer. And this match existed to show off a new agent.
If someone watching decided Why is she showing off like that?, it wouldn't even be a strange reaction. Pros themselves tended to hold back once a celebration started getting excessive.
Esports is a sport, and you could argue there is nothing wrong with a player celebrating a beautiful play. Except this was Korea. In a country full of people who can be made uncomfortable by absolutely anything, there were more than a few who treated a celebration as brainless behavior and demanded you show the other team some manners.
Then again, when a Korean team celebrated against a foreign side at an international event, most of those same voices called it cool and cheered. So maybe that wasn't quite it either. It didn't matter.
This was an event match, and the other teams were broadcasters from the same industry—colleagues. Some people were bound to take it the wrong way. Any more celebrating, and I was going to have to rein it in.
"I'll just buy an AR."
It was the buy round, straight off a pistol win. Normally I would have gone for the 2,050-credit Spectre, or the 1,600-credit Spectre. This round was different.
On a normal buy I should have had 3,900G at the very most. I had wiped all five of them and picked up the defuse bonus on top of it, so I had enough for my abilities, a rifle, and a medium barrier, with credits still left over.
−1,000
If that rifle ended up in enemy hands, it would be a real headache. I was confident I wouldn't give it up. The return was bigger than the risk of buying it, and this was an event match. A risk like that was fine. Whatever.
"Hm-hm-hmm~"
I wasn't hiding how keyed up I was, and a teammate took the opening to ask about the agent I was on. They had clearly decided I was this excited because Echo was fun.
"This? In a one-on-one like just now, I don't think it's bad."
Echo wasn't boring. It also wasn't fun enough to get me this worked up. So why was I humming?
I don't know. It was just fun. Whether the high was the ace or the brand-new agent, I couldn't tell. Or maybe I did know, and I was only pretending I didn't.
The crowd roared at Eunha's mouse-kiss celebration. Behind them, one young man watched her in silence, eyes bright.
"Yeah... good thing I came."
He was none other than the main entry of KZ, the team people called the strongest in the country—Park Jaeseong, FOXY, named alongside Seya as the best entry Korea had.
The final was only a few hours off, and here he was, spectating an event match. It looked like a man with no nerves at all. Too few. That was simply where PCK stood: one overwhelming champion, and nine other teams. Six tournaments in three years, and the winner had never once changed. The verdict wasn't unfair.
That didn't mean every player on those nine teams was worse than KZ's. A few of them were better than KZ's other members. P1's Seya, for one, was rated as not losing to Foxy in the slightest. The head-to-head record was a blowout in Foxy's favor, but after every series the same line went around: Seya lost because of his teammates.
Foxy acknowledged him for it. In interview after interview he paid Seya respect, and the two of them had settled into a good rivalry. Off the stage they were pretty close, too.
"What are you doing here?"
Close enough, in other words, to drop the polite speech without a second thought.
"C-Coach?! No, this is— I was just taking a walk to shake the nerves off...!"
Park Jaeseong flailed out something that was more excuse than explanation at the voice behind him. The owner of the voice was not Coach Yoo Seonho, the man he was actually afraid of.
"Huh? Seonwoo-hyung?"
P1, the storied org famous out of League of Legends, and Seya, P1's Project A pro. The voice belonged to none other than Seya. Han Seonwoo.
"Don't you have a final any minute now? What are you doing standing around here?"
What are you doing standing around here. Would this blockhead actually believe him if he said he'd come to watch the event match and get his fire up before the game? Jaeseong was sure he wouldn't. The man in front of him was dull as dishwater, and more of a hardass than Coach Yoo Seonho, who was already the hardass among hardasses. To a hardass like that, I came to see a streamer I like would land as nothing but an excuse. Jaeseong did not want Han Seonwoo treating him that way.
"Agh, I thought you were the coach. Anyway, what are you doing here? Come to watch the final? Don't tell me you're gonna cheer for us."
They were close, sure. Han Seonwoo might not have cared, but Jaeseong had always carried one thought where Han Seonwoo was concerned: he did not want to lose to him. Determined not to hand over anything worth teasing, he answered the question with a question.
"Me? Cheer for you? Why?"
"That's cold. I'm your favorite little brother and you won't even cheer?"
"That favorite little brother has beaten us in the final how many times now? If you were me, would you cheer?"
"That's... fair."
Thinking about it, he wouldn't have cheered either. Jaeseong changed the subject at once.
"So why are you here? If you didn't come to cheer for us, did you come to cheer for F4?"
F4—the other finalist alongside KZ, and the biggest dark horse of the 2023 PCK season. All five of them had come out of streaming, and the public had them pegged to wander the bottom of the table forever. Instead they had knocked over powerhouses like P1 and Gen and walked into the final like they belonged there. A miracle team.
Jaeseong did not actually think Han Seonwoo was here for F4. The man had no interest whatsoever in internet broadcasts. He also wasn't the type to cheer for the other side just because he disliked KZ, so cheering for F4 was—
"I just came to see a streamer I know."
Wait. He did?
"You actually came to cheer for F4? Wow. That is cold."
"What are you talking about. I came for the event match."
"Huh? The event match? There's a broadcaster you care about? No, no way. Then you came to see the new agent? You could've just watched that from the dorm... why'd you come all the way here?"
"If you're going to ask and answer yourself, why bother asking me?"
Han Seonwoo looked at him like he was hopeless, and instead of answering turned his eyes to the arena's huge screen. Realizing that was the answer to the question he'd asked, Jaeseong followed his line of sight.
"Huuuh?"
The shock was considerable.
"You watch Eunha's stream too, hyung?"
Of course he was shocked. At the end of Han Seonwoo's gaze was Eunha.
"Yeah. She's good."
The answer was yes. Han Seonwoo didn't watch internet broadcasts much. More precisely, he did watch, but the people he watched all had one thing in common.
They were the aces of the strong Project A teams overseas. The rest of the world thought of Eunha as nothing more than a streamer who happened to be good at the game. Jaeseong himself rated her higher than anyone, which was exactly why he hadn't expected this—that Han Seonwoo had been watching her, the same way he had.
Realizing he shared an eye with someone he absolutely had to beat left him with a strange feeling.
"Weird, isn't it."
"What is? Her skill? Or is it weird to you that a girl is that good?"
Half of him was delighted to have found an unexpected thing in common with his rival. The other half wanted to give Han Seonwoo a hard time. He laid a small trap in the question.
"Not that. All these people are watching, and she doesn't tense up even a little. She even did a celebration just now."
It didn't so much as graze him.
"Guess she's just the type who doesn't get nervous. You know... like me?"
"Maybe. But I've watched her stream a fair amount, and that isn't her personality."
Han Seonwoo pushed his glasses up and went on, serious now.
"Look at how she is on stream, or when she's doing other content. She is not someone who doesn't get nervous. And for a person like that, what she's showing right now is too strange. She looks used to it, like this is something she's already been through more than once. I wonder if streamers have some trick for taking the edge off the nerves..."
Ah. There he went again. Once that hyung got started, an hour or two was nothing. The moment Jaeseong felt Han Chanho Mode kick in, he decided to flee.
"Hyung! I should be getting to the waiting room, so I'm gonna head out! Enjoy the match."
"Ah. Sure. You do well in the final, too."
Jaeseong slipped free of Han Chanho Mode's clutches without a snag. Getting chewed out half to death by Yoo Seonho once he actually reached the waiting room was a matter for the slightly later future.
Time moved, and the game reached the second half. The second half went the way the first half had.
And how had it gone? We had stomped them, obviously. I had lived in a cold world where winning was the only thing that counted, and in that world there was no such thing as going easy. The other team was there to be trampled.
Match point. A round that might be the last. I talked it over with the team—where we were hitting.
"If I grab the ult point on B Main this round, my ult comes online. Want to try a B rush?"
One point left on the ultimate. I pitched the B Main rush with that in mind, and...
The reaction was nothing but cold.
"Ah, that was... the timing didn't line up. This time for real—for real, it'll be fine. And we have to promote Echo, don't we?"
In a way, the coldness was fair. All three rounds we had lost, I had been the one trying to force the ultimate and turning it into an accident. If I had just shot the guns and left the abilities alone, I had a feeling we would have taken two of those three.
But this match was for promoting the new agent, first and last. Unable to find much of a counterargument, the team went with my plan.
The moment the round started, Omen's Paranoia went down B Main. In a sense we had spent one of the abilities that did the most to help an entry—but Paranoia let us take the B Main space without a fight.
A chime rang.
I soaked the ultimate-point orb on the B Main we had just taken, and my own ultimate finished charging. Paranoia had not been a waste.
"Ult's going down, then. Go, go!"
They already knew where we were. No point dragging it out. We pushed straight through to B site.
With Echo's ultimate, of course.