An Invitation to the Team House (Reality)
Yoo Seonho. Head coach of KZ, and once my own teacher in Project A.
It wasn't some other staffer. Coach Yoo had written to me himself, and that alone was enough to startle me. As far as I remembered, he had no interest in internet broadcasts at all. He didn't watch them, and he never set foot in the communities, so I had assumed he didn't even know I existed.
"Yes, and there's one more thing. There's someone I've really been wanting to beat lately, and that person is here in the arena. I think that's why I tried even harder."
"That... would be the streamer, Eunha. She played in the event match earlier."
Hmm. Thinking about it again—was there any way he wouldn't know?
FOXY was eighteen, the same age I had been when I was Galaxy, which meant this was his debut year. A player that new needed the whole team looking after him. Back then, the one who did it was me.
"...You want me to teach him?"
"You play the same position. There's a lot you can show him."
Even now, with me gone, someone else would be looking after him, and the odds were good that someone was Coach Yoo. Even so, something still didn't sit right. Coach Yoo knowing who I was was one thing. It still didn't explain why he would bother to email me himself.
"What if..."
What if he had seen what I could do, and this was him trying to scout me?
Coach Yoo had no interest in streams, but if he had watched Jaeseong's finals interview, then Jaeseong had probably been talking about me to him at every hour of the day. Shoutout after shoutout, without a breath in between, until the coach searched my name once, checked how I played, and moved to scout me...
Hmm. Had I taken that a little too far?
If it wasn't that, then I genuinely couldn't explain why the coach had written me himself. What else could it possibly be?
"No. I can just read it."
The moment I thought about it, the whole worry looked pointless. The letter was sitting right in front of me. Why agonize over what it said? Open it and find out.
So I clicked the mail on the screen and read, character by character, the message Coach Yoo had sent me himself...
When I reached the last character, what I felt was a very small shame.
"Ugh... yeah. Of course it wasn't that."
Hearing Jaeseong overrate me, again and again, must have done something to my head. Maybe I had actually started to believe I was the same kind of monster as Apas or Duke.
The reason for the shame was simple. The word scout was not written anywhere in Coach Yoo's email. The whole thing had been a delusion I'd run all by myself.
And it was a strange delusion, once I thought about it. KZ already had a raw gem named FOXY. The team, as it stood, was a finished article; all that remained was to raise FOXY further and aim at a world championship. With Jaeseong's talent, that was entirely possible.
Freshly aware that my excess of self-regard was a serious condition, I read the mail again. Even if it wasn't a scouting offer, the contents were baffling enough on their own.
"The team house... an invitation..."
The email was an invitation for the streamer Eunha—for me—to the team house where KZ's pro roster lived.
…
Getting the mail didn't mean I meant to answer it on the spot. I still hadn't decided whether I was going, and I hadn't settled on a date.
KZ had said I could pick whatever day I wanted. Weekends excluded, and sometime before they flew to Japan for Masters.
Ah—what's Masters, you ask?
Project A Masters. Masters is one of Project A's official international events, and among the tournaments Rioat runs, it sits second in prestige. Only teams that finish inside the top three of their own league are allowed in. A world event of a very high standard.
It is smaller than Project A Champions, the most prestigious tournament of them all, and the prize pool is smaller too. Even so, the best teams in the world take part, and you can hardly pretend that doesn't matter.
KZ's departure was set for three weeks out, and they had asked me to tell them the date at least a week ahead, so I only needed to decide sometime in the next two weeks. Fine.
And so—invited, no less, to the team house of KZ, the most popular team in the country—what was I doing at this particular moment?
I had washed up, dropped into the chair with my hair still half-dry, and turned the game on.
If the housekeeper or my mother caught me like this I would get an earful—are you trying to catch a cold?—but I wanted to play, even a minute sooner. The reason the urge had hit so suddenly was simple. The season was over, and I hadn't touched the game in a while, so my hands were already itching; then I had watched the finals in person, and I thought I would lose my mind if I didn't queue Project A. It didn't help that the players on that stage had once been my teammates on KZ.
"Stream... hmm. Let's leave it off."
I could count on one hand the times I had played without going live, but today I decided not to.
That idiot had pulled an absurd amount of aggro, and if I turned the stream on I wasn't going to like what I saw. I trusted Jaeseong, and KZ, to clean up after that line, and I settled in to enjoy the game in peace.
The queue popped the moment I started searching. The new season hadn't begun, so my rank was still first; normally a game at that height should have taken forever to find, but this one came up fast.
The map was... hmm. Icebox.
Good, actually. It was exactly the map for the agent I most wanted to play right now. The layout rose in my head, and the agent select screen came up right after it. I grabbed Jett faster than anyone and was about to lock her in—
"Oh."
Somebody besides me wanted Jett?
I hesitated for a second. Instalock her like this, or read the room a little? Instalock and pick a fight, and things could get awkward. A streamer's image is the job itself, and you have to be careful with every little thing.
Hmm. But did I actually need to be?
All right. Let's go.
Thinking it through, even if they decided to start something, it didn't seem like it would matter much. I instalocked Jett on the spot.
All right. How were they going to take it?
This was the very top of the ladder, not Bronze, Silver, and Gold—the so-called ore ranks—where you'd get a why'd you take mine? throwing, gg. Even so, people can still complain when the pick they wanted gets stolen. In a bad case, they swear. Some would say it's ridiculous to get worked up over losing a single pick, but the world is a very wide place. There are plenty of strange people in it.
Contrary to the worry, Player 3 picked a different agent without a single reaction.
"Whew... thank god."
I had been quietly wondering what I was supposed to do if they blew up, so I could only be grateful they had played it like this.
And with every one of us locked in, the game began.
…
First round of the half: a pistol round, opened on a pitiful 800 credits.
We were on defense first, and given what Jett is, I had almost no skills worth using on that side of the round. I spent all 800 on a Sheriff. Every credit I owned, gone, for a single gun—but on a pistol round it is the hardest-hitting thing you can hold, and I had nothing else to buy. The choice was available, so I took it.
"Let's see..."
On the map, our hold had Chamber watching mid with his C, Trademark; Snake and KAY/O on B; me and Sova on A. Sova and KAY/O in particular both carried skills that could find people—a recon bolt, ZERO/point—so sending them toward different sites was the ideal.
The prep timer ran out, and the round started. Our Sova and our KAY/O both threw their E skills toward the main of each site.
The enemy was confirmed on B, where KAY/O was standing. I didn't rotate there in a hurry. ZERO/point had only caught two of them. The other three were still unaccounted for. If I swung over to help B and they walked into an empty A, there was no worse way to lose the round.
I was still holding A when Snake's urgent call came through. Four on B meant that was almost certainly the real hit.
The clock had already dropped into the one-minute range, so their target was B for certain. Sova and I broke for the site at once.
Chamber calling the Trademark destroyed meant they had taken mid as well. Whoever was on B was boxed in, with nowhere to go. If Sova and I moved carelessly, the enemy hiding in mid could jump us. Awkward from every angle—but we weren't the only ones caught. The enemy lurking in mid was pinned between both sides just the same. And if Chamber had been sitting mid from the start, he ought to have been more than enough to take that one lurker—
Hmm. Too bad.
Chamber was dead, but it was all right. We knew where the enemy Reyna was. Kitchen—and she had killed Chamber and used her Q, the blood-drain, so she was probably a monster sitting on 150 health. Buy a shield on a pistol round and the best you get is the light one, which only takes you to 125. One player walking around with a grotesque 150 in that economy earns the name. The Ghost, the 500-credit pistol most people buy on a pistol round, does 105 to the head. Calling her a monster doesn't even cover it. And yet—
Bang.
Even so, a Sheriff one-tap treats everyone the same.
I one-tapped the Reyna who peeked all the way out toward CT without a scrap of fear. She had probably figured that even if two of us were there, she could take one and get out on her E, Dismiss. You take a risky play and miss, you pay for it.
Whatever. If it bothers you, buy a Sheriff yourself.
Sova's reaction was short. Curt, at a glance, but there was a little awe inside it, and that felt pretty good.
Wait. Where had I heard this voice?
Normally I would have let it pass, but it was familiar. A voice I was sure I had heard often. It nagged too much to ignore, so I hit Tab and right-clicked Sova.
...What?
Why was I friends with this person?
Not many people were registered on this account's friend list—on MilkyWay's. The teammates I had played the exhibition with, plus Coach Spax. Five, in all. The account itself was only half a year old.
Turning that fact over again, I began to guess who the Sova was.
"...Han Seongun?"
Captain of SC, their current entry, and the only person I could call a friend. Han Seongun.
He had been pulled into the same match.