The Crosshair
Project A is built so you can't read a teammate's name in-game.
More precisely, every account ships with the same setting — display names anonymously — and since there's never any reason to touch it, most people just play with the names covered. I don't really know why that's the default. It hardly matters in the first place. Hide the names all you like; Project A is a game that wants you in voice chat, and the second someone talks, the anonymity stops meaning anything.
The odd part is that the setting still holds when a friend lands on your team. Same treatment as a stranger: Player N, or the agent's name. Even so, there are plenty of ways to find out.
If someone you know gets matched — especially someone sitting in your friends list — you hit Tab, right-click them, and look. Right-click anyone but yourself and the menu is always the same: Report, Block, Whisper, and, last, Add Friend. No Add Friend means they're already your friend. Know that much, and you can usually guess the rest.
The only friend online was Nebu1a — Han Seongun — and the round score lined up. Had to be him.
Still.
"This kid doesn't realize it's me...?"
I'd known him from the voice alone. He still didn't seem to have the faintest idea that I was Choi Eunha. A little galling. I'd caught on instantly, and he hadn't, and for a second I felt stupidly low, like maybe I'd been the only one who thought we were close.
"Oh. Right. My mic's off."
Thinking about it, expecting him to recognize me when I wasn't even in voice was probably the problem to begin with. I had six people in my friends list. He was the number-one duo target in the high ranks, a guy whose contacts went on forever. I had a pile of clues. He had almost none. I decided, more or less, to forgive him.
I was about to tell him in chat that I was Eunha. Then I stopped.
"Mm..."
Things had gone pretty cold with him lately, and I hesitated. Cold, meaning he was the one unilaterally leaving me on read. We hadn't reached out once since then. Not a single conversation. Of course the air had gone stiff. Inevitable, looked at a certain way.
"Why does this make me angrier the longer I think about it?"
I was cheering him on properly, as a senior from the scene. Even if something rough had happened recently, he could at least answer. Once I framed it that way, being the one to reach out first stung.
Unless he contacted me first, I was not going to contact him again. It might end with me cut off from the only friend I had left, but what pride I had left as a man — a former man — would not let me take one more step.
"Ah! Right. That'll work."
A good idea had come to me. The thing that first tied me to Han Seongun was chance: a ranked game, the same team. After that we ran duos, went out to the Platform Exhibition, met again at the afterparty, and the thread kept winding. Our real first meeting had been the entrance ceremony, in the school auditorium, but neither of us knew who the other was then, so if you set that aside, the ranked game was the start.
Yeah. Back then he'd watched me play and sent the request himself. Nebula — so wanted as a duo that even pros friend-requested him first just for a queue — that aloof Nebula had reached out on his own, and I'd wondered if his finger had slipped. Even so, a request like that meant the play had stuck. The kind of thing that lodges in your head.
"I'll make him wonder who I am."
Pop off hard enough that he had to think who is this, and he'd right-click my name. He'd see we were already friends. He'd ask who I was. And then — then — I'd give him the one line. It's Eunha. Quit reading my texts and ghosting me. Perfect.
Pleased enough with the plan, I started moving to back up the teammates holding B site. It was a small-hearted scheme, from wanting to be close again and not wanting to be the one who offered a hand.
Bang!
"...Nice."
Filthy reaction time. I'd been thinking there was no way they'd swing out from CT on that timing, but it was Reyna, so they'd tried it. If it hadn't been Jett, that could have gone badly. I hadn't even considered the timing, and my own reaction was late.
Four against four now, and the clock was already past the one-minute line. They had nowhere to go but B. Our Snake and KAY/O had already given ground all the way to the Snowman line, which meant the plant was not getting stopped.
Didn't matter. Ice Room is a map where you have to swallow the plant to some degree anyway. B site is especially miserable to hold from inside the site itself, so they had no choice but to drop back toward B Main and Nocon. After that it was just whose shots were cleaner — a long-range fight. My job was recon. Tell the team where they were.
"Bouncing arrow on the line behind Nocon. Count four, then go in."
The call was barely finished before I sent my E — the recon bolt — toward Nocon. An arrow that rides the wall doesn't stick where you want it the instant it leaves the bow, so I'd already given them the four seconds.
Killjoy and Jett, both on Nocon. The other two would be toward Main. The ones on Nocon would be too busy flinching at the recon to peek, so if we just watched Main and used the defuse sound to pull them out—
Whoosh!
"Huh?"
Our Jett hit Tailwind and charged straight at Nocon. There were two of them in there.
One enemy, and it would have been a fair call. There were two. No CC on them — just two players caught by recon — and taking that head-on was basically suicide. Worse, he was holding a Sheriff, the pistol that rules a long-range fight like this, the one we actually needed in the duel. If he died here, we were done.
The kill log showed the exact opposite of what I'd expected.
Bang. Bang-bang-bang. Bang!
And by a margin well past anything I'd pictured. What? How did he win that?
Chamber — already dead, I figured, and spectating Jett's screen. How do you win a one-versus-two like that? They'd shot back; I'd heard plenty of gunfire. Enough of it, actually, that it sounded like panic spray. So our Jett had dashed straight at them on purpose, just to rattle them?
"No way that—"
"—actually works. Except it kind of does."
I knew someone who liked to play exactly that way. Total faith in their own aim, and on the back of that faith, a taste for the play nobody was ready for. Mind you, that someone was always insisting they played fundamentally and logically. Calling themselves a smart player.
A tap on the shoulder.
"Oh, look at our captain, practicing hard again today!"
"Ah."
Ah. Here we go again. The on-stream death sentence.
"Aigoo, sorry, sorry. I picked the worst time to open my mouth and got you killed. My bad?"
...Did it on purpose, and now the lie.
"Don't look at me with those scary eyes. It really was an accident, okay?"
Ignore him. Paying attention only wears me out. One glance said practice was the last thing on his mind — he'd been out messing around with his friends. Someone like that, you just ignore. Best policy.
Anyway. He'd be cut in a few months.
SC had been through a full rebuild, but the timing of it meant most of the players were people the org didn't really want. Even if we earned a promotion to the first division this season, I was seventeen, and that age blocked me — I wouldn't be able to play next season. This year was only a preparation period. The real start was next year. Coach Kim Sangho had told me as much, and told me that if I rubbed the current roster the wrong way, I should just let it go.
The current teammates had problems. A lot of them, in a lot of directions. Hanbyeol-hyung excluded, obviously. His will to go pro, and the amount he practiced, were so far past the other three that comparing them felt unfair.
"Hey, you're not really talking to your girlfriend these days, huh?"
...This again?
"I told you, she's not my girlfriend. Just a friend."
"Now that you mention it, I haven't seen you texting after matches lately either. You two break up?"
Ha...
At least pretend to listen.
"Would you shut your—"
"Hey. The kid's practicing. Don't get in the way. Go."
"Come on, Hanbyeol-hyung. I just want us to get along. All of this helps team chemistry, I'm telling you."
"Looks like picking a fight to me. You want to talk, talk to me."
"Hah, it was a joke. Fine, I'm going."
"..."
Hanbyeol-hyung stepped in, and I barely held it. Those guys had some kind of inferiority complex toward me. They were itching for a fight and couldn't stand not getting one.
I was dead anyway, and I wanted to see the Jett play that had startled our Chamber, so I switched the spectate feed over to him. The first thing waiting on that screen was—
"What is this crosshair."
An extremely... well. A pointlessly enormous crosshair.
But this crosshair...
"Choi Eunha...?"
Wasn't this the crosshair Choi Eunha always used?