Silence
"Choi Eunha...?"
A grotesque little crosshair: a black circle, and inside it, eyes and a mouth scratched in red. Stare at the thing and you couldn't even tell if it meant to work as a sight or as a piece of art. Useless, past the point of argument. And yet the person who ran it only ever said the same two things.
It was exactly the crosshair someone I knew used all the time.
No. Just a coincidence. Someone on Choi Eunha's level was exactly the kind of influencer who could drag a new fad through the whole Project A scene, and even a crosshair that ugly was trendy enough if she wore it. The player in front of me was a fan, or just somebody with rotten taste. And even if it really was Choi Eunha herself...
What right did I have, this late, to act like I knew her?
At first I'd been grateful. After every match she sent a few words of support, and that feeling hasn't changed even now. I was afraid, though, that being tied to me would hurt her. I wanted to stop any more people from getting the wrong idea about what we were.
"What, is that your girlfriend?"
"Ha. Must be nice for some people. Whole future wide open, dating a streamer girlfriend who's stupid pretty. Meanwhile the rest of us eat shit every day and grind."
Every time a match ended and I got on with her, the team tore into me for caring more about a relationship than about results. I call it tearing, not criticism, for a reason. They weren't worried about the team's record. They'd just found a fresh excuse to cut me down.
If she really had been my girlfriend, at least the bitterness would've been fair. She doesn't even think about me that way. She is warm with me, that's true — warmer than I deserve, seeing as I'm her only friend. And that's where it stops. To Eunha I am a friend and nothing past it. The line is absolute.
The part that hurts most is that she doesn't doubt, for a second, that I feel exactly as she does. That I think of her as purely a friend. That there isn't a scrap of selfishness in it.
"Which one looks better?"
And then she'd send photos like that and ask me to pick an outfit. I still can't tell if that's innocence or cruelty.
What made me start ignoring a friend that good was the rumor that we were dating. The rumor is not true — I've said as much — but a dating scandal can be fatal for a woman who streams. I'm a pro, so I'm freer to date than she is. Let my form slip, though, and people will use that same story to tear me apart whenever they like.
At the start I tried to clear it up. It wasn't true, and I didn't want to lose a friend like Eunha over something like this. By the time I moved, too much time had already gone by.
One verification post, apparently written by a Seoyun High kid who'd been in the same class as Eunha and me, and just like that the story that we were dating hardened into something people treated as fact. At first the only proof on offer was that the writer went to Seoyun High, with nothing else attached, and the thread got written off as bait.
Then the Seoyun High kids piled on, testimony after testimony, proof after proof, and the lie that Eunha and I were a couple became the truth as far as they were concerned. What sealed it was the claim that, right up until I dropped out, Choi Eunha and I had spent nearly every hour of the day glued to each other. And we had, until a few days before I left. Of course, that was only because the afterparty of the school match had blown both our identities, and once we knew, we just stayed close.
Even so, every post with a photo of her or of me was gone within a few hours. Her family's reach had a hand in that, I'm sure. Delete them, though, and what does it change? Everyone who was going to see them had already seen them. The chance to explain myself vanished a long time ago.
So that's where it lands. Too many people have the wrong idea about Eunha and me, and no matter how many times I explain, they have no intention of believing it. The conclusion I came to, for my part, was to keep my distance. Even if staying near me cost her viewers, Eunha would never be the one to drop me.
From her side, of course, that just makes me the asshole who cut off the one friend she thought she had.
Ha. Just focus on the game. Thinking any further won't make it better, and that Jett isn't Eunha anyway. Whenever she plays, she turns the stream on. For her, broadcasting is closer to a hobby than a job. She isn't live right now. She had an event match on the schedule today. She's probably home, resting.
Three against two. On our side, Chamber and I are dead. On theirs, three are already down. A numbers advantage is not something you get to trust. The bomb is already planted, and their Snake is still alive.
Snake's C, Snake Bite. Cast it and you pull out that green ampule; left click sends it wherever you're looking. The projectile blooms into a wide pool of poison where it lands. Anyone standing in it eats twenty-four damage a second and picks up Vulnerable for two seconds, doubling the damage they take. The pool holds for five and a half seconds, the Vulnerable for two, and Snake can only carry two charges at once.
The skill does two jobs. Drop a Bite across an entrance and you shut the path down. Drop it on the planted bomb and you stop the defense from defusing.
A soft fwp as another one leaves the hand. And because the projectile has no range limit, you can lob it on a steep arc — the so-called angle molly — which is still one of the cleanest ways in the game to deny a defuse. Lay the poison orb, the Q, down on the plant as well, and two Bites stall the defense for something like eleven seconds. Broken tech. The bomb takes about forty-five seconds to blow after the plant. That's a quarter of the clock erased at no risk at all.
Jett's reckless entry has already cleared every enemy on the No-Con line. That puts the last two on B Main.
A hiss. Snake throws the toxic screen, the E, and wipes the angle from B Site into B Main. Neither side can see the other now.
If Snake is sitting on that angle molly, and if the other team is going to be pre-aiming the plant, then we have to be the ones who move first. So. How are you going to solve this? I know this person isn't Eunha. I still catch myself laying her over them anyway. Maybe it's that bizarre crosshair, the one only a single person in the world insists is cute. Maybe it's the reaction speed and the play they just showed inside of five seconds. I couldn't say which.
Jett walked out of No-Con without a word. Tailwind was already lit, as if an enemy might be waiting on the other side of the smoke. Not using voice chat, either. A carbon copy of Choi Eunha.
Voice is the bare minimum. It's a first-person shooter; if you aren't sharing information, you aren't playing, and talking will always be faster than typing. Up in the highest ranks, staying silent is treated as bad manners, close to griefing. Eunha is famous for barely touching voice herself, but she does it to dodge attention she doesn't want, and she's good enough that nobody complains when the mic stays off.
Pop. Fade's Haunt comes sailing out of B Main. Leave it up and Jett's position gets painted for the enemy, but the teammates still on B Site can't see the eye at all — Snake's toxic screen has it hidden. So Jett has to break it herself. Except she doesn't. She leaves the Haunt alive and only watches the gap where someone would have to step out of B Main.
"What are they doing?"
Once both sides know where the other is, the one who swings first is the one who wins. The peeker chooses the timing. The one holding has to wait, and wait, for an enemy who might come now, or later, or not at all. Every one of those possibilities eats at your focus, and the worse your focus gets, the worse your odds in the fight. Right now the Haunt has Jett lit the whole time, and she's standing in open air. Fade's chance of winning that duel ought to be—
—high. It ought to be.
"Hah."
I never doubted Fade would take it. The kill feed showed me the opposite, and there was no chance of a glitch. I'd watched Jett win it with my own eyes. Fade had every advantage. She was the one who got to pick the timing, and Jett had to keep guarding against a peek that might never come. Time was on Fade's side. Jett's focus should have been the thing that cracked.
"...Genuinely filthy fast."
Jett's reactions hadn't slipped at all from the gunfight that killed Reyna. Leaving the Haunt up, giving her own position away — was that just to bait Fade out? Snake was busy with the angle molly. She couldn't double-swing with Fade, and she couldn't trade her either.
"Yeah, no way. They didn't think it through that far."
Project A is full of skills other shooters simply don't have. Molotovs, flashes, smokes — those, at least, you could find somewhere else. Then there's the rest: Concuss, Vulnerable, Paranoia, Detain, all the tools that exist only here to ruin an enemy's ability to fight. You use every one of them to tilt a duel, and then you use the duels to win the game. That's the skeleton of Project A. Even the pro scene plays along it.
But Project A was also a game where raw skill could overturn every disadvantage on the board.
...You saw that.
You saw it, right?
The spectator count in the upper right says two. That means Nebula is definitely watching my screen. So he did see that play. Still not enough for him, is it? Then again, last time he only sent the friend request after the two of us had practically flipped the game by ourselves. There's a real chance this didn't surprise him at all. It's only round one. I can show him slowly.
"Anyway..."
"Why is this one so quiet?"
Nebula, dropped into the game by nothing but chance. Unlike before, he was... too quiet.
No briefing. No orders. Nothing at all.