Counterattack
What was that?
"...Am I imagining it?"
"Yes, miss?"
"No... I just felt like someone was looking at me."
For a second it had been unmistakable. Someone staring straight at me.
"...Which way. Say the word and I'll—"
"Ah—no. I think I imagined it."
Tell him the truth and Driver Kwon would have gone after them himself before the sentence was finished, so I hurried to wave him off.
It was probably nothing. The place was hardly empty.
TLB opened by smoking off High Mid, as if the smoke itself were saying please, don't come through here.
And they had a point. A smoke like that was miserable to walk into. If someone was sitting inside it with a shotgun, it was a full-blown disaster. Clearing it with utility wasn't much better either—you'd be spending one of your important pieces to do it, and nobody reached for that lightly.
They didn't stop there. Sova's and KAY/O's E—ZERO/point and the Recon Bolt—went out across B Link and A High Mid.
Left like that, the core of SC rotating out of B Link into mid was going to walk straight into Sova's Recon Bolt.
Nebula dropped his C, the smoke burst, on the exact spot the bolt had stuck, and the disaster of the whole squad getting lit never landed.
"Oh."
That was seriously well played.
One slip and their positions would have been exposed from the jump, every lane they cared about taken out from under them. Even if they spiked the tempo the moment they were spotted, the path SC wanted was mid, and mid costs time. What had just happened was a real crisis for them.
Huh? He's right.
Now that he said it—why weren't they rushing?
The caster had it. SC's attack, as a rule, was a brainless hit straight up a main. They liked to drive in on Nebula's fight power like an awl: aggressive, if you were being kind; mindless, if you weren't. But now they were taking it slow.
This wasn't the SC I knew. Not the one that had driven me up the wall.
It was almost like—
TLB's defense on Ascent left mid to an Alarmbot and Omen's smoke, and stacked bodies on A Main and B Main. From the attacker's side, there was no reason to force a mid stuffed with defensive utility when a main was the softer ask—so TLB got to fight on the map they wanted. The moment the round started they scattered bait, cut the options down, and herded the other team onto a battlefield of their choosing. That was the script on Ascent.
Mid covered by utility, the mains covered by numbers. It looked airtight. It wasn't. The script had a few serious holes, and the hole was this: TLB ran out of the skills they needed once the fight moved to a main.
ZERO/point, the Recon Bolt, the smokes—the pieces you wanted on an entry timing, or when you were taking space—were all-in on mid, so of course the mains came up short. Spending that much mid did buy them more bodies for the main duel. That was the trade. And that was the whole point. TLB could force you onto a main. The penalty was that they then had to hold the main with no utility behind them, a pure contest of weight class against weight class.
Think. The best play I can actually make.
Set next to first-division sides, TLB's weight class was nothing you could call good. Their average sat around the bottom of the first division, and on Ascent—where you had to take the mains in a straight fistfight—they had lost over and over because of it. But "their weight class is lacking" only meant something inside the first division. We were a second-division side with a mid-table average. Picking a raw fight with them was more risk than we could afford.
"Byeoli, you're the only one on B Main. The rest of you, on me."
If we wanted to win this game, we had to fight outside the frame they'd built. Slip their intention. Move one step ahead of them.
"Mid? You sure about that? They were dumping a disgusting amount of util in there."
One of them questioned the call. I knew perfectly well he didn't like me. Right now, that didn't matter.
"It's not fine. One skill tags us and we're done."
"Then what's the plan? We wait around to get tagged and then go, and we're late, aren't we?"
...Try thinking that way on a normal day. It nearly made it out of my mouth. I swallowed it. Winning this match mattered more than fighting a teammate I couldn't stand.
"Right. So the second the round starts, we move mid. And we don't get tagged while we do it."
"Yeah, and how exactly are you—"
"We're going. Move."
"No—oh, for—!"
There wasn't time to explain it properly, and I didn't expect him to understand it if I did. No briefing. The moment the round started, we pushed through B Link into mid.
—ting—
A few seconds in, Sova's Recon Bolt came flying for B Link. From the timing, it had been fired the instant the round began.
"Recon!"
The moment they clocked it coming, the others set up to break it.
"Don't break it."
I stopped them fast. If the bolt stuck in B Link got shot, we were telling the enemy, for free, that we were coming through B Link into mid. Leaving it up wasn't safe either. Don't break it, and the pulses rolling off the bolt would catch us and hand Sova something even cleaner.
Right. The pulses. A recon bolt sends a wave out from wherever it lands, and if that wave touches an enemy, it marks them. You don't have to destroy the arrow. Never meet the sound wave, and you give them nothing.
And a smoke shut that wave down easily. The bolt lasted six seconds. A pulse every two—three in all.
"Through, fast. Don't let the recon catch you."
Jett's C, the smoke burst, lasted four and a half. We had to clear B Link before the smoke died and the pulse ran clean again.
"I've got B Main. What do you want to do, Seongun?"
All four of us were in mid, and none of us had been spotted. All that was left was choosing where to hit. A Short into A, or Mid Market into B—except one obstacle was still out there. Where Killjoy had put the Alarmbot.
"Can you just confirm whether the Killjoy turret is on B? Watch the off-angle on B Main, and Market."
The way to get that information was simpler than it sounded.
"Got it."
Killjoy, the sentinel the pro scene rated as outright overpowered. Her one real flaw was that every piece of the kit except the C, Nanoswarm, only worked properly while she herself stayed inside a set range. That penalty made the split setup impossible—Alarmbot on A, turret on B, her in neither—and if you used the penalty, you could predict where the Alarmbot had to be. Killjoy on B, Alarmbot in Market. Killjoy on A, Alarmbot on A Short.
—beep!
"Turret's B. Killjoy's B."
Pola found the turret almost before the words were finished. Killjoy was confirmed on B, which meant there was no Alarmbot on A Short. And that information meant—
"Run it. A Short."
—A Short was where we had to go.
—beep!
The instant Pola tripped the turret, SC broke for A Short. Omen's smoke was down across it, and it looked like a terrible idea.
There was no one in the smoke. TLB had thrown a bluff.
SC didn't bite. They hit the site and, in a blink, forced it into a three-versus-four.
SC came in on Ground's hawk and Sova's Recon Bolt.
The tip of the spear was Nebula, of course.
There were fully three of them on the site, so Nebula was traded at once. Even so—
Four was too many bodies. The defense folded, and SC took the site at the price of Nebula alone.
That rush had not been a simple timing hit. Pola had confirmed Killjoy on B and made certain there was no Alarmbot on A Short, and they had gone to A on that read. The turret and the Alarmbot he'd accounted for also ruled out a push off B and a push through mid, which pinned the enemy's backup to CT and only sharpened the fight for the teammates already on the site.
So that was the strange unease I'd felt in the way SC moved.
"You pulled yourself together, Han Seongun."
A shape SC hadn't managed to show in all this time. This was—
It had to be Nebula's call.