That's Incredible (Project A)
The eleventh round was already behind them, and only the last round of the first half remained. Nebula let a thin sigh out.
"Haa. Unbelievable..."
Chat took the sigh for something else and piled onto the teammates the matchmaker had handed him. The person he'd called unbelievable was a teammate, yes. Just not in the way they heard it.
Their Jett — Milky Way, in the game; Eunha, on stream. Her play was the unbelievable part.
There wasn't a single initiator on the team with a flash or a concuss to help the entry through the door.
A Jett who ought to have been grateful to take even one was taking two, then three, sweeping the site clean in the most literal sense. Omen was spending Paranoia alongside her entry, but for an instalock the mastery was pretty poor. The blind wasn't helping the entry at all. In the end Jett had no crowd control worth the name. She was sprinting into a killing ground on nothing but Sova's recon bolt and a smoke.
Omen had been picked off Chamber's Operator before the round even got going, so there was no smoke and no Paranoia to lean on. Even then, Jett made the site and came away with two.
A play worth two or three players, even if she only did it once — and she had been doing it through all twelve rounds. Of course the awe slipped out. It was possible this streamer called Eunha was simply living through the game of a lifetime that every Project A player runs into once. Nebula didn't think so. People in those games get drunk on everything breaking their way and start forcing plays the risk can't justify. Jett was aggressive, yes. In another sense she was keeping the line so carefully it was almost studious.
She was first onto the site, the front of the hit, and the only shame was that he couldn't watch her from the spectator slot.
The Operator cracked, bright and clean, and the Jett who had been tearing the site apart finally went down. Omen, the smoker who was supposed to kill that angle, was already gone. She still gave the call, quiet and exact.
A player like that, riding the bench for Kwitch's representative side? Don't make me laugh. Geonmo or Rabbit could be in the room and it wouldn't matter. At that level you start. No argument. She might even be able to hang with pros.
"No. That might be going too far..."
Even I, the prospect they call the greatest there's ever been, have no idea what I'd look like against real pros. Far too much credit.
Anyway, she had already done this much. I wasn't about to let the round die on her.
We're supposed to play the exhibition together. I have to give her a reason to trust me, don't I?
"Ah! No, that was the head! Ugh... this game is seriously brutal..."
If I'd been on the rifle I don't main, I would have had that Chamber too. A little annoying.
The one I do main is the Phantom, the so-called M4. Step outside fifteen meters and a headshot drops to 140. Past thirty, it's 124. Buy medium shields and one bullet to the head will not kill you. The Outlaw — the so-called AK — pays 160 to the head at any range, and that would have finished Chamber where I left him standing. But a front-line entry like Jett gets more out of the Phantom when it's one against many. Nothing to be done about it.
At least if I die, Nebula is still there, so I can take the entry without holding my breath. There isn't that pressure that says the round is over the moment I drop.
Only Omen and I had died. B was clear, and the spike went down clean. They still had Fade and Snake. We had Sova — Nebula — plus Snake and Killjoy. The numbers were ours.
Their Snake had scooped the Operator off the dead Chamber, and our Snake had walked into it. The worst possible body to lose. Snake Bite was the stall that could sit on a defuser, and Snake was the one holding it. Still fine, though. Killjoy could stop a defuse too.
"Killjoy's Nanoswarm is down, so we're fi—"
?
What is this. Seriously.
"They knew it was an Op. Why walk out there and die?"
A long sigh out of Nebula. From the spectator view I could more or less tell what they'd been thinking. From where he stood, they were just trolls who had been told not to peek and peeked anyway.
The defuse clicked. If their Snake was holding an Operator from Snowman — B Snowman, on the callout — we were in a miserable spot.
Nebula dropped a single ping toward Snowman, right-clicked, and set his crosshair on the direction he'd marked. He held that aim and peeked the Operator.
"Whoa... is he out of his mind?"
He swung the angle where Snake had to be, one-tapped him on the counter-strafe, and flicked a second one-tap into the Fade who was still on the defuse. Snake never even answered the peek. Fade, defusing on faith that Snake had it, died before the gun cleared the holster.
"He's seriously good..."
People used to call me the best Project A pro in the country, and even I have never touched rank one on the Asia server. Scrims and the team schedule meant I never ground ranked the way Nebula does. Grind or not, I couldn't promise the top would have been mine.
So the twelfth round fell, barely, on Nebula's clutch, and the first half closed at six to six. For the record, his kills and mine came to thirty between us.
The half turned over. Attack and defense swapped, and it was our turn to hold. At last the weight came off — no more being the first body through a killing ground with nobody's utility behind me. I was about to buy the Sheriff, eight hundred credits, and leave it at that.
"...Huh?"
So the team really did want to ride the bus properly.
The Sheriff Omen paid for, a four-hundred-credit pair of light shields, Cloudburst on C, Updraft on Q. A pistol round hands everyone eight hundred credits. I spent fifteen hundred and fifty of them by myself. Omen's share, in everything but name.
"If they're going to ask me to carry them like that, I guess I have to."