On Air
Three years ago, Project A still wasn't much of a name in Korea.
FPS games had never been especially popular there to begin with, and with Legend of League planted immovably at number one, it was hard to imagine Project A ever catching fire.
The Korean server was so starved for players that most of the highest-ranked users abandoned it for the Asia server, and the home server was all but left for dead.
Then Legend of League collapsed. Project A blew up out of nowhere, people flooded onto the Korean server, and the Koreans who had moved to Asia mostly came home. The server came back to life.
A few pros and top-rank players stayed on Asia anyway, chasing a higher level of game. I was one of them.
Maybe that was why a fight like that over voice felt like something I was seeing for the first time. No—arguments on voice happened plenty on the Asia server too. It was just that over there they fought in English or Japanese, so hearing it in Korean had a strange novelty to it.
I ignored the two of them screaming at each other and pushed onto B, empty now that Jett was dead.
Nobody had shown on C, where I'd been holding, which meant the enemy Raze who had come into B had three choices: swing on the three teammates we still had alive on A, hide on B and wait for someone to walk in, or fall back and link up with the rest of the team.
All three were live, so what I had to do was already decided. If they still hadn't shown on C this late, they were hitting A or B. Raze already had B locked down completely, and yet the spike wasn't planted—so they were going A, and Raze was on a lurk, waiting to catch anyone who turned back or rotated over to help.
I cleared B on the assumption Raze was there. The moment I stepped onto the site, I found the enemy Raze creeping carefully toward A.
"...What are you doing here?"
When you take someone's back, you always have to remember that yours can be taken too. Or maybe they'd been checking, and simply looked away in the instant I arrived. FPS games are full of moments like that.
But while I was killing Raze, the teammates holding A got run over by the enemy Reyna.
Even granting that it had been a three-on-four, the fight was absurdly one-sided. Down to a one-on-four, saving my gun was the smarter call.
The two of them were still going at it on voice. The enemy planted on an A site they owned completely.
The spike detonates forty-five seconds after the plant. Fail to defuse inside that window and the defense loses. A defuse takes seven seconds, which meant I had thirty-eight to take an A with four enemies on it. Alone.
For someone who used to be a pro, that was a fairly easy job.
Three kills must have gone to her head. Reyna had the nerve to leave the site and come hunt me instead of sitting in a corner.
If Reyna gets a kill, her Q, Devour, lets her heal, and once that heal climbs past her maximum of one hundred she slips into overheal. They call her the queen of the pistol round—that opening round where each player is handed only eight hundred credits—because she can sit on 150 health, more than anyone else. But inside thirty meters, a Sheriff to the head makes everyone equal. One bullet.
That's the punch of the most expensive gun you can buy on a pistol round. Eight hundred credits.
Bang.
Three left. No trade had come, so I judged the lane from B to A empty. It wasn't a certainty—more a play that simply wrote the risk off—but when you're behind, you swallow gambles of that size.
Thirty seconds remained. I ran through the dangerous angles on A where someone could be waiting. Short. Main. Under. Heaven.
Three enemies, and it was still a pistol round, so I ruled out Jett boosting up to Heaven with Updraft, her Q. That left Under, Main, and Short.
Omen can only cover two spaces with his utility, so I smoked Main and Short at once.
The shadow goes.
Shadow, summoned.
I swung straight onto A, cleared the angle on the right, and peeked Under.
Bang.
I put one through the head of the Jett waiting in Under, then fished with the defuse sound. On my end I'd only tapped it and let go. On theirs, blinded by the smoke, there was no way to tell whether I was actually defusing or baiting.
So they made the best play available to them: both swinging at once. Even if I killed one, the other could kill me. A double peek. A high-percentage fight you see all the time in the pro scene.
Snake and Ground burst out together from inside the smoke on Main.
Unfortunately, coming out as a pair doesn't mean the pair wins.
Bang. Bang.
Getting two at once off a single player is pretty common, even in pro play. And if both of them come from the same direction, the way they just had, the difficulty drops by half. One of them holding Short would have been a much better percentage.
Of course, that was their problem. Not mine.
I cleared the last of them and defused at my leisure.
An ace. The message that appears when one player kills five or more and wins the round.
In other words: you did it alone.
The moment my play stole round one, Jett and Chamber—who had been tearing into each other on voice—went quiet. It hadn't really been a mutual fight so much as Jett picking at Chamber, and Chamber failing to let it go.
The play must have landed, because Reyna asked what tier my main account was. Fair enough. It wasn't something a level-one newbie pulls off.
I didn't tell the truth. Even if I said Chaser—the highest tier on the Asia server—nobody was going to believe it.
"Huh?"
A single message had landed in the chat of a stream I'd all but abandoned, tired of waiting for anyone to show.
Back when I streamed as a pro, more than ten thousand people could be watching and I wouldn't feel a thing. Right now, even that one viewer was precious.
"Welcome!"
I put on the brightest voice I had, for an audience of one.
"...Hello?"
The chat stayed cold. The counter still said one, so they hadn't left the stream. I should just keep playing. Right—maybe I'd made them uncomfortable.
Win a pistol round and you come out holding far more money than the other side. So Project A has an unwritten rule: lose the pistol, and you eco, hoarding cash and giving the round away; win it, and you full-buy, arming up as hard as the credits allow.
I dropped the pistol from last round and bought a shield that added fifty health, plus a 950-credit sniper—the Marshal.
The Marshal hits for 101 to the body and 202 to the head. On an eco, when the enemy hasn't bought shields, it's one of the best guns you can hold.
Everyone else on the team bought Spectres, the 1650-credit SMG.
...Jett bought no gun at all. Just the pistol I'd thrown away, and a light shield, and that was how the round started.
If they were on an eco, a rush at B was likely—the site where the fights are shorter—so I took the hold on B.
The instant the round began, the enemy Reyna popped out of B Window. I put one straight through her head.
A body shot would have killed her anyway. Taking the head with a Marshal just feels better than hitting the chest.
The person on the receiving end, of course, feels considerably worse.
From their side, B—the site they could most reasonably hit—was shut, so they'd have to look at A or C. We were holding better guns than they were, on average. The result was obvious before it started.
They rushed A with nothing but default pistols and went down one after another, shot full of holes by the SMGs.
Well. There did seem to be one guy that didn't apply to.
"Yeah, yeah, I got it~"
Before our Jett could lose it any harder on voice, I traded the enemy Snake.
Jett—who had, for all practical purposes, bought no gun—was the only one dead. Nobody dropped a weapon they'd paid for. We took round two clean.
Still watching, then.