You Said You Were Sick? (Project A)
The weekend went to first hellos with the teammates she would be taking into the exhibition, and then, under Spax—brought in as coach—to locking in the positions that would be the base of their comp.
The next step, the one you could not skip if a team was ever going to click, was a scrim. It was set for a weekday: this Monday. Today.
She was still high-school age, so the team had taken that into account and booked the scrim for five in the afternoon. Their opponent, by Spax's own read—he was also coaching the NPT platform's representative side in the same exhibition—was "a team without anyone whose individual skill particularly stands out." No clear ace. Five players moving as one team, by the book.
Someone might ask why they were scouting a mere practice match. In the Platform Exhibition, though, a scrim carried real weight. It was only practice, not the real thing, but it was the first time a representative roster would actually show its strength, and the fans piled in because of that. Win or lose, it tugged hard on a team's morale and on how they played afterward. In an exhibition crammed into so short a window, you could not afford to shrug off a scrim result.
And so, with that important scrim bearing down on the Kwitch representative team, what was their starter—the player in the most important role of all, the entry, Choi Eunha—doing at this very moment?
"Khek—! Cough! Uuugh..."
She was lying in bed. Sick.
Where had it all gone wrong?
"Eunha, that's your third. Keep that up and you'll wreck your stomach."
"Come on, I used to eat five at a time."
"Did you, now...? Anyway, be careful. You'll make yourself sick."
Was it because she had ignored the housekeeper and put away three ice creams in a single day?
Was it because the nights she stayed up gaming with Nebula, calling it a duo, had started to pile up?
"Ugh, it's hot..."
Was it because the night had felt too warm, so she had flung off the dress she usually slept in and gone to bed in her underwear?
"Achoo!"
What else could it be? All three, obviously.
Back when she was a boy, she could eat as much ice cream as she wanted in a day, skip a night of sleep, even sleep in her underwear, and nothing came of it. Of course, that body had been far healthier than this one. In middle school she had been a starter on the school team and had gone out to actual tournaments. Even later, as a high schooler the same age she was now, whether some of that training still clung to her or she had simply been at the peak of her health, she could stay up night after night and come through fine.
"Cough—! Khek!"
And now? Her head swam, a headache pulsed behind it, and her whole body had gone so slack she wasn't sure she could walk properly.
"Snff— augh, I'm dying..."
The cough kept coming with no regard for time or place, and so did the—ugh—runny nose. However she looked at it, the only honest word for this body was serious.
She had known it. This body was too weak. The very first thought she'd had, the moment she saw the body she had become a woman in, was that it looked far too frail.
And she had still gone and made a mistake like that. Was she actually an idiot?
Only yesterday, before meeting Spax, she had sworn to herself that she would not slip. Then she had walked in and dropped straight into casual speech. Yeah. Idiot sounded about right.
Fortunately the scrim was not until five in the afternoon, and it was only eight in the morning. There was time. Plenty of it.
No school, then. She would just lie down for a little while. And, just in case, she set an alarm for four-thirty.
Ah... the medicine... so sleepy...
"Kuuuh..."
She had really meant to rest for only a moment. But the medicine...
The weekend had gone to first hellos with the teammates he would be taking into the exhibition, and then, under Coach Spax's guidance, to settling the positions that would be the base of their comp.
The very next day was Monday, and for him—still a high school student—the inescapable ordeal of going to school came calling.
"Heading out."
On a normal morning he would have been up half the night on Project A and stumbling out the door half asleep. Not today.
"Seongun, can't you think it over one more time?"
"No. I haven't changed my mind."
His mother had promised that if he scored in the top tier on every subject of the March mock exam, she would grant him one wish, whatever it was. The wish he had asked for was simple: one month of living as he pleased, with no cram school.
She was the one who had said any wish at all. So she had no choice but to accept it, however unwillingly.
He had planned the month off from the start, with the exhibition in mind. Then the KZ trainee exposé had set off a full-blown character scandal among Project A pro-team trainees, the 2023 Platform Exhibition had been pushed back because of it, and the event itself had been slashed from a month to two weeks. He didn't really need a whole month away anymore. Whatever. It didn't matter.
He opened the classroom door, went in, and sat in the last seat by the window—the very seat he had been given the moment the first semester began. The homeroom teacher had announced he would be sitting there for the entire year, so that was where he would sit, all year long.
Morning assembly started as nine drew near. Before the teacher could even get a word out, one of the boys raised his hand.
"Teacher, what about Choi Eunha?"
His desk partner, Choi Eunha, still had not come to school.
She never looked as if she were throwing herself into her studies, but she did show up, faithfully, day after day. This was the first time she had been late. Not that the boy had asked out of any concern for her attendance.
Even if she spent every day sprawled across her desk asleep, you could tell, well enough, what place Choi Eunha held in the class. A cold air about her, a face with real breeding, looks so far out of anyone else's league that it was hard to so much as speak to her—Choi Eunha had already captivated plenty of the boys.
His partner, of course, wore the face of someone with no interest in the world whatsoever, so she probably had no idea. Or maybe she knew and was simply ignoring it.
Either way, the crowd of students with their sights on her mostly couldn't get a proper word out from under the weight of her presence, or else went around saying they had been ignored. Off campus, the rumor went, a bodyguard who looked like a bear stuck to her side. Nothing was going to come of it.
He himself had been struck by Choi Eunha's looks once. His type, though, was firmly older. And she was never going to take an interest in him in the first place.
"Eunha's guardian called. She's down with body aches and won't be in for a while. It's spring, but don't get careless and catch something. The weather's still chilly, so look after yourselves."
So that was why the kid who came so faithfully wasn't here. She was sick.
He wasn't exactly friends with Choi Eunha. No need to worry about it past this. Whatever.
"Don't wander off. Straight home."
"Yes!"
All six long, dull periods were over, and under the grace of a homeroom teacher who cut the closing assembly off with military precision, the students shot out of the building like bullets. Through the classroom windows, kids from the other classes watched them go with open envy. That came free.
He left with them. There was a five o'clock scrim to get ready for.
He sat down at the computer and went straight into the Discord channel. In the voice channel labeled as the Kwitch representative team, every teammate but him was already gathered.
"Hello."
It was four-thirty, and the scrim didn't start until five, so he wasn't late. He was still the last one in. A little awkward.
Eunha, the streamer. A friend he had been duo-queuing with a lot lately, and someone he had grown pretty close to. A woman gamer who had put up entry play on the level of the player they called the greatest prospect of all time—himself—no. Above him.
He had no interest in looking at her narrowly just because she was a woman. Even so.
Honestly, the person who had been on his mind the most these days was this Eunha.
More than that, though—why did her voice sound like that?
"What's wrong with you."
It was a voice so shredded it sounded painful to use out loud.
Anyone walking past would have said the same thing. That kid is sick. She sounded that bad.
"You okay?"
She did not look fine at all. Was that really just a cold?
On the surface it was concern for how she felt. There was another meaning folded under it: whether she could actually play the scrim that was about to start.
Even so, Eunha chose to play. Stubborn to the end.
A cold, though.
"Hey, Eunha."
The same name, the same age—that much could happen. But.
Both of them, at the same time, and overnight?
"...It's nothing."
Choi Eunha... Eunha...
No way.
Nebula and Eunha duoed often, and so did Oldboy and Zzangdol. A team game where all five of them had to be one team, though—this was the first time.
Each team's coach could call a timeout up to twice a game—a precious chance, when the flow turned bad, to break it and hand the team a new plan, or a way to answer the other side's. Declaring that he would not use that chance meant Spax wanted to see the Kwitch roster's overall strength as it actually was.
Kwitch opened on defense. On the pistol round, NPT set up a B rush, and Kwitch's Eunha and Nebula pushed up to meet them at B Main.
The two teams were about to slam into each other head-on. Naturally, the one out in front was Jett, who could spend her E—Tailwind—and vanish from a bad spot in an instant.
The Jett duel went to Kwitch's Jett. Eunha.
They had shot each other in the head. NPT's Jett, though, was holding a Frenzy, and one bullet to the head was not enough damage to kill. That gap in the guns decided it.
Eunha's Jett took the one-tap and slipped out on Tailwind. The Sova behind her peeked to trade, but Eunha was already gone.
Their only entry, dead for nothing.
A Frenzy round to the head had dropped Eunha's Jett into the twenties. One body shot from a Classic would kill her at that health, so everyone assumed she would back off.
Bang!
Anyone who watched her stream often enough already knew. She was not the kind of player who backed out of a spot like this.
In a blink, the Jett who was the heart of the execute and the Sova who was the heart of the info war were both dead. Spax, spectating; the whole Kwitch team, Nebula included; and every viewer watching the in-game feed through the broadcast—all of them had the same thought.