I Don't Know
Luckily I made it up before five, right on schedule, and got into the scrim lobby without being late.
"God, why am I shaking this hard over nothing."
"I know. If a scrim does this to me, what's the real match going to be like."
It was our first scrim as Kwitch's representative team. A scrim is only a practice match, so there was no reason at all to be nervous... and yet a couple of us were. Zzangdol and Oldboy, specifically, looked pretty tense.
A scrim is supposed to stay private. The Platform Exhibition, though, is a tournament for broadcasters, so turning your own stream on and playing it out had become a kind of custom. Viewers came in to watch one player's screen with their own eyes, and both of them suddenly had far more people watching than they usually drew. The rush seemed to have them a little tight. Fair enough. It was their first Exhibition.
"Eh... eh... a-choo!"
Ugh. My nose.
Better wipe it before the game starts.
"Eunha, you're not nervous?"
This was my first Exhibition too, but I wasn't particularly nervous.
"No... not really... cough!"
I'd played before in a huge arena, with more than three times this many people watching live.
It warmed me a little anyway. I'd assumed they were all creeps who wanted to watch me suffer. I was definitely better than this morning. Back then my body had been so heavy I couldn't move a single finger.
Right now I was fine—
"I'm okay, really.... A-choo!"
...not exactly. A little heavy, that was all. Everything still moved the way it should, so I was fine.
Yeah. Fine.
"Oh. It started."
A minute after Spax left the Discord, the custom lobby we'd made for the scrim finally loaded in. The map was Ascent, the one NPT had requested. For the first game we'd agreed not to drill any special strat or agent. We'd each just play whatever we were best at.
"You're on Jett to start, right?"
Nebula was our main caller, the IGL, but they'd made Zzangdol captain. Spax had told me he'd given him the armband because he was someone who could get along with everybody.
"Yep."
It wasn't only Ascent. Jett is loved on almost every map, and even more so in a team game like this. After Chamber was nerfed and phased out of the circuit, she was nearly the only agent who could still run a stable Operator, and her stock had only climbed. She was also the agent I trusted my mechanics on most. From where I stood, there was no reason not to take her.
Alright. Let's go.
"Come on, Kwitch—fighting!"
We hadn't settled on a team name yet, not before the real matches, so the cheer just opened on the platform's name. Even so. You do this kind of thing before a game starts.
"Fighting!"
"Figh—cough! ...ting... ngh..."
Damn it. Seriously.
Ascent, and we were starting on defense. We took the most basic comp on the map: one entry, two initiators, one sentinel, one controller. The other team...
"Three initiators...?"
"Wow. Three initiators, into a team with Spax coaching."
To me, the comp was pretty familiar. It was the one I'd used all the time on Ascent back when I was on KZ.
Three initiators meant KAY/O's ZERO/point, Sova's Recon Bolt, and Fade's Haunt—three separate skills that could pull information—so you solved the game on an overwhelming volume of info. That didn't mean it had no weaknesses. With no sentinel, it was hard to shut an entry down, and the info skills only covered fixed positions. If the other team had studied a triple-initiator setup properly, good information got hard to come by.
"I think they're coming A. Want the Killjoy setup on A?"
"Yep."
Killjoy could stall an execute cleanly, which meant our job was to lure them into hitting the site where she was set.
"Eunha and I will slow-push B."
On a pistol round, a stacked rush through one point is preferred over splitting into a default, so we'd arranged the bodies for that. If they hit A, Killjoy would buy time. If they hit B, Nebula and I—the two with the better straight-up fights—would meet them head-on. They might try mid into Short or Market, but KAY/O and Omen had that covered.
They came down the B Main Nebula and I were already pushing, and in a straight fight we picked off their Jett and their Sova.
Pushing with no utility behind us carried real risk, but it wasn't a read with nothing under it. NPT had no clear ace. All five moved as one team, by the book. Teams like that usually have a hole: they get dragged under by plays that are aggressive past the point of sense, or by plays with no foundation at all. If the two sides were even, textbook play would win, obviously. Right now they weren't even. There was a clear gap in skill.
That was the whole basis of what I did. The skill gap. The confidence that no matter what they tried, I could win—
"A-choo! Ugh..."
Pop.
Brrt-brrt.
"Ah."
A sneeze. Actually rigged...
Any other day I would have answered KAY/O's flash and the peek. My body just wasn't right, and I couldn't get out of it on reaction.
Still, the moment I died Nebula peeked and got the trade, so on the ledger it was three for one.
"Traded. Spike's still dropped on B Main."
The pistol round was already over.
First half, 2–0. After losing pistol, the other team ran an eco and saved their money. Ascent is a defender's map, and with that much gun advantage we took the second round without losing a single player.
"They'll have rifles this time, so let's play to drop as many guns as we can~"
"Yep."
"Eunha, you holding mid again?"
I had a Marshal. A sniper's long range favored me in mid, where the duel distance stretched out.
"Yeah. Why?"
"Three initiators, so I figure the ZERO/point sticks Market. When the round starts, drop all the way back to Triple."
If NPT had taken this from KZ's triple-initiator, Nebula's read would be right. KZ's mid take started with KAY/O's ZERO/point: suppress a Jett's Tailwind or a Chamber's Rendezvous, then pick them off. That had been our favorite setup back then. These days Chamber is gone and only Jett shows up on Ascent, so Killjoy sits higher in the tier list. Still.
"Mm... okay."
I decided to take his word. He was the IGL calling for us, and the strength of three initiators is an overwhelming info game. Put the other way: if you never give them information, a lot of that strength has to go dull.
Fweee—pop.
The ZERO/point stuck Market, just as Nebula had said. I'd already dropped off, so my position never reached them, and the suppress never caught me.
Whoosh.
A smoke laid straight across mid. Once that was down, there was no way to tell whether they'd take Short or push through the smoke into Market. Mid belonged to NPT. If I'd been holding an Operator—one body shot and they're gone—I might have stayed a little longer. What I had was a Marshal. Anything short of a headshot was a duel I almost always lost, so giving the angle up was the right call.
"B Main's clear. Pola, one ZERO/point on A. If it doesn't tag anyone, they're mid for sure."
"A's clear too."
Nebula's Recon Bolt down B Main didn't find them. Neither did Pola's ZERO/point covering A Main and Short. Before we knew it the clock had dropped into the final minute.
"They're hitting Short. I'll stall."
Their Jett entered Short behind Omen's Paranoia.
Killjoy's Alarmbot on Short caught their Jett, and the Nanoswarm already planted stalled the entry once.
KAY/O's C, FRAG/ment—hit the floor and it erupts in a lasting circle—stalled them a second time, buying the players on B and me enough time to collapse onto A.
The fight was with the Jett who had already stepped in before Nanoswarm went off. The guns were too far apart, and the trade came out one for two.
A site was already clear, and the spike was down. What we had left was a retake, or backing out of the blast radius and killing as many as we could on the way, just to drop their guns. In a real match the second choice would be the better one. This game was a scrim, though. Practice, in so many words.
"Want to try a retake on this?"
Nebula seemed to be thinking the same thing.
"Then I'll... swing around to their main, cough!— and go."
"Okay."
Three players showed on the minimap: Jett, KAY/O, and Sova. Omen and Fade weren't checked, but Haunt had been used on A site, so Fade was on A Short. That left either their Omen alone on Main, or nobody. A team with no Killjoy has to leave one player watching the rear. Thin guns, thin numbers—we started a retake that looked close to impossible.
"Hyung, what are you doing?"
KZ was on its break after PCT LOCK//IN. Most of them had taken the long vacation to spend time with family, or left on trips. The captain, Spax, had stayed behind in the team house.
"What? Didn't you say you were going on a trip?"
He'd thought he was alone in the house. A voice caught Kim Seungtaek—Spax—a little off guard.
"Canceled."
"Uh... huh?"
He said it flat, like a canceled plan was nothing. This was RP, one of KZ's starters, a player versatile enough to fill every role.
"Since when do you watch streams?"
"You know the Exhibition? I ended up going as coach."
"You?"
The guest-coach offer had come from Kwitch. He'd taken it because he thought sitting in the coach's chair would sharpen him as an IGL. RP had nothing else to do, so he settled in to watch Spax's screen with him, and a moment later asked, voice stunned:
"Who is this person?"
"...I don't know either."
Why someone like this was a streamer at all—
I really don't know.