Episode 58: Platform Exhibition, Day One — Youngest and Oldest vs. Pravengers

In the Platform Exhibition, every map is drawn at random.

Each team has maps it likes and maps it would rather never see, so the draw is a real roll of the dice. These are not pro squads, though. Nobody here has spent a season tearing a single map apart on film, and because of that the luck does not land as hard as it would on a real stage.

The map that came up was Bind. Bind has no mid — none of that ground between A and B that most maps give you — and its signature feature is a pair of one-way teleporters built into the map itself. Step through one and you are behind the enemy in a blink. It is a map made for trick plays.

Before I caught that cold. Last weekend, to be exact, the day the roster and the schedule went public. We had talked through a pile of ideas before the real scrim block started, and one of them was Yoru on Bind.

Yoru is not the standard. It is a joker pick, and a joker lives or dies on the pilot. That was why Spax was checking on me.

"I can."

The truth was, I still was not all the way better.

Even so, the moment they said Bind, Yoru had started tugging at me. Back when I was active, one of my rivals — the ace of RPX, a powerhouse out of Asia — used to pull Yoru against me on this map all the time. I had been burned by it often enough to know exactly how nasty that agent is.

Use Yoru properly and actually win, and anyone we met on Bind after this — playoffs, the final — would have no choice but to respect it. That alone pays for a joker pick. Count the way one game could bend the rest of the tournament, and the stake on the table was bigger than a single map.

While the others bickered lightly, a tournament staffer stepped into the Discord channel, the pre-match setup apparently finished.

That rascal. Heaping the pressure on.

"Okaay~"

I knew that was just his way of trying to loosen everyone up, so I let it go. I had not been nervous to begin with.

"Fighting!"

"Ahaha..."

Youngest and Oldest. The youngest, of course, was seventeen. The oldest was thirty — the oldest competitor in the whole event — and the owner of that glorious seat was...

...Oldboy.

Among the seventeen-year-olds in the field, the youngest were me and Nebula. Hand on my conscience, though: I had already lived to twenty-one back when I was a man. In any true sense, the only youngest one here was Nebula.

Small talk while the map loaded. There was so little tension it was hard to believe a match that mattered was about to start. You could just as easily read it the other way: every one of us was already full of confidence.

Nebula settled the room just enough. Zzangdol wore the captain's title, but the calls inside the game belonged to Nebula, and so did the job of catching a mood before it drifted off.

"Okay."

Yoru had come out as Youngest and Oldest's joker, and the viewers answered with nothing but cold. Was the pick a serious variable, or was it the kind of arrogance that says we can beat you even holding this?

It was the Kwitch broadcast, so the people watching were Kwitch's people, and the lean toward Kwitch's representative team ran deep. Even so, most of chat was questioning the Yoru. Among Project A fans, the agent's reputation was that bad.

By default, the first round of each half — the pistol round — gives every player 800 credits. You spend that 800 on skills and a gun. Here, one person had spent past the line.

The Sheriff is, without argument, the best pistol a pistol round can offer, and the price matches. In exchange for buying that Sheriff for Yoru, Raze had taken nothing: no gun, no skill. If Yoru died, those credits were gone into the air.

In the scrims against Youngest and Oldest, Pravengers had stepped up on every attack, forcing aim duels out of an aggressive forward hold, and they had lost those fights one after another. Wary of the same treatment, they cleared all four lanes — both paths into B, both into A — and waited for the other side to push out at them. Time passed. No forward hold came. Only the clock kept moving.

When the clock hit exactly 1:00, Pravengers used Ground's Q — Scout, kin to Sova's owl drone — and finally committed.

The info said Ground was alone in Hookah. Pravengers took B Short at a sprint and ran for B site.

A pop. A sharp metallic chime, then another pop.

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From A site, through the teleporter, came Yoru's Q — Ambush, a flash. It arrived in an instant, and Pravengers went blind. Yoru, already on the teleporter, peeked, and the fight started.

Two shots cracked.

Nebula's Ground popped a flash on B Short and stole the eyes of Yoru and every Pravenger at once.

The E she had already set on B site — Gatecrash — pulled her out.

Three Pravengers were still alive behind the ones who had fallen. Even with Raze and Ground dead, Yoru should have been traded — a one-for-two. But Nebula's Ground, holding Hookah, covered her with his E, and all Pravengers kept were the two bodies.

The first player in — the entry, Raze — and the initiator meant to support him, Ground, were both dead. They had burned too much of the round on the default. What Pravengers had left was razor thin.

Then the teleporter door clunked open, and Eunha's Yoru showed herself again.

Shots cracked. This time nobody had even eaten a flash. A Yoru fearless enough to peek twice in a row deserved to be punished, and Pravengers poured everything they had into their crosshairs.

That focus was the mistake.

A pop. Yoru's C, Deceive.

When she had taken the teleporter the first time, Eunha had left a Deceive behind. She triggered it now, so the clone rose exactly where a body would appear if she were coming through again. The clone's flash burst at the same moment Nebula peeked out of Hookah. An ordinary flash blinds friend and foe alike, and Nebula's eyes should have gone white with the rest.

The rifle opened up.

Deceive's flash only fires along the line to an enemy it hits. Nebula was clean. Only Pravengers took it full in the face. Two of them dropped in a breath. The last one, Omen, snatched at the spike and tried to run.

He ran straight into Zzangdol's Brimstone, who had already walked up B Main and taken the space.

One round. That was all it took for the entire Pravengers roster to end up toyed with in Yoru's hands.