Platform Exhibition, Day Two, Match Two: Youngest and Oldest vs. Byeongsik and the Kids

Day two of the Platform Exhibition, our second match of the cup, and we were still waiting for it to start when a staffer stepped back into the team Discord.

Split. It had been a while.

Every season, Project A benched a few maps or reworked them and sent them back out. Split was the most recently changed and relaunched of the lot, and for me—someone who had played real team games on it back in my pro days, before the rework—it was the least familiar map we could have drawn.

The moment Split was confirmed, our captain, Zzangdol, let out a groan.

"What's wrong with Split?"

Undefeated in scrims. Knowing how we played, this one might actually be dangerous.

Our edge was a hero game that lived and died on a double ace—me and Nebula. Split was a miserable map for that kind of Project A. The layout preferred Raze over Jett, and running an Operator there was awkward; that was the first problem. The second was that the only two people on the roster who could actually entry were me and Nebula.

Oldboy could entry too, in theory. But—

After the match against NPT's rep team, the Pravengers, Oldboy had all but abandoned entry, his own main role. He'd decided the team was better for it. Spax respected that, and we built the comp with a single entry picked: me.

What we landed on was this.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

He was right. KKT had never once brought out Split against us. Frankly, if a scrim had put us on Split together, that perfect record might already have been dead.

A soft chime. By the rules, Coach Spax couldn't stay in the Discord, so he left the channel first. The rest of us loaded into a custom lobby and waited for the match to begin.

"All right, one Hwaiting and we go~" Zzangdol said.

"Hwaiting!" Zzangdol, Nebula, Oldboy, and Pola answered together.

"Hwaiting!"

The pistol round opened the game, and for my gun I took the Frenzy, built for a fight that happened in your face. Raze made close range a habit, and on a pistol that was doubly true. Spending Zzangdol's credits along with mine, we started round one on the emperor meta—Frenzy, a light shield, and two charges of Q—with his money stacked on my shoulders on top of my own.

"We hit a fast B Main rush? Aim check while we're at it."

"You sure?" Nebula asked.

A main rush was the play that threw me, the most important resource on the team, straight into a killing ground. Of course it was also the play with the worst odds. But the return matched the risk: if I could just find the kills, nothing else paid like it.

"Yeah. I'm confident."

And I was.

Before the countdown ended I hopped onto a box and left Raze's Q, a Blast Pack, stuck and waiting. You throw a satchel that grips whatever surface it hits, and if you press Q again the pack blows, damaging whatever it strikes and knocking it back. The knockback is the whole point. Raze and her allies take no damage from it, so you ride the blast and fly. Not unlike the bomb-happy maniac in Finewatch, the rival shooter from the studio across the aisle from Project A's developer. That flight is Raze's most basic trick, the one everyone calls a double-Q.

The round started, and I rode the pack straight down B Main.

Pola's Ground sent Guiding Light with me. What I found at the end of the flight was a KAY/O who had stepped off site to throw a ZERO/point. Pola, on purpose, never popped the bolt.

Tat-tat-tat!

From KAY/O's side of it, he had snapped his eyes away to dodge the flash on the incoming Guiding Light, and that was exactly why he died to me so cleanly. I had expected the anti-flash. The pop was a fake.

"Nice. Smoking right now," Nebula said.

Astra's E, Stellar Cloud, sealed the second-floor high ground. Nobody up there could look down anymore.

Zzangdol's Snake dropped a toxic screen of his own, so whoever was still inside B couldn't just walk out and take a fight. That left B Backsite—the rear of B, as the map marks it. If someone was tucked in there, it could turn into a disaster, and ordinarily you had to go look with your own eyes. Raze had a skill that deleted the angle instead.

Raze's E, Paint Shells. A grenade, nothing fancier than that, and the reason Raze sat in tier one of the duelists on Split. The shell was a cluster charge: it burst, and then the spot burst again in a chain. You could grit through the first hit. The bomblets that followed hurt too much to ignore, so when Paint Shells came down you left. Like now.

Whump. Whump. Whump.

The Astra hiding in B Backsite had no choice but to abandon it if she wanted to live through the shells. Waiting outside were my teammates already sprinting B Main, and me, already on the site.

Tat-tat-tat!

"Backsite's clear."

"Nice. Planting right now," Zzangdol said.

We had the site, but not the second-floor high ground that looked straight down onto it. Smoke hid it for the moment. Smoke also ended, and someone might swing out of it, so I planted from the safest pixel I could find.

B was ours, and so was the plant. The round, though, started here. Slice it fine enough and everything before the plant is the first half, everything after it the second. Planting is only the beginning.

"I'm gonna clear all the way through CT."

"You good?" Nebula asked.

The spike was outside B site, in a spot you couldn't see from B Main. We'd had to plant without ever taking B ramp, so there hadn't been a choice. If they retook us without a plant we could play from Main, stopping the defuse would get very hard. So I was going, to cut even one angle they could come from. And to buy time, even if I died doing it.

"Yeah. I'll try."

I lifted a Ghost off the Astra I'd dropped in Backsite and started toward CT.

"Oh, Paint Shells! If Astra stays in there, she dies!"

Raze—Eunha—had dumped Paint Shells into Backsite, and the player tucked there was Astra from Byeongsik and the Kids.

"This is the nasty part of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Paint Shells. Step out and you die. Stay, and you die anyway!"

Not even a medium shield could eat that damage, and this was a pistol. Astra had no shield at all, and no way to live through it. In the end she chose to leave Backsite and take the duel head-on.

Tat-tat-tat!

That choice was a killing ground too.

"And she still gets caught! The pace from Youngest and Oldest is unreal!"

"KAY/O, and now Astra, gone in a blink. At this rate the plant is only a matter of time!"

The rest of the attack collapsed in behind Raze, and the spike went down on B.

"Youngest and Oldest still haven't taken B ramp, though. And right now BS is swinging through mid to get on their backs."

They had committed all five to the rush, which meant they had to remember, every second, that the other team could be on them from behind just as fast. They didn't.

"They don't even know!"

"This is about to be a disaster!"

And the price of that lapse was brutal.

"BS!"

"If it stays like this, Byeongsik and the Kids can still play this round!"

BS won the fight that mattered. In a breath it was three against three, and the angles Youngest and Oldest had to hold doubled—B Main, and the ramp. Snake's death dropped the screen with him, and the Astra smoke set over the second-floor high ground had already burned out.

"But Nebula cleans up Main!"

"So it's only the high ground left. They have to drop soon, right?"

The spike timer was getting thin. Snake and Ground, still up on the high ground, set themselves to drop for the retake.

"Wait—how far is Eunha going?"

"She's rotating through CT, up onto Heaven?!"

And then they were face to face with the Raze who had come up to Heaven.

She had made every footstep on the way. Two of Byeongsik and the Kids were already up there, and everyone watching expected Eunha to die for free.

Tat-tat-tat-tat!

Pap-pap!

It didn't go the way anyone had called it.

"No way. She still takes one with her?"

"And it's the only flash agent they had left! Byeongsik and the Kids have nothing to hope for this round."

"Nebula finishes it!"

The Raze everyone thought was overforcing still found one kill in a two-on-one, and the Astra watching the high ground closed on Snake. Round one went to Youngest and Oldest.

"And the pistol round belongs to Youngest and Oldest!"

"All through scrims and the official matches so far, this team has liked a stable game. Get info with utility, burn the other side's skills, then unfold the hit. Right now they are pure aggression."

"A bulldozer, literally. They just shove, and they keep shoving. Youngest and Oldest keep showing us a different face."