Platform Exhibition, Day Two — Match Two: Youngest and Oldest vs. Byeongsik and the Kids
"Back site, back site! Minus fifty!"
"Whoa, shit..."
"So close. So close."
"It's fine. It's only the first round."
"Yeah, but they shoot like absolute monsters."
"Fair. Still — I don't think I've ever seen them actually run a rush."
In every scrim up to now, Kwitch had never once used a rush. A rush was a gambler's strat, crowded with situations and variables depending on how many defenders were holding a site and which agents they were on. It might work once or twice. Three or four times, no. A one-and-done, and a poor fit for Nebula's taste for stable play.
"Well. What they showed in scrims probably isn't the whole book."
Most teams didn't open every strat even in a practice scrim. Kwitch suddenly calling a rush still sat well inside what you could understand.
"Eunha? Yeah, she's definitely good."
"Told you. That Eunha kid can play."
They had given up the first round, but the mood was still fine. A lost opener, and no further than that. They hadn't handed over the match, and they'd been caught by a one-off rush, so nothing in the roster actually shook. Maybe it was confidence — the sense that even if they dropped a round, they could steady it and still win. Split was that much of a map for KKT.
"No, I swear we saw each other at the same time, and I'm the only one who died. I just can't beat that reaction speed."
"Then swing it as a double. Or don't take the fight with Raze if you can help it. Same for Astra."
Aside from Eunha and Nebula, Kwitch was nothing special anyway. Pola was decent enough, but the man simply didn't have the Project A experience.
"All right. We eco this one, bank the money, and set up for next round. Just make sure we respect the rush."
"Okay."
They had dropped a round, but that comp made it hard for Eunha and Nebula to play at a hundred percent. Eunha on Raze, an agent that struggled to justify an Operator. Nebula on Astra, with no information utility at all. From this side of the server, it was convenient that those two had locked agents like that.
"All right — one cheer, then we go!"
"Fighting!"
The game had only just started.
KAY/O's ZERO/point went into B Main.
They'd eaten a B rush last round, so this time he threw it safe onto site, and the knife found nobody. That meant the enemy was looking at mid, or at A. Or else Nebula — having read from last round's setup that KAY/O was on B — had called for them to entry after baiting ZERO/point out. Either way, B still had to be watched.
They were holding that tension, blind to where the hit would come, when Snake's voice jumped, urgent. Mid, by the sound of it.
"They're coming mid!"
Tung. Tung. Bright, cheerful gunshots out of mid. This was—
"Ah, the Judge, fuck..."
The Judge. A 1,850-gold semi-automatic shotgun, overwhelming up close, and more often than not just called a crime.
"The hell— if I'd had a Shorty, what was the plan, walking in like that?"
He'd been smoking the whole mid lane with Snake's Q, the toxic smoke, so the other team had had no information at all. The way Snake told it, if he'd even been holding a Shorty, then depending on the reaction and the angle there would have been nothing strange about Raze being the one who died.
"It's fine. Eco round anyway. You see where they went?"
But the result was Snake dead, and picking over what-ifs wasn't what mattered now. Mid was gone in a blink. From here there was no telling whether they'd hit A or B.
"No. No idea."
He'd hoped they might have leaked a footstep. They hadn't. Then again, Nebula was never going to be that sloppy. If he'd known, he should have just stacked the defense on one site — but the moment for that was already gone. Two on A, two on B. All that was left was to pray somebody bought time.
"Ah, shit."
Curses coming in from every corner of the comms, the team's entry, BS, turned it over.
Yeah. This might be a little fucked.
If the last round had been a B rush, this one Youngest and Oldest had chosen mid. Snake had laid his Q, the toxic smoke, across the lane, but Raze didn't hesitate. She rode a Blast Pack straight in and took him.
"The Judge! She's just bulldozing straight through!"
"For Byeongsik and the Kids this is an eco, so all they've got are stock pistols — how do you stop a Raze flying in on a Blast Pack with a Judge!"
Raze kept walking, up toward the B ramp. Byeongsik and the Kids, of course, pulled no information at all.
Smoke dropped across B in the same breath Raze jumped off the ramp, and the crime's next victim was KAY/O.
"Ah! KAY/O too! At this rate Astra's going to have a hard time staying alive!"
After the KAY/O kill, Raze threw paint shells into back site the way she had last round. Astra wasn't there. She had slipped into B Main and tucked herself away.
"I don't think she knows Astra rotated off into Main. Can they catch her?"
Raze — Eunha — walked on, B Main left out of the picture. Keep going like that, and the Astra hiding in Main could take her.
Tat-tat-tat!
"Ah! Nebula doesn't miss it!"
Nebula had been watching B Main too. From the ramp he picked Astra off and pulled Eunha out of the kill.
"What a thorough player Nebula is. That thoroughness is what drags Eunha back from the edge!"
From Astra's side of it, a golden chance, gone.
Three of them had died for nothing, and the bomb was down.
So they wouldn't hand over ultimate points and extra gold, the defenders still alive threw themselves into the bomb's radius.
"And just like that, Youngest and Oldest take the second round on a flawless as well."
"The next round matters more, sure — but Split is a defender's map, plain as day, and it's the map Byeongsik and the Kids trust most. The mood is already looking ugly!"
"That's right. From their side, they have to win the next one clean — the round where they finally buy rifles — and try to flip this."
So the second round, too, ended as a win for Youngest and Oldest.
The pistol round, and then the full buy where we'd spent every credit we had. That one, too.
"Nice!" —Oldboy
"Good good~" —Zzangdol
A flawless, at that. We brought the round home without losing a single gun we'd bought.
"Yeah. Rushing really does work." —Oldboy
"We never showed it. Not once, the whole time. Honestly? They had to be rattled." —Zzangdol
Oldboy was right. Not once in scrims had we used a rush. Two rounds of them getting yanked around came from us playing well, sure — and just as much from them never seeing it coming.
"Then from here, we default." —Nebula
We'd already hit with rushes two rounds in a row, and a rush was a one-and-done by nature. From this point, we needed to leave it alone.
"Okay."
"Okay." —Zzangdol, Oldboy, Pola
Prep time ended, and the third round started. They had eco'd the round before, so they'd be stepping out with rifles. How many of those rifles we could drop was the whole point. Only Nebula headed for B Main. The rest of us went A Main.
"I'm going to get caught on the B Main ZERO/point on purpose. Pola, send one bird through mid. Everyone else, hold in A sewers." —Nebula
From what we'd seen of their defense, KAY/O and Ground each checked A Main and B Main with their E — ZERO/point and Guiding Light — while Snake's toxic smoke covered mid.
"Okay. I'm tagged." —Nebula
"Someone in mid as well." —Pola
Tucked into the sewers, we never tripped the Guiding Light their Ground had used. Through mid, Pola's own Guiding Light went out. If Nebula had been caught by KAY/O's ZERO/point on B Main, they would almost certainly read our path as B.
"Okay. Let's start walking." —Zzangdol
And because we'd rushed both the first and second rounds, they'd be feeling the pressure to rotate fast. Whoever was still on A had either already peeled off to cover B, or they'd stayed. Either one was fine, really. What we had to do was open the execute in a single breath.
If Nebula's plan had landed, their attention was already dragged toward B. And I launched for the A Main ramp on Raze's Blast Pack.
A rush that stole their timing in an instant. That was our plan today.