Who the Hell Is This Guy Now?
About a week had passed since I started streaming.
My days had shrunk into something painfully simple. I woke up, washed, ate, and then spent every remaining hour live. The housekeeper kept wondering what on earth I was doing shut in my room all day, and I brushed her off with a vague story about watching online lectures. If I'd still been a boy, that excuse wouldn't have survived a second glance. As a girl, though, I must have looked like someone who actually studied, because she simply believed me. That was why nobody said a word about me sitting in front of the computer from morning until night.
I'd pushed the account up quite a bit in the meantime. Level 19. Competitive opened at level 20, so I was one step away.
Unrated had given me plenty of time to think. I was a newbie, so maybe it couldn't be helped, but people locked the most obvious agents and got their heads blown open for it. Attack was a rush. Defense was a mindless push. Every round was so simple the game felt easy. I hit level 19 without a single loss and took MVP in every match, and I wasn't having any fun at all. Of course I wasn't. A game is only fun against people on your level. I just wanted to hit 20 and queue competitive already.
The audience had grown, too. I was holding an average of about six, and once I'd even touched twenty. Slow, but it was real growth.
And so the last unrated match before level 20 popped.
"Anything you all want to see?"
One thing I'd learned in unrated was that nobody there built a real comp. A single duelist was plenty, and people still locked at least three. Info and smokes, the things everyone called essential, were missing more often than not. Most players just thought entry was more fun than any other role, so there was nothing to be done about it. After that first game, I'd stopped forcing a proper comp myself.
Oh, and for the record, the mic still wasn't fixed. Getting someone to help would mean admitting I was streaming, and I wasn't ready to tell the housekeeper or my father. The broadcast hadn't grown enough for that.
Jett was the agent I'd played most in my pro days, and the one I trusted most, but someone else had already taken her. Well. Jett had always been that popular.
"Jett and Reyna are already picked, so I'll play Yoru for you."
If Reyna was built for staying in a fight, and Jett for mobility and utility, then Yoru was an entry made to scramble the other team. Project A is a game of information. How many of them are on a site, which agents, which angles — details like that decide whether a fight is yours before a single shot lands. It all comes down to an aim duel in the end, but even the best aimer plays a different game with info than without it. The side that knows only has to watch one place. The side that doesn't has to respect every angle, and in an FPS, where focus is everything, that is fatal. Yoru is the agent who hands the enemy fake information.
And the map that came up was the perfect playground for him: Bind.
Bind is only two sites, A and B, and each one opens through a pair of lanes, one wide and one narrow. Its real signature is the pair of one-way teleporters. The pad on A drops you into B, and the pad on B drops you into A. Because of that, Bind is a map of mind games built around those teleporters.
We opened on attack for the pistol round, and I bought the 450-credit pistol, Frenzy.
Frenzy is the only fully automatic pistol in Project A, and it earns the distinction with miserable accuracy at range and a thirteen-round magazine that empties faster than the fire rate deserves. Up close, though, it changes. One to the head and one to the body, or four to the body alone, and the other player is gone. In a pistol round, nothing else wins a straight one-on-one like it.
Until now I'd always bought a Sheriff on pistol rounds, mostly to drill my aim. Aside from the default pistol, ecos make the Sheriff the gun you live on. This round was different. I was only here to show the viewers Yoru, so I took the cheaper Frenzy and spent the remaining 350 credits on skills. Fakeout, the C, a clone that throws a flash back the way it was shot. Blindside, the Q, a flash that arms after one bounce. And Gatecrash, the E that comes free. Every ability but the ultimate, and the pistol round began.
The other four pushed for an A hit. I set my E and moved for B alone.
Yoru's E, the dimensional shift, plants a teleport tether. Left click sends the portal drifting forward for thirty seconds. Right click sets it down where you stand. Use the skill again and Yoru snaps back to it. Of everything in the kit, that tether is the heart of how you play him.
I slipped carefully into the lane toward B, and there was the enemy Snake. A burst of shots cracked out to greet me, like they'd been waiting. I checked the distance, decided Frenzy would never reach, and dropped behind a box.
They've already pushed this far?
I'd headed for B almost the instant the round started, and meeting them in this lane meant they'd shoved up the moment the barrier dropped. Unrated, then. No info, just bodies walking in. If I'd been holding a Sheriff or a Ghost, that swing would have been a gift. The gun in my hands was a Frenzy, useless the moment the fight got long. A brainless play had just become a real problem.
The gun difference left me at a hopeless disadvantage, but Yoru makes problems better than anyone. I could have taken the tether I'd already placed and simply left. The people watching me weren't going to be satisfied with something that lukewarm, and backing off just because I'm losing has never been my style. I used Fakeout.
A clone in my own shape walked a straight line away from me. From the other side it was a ridiculous thing, a player strolling in to die. Anyone who knew even a little Yoru wouldn't have shot it.
A single shot. Unfortunately, the Snake didn't have that much judgment.
The flash popped. I confirmed the clone had been hit and stepped out from the box. Project A is kind enough to show you when someone eats crowd control — flashed, and the head lights up yellow, just as that Snake's did now. I didn't fire. I closed the gap instead. Fakeout's blind lasts three seconds, far longer than any other flash in the game, and my gun was a Frenzy that already wanted the fight short. I walked it in, waited until the distance was right, and shot in the instant before the blind broke. A tight burst.
Two to the head, a clean kill. I didn't reload. I held the lane into B instead, watching for a trade that might swing the corner. However long I waited, nobody came, so I picked up the pistol Snake had dropped.
The Ghost is a suppressed semi-auto, fifty credits more than the Frenzy I'd been using, at five hundred. Set against the Sheriff's eight hundred, the damage falls off, but a headshot inside thirty meters does 105. If they didn't buy shields, that's a one-tap, and where the Sheriff carries six in a magazine, the Ghost carries fifteen. On a pistol round, no sidearm is loved more.
I'd taken their Snake on B, so they'd spend bodies filling that hole. This was the moment to take the tether, rejoin the pack, and hit A.
A soft snap of the teleport, and with Yoru's little flourish I left B and came out behind my own team as they pushed A.
Two shotgun blasts.
"Ah—! You scared me!"
The enemy Jett had been waiting on the exact spot where I'd planted the portal, shotgun in hand, and turned me into a sieve.
"I wasn't that surprised."
I really hadn't been, not like that. I'd just been caught by a play I didn't expect, and it threw me. Chat did not believe a word of it.
Hmph. Don't even start.
On top of my corpse, the enemy Jett was mashing crouch, up and down, up and down. Tea-bagging, as everyone calls it. And they did it with all-chat open.