Before the Final Begins
Saturday's playoff, AFS against KKT. The winner would be our next opponent, so the team sat in and watched.
"Haaahm... I'm going to sleep..."
AFS's win was as good as decided. Boredom got the better of me, and I went to bed.
Of course it was boring. I wasn't the one playing. All I could do was watch.
The players on KKT and AFS were obviously good.
"You all worked hard too... See you tomorrow..."
Even so, they weren't good the way a pro team is good, and from where I sat the match felt a little dull.
Tomorrow was the final. I had a condition to look after, and turning in early couldn't hurt. Sleeping now was fine.
"Mmnya... mmnya..."
I slept early, and the next morning—the weekend, so all four of us were home—we had breakfast together.
"Going straight up?"
"Yes, Mom."
"Do your best on stream today, okay?"
"Urk... yeah..."
I went straight to my room, turned the computer on, and went live.
The match didn't start until two in the afternoon, but I meant to loosen my hands from now with a few ranked games.
I put on music that wouldn't trip a copyright claim, stepped away long enough to fill a tumbler with honey water, and came back to this.
"What? Why's everyone like this?"
The chat was nothing but worry for me.
Had something happened while I was asleep?
"What's going on?"
"Mm..."
Chat was climbing too fast to read line by line, but a few words snagged. Something to do with that guy, Pilluelo, or whatever his name was.
A donation landed at just the right moment and told me why the viewers were acting like this.
"He mentioned me?"
AFS's ace was Pilluelo. Kwitch's aces were me and Nebula. He played the same entry role, so he was bound to be more conscious of me than of Nebula. Mentioning me wasn't strange in itself.
"What on earth did he say...?"
I ignored the viewers telling me not to look, and I searched the communities for Eunha, and for Pilluelo.
If someone was talking about me, good or bad, I was the type who couldn't feel clear until I'd heard it through.
It must have been a real topic. The post was easy to find. From the timing, it had happened on Pilluelo's personal stream after the playoff.
"Mm..."
The title alone was enough to guess the contents, but I decided to read it slowly. I went through every mention of me he had made, one by one, and the conclusion I came to was this.
"What is this person?"
Just... what is this guy?
I don't know how fragile the viewers think my mental is, but nothing Pilluelo had said about me was anywhere near enough to shake it.
In short, he was offended even to be compared with me, and I was supposedly some queen bee riding Nebula's bus.
I had never heard the words queen bee in my life. Well—I used to be a man.
Ha.
That line had come from the official winner's interview, so he had kept to some kind of line. On his personal stream, I was told, he had laid the slurs out without a blush—bus leech, carried girl, every ugly word in the set.
On the Korea server I still hadn't reached Chaser. I was Immortal 3, 150 points, fifty short of the Chaser cutoff at 200.
Of course, back when I was a pro and played on the Asia server, I had been Chaser. Those records were gone now. There was no way left to prove it.
"Well. Nothing else for it."
But what did that matter?
"In short, I just have to hit Chaser, don't I?"
My skill hadn't changed between my playing days and now. If anything, play felt easier than it had then. The weight of being called Project A's greatest pro was gone, and these days nobody reacted as if they meant to kill me just because I missed a few shots.
Fifty points to Chaser. The time was 9:30.
The tournament started at two in the afternoon, so four and a half hours remained. No—if the whole representative team had to be gathered before the official broadcast, call it four.
School, scrims, and review had stacked on top of each other, and I simply hadn't had the hours for solo queue. That was the only reason I was still sitting in Immortal 3. If I decided to climb, I could reach Chaser whenever I wanted.
Truth be told, there still wasn't a woman streaming at Chaser, so I had meant to run a separate solo-queue climb broadcast for it. Well. Nothing to be done.
I could have waited for the final and taught him a lesson inside the match. But that phrase—never even hit Chaser—had gotten under my skin.
It might look childish. I have always been a childish person who hates to lose.
"I'm heading in right now."
Time was tight enough that even the minutes spent in queue felt expensive. Six games if it ran long, four if it ran short. In that handful of matches I had to find fifty points.
For two weeks the Platform Exhibition had run its course. Today, at last, the final—the last match of all of it—began.