Chapter 81 — 2023 Platform Exhibition Final: Youngest and Oldest vs. Sprout Patrol
If someone asked me the difference between a pro and an amateur—
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
I wouldn't hesitate. I would say composure.
There are amateurs with better aim than the pros. There are amateurs, like Nebula, who read the game just as well.
But an amateur calmer than a pro? I was sure no such person existed.
That doesn't mean a pro is some machine who stays composed in every situation. They panic. They make mistakes.
It's only that, set beside an amateur, it happens so rarely—and most of the highlights that come out of the pro scene are, to my mind, composure made visible. That is why I think the greatest difference between the two is composure.
Just like right now.
Tiiing—
Whoosh!
"No way—nice!"
"Eunha, what was that?!"
"Spike's down on A Main. One Omen left, and he was on A Main too."
Through two rushes in a row, we had not stepped forward once.
Of course we hadn't. Five people crashing in at once, and you meet them head-on? That's suicide.
So I turned that against them. Not answering the rush—stepping out one beat early and hitting them first.
"Nice. You were insane, Eunha."
"Yeah. I got lucky."
I really had. The plan had only been to take two of them with me.
The rounds we'd handed over so emptily until now were rounds where we hadn't caught even a single one of them before we gave up the site. Trying to retake with all five of them still alive was always going to be miserable. So I'd pushed out the other way, to cut their numbers and drag the rush timing late, and because they had never expected me to come forward, they were busy casting and couldn't kill me fast enough.
Plain and simple, the sky had decided to smile on me.
Nebula picked off the Omen rotating back toward CT, and we took the round that mattered most—round three—without a single death.
"Nice."
"Nice. Flawless felt so good."
We had won with all five rifles still in our hands, so if the viewers called it square one, it was square one. A fluke like that, though, wasn't going to work twice. From here on they would be watching hard for an aggressive hold. This hadn't been one or two deaths and a reset—four of them had died and an entire round had vanished. Fail to respect that and you're just an idiot.
Which meant we needed some other answer if we were going to stop that rush...
I was about to call Nebula over to talk it through when the screen locked.
"Huh?"
The game had frozen, and a timeout sat across the screen.
"They called a timeout? The other team?"
They'd lost on a flawless, sure, but they'd been on a save round anyway. There was no real reason for them to burn a timeout.
Ding.
"No, that was me~?"
"Huh?"
"Ack."
So the timeout had come from our side.
"Ah, shit."
"The hell was that?"
"Damn it, damn it. I didn't think nobody would be peeking main."
"Same, I thought somebody was peeking."
Fuck. The guns aren't even the same. How am I supposed to win that?
What I'd been holding was a Spectre. At range it was always going to lose to the Phantom in that bitch's hands. A Spectre is a close-range gun.
If I'd had a rifle too...
Fuck.
"She really is good, though. How is every single one a headshot?"
"At first I thought she was just riding Nebula. Watching this, it kinda looks like Nebula's the one on her bus..."
"Huh? You're saying that now?"
"What? It's my honest take. Honest take. I'm allowed to say this much, right?"
What the hell is that bitch.
The first time, I peeked first. The second time, just now on A Main, she peeked first. The thing those two fights had in common was obvious: I was already aimed at her. She was aimed somewhere else.
And the result?
Damage Dealt: 0
Damage Dealt: 0
I lost. Pathetically. Died without getting a single shot off.
Why? Because the flick she puts on me is faster than me shooting while I'm already looking at her? Because our reaction times are that far apart?
Fuck, that doesn't make sense.
I'm rank one on the Korea server. She's nothing. Some nobody streamer. This isn't how it's supposed to go. Me hitting a wall against someone like her—
It doesn't make sense.
"Fuck... fuck..."
Pilluelo. Tell him what this was and he would never admit it. But the thing he was feeling, right now, was unmistakably inferiority.
holy shit what did I just watch?
"All right, timeout requested by Youngest and Oldest."
"The timing is a little strange, isn't it? They dropped the two rounds before this, but they just won a flawless and kept every gun..."
"Maybe those first two rounds hurt that badly? Even just now, if it hadn't been for Eunha's absurd play, it was a genuinely dangerous round."
In the two rounds before, Sprout Patrol had chosen the simplest thing in the book—a B-site rush—and Youngest and Oldest had still been blown open like it was nothing. Just now they had even stacked more of the defense onto B, and the other side had answered by hitting A instead. As the casters said, it was only fine because Eunha had killed four and lived. If she had died for nothing, nobody would have blinked at one rifle and the whole of A site going with her.
"While the timeout runs, let's look back at the replays!"
Round one. Sprout Patrol's B rush.
"I'll be honest, five players entering together like that... I don't think it's a particularly good execute. And yet it's working."
A rush that slams headfirst into a site with no information is supposed to fail more often than not.
"That is an incredibly clean entry. What, has Sprout Patrol been eating meals and then practicing nothing but rushes?"
The desk laughed like it was a joke. It had been a joke. About half of it had also been sincere. For a team that had only been playing together for two weeks, the rush was far too impressive to dismiss.
On the screen, Sprout Patrol was slaughtering Youngest and Oldest outright.
And then—
"Ah, this is the round we just had, right?"
The replay had already reached round three: Eunha's forward push on A Main, the 1v5 quadra. In slow motion.
"The detail in this clip—watch closely."
Not the Phoenix standing right on top of her. Pilluelo, farther off, rifle up, looking at her—and she takes him first with a flick, snapping her crosshair across.
"See here. Eunha kills the enemy who threatens her most, first."
"And she finishes by killing Ground, who's using Scout, last of all, then slips out on Tailwind... Wow. That was an unbelievable play."
"The two rounds before it had felt like they gave them away for nothing, and this was her dragging the momentum back with everything she had."
"And Spax winning on a flawless and still choosing to call a timeout—looks like he's found an answer to Sprout Patrol's rush. I'm very curious what it is."
A minute and thirty seconds that felt considerably longer from the stands finally ended, and the game the system had frozen began to move again.
"All right, they're going B again. Another rush, Sprout Patrol?"
The rush had been stopped once, and still every one of them gathered in front of B Main. As if the last time had been luck. As if they were daring them to stop it again.
"No, no, no, no—what is this?!"
"I caught myself watching with my mouth hanging open. What is that player?!"
"Huh. What was that just now?"
"God, that timing has to feel incredible. If that were me, I'd be so wired I couldn't sleep."
"If that were you, you'd catch one and die."
"The fuck did you just say?"
A knot of guys had crowded around one man's computer. At a glance they looked like high schoolers packed into a PC café.
"Ah, for—why are you assholes piled onto my chair?"
In truth, they were the roster of KZ, the best Project A team in Korea.
"C'mon, we're only watching. Just watching."
"That's what you call watching? Then at least shut your mouths."
They were back from vacation, returned to prepare for the domestic league about to start, and they were watching the final of the team Spax was coaching. They were watching it the way a crowd watches, not from the coaching staff the way he was, and that made them unbearable.
"What, Nebula still hasn't debuted?"
"...You close with Nebula?"
He didn't bother asking whether the guy knew the name. Nobody in the domestic pro scene hadn't heard it. What Spax was asking was whether he was close enough to call him that kid.
"Yeah. We got along pretty well, actually."
The answer was unexpected. To think someone besides Eunha—his same-age friend—got on with that aloof Nebula like an actual friend.
"Hold on, he went out to a streamer tournament and didn't even tell me?"
...Maybe Spax was the only one who thought of it that way.
He gave the colleague (idiot) in front of him an appropriate amount of ignore and sent a message to the staff.
"Huh? A timeout after we won?"
"Quiet. I'm about to kill the mic, so this time actually shut up. Your voices might go out on the broadcast."
"Okaaay~"
There wasn't much behind the timeout he'd just called.
AFS's rush looked overwhelming. It also looked like something they could take apart far too simply.