Chapter 84 — 2023 Platform Exhibition Final: Youngest and Oldest vs. Sprout Patrol
The game kept running in the same groove: Sprout Patrol stubbornly committing to nothing but a one-step-faster rush down the main, and Youngest and Oldest standing on site to stop them.
Most rounds were decided in the fight on that main lane, and aside from a single round, Nebula won every one of those fights. Sprout Patrol rushed anyway. To punish them for it, he brought out a new gun — the 3,200-credit light machine gun, the Ares.
Twelve rounds a second, spooling up to 15.6 — a blender more than enough to chew through entries walking in with their kits already burned.
Loss after loss, Sprout Patrol kept rushing, and once most of those rushes died after round three, the score was driven out to 3–7. Ascent favors the defense, but even so, this was a score that stung.
Only on round eleven did Sprout Patrol finally have the money for a full buy. Lose that round as well, and on round twelve — the last of the half — they would have nothing for rifles and would be forced into an eco. The score would open to 3–9. No matter how defense-sided Ascent might be, 3–9 at the half was as good as a lost match.
A minute and a half later the timeout ended, and Sprout Patrol moved out for the attack — not all five stacked in one place this time, but split.
In the end Sprout Patrol gave up the rush and switched to a default.
A default didn't make the round easy. Without a Killjoy of their own to take space, the execute was awkward from the start. Even so, a rush was clearly hopeless, so Sprout Patrol chose it anyway: Jett, Omen, and Ground toward A main, Sova and Phoenix toward B.
"Vision blocked!"
They laid a smoke so no one in Market could see high mid, denying the defense information, then spent Omen's Paranoia down A main. If Eunha tried to push the way she had before, the paranoia was there to stop her first. It worked. Eunha, already on A main, ate the paranoia and had to run — a sensible use of the skill. The small mercy, from her side, was that Tailwind had not been primed yet, so the dash itself wasn't wasted.
On B main, a Sova recon arrow checked for an aggressive defensive step. A main, B main, mid — all of it cleared so the other team couldn't buy information. Set up like that, Youngest and Oldest would have a hard time guessing which lane the hit was coming from.
The casters praised the attack as if Sprout Patrol had finally come back to the Project A they knew. The rounds before had been so blunt and obvious that there had been nothing much to add. Sprout Patrol picked up the ultimate orb on A and slipped away at their leisure.
At the same time the owl drone checked mid, clean and safe.
The owl drone tagged the Omen watching mid. A smoke went down on Triple, the back of Market, and Sprout Patrol broke into a run toward Market.
A pop of light — Phoenix peeked Market behind a Curveball, and Pola, of course, couldn't dodge it. The smoke hid whether the hit was going A or B, so he had been saving his ZERO/point.
KAY/O and Sova were down, and Sprout Patrol had B. Zzangdol's Omen could have rotated to help, but he would rather wait for Jett and Killjoy than step out and die for nothing.
Killjoy's ultimate, Lockdown. Plant the device, and fifteen seconds later it Detains every enemy inside the radius — move, but do not shoot. On a retake, few ultimates are rated higher.
Sova's ultimate, Hunter's Fury, can answer a Lockdown, but Sprout Patrol's Sova had nothing charged. If the device went down, the only options were to leave the radius or destroy it.
Against the chance of a Lockdown, Sprout Patrol posted a player to wait outside the site.
It was 3v3. Youngest and Oldest had no thought of giving the round away.
Instead of saving the Operator, Eunha took the rifle off Pola's body.
With the ultimate line, a field of green light formed across the ceiling of B.
The radius wrapped the whole of B site. Let fifteen seconds pass, and every attacker still inside would be Detained.
Behind Zzangdol's smoke across B main, Youngest and Oldest shifted to protect the device. Pilluelo slipped quietly out of the smoke, hoping to break it in the gap — but they had not relaxed their watch on B main.
With Pilluelo — the only player they had seeded outside — dead, Sprout Patrol had no choice but to break the Lockdown. Ground flicked out a short hawk and popped a flash, peeking in the same instant. Eunha refused to eat it.
Omen was left alone on the site. He thrashed for a way out, but Youngest and Oldest didn't bother forcing the fight.
The Omen was Detained. His ending—
Not even a gun. A miserable death on a knife.
They took the round with time to spare on the defuse. Given what Sprout Patrol had left in the bank — nothing — a 9–3 half was right in front of them.
Youngest and Oldest closed the half 9–3, then won the second-half pistol and the buy round after it, driving the score to 11–3. They dropped the bonus, 11–4, won the full-buy round for match point, and casually snuffed the force buy of a team staring at the end. The map finished 13–4.