Threat, and Danger
Someone who never asked for anything had come out with a line like that out of nowhere, and for a second he couldn't tell why.
"Whoa. That was filthy."
So that was why.
Before the second set, with the coach and the whole roster gathered in one place, what Eunha had asked was whether she could play this match her own way—even if it meant forcing it.
As a coach, of course, he knew better. Project A was a team game, and breathing with your teammates mattered more than anything else. There was a reason KZ, the side everyone called the best-meshed roster in the region, sat at the top of Asia. In this game, team play was a structure you could not peel apart.
Spax allowed it anyway. She had fitted herself to the team so faithfully until now that if she was saying this, she had a reason. And that wasn't the only one. They had already taken the first set, the room was at its peak, and if a moment ever started to look dangerous, he could simply cut it with a timeout.
Spax was the sort of man who believed that granting an unreasonable demand from a player whose form had crested that day was, in itself, a coach's virtue. Even Coach Yoo Seonho, who asked for the most orthodox play inside an already orthodox book, indulged a request like that from time to time. The idiot beside him, for instance—eyes shining, glued to the monitor.
"Hyung, is she actually a streamer? You didn't sneak in an active pro, did you?"
FOXY didn't so much as turn his head. Show this kid anyone good and he lost his mind. Every time.
"...You know a single woman pro who plays like that?"
Put another way, she was good enough for the boy to fall in completely.
"Uh... I don't really know the women pros."
"Forget it. Go practice."
As far as he knew, there wasn't a woman pro anywhere in the world who could put up a performance like that. The AFS across from Eunha was, for the most part, former Project A professionals. Second division or not, they had set foot in the pro world, and the skill was real. A seventeen-year-old high school girl was showing them a wall they had no way over.
Something that should not have existed had appeared. Two of them, at that.
"Eunha's plenty insane already..."
Ask who stood out most in the second set and ten out of ten would say Eunha. The level she was playing at simply did not make sense.
"This one's even crazier."
But the player hitting Spax harder was someone else. None other than Nebula—the one the Project A world was already calling the greatest prospect it had ever seen.
There was an unwritten rule that the captain took IGL. Spax had broken it to hand the role to Nebula, which said enough about how much he trusted him personally. But Nebula was not simply sitting in the main-caller seat.
Say it plain: what Eunha was doing still hadn't left the realm of brainless play. An FPS is first person. Get caught from behind and you can die for nothing. It was that dangerous.
And yet, even while he called, Nebula was threading in exactly the information Eunha needed, exactly where she needed it. His own play suffered for it. In exchange, she had grown wings.
One person was steering the whole team's movement in the middle of a game, and on top of that he was being someone else's brain at the same time.
"Does that even make sense?"
Spax played IGL himself. He knew how hard it was. His own mechanics were already more than enough to handle, and he still had to call for the team. That alone was enough to kill you—and then you were supposed to keep a leash on a teammate running wild like that? Just picturing it made his head swim. Nebula was doing it almost perfectly. A kind of play that even he—IGL of KZ, third in the world, without a rival at home—couldn't say whether he was capable of.
His thoughts turned, again, down a single road.
It was a chronic habit of his and his alone. Show him a talented prospect who hadn't gone pro, and he always ended up here. A contradictory wish, for KZ's captain: that the rival teams at home would get stronger. There was a reason he kept falling into it.
Korea's Project A scene might as well have been a KZ monopoly. Six titles across three straight years, and aside from KZ, not one Korean team had posted a meaningful result on the international stage. So Spax wanted more than his own org. He wanted the domestic scene itself to climb a level. Even if that climb cost KZ a domestic title, he could live with it, so long as the scene grew with it. A higher league meant real data, sharper play, and an actual shot at winning the world.
That was why he always wanted new prospects found. And why he hoped they would grow until they were a threat to KZ.
Those two, Spax thought, could absolutely become a threat to KZ.
"And what good does that do..."
Neither of them looked the least bit interested in going pro. Wasted talent—but you did not step into that world on a half-hearted will. No matter how much you had loved a game, once it became work it turned dull, and you got sick of it.
"What a waste. What a waste..."
That the raw stones in front of him—no, the jewels—refused to shine, all he could feel was regret. And at the same time he hoped they would debut anyway, even if they became a threat to KZ.
The spine of a double-controller plan built around Harbor on Icebox was simple: never let the other team know which site was the real execute. You spent the smokers' utility to burn as much of their info as you could, then used that gap to slow-play the attack. AFS trusted their aim, so we had expected them to pick Icebox, where long-range fights came often, and we had built the comp for exactly that.
We never got to play the plan we had prepared. One variable showed up. And what else is there to say—the variable was me.
The heart of it was to shake them, crash the weak site, plant, then stall the defuse from range with Killjoy's and Snake's C: Snake Bite and Nanoswarm. Jett's job was only to entry the site so Harbor could get the bomb down, then stay behind after the plant and buy time. A card you throw away.
I couldn't be satisfied with a role that small. Not when that father of mine was watching. Now that I was his daughter, making him smile was absurdly easy. Run at him calling Dad~ and the grin split all the way to his gums. But that felt like cheating. I wanted to show him my skill outright, make him laugh, and be acknowledged for it. So I decided to play the way I used to. The way I had at the start of my debut, back when they called me an aim-only one-trick.
Of course I worried. If I stopped fitting myself to the team, could they really swallow the discord that would follow? The worry didn't last. Thanks to this guy.
Nebula fed me the pieces I had missed and the info that mattered, so I could think about nothing but the fight. He had even turned the team's movement until it revolved around me.
"Okay."
If I was the one on the stage, Nebula was the director holding it up from behind the curtain. He laid the board for me. He built a room where I was allowed to run wild. His own play, the calls, and on top of that the holes in mine—he was filling all of it. Even Spax couldn't do that.
Of course, if you weighed the quality of an IGL's calls, or the level of this match, Spax was obviously above him. That man was a genius Coach Yoo Seonho himself had acknowledged. But a seventeen-year-old prospect, with multitasking like that. Real talent.
Harbor's ultimate line rang out, and I threw my body onto the site.
A rush of water. Then gunfire, cracking in short bursts.
Like giving my body to the rolling wave, I emptied my head and thought about nothing but the duel.
Whatever I was missing, I trusted him to fill it. Belt, second floor. I peeked it at once.
"Ah."
"Whew. Good work. No—you're the one who had it rough because of me."
Set two of the final. Icebox, the map Sprout Patrol had picked. We won it by a crushing 13–1.