Thank You (Project A)
This is insane.
This is actually insane.
Not once. How do you fail to win even a single time?
I'm still rank one. On raw mechanics alone, I'm the one they call the best. I know my style is bad for a team game—that's why I've been bending to the team, taking their help if that's what it takes to win. Fights I would've forced a peek on, Operator angles I would've swung one more time, I gave up instead of forcing. Every bit of it was for the team. So why the hell is this the result?
The gap was even worse than the last set...!
"Shit..."
"Haa... Hopeless."
"How the hell are we supposed to beat that?"
They'd already given up on winning. All that was left was waiting for the match to end 3–0. I didn't even have to look. The only thing in their heads was finishing fast and going to crack open some soju. Pieces of shit.
But not me. My future was on the line. I had to win this match and hold on to all of it—the future I'd lost, and the title of the best...!
"I can do this... I can..."
Pilluelo didn't know. The match was already decided. No matter how he thrashed, he could not change a result that had already been written.
Pilluelo fought, and the result did not change. Set one, Kwitch's pick, 13–4. Set two, AFS's pick, 13–1. Not a doubled score. A loss by more than triple.
Project A was an FPS through and through, and in an FPS, mental was prized above everything else. Mental mattered in any game, but when a fight could be settled in less than a second, its weight was simply greater than in other genres.
AFS's strength was aim, mechanics, and the duel power built on both. Even when NPT showed tight teamwork, even when KKT unveiled strange strategies, they had punched through all of it with raw force and taken their wins in the open. Undefeated, at that. They were that sure of their firepower, and they believed the final would be no different.
And the result? They were losing in the very thing they were best at. To just two players.
On the second map especially—Ice Room, home stage of Pilluelo, the strongest fighter they had—all it produced was the enemy entry running wild. The performance was so overwhelming it felt as if all five of them had lost to a single person. That the shock would carry into the third set was inevitable. AFS's coach called a timeout to wrench the flow back somehow, but the result didn't move.
The viewers watching the match, the casters calling it, the players and coaches of Kwitch and of AFS—every one of them landed on that score. Nothing else could even be imagined.
The third set. The map was Pearl, Youngest and Oldest's pick. Sets one and two had already closed on the worst scores imaginable, 13–4 and 13–1, and AFS's form was genuinely at rock bottom. Sprout Patrol had been driven all the way to match point.
"Oh, this can't keep going! The cliff's edge—the cliff's edge!"
"Youngest and Oldest are almost there! They only have to win this round!"
Twelve to three. Win this one round, and Youngest and Oldest would take the series 3–0 and the championship with it. Sprout Patrol had only Pilluelo left. Youngest and Oldest still had four alive—everyone but Nebula. From where Sprout Patrol stood, it was despair itself.
"Pilluelo's all alone! Can he do it?"
"Whoa! Pilluelo with the knives!"
"He refuses to stop fighting, right to the end!"
"Whoa, one more!"
"That makes it a 1v1?! Is he about to make a miracle?!"
Left alone, Pilluelo had used Jett's ultimate to claw his way through a 1v3. It was skill worthy of the title of Korea server rank one. If only his character hadn't been what it was, gamers everywhere would have been singing his praises. Even accounting for that character, the rumors said teams had still offered him pro contracts for the results alone. His skill was that real.
Bang!
But that was as far as it went. Standing in front of someone who was plainly the upgraded version of himself, he couldn't do a thing.
"Ah! In the end, Eunha gets him!"
The Korea server's rankings were already being slowly flushed and replaced. Eunha and Nebula, running wild right now, had until recently been nothing more than Immortal, and a player who had only just hit Chaser. Korean talents who had been grinding the Asia server were migrating to Korea in force and climbing, so in a few months Pilluelo might be knocked off that seat. Maybe not even months. Maybe weeks.
"Ah, sorry. We should've taken that together..."
"No, no, it's fine, it's fine. Even if we drop this one, we're still ahead."
So the name of Korea's rank one wasn't empty after all. Honestly, if I'd only seen set one, I would've called him nothing special. Sets two and three were different. The moment he started breathing with his team, he turned into a pretty threatening player—threatening enough that I caught myself thinking the score might have flipped if Nebula and I hadn't been here.
But only that much.
Bang!
Not enough to be a threat to me.
"Nice!!"
"WHOOO!!!!!"
"Niiice!!"
"Haa... haa..."
The victory log rose on the screen, and I let out the breath I'd been holding. Lock in without realizing it, and this is what happens.
"Everyone—really. Thank you for the work."
My teammates were losing their minds with joy. Even Pola, who had stayed so quiet, was yelling like that, and it brought home all over again what this match had been. The Platform Exhibition final. A 3–0 slaughter.
"Great work, everyone... Really."
School, scrims, all of it grinding past—thinking of how hard it had been, pride welled up in me.
A chime.
"Whoa, I say win it 3–0 and you actually win it 3–0. You realize I didn't call a single timeout except in set one, right?"
Our coach, Spax, joining the channel now that the championship was locked.
"Whoa. Absolute freeload coach."
"Aigoo, now why are we using the word freeload? It just means the rest of you played that well~"
Coldly speaking, if you set aside set one of this final, Spax really had freeloaded today. Not because I felt like dragging my closest friend. We had simply crushed them so hard the coach never had to step in. Even so, turning Oldboy, Zzangdol, and Pola into teammates one, two, and three—each of them actually solid—had only been possible because of Spax's feedback.
"But honestly, it also kind of feels like I freeloaded thanks to Eunha and Nebula?"
"No. We learned a lot thanks to you, Spax."
A chime.
"Yessir, much obliged~"
"Hnngh..."
Without meaning to, the exhaustion hit and I folded onto the desk. A 3–0 or not, I had poured a lot of focus into it. From set two on I had gone all out, so even after the sweep I felt wrung nearly dry.
"Aah! Eunha, cam! The cam!"
"Aah!"
I was on hand cam. That meant the top of the desk was what the camera saw. And I had just planted my face on that desk, so there was a chance my face had slipped into frame.
"D-did my face just show?"
If it did... ugh. What am I supposed to do...
"No. Right now it's only the back of your head, so you can lift it slowly."
"Whew. Thank god..."
Chat was watching the screen from three minutes ago. For the sake of competitive integrity, every chat had a three-minute delay on it. I briefly wondered if I should delete the VOD, then let it go. My face hadn't even shown. No reason to bother.
"But we really did win, huh..."
"Right? I came in with nothing but 'please don't let them flame me'..."
The two of them were still soaked in it. I'd been the same, the first time. I remembered winning my first domestic tournament and laughing with Spax for a while after—Who am I? Korea's best entry. Looking back, it was a little embarrassing. That's just how happy we'd been. A championship isn't simply proof that you finished first. It's your effort being recognized, and affirmed. Effort that never gets anything back is nothing but cruel labor.
"All right, let's head over to the broadcast channel. The second you're in, mute your mics. Don't forget."
"Yep!"
Three minutes had passed before I noticed, and we moved to the broadcast channel for the interview. By now, on my stream, the viewers' delayed timeline would just be reaching the end of the match. I decided to leave them a small hello.
They were the people who had watched me through all this long stretch of time, and cheered.
Back when I was the pro gamer Galaxy, there had been almost no one who cheered for me and meant it. To me, these viewers were precious beyond words.
"Thank you for cheering for me."
Almost no one would hear it. What I had just said would only reach them three minutes later, and by then most people would already have gone to the broadcast channel to watch the interview.
Even so, the reason I went out of my way to say thank you...
I just wanted to. I just wanted to say it myself, with my own mouth.