The Blame Tournament

Day One.

I went on cam. I swallowed my pride and even did the Zero Two dance that was supposedly everywhere these days, which meant the viewers immediately started jeering that I was stiff as a wooden plank. Even so, the so-called carry power—questionable as it was—of a chest that insisted on obeying gravity popped plenty of Water Balloons. I cleared the mission. I hoarded points like my life depended on it.

Day Two.

Cam again. A whale showed up and announced that if I cleared the horror game they were setting as a mission, they would fire five thousand Water Balloons. What an idiot. I'm a man, and I'm fairly sturdy when it comes to things that are supposed to be scary. Easy balloons, I thought—except this was the first time since my body had turned female.

Just like my tolerance for drink, the heart inside me had changed, and it would not sit still. From the moment that dark, dreadful soundtrack settled in, it was already ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hammering as if I'd sprinted a hundred meters at a dead run, and in the end scream after scream kept tearing out of my mouth. By the next day, clips of me on the verge of tears—and shots of my face twisted into something grotesque—were spreading everywhere. Fine. Karma. Damn it. They were going to ride this for a while, and the viewers were going to milk it until there was nothing left.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

Day Three.

Cam again. I cleared another mission, and the points came in nicely. The viewers' Water Balloon firepower, though, was steadily weakening. Three days of face cam in a row was a first for me, and the audience was starting to look a little worn out. It didn't help that this wasn't like before, when each broadcast upped the ante. I was still going on cam with the mask on.

Day Four.

Mia gave me an earful. She said I'd changed lately—that all I did was cam, that the tournament was only days away, and that my attention seemed to be somewhere else—and she got a little angry about it. Classic Mia: straight to the point, no thought for what came before or after. The other teammates didn't say anything, but I could feel the same thought in the way they looked at me, and that stung. This was effort spent on winning the game too. I just couldn't tell them about the program I was carrying, or the points, so I forced it down and finished the day's team practice.

I asked myself: resentful? Then work harder, and win. No matter what.

Day Five.

The two hundred and fifty points I still had, plus the hundred and eighty I'd scraped together recently, put me at four hundred and thirty. Not enough. I was too aware of the side-eye ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to turn the cam on, but I ran a broadcast built around the viewers' missions and raked the Water Balloons in hard. Thanks to that, I showed up on the gallery's rankings for the week.

Lately a chat had been popping up now and then, dubbing me a money fiend—MoneyMagpie—on the grounds that I'd lost my mind over Water Balloons. Money. It was mostly a joke, but grinding missions for balloons to feed my points needed to stop here. Keep this up and it might actually hurt my image in the long run.

And then, at last, I hit it. Five hundred points, the first goal I'd set. Push a little harder tomorrow and the day after, and I might get close to six hundred. Worth a try.

Day Six.

Hwaiting!

Day Seven.

I did it. Better than I'd thought. My points were down to nothing.

Time to show it in the game. In the result.

Four teams were entered in the Blame Tournament: Support's Fault, Ikueku, Lac, and AltF4. The format was simple. Each team played three official matches on the first day.

Once those results were in, the top two teams advanced to the finals the next day. If any records ended in a tie, only the teams involved played it off again. The whole thing started at five in the afternoon and, if it ran long, looked likely to wrap somewhere around eleven or midnight.

"Okay. We can do this."

"Let's go, let's go!"

"I am no longer the one who used to fold without a fight."

"Let's look good out there today."

"I'll carry."

My teammates all looked thrown by the confidence in my voice—nothing like usual—and then, to haul the mood up with me, they started chiming in that they would be the ones to carry. For them it was a conscious bit of cheerleading. For me it wasn't.

The truth was, I'd kept it buried even through our team scrims: how much my play had grown. I'd been quietly testing myself in solo queue on a smurf, getting the feel of it, confirming just how far the skill I'd raised through these abilities actually went now.

I kept my real level completely hidden. Which means the read the other teams have on me hasn't moved an inch from back when I was flailing around in the Yeti bracket.

Diamond 4. The cursed stretch of elo people also called the Yeti bracket—a place where intentional trolls set themselves up as gatekeepers of Diamond and made life miserable for anyone actually trying to play the game. Because of that, people often dismissed it as hardly any different from Platinum 1, and on that point I more or less agreed. A Platinum 1 who played in earnest was worth far more than a Diamond 4 who threw whenever the mood struck and ignored teamwork entirely.

Not anymore, though. Diamond 4 is about to become a phrase that has nothing to do with me.

I looked over the game category with no small amount of pride and checked the newly acquired abilities glimmering there.

Guillotine Match 4 had cost me six hundred points all told, climbing 30, 100, 180, 290, and Wide Vision was what I'd bought with the forty points left over. Its effect was extremely limited, which was why it had demanded so few points compared with the other, far more useful abilities. Right now, though, it was exactly what I needed.

Guillotine Match. Put simply, an ability with a vicious synergy in a one-on-one. Nothing like it had existed in my kit before.

Guillotine Match applied only when a fight was strictly one against one. Legend of League was a team game at its core, so the ability was bound to be rated poorly. Even so, if the sky falls, there's still a hole to crawl out of—and this was also the way to shine brightest in a match.

Backdoors. Side-lane macro. Counter-jungling. Above all, ways to stand out on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠my own.

The narrower the scope, the greater the effect. So even at level 4, in a pure one-on-one it performed on par with other abilities at level 5. The other teams would be coming at us with all their old data, which meant an ability like this—and the way I meant to play around it—sat completely outside anything they were accounting for. Of course, if you want to fool the enemy you start by fooling your allies. My teammates didn't know the situation either, so persuasion had to come first.

The broadcast began.

For a couple of ordinary BJs to be hosting, the viewer count had already cleared thirty thousand, so we'd even brought in BJs we knew to run the desk. Life and Summer, with fan clubs of fifteen thousand and eight thousand respectively, opened the show without a hint of nerves. They must have rehearsed; their lines clicked neatly off each other as they announced the start of the first match. Support's Fault versus Ikueku.

My teammates and I watched their ban-pick and their setups, trading opinions the whole way. The game was fierce, and Support's Fault took it with a little under forty-five minutes on the clock—a classic marksman-carry game dragged all the way into the late stages. Early on, Ikueku had the advantage of a Challenger jungler, but Support's Fault dug in and refused to break, and the moment their core items started coming online one by one, the game began to turn. Funneling CS and kills as a team made those items arrive even faster. Ikueku tried to cash in their early- and mid-game lead and end it, but they never found the sharp edge they needed. Past thirty-five minutes, Support's Fault's Challenger marksman was all but fully built. If a game goes late, it reminds you all over again just how much an ADC's carry power matters. This was one of those games.

"All right. Our turn. Everyone get ready."

"Mmh!"

"We'll dig in and we will not break!"

"Don't tense up. If we don't hand them mistakes, AltF4 is a team we can beat."

While the previous game was still going, I'd already told my teammates. This match, I was going to play more aggressively, and I was going to take on more of the map. I hadn't laid out the whole picture I was drawing. Change and reform that arrive too suddenly have a way of running into resistance. First I had to show them results. Then they'd trust my read a little more. In that spirit, the champion I'd prepared for today was plenty aggressive.

"You're really going with that? You barely touched it until now, right?"

"That's how it was in team practice, but I've played it a lot in ranked. And lately it's the one that fits my hands best. Trust me, just this once."

"...All right. I think I'm fine with it. A wrinkle like this in the game plan might even throw the other team off."

Waka slipped in his agreement. As the mid laner, a pick of mine that could come out swinging from the early game was bound to sit well with him.

"Understood. Then that's what we go with."

Ban-pick was over. Top, as ever, looked ready to settle things in a fight that belonged to them alone, and mid was just as evenly matched. The truly hot lane was bot. Miss Fortchun with Leonan against Jing with Zairan—strength against strength, no matter how you looked at it. If Leonan landed a clean engage on Jing and Zairan, we'd come out ahead. If the other side spaced perfectly and never gave us an angle, Zairan's poke could farm one-sided advantages instead. On paper, assuming similar skill, the draft was one our team was bound to suffer in.

Assume there are no ganks, and Zairan is a complete tyrant. And she's in the hands of a Grandmaster support, at that.

Early bot lane is dictated mostly by the supports. Setting the Gold-to-Grandmaster gap aside, a pick that strong had landed on their support, and it wasn't hard to guess how aggressive they meant to be.

Same as the scrims. They want to keep burning my jungle turns down toward bot. Cunning.

It was a plan that had already paid off for them across our team practices, which was exactly why they were going to be surprised. They were about to face a completely different person.