Top, Then Bottom (2)
The allied support champion was Jaina, the Wind Sorceress.
She had taken Wind Bird as her level 1 skill.
Wind Bird sent a bird-shaped projectile flying toward a chosen target, dealing magic damage and applying a slow debuff.
In Legend of War, where most attacks were non-targeted, it was one of the few target-lock skills in the game.
So when she stepped forward a little to make sure she could land a skill shot on the enemy marksman as he moved in for the last hit on a minion, the enemy support seized the opening and boldly flashed in front to force a trade.
Bang! Crackle! Bang!
"Aah!"
Jaina, panicked by the sudden ambush at an unexpected moment, took blow after blow and scrambled backward in a hurry.
The enemy marksman joined in the instant their support went in, ignoring the minions entirely, and before long Jaina’s HP had dropped by nearly 30 percent.
The enemy support champion was the Technomagic Golem BC32.
Like Lordinus, a champion Yeongho had seen when he was playing top lane, it excelled at creating variables and had a grab-type skill.
But since the enemy had started by using Flash first, if they calmly backed off now...
Even though Jaina’s HP had been shaved down a bit, the side that would actually end up losing might be the other team.
Flash had an extremely long cooldown, so it was usually saved as an emergency escape tool for only the most desperate situations.
Using it offensively like this meant that if they failed to secure a kill, they were the ones taking the loss.
"It's fine. Just stay calm—"
"I-I’m backing off!"
Unfortunately, the viewer who had joined as the allied support was a low-tier player, and his judgment was nowhere near good enough.
With the enemy support diving in boldly and the marksman joining the exchange to shave off more HP, he panicked and used Flash himself to create distance.
In a situation like this, it was truly the worst possible decision.
BC32’s arm suddenly stretched out and grabbed the hem of Jaina’s clothes as she fled in a fluster.
BC32’s grab skill, Lengthening Arm.
The hand that had caught Jaina dragged her back to where it started, and the distance she had barely managed to create collapsed to nothing again.
"Wah!?"
Half-panicked, Jaina desperately struggled to survive and even used Exhaust.
Every champion could begin the game with two combat support spells, and they were all fair game.
That meant Jaina had now spent all her spells, and until the cooldowns came back, she would have to fight with only basic attacks and normal skills.
But that wasn’t the only problem.
Exhaust weakened its target, sharply reducing both damage output and movement speed.
If she was using it to save herself, she should have obviously put it on the damage dealer.
Instead, because she was flustered, Jaina had targeted the nearby support rather than the enemy marksman.
It was the kind of play that made everyone watching choke on their own frustration.
The viewers were howling in outrage, eyes blazing, but Yeongho was focused on what he had to do right now, so he had no spare attention for any of it.
Bang! Bang!
He couldn’t just stand there and watch while his teammate was getting beaten up, so he advanced toward Jaina, who was being pounded down, firing his pistol as he moved.
Every single light bullet he fired struck the enemy support squarely, and before long BC32’s HP had also been cut to nearly half.
The problem was that Jaina’s HP was now almost completely gone.
Crackle!
When the three bullets fired by the enemy marksman slammed into the back of Jaina’s head as she tried to flee, her HP hit zero and she crumpled to the ground.
This is bad...
In a normal situation, any marksman would have retreated back under the tower and played safely.
But Yeongho moved forward instead, continuing to fire light bullets at BC32.
The viewers who knew Yeongho’s skill had a reason for lecturing him.
Because the enemy marksman’s passive had triggered with a gleeful, "Yay-ho!"
Its owner’s trademark line rang out, and the enemy champion’s movement changed all at once.
The passive skill Yay-ho! on the enemy champion named Trix activated whenever she destroyed a structure or killed an enemy champion.
It instantly more than doubled her movement speed and increased her attack speed by around 30 percent, causing her combat power to skyrocket.
At the same level of growth, there was basically no marksman who could go toe-to-toe with Trix once she had gone into Yay-ho mode.
Crackle! Crackle!
She closed the distance in an instant, and Trix’s minigun spat out a three-round burst.
Regardless, Yeongho’s Lewis charged straight ahead without any evasive footwork and finished off the BC32 with barely any HP left.
Whoosh!
Lewis’s Laser Bullet, a straight-line piercing skill, drilled through the returning wave and knocked down the enemy support who had tried to hide behind the minions.
Lewis immediately turned and aimed at the remaining enemy.
And so the one-on-one began.
Anyone could see it was an extremely unfavorable situation.
Trix was almost full HP at nearly 90 percent, while Lewis had already been worn down to around half health from tanking attacks and chasing the enemy support.
On top of that, Trix’s passive effect still hadn’t worn off.
Crackle! Crackle!
The gun muzzle flashed as bullets poured out.
The viewers who had already predicted Yeongho’s death leaned closer to their monitors, eyes wide open.
The HP was dropping little by little.
But it wasn’t Lewis who was going down.
"W-Why the hell aren’t these hitting!?"
As the flustered opponent screamed, Lewis dodged every bullet with godlike movement and silently planted his own shots between the enemy marksman’s brows.
Unlike Battle Arena, Legend of War didn’t have a dedicated headshot system, but the habit had become so deeply ingrained that his hand automatically aimed for vital points.
Even so, not a single shot went wide, and in the end it was Trix who fell first.
It was the kind of scene that made even viewers who had long since gotten used to Yeongho’s play style stare in fresh amazement.
Anyone who had played both Battle Arena and Legend of War knew this much.
Unlike Battle Arena, where you only controlled a single character, Legend of War forced you to swap between multiple champions, making precise control far harder to show.
And for melee champions, a basic attack only counted if the weapon actually touched the body, which meant you could use parries to knock away an enemy attack with your own weapon and negate the damage.
Projectile attacks, however, still dealt a set amount of damage to the champion even if you tried to smack them away with your weapon, so it was almost impossible to bring down an enemy without taking any damage at all using pure evasion control.
"I almost died there too."
Confirming that his remaining HP was around 30 percent, Yeongho cleared the lane and backed off to recall as he spoke.
Of course, to the viewers who knew the situation, it was practically a shameless lie.
In the early game, other lanes could have the advantage, but by the late game, everyone in Legend of War knew that the marksman’s contribution mattered most to victory.
After all, once they hit full build, late-game marksmen could fire projectile attacks at a speed that made their otherwise unparryable shots fly out like a storm.
Once they had distance, they became the role that could deliver the highest damage in a 5v5 team fight.
That was why, once each lane phase ended and the game reached the mid-game, it was an unspoken rule to deliberately give the marksman the last hit on kills during skirmishes.
If anyone could take down a marksman with nothing but movement control like that and suffer no real damage, then the entire idea that the team which fed its marksman better would win would fall apart.
"I guess I can just buy whatever the recommended items suggest?"
While the viewers were furiously typing in chat...
Yeongho spent the gold he had earned from the double kill, bought his weapon item, and moved back to lane.
Even with the viewers losing their minds over it, all he could think was: Was it really that big of a deal?
From Yeongho’s perspective, he had simply done what he could; compared to Battle Arena, this actually felt less flashy and less fast-paced.
He could only think they were either all very kind-hearted, or they were exaggerating their reactions on purpose for the streamer’s sake.
"From here on out, I’ll fight more aggressively."
The enemy marksman had also secured one kill, but with Yeongho having taken a double kill, he was bound to have a slight item advantage.
As if the skill gap weren’t already hopeless enough, he had also come back with more items, so the enemy side had no hope of holding out.
Lewis strode forward boldly and forced a fight, and the enemy bottom duo threw skill shots at him with all their might, only for him to dodge every one of them with movement alone.
Because they lost so badly in the trade, even though they had only just respawned and returned to lane, the enemy bottom duo’s HP had dropped below half, forcing them to retreat in a panic into tower range.
Even this early in the game, tower hugging had already begun.
It meant the power gap was so huge that the laner couldn’t keep up with the wave and had to survive by clinging to the tower.
In a setup like this, whether it was the enemy jungler or the allied jungler, a jungler was bound to show up eventually.
If the enemy jungler came first, they would briefly pull back and loosen the enemy’s chokehold.
If the allied jungler came first, they’d dive straight under the tower and crush the enemy’s mental for good.
"Ahhh! Jungle gank! Other lanes, get your advantage!"
Just then, the enemy jungler appeared in the top lane, and Choi Pinam shouted over voice chat.
It was a jungle gank received while pressuring the opposing top laner.
In the end, he couldn’t disengage in time and died, but he still took the enemy laner with him, recording a kill trade in the process.
"Hey, I told you this was my first death, you crazy people! And if I got one in a 2v1 and took one with me, that’s the best result! Why are you flaming me?"
"Wow, I’m seriously going to die of frustration here. Hey! If you’re going to compare me to someone, compare me to a human being! I’m still at the very top of the human league!"
"Pinam...? I’m a person too."
He protested because the comparison was getting ridiculous, but there was no answer.
At any rate, having confirmed the enemy jungler’s route, he pinged that the allied jungler was on the way and moved into the enemy formation.
The dive that followed.
The jungler mistimed it slightly and ended up taking too much tower damage and dying, but...
Yeongho still secured the enemy bottom duo’s kills, and the gap in growth had now become unmistakably huge.
After that, there was no need to watch the rest.
Seeing their bottom lane collapse, the enemy jungler and mid laner hurried down to help, but they were greeted by Yeongho’s same godlike movement and handed over kills just like the others.
In the end, apparently having broken mentally, the enemy marksman rushed at the mid tower and hard-inted into it, and a surrender vote came out right after, ending the game.
"Marksman is fun too."
With a grin, Yeongho spoke, and the viewers reacted wildly in chat.
"Ah, n-no... I wasn’t exactly trying to bully anyone or anything. I’m not a bad person."
He had tried so hard to get praised, but then he looked at the chat turning into a sea of tears and immediately panicked, stumbling over his words.
Who had said men who only play games lack empathy?
Watching the enemy team get beaten down like that, they were still immersing themselves in it, remembering their own experiences and getting genuinely sad for them.
He had been too good, and somehow, that had become a surprisingly fresh reaction in itself.
---