Is Jungle Harder? (2)
There was a saying.
Games weren’t played to win—they were played to make the other guy lose his mind.
And in Legend of War, there were always a few users who played exactly like that.
Sashak was one of the champions those players loved most.
Its skills were built to poke, slip away, lay traps, and lure enemies in by the nose.
On top of that, it looked ridiculous, a clown in the flesh.
If you really set out to needle and taunt someone with it, your opponent could feel their blood pressure climbing before they even realized it.
That was why so many viewers were not cheering cheerfully at Yeongho’s perfect harassment of the enemy jungler.
Instead, bad memories of Sashak came flooding back, the kind of mental scar people called trauma, and it felt like an old wound was being ripped open again.
This champ might actually be pretty broken.
Unaware of that fact, Yeongho simply wondered what else he could do with this champion and did the best he could in the role he believed a jungler was supposed to play.
The enemy jungler, who had died at level 1, was able to return to his own jungle quickly thanks to the short respawn timer.
The jungle was split into upper and lower halves with the mid lane as the dividing line.
But the lower jungle had already been invaded and stolen by Sashak, so by now the other camps there were probably being cleaned out as well.
So he had no choice but to run toward the upper side and try to salvage at least those camps.
But then—
Isn’t this not much different from top or bot lane pressure? If I think of the whole jungle as one big lane, it makes sense.
As soon as Yeongho had killed Jin Tao, he cleared only one camp on the lower side, then left the rest alone and headed toward mid, extending the feelers of his senses far into the distance.
He had already used a deny strategy in top and bot to solidify the advantage after winning those lanes, so he figured he might as well do something similar in the jungle.
Sashak eventually crossed mid and moved toward the upper side, tracking the enemy he had detected.
He had activated stealth to hide his route, so the enemy team had no way to predict where Yeongho was headed next.
He had used Surprise Show!, so the skill was on cooldown, but that didn’t matter much.
After confirming the enemy jungler’s position, Yeongho circled around a wall outside the enemy’s vision and came in from half a lap away.
This time, he ambushed Jin Tao from behind while he was trading blows with the red golem, the jungle monster commonly called Red.
The enemy had no real escape skill, and Flash had already been burned, so the moment Yeongho entered vision, he slapped on a slow with Knife Show! and strode straight forward, stabbing away with his daggers.
“H-huh!? No, what the hell! Why is he here—aaaah!”
Jin Tao screamed and tried to run, but before long he collapsed, a cold corpse on the ground.
Then Yeongho quickly devoured the Red, which had been left with barely any health after being battered by its owner.
With Sashak hitting level 3 after clearing one more camp, he slipped back into stealth and moved down toward the lower side along mid lane again.
At this point he should have finished the invade and gone back to clearing his own side.
But Yeongho just kept moving diligently, following the direction the enemy jungler took.
It wasn’t because he had a personal grudge or because he got some sick pleasure out of relentless bullying.
It was just that, with a pile of jumbled strategy videos and a tiny bit of his own experience mixed together, he had come to believe this might be the best way to play a jungler and was faithfully carrying out the role given to him.
“What the hell?! Why are you here again, aaargh!”
Jin Tao, who had been running around with tears in his eyes to salvage whatever camps were still left, ran into Sashak again, lost his mind, and died to a dagger through the chest.
Deciding he had squeezed out enough value, Yeongho recalled to base, bought items with the gold he had stacked up, and then passed through the lower jungle of his own side to head back toward mid lane.
This time, he wasn’t relying solely on that peculiar sense of his. It was a play that actually used his head.
Hmm. Well, that’s also thanks to my absurdly broken ability, of course.
The function of his super-sense let him explore the map broadly.
With it, he could do more than just observe enemy movement—he could also expose wards that had already been placed and hidden.
He couldn’t destroy them unless he used Lens, but he could still detect where transparent wards had been planted.
That was how he knew the enemy mid had warded the area around the lower jungle to prevent ganks.
So he deliberately walked through that side to show himself and feed the enemy false information.
Apparently the plan had worked, because the enemy team exchanged opinions in chat and tried to predict Sashak’s next move.
But Yeongho, who had shown himself only on the ward and then come back around by jumping over the wall with stealth, was already sprinting with all his might toward Jin Tao, who was about to invade his jungle.
Arriving first and taking position, Yeongho used Sashak’s third skill, Box Show!.
Box Show! set up a trap box, like planting a mine at the designated location.
The box stayed invisible like a ward, and when an enemy came too close, a toy popped out and inflicted a fear status on nearby targets.
“Uwah!?”
Jin Tao, who had been running on gritted teeth to recover even a sliver of lost ground, triggered the trap, got feared, and flailed around as he spun his body around.
Fear was a powerful crowd control effect that forced the target to turn their back on the point where it triggered and robbed them of control for the duration.
Sashak clung to Jin Tao’s exposed back and swung his daggers without mercy.
Sashak’s passive skill, Backstep, dealt bonus damage when attacking an enemy from behind.
With such a massive level gap, and that passive used to the fullest, the enemy couldn’t even let out a peep before collapsing onto the ground in an instant.
So he respawned, Yeongho chased him down and killed him again. When he respawned again, Yeongho hid and killed him again.
Even though he hadn’t been able to keep up with camp clears because he was busy tailing the enemy jungler, by the time Sashak reached level 5, Jin Tao was still stuck at level 1.
Before long, Jin Tao’s mental state had been ground completely into dust.
“You little shitttt!”
He screamed a string of furious curses right before another dagger ended his life, and after that he never appeared on the battlefield again.
A translucent chat window floated in one corner of the screen, and the enemy team’s all-chat appeared there.
With the surrender notification from the other side, the victory banner rose up.
Back in the waiting room, Yeongho pulled up the match history and spoke in a gentle voice, sounding genuinely sorry.
“It seems Jin Tao-nim got very angry. Still, he really shouldn’t have been cursing like that.”
For some reason, the viewers’ reactions were oddly mixed.
Why wasn’t anyone saying he’d done well?
He had clearly played a pretty competent game, even if it was his first time in the jungle.
“For the sake of a clean gaming culture, I’m going to report Jin Tao-nim for bad manners.”
Saying that, he pressed the report button and filed it under verbal abuse.
Yeongho, feeling a little hurt by the viewers’ different reaction from before, stared at the chat with a sullen face.
“Oh! Thanks for the donation.”
Someone sent a donation message, and he brightened up and offered his thanks.
He was just thinking that the reaction was a little strange, but the game itself had still gone well, when a long message stretched across the broadcast screen.
“......?”
It was ridiculously long, but the content was somehow even stranger.
“No... my parents weren’t really that strict. Poking people with chopsticks? Who does something like that?”
Yeongho protested, indignant, but the viewers only laughed and spammed lol.
“...Let’s move on to the next game.”
After gathering participants from the audience and starting queue, matchmaking hit almost immediately and the game began.
Yeongho locked Sashak again without hesitation.
Apparently last game had been his first full jungle clear, so there were a few things he regretted.
Maybe that was why the chat had been full of criticism and armchair coaching, and why the viewers weren’t praising him the way they did when he played lane.
“I admit I was lacking. This time, I’ll do even better.”
As Yeongho declared that with fire in his eyes, determined to give it his all—
Viewers who seemed to have jungle as their main role came out in a flood, turning the chat box into a sea of tears.
Of course, that still didn’t cancel the already matched game.
With the champion’s signature grin stretched so wide it seemed to split his face, Yeongho’s Sashak appeared on the battlefield once more.