"Fall back."
Four voices stopped at once.
"Kazu, the turtle’s at fifty—"
"Fall back," Karl said again. "Dane, off the ramp. Sana, don’t come up. Dori, walk her out. Elsa, take the mid wave and then take the one after it."
"We’re giving it to them?" Dane’s voice cracked on the last word.
"Yes we are, go!"
He watched Draeven’s blade come down on the turtle’s back through Charlotte’s eyes, from the top of the pit wall, close enough that he could have jumped in and died in about two seconds.
The stone under his hands in the empty hall stayed cold. Steel Nerve sat over everything, and the thing he was supposed to be feeling was somewhere behind glass, still shouting, just not at him.
’Take it,’ he thought. ’Take it and get fat and get bored.’
"Master." Charlotte’s voice came from beside him and from inside his own chest at the same time. "They will read this as fear."
’...’
...
At the casters’ table, the older one leaned back from his mic and laughed into his hand before he remembered he was on air.
"So that’s a full disengage. TBD walk away from the first turtle with the jungler standing right there, and I have to be honest with you, that is the safe play and the safe play has never won anything in this building."
"You’re being kind. That’s a team that got scared."
Up in the red pods, James was already talking.
"They ran." He said it twice, the second time louder, so his gold laner heard it. "Kito, they actually ran. He walked up to the pit wall, looked at four of us, and left."
"Yeah, I saw." Kito’s voice was flat with the turtle buff still washing gold over his hero. "So he’s not stupid."
"He’s not anything. He’s a name on a forum."
Bastien Orlov said nothing at all. He walked his wave to the tower, hit it under the plate, and watched the minimap.
...
The next nine minutes were the worst nine minutes Karl had spent inside a game in three years.
Kito stopped farming his own side entirely. He lived in TBD’s jungle with James walking two steps ahead of him, and every time somebody on comms said a camp is up, one of them was already standing in it.
Sana went first, caught stepping toward her second tower. Dane went at fourteen minutes when he held a wave one bar too long. Elsa went twice, both times because she was somewhere she should not have been, and the second time she said sorry before the respawn screen finished loading.
Then it was Karl’s turn.
He took the red camp with three quarters health and no vision on the river, and Draeven came out of the wall behind him with James already mid-hook.
The stun hit first.
The pull hit second.
Charlotte’s health opened up like a seam, and Karl felt every bit of it arrive in his shoulders on the throne, dulled, arriving anyway, his arms locked flat to the stone while a hero built out of paper came apart on the other side of his eyes.
"Master, I can’t—"
’I know. Don’t apologise.’
{Kito Sarn has slain Kazu.}
The hall in the World of the King went quiet, and Karl sat in it for eleven seconds with a respawn timer in the corner of his vision and a scoreboard that read five to ten.
"That’s the game," James said on the enemy channel, gone giddy. "That’s it, that’s the game, somebody screenshot the scoreboard."
"Don’t screenshot anything." Bastien’s voice cut across it, calm, bored, a little tired. "He’s up four camps on you, Kito."
"He’s dead."
"He’s dead and he’s up four camps. Those aren’t the same sentence."
...
"Elsa."
"Yeah."
"Farm. Ignore everything else. Both side waves are yours, I’m not touching them."
"Kazu, we’re five kills down—"
"I know, just focus on farming for now."
She went. Karl walked his own jungle in silence and cleared, and cleared, and cleared, and the crowd noise leaking through the sky above the hall got flatter and flatter as nothing happened for two straight minutes.
Then it happened in the EXP lane, and it did not stop for a while.
...
Kharon,which was Bastien, met Gorran, Dean, under the second tower at seventeen minutes with a level on him and a shield up.
Dane had been holding that lane with his teeth all game and everyone in the building knew it, and Bastien walked up anyway, because Bastien had done the math and the math said he won.
The first exchange took four seconds. Kharon’s blade came down twice and Gorran ate both on the guard, and Dane threw the counter that Bastien walked out of without hurrying.
"You’re good," Bastien said on proximity chat. Nothing sharp in it. "Genuinely. You’re the third best player on this stage and it’s not going to matter."
Dane didn’t answer. He was busy.
Kharon’s passive stacked on the third strike, and the third strike came, and Gorran’s health dropped a quarter in one tick. Dane pulled back into the tower’s range and Bastien followed him under it, took a shot from the turret, and kept swinging, because he could afford it.
Second stack. Third.
Gorran’s health went to forty percent, then thirty, and the crowd started making a sound that had nothing kind in it.
"I’m going to die here," Dane said on comms. His voice had gone very even. "How long do you need?"
"For what?" Elsa said.
"Kazu. How long."
Karl was at the wall crack on the red side with both buffs burning gold up his arms and eight seconds of walking between him and that lane.
"Six seconds."
"Then I’ve got six seconds."
He turned back into Kharon.
The fourth stack landed. Gorran was at fifteen percent, and Dane was still walking forward, and at the casters’ table one of them stood halfway out of his chair.
{He’s not backing off. He is not backing off—}
Then the light came down.
Amara’s ultimate dropped out of the sky over Gorran’s shoulders and folded itself small, and Dori was suddenly sitting on Dane’s back, a tiny bright thing with both hands out, and Gorran’s health bar climbed from fifteen percent to eighty in a second and a half.
Bastien Orlov stopped moving for the first time in the entire match.
"Roam’s on him," he said. "Where’s their—"
Karl came out of the bush.
He didn’t dash in. He was already there.
Dori bounced off Dane’s shoulders the instant she saw him and landed on Charlotte’s back, and the healing hit Karl in the chest on the throne, warm and immediate, and both buffs went with him through the space between Kharon’s guard and Kharon’s tower.
The first strike opened Bastien’s shield. The second went through it. Kharon turned to run for the turret line and Karl was on the other side of him before the animation finished, one blade reversed, and he cut the retreat down to nothing.
{Kazu has slain Bastien Orlov.}
The building screamed.
Yuna came up the lane because she had to, hands already glowing, and Karl watched her cast the same opening she had cast on him twice in his own jungle. Charlotte was inside it before it landed.
{Double Kill.}
Kito arrived four seconds later, alone, at a fight that had already finished.
{Triple Kill.}
{EPIC OUTPLAY.}
"THREE. THREE, from a team that ran away from a turtle nine minutes ago, and the jungler had both buffs the entire time, he has been farming in the dark this whole game—"
"They didn’t lose the early game."
Dori was still on Charlotte’s back. "Okay," she said, and there was something in her voice Karl had not heard from her once. "Okay, that was—do that again."
Karl was already looking at the gold lane.
He didn’t get to say anything, because Sana got there first.
Vesper had been on one bar of health for eight seconds and running a wall she had no business surviving, and Otto Pran chased her into it, and then she turned around at the exact width of his hitbox and put three shots into him in the time it took him to flash.
{Sana Ibe has slain Otto Pran.}
"SANA," Elsa shouted, "SANA, WHAT."
"He kept walking," Sana said quietly.
They took the second turtle in nineteen seconds with nobody contesting it, and the level bars on the scoreboard slid back together, and the noise in the hall stopped being noise and started being one long unbroken thing pressing down on the sky.
...
In the red pods, nobody was talking.
Then James did, and it came out thin. "Okay. Okay, we group, we’re still ahead on—"
"We’re not ahead." Bastien’s respawn timer was still running. "Kito. What’s his buff timer."
A pause.
"Forty seconds."
"Then all five of us are standing in it in forty seconds." Bastien’s voice didn’t rise once. "Not the turtle. Screw that, we are going for thier jungle directly. He is the only thing on that team that works, and if he’s alive at twenty-five minutes, we lose this game in front of my sponsors."
"That’s a full invade with no vision, you want to risk that?"
"Yes."
...
Karl watched five red dots peel off the minimap at the same time and start walking the wrong way.
’They’re coming into my jungle.’
"All of them," Charlotte said. She had gone very quiet. "Master. Every one of them."
Elsa’s voice arrived a half second later, tight. "Kazu, back off, get out of there, that’s the whole team coming for you!!!"
Karl sat forward on the throne, and one panel came up in front of him, pale and patient, the way it had been sitting there unspent since the countdown hit zero.
[Clear Vision. One activation remaining. Confirm?]
’Confirm.’