Outside, the gymnasium had already picked its winner.
The giant screen above the stage showed the map from above, red icons pressing forward on every lane, and each time the Shark Riders won a fight, the east bleachers rose like a wave. Somebody had started a chant, and by now half the building had joined it.
"Riders! Riders! Riders!"
At the casters’ table below the screen, two commentators leaned into their mics.
"Another tower down, and honestly, at this point the Borors are being held together by one player."
"The masked one. Kazu, apparently. Look at that scoreboard, nine kills, zero deaths. Incredible numbers. Completely wasted numbers. You cannot win a five versus five by yourself, folks. Nobody can."
The stream chat running down the side of the screen agreed.
[borors? more like goners!!!!]
[masked guy is smurfing and it still wont matter]
[sharks just have to bait him out and its over]
[Get your ass out the game exp! My God!]
On stage, ten pods sat in two neat rows, quiet and closed, while inside five of them, the Borors were losing in front of the entire district.
...
Inside the game, the Shark Riders had gotten comfortable. Comfortable enough to talk.
"Forget the other four; they’re free kills," the blonde said, crouched in the river grass with his three tanks around him like furniture. "The masked one is the only real threat in this game. We delete him once, morale dies, and the game ends."
"So how do we catch a guy using a hero that never gets caught? Isn’t that the voice line of the hero?"
"You’re right about that. Which is exactly why we need to bait the hero for this to work." The blonde nodded toward their mage, who was sitting at a third of her health after the last skirmish.
"Can you walk towards the mid lane and let him come for you? To him, you’d just be another walking kill; there is no way he would miss the chance."
The mage sighed and did as she was told, drifting up the middle lane alone, hugging just close enough to danger to look like a mistake.
For a moment, nothing happened, and it seemed like their opponent was not going to risk entering a battle, especially since they were several gold behind.
Then a spark of light snapped across the lane, a second one right behind it, and the mage dropped where she stood.
Elsa was already running before the kill banner finished appearing, skirts of light trailing behind her, laughing the entire way back to her tower.
"Thanks for the free kill, Muaaaaaahh~."
The blonde stood up out of the grass and stared at the empty lane for a long second.
"...Okay. New plan."
...
Karl heard none of it. He was standing in the shadow of his own blue buff camp, and the only voice that mattered was the one inside his skull.
Actually, the truth is, he had been there ever since he recalled, wondering what he should do in this sudden change in power spike.
There was no doubt in his mind that if the pressure kept going on, his team would request a surrender.
’You asked if I want to see how to win. Show me.’ Karl spoke directly to the system, a look of total obsession slowly creeping onto his face.
[Answer accepted.]
[Accumulated EXP threshold reached. Kill contributions have been converted.]
[The Administrator may now unlock one skill. Presenting available options.]
Three panels of pale light unfolded in front of him, hanging in the air where no one else could see them.
[Silent Steps: All sound produced by the Administrator’s movement is erased.]
[Iron Will: Duration of all crowd control received is reduced by half.]
[Clear Vision: Enemy movement patterns are displayed as directional arrows upon the ground before they occur.]
Karl read the third one twice. Then a third time, slowly, in case the words changed.
’Interesting...’
[This unit does not understand the distinction.]
’Yeah. I’m starting to see that.’
He pressed his palm to the panel.
There was no reason for him to think long and hard before making a decision here.
[Skill unlocked: Clear Vision.]
The world shifted.
Faint arrows bled up out of the ground like watermarks, crawling along the river, curling through the jungle paths, each one tagged in his sight with a name. The blonde’s arrow bent around the drone pit toward his own red side. Two tanks trailed behind it. A trap, being set for him at this very moment, drawn on the floor like a diagram.
Karl felt something in his chest go very still and very cold. The same feeling as three in the morning in ranked, one game from rank one, except now it had a body, two blades, and a map that had decided to tell him the future.
’All means necessary, right?’
[Correct.]
’Then keep the arrows coming.’
Whoosh!
He dashed forward.
...
The casters saw it before the crowd did.
"Wait. Wait, where is Kazu going? he’s walking straight into their jungle; that is exactly where the Shark Riders are setting up, someone tell this man--"
He stepped through the wall crack at the precise second the blonde’s arrow crossed the tank’s, arriving behind all three of them like he’d been teleported there.
Two strikes dropped the mage before her flash finished casting. A dash carried him through the stun he was never standing in, and the second tank folded around his blades.
{Double Kill.}
The blonde turned, hook already flying at Kazu.
Kazu was not there. He was behind him, because the arrow under the blonde’s feet had said so two full seconds ago.
{Triple Kill!}
{EPIC OUTPLAY!}
The gymnasium made a sound like the roof coming off. Half the east bleachers were on their feet without deciding to be, and the casters were both shouting over each other.
"THREE FOR NOTHING! He walked into their trap and ate everyone in it!"
[what did I just watch]
[bro saw the future]
[KAZU???]
[Ain’t no way.]
In her pod, Elsa watched the replay flash across her respawn screen, kill after kill after kill, and heard her own heartbeat do something strange.
"What...in the hell?" she said quietly, to no one. "Am i the only one seeing this?"
Two pods down, the tall one watched the same replay with his jaw set, listening to a crowd that had spent all night ridiculing them suddenly learn one name, and it wasn’t his.
...
The Shark Riders stopped talking after that. They played scared, and scared teams take the safe money, so at the twenty-minute mark, all five of them collapsed onto the Lord pit to take the one objective that would still end the game.
"Leave it," the tall one said on comms, already backing off. "We can’t contest five of them, we give this one up--"
"No! Push forward!" Karl’s voice came out flat. "Hit it from range. On my mark, everyone walk up like you’re fighting for it. That’s all I need."
"That’s all you need? That’s a coin flip, if you miss the steal we lose the game right here--"
"I won’t miss."
"Uhn?"
"I said i won’t miss."
The arrows told him everything. The pattern of the Lord’s health falling, the blonde rotating to guard the pit mouth, and the exact seam between two tanks that would exist for half a second and never again.
Elsa’s voice, grinning through it. "You heard him. I say we give it a try; he has been carrying us the entire game after all."
The Borors stepped out of the fog in a line. The Shark Riders flinched toward them, the seam opened, and Kazu went through it, over the pit wall, blades first, into the Lord’s last sliver of health.
{The Lord has been slain.}
The stage screen turned gold on one side of the map, and the casters simply screamed.
The rest was a formality wearing armor. The Lord marched down mid lane with five Borors behind it, towers falling one after another, the Shark Riders’ base opening up like a cracked shell, and the crowd chanting a name that hadn’t existed in this district three hours ago.
"KA-ZU! KA-ZU! KA-ZU!"
{VICTORY.}
...
The pods hissed open one by one.
Sound crashed in first, the raw, unfiltered roar of a building full of people, no longer leaking through the sky but right there, pressing on his ears.
Elsa was already out of her pod, dragging the ponytail girl into a jumping hug, the quiet marksman was smiling for the first time all night, and even the tall one was on his feet, fists clenched, torn clean between celebrating and staring.
Karl sat in the open pod for one more breath.
His hands were shaking. He noticed that, and this time he didn’t mind it at all.
Then he reached up, and pulled the helmet from his head.
....
[A/N: If you like this book so far, do add up and send me powerstones.
this book will conntain so much more than gaming.]