A four and two season was at our doorstep.
And if not, a three and three. It all came down to the five people arrayed in front of me and Rachel's ability to jungle on the fly. We passed a unremarkable ban round before everyone got into position and surprisingly everyone got the first pick. They were playing a softball with us or they thought we were playing softball with them. I didn't even need to check the match ratings to know that they thought they were about to lose. It's unusual to be at this level of play for so long and not you kind of have a sense of what your opponent was doing.
What they didn't know was that Esther wasn't with us. Or at least he didn't know up until we started playing. Because they all look a bit confused in their lineup. It quickly went back to business as usual. Not that I would want it any other way. One person not being there shouldn't change the game that much.
She might be the best in the team but she was part of the team. She did make the team better overall by your presence, but the team was healthy without her.
They start round one with farming, something I'd expected. From then, it was a race to farm more. My first surprise was that their Jungler seemed to be prescient. He was clearing the jungle right before Rachel would go in there and try to get it herself. So either he was doing it in just the right way or the odds were working out in his favor. I tended to think that it was going to be the odds were in his favor. I wouldn't would have passed him to have made his own deal with Jamaican Santa.
After all, if he made a deal with me, then he probably had me to deal with somebody else. Not like a choice in the matter. I had not been given a contract.
How many fairy tales involved the protagonist getting a USB stick with a corrupted file in it? Not many outside of certain fever dreams made by guys that had worked in IT for too long. But this wasn't a story, this is my damn life that he was playing with.
As much as I appreciated the gifts, I knew that he was going to have some big ass down the line and I was going to have to tell him no. No and oh no, there goes my soul. Because of course that's what had to happen. Unless I made him interested enough what I was doing that he didn't care about my soul anymore. There was always that chance.
Even if I didn't care my soul then what was he going to actually collect?Probably just a lot of my grief. Maybe he could be the one that inherited my mother's china cabinet or her collection of little porcelain dolls from her many travels
I stood behind Rachel as we got into minute eight with no kills and no towers down. The thread had been carefully threaded through needle of fate between what was happening and what they wanted to happen. We had an advantage in gold and just what everyone had already shopped once, if not twice. We had the precarious upper hand that could easily fall in a manner of seconds.
But I was going to play it close to my chest as long as I could. There was no point in me going over this and switching to attack mode before the enemy was ready to do that. In fact, my new thing was waiting for the demon to attack seeing the attack coming and then switching to defense mode and alerting my guys.
As I stood behind them, I could feel it coming. I checked and the opponent had switched their strategy to attack and I mentally switched mine to defense. They weren't going to get one ahead of me unless I was going to give them something to work with. And I was not going to give them a single thing to work with if I had anything to do with it.
Rachel pulled back from the jungle that she was trying to go to. She had been trying to infiltrate the other general and immediately on my mental command she pulled back. It was one of those things where I wasn't sure if it was the patch that was doing this or if she just kind of sensed the overall board state.
In the back of my mind I was thinking about what it would be like if I could get her infected with the patch so that she could see what I was seeing. I could imagine me telling her all about it and then her committing me to the mental hospital because of how ridiculous it sounded to her.
I did not want to be committed to the mental hospital. I definitely had shit to do in my life. A 72-hour hold did not sound like a vacation at that exact moment.
Plus there is a question of how would I explain it to my mom? It's not like she believes in things like Western medicine or mental health. I mean sure she went to dialysis but that was because her doctor had informed her. No uncertain terms that missing two appointments was going to make her die. I have seen the statistics. They are particularly grim.
Raquel and Murph were playing defense. Not only playing, they were winning. They kept drawing their opponents out, getting them close to their Tower and then trying to make them take a dive. Neither one of their opponents wanted to take a dive, but they kept getting hit by the tower because they kept getting within range. It's easy to tell if you're within range, and you'll get a little notification when a tower starts attacking you or targeting you. It's as easy as you attacking an opponent or an enemy's Avatar underneath the tower or in their range. That will set off the tower attacking you.
The towers were not smart AIs. They just followed the algorithm. Anything else that was happening, was on the enemy getting in their own way.
It was like they had a specific reason to trip and fall in front of the towers. It wasn't their step Tower that they were falling in front of, it was just a tower and they were just being bad teammates because rather than our first kill being something the team generated the tower killed him. This meant that Murph was surprised when he got a kill notification. He had been the last person on our team to take out one of their guys when they flew a little bit close to the Sun.
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I could see the enemy support cursing and nearly throwing his keyboard. He probably realized that it wasn't his keyboard at just the right moment because the esports academy guy gave him a look. Even I paid attention when that guy scowled. He looked like he had been given the opportunity of a lifetime. There. He was, a worker who had been given carte blanche to fight whatever customer messed with their systems.
"Hey guys, let's not throw the keyboard's mouse or monitor okay? I don't think that esports academy would like it
You see the thing about what they were doing was that they thought that they could sneak in a gank. Everyone thinks that they can do it. It rarely works.
Like it mostly doesn’t but no one looks at these odds. It’s easier to play conservatively and not rock the boat anytime, but then there are dudes that just relish the idea that they’re going to be able to get their opponents into a bind. Murph did the dance emote underneath the tower, taunting the remaining enemy avatar.
The thing you do after your partner dies is return to a safe location and ride it out. What you are not supposed to do is try to bait the guy under tower to attack you safely.
That was the job of your jungle when they were being fully supported. It would have been a good time for their jungle to show up and help out, meaning that ours showing up instead was the exact wrong thing.
I’ll give them credit. They attempted to get to a safe spot. It just happened to be that Rachel was lurking there, ready for them. Some of the kids watching in between class hooted at that. We were also livestreaming. I texted Esther.
Kelly: Your girl is copying your textbook moves. It’s too bad you’re not here to see it.
Esther: Damn. Jungle in the rear?
Kelly: Text. Book.
Esther: Squeee!
I swear that I could her emoting through the phone and across state lines. The girl was a certified baddie.
Unlike my romance novels, that three on one didn’t bear fruit. The bot laner exhausted his consumables to get out safely. If we couldn’t get them out, then we were going to make them pay for the experience.
The bottom lane being open left a hole in their defense, too many of our minions and we snagged their tower by minute eleven, right when they returned. By then I had set the round two strategy to farm. They had wisely chosen to defend in round two and I wasn’t going to stop my enemy from failing upwards. They just needed to understand what was going on.
This was our helms deep. We needed to hold the line against them. When they moving to take the dragon, we let them assume that we weren’t paying attention.
We were.
“Surgical strike?” Rachel said.
“Make it so,” I said.
Rachels avatar led our team to ambush their team when dragon was at half health. It wasn’t even that it had taken that long. They went to do their thing and we responded.
The team fights began in Earnest then and that was the part where we found out that Not only was their match rating bad, should have been a lot better by the end of the rat. By the end of the season. Whatever had happened, it just wasn't there. I was guessing that it was a small college and they didn't have much to choose from and that this was not only a elective but like a very small part of a bigger School. You work with what you had to work with. And if these guys had to bring their friends together to play, then that's what they did.
I finally checked the match rating and only one guy had an eight. Well the rest had a five. I was only the back of the guy with the eight who happened to be their top. Laner had pulled the other guys with him. Mostly because he was trying to play this narrative of him being the main character as he weaved in and out of team fights. Look it's fine if you want to be drawing conclusions or making a story out of your experience while you're playing a video game, but there's no main character 10-person match. It just isn't. It's about the team.
And somehow somewhere along the way, they must have forgotten that. I had never forgotten that
We were a group of people working together for one goal and we practiced and we trained and then we left it all out there on the table.
Mostly because we had to set up big tables for our computers and that's how you played the game.
Rachel, let them think that they were going to get something and they chased her and then she brought in her back up and the backups meant in a five-on-5 match.
I'll say that the best thing that they could probably do in that situation will be to not engage with Rachel and her shannigans. That'll be the most awkward outcome for them. But what actually happened was that Rachel led them on a while against Chase while getting them to get picked off one by one. It was like the best day ever. If you were, it's being chased by avatars.
And then, like a horror movie, the team picked him off one by one. We got the three kills before they noticed what was happening and they reset their plan. By now. We were up a significant amount.
Five kills against their zero. That felt like it was enough where we could rest in our laurels. We wouldn't, as Raquel and Murph headed back to their Lane but we could. On the way, they harassed three of the enemy team that were trying to work their way through the Jungle.
Even if their state of disregard for the meta and each other played out, it wasn't going to be anything they could use to turn back on us. At a certain point, we were inevitable.
The Bulldogs secured another victory at the twenty eight minute Mark. They had done the slow play that I had recommended and they were generally doing things that I agreed with.
As Sun Tzu likes to say, don't stop your enemy when he's about to make a mistake.
We took a little bit longer than normal break giving everyone fifteen minutes before the next one.
Was it because there was a donut shop next to us that had coffee and all the students wanted to sample some of their wares? Maybe maybe not. Had I bought two boxes of donuts for the students? Yes.
Had they greedily eaten them all? Yes.
But that's to be expected with these young kids who are all action with no forethought unless it's about being strategic in a game. It was like they had they were of two minds. There was the mind of which they went to work or went to school and then there was a mind where they were out here playing a game talking to their friends and it was a whole different ball game.
Esther was in the group chat asking what happened as Rachel typed out a play-by-play. She even gave us a video call where I was not prepared for it.
"Oh my God! I'm so proud of you guys," Esther said. "I mean I knew you could do it but without me?"
There was a little bit of a smirk there. Unfortunately, she was parked at an airport waiting for her family to arrive so she gave her kudos before she disappeared out of our lives again.