Loading into Jessica’s testing grounds, Jade had expected them to be discussing the ability set that she’d asked them to build.

Instead, she jumped straight into what looked like fairly active testing. Jessica had just released two arrows, one of them making contact with the ground at an angle to the target while the second one made contact, blasting shards into a wall that had appeared immediately behind it as the beginnings of grass appeared around the base of the dummy.

One arrow, apparently made of ice, shot back at Jessica while a spray of shards slammed into the back of the dummy and those grassy patches from before exploded into vines. Jessica had already pulled another arrow back, but didn’t fire it instantly. Instead, immediately before the icy arrow hit her, she teleported to the point where the first fired arrow was still sticking out of the ground, then turned and fired almost without looking.

This time, as the arrow made contact, a metal ball sprung into existence around the dummy and a rain of pings, like a few dozen hammers had suddenly hit the back of it, sounded out, immediately followed by the sound of Jessica snapping.

Two more large pings with a smattering of the smaller ones almost covering it up, two sprays of shards out of the ball, facing towards the two locations Jessica had fired from, then more multiple-ping sounds.

The metal ball dissolved five seconds later, revealing the dummy.

The utterly shredded dummy.

Neither Nathaniel nor Jessica was facing her, but she didn’t want to interrupt their whoops of celebration, either, so she waited until they were in excited discussion that she couldn’t really follow to speak up.

“Either of you want to explain to me what the hell happened there?” she asked, pointing at the dummy.

Nathaniel was faster on the uptake, and he smirked at her. “Timing practice.”

She was going to strangle her twin.

“Got my set set up and holy shit it’s so ridiculous,” Jessica said, ruining Nathaniel’s technical correctness. He didn’t look to torn up about it.

But she no longer felt the urge to strangle him, either, so that was good.

She had to admit, it looked the part. There’s just been too much weirdness involved for her to really place what was happening.

It wasn’t difficult to get the two of them to explain their thoughts on it, though to her surprise most of it came from Jessica.

She seemed to have a bit of an odd approach, honestly. She didn’t treat each ability like a “unit” at all, instead choosing to combine multiple for simpler combination effects.

It wasn’t how she was used to doing things, but Jade could already see how it would work, mostly. The only issue was just…

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The penultimate, Trap Ball, sort of made sense, playing on the trapping theme of the Curse of Flourishing and Metallic Wall. She could see how the AI had come to that conclusion. With an eight minute cooldown, it wasn’t anything fantastic. It could honestly be considered on the weaker end of penultimates, given that it was just unprotected, three-centimeter-thick steel. It wasn’t out of the range of possibility that someone could teleport through it or, in the case of carries in particular, just rip through it with damage.

The issue was the ultimate, Lonely Echoes of Ice.

It didn’t even bother to pick up the movement or counter tags, instead focusing in even more strongly on what the set was actually doing.

It was a fairly short, for an ultimate at least, fifteen-minute cooldown. All it did was put a marker on the target– at first. When its thirty second duration expired, it caused a copy of every projectile controlled by the user that had hit the target in that duration to fire out of the target, directly opposed to the direction that it had hit them in.

But that focus was the thing that she really needed to ask about. Once was possibly just a random occurrence, but twice? And both times when she’d been choosing based on what she wanted rather than what was considered good?

“Do you… know what’s up with this ultimate?” Jade asked hesitantly. “I’m not sure how much you know about ult theory…”

“Huh? It’s just a pre-centralized. A good one, honestly, but it’s not like I’ve got pure gold with the abilities or anything…” Jessica replied, seemingly confused. Nathaniel’s eyes snapped over to her, then narrowed.

So he’d heard of it. She hadn’t, though. “A what?”

“I thought that was just wishful thinking…” Nathaniel said, then sighed. “Shit. For me, it would be.”

Jessica looked at him strangely, then started talking again, addressing Jade’s question without looking at her. “Pre-centralized. The AI saw a stronger connecting line than the pure tags on the abilities. Not common, but better to force that than to try to live with a counter ultimate on me.”

That couldn’t be left alone. “Excuse me, what? You can force ultimates you want?”

Jessica waffled around it for a second before screwing her face up slightly. “Not like, a specific ultimate, obviously. Unless you’re just using a known set. But if you put a really strong through-line in it you can almost guarantee that you get something on that, not your tags.”

Nathaniel looked stricken. “You know, I think you just completely blew standard ult theory out the window.”

The girl just rolled her eyes at that. “Come on. People already knew that sometimes the ults didn’t match up and that changing one ability could make it completely different. Ari and Lex broke that whole thing like six months ago. It’s not really my fault that nobody listens to them and saying ‘they’re the siblings of a small-time semi-pro’ isn’t exactly the most glowing of endorsements. And they didn’t even want it.”

Jade was only somewhat listening to her.

It hadn’t really been the plan.

She had mostly wanted to build an obvious, competent team. But before she’d even put out anything resembling a tryout, they had three players on something completely outside the norm.

Nathaniel as a caster support, Jeremy as a physical tank, and Jessica as a physical carry. She wasn’t quite standard herself, as a concentration-hybrid-generalist assassin ranger.

Then Nathaniel had been inspired by Jessica, then she’d been inspired by that…

And one of them knew how to make more sets that worked like that. And she’d just shared how.

Maybe it was a little bit crazy, but that was how the team was shaping up so far…

There were, of course, two options here.

She could try to reign in the crazy, finding two solid, meta, players to round out the roster.

Or she could jump all the way in, betting everything on the wild chance that being something that the other teams couldn’t practice the counters to her team while maintaining their own general strategies.

She’d never really been the betting type.

But, at the same time… she was definitely the jumping type. And the deeper that pit went, the more it drew her in.