It felt like getting mocked by numbers.

Which was particularly egregious because numbers couldn’t even talk.

If it was just one number, that would be fine, if annoying, but that wasn’t the case.

He only had a B in the calculus class, only managed the same with statistics, and couldn’t push the stupid Arrows calculation score above one-seventy.

And that one B wasn’t something he could change, either. If he got maximum credit for everything that was left, he’d still end up with eighty-nine percent in the class, just because of a single screwup on a test.

It wasn’t even his fault, entirely, because the teacher hadn’t ever bothered to check the content of the homework assignments, instead just marking that each of the problems had been completed, regardless of correctness.

Which was completely unhelpful and not at all–

Quince cut that thought off before he let it get out of control.

It was at least partially his fault that he didn’t bother to check the books or online sources to make sure that he had written down the formulas correctly. His misplacing of numbers and failure to recognize the pattern that the mistake had been breaking had been the primary contributors.

And all of that compounded on the fact that Doug had asked him to play for his team.

He barely even knew the guy. Only thing he’d been able to confirm was that he was being asked to play north.

Northlane! Him!

Never mind that he was a much better mid lane player, he’d been scouted for being nearby and having the calculation score to play the more common north builds.

Never mind the fact that it apparently wasn’t getting any higher!

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He threw his phone backwards onto his bed as soon as he entered his dorm room. Kaiden wasn’t back yet, and wouldn’t be until way later.

That was good at least.

It took a few more hours of fuming over the test score before he finally gave up on that, and it was better that he did that on his own.

Better to focus on Doug’s thing, instead.

He didn’t know when he’d let it slip that he was a level six player, but apparently the guy had remembered it somehow. Annoying, but not too surprising. He was also fairly highly ranked, but that wasn’t exactly going to do him entirely favors going into the pro scene.

Solo play was much more about personal skill and being able to work with any teammates, where with a pre-selected team, it would be much more about how his personal abilities fit into the team.

A lookup of who their members are, then. And who’d left.

What he found didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

He’d still try it out, of course, but the ongoing list of one to two game members was worrying.

Instead of getting caught up with that nonsense, he took a moment to wrap it all up chronologically.

They’d started with a solid team of six. Greg C., Jonah A., Doug S., Emma H., Jessica B., and Jakob F., in the standard form of North, Ranger, Mid, Diver, Carry, Support.

Looking through their builds, it was actually surprising how utterly standard they’d been, except for the two women. Calculation bruiser north, Tank/control ranger, Calculation assassin mid, and tank support were all exactly what he’d expect to see.

The calculation tank diver, though, and the physical carry, were interesting. It was certainly taking a stand, given that it would usually require the people to play it much better than the others, but that was fine if they could manage it.

That team lasted for three months, and since then had fundamentally changed in the way that it worked. Doug had moved to the carry position, Greg had moved to mid, and the northlane had become a rotating cast with, problematically, no repeats.

Which was, in and of itself, strange.

Strange enough that he started looking deeper into that.

It didn’t take long to realize that they’d had a rotating cast of people, every single one of them new to the scene and based in the area.

Doug’s friends first, then, and his acquaintances next.

He could already see that this wasn’t going to go great.

After Jessica had left, not a single person lasted more than three games, and they all decided to leave the scene, though one of them had been picked up for a feeder team.

Which was good enough for him. Use the team to get his name out there as a good player, then wrangle for a midlane position somewhere.

Definitely doable. A bit of work, absolutely, but doable.

Maybe the better teams would know how to break through the stupid wall he was running into.

It just wasn’t fair.

Or maybe it was, and just a personal wall.

Quince certainly hoped not.