They sure were trying quite hard to be sneaky, in possibly the worst way he’d ever seen.

They hadn’t even bothered to change course when he’d reduced his cast volume, not that she probably noticed. All he’d needed to do was change his average cast rate from an average of once every two seconds to once every three to be noticeably in the green on Energy.

He’d probably have a full pool by the time whoever it was that was ganking him got here, so he’d just be able to ride out– neither of the options were likely at this point to have enough CC to result in his death.

And with the advantage of being an unknown, he was ready to milk that for all it was worth.

It wasn’t that his lane opponent was bad– far from it, actually, to an almost problematic degree.

It’s just that she was built to be a good all-around northlaner, and he’d built his own set to take advantage of the most degenerate strategies available to the archetype. And even beyond that, he had in his kit two very specific counters to hers.

Though he was trying to keep that non-obvious until it was important.

Their diver, Adalynn, jogged past his ward-orb, and he very specifically avoided giving off any tells that he knew what was coming, but his mind was racing.

He should be able to pull it off, but there was no actual guarantee, and he was still a bit wary of Nova.

He’d looked her up before the game, and her current ability set made him extremely skeptical of her ability to actually compete with this set of his, but that wasn’t in any way a guarantee. He’d been careful to only hit his own mist with Condense, and only that water with Suffuse, but it was entirely possible that she knew what he was using.

Which, given her own reliance on steam, would be leading to her playing differently.

The whole thing was a bit of an I-know-you-know-I-know situation.

Quince hated it.

Not that she could necessarily do much about it, even in that case, but a truly problematic amount of them rubbing up against each other would come down to who had more energy to burn for fighting.

His would be more efficient, but it was two against one.

Which the enemy diver had decided to make known by opening with her penultimate. A wave of heat passed over him as what looked like a copy of her passed through him, while rain started up overhead.

So they thought they could kill him. That was good. It meant they’d commit.

Swashbuckler’s Option was a good penultimate. It gave the user a lot of leeway and decisions they could make within it, while opening up more options and providing a lot of speed with its three charges.

It also instantly told him that she had pre-cast Mirage, which he broke with a single well-placed Mist Wave.

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If they were going to commit, he wasn’t going to let them down.

He ran right towards the minion wave, firing off a couple of Mist Waves, following up the one that made contact with Nova with the Condense/Suffuse that turned the ground under her feet to mud. It wasn’t a lot of damage on its own but, as was the case for the truly annoying north laners, that wouldn’t matter much. So long as he didn’t die, a thousand cuts would be enough.

Annoyingly, though, Adalynn was a faster runner than he was, catching up and tagging him with Directing Feint before he could react. When he did react, he had to be quick.

Three Mist waves, all aimed basically at his feet then Condensed and Suffused before they made contact with her. This whole plan fell apart if she got Daredevil stacks.

Nova was quick, though, and with his approach she’d decided to match him, then cast her own penultimate. They thought they had him, then. It might be a silly name, but with Steam Engine causing her to put out a huge amount of the stuff, it would usually be a fair assessment. He could see some of it arcing towards him and barely managed to avoid the main strike of it before his shield was hit from behind, hard, and he jumped off the mud-wave he’d been riding.

What?

Oh.

She’d used the damage from his opener to power up her passive, then fed that into Heat to transform the water from the rain into more steam, cloaking her actions with Steam Engine. Combined with the Directing Feint, that single strike had taken off over half of his shields, and now almost the entire lane was covered in a thin blanket of steam that she was directing towards him as the second copy of Adalynn charged through him again.

That was fine, though. He’d been preparing for that.

It needed to be fast, otherwise he’d have to fight for control. And it would need to be accurate, too, or he’d spend too much energy on the first part and not have enough left for the second. He got hit again, though less strongly, in the middle of his preparations. Fifteen percent shields left. All the minions were dead of either his mud or Nova's steam.

But he’d been practicing for that exact reason.

Seventy Energy, more than half of his total, disappeared in a flash, followed almost instantly by another forty.

Almost all of the steam around them, minus some that was too high, turned into water, falling to the ground– then was Suffused into the ground around them, turning it into mud.

It was a good thing that penultimates didn’t usually require Energy, because the mental exhaustion that came with single-digit low Energy was already settling in hard when he cast his penultimate.

And Grasping Sludge did not disappoint.

A huge number of hands leaped out of the mud around him as he stumbled, hit from behind by Adalynn and breaking his shields, who had opted not to teleport this time. He watched as she cast the last charge of it in an attempt to get away, but much to his exhausted amusement, it was just barely not long enough. She could have made it if she’d Chase-d her ally before doing it, actually. He didn’t have enough energy to make it big enough for all of their options.

Which didn’t mean it wasn’t enough for most of them. Nova didn’t have a movement ability, and his combination had torn through her stock of steam. More was being produced by the second, but she’d picked up another problem in the meantime.

The hands grabbed both of their ankles first, after breaking through the shields in just a few seconds.

It wasn’t usually enough, on its own, but Grasping Sludge scaled most effectively with a large, contiguous pool of mud as its target and a low number of potential enemies in its range.

And he had not let it down. It felt like hundreds of mud hands, churning as they flew up from the ground, piled on to his two assailants, dragging them down into the mud. It was probably a few dozen, realistically, but he was seeing double. Around Nova, he saw huge bursts of steam start up, hardening and cracking some of the mud as it piled on, and he threw every last bit of Energy that he had into Condensing it to slow her down, passing out on his feet for a moment at least twice.

He knew from experience and the timing of the notification that the game counted them as dead before the sludge was allowed to close over their faces, though they appeared to fight for a few seconds past that.

Granduon didn’t want their players traumatized too badly, after all.