Chapter 101: Even if it

Time returns to the start of the round, from the perspective of a wild livestream: 【Oh? VG is letting Jiaoyang play alone again?】

【NB! They guessed right! There's only one person at B.】

【What rank is this? The other side is clearly rushing A da and stacking B.】

【What is Jiaoyang doing? The sniper rifle suddenly fired and gave away his position?】

【Is he panicking? Why is he firing wildly through his own door?】

【Look at JamYoung's stats, you'd panic too if you had teammates like that!】

【Something's not right—is he unloading his magazine?】

【For real? Unloading in a tournament?】

【That's the ninth shot! He's changing direction!!!】

Bang! The smoke cleared and the shot rang out; sta fell straight onto the A da slope, eyes wide open in death.

【Holy crap?!! This actually works?】

"I get it! I get it!" the small streamer exclaimed excitedly.

【Stop getting it, spit it out already!】

"The 18-second smoke grenade starts to fade at 14 seconds, and the time he fired the tenth shot from his sniper rifle—was exactly 14 seconds!!!"

"It's a decoy grenade! He added a decoy grenade! He's been setting this up since the second round!"

The small streamer was a bit incoherent, as if he had discovered something incredible, nervously blurting out one thing after another.

【Over-analyzing.】

【Not over-analyzing. Don't you guys think the first round was also strange? I feel like it's a tactic.】

【Is this the god-tier player who plays Dota 2? He remembers the cooldowns this clearly?】

【This play is a bit artistic. Unloading the magazine while disguising it as a decoy, using the opponent's smoke as a timer to sneak through—】

【Learn from this, brother, learning has no limits.】

The moment Jiaoyang secured the kill, the defense that was originally stacking B shifted again; as sta recalled the decoy grenade from the second round, he also remembered the solo bomb steal from the first.

Repeating previously used tactics in different rounds with different forms? After sta raised the idea, HSK became vigilant.

Jiaoyang threw a smoke to cover his crossing into Big Pit, leaving the only remaining defender at the back of A Site in a precarious position.

This was no longer the time to stack B!

"Drop smoke at B, leave one at B, coordinate at Middle, no matter what, take Ori down for me!!!"

HSK roared viciously; since the opponent was bold enough to let their star player go solo, then Ori should taste what it's like to be outnumbered!

"I want to see how many bullets his sniper rifle can fire at once!!!"

From the god's-eye view, on the map in the top left, the blue dots representing the Counter-Terrorists at A Site surrounded a yellow dot, while the yellow dot at B Site was charging forward in an S-shape.

In an instant, the kill feed refreshed directly—

【Ori used AWP to get a Headshot on XigN】

【eta used M4A4 to get a Headshot through smoke on advent (while blinded)】

Immediately after, Jiaoyang's ID appeared again, but not with a sniper rifle—【Ori used M4A4 to get a Headshot on zeff】

【eta used M4A4 to get a kill through smoke on zhokiNg (while blinded)】

【Ori used M4A4 to get a Headshot on HSK】

【eta used M4A4 to get a kill on aumaN】

【JamYoung used AK-47 to get a Headshot on eta】

"eta was blinded and scanned to death by three people through the smoke; the goddess of luck is already standing on the side of the MVP."

"But it's a pity, Jiaoyang used his plays to tell the world that even if a god comes, he will kill them all the same."

Once this round ended, the entire match entered garbage time.

After the sides swapped, no one knew what happened, but JamYoung seemed like a different person, holding angles and getting kills as easily as slaughtering chickens.

And MVP's desperate struggle continued until Map 2, Overpass; once their new Three-man Stack was seen through, they completely lost the ability to resist.

They ultimately fell into the lower bracket with scores of 11:16 on Map 1 and 8:16 on Map 2.

Inside the MVP match room, ever since HSK left in silence, the team members' faces were deathly pale; this was already the third stage, following the blood-red of the Map 1 stage and the iron-blue of the Map 2 stage.

HSK cared deeply about this tournament; after achieving some results at IEM Sydney, the management changed their previous attitude, stating that as long as they could secure the position of number one in Asia, MVP would not disband.

After all, this meant MVP could get Major Stickers, and that money was not to be underestimated.

But HSK had a massive headache; although Tyloo was no longer a threat, the problem was VG.

After Sydney, Ori would return to VG, and no one understood the terror of Ori better than HSK.

Even now, when HSK closed his eyes before sleep, he would still recall the fear of being dominated by Ori; whenever he couldn't sleep, he would take out the few recordings of Ori to analyze, and then he would be even less able to sleep.

As it turned out, just when HSK was racking his brain over how to deal with the kaze+Ori double-sniper system, the Coach brought good news: kaze went to Tyloo! The new player VG recruited was a kid who hadn't even played in the second tier!

At the time, HSK felt things wouldn't be that simple; this kid must have had some extraordinary talent!

He didn't expect that after watching the demo, he would find that apart from having a slightly aggressive aim, JamYoung was completely incomparable to kaze, especially in terms of discipline; he would definitely need some time to grow.

This meant that this was the perfect time for MVP to reach the top of Asia!

After they tried their best to defeat the new Tyloo, they gained even more confidence in their own strength.

It was precisely with this confidence that they chose to use a steady approach, preparing to compete directly with VG in terms of raw skill.

Who could have guessed that this guy advent would play dirty, starting to deceive them from the very first map selection, choosing a map that relied on raw aim to make them think it was a head-on fight, only to play dirty from start to finish.

With such good frontal firepower available, he chose to use these never-before-seen stealth tactics; how little could he trust anyone other than Jiaoyang?

Now the result was out, and he could only say—advent was absolutely right.

Judging by JamYoung's performance, advent's choice was already the optimal solution; the only problem was that advent had actually underestimated Ori a little!

As Ori's teammate, advent might have been too close to the situation; HSK had already felt it when playing at IEM Sydney, that even the players from the runner-up, Fanatic, did not put as much pressure on him as Jiaoyang did.

Perhaps influenced by Ori, he actually felt somewhat relaxed when playing against some former European tier-two teams.

Today, Ori used terrifying mechanics and astonishing game sense to prove this point once again—Ori is a top-tier player even on the world stage.

HSK had already proposed to the management that if they could bring in Ori, he was one thousand percent certain they could make it into the Major; the language barrier was not a concern, and it wouldn't matter even if the whole team had to learn Chinese.

Otherwise, they would only have to wait for Valve to grant Asia an extra slot after VG achieved good results at the Major.

He certainly knew that with a small, shabby club like MVP, it was impossible to sign a Paris Disney Major Champion mid-laner; he was merely trying to persuade the club to lower their expectations.

However, this statement was undoubtedly seen by the management as waving a white flag; the old man in charge clenched his fists, pondered for a moment, and finally agreed with a pretense of sincerity.

Then, he immediately smiled and comforted HSK, saying: "Haicheng, I know you might be in a bad mood after losing the match. But you mustn't lose heart because of this."

"This VG was just formed less than a month ago and even changed players midway; perhaps it's just a honeymoon period, don't be too anxious."

"The shareholders' talk about MVP dominating Asia might have put too much pressure on you."

"You all still need to adjust properly; the young people on the team are still counting on you!"

HSK sighed; this group of management really didn't want to suffer even the slightest loss!

His dream of being a brother might actually come true.