Rise

Zeng Rui’s jaw muscles pulsed with fury. He was incredibly frustrated with himself. I should’ve seen this coming. I should’ve seen this coming! But he hadn’t. And as a result, his entire team died. He had lost his team the first teamfight against High School 13 in the Finals of the Shanghai 16 School Tournament! He was so caught up in self-directed rage for this turn of events that he barely noticed the Tristana jumping towards him. But he didn’t really care. There was nothing he could do, especially considering that his health was already really low from trying to save his teammates. He glanced down at the minimap one more time, just to confirm. Mostly out of habit. He knew he wasn’t going to reach the safety of a tower before she killed him. And even if he did, it wouldn’t change things. The rest of his team was dead. So instead of worrying about how to preserve what little remained of his life, he started thinking about how to turn this game around.

《Triple kill!》《Aced!》

“WOOOO!” Westwind screamed into his microphone. “What. A. Teamfight! Show me those High School 13 posters! Show everyone the posters!” And the High School 13 students happily obliged. They were on their feet, holding the posters up above their heads that read: “HIGH SCHOOL 13 CHAMPIONS!” A line that was screamed out over and over again by the other students, booming through the arena.

Whistling, jeers, and boos. Shanghai High School did everything they could think of to shut High School 13’s section of the audience up. But it had quite the opposite effect. The venue was far too small for the amount of people there. So anything they shouted was drowned out by everyone else that was shouting. All anyone could hear was a massive reaction to the teamfight win by High School 13!

Silent Reed giggled and said, “The Tristana picked up a very nice triple there, though Zeng Rui should’ve tried harder to escape. Still…” She shook her head slightly before continuing, “That fight was all Lin Feng. He won that fight for High School 13.”

Westwind laughed and said, “That is WIN FENG for you! Right, guys?” He was trying to bait the audience into starting a WIN FENG chant to serve as the background to the rest of his commentating. Unfortunately, the audience did not bite and continued their unintelligible shouting and cheering. Westwind didn’t care though, he was just thrilled to have the audience reacting to him. Any cheering and noise was good enough as far as he was concerned. He decided to continue whipping the crowd up, “A crazy 3-man ult to win the fight! WIN FENG was the bait and the trap! HOW AWESOME WAS THAT?”

An Xin was up on her feet, together with Ren Rou, Ouyang, and Yang Fan. They were cheering for the team, for Lin Feng and Tang Bingyao who’d turned the losing teamfight around into a win. An Xin looked over her shoulder at the audience. The excited and happy expressions on their faces left her smiling. She turned back to look at Lin Feng and mumbled, “Not bad, you blockhead. You won the match.”

Zeng Rui knew, just like An Xin, that the game was as good as played. He’d prepared this teamfight specifically to deal with the Wukong who was the only real nuisance on High School 13’s team up until that point. Everything was going as planned. They got a couple of kills and baited the Wukong into action. Then they used their high cooldown skills to burst him down before he could do anything. That was where his plan fell apart. Zeng Rui stared across the stage at Lin Feng. Outplayed by him… He gritted his teeth and focused back on the game. His team needed him right now. They had to come together and find a way to stop the Wukong.

“Shit,” Zeng Rui cursed over the team’s voice chat. He rarely cursed, but he really needed to vent out his frustrations. “That went terrible, guys. Now we focus. We’re going to shut that Wukong down.” But how…? I didn’t see it coming. That’s the second time now where I didn’t expect his next move. How is he doing this? Is he just really lucky? No. Once, maybe. But not twice.