Rise

Brand new professional teams needed months and months of practice before they could compete at the highest level. This was because the players needed to get attuned to each other. It wasn’t any different for Team Shanghai, except that they only had one month to do this. An Xin and Zeng Rui understood the time crunch. So after the first practice, they’d talked with each other and came up with a training schedule that would get the team to a level where they could compete for the Winter Collegiate Cup.

On the second day of practice, An Xin and Zeng Rui presented their training plan. It was simple and straightforward. Play a lot of League of Legends. Because more than anything, the team needed to play as many games together as they could to get attuned to each other. But they also had to learn from the mistakes they made. So An Xin would record the games and review them with the rest of the team, pointing out the mistakes and how they could’ve been avoided. And finally at the end of practice, An Xin and Zeng Rui would sit down together to talk tactics and strategy.

All five members from Team Shanghai liked this training plan. They got behind their computers and started practicing, quickly winning one game after the other. This was an unfortunate side effect of being a new team. They had to start fresh on the ranked ladder. From the initial placement matches to Platinum and beyond.

It took Team Shanghai two more days of winning every single game to find some serious opponents. But this was far longer than Lin Feng could stay focused. He’d enjoyed the first couple of games, but smashing Midlaners game after game became pretty stale. And in the last game of that day, he was completely lost in boredom. I should tell Fatty that Chu Fang invited me to play at the Winter Collegiate Cup! He’d love to watch me play! Maybe I can call him on the way home and tell him! Hmm, but what do I call our team? He needs to know which team to follow. He looked at the other, completely forgetting they were in the middle of a game, and said, “Hey! We haven’t named our team yet! What should we call it? Shanghai Masters? Or Challengers! Shanghai Challengers! Or, or, The High Schoolers!”

“We’re in a game,” Zeng Rui said. He closed his eyes for a brief moment and sighed, then added, “Besides, Chu Fang registered us as Team Shanghai. That’s our team name. Now will you please focus on the game?” Thundering dumbass.

An Xin chimed in, “Just focus on the training. Leave the rest to people with a brain!”

✹

At the end of the first week of practice, Team Shanghai had made remarkable progress. Their teamwork improved rapidly, which helped them further improve almost every other aspect of their game as well. But the biggest changes were happening in the bot lane. More specifically, Tang Bingyao was progressively getting better at the game. There was still so much potential within her that she had yet to tap into.

Tang Bingyao had discovered early on that she was quite talented at League of Legends. But she never saw herself becoming a professional player. Then one day, while she was just playing games in solo queue, she was contacted by a representative from an elo boosting website, asking her if she wanted to work for them. They offered her quite a significant sum of money and she jumped on it. From then, she’d boosted more accounts than she could count, most of them from Silver to Platinum. She became really good at beating low elo players. But she rarely ever played against high elo players, which had stagnated her progress.