Rise

“What’s this? It looks like Yasuo’s heading to the bot lane!” Lightless exclaimed.”I think he’s going in for the gank! This is going to be good, guys!”

There were over a million viewers watching Lightless Heart’s historic stream, and they sent the chat buzzing with excitement and anticipation. The clash between CN•HOOK2 and Orion, only minutes ago, still continued to drown them in fear and hopelessness. Because it was clear that there was no way to pull one over on a player of Orion’s caliber. That was the truth behind facing a King. Despite CN•HOOK2’s incredible skills and gameplay, none of the viewers believed that it was possible for him to gain any advantage at all against Orion in lane.

They were absolutely convinced of this after watching CN•HOOK2 and Orion poke at each other over the last few minutes until Zed and Yasuo both hit Level 6. It was obvious that both players were absurdly skilled, and evenly matched. Yasuo and Zed ducked and weaved through the Midlane, trying to predict each other’s next move and timing their abilities to where their opponent might be. It was a breath-taking dance upon the edge of a knife. One slip meant certain death.

Sitting on the edge of their seats, wondering when that one slip would happen, if it would happen, that was more than the viewers could handle. The thought of CN•HOOK2 making a slight mistake that Orion would capitalize on to deal a mortal blow wrapped cold tendrils of fear around their hearts. It wasn’t a great feeling, and they made their sentiments known in the chat. Sitting through more agonizing minutes of this that stretched onto eternity was torture for all of the viewers.

And then the game changed. CN•HOOK2 decided to roam to the Bot lane, and relief washed over all of the viewers. As far as they were concerned, the opponents in the bottom lane were far easier for CN•HOOK2 to deal with than Orion. Which meant that was a lane where he could get ahead of Orion and break the stalemate in Mid lane.

It wasn’t that the players in the bottom lane were bad. They were all skilled at League and climbed to the very top of Challenger on the Korean server. But all of the games CN•HOOK2 played this night showed the viewers that most of those players posed no threat to CN•HOOK2! The viewers also understood by this point that CN•HOOK2’s map awareness and roam-sense was impeccable. If he decided to roam to the Bot lane, it meant he knew there was an opportunity there. And now that he’d decided to avoid playing an indefinite stalemate with Orion, this game was now winnable!

Lin Feng sent his Yasuo running down the river towards Bot lane. Then he pinged to let the AD-Carry and Support on his team know that he was coming in for the gank. Then he slowed his Yasuo’s pace as he waited for Thresh and Tristana to create an opening for the engage.

When Tristana and Thresh saw the pings from Yasuo and understood that he was roaming down to Bot lane for a gank, they started making changes to draw the Champions from the opposing team into a trap. First they started controlling the minion wave. They slowed the pace of their auto attacks until they stopped doing any damage to the enemy minions. They waited until an enemy minion was about to die before they attacked it to get the last hit. This pushed the wave back from the center of the lane towards the Blue Outer Tower. And slowly pulled the enemy Jinx and Janna towards the Blue Team’s side of Bot lane.