Against the Algorithm

Chapter 43: Off-Script

He didn't flinch. Didn't blink.

But he definitely felt it.

Her arms uncrossed slowly as she stepped forward. "You set the entire tempo of that game. And you deliberately sped it up."

He raised a brow, cool as ever. "It worked."

"It was reckless," she snapped. "You weren't thinking about macro. You were thinking about Hang Suk."

The others immediately found somewhere else to look.

Yao didn't break eye contact, her voice quiet now, but sharper. "We're not playing to prove something to him. We're not playing to punish him. You're not playing to mark territory, Baobei."

Sicheng's jaw flexed at the word but he didn't argue.

She exhaled, some of the fire dimming in her shoulders as she took a breath. "Save that for after we've secured a clean sweep. One more game. Stick to the plan. Make it clean. Professional."

A beat of silence passed.

Then Pang raised his hand hesitantly. "So... we're not having our pay docked or snacks taken away?"

"You will be if you go off-script again."

Yao turned on her heel and walked toward the screen to load the second game's data, braid swinging, voice calm but still laced with steel. "Now sit down. We're fixing your pathing before you go back out there."

Sicheng watched her move across the room—barely five feet and inches of cold fire and data-fueled precision—and muttered beneath his breath to Lao K. "...Why is that even hotter?"

"Because you're a masochist," Lao K replied underneath his breath back to the man as he snorted.

And with that, they all sat the hell down.

Yao might have been soft-spoken, introverted, and the one most likely to slip out of a crowded room without a sound—but in that moment, standing in front of the whiteboard with a marker in one hand and Coach Kwon backing her up with an expression that read don't look at me, she's in charge, she was every inch the Tiny Boss Bunny that had earned her the nickname they dared not say too loud when she was annoyed.

The boys sat in a crooked line across the lounge couch and extra chairs, heads angled in varying degrees of guilt and fatigue, still in partial gear, half-listening while pretending to focus as she pointed to the whiteboard filled with tight columns of timing marks, rotation lines, and visual cues she and Kwon had mapped out meticulously for this match.

"And here—here," she said, tapping a bold red circle with the butt of the marker, "was where we were supposed to split aggro. Not collapse mid and force a push without vision."

No one moved.

Sicheng leaned back like he hadn't just blown the tempo on purpose, his arms folded, his jaw ticking subtly.

Lao Mao's head was tilted, eyes on the board but glazing.

Lao K was twiddling with his sleeve.

Pang blinked twice too slowly.

And Ming? Ming was absolutely zoning out.

Yao's hazel eyes narrowed.

She didn't yell.

She didn't raise her voice.

Instead?

She reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a tiny, pastel-colored handful of vengeance.

Miniature Shikigami erasers.