Tucked inside the captain’s arms, Tong Yao, though not sleepy, still fell asleep in the end. She woke up by the noise of running water from the bathroom. Without knowing how long she had been sleeping, she opened her eyes when the water stopped running and found that she was alone in the bed. Lu Sicheng happened to open the bathroom door and walked out.
His hair was dripping wet, the corners of his eyes were faintly pinkish from the hot water, even his eyes seemed clouded by the steam. He was wearing only underpants. Beads of water slid down on his flat abdomen and disappeared into the waistband.
Tong Yao: .......
She couldn’t understand why someone who sat in front of the computer the whole day and ate quite a bit could maintain a figure like this. It was true that some people couldn’t get fat no matter how much they ate. But wouldn’t it be too unrealistic to expect a person like that to still have abdominal muscles? If such a good thing was true, Tong Yao thought, then maybe she could expect to develop V-shape on her lower abs someday when she woke up from her sleep???
While all these thoughts went through her brain, Lu Sicheng had already come over to her. He bent over to give her a kiss on her lips: “Why do you look at me like you’re bitterly resenting something?”
“Do you sneak out at night to work out in secret to get such a good figure?”
“Do I have a good figure?”
Lu Sicheng pulled Tong Yao’s hand over to touch his abdomen. It started out as just a joke, but with Tong Yao rubbing his tummy, it seemed to have triggered something else. The atmosphere suddenly changed that even Tong Yao could sense it. She watched the lazy smile on Lu Sicheng’s face change and he pulled her hand downwards. Tong Yao’s face suddenly turned red when she touched a certain thing. She cried out: “Ahhh.” Then she abruptly pulled her hand back while cruelly slapping that thing.
Lu Sicheng’s face instantly changed and bent over with his hands over his crotch while hissing. Tong Yao was shocked and thought she had hurt him. She was afraid that an angry Lu Sicheng was going to throw her out of the window. She hurriedly bent over to check: “Did I hurt you? Is it really hurting? I didn’t really use any force.”
“This is how you react when I let you touch it. Is this a thing you can slap?” Lu Sicheng pushed away Tong Yao’s head as it grew closer: “It hurts. It won’t hurt if you kiss it.”
....................
Seeing Lu Sicheng straighten up and didn’t seem to look like he was suffering, Tong Yao breathed out a sigh of relief and didn’t bother giving him a retort. She rolled her eyes and said: “Can you be more civilized so early in the morning?”
“I can’t.” Lu Sicheng sneered and cast a sidelong glance at Tong Yao. Seeing that her ears were still pinkish, the look in his eyes turned much softer: “You’re awake?”
Tong Yao used her hands to tidy up her messy hair from being buried under the blanket: “I’m awake.”
“The last time you said you were awake was three hours ago. You ended up falling soundly asleep like a dead pig in my arms within 5 minutes. You even snored.”
Tong Yao: “....Speak nicely. Who was sleeping like a dead pig?”
Lu Sicheng reached over to pick Tong Yao up from the bed, who looked quite unhappy with his description: “Go downstairs, practice.”
Tong Yao landed on the back of Lu Sicheng’s feet. Lu Sicheng carried her till she found her slippers, then she jumped off from his feet to put on the slippers. She asked without looking up: “Duos? I’ll be the support.”
“We aren’t in that kind of relationship yet for me to endure you being my support. But, don’t worry, that day will come. I estimate, at best, when our kid is in kindergarten.”
........
Lu Sicheng asked Tong Yao to practice because there was a scheduled skirmish against a Korean team, Riotpower (Rp), at one o’clock this afternoon. Rp wasn’t a particularly famous team in Korea. It was formed by several famous Korean players in China after they returned to Korean when their contracts with Chinese teams were up. Therefore, this team was popular among Chinese fans. The fans followed these players, watching the Korean league competitions and those that streamed on foreign stream platforms...
Tong Yao often saw on Weibo where Rp fans shared news about the team or interesting clips from those players’ streams.
Lu Sicheng believed that Rp would be one of the most likely three teams, other than OP and TAT, to represent the Korean region in the world tournament this year. Therefore he had arranged a skirmish with them.
When Tong Yao and Lu Sicheng walked downstairs, the rest of the team were already sitting in front of their computers playing ranked matches to warm up for the upcoming skirmish. Little Fatty looked listless. When Tong Yao sat down in her own seat, she heard Old Cat asking Little Fatty: “What’s wrong with you, Little Fatty? Didn’t sleep well?”
Little Fatty slightly squinted his eyes: “Oh… Suppose one day early in the morning, you saw a young lady in your dream, who was 170 cm tall with legs as long as 110 cm, an E cup, and weighed 47 kg, confessing to you. But before you have time to accept, you were woken up by the sound of rustling. You opened your eyes and heard your team’s ad threatening your team’s mid that he was going to bang her till she cried. Can you be in a good mood?”
Tong Yao: ........
Old Cat looked up to stare at Tong Yao.
Their eyes met; it was quite an awkward moment.
Tong Yao unflinchingly replied with an expressionless face: “He said ‘suppose’.”
Lu Sicheng happened to come over with some food in hand. He could hear Little Fatty’s loud voice even in the kitchen. Facing the questioning looks from his teammates and the team manager, he also remained quite calm and at ease. He glanced over all the people there and retorted: “Do I look like that kind of person?”
Just as he finished asking, numerous voices came from various corners of the base saying “you do” “it’s exactly in line with your image, no doubt about it” “yes, you do” “Isn’t it”
There were even voices coming from several kids of the B team on the second floor.
Lu Sicheng: .......
This phenomenon signifies that the time for ZGDX to rule by the only voice of the captain has passed. From now on, the team will be moving into a beautiful time where everyone voices their opinions and suggestions.
--ZGDX Team Manager Xiao Rui
……
The skirmish began at 1:30 pm as scheduled.
From the beginning of the ban & pick phase, Tong Yao had sensed that this skirmish wasn’t going to be the same as the other ones. She could feel that there was something quite different. In the skirmishes they had before, under normal circumstances, it would be Lu Sicheng and Ming god talking at this phase. Lu Sicheng would say let’s try so and so strategy and Ming god would then say let’s take so and so champions.
They would echo each other, obviously they probably had discussed it before the skirmish. So every time the ban & pick phase would go by rather quickly. The team would only briefly talk it over which champion would work best with the others.
Today, however, it was quite different.
They were already involved in a heated argument just over which champion the mid should take.
Ming god: “Take Ekko to play around with? Tong Yao has to practice more with Ekko, sometimes you release the ultimate too randomly.”
Little Fatty: “Leblanc is still available, we’ll just let it go?”
Old Cat: “The important part of a training match is training, not winning. Tong Yao doesn’t need to get any more training for Leblanc, right?”
Old K: “I second that. I suggest taking Brand.”
Lu Sicheng: “Take Orianna.”
Little Fatty: “Why Orianna, the other side has Akali. Don’t mess around.”
Lu Sicheng: .......
In the end, it took them too long for them to decide and they were close to running out the countdown, Tong Yao hastily picked Ekko and locked him in.
The same situation repeated itself during the pick for ad. The discussion was so heated that even the kids from the B team were gathered at the railing on the second floor to watch the rare moment. Amidst the discussion of “Urgot” “Draven” “Jinx’s better”, Lu Sicheng locked Kalista as the champion for himself without any expression on his face.
Everyone was silent for five seconds.
Old Cat: “The apology is all a fake, team bully.”
Little Fatty: “Team bully.”
Old K: “Team bully.
Tong Yao looked at Lu Sicheng sympathetically. Lu Sicheng said with a stone face: “I just want to play this one. Who said Draven earlier, you better raise your hand.”
Little Fatty: ........
Lu Sicheng could play almost all the ad champions pretty well, except Draven. His teammates had confirmed that his skill level for playing this champion was at best Gold III. Little Fatty had mentioned him purely for fun. Old Cat, likewise, was doing the same when he had brought up Urgot. Among the five major regions, during this year’s regular summer season competitions, the number of times Urgot had been picked or even banned was zero.
Lu Sicheng would listen to constructive suggestions, but not random ones.
After both sides picked their champions, the skirmish officially started. During the laning phase in the early game, everything went rather normally, since every player in the team knew what to do. However, Tong Yao still had a strange feeling about the whole process. It was just like in the early days of massive multiplayer online games when trying to do a 25 player raid for the first time, once the game reached the mid game, everyone had their own ideas, where some were right but some were wrong.
After the lesson they learned from the game against YQCB, everyone of ZGDX was very mindful of following orders. When everyone agreed upon an action, they would then basically carry it out to a tee--
For example, Old Cat was farming at top the previous second, but when Lu Sicheng said to teleport down the next second, Old Cat would immediately give up farming and teleport down even though there wasn’t any action at bot. Then the moment Old Cat landed at bot, Lu Sicheng would initiate his ultimate and let Little Fatty go ahead and kill the other side’s ad. They successfully gained a double kill at bot. Lu Sicheng let Old Cat get one kill which would make up or even exceed the loss he might have suffered from giving up on farming in the first place.
This was the good side from the lesson they learned.
Yet, there were times when other teammates voiced different opinions from the orders, then the skirmish turned into a mess for ZGDX. Usually when there was an objection, Lu Sicheng would habitually ponder about it. Since he wasn’t used to doing this sort of things during a game, the few seconds he was evaluating the suggestion, though the suggestion might be correct and the best for team at the time, would cause the team to be left in a short state of leaderless--
League of Legends is a game that could change unexpectedly in just a few seconds.
Since ZGDX wasn’t used to playing as a team under these new conditions, after 50 minutes of battle, ZGDX lost the skirmish against Rp.
Everyone was exhausted after the skirmish.
It wasn’t simply because they lost the game.
It was because they were physically and mentally drained after 50 minutes of highly concentrated play. There were discussions in their ears for almost the entire time they were playing. Which was something they had never experienced before.
In the past, because they were all skilled players and they had Lu Sicheng giving out orders, all they needed most of the time was to follow the orders. At most, they sometimes had to plan a bit about how their own lane should be developed. However, in this match, they started to think for themselves and cared more about their awareness of the entire map. They would consider what should come next while they were considering their own areas so they could make corrections in case Lu Sicheng occasionally made a few not so correct decisions.
After the skirmish, the team held a debriefing which lasted a much longer time than any previous one before.
After the meeting, they all looked listless and famished.
Little Fatty: “Though physically exhausted, I’m in high spirits. I can feel the change of our team. After driving out our captain as the only voice in the team, we’ll be able to punch the League of Legends Master Series and stomp the Korean region!!!!!”
Lu Sicheng: “Driving who out? The final say is still up to me. Want to rebel? Over my dead body.”
Little Fatty: ........
Tong Yao shook her head at those childish two. She sat back at her own seat. While waiting for her teammates to finish ordering takeout, she flipped through the notes she had taken during the meeting. Looking at a whole bunch of points which needed to be improved, she put down her notebook and started to check Weibo posts to take her mind off of it.
She was looking for some relaxation.
Yet, she found a Weibo post which made her feel even worse--
Rp-joker hehehe: Our Rp-joker just said in his stream: This afternoon, we had a skirmish with Chinese ZGDX, we won. And somehow I feel ZGDX was a mess in this match. Sometimes they supported each other swiftly just like a first rate team should. Sometimes they were slow in making better decisions. Don’t know what happened to them, it just feels like they aren’t in a good condition.
Ah......., so many issues with ZGDX lately. Yesterday, they were saying that Cheng Ge had apologized to his teammates. Today, they lost the skirmish and their opponent said they were a mess. Don’t know what happened? Could it be that after the apology, ZGDX had changed its leader? Perhaps it’s not Cheng Ge anymore? It can’t be that the players really aren’t getting along? I’m worried.
This post was shared 3000 times and the comments underneath reached 5000.
The shared ones were all worried about the team. The comments were split between feeling sorry for Lu Sicheng and trolling the other ZGDX teammates. Even those minor things like Little Fatty rolling his eyes at his captain were brought up to prove that the team didn’t really get along.
Tong Yao: .................................
She could sense that another storm was approaching.
They just had to stand strong and face the oncoming gale.