The TV screen shows the arena has filled up now, the sea of plastic seats now under the mass of people. She’ll be up in front of that crowd soon enough. The thought of going up there still makes her anxious – all the noise and lights and eyes on her should be the stuff of her nightmares. But there’s other factors that are in her favour, like the soundproof booth she tried out during the dress rehearsal, and the large noise-cancelling headphones that meant she would be playing in near silence. But more than that, she feels a certain clarity. Every moment of her practice, every waking hour for the past six months, every late night of practice...all of it has led her here, to this place on this day.

For now, at least she has the comfort  of this waiting room.

She takes out her book, runs her fingers along the edges of the weathered pages. After all those hours of practice, there’s no point in opening it to revise – she can remember all of it. It’s more something to do with her hands while she waits.

Someone waves their hand in front of her, and it takes a moment to come up from her thoughts. The first thing she sees when she looks up is a pair of eyes right in front of hers. They’re deep brown and outlined with precision, long lashes smoothed by mascara. The woman pulls back, and now she recognises that it’s Miyoung. It’s like she’s from another world, everything too sharply defined to be quite real – the stage makeup accents her features to an unreal degree under the softer lighting backstage.

“Tae? Hello?” The woman asks.

It’s her. “Miyoung? What are you doing here?“

“I’m performing, silly.” There’s that smile, the one that pulls her eyes into two cute little arcs. “Are you going to watch me?”

“Uhmm, I, uhhh – coach?” she stammers, turning to the man in the seat next to her.

“Hmmm…there’s enough room in the schedule. Will you be OK with the crowd? We can stand at the back.”

She nods. “I want to watch.”

Miyoung beams a smile back at her. “I have to finish getting ready. Hope you enjoy the performance!”

///

When she was younger, this place would have been overwhelming – the rows and rows of seats full of people, the speakers are that too loud blasting fast pop beats. It’s still not comfortable – she’s not one for this type of music, and she doesn’t care for the lyrics either. But in this part of the arena cordoned off for the staff, she has something to focus on. Something that lets her block out all of the noise and stimulation that want to invade her head.

It’s the movement on the stage that holds her gaze. The seven women on stage move in perfect synchrony, likes individual fingers on some hand. She watches for when their steps match the beat, when they’re off-beat. She sees when one move is mirrored, when one is repeated across the backup dancers behind them. It’s actually very interesting, and seeing it live makes it stand out more than when watched the music video Miyoung sent to her.

And Miyoung is smiling the entire time. Tae has always had trouble with faces, but the feeling she gets is nothing but joy. This is Miyoung’s dream, this is where she belongs. Her thoughts turn to the stage. She never thought that her passion would bring all of this to her – her teammates who shared passion, the stage that she will be playing on, and of course Miyoung.

It was more than a game, it had always been.

///

The booth door closes behind her and she’s in another world now, the roar of the crowd now just a low rumble. She sits down and everything is exactly where she left it from the rehearsal, perfectly measured and in place. Other players might have some ritual, some way to psych themselves up, get in the zone. But she doesn’t need any of that. She just needs to start playing and the rest of the world disappears, fading into nothing.

And so it begins. She knows what he’ll do in the first game. MC is a bully in game. Against what he thinks is a worse player, against one who’s choked on stage before, he’ll go for early aggression with his stalker units. And he does exactly that. But she’s ready for him, having started her army production earlier, her marines meeting his stalkers on the field of battle. It’s a solid plan, one she practiced with her team and her coach. The problem is that he’s still really good at playing Starcraft. He just attacks again and again and again, sacrificing everything to produce more and more attacking units. They deplete not only her in game resources but also her attention as he’s coming from seemingly everywhere at once, a neverending stream of his forces besieging her base, one that she can’t outlast.

It’s over in less than ten minutes – she’s lost. But she can handle this loss, she has a plan. Her coach confers with her in the booth in the break between games – he wasn’t expecting her to put up this much of a fight. So just like they predicted he plays it safe, anticipating to try a cheap, early attack, the kind of strategy that allows a weaker player to beat a stronger one. Instead, she goes for the opposite, going for a greedy build that chooses to sacrifice early combat power for economy. By the time his scouts reveal the strategy she’s chosen, her much larger army is already on the move, ready to wipe him off the map. And just for a moment, she lets a smirk curl her lip while the victory screen appears.

It’s on the third game that she starts to think she’s in trouble. He starts to anticipate her strategies, and his unit control is as flawless as ever. That’s why they said he was the best. One loss is fine, that just means she needs to change up her strategy. But the second loss is far worse – because he can read her now, he knows how she will react. And that’s ignoring the fact she’s now down three games to one.

What is it she’s doing wrong? Why can’t she make it work? The frustration comes as an odd tingling down her arms that intensifies into a dull pain, a physical manifestation of the shock in her head. It’s like something is filling her head with static – and when she fights through it, she has no answers. If only she made one mistake, that would give her something to latch onto, something she could focus and fix. But there were too many little things, things she can’t handle all at once. Did she send her scouting units in the wrong direction? Did she need to produce more marines, or less Hellions, or more of this and less of that?

The door to the booth opens and her coach is there, beckoning her to come out. They’re halfway through the series, so she gets a longer break. He leads her backstage, the staff and her team keeping their distance – they know she’s not to be disturbed.

“Coach – I can’t – I can’t do this.”

“Tae, look at me when I’m speaking to you.” It’s an admonishment – his voice is stern, but it’s not harsh either. It’s the same teacherly tone he always has, just like they’re back at the house. “Look at his strats. It’s a two base power push. It’s nothing weird, it’s not a cheese, it’s just solid fundamentals and good micro to back it up. This is nothing you haven’t beaten before. You smashed Ryung all of Wednesday during practice when he was doing this build. You can beat this guy, Tae. You just have to let yourself beat him.”

As she raises her bottle of water to take a drink, she spots someone waiting in the wings of the stage. Someone with her hands clasped together in front of her dress, trying to see around the people in her way. What did Miyoung say to her? That she was brilliant? She doesn’t want to fail to meet that expectation, not just from Miyoung. Her parents, her teammates, her coach too.

But of all their praise, it’s Miyoung’s that matters the most. It’s Miyoung who is here, who’s smiling at her and mouthing to get her words across. You’re brilliant, Tae. You can do this!

She stands up and her coach takes his cue to exit, leaving just her and Miyoung in the waiting room. Miyoung extends her hand clasping Tae’s in her own. She’s radiant in her dress and makeup, and suddenly Tae feels very silly in her team shirt and sports pants. From behind her glasses she stares back at Miyoung, meeting those eyes.

“Tae….do you remember that time I called you?”

“Of course I do.”

“That was the night before an audition, you know. I’m only here because of you.”

“That’s…that’s not true. With your talent, all your practice…you would have made it even without me –“

Miyoung shakes her head. “Take the compliment, Tae. And can I give you some advice?”

“Sure.”

“You’re always talking about practice, about wanting to improve, about how there’s always something you can do better. That’s what makes you inspiring.” Now Miyoung stares back, squeezing her hand. “Forget about all that. You’ve already done the work. You’re better than him, you know that. I know it. Now show him, show everyone out there just how brilliant you are.”

Coach opens the door again, beckoning for her to follow. She looks back at Miyoung, giving just one nod before her mind is on the game again.

///

The staff backstage part for her as she makes her way through the corridor. Someone else might have relished the attention, but not her. Her mind is far away now, detached from the body that strides back into the booth. Once more the soundproof door closes and the rest of the world falls away, leaving her with nothing but the game – and her opponent.

If he wants a fight, she will give him one. So she plays with nothing left to lose, with nothing else on her mind. She picks an agile strategy, one that starts out greedy before she throws everything she has into a series of fast-paced assaults only a few minutes in. The first he holds against, then the second, but the third one breaches his main base. And with that she breaks the game open, streaming her army into his base to destroy him. Three games to two. Just two more to go. When she takes off her headset to stretch, that’s when she hears it , the faint roar of the crowd. They’re chanting her name, cheering for her.

For the next match she asks herself – what would the better player do? What would a superstar player do? One that’s so clearly better? That’s how she has to play. So she chooses the dirtiest, cheapest strategy she knows. Instead of building her forces inside her starting base, she sneaks them past his early scouts to build in a location much closer to his base. It only saves her seconds of travel time – but this early in the game, that’s an eternity. Her attack hits before he even has an army, his few combat units instantly destroyed. Three games each.

It all comes down to this. She’s out of clever ideas, and she’s pretty sure he is too. A lot can happen over six games, and then again over all the matches leading up to this match. There’s only so many strategies you can practice. She goes for a balanced opening, and her scouts tell her he did as so well. Looks like this game will be a long one then, decided by who makes the first mistake in a sequence of thousands and thousands of tiny decisions.

But she’s wrong. His army appears at the edge of her vision much earlier than she was expecting - sending a chill down her back. She’s made a mistake, misread which strategy he went for. The static in her head reaches a peak, threatening to drown everything out. But she can fight it, she can fight him. Every unit, every building is conscripted into her desperate defence as his army marches forward. Zealots charge in, blades cutting down everything in front of them while his Colossi stride behind them, lasers firing. Her helpless workers take the brunt of the assault while her tanks and marines mass behind them, firing back.

And she holds him, the flow of his reinforcements slowing and finally ceasing. She breathes deep. She’s not dead. And it wasn’t that close. But there’s only one way she can win this game now, and that’s by taking it to the late game. Which means only one thing – she needs to attack. It seems paradoxical, but it’s something any decent player quickly has to learn. Her opponent has just expended his army to cripple her economy, which means she now has the advantage in fighting units. So she needs to give back just as good as she got. From amongst the burning buildings and blood spatter on the ground, she selects what’s left of her fighting force and orders them forward. Within the next seconds, the last of her army will die. That’s certain. What matters is how much damage she can do.

And when the last of her forces finally fall, there’s next to nothing left for either of them. She’s forced a reset, both of them now needing to rebuild and re-arm with what’s left. For her, that means another three bases, probably. Mech units, starport units, static defenses. And the most sapping resource of all – her time and concentration. He can’t attack her for probably a good five minutes at least, but that’s not much comfort.

She has to fend him off. Then she has to win. But she’s practiced this. She knows how to do this. How to win. The rest is just details that her fingers fill in for her – moving extra workers from one base to another, building supply depots, constructing new buildings. Those details are remembered in her muscles, not her brain. They’re in the fingers of her left hand as she switches between her units and her bases, they’re in the muscles in right arm and wrist as she flicks the cursor across the screen, directing her soldiers across the map. And she knows it now, she knows he’s running scared, she knows that he knows that she shouldn’t still be in this match. And when players are scared, they make mistakes. He’ll want to attack as soon as he can, find a way to finish her off.

But she’s ready for him this time. She sees him coming, part of his army passing through the vision of one of her scouting units for just a second. That’s an eternity in this game. An orbital scan shows her all of his units, and now he can see that she sees him. There’s no going back now.

He engages.

There’s no slowing down of time, nothing special that happens. It’s just pure concentration as her eyes flit across the screen, seeing everything and nothing at once. A single, low-health marine is pulled back. A siege tank is lifted up by a medivac unit. And this repeats over and over, tens, hundreds of clicks and keypresses happening within a single second. She is everywhere at once, in every unit and seeing everything. And then the confrontation grows as she pushes forward – maybe too aggressively. Maybe not when she sees him commit more and more – a mistake as she brings up the rest of her army on his flank. Part of her sees the big picture – part of her is focused on the details, tasking siege tanks with their targets, switching back to her production to rally in reinforcements. But the wave of her forces is building to a peak, more and more of her units streaming, more and more of his forces falling.

It takes five seconds for her to realise she’s winning – that she’s destroyed enough that he can’t recover. Then comes the longest ten seconds of her life as she picks apart the rest of his units – it’s a formality, really. This almost takes more concentration as her hands start to shake, no, her whole body. She’s done it. She’s won.

Victory flashes on her screen as her opponent concedes the game.

It’s over.

The booth starts to rumble from the crowd noise. She stands up, everything seeming so real, so sharp. Like the concentration she’d been mustering for her game needs a new target. She opens the door to the booth, and looks offstage. Coach is there, tears in his eyes as he applauds her victory.

And then there’s Miyoung just beaming that smile. I knew you could do it. Miyoung raises her hand, points to the trophy waiting on the stage. They’re waiting for you, Tae.

She walks out into the light. Her fingers close around the trophy, seizing it in their grip. She kisses the metal, raising it over her head as the crowd roars. And she roars with them, shouting out her victory.

Today is her day.