Chapter Eighty-Eight: Where Did the Problem Lie?

A truly exceptional assassin always strikes with a killing blow at precisely the right moment.

Not by seeing teammates brawling head-on and, in a rush of hot blood, charging straight into the front lines, dumping every bit of damage in reckless abandon, only to hand over a kill.

That was also why jungle assassins in the professional league almost never broke twenty percent damage share.

Everything they dealt was effective damage; every hit landed exactly where it would hurt most.

How the frontal battlefield was faring was never the main thing Wenyang watched for when handling a teamfight.

In this clash, his sharp gaze first locked onto Agudo, the closest target to him.

The great bear had already been released; this was precisely the moment when Agudo was at his weakest.

Bang!

Wenyang’s Nakoruru crashed down with her ultimate, and Agudo’s health dropped from full to below half in an instant.

Agudo reacted quickly as well. He immediately activated Bloodfury, then rolled sideways toward the teammates fighting at the front.

But Nakoruru’s ultimate came with a massive slow. In the next instant, she was already on him again.

First skill into a basic attack—Nakoruru summoned Mamahaha. The hawk swooped in, the enhanced strike detonated, and Agudo was taken away on the spot.

Though Bloodfury had turned Agudo into something almost godlike in this version, his rider form still had a flaw: the shield from Bloodfury built up gradually. As long as the enemy burst was fierce enough, violent enough, Agudo himself could still be erased instantly.

Mirror could do it. Nakoruru could do it. Sun Wukong could do it too.

After killing Agudo, Wenyang had intended to pull back a little, wait for cooldowns, then look for a second entry.

But when Nakoruru lifted her head, she found four pairs of eyes—no, eight—staring straight at her.

Lin Hao’s entire team was charging at her, including the four soldiers summoned by Meng Tian.

At some point, all of Wenyang’s teammates had already died.

The frontal battlefield had collapsed far too quickly.

Even with tower-defense monsters like Mulan and Angela, they still could not withstand the most terrifying siege specialist of all: Meng Tian.

Especially a Meng Tian who had slaughtered from start to finish, who had barely ever fallen behind and almost never made a single mistake.

Nakoruru farmed brilliantly and currently had the highest economy on the team.

But Meng Tian’s development had also left everyone else far behind.

The enemy still had not built Starbreaker. They had not built Dawn either. They did not even have enough gold to stack the most basic defensive items.

And that created the perfect timing: this was exactly when Meng Tian was at his strongest.

A moment earlier, just as Nakoruru’s ultimate landed, the front line’s Shen Mengxi had already used his ultimate to mop up the low-health survivors who had barely escaped Meng Tian’s spear.

Yuke, too, under Sun Bin’s slow and silence control, had killed the isolated Liu Chan.

Only Nakoruru remained.

Clear the minion wave!

At that moment, that was Wenyang’s only choice.

What met him, however, was Yuke’s frenzied damage output under Sun Bin’s speed boost.

During that brief skill downtime, even if Wenyang had been the world’s number one jungler, there was nothing he could do. Slowed by the Red Buff, he was shot to death by Yuke’s basic attacks.

Team wipe!

“What the hell is wrong with these teammates? How did they all die?” Wenyang practically jumped out of his seat, rage exploding in an instant. “You couldn’t even hold the high ground?”

Tilting in a game was easy enough to understand.

Though Wenyang was a battle-hardened professional player.

In this match, he had crushed the enemy marksman so hard in the early game that the man could hardly collapse any further, only to have a Meng Tian on the bottom lane tear straight through with absolute dominance, then lead his team in a relentless push. In front of him, even defensive towers were little more than decoration. He was so overpowering that he could stand head-on and trade damage directly with Mulan and Angela...

And just over ten minutes in, they were steamrolled flat.

How could he not be furious?

On Lin Hao’s side, they quickly escorted the minion wave in and ended it in one push.

“Beautifully done!”

“That was fierce, fierce!”

His teammates began clicking Lin Hao’s portrait.

But unlike the usual portrait-clicking in high-rank matches, where people used it to criticize or ruin a teammate’s mentality, this time it was naked, undisguised praise.

If Lin Hao had not been this monstrous, then the side getting flattened in ten minutes would probably have been them.

In Lin Hao’s livestream, the fans were flooding the chat with excitement as well.

“Meng Tian is way too savage!”

“This is what the great general Meng Tian looks like!”

“Damn, Mulan and Angela were both dumping damage into him face-to-face, and in the end it was those two who tucked their tails and ran!”

“Looks like I still know far too little about Meng Tian.”

“After watching the streamer’s Meng Tian... I’ve decided to go practice Zhu Bajie. If his teammates had even one pig this game, Meng Tian wouldn’t have had such an easy time.”

“Hard to say. I feel like even a top national Zhu Bajie would still get skewered by Haozi’s Meng Tian in the early game.”

The visual impact of this hero was simply overwhelming.

Especially in that final wave diving under tower onto the high ground—Lin Hao stood right at the front, charged straight into the enemy turret, switched into the Wild Goose formation, and began charging power face-to-face against the enemy.

Then came the scene of Mulan hastily canceling her heavy-sword charge, Angela decisively cutting off her ultimate ahead of time, and both of them scrambling to flee in panic.

It was exhilarating beyond words.

“It was mostly an economy issue, an economy issue. Still, if I hadn’t been so far ahead in gold compared to all four of them besides Nakoruru, I wouldn’t have been able to play this aggressively,” Lin Hao explained. “The main point is that this point in the game is Meng Tian’s strongest period, so the best move is to finish quickly. If it drags to late game, the other side will very likely fight their way back.”

It was not hard to imagine that once Nakoruru completed Starbreaker and the marksman completed Dawn, Lin Hao’s Meng Tian would start to feel the strain. At the very least, he would no longer be able to achieve that one-man-against-an-army effect.

As the game ended, Lin Hao also received one thousand anger points from Wenyang.

Looks like this Wenyang is the slow-burning type, Lin Hao thought silently to himself. Calm during the match, but once he truly loses, he turns explosively irritable.

...

BW Esports Club.

“My tempo was definitely not the problem. The key to this loss was the bottom lane—Mulan got solo-killed diving under tower multiple times.” After sulking by himself for a while, Wenyang finally came back to his senses.

“In the early game, Nakoruru’s damage hadn’t come online yet, so trying to gank Meng Tian was absolutely the wrong call. What I did instead—smashing the enemy marksman directly and freeing up our farm lane—that was the right choice.”

“And judging by Mulan’s several attempts to dive the backline in the mid game, he didn’t look like someone griefing on purpose. He even had a top-fifty regional Mulan badge.”

“So how was it that the moment he ran into Meng Tian, he kept getting force-killed even under tower?”

Wenyang decisively saved the replay, then immediately clicked to watch it.

That, too, was one of his habits as a professional player. Every match, especially high-rank games, he analyzed with a very serious eye.

If this had simply been a one-sided stomp in their favor, then naturally there would have been nothing much to study, and he would have just queued the next game.

But this time, it was the opponents who had steamrolled them—and just three minutes earlier, Wenyang’s team had still had a dream opening.

So Wenyang wanted to see exactly where the problem had begun.