Chapter 85: Four Versus One!

Piercer immediately turned in her chair, a sharp grin spreading across her face. "Wait, forget NightEye—Amanda, it’s my turn. Let me at her."

"Hold on," I interrupted, raising a hand as I stepped down from the massage chair. "I have a better challenge for all four of you."

They all stopped and looked over at me.

"Instead of endless 1v1s," I said, leaning casually against the edge of the desk, "the four of you are going to form a full squad and try to beat me in a 4v1 match."

Amanda blinked. "Uh... what?"

"Did I stutter?" I smirked, looking around at their bewildered faces. "All four of you, full team comms, against me alone. And don’t worry... you won’t win."

A heavy silence fell over the room for a split second before NightEye burst out laughing. "Boss, no offense, but are you insane? You’re setting up a four-player trap against an S-rank captain, two cracked duelists, and a tier-one support!"

Angelo just stared at me, his mouth slightly open, while Amanda crossed her arms with an amused eyebrow raised. "Ethan, you haven’t played a single match with us since we got here. Are you serious?"

Piercer, however, was thoroughly intrigued. Her eyes glinted with sudden curiosity as she looked at me up and down. "Wait... are you actually secretly cracked at this game? Is that why you’ve been coaching us so casually?" She leaned back and cracked her knuckles, her cocky smirk returning. "You know what? I’m in. Let’s see if the boss can back up that massive talk."

"I like the confidence," Amanda said, clicking her mouse as she set up the custom lobby. "Alright, team. Let’s see what the boss has got."

I didn’t even bother getting up. I just pulled a sleek laptop onto my lap, leaned right back into the massage chair, and hit start.

The team stared at me in total disbelief. "Wait... you’re playing us from a massage chair on a laptop trackpad and keyboard?!" Amanda gasped.

"Don’t worry about how I’m playing," I replied calmly, setting the laptop on my lap. "Just worry about surviving."

The match loaded in. The moment the round barrier dropped, Piercer charged straight at my spawn, spraying down the lane with full-auto fury. I was standing there with just a basic starter pistol. She was absolutely relentless, pinning me down while I frantically jumped, slid, and strafed across the terrain to minimize the damage.

My health bar dropped into the red—down to 12 HP, then 5 HP.

Angelo and NightEye just watched the feed on their displays, laughing. "Yeah, he’s dead. Boss is cooked."

Click. Click. Click. Click.

Four single taps from my pistol echoed through the lobby. Four instant, rapid-fire headshots pierced through the air.

Eliminated: PiercerXI Eliminated: Luna_Sky Eliminated: NightEye Eliminated: Angelo

VICTORY.

The entire room went dead silent.

"WHAT?!" Piercer shrieked, slamming her hands on her desk as she stared at her death recap screen. "How is that even possible?! You were mid-air sliding and hit four center-mass headshots back-to-back?!"

"No way..." Amanda muttered, leaning closer to her screen, completely bewildered. "The reticle tracking on that crosshair wasn’t humanly possible from that angle!"

They had no idea that I was secretly running a custom, soft auto-aim script on my laptop setup.

Watching TitanSkell’s VODs earlier had triggered a gut instinct: those three-time champions were definitely using subtle, micro-adjusting auto-aim in clutch moments—disguising it just enough to bypass anti-cheat detectors and pass off as "god-tier reflexes."

I wasn’t using it to cheat in real matches; I was using it right now as a simulator. If Zenith was going to face TitanSkell’s hidden automated assistance in the regional finals, I needed to train my team so aggressively that auto-aim wouldn’t even matter against their movement, utility, and positioning.

I leaned back as the massage chair hummed softly against my spine, looking at four completely stunned faces.

"That was just warm-ups," I smirked, hitting ready. "Round two. Figure out how to outplay perfection."

Round two ended in the exact same brutal fashion.

I barely shifted in my massage chair as my starter pistol tapped four clean, instantaneous headshots in a fraction of a second.

VICTORY.

Amanda threw her hands up in absolute disbelief, staring across the room at me. "Are you serious right now?! Ethan, what is this?! Were you some secret top-tier esports prodigy who retired at fifteen or something? No human being tracks targets from four different angles like that on a laptop!"

NightEye was clutching her head, completely wide-eyed. "I peeked for a microsecond behind double-cover and got instantly deleted!"

Despite their shock, they still weren’t adapting to the raw, mathematical perfection of the auto-aim. They were trying to out-gun an algorithm that simply didn’t miss.

Then, Amanda’s captain instincts kicked in. She leaned over her map overlay, her eyes sharpening as she called a huddle on comms.

"Stop trying to take him head-on in 1v1 duels," Amanda ordered, her voice dropping into pure tactical focus. "If his reaction time and crosshair placement are mathematically perfect, we have to overload his hardware. We play like a pack of hyenas."

Angelo leaned in, listening intently. "What’s the play, big sis?"

"We surround him from all four cardinal angles," Amanda explained, pinging the layout. "One person strikes from the front, lands one bullet, and immediately drops back into hard cover. The exact second he turns to fire, the person behind him strikes and hides. We cycle damage, break his line of sight, and chip his health down slowly. He can’t shoot what he can’t see."

Piercer grumbled, crossing her arms. "I still think I can catch him on a corner peek..."

"Piercer, shut up and listen," Amanda cut her off smoothly. "You want to win, right?"

Piercer quieted down, looking at the map layout, then let out a sharp grin. "Fine. Hyena tactics it is. Let’s take down the boss."

I smiled silently from my chair as the countdown for round three hit zero. They were finally beginning to think like a unit capable of breaking a machine.