Chapter 42:

Ace loaded into the discord, and began viewing the stream, he would watch the stream until his team was selected, then enter the correct voice channel. From then, he would continue watching until the first matches began, and they had to enter the correct custom match. The whole drawing process took about 1 hour, so by 9 o'clock, Ace had joint the Team 7 discord voice call. When he joined, there were two people there already, and one of them shouted excitedly when he joined, a man's voice by the sound of it. "Hell Yeah! We got The Ace in our team! My name's Harris or BrickBreaker, I usually play sledge, but Thermite is cool too. Less good!", he had an almost infectious excitement that simply did not match his gruff voice.

After his energetic introduction, another voice spoke, this one with a distinct Spanish accent, "My name is JuanForAll, or with a 4 as it's usually displayed.", he seemed much calmer than Harris, but his excitement was still palpable through the tone of his voice.

It was then for Ace to introduce himself, he kept a steady, calm voice, "I am Ace, let's win this."

As he finished, a new user joined the chat, and they repeated the introductions and the user reciprocated, "My name is too hard to pronounce so just call me by my username: S1k", he had an accent that indicated he was Eastern European, and he seemed almost as calm as Ace.

Then, the sound of a new user joining the call rung through Ace's headset, and before Harris could begin to shout his introduction, a distinctly female voice sounded out: "Hey, my name is OneMorePlz"...

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After a few minutes of discussing the roles of each player, they were set and joining the custom game. They were playing against Team 4, the team did not have any names that Ace could remember, which meant that they were most likely not very good, since otherwise, Ace would have probably met them while playing ranked. Now that he was playing with the other streamers, his Rank had skyrocketed, and Ace was now playing with the best of the best.

Harris played hard anchor [A/N: Player that protects a specific room, usually (but not always) the objective] on defence with Juan who played support. However, while Harris usually played Rook or Doc, Juan played characters such as Kapkan [A/N: Devices that are attached to doorways and explode if not destroyed before going through it] or Jager [A/N: Device that can defuse three grenades when they come into range of it before they detonate], that could provide extra protection on site. He then also checked cameras and droned on attack and defence, he was supporting both offence and defence. On attack, they both played entry fraggers [A/N: Player that will destroy objectives], but while after that Juan would support by ensuring to check drones, Harris had a more offensive playstyle, which usually involved entering a room first and trying to kill as many people as he could before dying.

S1ck usually short roamed [A/N: Roamer that usually wanders around close to the objective], or played anchor in one of the key rooms close to the objective. OneMorePlz, who insisted they called her by what Ace assumed was her first name: Abby, and Ace, were flex [A/N: Players that can play any role], which in this team meant they would be roaming on defence, and heavy fraggers [A/N: People that usually are tasked with killing enemies].

They had set up their tactics as well as they could when it came to positioning, but the specifics would depend on the map they played in and the side they played as. Ace wondered if the whole thing was rigged, it was honestly pretty lucky to have a team were the roles all fit together, and none of them seemed like they were here to mess around. Extremely lucky considering it was a free tournament. However, thinking it better, it made sense, this was a stream that everyone who knew about Siege would be watching, and if a user ended up trolling, his account would get flagged quicker than they could even imagine, and even if the company did not ban them, the hate they would receive from players was probably enough to ensure anyone did not mess around, and if they did… Tough luck.

During this tournament, there was no banning, they wished to see all possible tactics and combinations, so they forwent banning directly. They would first be playing in Hereford Base, it was a first of one match, with Ranked rules, which meant you had to win 5 rounds by a difference of at least two, so if it was a tie (4 to 4), they would have to win two rounds in a row. Multiple games were happening at the same time, and once all were finished, a new poll would commence. There where 40 teams from what Ace saw, which meant they would have to play and win 3 matches, once only 5 teams were left, they would commence a league style chain of games, where each team played 4 games, and the team that ended the best would win the tournament. This was good as it meant that it would also show the top 5 ranks, and if a tie existed, the global kill to death ratio during the top 5 matches of the whole team would be considered and compared, the higher is the one that came on top.

Ace had already considered it, and informed his teammates that when they made it to the top five, if they met and easier opponent, they should try and farm as many kills as they could, while also being careful to not lose. They agreed with it, and after a few minutes of waiting for the servers, they began the game.

They were playing attack, they chose a simple composition, Harris would play Thermite, Juan would play Thatcher, and S1ck would play Montagne, Abby and Ace would play Twitch and Ash respectively. Juan usually played a breacher, but S1k wanted to play Montagne since there was a really good strategy they could do when diffusing the bomb in a specific location.

During the drone round, they tried to keep their drones safe, but Harris' and Sik's got caught, that was fine since the main one to keep safe was Abby's. Her gadget were two drones that replaced the normal ones that could shot lasers that would damage structures, destroy gadgets and do damage to opponents, 10 damage to be precise. They found that the bombs were located on the lower floor, so S1ck, Ace and Abby would go through the tunnel, while Harris and Juan would attempt to create havoc from the upper floors.

Theoretically, it was a simple tactic, Ace and Abby would drone out a safe path for S1k, who would then push with Ace's support. Abby would stay behind and use her drone to distract and annoy the defenders. They would hopefully clear one of the bomb sites, which would cause the whole team to collapse [A/N: Quickly move back to the site where they have to defend to combat the attackers]. Once they were collapsing, it was Harris's and Juan's time to shine, they would have hopefully destroyed key walls or hatches, and as soon as defenders were running back to the base, they would be caught unaware by the peeking duo.

It was simple, and it worked perfectly.

They droned out and saw two defenders, one in each site, so S1k and Ace quickly went in, with Abby feeding them information. They were headed to B, so as they were going to go against their first defender, they gave the signal and she began to distract the defender in A with her drone, shooting him as necessary and doing circles around him.

As they went in, the defender saw the shield and panicked, most players got nervous when they saw a Montagne running at them, it was intimidating and you could not harm it when it's ability was deployed. The defender tunnel-visioned on the Montagne, as they expected he would, and when Ace peaked out and got the kill, he was still attempting to shoot the sides of the shield.

Abby warned them that her first drone had been shot, but that her second would be safe for a few more seconds, but would soon be either ignored or killed. Luckily, it was enough time for S1k to plant the bomb and throw smokes that would blanket the room. This was when Abby warned them that her drone had been destroyed and Juan and Harris informed them that they were hearing steps.

Ace made his way around and went to A, where he saw the back of the defender that was trying to make out shapes through the smoke. One-shot to the head and he was dead.

By now, there were 3 players left, and they had their defence set up, S1k protected the bomb with his shield out, and Abby the stairway with her rifle. Ace was waiting in A to see if anyone came in through the other stairs. Then, Juan informed them that they were coming, two of them were gunned down by the duo, but the last one had run past their peeking spot, unluckily for him, as he came down the stairs, he was shot down by Abby, who had been waiting for him with her aim trailed on the stairs.

And in this way, they had won their first round, a flawless composition with a perfectly executed tactic. The defenders then chose a new space to defend, but it was simply not to be, Ace's team was able to win one round after another both in attack and in defence, they won 5 - 0, and were one of the first matches to finish. Ace was the person who had not died, the rest had died only once, mostly because multiple enemies came at them at the same time.