He knew that it wasn’t really all that meaningful of a distinction when he had ended up winning the lane, if one ignored all of the other things around that lane that had been set up for him to fail at.

Still, it rankled his pride.

She hadn’t even been playing at her full ability?

Why the fuck was he even here, then?

They had better shotcallers, obviously better players in Jessica and Emma– Jessica had lost to him in lane, but she’d set up to lose, used it to bait him with intentionally, used a set much better at countering the standard strategies than his own, then, on top of that, apparently, she’d been sandbagging– and strategy coverage he couldn’t really contribute to.

He was good, and he’d be the first one to say it, but it felt a bit like claiming to be the best player at the peewee game.

“So, do you even need me for that next game?”

Jade looked a little bit confused at the question for some reason, and he saw Rayne close her eyes for a second. “I would think so. I got pretty much everything we really need from that first game, but we should see how well you fit in on the same side.”

He had to keep from rolling his eyes. “Why the fuck would you bother? You don’t plan to get me to join.”

Jade’s eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t want you as a shotcaller.”

He paused the logout process, glaring at her. “So, what? That’s what Rayne was calling you on. Testing me on something you don’t care about? Why would I put up with that?”

He was beginning to see why Jessica had had some reservations about this team. He was obviously used to people disguising their motives and lying, but dealing with those twins was setting him on edge.

Not because they lied, really– if anything, they’d been abnormally honest with him with the words that they said.

It was which words they said that he had to watch out for, which was entirely too much work to try to keep up with. And whenever they did something for more than one reason, it apparently made it easy for them to just tell him an incomplete version of those.

It didn’t make him as angry as dealing with Doug had, but that bar was a few feet underground.

Jade, for her part, looked so mildly hurt that if he hadn’t seen just how effective she was at hiding her actual feelings on the topic he would think she was faking it– and poorly.

The glance at Nathaniel was so subtle that if he hadn’t been glaring at her, or if Nathaniel hadn’t been quite as far away as he was, he wouldn’t have caught it at all. Nathaniel’s tiny shake of the head was a little bit more visible, but that didn’t mean it was obvious, either.

“Purely on an objective level, there are a couple, but mentioning them here would seem like I’m trying to hold it over your head, which I’m not. More realistically…” she grimaced slightly. “I’ll be called out whenever I do that to you. It might be afterwards, but I won’t just get away with it, either.”

“Okay, but it’s not like I actually won against your, what? Third-choice midlaner? I ‘won’, sure– right up until she actually decided to fight me. Then I was suddenly even at best, and even that was iffy.”

“Jess, you want to take this?”

“No,” Jessica said, crossing her arms and leaning forward slightly. “But I will.”

She turned to face him more directly, the crossing of her arms seeming to change to digging into her sides. “About the only reason I won that is because I was better with infosec than you. Your choices of counter-build were fairly decent, but because you didn’t know what my passive actually did until you’d already committed to slightly the wrong counter, you weren’t able to overpower me as effectively as you should have.

“I’ll admit that was the point, but it was only possible because I gave you way more rein on that lane than would typically be reasonable. Essentially, I’d figured out by a few waves in that it was better to go around you than through, because if we were on even footing? I couldn’t have beat you.”

He paused at that. It sounded good, but…

“So you think I’m a good player, but an idiot when it comes to strategy?”

Nathaniel stepped in before Jade could get a word out, which, given how the conversation had been going, might have been a good thing.

“Not how anyone here would put it. You’re… focused, and effective at handling yourself in the circumstances you’re used to. Irregularities in the actual handling of the lane itself pull your attention really strongly, but that isn’t even necessarily a bad thing. She’s dancing around it because it makes her uncomfortable to say, but I believe that everyone here thinks that you’re actually a really good fit for the team.”

Jade groaned, loudly, and let her head crash into the table in front of them with a sound that could not have felt nice.

Pain was reduced in VR, and bigger pains were reduced by bigger amounts, but still…

She looked up from the table, placing her chin on it. “He’s right. Certain parts of dealing with you annoy me, but you seem like a good fit on the social level and a great fit on the gameplay side. Can we just do the 6v6 so that I can say we’ve actually tested you and get it over with?”

“None of the others had actual gameplay tests.”

She groaned again, this time sounding aggrieved. “Yeah, because– and let’s just go down the goddamn list– the first one was my brother, who I play with all the time and my accepting any team’s offer was conditional on his joining, for a full year of no bites. The second was the person he said was abnormally good, and I watched her games first anyways. Third, the guy recommended by the coach who actually got me a shot, not out of pity but because she saw potential in it. Fourth, Emma. Do I even need to explain that one? Notice where you stand out?”

Quince sighed.

Mostly because she was right.

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, thinking.

He didn’t really dislike anyone here, and while he wasn’t entirely sold on Jade yet, she seemed fairly decent when he put the constant half-truths and unclear directions out of mind.

He sighed again. “Fine. 6v6 first.”