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There's a sense of inevitability when he arrives in Excellent Era, like every part of his body shifts in place and weaves him whole where he hadn't even noticed he'd been coming apart. Chen Yehui thinks, Yes, this is it, and breathes.
Him and the others are taken down to the dorms, the new subterranean units they'd now call home—evidently Excellent Era takes climbing their way to the top an ounce too literally—and he works on a cocktail of adrenaline and anxiety that hastens his unpacking to an impressive seven minutes, pushing him out the door before some of the others have even hauled their luggage through the threshold. He's first to the assembly tour, where they're taken around the building, pointed to training rooms and communal areas and then, as the crowning jewel of their welcome, the trophy room, where Excellent Era's three championships are displayed, framed by the players who made it happen.
No, Yehui corrects himself, inspecting each photo with some measure of confusion. He isn't there.
He doesn't know why that comes as a surprise, yet it does. At the back of his mind, he supposes, he'd expected the curtain to be drawn back inside the team headquarters, for the armour to come off and show the soft belly beneath.
The Team One members don't greet them—it's thick in the heart of the season and they've gone to City X for an away match with Void, a day earlier than usual to help the new players climatise. Last year, they'd barely made it to the playoffs, half their roster retiring as they had, and they'd held on through the sheer dominance of the alliance's new Best Partners: Battle Mage One Autumn Leaf and Excellent Era's new rookie Launcher Dancing Rain.
It's a matter of time, he thinks. God Ye's tactics and mechanics remain at the forefront of the Alliance, even as the original Excellent Era roster lagged noticeably behind. Only Xue Mingkai continues to persist, but the wear of four years of professional matches are beginning to show, and speculations of Total Darkness' successor creep like the first drops of rain before the skies are rend open.
And isn't it fortunate then, that they have a talented Spellblade among their new recruits, waiting to take glory back with him.
Ye Qiu goes down to see the new trainees fresh off Excellent Era's victory against Void. They're in the middle of one of their round robin sparring sessions. His own match done, he watches from He Ming's screen as he suppresses Dai Xiaoming, a Summoner who'd won his last three rounds. They're evenly matched, but when He Ming gets rid of his Undead Knight, it's over; Dai Xiaoming falls to Wave Caster's Raging Flames.
There's a knock on the door and the trainer tells them to take a break as he goes to answer it.
He's back a while later with a stranger in the Excellent Era uniform, speaking in low tones as he points at something on the tablet the man is holding and occasionally, at some of the trainees. One of those times, it lands on Chen Yehui, and something in his stomach clenches at the intensity of that gaze, a deer pondered by something with its claw pressed to a quickening pulse.
"Holy shit," He Ming whispers. Everyone's turned to where the trainer and the man have moved to the front of the room, even those who'd started another round, their characters all suspended mid-battle as if this were some part of a rehearsed play. "Is that—"
"Everyone," the trainer says. "This is Captain Ye Qiu."
"Looks like you're all working hard." His smile comes easy, as if he hadn't just ground an entire room to a standstill with his presence. "Resume your practice."
Chen Yehui wins the next round partly from skill, partly because his opponent, a Sharpshooter called Li Yuhang, had been so flustered by the arrival of their captain that he hadn't even put up a fight before the silver defeat logo is flashing on his screen. He looks around to find that the room is much the same—half playing with the ferocity of men possessed and the other walking into mistakes long trained out of them at camp.
A hand lands on his shoulder, warm even through the thick cloth of his training gear.
"Good," Ye Qiu says. "Glory isn't just about skill—it's also a battle of the mind. Take every opportunity you're given to win." He pauses, then puffs a laugh. "Just don't talk your partner's ear off to do it."
Another pat and then he's off, this time to supervise the rematch between He Ming and Dai Xiaoming. Chen Yehui starts when he's called to the next round, the lingering weight on his shoulder burning like a brand.
Qiu Fei is as loud as a chihuahua and about as tall, and when he swaggers into the training room, all self-possession and young master cockiness roaring for a fight, nobody pays him any mind. So he circles around the room and stops before the whiteboard where their rankings are written, the name on top unchanged for the better part of two months.
Then he says, "Chen Yehui? Who's that?" and it's not like Yehui to do admin things like teaching newbies their lot in the Team Two hierarchy, but this one may not actually shut up until he does, so he accepts the challenge—
And loses.
He nurses his wounds in silence, in every respect the courteous loser, even being on civil terms with Qiu Fei. Qiu Fei, for his part, has graciously deflected any of the mockery Chen Yehui might've otherwise gotten to himself, both by being teeth-grindingly smug about the fact that he's at the peak of the new social order and because no matter how much they tried, nobody is skilled enough to bring him to heel.
"Qiu Fei's going to be One Autumn Leaf's successor," he hears after training, in the strained few days before the promotion matches to Team One. It's He Shiyang, the Battle Mage who used to be only two spots from the top of the board and who'd gotten an offer for a transfer to Misty Rain. "He's gonna be promoted to Team One. Looks like there really isn't any point in staying."
It's the thought of One Autumn Leaf—that champion he'd watched as a child, phone snuck between the pages of his books while his teachers' gazes sweep the room for troublemakers—being controlled by Qiu Fei that finally does it.
It's surprisingly easy to pry Combat Form from Qiu Fei. It's leagues from a God-level account, but as far personal ones go, it's much stronger than average. Zero Breakthrough isn't much different in terms of stats, but even if Chen Yehui knows he'll have to give it up when he moves up to Team One, he still wouldn't let anyone within a foot of it.
There's some benefit to reap from someone so used to looking down. He loads the script onto Qiu Fei's card, thinking of those words from when Ye Qiu had watched that very first match.
Take every opportunity you're given to win.
He's promoted to Team One but nothing changes.
The thing with Qiu Fei worsens even further. In the stretch of time it had taken Chen Yehui to settle in the main roster's dorms, Qiu Fei manages to become Ye Qiu's favourite, in keeping with his hobby of throwing Chen Yehui's plans back in his face.
It isn't as if Ye Qiu hides it either—he comes down to the trainees and spars with them occasionally, points out the things they need to improve on, but he doesn't interfere with their training, leaving that up to the actual instructors. Yet for Qiu Fei, he's in the training areas everyday, coaching him personally when that used to be a privilege reserved for Team One members.
That's what stings, that Yehui had been there longer, been on the top for months and still had to fight for scraps of the captain's time, but Qiu Fei goes against every unspoken rule and is rewarded for it.
Is it because he's a Battle Mage? Because he's strong? he wonders. He's nothing like you.
One night, after training, he catches Qiu Fei boarding a taxi, luggage in tow, and goes to the Team Two dorms to ask what had happened.
"Oh, didn't you hear, Hui-ge?" He Ming asks. "The captain sent him abroad for training."
Finally, he thinks, the burden lifting from his chest like a physical weight. Finally.
But then things get worse.
And worse.
And worse.
Ye Qiu finds reason to call him out every post-match analysis. He's thrilled at first, seen at last, but it gets harder when it's only his name that's unchanged in the lectures week after week, till he develops dread at the words Chen Yehui, pinned to his seat by that heavy stare.
One week, he's told this: "Stop trying to curry favour with the others. If you have time to type, you have time to improve yourself."
It's to boost morale, he wants to shout, fingers clenching around the pen so hard he's half-afraid it might break. Which you wouldn't know anything about. All he'd done was tell Zhang Jiaxing a good job for the timing of his Sacred Fire, which is the only reason they had an advantage in numbers in the first place. There's poison on his tongue, and he swallows it down where it collects in the well of his throat.
"Yes, Captain," he says.
The match against Tiny Herb is the tap that shatters the spiderwebbed glass of their team.
He hears about Sun Xiang in the telephone way news of team importance travels in a building: someone said something that's maybe—no definitely from the boss or maybe it's one of the cleaning staff? But it's definitely true, even if it's in direct contradiction with what someone else said that was also definitely true.
He catches voices in the office, Boss Tao and someone else he recognises only vaguely from quick introductory handshakes before and after matches. He listens, and that poison well spills out, acrid and bitter with all the things he hadn't said thick in his mouth, where it tips over as he confronts Ye Qiu.
"What are you still doing in our uniform? You're not part of our Excellent Era anymore." Our, he makes sure to say. The legend you've built, come back to bite the hand that feeds. His mouth twists and adds, "Or do you need my help?"
And here, that heavy gaze fractures, his head bows, and Chen Yehui feels a stirring in his blood.
He shouldn't have drunk so much but the guilds are in a frenzy, and asking Sun Xiang to help had only resulted in getting water thrown in his face. So he allows himself the indulgence for one night, stumbling to the nearby internet cafe to spend a few hours sobering up before returning to the dorms, lest he run into Boss Tao and get into even bigger trouble than he's already in.
Then he spots him.
His mind doesn't accept it at first, like being confronted by a spectre after a lifetime denying ghosts. But he's here—he hadn't even left the same street as Excellent Era, the gall of him, really.
And then the lectures, even now, when he's nothing but dregs in a barrel and working as a fucking internet cafe manager, fallen so far from the peak where he'd looked down his nose at Chen Yehui and after all of that, he still thinks he's qualified to criticise.
Ye Qiu is much more suited to the look he'd had leaving Excellent Era.
Chen Yehui sneaks a glance at the computer behind the counter—he's playing Glory of course he is and his mind stutters to a stop when he sees the name onscreen.
It's you. And he's right back to that moment when he'd stepped onto the grounds of Excellent Era on his first day, where everything had fallen into place. After all these years, it’s still the same wild animal come to pounce when he least expects, an old adversary stinking of new blood. Of course it's you.
He has the server guild masters all log into Heavenly Domain the next day.
"We're going hunting," he says. "ID: Lord Grim."