Twenty-seven minutes…

That was how long the match lasted before the victory screen presented itself to Nathan. I could hardly believe what I saw. What I had just saw.

"…Holy shit…"

Nathan glanced over to me and didn't even bother trying to hide his smirk.

"No WWF in terms of speed, but all things considered, I'll take it" he stood up from the computer. "Though when I asked if you had all the strategists unlocked, I was also talking about their top retinue units and weapons and stuff; not just the character themselves unlocked."

"But… how…? You just walked the entire left flank solo… as a strategist…"

"Told you his move set was busted. Shame I had to really crank up the APM to make it work though; get all your characters their top weapon already; most, including Guo Jia, have velocity on their top weapons, giving them faster attack speed! My hands are killing me, even with painkillers!"

"You just… juggled them…"

"Yeah."

"Like, for minutes on end…"

"…Yeah" Nathan gave me a blank stare. "That's the point of his move set; he doesn't kill well, but he stalls like a motherfucker if you know how to combo properly. Flip that on its head as an offensive strategy, and Guo Jia can theoretically lock down an entire team on his own; highly unlikely against actual good players to lock down more than two, even with his top weapon and the best APM in the world, but technically it is possible; people have run tests with bot programs. Granted, your team has no way to communicate and has no one looking at the map and giving orders if you're not in the main camp, but as I said, I was going to 1v15; don't need my teammates to do fuck all but not get pushed down before I push up and win. No communication needed for that."

"…"

"Oh, but uh, it's not a common way of playing" Nathan smiled a bit sheepishly. "I wouldn't be surprised if you got fifteen reports from that. Not that anything I did warrants a ban, but that many reports will trigger a manual review of the match for sure. I expect you to be pegged for smurfing; no way anyone from the dev team will believe that came from someone in gold, with no match history in the character to boot."

"…Right… Just great…"

It was only as he moved out of the way for me to take a seat again that I noticed his hands. They were twitching. Rapidly. As if he was still playing. I've seen shaky hands; hell, my mother had a bad case of it herself due to her old age. But this was…

"Uh… is that… normal?"

"…You mean my hands? Yeah, that's normal. At least for the past decade, roughly. Why do you think I stopped playing? Anything strenuous on my hands, and they act up. Basically, the minute I break 80 APM, my hands begin to fuck themselves real bad. To do that… that was about 265 APM, I want to say… Even with the painkillers I took mid match, this shit hurts. Can't stop it myself either; it's just a matter of time. Looks freaky, yeah?"

"That's one way to put it… Isn't there anything you can do to fix, well… that?"

"Nope" he grinned, which I thought was weird considering he just said it was really painful. "Asked all the doctors I could get to, both back home in Canada and here in the USA. The damage to my nerves is permanent; they'll never get better, and each time I do something like that, or hell, even something minor and slow but requiring detail, like drawing a summoning circle, I only damage them more. Glad I was able to finish the match though; another few minutes, and I would have lost all feeling in my hands. Has happened once before; couldn't feel or move them at all myself for a good couple of days after that. Though that was years ago; right before I stopped playing, in fact."

"That was your signal to quit?!"

"Oh, no. I still wanted to keep going; keep playing. But that was when I apparently lost the ability to make that choice for myself... So, I turned to… other things… to pass the time. Mainly reading and book collecting. Most doctors figured I would paralyze my hands by the time I was twenty, even if I stopped all gaming, but here I am: twenty-four, and still not paralyzed! …Probably pushing it by doing stunts like that though; why even way back when I first noticed the… twitchiness, let's say… I started playing slower, control-oriented playstyles in all the games I played. Why I had Guo Jia as my main in WotH, basically; if you play him normally, you should never need APM above 60. He's very relaxing to play under typical circumstances. It's only when you wish to abuse his move set that, for some reason still has yet to be nerfed, and fuck with people that his APM requirement becomes obscene. To pull of what I just did in grandmaster ranked, you'd need something like 400 APM, if not 450 plus. And that's for juggling two players on the enemy team, mind you, at most; not four like I just did multiple times for minutes on end."

He spoke all of that as if it were the most natural of things to say. But looking from his smiling face, to his hands twitching and shaking uncontrollably… I couldn't help but feel like Nathan was just… gone. The man was the embodiment of gaming addiction at this point, and nothing was going to convince me otherwise…

Author's Notes

If anyone was wondering why I 'wasted' an entire chapter on this made up game I threw into this FATE story *wink, wink* this fragment should explain why. If you can't figure it out from this (seriously though, I think it's obvious enough) well... I suppose you'll just have to wait till later in the story xD

Thanks for reading everyone!