Chapter 65: The Dual Interpretation of the Flaw
"Alright." Raj took a deep breath, cracked his knuckles, and got into character.
He controlled a squad of Marines to "accidentally" stumble into the opponent's scouting vision, then staged a convincing panic-retreat, deliberately leaving two Medics behind like breadcrumbs — textbook evidence of a rookie blunder.
Meanwhile, his secondary base construction was running conspicuously behind schedule, and his defensive tower placement contained one small but glaring vulnerability — a carefully engineered trap the team had rehearsed until it was second nature during their grueling training sessions.
The Coastline Rangers took the bait exactly as scripted.
"Their main force is moving toward Raj," David reported, eyes locked on the swarm of red cursors crawling across the mini-map like a slow-moving storm front. "Quantity... roughly 70% of their total military strength. More than we planned for."
"Does that mean my acting was convincing?" Raj's voice carried a fragile, almost adorable note of uncertain pride.
"Try too convincing," Howard shot back immediately. "They're not sending a strike team — they're sending basically their entire army at you!"
According to the original game plan, this was precisely the moment David and Sheldon's mirrored Protoss forces were supposed to merge into a unified strike force, linking up with Howard for a classic three-way pincer that would annihilate the Rangers' main army on the killing ground Raj had so carefully baited them into.
But something was setting off alarm bells in David's head. The Rangers' movement was too immediate, too decisive — almost like they'd been anticipating this exact scenario.
"Wait." His voice dropped half a register. He rapidly cycled through map perspectives, his eyes methodically sweeping every corner of the Cassini Ring. "Sheldon — anything unusual near your base? Anything at all?"
"All scouting units report normal," Sheldon replied, his tone carrying its characteristic clinical detachment. "However, I'm detecting an abnormal signal pattern, right at the—"
He never finished the sentence.
The alarm hit like a slap.
Not Raj's base. Sheldon's.
Four cloaked Dark Templar materialized from the shadows of the map and surgically destroyed the most critical tech structure in Sheldon's base — the Stargate — before anyone could respond. A split second later, a compact ground force surged out from a concealed secondary path, making a beeline straight for his main mineral line.
"They faked us out!" Howard's voice jumped up an octave. "The push toward Raj was a decoy! The real target was Sheldon the whole time!"
"Not entirely." David's brain was already three moves ahead. "It's a split-force gambit. The army heading for Raj is real — but it's only about 60% of what it appeared. The other 40% is this cloaked strike force. It's a calculated trap — if we stick to the original plan and reinforce Raj, Sheldon's entire tech line gets dismantled. If we abandon the plan and save Sheldon, Raj gets overrun by that main force. They're forcing us to choose."
"So what do we do?" Raj's voice had developed a slight tremor — his base was already exchanging fire.
"We execute the original plan," David said. His voice was steady — almost eerily so, like someone calmly reading a weather report during a tornado. "With one modification. Sheldon — write off the Stargate, it's gone. Use what forces you have to slow down the cloaked strike team as long as possible. Howard — cut your harassment short and get back to Sheldon's position now. Raj—"
He paused for just a fraction of a second.
"Your performance needs to enter Act Two."
"...Act Two?" Raj sounded like he'd just been told his dentist appointment had a surprise second half.
"You've been playing 'helpless rookie' for seven minutes," David said. "Time to flip the script. Break out the defensive grid we built in practice and the minefield layout — channel their main force, hold them in that kill corridor, and do not break for at least three minutes."
"Three minutes," Raj repeated, like he was calculating the odds of surviving a shuttle re-entry. "I'll... try."
"Raj." David's tone sharpened just enough. "Not try. You will. Sheldon and I merge in two minutes forty seconds. We hit their main force from the left flank the moment we arrive. Howard loops around from the right after he cleans up the cloaked strike team. Three minutes is all we need."
A tense silence settled over the station for exactly one second.
"But Sheldon's situation right now..." Howard's voice carried genuine worry as he watched Sheldon's screen. The Stargate was rubble. The tech line was severed. The cloaked strike team was tearing through economic buildings like a wrecking crew with a deadline.
"I can handle it." Sheldon's voice came through the comms like liquid nitrogen — cold, measured, and absolute. "The projected losses are within acceptable parameters. Based on my current force composition and terrain modeling, I can hold this position for two minutes and fifty seconds. Margin of error: plus or minus five seconds."
Only Sheldon Cooper could make a crisis sound like a footnote in a research paper.
"Then we move," David said simply.
For the next three minutes, the Justice League Squad's station became the undisputed center of attention in the entire venue.
On the main tournament display, four split-screen feeds broadcast the simultaneous chaos unfolding across every corner of the Cassini Ring map — and the crowd, which had been casually drifting between stations, gradually migrated toward the big screen, drawn in by something that felt genuinely different from the other matches.
In the left feed, Raj's Terran base was delivering a masterclass in defensive play.
He'd deliberately abandoned the outer structures — letting them burn without flinching — and consolidated every remaining unit into a tight, overlapping formation around his main mineral line. The defensive tower array he'd spent training sessions perfecting now revealed its true purpose, channeling the enemy advance into a narrow killing corridor. Pre-planted mines detonated in precise sequence, each one timed to catch clustered units mid-stride.
The focused fire, the carefully staged retreats to bait overextension, the mine detonations — every decision was hitting at exactly the right moment.
"Hang on," muttered a kid in a Berkeley sweatshirt somewhere in the audience, leaning forward with narrowed eyes. "Two minutes ago this guy looked like he'd never touched a keyboard in his life. What happened?"
In the center feed, Sheldon's base looked like a building on fire — but Sheldon himself looked like a man calmly reading a physics journal in a comfortable chair.
With his Stargate destroyed and tech line severed, he was working with a fundamentally compromised hand. And yet his remaining Stalkers and Immortals moved with the kind of precision that had the tournament commentators genuinely at a loss for words.
Every Blink ability fired at the last possible moment to pull units out of lethal range. Every Force Field dropped in exactly the right position to split the enemy formation in two, isolating clusters for focused fire. The casualty exchange ratio, against a force that should have been overwhelming him, was somehow remaining nearly even.
And — most improbably of all — somewhere between all of that, Sheldon was simultaneously queueing up reconstruction jobs on his destroyed structures, methodically working to restore his tech line while managing an active battle on multiple fronts.
The tournament commentator leaned into his microphone with barely concealed disbelief.
"He's macro-managing while micro-managing a multi-front engagement simultaneously?" He shook his head slowly. "I don't know who this guy named Sheldon is, but whoever told him to enter a gaming tournament instead of a chess grandmaster circuit made a serious mistake."
In the right feed, Howard's Mutalisks arrived at Sheldon's base like a weather event — not flashy, not theatrical, just immediately and completely catastrophic for the cloaked strike team that had been happily dismantling Protoss infrastructure forty seconds earlier.
Gone was the stylish dancing micro that had defined his earlier harassment. This was pure, efficient, workmanlike destruction. Mutalisks burned down key enemy units in coordinated salvos. Corruptors peeled off to hunt and expose the invisible attackers. Zerg ground forces punched through the flank and systematically collapsed the enemy formation inward.
Twenty seconds after Howard's arrival, the cloaked strike team had ceased to exist as a coherent fighting force.
And in the main center feed — the one the commentators kept cutting back to — was David.
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