Chapter Two: The Practice Room in the Low Tide

The enemy supports had vanished for seven seconds. They weren’t rotating mid. They were waiting for him to leave lane before collapsing somewhere else. “Mid is not about last hits,” Marcus said. “Mid is the first map.” Caleb wrote that sentence at the top of his notebook. Real change did not happen in one big moment. It happened in a thousand small ones, all at once, slowly grinding the old habits out of him. A month later, his hero pool was no longer just Storm Spirit and Queen of Pain, the explosive comfort picks that had made him famous in pubs. He learned Invoker. He learned Puck. He learned Ember Spirit. Marcus forced him to switch roles inside the same role: sometimes tempo engine, sometimes Split Push anchor, sometimes a High Ground Defense