“System alert: Your friend ‘Fate’ has sent you an invitation to join a team that you cannot refuse.”
Five years ago, the championship team known as “Sparks” fell apart, its members scattered like dust. Five years later, a “slave contract” from an MCN agency binds five former teammates, all worn down and changed beyond recognition by life, back together as a team called “Against the Current.”
The contract is merciless: meet an astronomical livestream KPI and qualify for the national tournament of the global esports extravaganza, the “Dawn Cup,” or be crushed by debt. On the day they reunite, their skills are rusty and their teamwork is a mess. The livestream chat is filled with mockery, calling them “the sunset squad.” Should they play along with the powers of capital and become clowns in an entertainment-obsessed world? Or should they stake everything on the unsaid “I’m sorry” and the “second life” they share, and truly win once more?
The road from internet laughingstock to professional dark horse is full of thorns. There are the machinations of capital, crushing defeats at the hands of rivals, misunderstanding from family, the limits of their bodies, and the truth of the betrayal that tore them apart... When golden confetti finally rains down on them, what they win back is more than a championship. It is the most hard-won act of redemption, signed by five men for one another at the lowest point of their lives.
(This is a story about starting over, brotherly redemption, and how a group of “losers” clumsily yet fiercely take back the era that belongs to them.)
