1 HP, 0.03 seconds: VALORANT Champions teams make the impossible happen twice

In a VALORANT Champions playoff match between Paper Rex and LOUD, Lotus brought the best from both teams, so much so that we saw two of the rarest occurrences in the game’s history, starting with a player making the most from going down to one health, and ending with one of the closest bomb defuse attempts possible. 

Tied 3-3, a post-plant scenario came down to a 1v2 scenario for Paper Rex. The bomb was ticking, going down to the wire as LOUD successfully traded the final kill. When LOUD’s Saadhak went to defuse the bomb, he knew it would be close, and his reaction showed every moment. He could not have expected to lose the round by just 0.03 seconds, going from happiness to sadness in three percent of a second.

Paper Rex got the clutch thanks to the milliseconds their team bought from their A post-plant, getting an early lead. With how close the map ended up being, 0.03 seconds could’ve been the difference between a LOUD map win and a PRX map win.

Related: Boaster thinks losing at VALORANT Champions helped Fnatic reset: ‘I’m happy we lost’

On round 10, only three rounds after that close defuse, Paper Rex’s Jinggg stepped up. He was having a tough start to Lotus, dying first a lot due to smart trap plays and good shots from the LOUD roster. Even in this play, he was focused down early, going down to exactly one HP while getting his first two kills at A long.

As his teammates pushed onto the site and got the spike down, he went upstairs to catch another enemy rotating for his third. Every time he swung, one bullet from any gun would kill him, so he needed to either hit headshots or surprise his foes. That push upstairs was calculated, knowing he could catch someone off-guard and get the kill despite his health.

Then, as the last two players had to rush onto the site to defuse, Jinggg caught one teleporting while he traded the other with his teammate, securing more than half of his ace on the lowest health possible.

Considering how dominant the second map of Split was for LOUD afterward, these two moments could have changed history from a 2-0 sweep from the Brazilians to a close series between two titans of VALORANT. Either way, one of these teams are going down to the lower bracket, and these impossible plays will only make a loss sting even more.