Landing spots are almost sacred in competitive Apex Legends. Teams spend months fighting each other for a spot, then build their entire gameplan around landing there. And usually, contesting another team isn’t ideal at LAN—unless you’re Aurora.
Composed of veteran mouse and keyboard players Kiryl “9impulse” Kostsiu, Svyatoslav “ojrein” Korochinsky, and Konstantin “Hardecki” Kozlov, Aurora has long been known as an aggressive team unafraid of flaunting the meta or taking any fight possible. In particular at the ALGS Split One Playoffs in Los Angeles, they’ve been notable for being one of the only teams to pick Lifeline. But they extended their wildcard reputation further on the first day of competition when they hot-dropped at three different points of interest in three consecutive games on World’s Edge, proceeding to win every single contest they took.
After dropping at their usual World’s Edge POI of Climatizer in game one and getting a couple of kills in a long-running contest with Red Rams, they surprised the entire lobby in game two by not dropping at Climatizer, but instead landing at Overlook with North America’s Cloud9, who they put down with aplomb.
It almost felt like the CIS players were trying to outdo themselves by game six when they decided it was KINOTROPE Gaming’s turn to face their wrath at Epicenter, again laying waste to their opponents. The arena was left in shock as Aurora won their third consecutive contest against a third different team, at a third different POI.
And it wasn’t just random hot drops for the sake of fighting from Aurora, either. They went on to win their opening group stage match, topping titans DarkZero and thrilling the ALGS crowd in the process. By the end of the last game, where Aurora notched an impressive 14 kills, Hardecki decided to draw out the game a little longer while left as a solo high atop a tower with another EMEA team, 2R1C, searching for him below to end the game.
Hardecki and Aurora currently sit atop the ALGS group stage standings, and their performance in their group should serve as a warning to every team on the server with them; if Aurora is in your lobby, they may just land on you.
And, honestly, they’ll probably beat you in a fight, too.
