The Vicious Limited Skin Collab (3)
Twenty hoppang left.
“Urgh…!”
Am I pregnant or something?
It wasn’t even a phantom pregnancy, yet the gagging kept rising no matter what. I’d shut the stream off, but my suffering was far from over. Force myself to finish all of these and tomorrow’s news would plaster me across a giant headline: “Streamer Dies Eating Buns for Limited Collab Skin.” That kind of total-dumbass story.
This can’t go on.
Feeling a genuine threat to my life, I grabbed my smartphone just to stay alive.
Eating them myself was a lost cause, so I fired off a message to DeepSeaCleaner for that exact reason.
“Hmm.”
Guess my true intentions were way too obvious.
Why does nobody understand the preciousness of food?
To my question, DeepSeaCleaner simply replied:
He mocked me like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Already!?”
DeepSeaCleaner was ridiculously fond of Tiaris. He collected every single skin, of course, and even swapped out accessories and decorations on the regular, so his affection for the character was something else. But this fast? Truly, the latent power of that netkama pig-broth-guzzling middle-aged dude was not to be underestimated.
Threw them away? Threw what away?
Insane. He threw away all fifty buns? Seventy-five thousand won worth of food, just dumped straight into the food waste?
My fingers were shaking with pure sadness. Dumping food. Sure, even as a kid I’d seen brats throw out the contents just to collect stickers, but a full-grown adult doing that? And my one and only acquaintance, no less!
Bring it on.
I invited DeepSeaCleaner into a game. The three random teammates who got stuck with us took full collateral damage from our war.
Ant Day Labor Agency. From the crack of dawn the place was packed with people, yet an untimely sweet scent was drifting through the air.
—Sniff sniff.
The moment Kim Jeong-bae stepped into the office he wrinkled his nose. Instead of the usual sweat and instant coffee, something completely different was hanging in the air.
“What the hell is that smell?”
He walked in puzzled, only to grow even more confused. The guys who would normally just be staring at the TV were all gathered around the center table, tearing into steaming hoppang.
“Oh, Jeong-bae hyungnim, you’re here?”
“Yeah, yeah. But what’s all this? Somebody’s birthday today?”
A bearded guy with cream filling smeared across his face grinned at the question.
“Nah. You know that young lady Yu Aran from last time?”
“Aran? What about her?”
“She stopped by to say thanks for the help back then. Brought a whole mountain of hoppang for us to eat.”
He pointed at the table, which still held a solid pile of remaining buns. Enough to give a rough idea of just how many she must have bought.
“Good kid….”
Kim Jeong-bae let out a short chuckle. These days, people who actually knew how to show gratitude were rare. And a kid who looked busy enough just scraping by had still remembered to come pay her respects…
“In light of the sincerity, maybe I’ll try one myself.”
He picked up a hoppang from the table. A spicy-looking red one.
But the second he went to tear the wrapper open, his body froze. The logo printed on the outside was way too familiar.
Asgard × Onki Hoppang
A familiar character was winking right at him.
“What the…?”
Kim Jeong-bae’s eyes sharpened. He started scanning the wrappers of the other hoppang. Yuria, Tiaris, Nike—characters he knew all too well appeared one after another.
“This… this is Asgard?”
“Huh? As… what?”
“Asgard. The national game. You know, the one I play on the office computer sometimes.”
“Come on, hyungnim. Still playing those arcade games? At your age, cartoon movies and whatnot…”
“Beats being a gambling addict like you.”
Kim Jeong-bae shot back a scolding and shoved the bun into his mouth. That was when he spotted the white something stuck to the bottom. An Asgard game coupon.
There’s a coupon too.
He wasn’t the type to carefully check announcements, so he had no idea what event this was. But that could wait. Right now the most important thing was securing the coupons.
“Wait, wait a second!”
Kim Jeong-bae shouted urgently. The workers mid-bite all froze.
“What’s wrong? Did these go bad or something…?”
“No, not that… the paper under the bun! Don’t throw those away—give every single one to me!”
“Paper?”
“Yeah! Those sticker-looking things! Collect them and you get game items… anyway they’re useless to you, so just hand them all over.”
He didn’t doubt for a second that the others would give them up. But—
“Ah, no can do.”
“Huh…?”
“I can’t give these.”
“Why not? Kwak-ssi, you don’t even play games!”
The man called Kwak spoke carefully.
“I don’t. But that young lady Yu Aran left strict instructions. Enjoy the buns, but the papers inside—she’ll come back later to collect them, so please gather them carefully.”
“….”
“Even if someone asks, never hand them over. She begged so earnestly, saying they were as important as her own life…”
The other laborers nodded along and carefully pocketed their coupons.
“Right. That young miss even went and bought us the bread—least we can do is grant that request.”
“We got loyalty, us.”
“Jeong-bae hyungnim, hand yours over quick too. I’ll gather them all and give them to her at once.”
In an instant Kim Jeong-bae’s coupon was snatched from his hand. The stack of coupons piled up neatly after that.
Only then did he flip a wrapper over and check the expiration date. Sure enough, it was the same as today’s date.
Came here to dump the leftovers, huh.
BJ Pororo had been streaming for nearly three years now.
But for all that career, his banter and skill were thoroughly average, so his viewer count hovered around three hundred at best. Even that number only held because he streamed consistently.
“Hyungnims, that’s it for today’s stream~ See you again tomorrow evening~”
Stream has ended.
The moment the broadcast cut off, Pororo stuck a cigarette in his mouth and checked the stats.
“Ha… holiday, so everyone’s out having fun? Viewers are way too low today.”
Average viewers: 250. Not a terrible number. For an ordinary guy stuck in Iron 3 with zero special content, just holding that many was already hard. Most tiny streamers never even hit fifty before dying off—that was reality.
But human greed has no ceiling. Pororo kept comparing himself to the famous Asgard streamers.
“Haa… when am I ever gonna get like that.”
He let out a long sigh and clicked open the ranking tab. The top ranks were their own world, so no point getting jealous. What really ate at Pororo were the competitors in his own weight class.
And while hunting for his own rank, Pororo’s eyes nearly bulged out of his skull.
“HugeADC has 400!?”
He already knew that bastard had started streaming recently. But four hundred? A full hundred to hundred-fifty more than his own stream?
“What the hell. Did he viewbot or something?”
Newcomers sometimes used illegal programs to inflate viewer counts for attention. Commonly called viewbots. For a guy living as rough as HugeADC, using one wouldn’t be strange at all.
Let’s check.
Pororo entered the room with suspicious eyes. Immediately a clear, pleasant voice floated out.
Voice changer?
Voice changer the second he walked in? Suspicion hardened into certainty. HugeADC was definitely a scummy user running all kinds of programs.
—Look, everyone. I got the Patissier Nike.
What a disgustingly fake voice. Some guy putting on a voice changer just to make a little money and seduce viewers?
Pororo completely ruled out the possibility of a real girl and muttered curses under his breath. Considering how endlessly that human spewed misogynistic trash-talk at supports, there was zero chance it was actually a woman.
To stoop to such a pathetic trick….
Pororo clicked his tongue. Yet that pathetic trick had snagged a full four hundred viewers. More than the number he himself had carefully built over three years of steady streaming.
Sage time hitting hard as fuck.
Honestly, it made his blood boil.
No more. I’m gonna dunk you properly this time.