Is That a Girl?
Is that a girl?
This was the time to assess the qualities of potential trainees in order to select one.
Honestly, part of me felt like this was a first-world problem. After all, Camilla was the kind of hero that back in the day, nobody wanted to touch even when you offered to teach them for free.
I'd write guides on the gallery boards, go around pitching Camilla as a once-in-a-generation free-win pick—and still get bizarrely little interest.
People would flame me for even bothering with her before anyone ever said she looked decent enough to try. Granted, it was a dead-on-arrival game with barely anyone playing it to begin with.
I kept slipping into old stories. It was a habit by now. I'd gone on about it so much that even the viewers who used to listen patiently had started slapping labels on me like BoomerKayak and Overlord of Abyss Retirement Park.
This was the point where I once again realized there was no need to dredge up ancient history that most people—viewers included—couldn't relate to.
Anyway. Back on track.
The Abyss nickname SuperCuteCamilla was a seriously solid trainee candidate. Good enough to draw a genuine sound of admiration.
"Whoa…"
When picking a student, what should you look at first? Talent? Rank?
Sure, talent would be nice—they'd learn fast, and even if I explained things like garbage they'd somehow understand it perfectly.
Rank, though… I'd recruited from Bronze through Gold to begin with, so it barely mattered. The Golds watching my stream would probably have a stroke hearing this, but as far as I was concerned, Bronze and Gold were basically the same thing.
What I considered most important was… passion.
An unshakable will that refused to quit no matter how much the world piled on the hate, and a burning desire to play Camilla specifically out of every hero available.
I never said it out loud to the viewers, but that was the evaluation standard living inside me. It wasn't complicated, but it wasn't easy to meet either.
Everyone's mental fortitude is different. Put simply, you needed a strong mentality.
That way I'd have an easier time teaching, and they wouldn't shatter and fall apart the moment they hit hardship. Surpassing your own limits has always been exhausting, grueling work.
Climbing ranks was the same. Breaking out of the tier you'd been stuck in meant erasing every bad habit and installing an entirely new way of playing.
People can't be formatted like computers. So the only real solution is repetition until it sticks.
438W 714L (38%)
By that measure, the first candidate I'd come face-to-face with—SuperCuteCamilla—checked every single box I'd laid out.
Even the viewers who'd been spamming drop-this-person messages went quiet with a kind of stunned dread once they saw that record.
Yeah… it really wasn't easy. That line on the application about being desperate had been the truth. I had no idea what had happened to them, but nobody played a game this hard without meaning it.
The match history had still been updating just a few hours ago. How many games was this?
Avg Rating:1.01
Games:477(38%)
And right at the top of that match history, sitting proudly in the Most Played number-one slot, was Camilla.
A frog forgetting it was once a tadpole—these viewers had all been Bronze at some point too, yet they were being ridiculously harsh. Not everyone starts at high elo.
"Hey now, keep the chat nice. What are you saying about our precious student."
"Anyway, the beginner-class trainee for the Camilla coaching stream is SuperCuteCamilla. Everyone else, please try again next time…. Is this person in the stream right now?"
The answer came instantly. A chat message that shot up like a spike, desperate to announce its own existence.
"Ah, there you are. I'll send a whisper. One sec. Could you drop your Discord ID? Ah, never mind. You might not have time right now. If you're busy, later is totally fine. I'm not gonna cut you or anything, so don't stress—do it whenever you're comfortable."
Now that I'd already chosen a student, I had no intention of swapping them out for someone else. I wasn't running a coaching stream just for live content and Vtube clips—I was genuinely planning to teach. I hoped that sincerity would reach the student too.
It had been the same with Ririyang: teaching someone isn't something that happens overnight. It takes time and consistency, which meant this could easily become long-form content. Better to stubbornly raise one person than burn myself out swapping students halfway through.
The number of exclamation marks was not normal. That much enthusiasm, at least. Looking at this alone, I didn't see any reason I'd ever need to replace this student.
Consent secured from the person in question—no reason to hesitate. I started the Discord connection.
SuperCuteCamilla.
The Discord nickname was the same as the Abyss one. The one odd detail was the profile picture.
There was a photo of Camilla there. No—someone who looked uncannily like Camilla, and yet was distinctly not Camilla, set as the profile.
That's right. It was a photo of me. Captured mid-stream, headphones on, gaze locked straight ahead without a flicker.
I'd already confirmed while lurking boards and galleries that my screenshots were floating around the internet. Type "Camilla girl" or "Camilla cosplayer" into Google and you could meet the archived version of me right there.
But seeing my own face planted on someone's profile like this, completely out of the blue, left me with a strange feeling. A little embarrassed, and yet I couldn't really complain—they were my fan, so of course they'd slap it on there that big. That kind of weird feeling.
There was no way over ten thousand viewers would miss something I'd already noticed.
Well… it wasn't like it was forbidden or anything. It was just a photo, and I'd heard that scrubbing an image off the internet once it's out there costs astronomical amounts of money.
Even if I told people not to, someone would ignore me for sure—and it wasn't like I could sit on stream every single time going please don't use my photos.
It didn't even feel that bad. Kind of like back in school, when you set your favorite celebrity as your profile picture as a kid. Calling myself a celebrity out loud was a little embarrassing, but being a semi-public figure was the truth at this point.
So I had no plans to give anyone grief for using my photo. No plans to try controlling it either. Who has the energy to police that one by one? The moment my face got out there, it was already over. Maybe if I'd gone no-cam the whole time it would've been different.
The one thing I did hope for… was that they'd pick a prettier photo of me. That one wasn't bad, but something about it just felt unsatisfying. There had to be better shots out there.
I was right in the middle of thinking using the photo is fine, but could you swap it for a prettier one—when the call connected.
"Hello, Teacher…!"
A voice arrived with the call-connected chime. It wasn't as bubbly as the messenger chats. There was strength in it, but a slight tremor that made the other person's nerves obvious.
I, however, was flustered for an entirely different reason.
I completely forgot the request I'd been about to make—about changing the photo—and just read the donation TTS out loud as it came through.
"Was that a girl?"
The owner of an account that had played over a thousand games this season. The person who'd put my photo on their Discord profile. Nickname: SuperCuteCamilla.
My new trainee, wearing all those descriptors, was apparently a woman.