Kids These Days Don't Know the Fundamentals
"Barely any reaction…."
Geon-hui sat in front of his computer, muttering as he stared at something on the screen.
That something was the reply that had just come back from Kayack.
The short reply held none of the things Geon-hui had expected.
Not the usual fuss people made when they found out he was a streamer, nor the faintly awkward discomfort of realizing their face had shown up on a V-Tube broadcast.
He had assumed something along those lines would come back.
Instead, it was cool to the point of being almost cold. If he had to pick, he would have pegged Kayack as the latter type—yet his prediction had been completely off the mark.
"Did they already know I was a streamer?"
The fact that Kayack hadn't even asked about the circumstances that ought to have been questioned made that seem likely. Even the most unflappable person usually had at least one question when someone said they wanted to put a clip of them on V-Tube.
But did that mean Kayack was a stream sniper targeting him? Probably not. The odds of that were low.
They had simply been matched into the same game, pure and simple. As someone who kept track of every sniper's nickname and behavioral patterns, Geon-hui felt no particular sense that Kayack was one of them.
Snipers always gave themselves away eventually. They were the sort who wanted to be noticed in the first place.
People so full of ego they wanted to appear on stream even once—those were the snipers.
"Doesn't seem like a sniper, though."
Years of experience let Geon-hui pick snipers out with uncanny accuracy.
On that radar of his, Kayack barely registered.
The one ambiguous point was that, even while playing, Kayack had seemed to keep half an eye on him.
Maybe a fan of mine?
A V-Tube subscriber, perhaps.
With seven hundred thousand subscribers as Taker, it was a plausible enough idea—
Doesn't feel like it, though.
The reply had been far too indifferent for that.
If they were a fan—someone who watched every V-Tube upload—they would have reacted a lot more strongly than this. That was Geon-hui's read.
Either way, things had worked out well.
A firm refusal like "I'd rather you not put this on V-Tube" would not have been strange at all, yet he had gotten permission this easily.
Once it went up on V-Tube, it was bound to blow up.
His certainty wasn't pure gut feeling.
People watched more than usual.
Live viewership had been far better than normal.
Clearing ten thousand viewers alone was enough to call the content a solid success. Taker's usual live numbers sat around four to five thousand; when he put "filming in progress" in the title, a few more would pile in.
By rough math, today's numbers had roughly doubled.
Honestly, Taker still wasn't sure exactly why the audience had been so strong today.
Today he hadn't been griefed by snipers—he had ridden the bus and won easily.
So people weren't just here to watch me suffer?
For Geon-hui, who had always thought that, it was genuinely surprising. Today, for once, he had finished filming in a good mood.
He didn't look elsewhere for the reason the stream had succeeded.
It was because of that person.
Viewer count had been normal when the content started, then climbed steadily the moment the game began.
Timing it out, that was clearly when Kayack started carrying as an ally. Someone had probably dropped coordinates on a community somewhere.
From a streaming standpoint, the plot wasn't anything special.
Streamer Taker meets a suspiciously skilled high-ranker mid-content and gets carried—that kind of broadcast.
The unusual part was that the high-ranker was on a hero nobody used, pulling off plays you almost never saw in other games.
That alone had drawn twice the usual crowd.
It was proof people had come for the mystery high-ranker more than for Geon-hui—and proof that keeping that player on screen the whole game had been the right call.
That was when it happened. He was resting after the stream, still savoring the moment, when a message came from his editor.
"Why so excited?"
Geon-hui eyed his phone with mild bewilderment.
His longtime first editor was not exactly the industrious type. Work speed wasn't great either. The guy was decent as a person and had editing sense—otherwise Geon-hui would have fired him ages ago.
This was the first time the editor had ever asked for work first.
Curiosity piqued, Geon-hui asked.
"A fan?"
What the editor told him next was rather interesting.
A top-tier ranker. A village chief who had fought to keep a dying town alive. A beloved fixed-nickname regular from the Abyss Gallery. A sunflower of a man who obsessively one-tricked a single hero… and so on.
Hearing the editor's explanation, today's events no longer felt quite so strange.
Kayack—that mystery user—turned out to have been quite the celebrity.
"Wouldn't mind collabing sometime…."
Or a master invitation segment, maybe.
All kinds of possibilities flickered through Geon-hui's mind.
Riding the popular algorithm right now, views exploding
Any gallery bums with nothing to do should go drop a like, yeah?
But like, Kayack? Why are we talking this much about some random civilian who doesn't even stream? Why keep rolling these worthless baits, and why aren't the mods deleting posts from the guy whose flair is literally just "Kayack"?
Go live and prove it—that they're a fundamentals-packed Season 0 veteran who can still hit Challenger
Meanwhile, a young woman held her phone in one hand and simply watched this entire farce unfold.
"The gallery itself, huh…."
She had never thought of it that way, but—well, it didn't seem entirely wrong.
Judging by the urge rising in her to put these fundamentals-less kids in their place…
Maybe it was the perfect description.
They were precious new blood, and that was exactly why the ranks needed tightening all the more.
Realizing that, deep inside her, something the gallery would call an old-timer fossil was alive and well, the girl let out a small laugh.