There's No Free Lunch
There's no free lunch in this world.
I'd thought things were going a little too smoothly, a little too easily — and sure enough, the universe had gone and smacked me right in the back of the head.
How could Oh Hong-gyun wear that friendly face and still pull something this ruthless? Of course, if you really wanted to assign blame, the bigger fault was mine for not reading the contract properly.
It wasn't like I'd never held a real job. I should have gone over that contract again and again, hunting for poison pills and anything stacked against me. The disappointment I felt toward myself ran deeper than any sense of betrayal toward Hong-gyun.
Well — if you wanted to split hairs, it wasn't quite a poison pill. Still.
Changing into a costume ahead of the official broadcast? Honestly, it wasn't something I couldn't do. Maybe once upon a time, but I'd already gone to G-Star in full cosplay.
I was halfway desensitized by now. I wasn't about to look at some frilly, feminine outfit and declare that putting it on was a castration of my inner masculinity, and therefore I simply could not wear it.
I'd been shopping for a while already, treating it like dressing up Camilla — so even with resentment simmering under the surface, I changed clothes without a fuss.
Makeup, though. That was a different story. I still couldn't get used to it. I didn't usually wear any when I went out.
"This — this is your bare face?"
"Y-yeah… I just get lazy…."
The staff had somehow worked themselves into a frenzy, slathering sticky creams across my face and scrubbing away with brushes until I thought the itch would kill me.
Was this how the subjects of those mad medieval artists must have felt?
And so, costume changed and makeup finished, here I was.
"Wow, you're so pretty!"
"Insane. Absolutely insane. For real…."
"Viewers are going to lose their minds. If you went around like this every day, it'd be total chaos."
I'd kept my eyes shut from start to finish, terrified of getting makeup in them.
Only now did I open them and look around — and how many women were clustered around me? There had definitely been one at the start. Somehow that number had ballooned to five.
Even one comment each was enough to make the whole room noisy. I was hearing "you're so pretty" roughly five times a second.
Still, I could more or less understand how they felt — because standing in front of the mirror and facing the finished product, my own reaction wasn't far off from theirs.
"…."
People say that when you see someone truly beautiful, the words just stop, and silence settles over everything. That was exactly where I was.
This… is me?
I stared into the mirror without a word. Looking back at me was Camilla — the same as always, and yet not. Camilla at peak condition, dialed up past her everyday self.
My looks had never been lacking to begin with. I hadn't really had any complaints.
But the Camilla in the mirror right now made it painfully clear that there had been a tier above that — and I was left completely speechless.
If I'd known it would turn out like this, I should have just sucked it up and learned how to do makeup ages ago. It wasn't like I had anyone to show a made-up face to, and there wasn't any real purpose to it… but just looking at myself was enough to fill me with deep, quiet satisfaction.
So pretty Camilla had been stuck with the wrong owner all this time, never fully blooming into her beauty.
I stood there staring blankly at the mirror for a while, until a staff member called me and I finally walked out — already thinking I needed to learn makeup from someone, anyone.
"Whoa… better than I expected… That's pure Camilla. For real."
That was Hong-gyun's reaction the moment he saw me come back.
He muttered that it looked like the real Camilla had stepped out of the game, that I might even be prettier than Camilla herself — and the corner of my mouth twitched upward despite myself.
"So. Why exactly did I have to change clothes?"
I wasn't about to let it slide that easily.
I narrowed my eyes into sharp triangles and stared the director down. He cleared his throat and opened his mouth.
"Well, I figured if the guest matched the costume too, the effect would be a little better—."
The reasoning made sense. Why else go to the trouble of preparing an outfit? To make the official broadcast a little richer.
What I was wearing now was similar to Camilla's default skin, but not quite — a casual, everyday-wear take on the base design.
Given how people had reacted at G-Star, the response this time was pretty easy to predict.
"I'm Camilla, so do the other supporters get different costumes like me?"
I'd asked out of pure curiosity, the way you'd want to peek into Nikang's closet stuffed full of cosplay outfits and see the other characters' looks.
The answer I got was not one I'd expected.
"Ah — actually, other than you, Kayak, there are no other supporters."
"What?"
Hong-gyun scratched the back of his head, looking sheepish.
"The year before last we picked ten supporters. Last year, five. But more people doesn't necessarily mean better efficiency."
"Right."
"Rather than fill slots just for the sake of numbers when there wasn't anyone worth picking, I figured we'd just pick one person who was actually solid."
"…."
And that solid person was me. The words felt good and a little heavy at the same time. No wonder the schedule and all the accommodations had seemed almost excessively generous.
"Thanks to that, we can funnel the budget that would've gone to the whole supporter team straight to you. Win-win, right?"
"Ahh… so can I get two Camilla skins out of this?"
"I'd love to, but if I ask them to make two they might work themselves to death. Talk to that team yourself after the broadcast."
"Tch."
I'd been trying to leverage the whole silent costume-swap ambush into one extra skin, and he'd wriggled free like an eel. His pressure-deflection game was top-tier.
"Anyway — let's start today's broadcast."
Abyss's official channel. Within minutes of going live, viewers flooded in and the chat scrolled at a blistering pace.
More viewers than usual — the existing audience plus a fresh wave of newcomers. Where those newcomers had come from, how, and why… you didn't really need it spelled out.
And so the viewers waited — for how long, who could say.
"Hello, everyone who loves Abyss. It's a pleasure. I'm Oh Hong-gyun, total director."
Oh Hong-gyun spoke first, opening the broadcast. But the viewers' attention was not on him.
The chat was on fire. Hong-gyun smiled with quiet satisfaction, as if he'd expected exactly this, then turned to look at the woman beside him — a silent signal that it was her turn.
But Kayak just blinked at him, staring blankly. Then, as if something had finally clicked, she faced the camera with a faintly dazed expression and opened her mouth.
"I'm streamer Kayak. I'll be joining you all as a supporter this time."
The Camilla lookalike — Kayak — seemed to realize she'd made a mistake; the tips of her ears had gone a curious shade of red. Her face stayed blank, but the viewers who'd caught the flushed ears only found it another charm point.
"Going forward, we'll be broadcasting with streamer Kayak at this time every week. For now, we're scheduled through eight episodes. So — what were we doing today, Kayak?"
"Yes. Today we'll go over the patch notes that went live a couple days ago, then play the game ourselves."
From there, the broadcast rolled along smoothly. The problem started the moment Kayak began reading the patch notes.
"Lenok got adjusted… Personally, I think a nerf would've been more than enough."
"Lenok needs a buff, teacher… Well, that depends on ak736's tier… I'll stop there."
"Calling Lenok a one-trick hero is a bit of a stretch. A true one-trick hero is someone like Camilla — low pick rate, played by only a handful of people—."
Hong-gyun made no move to stop her. He just sat beside her, watching with rapt, delighted eyes.