To Solve a Slump
To solve a slump, you need…
Forty-eight thousand won.
A full forty-eight thousand won.
In this era of sky-high prices, that was enough money left over after ordering chicken twice, or enough to buy eight-thousand-won gukbap six times over. An absurd sum.
You could also buy several kilograms of cheap bean sprouts with it, or a few bras to keep those inconveniently bouncing breasts in place…
In short, forty-eight thousand won—nearly fifty thousand—could get you a lot more than you might think.
Why the sudden nonsense?
Because I had earned forty-eight thousand won.
In a single day. Just yesterday.
At first I couldn’t believe it.
It had been a stream that barely lasted four hours. All I’d done was turn the broadcast on, click around in the game like usual, and ramble about Camilla.
And yet this much money had come in. Even calculated as an hourly wage, it blew past minimum wage so thoroughly that my jaw dropped on its own.
It wasn’t as if donations had never existed before, but those had been gallery-level collections… more like fundraisers, really.
Public money gathered for the “save the dead game” movement. That cash could only ever be spent purely on the stream.
This money was different. Unexpected, unanticipated—it felt like a pure reward handed straight to me.
So with a fluttering heart I started picking through the donation list one by one.
…A little deflating, but they were still good people. They’d given me free money, after all.
Truthfully, I couldn’t use the money right away. Withdrawing donations only became possible after a short waiting period following receipt.
But whether now or later didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that I had earned money from streaming.
First stream, first income. Anything that was a first experience always felt unfamiliar—and that much more thrilling.
I decided to treasure my first experience for a long time to come.
“Waaah…”
When I opened the paper box with steam gently rising from it, a luscious pizza revealed itself inside.
Its chewy, mouthwatering appearance made saliva pool in my mouth on its own.
Today, of all days, I hadn’t wanted to settle for the usual ramen or bean sprouts, so I’d ordered this. Even so, I hadn’t gone full luxury just because I’d made some money.
I’d ordered from a branch running a thrifty discount and even snagged the review event. This level of spending was perfectly acceptable.
“Thanks for the meal.”
Your donations had been replaced by the pizza right in front of me.
I bowed my head toward the invisible viewers.
“Aaaaaaagh! Nooo!”
A scream of pure agony, the kind that would make anyone think something truly catastrophic had happened.
A woman clutched her head and let out a desperate wail.
It wouldn’t have been strange if the neighbors had come knocking any second—but fortunately that never happened.
The room she was in right now was completely lined with grayish-white sound-absorbing material.
A soundproof booth. She was currently screaming inside a soundproof booth.
“Why… why is this happening…”
The woman stared blankly at the computer inside the booth.
Two towers. And two monitors.
On one monitor, a brilliant golden emblem shimmered.
In a corner of the other monitor, black text scrolled up as if mocking her.
“Kraaaagh!”
She looked at the golden emblem once, then at the black text once.
After repeating the motion a few times, the woman twisted her body again and let out another voice thick with pain.
Soundproof booth. Dual monitors. And a suspiciously high-performance computer plus microphone.
All the clues were already there.
That’s right—the woman was a streamer, and she was currently live. The black text flooding the screen was real-time chat.
Streamer Nikan. She had just been demoted from Platinum to Gold tier.
That was why she couldn’t say a word even under the viewers’ mocking chat.
Yeah. This was a kind of karma.
The karma of carrying a “gifted prodigy” image and sneering at lower-tier players all this time.
Nikan had climbed ranks quickly with her natural physical talent and game sense, and somewhere along the way she had looked down on low-tier players without even realizing it.
Even the Gold she had just fallen into—right after hitting Platinum she had gone around saying Gold was too easy, that Gold players shouldn’t even share a table with her.
“Ugh…!”
It scraped. Watching the chat, injustice and sorrow rose in real time at once.
Normally Nikan forced a cheerful front for better streams, but lately she rarely bothered masking her feelings.
Because she was genuinely pissed. Even Nikan herself hadn’t known that dropping tiers—losing while trying hard—could feel this frustrating and irritating.
Why… why am I dropping?
Leaving the noisy chat and donations behind, Nikan began analyzing the cause of her endless losses.
One or two games would be one thing. After a losing streak bad enough to demote her, she could no longer blame others.
She didn’t know the details, but her own influence on the losses couldn’t have been zero.
Yet no matter how hard she racked her brain, no immediate problem came to mind. Nikan still played more or less the same as before. The only thing that had changed was the result—from wins to losses.
“No, guys. I’m seriously asking because I don’t know. My form itself hasn’t dropped, right?”
In times like these you borrowed the power of collective intelligence.
Sure enough, plenty of the chat was infuriating, but an answer still emerged from it.
…It hurt, but Nikan inwardly admitted it was true.
Form had dropped at some point. Some point.
I feel like I almost know what it is.
She couldn’t pin it down clearly, but she roughly got the feeling. Definitely, from a certain moment, she had fallen into a swamp of consecutive losses. When was that…
Looking at chat was embarrassing, but it helped.
Once again collective intelligence lent a hand.
“Kayack…”
Nikan quietly murmured the name. Someone who had now climbed to a tier Nikan couldn’t even reach.
Turns out she was a girl. She’d even heard the recent news that she’d started streaming.
Thinking it over after the viewers’ words, the timing lined up perfectly.
Yeah. That day. It had been from then. The day she lost without even putting up a fight to Kayack’s bizarre Camilla.
From that day on Nikan had strangely been unable to win games. As if she’d been hit by a witch’s curse, a kind of slump had set in.
Alright, so the truth of the matter was roughly clear. The shocking defeat to Kayack had probably been the cause.
The problem was that something like trauma had remained from that lunatic who charged in while dancing like mad.
Because of it, Nikan—who had been a confident ADC—had lost her signature aggressive playstyle.
But how do I fix this…?
She had identified the cause. She had identified the cause, but…
The problem was that this issue had seeped into her play so unconsciously that even Nikan herself couldn’t fully recognize it.
Of course she could fix it if she tried, but she would have to play every single game while meticulously watching every movement and every skill.
That kind of corrective work would clearly be exhausting for Nikan, who had just gone on a losing streak and gotten demoted. And she couldn’t just end the stream right now either.
She was scratching her head with an annoyed face when it happened.
CamillaIsStrong donated 10,000 won!
Teacher, since you got demoted, how about trying other heroes? Our Camilla is actually pretty decent haha
“Camilla?”
The heroes Nikan mainly played in Abyss were all the long-range type that could attack from a distance.
That was to make use of her background mainly playing FPS games.
Whether because of that experience or not, she had even pulled off the feat of hitting Platinum as a newbie who had only just started the game.
But what good was that now? She had already dropped to Gold.
Maybe, just like the donation said, trying out various heroes while she was demoted wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
In the old days Nikan would have ignored it and stuck stubbornly to ranged heroes alone, but today that advice sounded surprisingly tempting.
Like a retooling, I guess.
If she wanted to climb eventually, a basic understanding of every hero was essential anyway.
She’d gotten hooked on Abyss, and she’d sincerely decided to raise her tier, so taking time like this someday was the right call.
Having finished that thought, Nikan slowly nodded.
“Yeah. I already dropped anyway… might as well treat it as practice and try something else.”
And so the first hero Nikan chose was one familiar both to the viewers and to herself.
On the screen, a silver-haired girl danced and locked eyes with Nikan.