Newbies Are Precious
"Haaah…."
If heaven existed, this had to be it.
A proper meal after so long left me blissfully happy. Why had I been surviving on cold potato porridge and bean sprouts all this time? The world was full of delicious things like this.
Ah, right. No money. Money. That had been the problem.
The more money, the better. Obviously.
Some people claimed true happiness couldn't be bought, but most of life's problems melted away the moment cash entered the picture. Therefore I needed to make money. Money wasn't everything… but it was indispensable.
To make money I had to stream, and streaming would make me money.
I'd stream hard… then order pizza every single day….
Happiness didn't need to be hunted far away. Just ordering pizza was enough to make me happy. I was that simple a creature.
Unlike the days when I only filled my stomach, I finished a real meal savoring every bite. My face felt hot. By the time I noticed, heat was already flushing through me. I shook my head left and right at the rising warmth.
…Hot.
"Mmngh."
A soft nasal sound slipped out when I turned my head. Was I trying to sound cute on purpose or what?
I'll be honest. I had a drink. Nothing fancy—just pizza felt incomplete somehow. Forgetting to order cola was the real mistake, if anything.
I needed carbonation to cut the greasiness, and luckily the fridge held a beer of unknown origin. The moment I saw it I thought, perfect.
Pizza and beer… pizza-beer. The combo itself had zero pedigree, but today was a day worth celebrating.
Alcohol was something you drank according to mood and atmosphere, not by carefully matching side dishes.
Anyway, it had been a thoroughly satisfying meal.
"Hmm-hmm."
Humming, I threw myself onto the bed. The old warning about lying down right after eating floated up, but… whatever. Today I was lying down.
I believed Camilla's superior body would casually shrug off something as trivial as acid reflux.
Abyss's genius dancer Camilla-nim didn't know about that stuff!
After rolling around on the bed for a while in pleasant fullness, I pulled out my phone. Nothing special—just the urge to watch other people's streams while resting.
Market research, so to speak.
Even when opening a shop you checked what stores were nearby and how the commercial district looked. As a self-employed streamer of sorts, I figured I ought to know how people in the same industry ran their businesses.
With that thought I logged into Twich and found far more streams running than expected.
Just-chat. In other words, talking streams. The first ten minutes I spent simply marvelling. People basically never ran out of audio. Keeping up nonstop chatter like that was a talent in itself.
Next came streams that were still just-chat but needed a completely different classification.
Mm, the noonas dancing hard while flashing skin made even me, the viewer, feel embarrassed.
Those first two kinds of streams belonged to the category I simply couldn't do.
If I absolutely had to, I could force it. If a robber suddenly held a knife to my throat or a bomb collar locked around my neck, sure, I'd manage anything.
I'd turn on the stream, throw out random topics, ramble for dozens of hours, and dance half-naked in front of the cam.
But would the result be any good? I didn't think so.
Being able to do something and being good at it were clearly different. Those two fields were simply too far from me. My aptitude just didn't match.
…Come to think of it, Camilla was a dancer. I'd never tried, but maybe I could dance well too—
No. Still no. Physically possible or not, I simply didn't want to.
Waving arms and legs and hips seductively, smiling with my eyes, all while my image was beamed live to people?
That wasn't a talent issue; it was pure preference. Mentally I couldn't accept it.
Long digression aside, the summary was that there existed a type of stream I could actually do well and that suited my aptitude.
It was the category that took the biggest slice of Twich's pie, with well over a hundred sub-categories.
Game streams.
And among them, Abyss. Currently number one in PC bang occupancy, the game Forbes said the current teens and twenties loved most.
Our game, decorated with every possible superlative, fully deserved the title of god-tier game.
Proof: the category currently drawing the most viewers on Twich was Abyss itself.
Every time I saw it I was reminded how completely different this world was from the one I used to know.
A game that used to hover around three thousand concurrent players and teeter on the edge of shutdown had become a god-tier title overnight. Almost as shocking as waking up looking exactly like Camilla.
Anyway, I set other streams aside and started browsing only those tagged with the Abyss category.
These were the streamers I'd most likely run into while broadcasting myself. I was also curious what the atmosphere was like elsewhere.
Alt-account streams, build research, duo collabs, event customs… nothing particularly special.
I was scrolling from highest viewer count downward when—
"Hm?"
One stream title snagged my eyes.
It was—
Camilla Beginner Day 1 — Dreaming of Becoming a Camilla Master
Something I hadn't seen in any stream I'd browsed so far.
A stream actually playing Camilla.
"Ooh…."
Current viewers: 3,400. A fairly sizable stream.
And somehow the streamer's name didn't feel completely unfamiliar.
Streamer Nikang. I'd run into him once while playing. I remembered he was an ADC main.
Suddenly picking Camilla?
Deeply intrigued, I started watching Nikang's stream.
"Hmm, hmmm, oh… oh…."
Camilla was fundamentally an off-meta hero.
Pick rate itself was low. Abyss players avoided and disliked her.
Probably because of her uniquely excessive difficulty. Yet once you got even a little proficient, there wasn't another hero this fun and charming.
In short, I wanted more people to discover Camilla's appeal.
"Ah, you should've used E on the creeps there instead of Q."
The words slipped out of my mouth from pure regret.
I wasn't angry or annoyed. Not even frustrated.
Just a little disappointed. Honestly, this was the first time watching a stream had made me feel this way.
Probably because it was the first time I'd ever seen someone else play Camilla on stream.
"Aigoo, that's not good."
On screen Nikang committed another control miss and died miserably. That… that wasn't how you did it.
At this rate he might lose interest in Camilla and drop her entirely.
Impatience. And the alcohol.
Those two things, I believe, were why I unconsciously started typing in Nikang's chat.
It was no different from the usual backseat advice viewers gave streamers, but I didn't regret it.
Better to offer a little guidance than stay quiet and watch a budding sprout get snapped.
Because Camilla newbies were precious, yeah.
I decided to generously pass on every bit of know-how I had.
"…How the hell do you even play this?"
It felt like staring at a massive wall.
How many games had it been already? No matter how many matches he queued, this Camilla hero refused to make any sense.
No—actually he was starting to get a rough idea. It just happened to be a terrible idea.
This is trash….
Pretty trash. The chat he'd seen earlier resonated hard.
This Camilla hero felt like a hollow cream puff—pretty exterior and nothing usable inside.
But that guy used her just fine.
Thinking of Kayack changed the story again.
Worried he might have missed something, Nikang rewound the replay and asked the viewers.
"What do you guys think? What am I lacking?"
He tried borrowing the power of collective intelligence, but unfortunately no useful answers came back this time.
Only empty chats that gently needled him.
"I'm the idiot for asking you guys. Nobody here has even tried Camilla, right?"
"It'll be faster if I just crash into walls and research myself. Unless you're a self-proclaimed Camilla expert, no backseating."
Thud thud.
Nikang reached his conclusion, and for a while no coaching chats appeared.
The moment Nikang took his first death, another coaching chat popped up.
Already on edge from demoting earlier today, Nikang latched onto the backseater like he'd been waiting for it.
"I said only Camilla experts get to coach. Use W as a mobility tool? You know Camilla that well? You a master with Kayack-level mastery?"
But the viewers' reactions were completely different from what Nikang expected.
"…For real Kayack?"
Nikang muttered in disbelief, and before the words even finished another chat appeared.