A Dolphin That Flies
She'd told them not to open their mouths unless they were Kayack — and then Kayack actually showed up.
She picks Camilla, and a Camilla specialist materializes in chat out of nowhere.
Whether he'd been watching the stream all along or not, the sudden visit left the viewers visibly startled.
What is this, a summoning spell…?
Nikang decided to set that useless thought aside for later.
An unscheduled lesson was already underway.
"My build… you mean?"
Kayack's suggestion was to fix the build first.
So that was it — the build was the problem. Hearing those words, Nikang felt a quiet wave of relief.
A craftsman who had refined Camilla to the absolute limit had pointed to the build before anything about her in-game play. That at least meant her performance hadn't been so bad it was unwatchable.
Of course, it was also possible he was just being polite — that he couldn't come right out and say you suck, so he'd dressed it up as "let's try changing the build first." But at least, that was how Nikang chose to take it.
Until Kayack's next message came through.
"Who are you even talking to right n—"
"…You don't have to answer every single one of those."
Nikang swallowed the question of whether he really needed to dig through chat and answer every last thing, packing it down deep inside.
At least one thing was clear. Kayack — her teacher — was not the type to carefully filter his words out of consideration for a brand-new student.
That was fine. She actually preferred it that way. Better this than someone who had something to say and sat there stewing over it in silence.
Nikang valued efficiency just as much as he did.
"Yes, but the one I've been using is a build you made too. We're not using that one?"
How many of these are there?
Five in total. Five builds for Camilla that Kayack had sent over.
Nikang had expected two or three at most, which was why she was quietly thrown off. Were craftsmen always this versatile when it came to theorycrafting?
From the perspective of someone who had once tried to cook up her own build and failed, the sheer existence of this many options was astonishing.
Five builds. Even at one game per build, that was five games minimum.
Five games. And if I get feedback after every single one…
Was this an educational stream, or a collab?
It was content thrown together on the spot. And yet this hastily assembled segment looked like it was going to hold Nikang hostage for far longer than she'd expected.
She'd already been live for four hours. If she played five more games on top of that and sat through feedback after each one, she'd blow right past her usual six-hour stream length.
"Okay…"
Still, Nikang couldn't bring herself to ask if they could just do this another day.
The enthusiasm radiating through her teacher's chat messages was far too intense for that.
Today's stream was going to run longer than usual.
"…."
It was a massacre. An absolute, unmitigated massacre.
Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss. Five games, five defeats. A blood-red match history greeted Nikang with open arms.
"Ha… haha…"
Nikang wore a hollow smile and muttered under her breath. A thick wave of regret washed over her.
She should have just said she'd learn later. Should have claimed she wasn't feeling well today. No — she never should have touched Camilla in the first place.
Was this how Pandora felt after laying hands on the forbidden book and prying open the box of calamity?
On a normal day she might have weathered it, but Nikang's spirit — already shredded raw by her recent demotion — simply couldn't absorb a shock of this magnitude.
And so, as Nikang's dazed mind slowly turned to mush—
"Okay…"
At this point, there was nowhere left to retreat.
Truthfully, she wanted nothing more than to end the stream right then and collapse into bed — but another part of her refused. A contradictory impulse.
Stubbornness, probably. Everything she'd already put in felt too costly to throw away now.
Holding onto that feeling, she waited a moment, and then the invite arrived.
A custom training-ground map, built from user settings.
A training ground. It felt like a quiet announcement that the real education was about to begin.
One question still nagged at her — why Kayack was putting this much effort into teaching her at all — but Nikang more or less accepted it.
Craftsmen are always a little weird like that.
People called them craftsmen as a compliment, but most of them were just eccentrics who did strange things for a living. Take a master potter who spent all day shaping clay — if a perfectly good pot didn't meet his standards, he'd just hurl it to the ground and smash it, wouldn't he?
Kayack was probably the same type, Nikang figured. Maybe he saw her as a work of art through which to project his own convictions, something like that.
Wait. Does that mean I'm going to get smashed too?
Like a pot flung by a master potter. Shatter into pieces the moment she failed to produce results—
"Ah — yes."
…She really must have been exhausted, drifting into weird thoughts like that.
This time, determined to actually show him something, Nikang accepted Kayack's invite.
The practice range, lined with wooden training dummies, was a bleak landscape just to look at.
People came here to drill combos or test the skills of a hero they wanted to try. For Nikang, the training ground was a thoroughly unfamiliar place.
And for good reason — she was a pure practical-play type. She'd always preached to her viewers that rolling around in the practice range was a waste; better to queue one more real game and burn the play into your body that way.
I think I only came in here briefly when I first started Abyss.
A strangely nostalgic feeling settled over her.
"Yes."
"Yeah, yeah, right."
Nikang hadn't been playing Abyss for long, and she'd never received professional coaching from anyone.
She simply hadn't felt the need. Even when viewers suggested she take a lesson from a high-ranked player, she'd always turned them down — my rank's climbing anyway, so why bother?
Which was why, now that the moment of instruction had finally arrived, Nikang found herself curious.
How would a player who'd once reached the absolute top — someone who clearly belonged among the game's elite — actually go about teaching her?
That curiosity was answered by Kayack's very next message.
"Huh? Starting what…"
Dodging the blade that came flying in with the chat message was pure luck.
Her hand had just happened to slip and hit her ultimate, and Camilla danced right out of Kayack's attack as if she'd planned it.
Her teacher's impressed chat message arrived within a single second.
It was the first time. The first time pure satisfaction had come through so clearly from nothing but a chat message.
A sudden dread seized Nikang, and she cried out in a trembling voice.
"No, Teacher, this isn't right. How many tiers are between us? How am I supposed to win this?!"
They said a lion raised its cubs by throwing them off a cliff.
Kayack's teaching philosophy was exactly that.
Shove the cub off the cliff, and if it somehow clawed its way back up, call it a successful lesson and be satisfied.
And the ones that died along the way? Stamp them failures and move on.
"How am I supposed to do that?!"
It was like telling a swimming dolphin to fly through the sky.
In one sense he was a kind teacher, always providing the correct answer for every situation — but every single one of those answers was something Nikang simply couldn't do, which made him all the more sadistic.
It felt exactly like listening to backseat gaming from chat!
Wearing a miserable expression, Nikang took hold of her mouse once more.