Toward the Summit
There were no surprises.
Maybe a two-tier gap really was something you just couldn't ignore.
Victory went to Kim Jaejun, the Platinum player.
He'd barely touched Camilla before, yet after reading the skill descriptions and running a few practice rounds in the training grounds, he adapted with impressive speed. You could call him someone with a fundamentally high game sense. It almost felt like a waste for a player like him to be stuck on Lennox — a character nowhere near as cool or fun as Camilla.
"Camilla's pretty decent, right?"
"Yes, better than I expected… though that's only because this was a one-on-one. In a real teamfight, the controls would be way too hectic. I don't even know if I'd be able to see my own character—"
"But it's fun, right?"
Nod nod—
As the oldest person present, Kim Jaejun hadn't wasted his years. He quietly dipped his head in agreement.
I'd have to keep putting him on Camilla from now on. Having pulled the exact reaction I'd been hoping for, I wore a satisfied look of my own.
"Hnnngh…."
Yu Sia, on the other hand, had been wearing a full pout ever since her loss to Jaejun. She must have been that bitter about losing — her eyes even had the faintest sheen of tears welling up without her realizing it.
"You did well too, Sia."
I meant it. No empty praise. Best of three, two sets to win.
Yu Sia hadn't just been steamrolled by Kim Jaejun. Against a player steadily locking the game down, she landed one of Camilla's ultimate combos and snagged a set off him — a genuine highlight.
It was one of the combos I'd demonstrated over and over in the training grounds during my so-called lectures for viewers.
So her claim that she'd practiced Camilla while watching my streams hadn't been empty talk after all.
If she could pull that off in a real match, she was a proper Camilla player in her own right.
Her tier was only Silver, and she had lost to Jaejun — but her effort and fighting spirit had come through loud and clear. That was enough for me.
Even so, Yu Sia couldn't seem to take my praise at face value. Her head slowly drooped.
"Then… since I lost, is that it…? Does that mean Jaejun is becoming KayakTube's editor…?"
"Ah, about that."
The thick disappointment on Yu Sia's face was hard to miss.
I considered teasing her a little longer — then took one look at that expression and decided to just tell her the truth.
"I'm hiring both of you."
"What?"
"Both of you are my editors now. Since things turned out this way, we might as well run it two-man."
KayakTube would operate year-round on a two-shift system!
Successful Vtubers supposedly had entire editing teams of their own, so employing two people was practically modest by comparison.
Starting out with two editors from day one was unusual, sure — but if I thought of it as investing a little extra, it wasn't out of the question.
"Thank you, thank you!"
"Thank you for hiring us, boss."
"Hearing 'boss' all of a sudden feels weird."
Yu Sia shot up from her PC bang chair and fired off ninety-degree bows in rapid succession, while Kim Jaejun offered a single deep nod of his own.
It was a scene completely out of place for a PC bang, and the surrounding stares started to gather in a faintly awkward way.
"I'd even work for free…."
"For free? For real? So I can just work you to the bone without paying you?"
"Boss, that doesn't work for me. I need the money."
"I'm kidding, kidding. Like I'd actually not pay you."
At the end of the day, I'd made this call because I liked both of them. They both seemed like decent people with good personalities. Maybe meeting them in person really had been the right answer after all — a small laugh slipped out of me.
"Shall we go grab dinner? We can talk Vtube stuff while we're at it."
"And that's how it went. Yep. So, my dear friends — subscriptions, likes, and notification bells. You're going to smash those buttons for me, right?"
A brand-new Vtube channel. The name: Kayak. I spun the mouse cursor around the freshly created page in lazy circles, prodding my viewers along.
"Hmm, not going to subscribe, huh… Then I might just start getting some bad ideas…."
The moment I hovered my mouse over one particular nickname, the tail tucked right between the legs.
"We're all doing this for each other's benefit here, so let's keep things friendly. I hired two people, which means the money going out just doubled. You guys said it yourselves — hire both of them. The vote split right down the middle, so I took both. That means you all need to subscribe hard, watch the videos, and promote me to everyone you know, right?"
"I don't have much money, okay? I'm not some rich kid, and all I do is stream — where would the money come from. Right now I'm just spending what I saved up before, but, uh. If things don't work out, adjustments will happen. Cut it down to one editor, or just learn editing myself and run the whole thing solo. Aaah, wait — let's not start with the doom and gloom already. Let's have some hope here. If it works out, that's great, right? And for me to succeed, what do we need? All of you helping me out a ton~."
Thankfully, the money I'd earned back when I was still a guy had carried over intact even after the world rewrote itself.
Sinking that money into a bold investment was exactly what I was doing now — and that was how the sudden "Kayak is a rich kid" theory had been born.
I was still rambling on about how I was just spending old savings when—
Is there going to be a 10,000-subscriber event?
"Thanks for the thousand-won donation. A ten-thousand-sub event? Isn't ten thousand a little early. I just barely crossed a thousand."
Even a thousand was honestly a huge number from my perspective. Back in the day I'd run streams that couldn't even pull a hundred viewers — and the moment I asked people to subscribe on stream, we breezed past a thousand like it was nothing.
I still felt dazed, but it felt good. At this rate, maybe I really would start printing money through Vtube.
More importantly — an event. An event, huh. A ten-thousand-subscriber event….
"I don't know, nothing's coming to mind right away. A Q&A? Isn't that too basic. Do a boob cam… is that the boob cam I think it is? RiriyangOfWonderland, what on earth are you saying…. You can't talk like that. Go cool your head for a bit. Oh — the editors I just met are pretty good at Abyss too, so maybe a Camilla coaching content series?"
"Oh, by the way — one of the editors is a woman. You know the Abyss Gallery padak? SiaSia. Meeting her in person, she was ridiculously cute. Her tier? Silver."
Mention a woman and the whole place loses its mind. The reaction was so easy to read that a laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it.
Revealing that one of the editors — Yu Sia — was a woman was something I'd already gotten her consent for.
She'd volunteered to step forward and manage my chat herself once her gender was public. In other words, she was offering to take on the role of the so-called True Silver Sword.
When I asked whether she could handle that on top of editing, she said she'd do it in her free time. She watched my streams in her free time anyway, she claimed.
From her perspective, there were a lot of chats that crossed the line, and if nobody managed them, they'd only get worse.
It didn't fully land for me. Sure, the occasional incomprehensible message popped up, but overall I thought my chat was pretty decent.
Still, if she was volunteering to manage it herself, there was no reason to turn her down — so I granted True Silver Sword status to both Yu Sia and Kim Jaejun. People had been telling me now and then to pick chat managers anyway, so this worked out perfectly.
"Anyway — two editors hired, Vtube channel created. For the time being, one video a day. I'll make sure they go up, so please give us lots of love. Today I'm just here for a status update, so we'll keep it casual—"
A grand BGM roared to life, and the viewers started cheering.
I'd heard that in some streams, people actually left the moment a game booted up — but our room didn't seem to have that problem.
That was a relief. Sitting around for hours rambling with no set topic was something I simply couldn't do.
The familiar screen lit up, and I queued into a match right away.
"Rank climbing time. The tournament's over, so we'll take it slow and grind points…. A goal? I don't really have one. But I should at least hit Challenger by the end of the season."
The moment the words left my mouth, a queue popped.