How Nice That Would Have Been
How nice that would have been.
Two percent.
A number that brings a certain famous sports drink to mind.
Exactly two percent left. Two percent of what, you ask? My phone battery. It was sitting at a miserable two percent.
I'd just gotten home after having dinner with Sihyeon. By then my phone was already drowning in a backlog of messages and missed calls, and more were still pouring in from people I knew in real time.
No wonder the thing had been running hot. It wasn't just ordinary overheating.
I'd finally checked my phone, seen the mountain of missed calls, and almost dialed someone back to ask what the hell was going on — then stopped. If this many people were trying to reach me, something serious had clearly happened. But at the time, for reasons I couldn't quite pin down, I was just too tired to deal with it.
I'd caught a solid nap on the bus ride home, and after walking Sihyeon back and breathing in the night air on the way, my head had finally cleared.
So I started piecing the situation together with the grim determination of someone sitting down to a pile of overdue homework. It didn't take long. The texts from my ever-so-thoughtful acquaintances painted a pretty clear picture all on their own.
Yu Sia, Kim Jaejun, Ririyang, Hangang, Hakchu, Limetaq — even Nikang, who I barely talked to these days. How had all of them found out about something I didn't even know had happened to me, and so fast?
I supposed that was the difference between pros and everyone else. No matter how quickly I'd grown, you couldn't just ignore the gap in experience. Veterans didn't look down on freshly commissioned second lieutenants for nothing. Not that I was comparing myself to a second lieutenant or anything.
Pointless thoughts kept chaining one after another. That happened to me a lot on ordinary days, but this was different. This was pure avoidance — spinning out idle nonsense because I had no real solution for the mess in front of me. The kind of logic that went: Camilla is pretty, Camilla is me, therefore I am pretty…
"Mm."
I shook my head hard. My focus kept slipping. I needed to figure out a response, not keep dodging the issue. Nothing got done that way.
After getting the broad strokes from my friends' messages, I decided to dig deeper and logged into the Abyss Gallery to get a closer look at what had actually gone down.
The Abyss Gallery, sitting in its usual first-place spot on the real-time hot list with a massive crowd piled in, somehow felt off.
Call it an inflated sense of self-importance if you want, but I had this creeping feeling they were talking about me in there.
Well, shit.
They say bad premonitions are never wrong, and sure enough, every single post on the popular list had the name Kayak in it.
I let out a short sigh and started reading from the bottom up.
True to a gallery dedicated to Abyss, today's main topic was the match between Fusion Gaming and Optimum. For hours leading up to game time, people had been going at it full throttle — calling each other dogs and spies, the whole routine, exactly like the hardcore sports fans from my old world.
Up to that point, nothing looked particularly wrong. A bunch of idiots having a great time just looking at each other's faces. Morons entertaining morons. Fine by me.
Kayak's name first hit the popular list on the next page. Judging by the post, it was right after Fusion Gaming had pulled out a surprise Camilla pick.
The write-up was pretty ridiculous — claiming Kayak had somehow influenced even a pro team. Because it leaned more toward jokes than seriousness, the comments were nothing but ahaha yeah exactly type replies.
The real punchline was everything that came after: holy-site pilgrimages, how the hell did you know lmao, that kind of thing. Looking at the timestamps, those had all gone up after Junhyuk's interview.
The real problem posts were two pages further down. Also written after Junhyuk's interview — starting with speculation about whether Kayak was going pro, then moving on to "the cute little kid in the audience" and "that Camilla girl who was just in the broadcast booth," before finally landing on a post titled Why the Camilla Lookalike Cosplayer Is Kayak.eu.
I had no idea how the conversation had jumped to that conclusion so suddenly, but that was how bait worked. It shifted constantly. I just wished this particular situation hadn't gone the same way.
The comment section under a post that had racked up both massive upvotes and downvotes was a full-blown war zone. My side, your side — a heated debate raging over Kayak's appearance.
The comments ran so long that scrolling never seemed to hit the bottom. It wasn't like I'd never joined gallery arguments before, but being the actual subject of one left me with a strangely complicated feeling.
A little cringe, a little skin-crawling, and just a touch of anger? Complicated and subtle, I guess.
That was about where I closed the gallery and set my phone down. I'd mapped out all the bait already. No point wading through more unproductive garbage.
To sum it up, the current controversy boiled down to two things. First — and this one was a bit messy — the Kayak-going-pro discourse.
More precisely: was Kayak going to debut as a pro gamer, when exactly had her connection to the Fusion Gaming pros started, and a grab bag of other pro-scene-adjacent chatter.
Second: somehow, some way, people had decided the Camilla cosplayer caught on the broadcast cameras might be me.
Mm. Keep saying "controversy" and it starts sounding like I actually did something wrong. Let's swap that out for "bait."
For the record, I hadn't even known I'd been caught on the broadcast cameras. Only now were some of the puzzle pieces clicking into place. So that was why people had been staring.
During the short break between games one and two, the image of me coming back from the bathroom and ruffling Sihyeon's hair while she waved her picket sign with everything she had had been permanently preserved in the gallery. Including the part where I turned my head and stared straight at the camera.
At the time, I'd looked over because of some vague sense of wrongness. Camilla's razor-sharp instincts, I supposed — picking up on a camera's gaze I couldn't even properly see from where I was sitting.
A flicker of regret hit me — if only I'd noticed sooner — but it didn't last.
Even if I had, what then? Cover my face? Yeah, no. That wasn't happening either.
Part of me fretted over what to do, and another part just went, well, I guess that's how it is. Maybe because from the moment I'd decided to go out, I'd already expected something like this would happen eventually.
A two-faced heart. They say a woman's heart is like a reed in the wind, and that was exactly what this was. I couldn't even tell what I wanted, or how I actually felt.
The one silver lining was that only my time in the broadcast seating area had been immortalized online.
The stretch where Sihyeon and I had been taking photos in the photo zone — all those pictures with the other cosplayers — existed only as text. No visual evidence had survived.
I'd asked people not to get me in frame if they could help it, and if they were going to post anything, to cover my face. But I knew perfectly well how many people in the world ignored requests like that.
I had to call it luck. If things had gone differently, I wouldn't be sitting here this calmly.
I'd have been dealing with a full personal-info leak and the secondhand embarrassment on top of it. Reading posts like ahaha look at Kayak fully immersing in character, so cute lmao while thrashing around under my blanket.
Anyway. Things had ended up like this…
So — did I turn the stream on or not? Had the cam I'd only ever kept around for hand-cam finally found its true purpose?
How nice it would have been if every single thing in the world could just be ruled right or wrong on the spot, no agonizing required.
Late at night, I sat in front of my dark computer screen and thought about it for a while.