An Absurd Request
I never much liked smurfing.
It left me feeling like garbage—the kind of person who picks on people weaker than themselves.
Of course, you'd be hard-pressed to find an idiot who goes around bullying people stronger than they are. Still, most of the people who smurf are unsavory types who've hit a wall with their own skill and take it out on the weak to blow off steam.
What's fun about killing someone who can't even fight back? Where's the thrill in that? It's nothing but self-satisfaction. And what value is there in the satisfaction you get from crushing people weaker than you?
Conquest is something that happens when you overtake someone standing higher than you. Anything else is just a kind of self-soothing—telling yourself you're better than that guy. Even if you can't reach it yet, the meaning lies in working and working until you arrive.
So I didn't like smurfing. There was nothing to gain from lording it over the weak. Value only comes when you surpass someone above you.
But when do things in this world ever go the way you want? Just as you can't live doing only what you feel like, it turned out I couldn't simply refuse to smurf because I didn't want to.
This was the game company's fault for placing me in such a low tier to begin with. If you've got a grievance, take it up with them. It's not like I'm doing this because I enjoy it.
...No matter how much I told myself that, it didn't change the fact that what I was doing was smurfing.
The opponent was charging me head-on. Until now, this had been a player who moved carefully, reading the situation as they went. Now they were showing brainless play without a thought for what was behind them.
They'd probably died so many times they'd completely tilted. I couldn't say I didn't understand. The scoreboard listed eighteen deaths, and if you watched your teammates flaming you in chat to stop dying already, anyone would lose the will to play.
That didn't mean I had any intention of dying on purpose for them. If anything, dying on purpose would be an insult. Intentionally throwing because your opponent is weak is nothing but looking down on them. Showing at least a baseline of skill is basic manners. Especially—there was nothing more vicious than toying with someone before you killed them.
Bang!
A gunshot cracked through the air, and the charging user's head punched open as they crumpled to the floor. Running in a straight line with no movement and no cover made them easy to hit.
I flicked my gaze over to the chat. Viewership had climbed since earlier; messages were scrolling faster than before.
Why was chat reacting so well?
Even with my short streaming career, I knew smurfing wasn't a good look. In an internet broadcasting scene where image mattered, slaughtering beginners was a double-edged sword that ate away at your lifespan. You could pull a hot reaction out of it, sure—but the ugly voices were bound to come with it.
So why? Why was the chat this clean?
The occasional person still threw out slurs or sexually harassing messages, but they got buried under the rest of the chat and vanished. Even granting that Last of Quantum was an unfriendly game for beginners, I hadn't expected it to be this bad.
A match with the balance this thoroughly broken wasn't going to last. Once you'd seized the initiative, the flow didn't change easily. It was one-sided slaughter, plain and simple.
The enemies who respawned couldn't show the same focus as before. All they did was blame each other in chat. And so my head naturally filled with thoughts of this first stream.
As expected of a first time, there were plenty of difficulties. Checking the chat constantly was hard, and I'd jumped more than once at the sudden blast of a donation alert. Still, getting a real reaction to my play was more thrilling than I'd expected. Once I got used to this environment, wouldn't playing games alone start to feel bland?
On the flip side, knowing they were watching my play did put a mental strain on me. The stream runtime wasn't even two hours yet, and I was somehow already tired.
Part of me wanted to end it here, but there still wasn't a highlight worth remembering. You needed at least one memorable, explosive scene if you wanted people to come back next time, right? This match was as good as decided. Killing enemies who'd already given up couldn't be called a highlight.
I'd planned to keep the first stream short, but since it had come to this, filling out the full two hours didn't seem so bad.
The game ended with the enemies' surrender.
A light burst of fireworks popped across my vision, gilding the word in style.
They'd put some effort into letting you savor the win, but I felt absolutely nothing. The fun had already been gone since the moment the enemies gave up.
Bronze 3 → Bronze 2
-89 LP → 9 LP
Before I knew it, I'd hit Bronze 2. Apparently the structure was that every 100 points bumped you up one sub-tier. Considering a win gave you as much as about 20 points, that meant I needed to win about ten more games to reach Silver.
I was thinking I should at least hit Silver—the rank where people were judged to know the basics of the game—when a donation came in.
The mechanical voice unique to donations cut through. It was true I was playing most games with nothing but a pistol and a knife. I used the M16 as a primary now and then, but the number of times I did was few enough to count on one hand. It was a weapon that only did single-shot and burst fire to begin with, so I barely had occasion to use it.
If I bought a weapon, I could definitely play a bit more comfortably. Like other people who swapped guns depending on the situation, I could pick different loadouts based on the terrain or the opponent.
But on the other hand, I also thought this: if I bought a weapon here and now, wouldn't that be too unfair to the newbies? What you could do with just a pistol and a knife was limited. If I started swapping weapons on top of that, wouldn't I be crushing the other users' hopes too thoroughly?
I figured I should hold back at least until my tier went up some. And more than anything, I hadn't been playing long, so I didn't have much money yet. I'd already more or less decided on the weapons I wanted to buy. The good ones were expensive, after all.
"I'm planning to buy one once I climb a bit. Once I hit around Silver, I'll probably pick one up."
A ding sounded as a queue popped, and I accepted it without thinking. When the loading finished, the connected players were checking their weapons, waiting for the match to start. I naturally started looking over what I was holding too. A Glock 17 and a tactical knife—there wasn't much to check.
The moment prep time ended, users sprinted out. I followed behind them, glancing at the map visible in a corner of my vision. It wasn't that wide a map, but it had a lot of cover—buildings, wrecked cars, that sort of thing. It looked like there'd be more small skirmishes and terrain-based ambushes than a drawn-out fight.
Allies were already dying; combat had started. Just as I was about to move in earnest—
"Are you Unknown?"
A user on the enemy team called my nickname like they knew me. I hadn't felt a hint of presence, so I was briefly startled, then quickly kept my expression and looked at them.
"Whoa, I wondered when I saw the nickname, but looking at the character I can tell for sure. I watched the video you shot with Jump."
Paying no mind to whether I even wanted to hear it, the enemy user rattled on at a machine-gun clip. I considered ignoring them and just killing them. I didn't want to get tangled in something annoying by revealing I was a streamer. But I wasn't that famous a streamer, and being cold to someone who might become my viewer didn't seem like basic courtesy.
"So you know me."
"Yes! Of course I do. You drew huge attention from the very start of the game...! Wait, that's not it right now. Ah, of all places to run into you here."
The other user suddenly muttered to themselves, hesitating.
"...What?"
Lose, just like that? What kind of request was that. I frowned so obviously anyone could see it and stared at the other player.
"..I'm really sorry. I'm in a promotion match right now. If I just win this one game, I hit Silver... I'm asking you like this. Is there any way?"
It was the most absurd thing I'd heard in all my time playing games. A promotion match, so please throw.
The viewers answered for me. Of course, the other person couldn't see any of this chat.