A Feel-Good Potion
Beside the screen as it faded to black, chat was still scrolling at a terrifying clip. If I kept watching, I'd only get attached, so I just turned it off.
The last viewer count I'd seen was a little over two hundred.
...That kind of attention was too much for me.
With the tension gone, my body sagged into the Connector's cushion. First times always came wrapped in high-strung nerves. Maybe I'd taken streaming a little too lightly.
I'd thought playing while watching chat would be easy. Actually doing it was another story. Keeping your head in the match and reading incoming messages at the same time was no small feat. On top of that, I had to think of things to say.
Jump had made it look effortless, but I guess that's why they called him a big-corp streamer. There was a reason people said that if someone else's job looked easy, it was because they were good at it.
Still... it was fun.
I'd probably fire up the next stream when the timing felt right. If I kept at it, talking to people would start to feel natural eventually.
"Nnngh~"
I stretched, working the stiffness out of my body. I'd been moving hard in-game, but in the real world I might as well have been sitting still. Loosening up afterward had become something of a ritual.
"Maybe I should start working out."
Some baseline stamina wouldn't hurt. If I kept coming out of games with my body locked up, it was going to get in the way of daily life. Long sessions especially would be a problem.
I checked the time. It was past eight in the morning. Going out to exercise at the hour everyone else started their day almost made it feel like I could kick things off productively.
In reality, I'd just woken up from a twelve-hour sleep binge. Not that a shut-in needed to care about that kind of thing.
Hitting a gym right away was probably too much. Even working out required a foundation of fitness first. Starting with some light jogging seemed like a good idea.
...A thought that didn't last long.
I was about to find out just how weak this body really was. I'd figured it was frail, but I'd never pushed it to the limit, so I'd been thinking of it as simply not having much muscle.
"This is... a little too much, isn't it?"
I'd only been running for about thirty minutes, and my body was already screaming. I hadn't even been going fast. I'd kept it to a slightly brisk walk, trying not to overdo it. Even so, I was already gasping, and my legs were trembling like a leaf.
At this rate it was practically a pseudo-body. Something that resembled a body without quite being one.
Entertaining that useless thought, I dropped onto a nearby bench. Catching my breath, I looked around. People were moving with purpose—office workers in suits heading in, students with backpacks on their way to school. Everyone was living so diligently.
I hadn't even decided what to eat for lunch.
Yap! Yap! Yap!
A sharp, loud noise shattered my daydream. My eyes drifted down toward the source, under the bench.
A fist-sized dog was barking its head off. A Maltese. Was that even a Maltese? I was staring at it like I might eat it, but the little bastard didn't care. Its shrill yapping showed no sign of stopping.
Then again, if it had any sense, it wouldn't have started barking in the first place.
"Hah... hah...! I'm so sorry. She just bolted all of a sudden."
The owner came running a beat too late and tried to collect the dog. Watching them glance around and gently tug the leash, I almost felt sorry for them. Why I, the one-sided victim here, should feel that way was beyond me.
All of this because that mutt had taken one look at me sitting on the bench and started barking. I suddenly understood every old man who'd ever yelled at someone to shut their dog up.
Go take a dump somewhere else, you miserable little beast.
"No, seriously, why is she like this. I'm sorry, she's just got that kind of personality... I'm really sorry."
After a long tussle with the dog, the owner finally grabbed the leash and all but dragged it away from me. Between wanting to be gentle with the animal and wanting to get out of this awkward situation, the latter had won. They hadn't yanked the leash even while the dog was screaming its lungs out. I supposed the embarrassment of drawing a crowd had finally kicked in.
Even as it was being hauled off, the mutt kept looking back and wouldn't shut up. I should've smacked it across the snout.
I'd come out for a nice workout, and this was what I got. No—"coming out for a nice workout" had been a paradox from the start. For someone with zero athletic ability, a pleasant workout simply didn't exist.
A heavy body. Legs still trembling. And a mood ruined by a barking dog, as a bonus. I shouldn't have gotten cocky and gone out for a walk. My mood had sunk all the way into the dirt.
Honestly, this had been a foreseeable future. Given Lee Harin's physical stats, I should have expected exactly this. I'd gritted my teeth and done it anyway, hoping that if I turned it into a habit, it might become a routine I could actually live with.
The plan had been a proper training run. Too bad. Just stepping outside and wandering the neighborhood park for a bit had me gasping. Day one of a big resolution, and the plan was already in pieces. At this point, all I had left was the urge to sit here and photosynthesize.
I'd have to pace myself next time. I'd overdone it on day one.
From the bench, the sky overhead was a clear blue. The park was small enough that you could see cars passing right nearby, but the outdoor air, after so long, felt surprisingly clean.
At least the first stream had wrapped up well. If I'd botched that too, my mood might have punched through the seafloor and kept going.
Sitting in the warm sun with a cool breeze on my face, useless thoughts drifted in. Maybe that mutt had been barking at me to get a grip.
Going home like this didn't feel like it would improve anything. Sometimes you had to invest a little time in changing your mood. I wasn't planning anything grand like a trip. If you looked around, there were more mood-lifters nearby than you'd think.
A feel-good potion, for instance.
What. Why. What.
I was a proper adult. I could drink soju, couldn't I?
Sure, if I were thinking about my body, not drinking would be best. But it wasn't like people keeled over clutching their livers after a single drink. The human body wasn't that fragile. Which meant a drink wouldn't be a problem.
...I couldn't say no to a drink.
A woman's voice, filtered through machine-tone TTS, made Jump snap.
"Do you have any idea how many hours I've been live? And you're saying that?"
Jump had dozed off after setting up Unknown's stream last time. By the time he opened his eyes, his own scheduled hours were long gone. He'd gone live late, but the audience's goodwill had already hit rock bottom. Chat—and even the community boards—were full of abuse. In the end, Jump had tried to soothe the wrecked sentiment by running a bit where donations extended the stream.
This was the result.
A stream he'd started at midnight was still going, nonstop, past ten in the morning. He wasn't a joke machine you could just press for bits, so of course he was physically wrecked.
Anyone want to stream for me?
He was staring at the three hours still left on the clock, hitting a hard wall of existential fatigue, when—as if even the heavens had taken pity on him—his quiet Discord started chiming without pause.
Ding—
Ding—
Who'd be messaging me at this hour?
He opened it with that question in mind. The sender was none other than Unknown. Had something gone wrong with the setup he'd done for her?
The incoming messages were... off. At first he'd written it off as a simple typo, but they kept coming in like that, and the doubt started to settle in.