Sometimes You Need to Let It Out
"I went out for a walk for the first time in a while and ended up in a foul mood. Plus I figured the first stream had gone pretty well in its own way, so I had a drink as a little celebration. I didn't even have that much."
I was laying out a grand explanation for doing the very thing I'd been told not to. Whether that counted as a skill, I was getting better at it — and the fact that I was getting used to this at all was almost funny.
Honestly, I had plenty I wanted to say. People have to move on impulse sometimes. Clamping down on every urge never ends well. Whatever you bottle up is going to explode eventually.
All I'd done was bleed it off with a drink before it got that far.
It wasn't as if I'd gone out and caused a scene. Streaming after a few drinks was the only thing I'd done wrong. That hardly deserved this much of a dressing-down.
It wasn't like she was a mother policing her kid… Did the nagging have to be this relentless? No — calling it nagging didn't even cover it. Listening to my little sister's voice go cold and flat over the line was closer to psychological torture.
I knew it came from worry, which made it hard to push back. Still, my desperate excuses seemed to have landed, at least a little.
A voice that had softened from before came through the phone.
"Even so. How could you drink until you couldn't even tell right from wrong?"
"I drank in moderation, so you don't have to worry. I just played it a little drunker than I was because it was a stream."
I gathered the soju bottles rolling around the floor — the ones that had been getting on my nerves — and stacked them against one wall. A moderate amount?
That kind of thing was different for everyone.
"Alright. Have you eaten? You probably finished everything I made for you."
"Don't worry about that either. I've been eating it properly."
Even after that, my sister's nagging showed no sign of ending. She'd already come by a few days ago, and still the worry never ran out.
I was just grateful she hadn't offered to come over to the studio apartment. If she had, she would have taken one look at the soju I'd hauled in because I couldn't be bothered to go back out, and I would have gotten another earful. In the worst case, she might even have said we should live together again, like last time.
The call finally ended when I asked if it wasn't about time we went to sleep.
I was lucky tomorrow was a weekday. If it had been the weekend, we would have talked until the sun came up.
It was early dawn, the sun not even up yet. Even if I streamed in the evening, I had far too much time left. They say the early bird catches the worm, but at this hour, even the worms were probably asleep.
It seemed like a good time to do the stream-hopping I'd been putting off.
It wasn't as if I was getting worked up to spy on other people's broadcasts. Call it simple curiosity from a brand-new streamer.
I just wanted to see how other people actually ran their streams. It had to be better than killing time mindlessly on Newtube.
Watching live streams with a modest bowl of hangover ramen at my computer desk… that didn't sound bad at all.
The platform I was going to browse was, of course, Trisch.
It was the most famous streaming site in Korea right now, and the biggest.
I logged on and looked around for a bit. Game streams made up the bulk of it. The games were split by tags, and the one with the most viewers was, unsurprisingly, Last of Quantum.
There were also people running something called Just Chatting — broadcasts built around talking with viewers, covering whatever was going on in the real world or just daily life.
"Just Chatting, huh…"
No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn't come up with a single thing to say.
Muttering to myself, I scrolled through Trisch and looked over the streams. Up at the very top, where the viewer counts were highest, the vast majority of streamers were playing Last of Quantum.
It made sense. For a game with that kind of worldwide popularity, even the streamers were flooding into it. Broadcasting a game that already had a huge player base was obviously the smarter play. Stream something nobody was playing, and nobody was going to care.
I scrolled slowly, looking at the streams one by one.
Some had a few dozen viewers, some a few hundred. The bigger ones were pulling in thousands.
Then, as I kept scrolling, an interesting title caught my eye.
Diamond, Easy as Hell
Judging by the game tag, it was Last of Quantum.
Diamond. I had been curious what the skill looked like up in the high tiers.
I was stuck in Bronze, and the level of play was painfully low. I'd expected people to at least have the basics of how to respond, but the second it looked like they were about to die, they just gave up. Probably that whole I'll just respawn and fight again mindset.
Which was exactly why I wanted to see what the game looked like once you climbed.
As if something had taken hold of me, I clicked into a streamer named Bernie.
"I told you guys, right? Once you get used to the game, your rank climbs fast."
I flinched a little at the voice coming through.
I'd heard that Last of Quantum had almost no female players so many times the words had worn a groove in my ears. I'd even heard of female streamers who jumped in without knowing what they were getting into and quit on the spot.
But the voice I'd just heard was unmistakably a woman's.
It was a little husky and packed with force, like her voice had only half-finished changing — but she was definitely a woman.
There were enough viewers that the chat was flying. At a glance, at least ten messages a second were scrolling up the window.
The odd part was how different the atmosphere was from my own stream.
As far as I remembered, my viewers had kept it pretty clean, aside from the ones throwing sexual harassment.
Maybe they were still minding the line because I hadn't been streaming long.
I sat up properly and started watching Bernie's stream in earnest.
"……"
And not long after, I lost interest in the broadcast itself. Not that the streamer or the chat reactions weren't still new — I left Bernie's window open for that — but her gameplay was, how to put this.
"She's actually terrible."
Everything on screen was so far below the bar it hurt. Put a little harshly, it didn't look like a war game where blood and meat went flying. It looked like watching elementary schoolers run around with toy guns.
The raw mechanics looked excellent. Her reaction speed was high-level too. Beyond that, there was nothing to look at. Put simply, she had no eye for the situation at all.
She kept dying to the most obvious ambushes, or dying because she reloaded without thinking. It happened constantly.
"…Why would you do it like that."
Words kept leaking out of me as I stared at the screen.
"Ha. That's not how you shoot."
Her stance was a mess, like she'd learned marksmanship off some half-baked tutorial and called it a day. The actual tutorial had to have covered the basics, so why was she like this? Watching a woman play was making me deeply uncomfortable.
Is her brain just decoration?
When the rounds were flying off in weird directions, you were supposed to notice something was wrong.
The strange part was that even shooting like that, her accuracy was good.
It was almost impressive — like she was calculating the deviation and firing through it on purpose.
"No… you could've just knifed him in the side just now and it would've been over."
Even so, the frustration wouldn't go away. The longer I watched, the more a slow, rising anger sat in my gut, and I found myself biting my lip and clenching my fist without meaning to.
Why was she fighting like it was kids playing pretend?
And the even worse part was the viewers, praising it like it was something special.
Was there not a single person in that entire chat who thought any of this looked wrong?
Look closely and it was weirdness on top of weirdness, and they were still gasping and talking it up like it was amazing. I couldn't understand it at all.
In the end, after holding it in and holding it in, I put my hands on the keyboard.
I was hammering the keys when the chat's reaction caught my eye. For some reason, the messages coming in did not look normal.
I wondered if they were furious at some backseater who'd shown up out of nowhere — except they were throwing out cheers and gasps of amazement, which didn't quite fit.
And not long after, I found out why.
That was when it hit me.
The account I was logged into on Trisch was the Unknown account I used for streaming.