That's Not How You Play the Game
Streamer Bernie was in a good mood.
Nothing quite matched the high of a game going exactly the way you wanted it to.
The way anyone who's ever picked up a controller has, at least once, pictured themselves starring in a highlight reel — Bernie was convinced her play right now was highlight-reel material.
Every time she pulled the trigger, enemies dropped. Even the surprise ambushes she hadn't seen coming, she turned around with raw mechanics and made them pay for it.
Two enemies were charging her head-on. Their last ambush had already failed, and they were still coming back for more. To Bernie, they looked no different from moths diving into a flame.
For the record, she was the flame.
Tat-tang!
She laid down suppression fire at once and closed the distance. Anyone who'd just lost the initiative would duck behind the nearest cover to keep the damage down.
What they wouldn't realize was that that choice was going to cost them their lives.
Just as she'd predicted, they ducked behind cover. This was the window — the moment they couldn't see what she was doing. Bernie broke into a run toward their hiding spot. The full-sprint perk she'd taken to close gaps fast finally earned its keep.
Too late, the enemy sensed something was off and peeked to check the situation.
Bernie was already in their face. She opened fire without a second's hesitation on the one lifting his gun. In a single beat, holes punched through his body, and one of them was dead.
The fight wasn't over.
The player who'd been covering right beside the corpse lit up his muzzle. Too late to dodge.
A faint smile touched the enemy's mouth — he was already sure he'd won.
Bernie crushed that smile the way you'd grind it under a heel. She snatched up the corpse in front of her.
The dead player's body made an excellent shield. The remaining enemy had already burned through his magazine and couldn't put up any real resistance. Bernie's rounds took him anyway.
Satisfied enough with her own play, she flicked a glance at the chat window off to the side.
Maybe chat was running hotter than usual. Messages kept stacking, scrolling without a pause. The strange part was that none of it was about her.
Why, on her stream, was everyone talking about someone named Unknown?
Bernie the streamer knew the name, at least in outline. A female player who'd blown up not long after starting the game, accused of hacking. The important word there was female — and one who was good, the same way Bernie was.
On top of that, she'd heard the collab stream with Jump had sent Unknown's popularity through the roof.
Chat had basically turned into an Unknown fan meetup. A laugh almost slipped out of her — and then the comments that actually got under her skin started showing up, one by one.
What? I'm trash compared to Unknown?
KWAANG!
Kang Suha — the woman who streamed as Bernie — saw the chat rolling in and, before she knew it, had slammed her fist into the wall of the building.
She was one of those people who'd poured their entire life into games. What set her apart from the usual addict was that she had monstrous talent to go with it.
In anything that demanded mechanics, she was basically a god. A few months into a title and her name was sitting pretty on the ranked leaderboard. That was just a normal Tuesday for her, and she loved the noise that followed every time she cracked ranker.
Last of Quantum had been no exception.
A few months since she'd started. Just a few days ago, live on stream, she'd punched through Platinum and hit Diamond. Even now she was putting on a performance she genuinely believed was overwhelming.
So why was the community worshipping some player named Unknown instead of her?
The people stamping her as worse than Unknown sat wrong in her chest. For Bernie, who took a quiet pride in being among the best in Last of Quantum, this was not something she could swallow.
She could live with a lot of things. Losing at a game was not one of them. She'd rather die.
"Did you guys see that play just now? That was a perfect mechanics play, I think."
She tried, with some effort, to drag the conversation back onto herself. Chat's consensus did not budge. They were still busy deifying Unknown.
Bernie, who'd been watching the window, scowled. She stopped the match, scrolled chat back up, and started hunting for something in earnest.
She had about two thousand people watching. Two thousand viewers did not mean two thousand people typing. Plenty of them had the stream on in the background, or treated it like radio and never touched the keyboard.
She dragged through the flood that had been pouring in without a break until it looked like it had frozen — then peeled one window out of chat and parked it in front of her face.
Handle: Unknown.
Among the streamer-only buttons next to the ID, she hit chat history. It unspooled in a rush.
is that even the right shooting stance?
you'll blow your shoulder out shooting like that
why are you reloading NOW? is the sidearm just decoration?
Every line was designed to get under her skin.
Looking at that history, she finally understood why chat kept calling her trash compared to Unknown. To anyone scrolling past, it would sound like this person actually played better than she did.
Like you're so good.
Bernie clenched the rifle in her hands until it felt like it might snap, and when she opened her mouth her eyes had gone sharp.
"Unknown, you still in the stream? I pulled your chat history. You've been getting on my nerves. Let me see that so-called skill of yours. Mind giving me your Last of Quantum ID?"
A little smirk sat on her face as she looked at chat.
Bernie watched the chat keep climbing with eyes gone cold and still.
Irritation sat in her chest, and disappointment rose up beside it. She'd been ready to see just how good this backseater actually was. If they were Bronze, there was nothing worth expecting.
Why were the people who typed like that almost always all mouth and no skill?
For Bernie, who had never once watched Unknown play, it was the obvious conclusion. A user who'd been accused of hacking, still stuck in Bronze? Rumors really weren't worth the bandwidth.
That didn't mean she was going to let it go.
She fully intended to make it crystal clear who the female player in Last of Quantum actually was.
"Unknown, did you already leave? Or are you hiding because you got scared?"
No matter how long she waited, nothing came through. Figures. No skill, so they got cold feet and ran — that was the thought taking shape when a message suddenly dropped in.
I hadn't planned on typing anything. I was watching livestreams to get a feel for how other people ran a broadcast, not because it was entertaining.
Then I came back to myself and realized I'd already been in chat.
In the flood of messages pouring up the screen, mine got buried. Nobody paid them any attention. Somewhere in the back of my mind, though, I thought, Is this the fun of watching streams?
Picking apart a streamer's play, line by line, was actually pretty fun.
Bernie herself seemed too locked into the game to even see my messages, but that didn't really matter. The stress I hadn't noticed piling up was bleeding off. Watching a stream was more entertaining than I'd expected.
The problem, if there was one, was that the account still logged into Trisch was the Unknown account.
One message like that, and every eye in the room snapped over.
All I'd done was dump my own thoughts into chat. The streamer, apparently, was not taking it that way.
"...Should I just leave."
Kill the stream, close the site, and run. That was the impulse.
The real reason I'd been typing was that it was frustrating to watch. Getting invited by Bernie in Last of Quantum didn't scare me in the slightest — I didn't have a single thought that I would lose.
I was still worried, though.
A bad look on my second stream hadn't been enough. Now my third appearance was going to be on someone else's broadcast, and I'd gotten caught backseating. I bit my lip without meaning to, turning it over.
Then another thought hit me.
Even if I ran now, the second I went live those viewers would come pouring in anyway.
Better to take the beating first. Maybe walking out there now was the smart play. If I handled it well, it might even bury the talk about the drinking stream.
The streamer's next line made the decision for me.
Tap-tap-tap.
I started typing.
The second I hit enter —
Thud.
I'd done it. I'd even thrown in a pointless little provocation on the way out.
I didn't regret it.