That Sticky Feeling
A Trisch streamer, and a Newtuber besides.
In practice, Seong Eunha was neither. At twenty-two, she was a Hakko — a micro-streamer who had failed to catch fire on either platform.
She had dropped out of university and thrown herself into both, body and soul. There isn't a person alive who doesn't want to be the best at the thing they care about, and Seong Eunha was no exception.
She wanted to go big-corp. She wanted to be popular. She wanted lively back-and-forth with her viewers, she wanted to make money — the ambitions she carried in her chest were enormous. Reality, however, had no interest in keeping pace with them.
Her Trisch channel sat at six hundred twenty-three followers. Mid-broadcast, her average concurrent viewership never cracked ten. Her personal Newtube channel, Amber Tube, had four hundred ninety-two subscribers, and her videos hovered at a dismal hundred to two hundred views apiece.
Streamer or Newtuber, nothing had come within shouting distance of what she'd hoped for. A full year had already slipped by since she'd quit school and gone all-in. Measured against that, the numbers weren't just disappointing. They were brutal.
Seong Eunha knew it. By any honest reading of the scoreboard, she had failed.
Maybe it was greedy to expect, after a single year, to stand on the same line as the big-corp streamers — or the Newtubers sitting on hundreds of thousands of subscribers. If success came that easily, who wouldn't try streaming? Who wouldn't start a Newtube channel?
There was that saying, after all: the ten-thousand-hour rule. To become an expert at anything, you needed at least ten thousand hours of practice. If that was the investment success demanded, she hadn't even put in half. Wanting to make it already, this early, was shameless.
She believed that. She really did.
"...It's not fair."
The world wasn't fair. It didn't hand out chances equally, and the gap in talent was real. Even people who started on the same line produced someone who pulled ahead. Even so — wasn't this too unfair?
Seong Eunha's gaze drifted to the Trisch broadcast open on her monitor.
A beautiful character with long, uncombed black hair streaming behind her was charging the enemy with a shield held out in front — an alien sight in an FPS like Last of Quantum. The streamer everyone had been talking about for days: Unknown. A giant among rookies, too. She hadn't been live for long, and her concurrent viewership had already blown past a thousand like it was nothing. The stream hadn't even been running an hour.
Eunha knew as well as anyone that female Last of Quantum streamers were rare. Fewer people doing it meant it was easier to get popular — that much was true. So why wasn't her stream popular?
Seong Eunha was one of the few women broadcasting Last of Quantum. It was a game that was unkind to newcomers. Even with the mosaic filter on, the cruelty didn't go anywhere. There were plenty of reasons a woman might bounce off it, and she had kept streaming it anyway. By now she had the skill to hold Silver.
So why wasn't her stream popular?
Looks? She didn't think she lost to this Unknown. People had told her she resembled a celebrity. Back in college she'd been popular enough to get called the campus queen.
So it really is the skill, then.
Looked at objectively, Unknown's skill was a wall. Not an ordinary wall — a rampart poured out of steel. In a world ruled by firearms, she was walking around with a sword and a shield. Common sense said you'd be riddled into a honeycomb before you ever got close.
Unknown was playing like common sense didn't apply to her.
An enemy was pouring fire from the front. Having confirmed Unknown had no ranged weapon, they weren't even bothering to take cover — just spraying indiscriminately. A shield could stop bullets, sure, but it was only large enough to cover the upper body. Blocking every round in a hail like that was impossible. And the mobility penalty from carrying the thing would only make closing the distance harder. Anyone watching would have said Unknown had no way to take the kill.
Unknown charged anyway, without a flicker of hesitation. The impacts should have staggered her. Instead her stride only got faster.
As the gap shrank, the opponent swapped weapons — a shotgun, the infamous close-range bully. Even with a shield, stopping a blast that went off in your face was a tall order.
Bang!
For a heartbeat Eunha expected the black-and-white death screen. Then Unknown dropped her center of gravity, slipped in under the shot, and smashed the shield across the enemy in a vicious sweep.
Bang!
The opponent fired in a panic, but they were already reeling from the shield bash; there was no chance of a clean sight picture. The round punched into the sky, and Unknown's blade drove through their chest.
A perfect win.
Anyone else might have paused to savor it. Unknown's character never stopped. She brought the shield up and guarded empty air dead ahead — and in the same instant a sniper's round, announced by a heavy crack from far away, slammed into the face of the shield.
Ballistic material or not, a shield was not supposed to stop a sniper rifle. The reason it had: the instant the bullet struck, she had changed the angle of the plate and bled the impact off.
Eunha's own rank was stuck in Silver, but even she could tell how little sense that play made. Reacting to a blindside ambush wasn't enough — she had deflected the round.
Is that even possible with human reflexes?
That Unknown was overwhelmingly better than her was not something she could deny.
Then again, a stream wasn't decided by game skill alone. She told herself she made up for what she lacked in other ways. So why was the gap still this wide?
Jealousy and inferiority welled up until they filled her chest, and other feelings besides — sticky, gloomy things that kept taking hold of her and wouldn't let go.
She was envious. It felt cheap. Why couldn't she be like that? If she'd had connections with a big-corp streamer like Jump, wouldn't she have ended up the same way? Thought after thought hooked into her and pulled.
"Why... does it come so easy for you...? Some of us... are killing ourselves trying..."
She kept watching Unknown's stream, the words coming out in a sunken voice.
Under a vicious sniper's fire, Unknown looked the other player over with almost lazy composure. No attempt to match their movement. No attempt to close the distance. The sniper rifle spat flame again, a round coming in as if it meant to punch straight through her — and once more Unknown stopped it with perfect shield control.
Light burst where bullet met plate.
Eunha played Last of Quantum. She knew what that was. That was parrying.
"...Hah."
She couldn't swallow the sigh that came with it. The motion was so natural she wondered if she was even looking at a person. The hitching, clunky feel she always had when she logged in and played — there was not a trace of it in Unknown. As easy as breathing. As if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Last of Quantum was a full-dive VR game. Using weapons like that meant you actually had to know how they worked. You couldn't just spray and hide behind a shield the way you did in an ordinary shooter and expect anything to stop. And Unknown was using not only the sword but the shield as if she'd been born with both in her hands.
Before she knew it, Eunha couldn't take her eyes off the stream for even a second.
Deciding the sniping was useless, the enemy player started closing instead, pulling a rifle for suppressive fire. Unknown charged them without even raising the shield.
To anyone else it was insanity. To Unknown, it wasn't.
Ting!
Ting!
The rounds struck the blade and skipped away. It was a sight you would never, ever see in the Last of Quantum Eunha usually played. Then, with a sequence of movement so beautiful it almost hurt to watch, Unknown wrecked the other player in a single breath and drove her sword into the ground.
"Whew... this Sword & Shield Combo is harder than I thought."
She was complaining to her viewers, calling it difficult, and between the beautiful character and that naturally pleasant voice the goodwill arrived on its own. Had she meant for it to land like that?
It was nothing like Eunha's own streams — forcing her energy up to bait reactions out of chat, swinging between joy and panic at every single message. If she could imitate even half of that ease...
"So this... is talent?"
Past the sticky feelings packed into her chest, Eunha felt a kind of hollowness settle over her.
"Yes. I'm taking them."
Five times the largest donation her own stream had ever received — and Unknown didn't even react. All she did was answer the question that came with it.
"Ugh..."
Some people could save every donation they got for days and still barely scrape together forty dollars.
That sticky feeling took hold of Seong Eunha all over again.