Let's Pick a Manager
The next day.
As usual, I went live at six in the evening.
"Good evening, everyone."
"Today I was going to play a Chinese politics game... no. I'm playing the Rift. I am a crystal-clear Grandmaster, but people keep smearing me as Lungkids and whatever else, so I'm going to prove it."
"No. Watch the gameplay, not the Mute-Control."
I was grumbling my way through queue when a number at the edge of the screen caught my eye.
"...Huh?"
I checked the number again. On a normal day, maybe thirty people drifted in while I warmed up with just chatting, and the count only kissed fifty once the stream had properly hit its stride. Today there were eighty from the opening second. The moment I went live, I had smashed my all-time viewer record.
"What."
It felt less like good news than something vaguely off. I couldn't think of a single reason the number would jump like that.
Even so, the queue popped, and I started the game.
The early game was no different from usual: laning, pinging the jungler, chat taking its comfortable little shots. A familiar broadcast.
Then a few messages caught my eye.
"...?"
Usernames I'd never seen. And what was this about a fake Red Pill? It wasn't as if I had a past life, and my face had never been shown.
The channel was still small enough that the people who actually chatted were mostly a fixed crowd, so an unfamiliar name saying something strange stood out right away.
I was mid-game, so I ignored it and kept playing, but the longer it went, the filthier the chat became.
I couldn't police every line while I was laning. I glanced over to check, lost a single minion for my trouble, and in that gap another wave of spam rolled up. Only after the game ended did I autopsy the chat.
I banned the accounts that had been pasting the same lines over and over, one after another, and nearly ten of them got cut. Only then did the chat slowly drift back toward its old mood.
"Haa......"
Malicious emails, and now a chat raid. I never thought this would happen to a hakko like me. The stream was growing, little by little, and apparently this came with it.
Being a superstar really isn't easy.
The problem was moments like this, in the middle of a game. Watching chat while I played, sniffing out the weird ones, and banning them myself was more than I could manage.
I'm going to need a manager.
Now that I thought about it, most streams had one or two people who handled chat for them. So I just asked.
"I'm looking to pick a chat manager. Anyone want to volunteer?"
More people offered than I'd expected.
I started clicking through the applicants one by one and checking their recent chat logs.
"Looking at what this person wrote... 'You brain-dead or what?'"
Wait. This person? I checked the date. It was from the puzzle attempts on day one.
"Excuse me. That is way too harsh. You're eliminated."
Next.
"This one called me Hyeob-a-beol, huh?"
That one was from the first broadcast too.
"I'll have you know I'm good at other games. Eliminated."
Somehow the manager tryouts themselves were turning into content.
That was when a donation alert burst onto the screen, huge, with a blaring sound.
"Noooooo~~~!"
My voice shot up before I could stop it.
"KindergartenCandyThiefMingjwe donated a hundred thousand won...!!!!"
A hundred thousand won! The most money I'd been handed since I started streaming.
I checked the amount one more time, then looked at the Ttutta avatar parked in the corner of the screen, mouth opening and closing in a blank little flap.
"I want to at least hit a Grand Bow for this, but it's a Ttutta......"
I thought for a second, grabbed the avatar with the mouse, and flipped it a full hundred and eighty degrees.
The black-haired avatar hung upside down on the screen, mouth still flapping.
"Thank you for a hundred thousand wooon~~"
I turned the avatar right-side up again and checked the name.
KindergartenCandyThiefMingjwe.
So it's that person.
If it was this one, I could probably trust them with it.
"Okay. Then KindergartenCandyThiefMingjwe... ugh, that's long."
I paused for a breath mid-sentence.
"This person will be the chat manager."
I fiddled with the settings for a moment, and a sword mark appeared to the left of the nickname.
Right then.
Another malicious message went up.
And before even half a second had passed—
It was gone.
"......Ooh."
Performance confirmed.
Looked like I'd picked the right person.
"Haa......"
Half-buried in her bed, Seo Yunha let out a long breath.
Twenty-six years old.
Not long ago, she had been an employee at a conglomerate anyone would recognize by name. When the acceptance notice came, she had been sure her life was a straight, well-paved road. The long job hunt was over, she had walked into a company other people envied, and all that remained was to work hard.
The job itself turned out quite different from what she had pictured. Endless pressure to perform made staying past clock-out an ordinary day, and work-life balance felt like a story from someone else's company. On top of that came the office politics she had assumed a place that big, at least, would be free of.
Whose side to take. What you must never say to whom. Some days, reading the room wore her out more than the work.
Even so, at first she simply endured.
Everyone else must live like this too.
If I just get a little more used to it, it'll be fine.
She kept telling herself that, and kept showing up, until about a year and a half had passed.
One morning, driving to the office the way she always did, a thought came to her out of nowhere.
...If I got into an accident on the way, I wouldn't have to go in today.
Even after thinking it, Yunha kept her hands on the wheel as if nothing had happened, and only realized what had crossed her mind once she was stopped at a light.
From that day, she didn't deliberate long. If she kept going, something really would go wrong. A year and six months after she had joined, she turned in her resignation.
Fortunately, her family understood the choice without much protest.
And just like that, a month had already passed since she left.
At first she had meant to rest hard for about a week, then start preparing to change jobs. A week passed. Two weeks passed. Her body still wouldn't move. She would open a job posting and close it before she had read more than a few lines, and the mere thought of writing a new cover letter tired her out in advance.
In the end she spent most of her time on the bed.
What caught her eye while she was letting the hours drain away like that was internet streaming.
At first she had only put it on because she was bored. It turned out to be surprisingly all right. She could lie in bed without moving a muscle and still hear someone talking, and if she typed a single line of chat now and then, the person on the other side of the screen would read it and answer.
She didn't want to meet anyone in person. Going a whole day without speaking to a single soul, though, was stifling in its own way. For her, a livestream sat at a strangely perfect distance.
So for a while she really did watch streams all day. She woke up and turned one on with her phone, watched on a tablet while she ate, and picked the phone back up the moment she lay down again. Big-name streamers, mid-tier streamers, hakko. Facecam broadcasts, VTubers, pro gamers—she didn't particularly sort by genre.
After wandering through all of it, the place Yunha stayed the longest was, unexpectedly, the streams with almost no one watching.
So-called hakko streams.
Channels with big audiences were fun, but chat flew by so fast that anything she added was buried in a second. In a small stream with a few dozen viewers, one message was often read aloud by the streamer, and if you showed up a few times they even remembered your name.
Yunha liked that.
That day, too, she was clicking through hakko streams one by one the way she always did when a VTuber she had never seen caught her eye in the listings.
A rookie VTuber. Mingjwe.
The first thing she saw when she entered was a black-haired Ttutta avatar that looked somehow flimsy. The voice was young. The way of speaking had no spine. The skill level swung wildly from one game to the next: Grandmaster on the Rift, and abysmal at puzzle games.
Up to there, it was just an ordinary rookie VTuber who happened to be decent at the Rift.
And yet, strangely, it was hard to turn the stream off.
How to put it.
The perfect sandbag.
Whenever a viewer took a jab, Mingjwe flared up and still clapped back every single time, and while she earnestly tried to explain herself, the explanation usually became fresh material to tease her with. The back-and-forth with chat fit together to an uncanny degree. And every so often, a cheerful grandma made a delightful guest appearance.
"Pfft."
Yunha was holding her phone when she burst out laughing without meaning to.
After that, she started showing up to Mingjwe's stream without fail. She changed her username, too.
KindergartenCandyThiefMingjwe.
Nearly a month of wandering livestreams had shown her plenty of names just as unhinged, and this one felt fitting enough for the internet.
At first she only watched, and laughed. Then she started typing, a little at a time, and Mingjwe read her name more and more often. When it was time for the stream to start she found herself waiting without really thinking about it, and when the notification rang she went in as if it were the natural thing to do.
And so, on a day when the things that made her smile had been growing, little by little, strange people started clinging to Mingjwe.
At first it was malicious emails ranting about viral marketing and whatever else. Before long they found the chat and started spamming there too.
Especially the day Mingjwe read the emails out loud herself. The voice that had laughed it off at first, as if it were nothing, began at some point to tremble. That stayed with Yunha for a long time.
And a little later, mid-broadcast, Mingjwe said it.
"I'm looking to pick a chat manager. Anyone want to volunteer?"
Chat filled in an instant with people raising their hands.
Yunha looked at the screen for a moment, then opened the donation window. There was no reason to hesitate. She entered the amount, wrote a short message, and pressed send.
"Noooooo~~~!"
A moment later, Mingjwe's Grand Bow reaction burst onto the screen.
Watching it, Yunha lifted the corner of her mouth.
And a little after that—
A small sword had appeared to the left of her name.