End of Week One: Rest Day Stories
The first week of the RCLK 2024 first half season had come to a close. Where did the standings sit?
Diafle Monarch had stormed out with three straight wins as a brand-new team, claiming second place after the first week. Of course, this was only one week out of a fourteen-week season. Thirteen weeks still remained, so it was far too early to jump to conclusions.
Today was a match-free day. What were the players doing with their time?
Moon Naru was hunched over her notebook. Ever since suffering her first professional loss to Baekto, she had been writing even more diligently. The main focus was how to handle vertical spinner blade robots.
(Best to leave it to my teammates, but sometimes you have no choice, right?)
When the opponent came out second, a favorable teammate could take the matchup instead. But a true powerhouse had to be able to win reliably even when sent out first.
How to Counter Vertical Spinners with V-Killer
● Head-on collision offers zero winning chance
└ You’ll simply get flung back and self-destruct
● Target the weapon axle
└ Can lead to both judge decision and KO
└ Still untested against A-rank or higher opponents
● Equip a skirt and play defensively
└ Reduced firepower makes KOs difficult
└ Still viable when aiming for a decision win
● Aim for fragile self-righting parts
└ Hard to flip them, so KO is unlikely
└ Again, useful for decision wins
● Attack from the side
└ KO remains difficult
└ Decision win is a realistic goal
“This should be enough for today, right…?”
Naru had filled her daily quota.
(Mrrrow~!)
Her pet cat called softly to her from inside its box.
“Donggle, you want food? Got it~!”
He was named Donggle because he was so round.
(Knock knock)
“Naru, what are you up to?”
“Oh, come on in, Cheong-bi!”
Lee Cheong-bi had her hair done in that anime-AI-character style again.
“Cheong-bi, why did you dye those cyan extensions? You look like an android.”
“Ah, these? They’re not dyed—they’re synthetic hair. I matched them to our team color.”
Cheong-bi took team spirit to another level by color-coordinating even her hairstyle.
“Now that I look closer, you’re even wearing cyan color contacts?”
They were the perfect team-color cyan, complete with a pattern that looked like an airplane engine intake. Maybe it was a nod to the club’s parent company, Space Aviation.
(Meow~)
“Naru, your cat’s really handsome.”
“Donggle does have a pretty face, doesn’t he?”
He was quite large, with a fierce, wild-animal look that somehow stayed cute.
“He’s not a wildcat, is he? He looks a bit like one.”
“Just looks like one. He’s a regular mackerel tabby.”
“Yeah, no way a real wildcat would be this gentle, right?”
Wildcats might be cute, but they were incredibly fierce. House cats only acted sweet toward humans; around other animals they were tiny apex predators.
Na Sau kept her snake at team headquarters.
(Finished整理 the match notes… time to feed Hong-yeom!)
“Today’s Hong-yeom’s feeding day~! Come out, little squeakers!”
Snakes didn’t need to eat often. Depending on the species, once every one to four weeks was enough.
(I know she eats rats, but where does she even get them!)
“Hong-yeom, want big sis to catch you some bullfrogs too?”
(How do you even remove the parasites…?)
Kang Cheong-hyeon, who had just entered the room, jumped at the sight of the snake.
(Knock)
“Sau, what are you… Whoa! I knew you kept a snake, but it still scares me every time!”
“Why are you surprised again? I’ve had him since my rookie days.”
She loved snakes so much that she even named her robot after one. Lycodon—the scientific name for the genus of wolf snakes.
“What kind is it? Boa? Python?”
“Asian king snake. A type of wolf snake.”
(She really does keep a wolf snake…)
“Are you even allowed to keep that?”
“Farm-bred ones are fine.”
At breakfast the menu was smoked salmon salad.
“Whoa, smoked salmon for breakfast! What species is this exactly?”
“What else? Brown trout caught from the Geumgang River.”
Brown trout—one of the world’s top one hundred worst invasive species. Ironically, back in its native range it was the one getting bullied by invasives.
“Salmon family fish are delicious no matter when you eat them~!”
Most salmonids tasted good pretty much anytime.
During the morning they gave the robots a thorough once-over.
“No major updates needed for a while.”
Last week hadn’t revealed any glaring weaknesses. They’d decided to only make minor upgrades. This week, the priority was shaking off accumulated fatigue.
“Everyone, you know about next week’s event, right?”
“Oh, our first collab since the team was founded?”
The information the players actually needed could be summarized in three lines:
“We’ll be wearing the SHiaLive collab uniforms starting next week.”
“Director, we’re switching to five matches a week starting next week. Why schedule the collab right now?”
“Yeah… why schedule it during the ten-week stretch of five matches each?”
RCLK ran two seasons per year. Each season consisted of (12-1) × 6 = 66 matches per team. Factoring 66 gave 2 × 3 × 11. Only three prime factors for such a large number—too few to divide evenly. Some imbalance was inevitable.
There was one clean solution: split using only fours and fives.
● Season lasts 14 weeks
● First two weeks and final two weeks: 4 matches per team
● Middle ten weeks: 5 matches per team
(4×2) + (5×10) + (4×2) = 66. Perfect. No week differed by more than two matches from any other.
“I was surprised the uniforms turned out so neat for a VTuber collab.”
“They actually look even cleaner than our regular ones.”
The design was pretty yet tidy, completely different from their usual uniforms. It incorporated SHiaLive’s colors directly. The uniform was deep navy with white gradients at the hem and orange accent patterns. The SHiaLive logo sat proudly on the chest.
“Is it the same for home and away?”
“There’s an away version that just swaps the navy and white placement.”
Naru and Cheong-bi were watching highlight shorts edited from their own matches.
“Naru, look at the SNS reactions!!”
“Whoa… the response is huge?”
These weren’t from the official RCLK channel. They were fan-edited highlights made by a regular person, not a full-time editor.
The titles were especially striking.
The reactions visible in the comments could be summarized like this:
“Wow… not everyone who’s pretty gets this kind of attention, right?”
(Of course she’s getting this much attention—she’s both pretty and skilled…)
“Right? If you’re pretty but you suck, you just get flamed harder. Pretty piece of tr—”
No matter how good-looking a player was, if they performed poorly they still got hated. In cruder terms, they were called “pretty trash.”
One esports team had once tried building an entire roster of attractive female players. Their skill was far below pro level. They had been scouted purely for their looks as a marketing stunt. The result? They failed to win a single set across two seasons and disbanded.
Director Chae Ju-myeong seemed to have avoided that particular worry when building the team.
(If we’d been bad, we definitely would’ve been called a face-selling team. Good thing they’re performing.)
A 5:6 gender ratio was practically impossible in a nerd-heavy industry. Even 6:5 was difficult; 5:6 was basically fantasy territory. The snowball had started rolling the moment they recruited Kang Cheong-hyeon, Na Sau, Moon Naru, and Lee Cheong-bi. This gender balance had never been intentional. The moment they underperformed, the “face-selling” label would have been slapped on them instantly.
In the afternoon, once the updates and maintenance were finished, they repainted the robots. For this week they would compete in the SHiaLive collab colors.
“The SHiaLive collab paint job makes us look like model students.”
Navy, orange, and white—the color scheme was basically identical to middle- and high-school uniforms.
“Right? It’s a collab with a VTuber MCN, yet it feels like this. Kinda weird, huh?”
“Who came up with this design?”
“SHiaLive handled everything.”
“Even the uniforms?”
“Yeah, pretty much all of it came from their side.”