Stocks and LoL
Queen-ji was a professional broadcaster.
That did not simply mean she had been streaming for a long time.
"Team luck's been garbage today, so I'm looking for a duo~."
He was running three monitors.
One for the game. One for chat. And one for surveillance.
The third was for work the viewers were never meant to see.
Okay. Same queue.
He had already lined it up over KakaoTalk a moment ago. Now the covert operation was underway.
Finding Match…
▨ 0:10
Estimated Wait: 0:31
On Sora's stream, the queue timer was clearly visible. All he had to do was queue at the same moment. The odds of landing in the same game were high.
"Wait, for real? Dream Girls Sora?"
That fact had come from one of his own servants. It had started when he sniped a female streamer and crushed her.
Snipe them a few times and wreck them, and the chat mood flips.
LoL bros loved comparing people and tearing them down. The LoL gallery ran Gold Cup rankings twenty-four hours a day. Toss them a pretext and they would rip someone apart. Female LoL streamers were no different. Plenty of them had weak mental fortitude — a little hate was enough to make them collapse.
Welcome to the Rift of Summoners!
This was not his first or second time. Any girl who tried to climb even a little, he had smashed flat.
"Obviously we win, hyung~ Mission accepted!"
He played along. PaprikaTV's Won-dil-king — Heo Sang-woo — wore a gentle smile on the outside.
A whale like you doesn't even need to ask. I was going to win for her anyway.
Inside, his thoughts ran elsewhere. A kind of superiority complex. Real-world connection. He had met Queen-ji offline. They had even gone on dates.
Through League as the medium, the distance between them kept shrinking.
It's not that Vayne is weak early. It's that you suck…
The reason he duoed with her: Queen-ji's skill, charitably assessed, was not even Gold. She had been bused up by multiple ADC BJs. He was far from the only one.
But the only man who could actually satisfy her was him. He knew what she wanted.
She wants me to wreck them for her.
She wanted to humiliate a rival streamer. It happened often enough among PaprikaTV BJs. Female streamers had their own version of the same thing. Clear that grievance for her, and you banked goodwill.
He would show a clear skill gap. Crush them until the other side wanted to uninstall League.
Yoon Sora is insanely pretty, sure.
But she was a pie in the sky. Zero chance. Better to look good in front of Queen-ji.
The die is cast.
Having made up his mind, Sang-woo rolled in. To a Grandmaster, Platinum was a joke.
An enemy has been slain!
DOUBLE KILL!
Galio's positioning. A spot so sloppy it completely ruled out any chance of getting wall-banged.
Regular players would never see it. The brain that caught kill angles in a split second simply operated on a different level.
When Leona landed Flash-Q, it got a little chilly though.
If Galio had reacted with Flash? He might have been the one who died. Queen-ji had just been mashing skills from behind. Even laning phase had been a desperate hold.
On the surface, he said exactly what she wanted to hear. Dunking Yoon Sora was what Queen-ji wanted, after all.
Viewer IQ is low anyway.
Low elo. Anyone watching female LoL streamers was even more predictable. Feed them a half-coherent narrative and they swallowed it whole.
Cakewalk. Think of it as a little extra work until you could frost the cake while lying down.
This much goodwill farming should be plenty. Heh.
No other man could sync with her this perfectly. A good chance to make her realize that.
Click. He locked the game down. They already had kills — just keep rolling that snowball hard.
An ally has been slain!
The weak links started popping first.
A tilted playing field. Something that happened often enough in the stock market too.
"Right? Grandmaster's a crazy high tier, isn't it?"
They moved prices however they wanted — on insider information and astronomical capital.
This is exactly that situation.
In League they called it smurfing: a high-tier player massacring low-tier ones. The game would feel ridiculously free. From a retail investor's seat, you just had to take it.
Except that was not always true. Everything she had lived through in the stock market was screaming at her.
Even the manipulators aren't risk-free.
They only induced retail into accidents. If you could catch the entry point the manipulators hated—
Fwoooom—!
Give us the money!
—then you had a real shot at winning.
Sora cut mid instead of bot. A mid-and-jungle two-versus-two. Enemy Gragas and Yasuo were chaining ultimates.
Taliyah had nearly been deleted. Right before it landed, she slammed a Black Hole Blast into their faces.
An ally has slain an enemy!
DOUBLE KILL!
Stun chain. She took Yasuo, then finished Gragas after his body slam was spent.
So far, so good.
Fighting bot was a dead end. Climbing mid had clearly been the right call. But it was not a fundamental fix. The ADC still could not even take CS.
Still, in the end the price has to rise… no — they have to fight.
The enemy support never roamed. She could guess why. She had felt it all laning phase: nothing but passive shield-bots from behind.
They lived bot lane nonstop. No matter how much raw power the manipulators held—
If their behavior is predictable,
—you could counter it just fine. And this was not the stock market. This was the Rift of Summoners.
The enemy has destroyed the first turret!
She dropped down pretending to defend the tower. Right on cue, they finished it off.
The die is cast.
Ult up, rolling in. Sure enough — fully committed, ready to fight. She had seen it in the bot skirmish too. No matter how well you prepared, the manipulators were supposed to be unbeatable.
Dadadadadak—!
But this was not the stock market. Here, you could absolutely outmuscle them.
Ally Taliyah rode her ultimate down. The mid fight win had given them first move.
Make them suffer.
Galio's ultimate. Flying straight at Vayne. She tumbled out exactly as expected—
KWAANG!
Kwaduduk! Pababang!
The Black Hole Blast dropped. Taliyah's W-E chained in, and Vayne's health deleted in an instant.
An ally has slain an enemy!
DOUBLE KILL!
Even Lulu, who had been standing around gawking in the back, got cleaned up. For Sora it was deeply satisfying — but she did not bother showing it.
"If you'd cut your losses, you would've lived."
A manipulator trying to make money, she could at least understand. Doing it just to win a game was just ugly. Even so, she felt strangely good. She was starting to get why people loved this game.
An ally has been slain!
DOUBLE KILL!
TRIPLE KILL!
And at the same time, she understood why the people who played it lived with mental illness.
"No — why are you giving Vayne free damage angles!!"
A game she had been steering well. That did not mean a win. Time kept dragging. She could not stop the fed Vayne from hard-carrying.
Baron went down, then the Nexus. The hollow deprivation of watching it happen with both eyes open.
KWAANG!
Sora's chest had every right to be furious. In the game, she had clearly lost.
In another sense entirely, she had won.