The Third Stream
"Got a favorite food?"
How did he have this many things he wanted to know? He looked up at her with those clear, glittering eyes and poured on the charm without a single pause, as relentless as a puppy that had never been told no. If she let her guard down for even a second, she was going to get the wrong idea.
Lee Se-a watched the man she had been assigned to protect, and a name surfaced unbidden.
Dan-woo... sir.
A face so cute she could have sworn he wasn't really a man. A good nature to match, and he was the one who kept reaching for her. At this point it was the kind of character setup people would roast even in fiction — the sort of thing you were supposed to tone down. He had no intention of toning anything down. Whenever there was the slightest opening he stroked the back of her hand with his thumb, or squeezed, putting a little strength into it.
If she hadn't been an Escort Officer — if she hadn't endured the brutal exams and the training that came with them — she would have jumped him. One hundred percent.
"Do you just train all the time? Don't you have any hobbies?"
Why did he keep wanting to know about her? Special Escort Officer or not, MSVT-certified elite or not, she had never prepared for a situation like this. She could feel herself slipping into confusion, because no exam and no amount of grueling training had ever covered it. They hadn't even told her it was possible.
Her hand tightened without her meaning it to.
"Hm? What's wrong?"
He tilted his head and looked up at her, and the moment their eyes met she lost her words.
"Uh... it's nothing. Just a little cold."
"You're cold? Do you get cold easily? Want to head inside?"
"I'm fine. Don't worry about it. Let's keep walking."
She was not, in fact, cold. Her clothes were cut for mobility so they wouldn't get in the way of an escort, but that didn't mean she had given up on staying warm. Anyone sloppy enough to do that would never have become an Escort Officer in the first place. It was just an excuse she had blurted out because she was flustered.
There he goes again. Just casually being considerate!
She could feel her heart getting complicated in real time. Falling in love with the man you were assigned to protect was ordinary enough, as far as Escort Officers went. Plenty of them had. This time, though, it was a little different. Something that looked infinitely like love — and was not quite love — came surging up.
A man who looked a good four or five inches shorter than she was. The average guy in this world stood at about five-four, which made him look even smaller than that. But unlike every other man she had ever seen, that tiny face of his, packed with an almost unfair amount of cuteness, more than made up for the height. If anything, she caught herself thinking he was cuter because he was small.
And that man would look up at her and smile, and treat her gently. He would reach for her without a shred of wariness and talk to her like it was the most natural thing in the world. He asked question after question, as if there were nothing about her he didn't want to know, and he marveled at every answer. Like a child.
I want to take care of him. I want to treasure him. I want to treat him with endless, boundless tenderness!!
A desire so small she hadn't even noticed it the first time they met had already grown into something larger than love. Viscous and scorching — an emotion that felt like it would burn her if she so much as touched it. It wasn't obsession. If she had to put this feeling into a single word...
I never knew anyone could be this angelically beautiful.
Yes. It was agape.
I finished the walk, said goodbye to Se-a noona in front of the house, and went inside. Somewhere around the middle of the path I had started to feel like her expression and the way she was acting had shifted, just a little — though it might have been my imagination. I wasn't sure.
"Something... something was off."
Still, I didn't think anything bad of it. She was so pretty that even if whatever that was turned out to be something bad, I would have forgiven it, so long as it was only moderately bad. She really did have to be that pretty, though.
They said the women of this world had been standardized upward. Se-a noona stood out even among them.
"It's already four? I should start getting ready."
Starting today I was going live at seven, which meant I needed to get moving now. I grabbed a change of clothes and took a shower. I hadn't broken a sweat, but I had been outside for a long time, and washing up always made me feel more settled. Before I got in, the budae-jjigae I had ordered — that spicy sausage-and-kimchi stew — showed up at the door, so I heated it up and knocked out dinner.
"That's good. No wonder the reviews are high. Gotta bookmark this place."
I opened the Delivery's Here app and starred the stew shop. That made two regular spots. Two, already?
By the time I had brushed my teeth it was six-thirty. I sat down on the couch and set up the laptop. Not that there was much to set up. Power on, charger in, Twitch and the streaming software open. That was the whole ritual.
"Today I'll lock in the reaction I didn't get to yesterday. And maybe talk about the walk?"
I was still roughly sketching out the rundown when it hit ten to seven, and I hit go on the streaming software.
The title was brainless, as usual.
The yanderes started pouring in the instant the stream went live. Before I had even gone on, I had checked the notification list on my Twitch page — over five thousand people had subscribed to alerts. Not all of them were going to sit through the whole thing, so the real number would be much smaller than that, but even accounting for it the speed and the volume of people coming in were something else.
On day one it took several minutes before even a single person showed up. Three days later and over a thousand are coming in off the rip.
Granted, even that first stream had blown past a thousand by the time I signed off, but I still felt a swell of something unreasonably fond. Day one already felt like it had happened a long time ago.
I had meant to start about ten minutes early so people would have time to filter in, but they showed up so fast it barely mattered. On top of that, there were so many people asking why I hadn't gone live sooner that I ended up opening my mouth three minutes in.
"Hey, yanderes! You all worked hard today."
The chat detonated over a greeting that simple. Would I get used to this with time? Or would the yanderes get used to me first?
"A lot of you are wondering why I went live at this hour. I was actually supposed to say this yesterday and just... forgot."
Honestly, I hadn't expected them to wait like this on a weekday. I figured they would just assume a weekday stream would start later and leave it at that.
"There are a lot of people who work during the week, so from now on I'm starting at 7 p.m. whether it's a weekday or the weekend!"
"Whoa, whoa! Calm down! Why are you all so mad!"
I watched a full gradient of rage roll through the chat. I waited for the overheated window to cool off a little before I started talking again.
"So! What are we doing today? First I was thinking we pick the reaction we didn't finish yesterday. How's that sound?"
Alpha noona, dropping by again today like always. I did kind of wonder what she did for a living, but there was no reason to go poking at it.
"Alpha noona! Thanks for the hundred. What, you just handing out money because you've got a cute little brother? Go eat something tasty, noona."
"I am not a shut-in loner, I am a job seeker! There is nothing you people won't say to our yanderes."
Whatever the reason, someone starting a job was a good thing. Calling them a shut-in loner on top of that — I couldn't stand that kind of talk. I especially couldn't stand it when it was aimed at my viewers.
"Right! I've got one! For the five-hundred-dollar reaction — how about I sing?"
Honestly, I thought they would like it. I figured they would find it fun, or at least interesting. The reaction that came back was nothing like what I had pictured.
"H-huh? Why is everyone reacting like that?"
Video donations. Short clips, under a minute, sent as a tip. They could get in the way depending on what you were doing, so you had to flip them on in the settings before viewers could send any. In my case I hadn't touched a single default, which meant they had been locked off this whole time.
"Turned it on. But why?"
"Whoa, RobbedTheNeighborsAgain! Thank you for the ten. But what's the video?"
I hit play, and a man came up singing his heart out in front of a huge crowd. White glow sticks rolled left and right through the seats, turning the audience into a single swaying tide, and the guy on stage had the veins standing out in his neck, giving it everything he had. The longer I listened, though...
Hup! Get it together!! This guy is a popular singer! If I so much as accidentally say what I actually think, never mind the stream — my entire real life is done!!
I pinched my thigh and clung to my composure for dear life, terrified my honest reaction would slip out. I sat there in a cold sweat through a song that lasted a little over a minute. The closer it got to the highlight, the more the notes cracked, and his breath control fell completely apart. The real spectacle was the audience. They were crying. Judging by their faces, they were tears of emotion. It was so bad I started to wonder if this was some new form of torture.
"H-he sings well. Hahaha!"
Damn these sharp-eyed yanderes. My face had been perfect. Where had I given it away?
"It's not like that! You're misunderstanding, yanderes!"
"Uh... I think I'll be fine."
Honestly, it was the opposite. Courage was welling up. That was the Maginot Line? I just had to sing better than that? If I had known the cutoff was this low, I wouldn't have needed to practice at all. I even felt a twinge of regret — if I had looked into male singers even once, I wouldn't have wasted the time.
"Alpha noona... thank you, really. You're the only one who believes in me."
In an atmosphere where nobody else had any faith in me at all, she was the only one who did. Something in my chest pulled tight.
Talking trash about Alpha noona? I was not about to sit still for that.
"Why do you keep trash-talking Alpha noona? You're all yanderes! We're supposed to look out for each other, right?"
The pushback was fiercer than I expected. In a situation like this, there was only one move.
"Ah, my bad."
See? Nothing shut a situation down faster than a quick apology. Stretching it out with excuses would have only hurt me.
"Hmm... I don't really have anything in mind. Want me to just try one?"
I opened a piano app on my phone and set it in front of the laptop. I had the volume all the way up — but would the earphone mic even pick it up? I tapped a key to test it.
"Can you hear that?"
"I can play a little."
In reality I had studied it for about three years. Not formally. In high school, clubs were mandatory, so I joined whatever would take me. It happened to be a free-form music club, and the music teacher taught us a handful of different instruments. She was especially kind to me, which I was pretty sure had everything to do with my face.
That was why I could handle a few instruments. I didn't have concours-level technique or anything close, but if I had sheet music in front of me I could get through a piece at a decent level. Piano was the one I had worked at the hardest, so I could even play competition pieces if I had to.
"I'm singing now, okay? You better listen close."