The Fifth Stream
When the time came, I went live. The viewer count climbed fast, but I kept my mouth shut and didn't say a word.
Every flavor of worry and wild speculation started flooding the chat, but I still didn't say a word.
More precisely, I couldn't.
How am I supposed to say it? This is mortifying!
I still couldn't shake the shock of going ten matches, ten losses.
No — after noona went home, I played a few more rounds. Now I was sixteen matches, sixteen losses.
I'd played about five matches of UnCom too, and those had gone about the same. A hundred-player battle royale, and I'd barely scraped together a single kill at the very end.
Should I just lean into the image of a streamer so bad at games it made you want to scream?
It's not like I can just not play games.
For someone who wasn't great with words, games were good material. Even if my talking fell short, they were fun to watch, so they made up the difference.
First I had to calm down the Yandere, who were about to skip past a riot and go straight into a full-blown uprising.
"Hey, Yandere."
"I'm not mad, so sit down and relax. Other streamers make you wait like ten minutes after they go live. Why are you guys so impatient?"
I'd said before that my stream didn't need a waiting period — the viewers came pouring in like a tidal wave the second I went live.
But that was just my opinion.
Viewers should have been used to that kind of thing. So why couldn't they wait on my stream?
"No I don't? I'm actually really objective about self-evaluation."
I was someone who could evaluate himself more fairly and critically than anyone.
A guy with looks that could rival a celebrity, and a sensibility that was just a little off-kilter.
Among the people I'd met at my part-time jobs, there had even been some who said my personality was fun.
Not that I was a fun person — that my personality was fun.
Wasn't that basically permission to take it as your personality is weird?
Well. Of course, since coming to this world, self-evaluation has been a little harder.
A world where every value had been flipped upside down, and on top of that, men were rare.
In a world like that, I still didn't know exactly what I was worth.
Grade 1 with a cute face, so my value was probably very high — but I couldn't explain it with clear comparisons and examples.
"W-what are you talking about? Games?"
How did they even know? The only person who knew I was going to play games was Se-ah noona. She wouldn't have written it down... right?
"Ah..."
The stream was currently showing my wallpaper.
A barren desktop with nothing but the basic programs, a browser, and the three major game icons I'd installed today, sitting there all by themselves.
Come on. If they wanted to ask if I was playing games, they could have just asked. Did they really have to phrase it in a way that made my stomach drop?
"Uh, well. Yeah. I was gonna play games, but the Big Three are a little..."
"Th-that's not it, okay?"
They went straight for the jugular. And it hurt.
"A lot of other streamers play the Big Three, so I was going to try something a little different."
"F-for real? Variety games are that hard?"
This was an unexpected variable. You needed to be better at games for variety titles than for the Big Three?
And this time they didn't even have a teasing tone — they seemed to be saying it sincerely.
What do I do?
Minesweeper? The game that came preinstalled on Windows — except you supposedly needed a supercomputer-tier rig to actually play it?
Lucky for me, I'd just upgraded to a new computer. I could handle it just fine.
"Then today! The first game I'll play on my stream is Minesweeper—"
...Was I that predictable? Why did everyone see what I was about to say coming and shut it down before I could finish?
"You must've misheard. When did I ever say Minesweeper? I was just saying don't step on any mines and safely play the Big Three, or..."
The world was out to get me.
How did they pull that out like they'd been sitting on it? And when did they even clip that?!
"The first game I'll play is Minesweeper..."
*whirrr, click.*
"The first game I'll play is Minesweeper..."
*whirrr, click.*
"I'm sorry! I was wrong!"
Watching the chat get spammed in real time made me dizzy. And the contents of the spam were getting more and more varied.
"Stop spamming!"
"What? So you listen when it's like this?"
The Yandere, stopping on a dime the instant I told them to stop.
Chat got briefly flooded with "Stop!", but it went back to normal soon enough.
"Haa... So you want me to play the Big Three?"
"This isn't how this was supposed to go."
Things kept unfolding in a completely different direction from what I'd planned.
I coaxed my frozen hand into motion and hovered the cursor over a game icon.
The "ReMyth" they were talking about was the shortened English name of Forgotten Story.
Full name: Unremembered Myth.
"I never said a single word about being bad at games?"
"...I'll show you."
I'd gotten a kill at the end, at least. The important part wasn't that I'd gotten a kill — it was that I'd improved.
If I'd grown this much in just a few matches, wasn't it fair to have some expectations?
I launched the UnCom client, logged in, and connected.
In the lobby stood a male character in the default avatar — a baggy tee and cargo pants.
In-game avatars were locked to the account holder's gender.
If you were a woman, the default avatar was a female character in a skintight combat suit.
The reason the outfits were different was to prevent the sexualization of men, even inside a game.
Sexualization. Over this.
Apparently this, too, was the result of men in the past kicking and screaming about it. Who'd be interested in a body like a pig's, they'd said.
Well. The women of this world were interested, actually.
"I'll buy clothes eventually."
Honestly, I didn't have much interest in dressing up a game character. Doing that wasn't going to change the real me, was it?
"What should I do for the game? Jump right in?"
Most of them wanted squads.
Due to the nature of the game, Unknown Combat didn't let you create rooms in battle royale mode. It was too hard to gather a hundred people.
Instead, you could form a team with three or four people you wanted to play with. That was a squad.
"Squads? Don't I need to friend you guys to play with the Yandere?"
"I'd just be dead weight. Let me try it solo first and then decide."
I was still improving, but I wasn't at the point where I could team up with someone without being a burden.
Being bad could still be entertaining if you were bad in a fun way — but that wasn't me, was it?
If you were bad because you were unfamiliar and inexperienced, it just made people frustrated.
...It definitely wasn't because my skills were trash.
They kept saying I was bad, and it wasn't exactly wrong, so I couldn't argue.
So I didn't bother responding to each one and just started the game. Mode: 100-player battle royale.
The waiting room was a wide indoor space that looked like a shipping container. Iron covered every surface, and strange emblems were painted here and there.
From what I'd looked up, they were the emblems of organizations that appeared in story mode.
"What place do you think I'll get?"
"What do you mean that's the one! You wanna get hit!?"
They just kept needling me.
"What is that. That's scary..."
Goosebumps rose on my arms. Sometimes when I saw the chats that popped up, I wondered if they actually meant it.
I swept the mouse to look around, and surprisingly, none of the women were trying to approach me. Men didn't exist here to begin with.
"They're not coming over as much as I expected?"
"Don't those people look like they're keeping a set distance?"
I'd realized it while watching them, since there was nothing else to do in the waiting room.
Those female avatars were just standing there at regular intervals. And those intervals were centered on me.
I couldn't get a full top-down view so it was a little unclear, but they were probably arranged in a circle around me.
"Still, there's no way all those people are Yan Sisters... huh?"
The moment I tried to deny what the Yandere were saying, someone slipped through a gap in that wall of bodies and came toward me.
The instant they wound up a punch at my avatar—
The ones who'd been standing like a wall surged into motion, surrounded the approaching avatar, and started beating them down.
"W-wait! Why are you suddenly doing that!?"
Their violence only ended after the victim(?) logged out.