Nothing Without Choe Seohyeon
So I really was someone who couldn't do a thing without Choe Seohyeon.
Ppulppulpiri suffered for a very long time. How bad was it? Bad enough that a video titled Ppulppulpiri's Roar started making the rounds all on its own.
She could beg them to drop it until she was blue in the face, and they still would not stop teasing her. That should tell you everything. It spread so far it even started pulling in real attention, and I was pretty shocked myself when the clip climbed all the way to number two on Nutube's lifestyle chart.
Of course, worn down by the endless ribbing, she got angry enough to warn that she would start handing out bans if they kept it up.
But.
In the face of capitalism, none of that meant a thing. And so Ppulppulpiri picked up one more disgrace to her name: Capital Piri.
I, for one, considered it an excellent development.
"A truly outstanding streamer. You don't see many like her, not in a world like this."
I meant it. A streamer, properly speaking, owes the people watching a good time. She had delighted her fans and her viewers, so she could rightly be called a true streamer — even if it hadn't been by her own will.
"Her subscriber count went up, too."
There was too bright a silver lining to write the whole affair off as a laugh-and-forget mishap. Ppulppulpiri's Nutube subscribers had ticked upward from the moment that lifestyle video hit number two — a single video, and more than a thousand new subscribers across just a few days. Humiliating for her personally...... but looking ahead, a genuinely excellent result.
"So be grateful to me, Ppulppulpiri."
I was sincere. The Ppulppulpiri of today only existed because I was the one who slipped Choe Seohyeon the strategy, which meant she ought to be thanking me. Not that I expected she actually would.
"Hmmph......"
Anyway, the Ppulppulpiri Roar incident was settled for the time being. Time really does fly. Before I knew it, it was the weekend of the first week of September — a leisurely weekend, the first I'd had in a long while.
Leisure, however, was a separate matter from knowing what to do with myself. I was adrift. Both of the Choe siblings had announced they were heading to the family home and taken the weekend off, so there was no stream at all. A classic no-broadcast-today.
"Nnngh......!!"
My purpose in life was to happily watch Choe Seohyeon's stream and help him out wherever I could, which made a stretch of time like this nothing short of torture. Sitting perfectly still would only have been worse, so I gave serious thought to anything that might kill the hours.
But.
"Nothing."
There was nothing. If I forced it, there was one option: same as last time, I could haul out the old videos of his I'd saved and upload them, and the hours would pass one way or another. There was a reason I couldn't.
"Honestly — purely, simply honestly — my editing is terrible."
Even I knew my editing was terrible. Until I could actually do it properly, I wanted to hold off on posting his old broadcasts. I had no desire to spend his past just to spend my afternoon, not with skill that shabby.
"At this rate I really will have nothing to do."
That was the full extent of what came to mind. What else could there have been? The only other notions that surfaced were sniping his stream, or tossing a donation mission at him the way you'd tuck money into a safe asset, purely to get a rise out of him...... And as you can already tell, every one of those required him to actually be live.
"I'm screwed. Completely screwed."
Without Choe Seohyeon, I was someone who couldn't do a thing. Yes — that was how thoroughly useless I became the moment he wasn't there.
"Haa......"
The sigh left me as I flopped back onto the mattress. I stared up at the ceiling for a long, empty while, then shot upright and went to the computer.
"Screw it. I'll just play a game."
Sleeping the whole day away just because I had nothing to do felt a little pathetic, even to me. I was twenty-seven, stamina still in its prime, and TS Mutation Syndrome had granted me tireless stamina on top of that. Wasting time was something I couldn't forgive in myself.
Which was to say......
I wiped the cold sweat from my brow.
"Hoo......"
Only when the words declaring victory came up did I finally let out a breath of relief.
The viewers took my side, the way they always did. Thanks to them, I could set those forty minutes of pain aside long enough to manage a smile.
"Thank you, everyone. I only pulled it off because of you."
I turned every bit of the credit over to them. Gratitude was one thing; inside my chest, everything was burning red. Seriously — what number was this? From last week until now, the Knight of Fury snipes alone came to five. Five. A full five times. And every single time, that bastard had thrown a wrench into my stream.
They were asking if there was any way to nail the sniper, and I shook my head on the inside. If there had been a way, I would have used it already. This one never let a hint of who they were slip onto the broadcast. They weren't the type to send chat, or donations, or anything at all — the distinctly creepy sort. Even when I reported the account, they just came back on an alt and sniped me again...... And the way they played was vicious. On my team, deliberate griefing. On the enemy team, they tunneled me and nothing else, and they were good enough that running into them as an opponent doubled the misery.
"Ah, what am I even supposed to do about this......?"
The viewers fretted, as if they genuinely feared I might quit Knight of Fury. I understood how they felt. If sniping that malicious kept up, the broadcast was obviously going to curdle, and from there it would slide into falling numbers and every kind of ugly noise. Before long I might drop Knight of Fury entirely — for the stream's sake, if nothing else.
"......I'm not quitting right this second, so please don't worry too much."
"I can report them all I want, but they just snipe again on another alt, so there really isn't a way."
"I know, right."
We drifted through this and that, and then the queue popped again......
"Ah."
A foul feeling crawled over me. That sniper always announced themselves the same way. Exactly like that.
"Again. Paper Knight again......"
Paper Knight. True to its fantasy skin, Knight of Fury had every sort of character imaginable, and a handful of them were treated as pure garbage. Alongside Light Knight, Paper Knight was one of the signature trash picks — and this sniper was fond of it. More precisely, they were fond of it only when they landed on my team.
Every single viewer told me to dodge, and fast.
But.
"I-if I dodge this one, I'll drop to Diamond......"
Dodge now, and the demotion was guaranteed.
Once they understood why I couldn't simply dodge, the viewers exploded too. Aaah. So this was how it ended...... There really was no way out now. If I wasn't going to be able to weather their anger by playing it out, then maybe I ought to brace for the demotion and just dodge......
That was when it happened.
It was a 1,000-won donation, the same as always. But that single message was enough to start turning the air in chat.
The viewers seemed to catch on at last, startling even themselves. I, of course, had no idea what was happening.
"No, everyone, I'm only asking because I genuinely don't know — that guy...... who is it?"
I didn't know, so I asked them to explain, and they were kind enough to fill me in.
Master, Grandmaster......? Even with the explanation, I couldn't follow. And as if someone had read the look on my face, another donation came flying in.
"......Ah."
Only then did it click. Now that I thought about it — top lane, right now......
The nerve was staggering. That unhinged audacity — no matter what the opponent did, they were playing Light Knight and nothing else. And that, it seemed, wasn't even the whole of it.
Reading the chat, the memory started to surface. Right. The name was hidden for the moment, but that person's handle was probably......
"TSGoDie."
"The hell......"
The very first game was a disaster. Right from champ select, the mid laner brat had locked in Paper Knight.
"Wow...... you're picking that?"
Paper Knight. Like Light Knight, it was known as one of Knight of Fury's signature garbage characters, which meant the person picking it had exactly one objective.
"This fucker's about to troll."
I was sure of it. Ask me why, and it's because that character was refuse that couldn't even be compared to the Light Knight I played.
"Light Knight at least has its base attack and its crits. You can try to scrap with those."
Yeah. Light Knight dumped everything into attack power and could at least try to brawl with the current cast. But that thing?
"How many times have I fucking dropped out of Grandmaster trying to make that work."
I had researched every item path and every trait, desperate to wring some use out of it. The conclusion of all that research was simple: not even I, mechanics sharpened by TS Mutation Syndrome, could play Paper Knight.
"It isn't the stat numbers or the shape of the skills. The skill damage ratios are just too low."
Even if a skill's mechanics were awful, a high damage ratio left you windows where it worked. Knight of Fury had plenty of characters living on a ventilator in exactly that fashion. In other words—
"A character the devs abandoned."
Nudge those ratios up a little and it could at least crawl to the bottom rung of tier four. But these damned developers had left Paper Knight to rot for over ten years, and so it had become nothing more than the universal emblem of intentional griefing.
"And I'm on a team with that guy."
Teamed with a troll. Ah, fuck. I already didn't want to play. And then—
"Wow, fuck, look— look at them slamming straight in at level one."
Genuine revulsion. Hm? Not quite following? All right, then. Let's take a look, right here, at that troll's all-chat.
"......Wow. Fuck."
How was even the all-chat this fucking awful. If they had simply said yeah, I'm throwing, you all figure it out, that would have been better. But to do it like that — absolute dogshit — and clumsily stir in a catchphrase that had gone stale years ago......
"Fuck. This bastard is actually hopeless."
I made up my mind. On this quiet weekend, with neither Choe Seohyeon nor Choe Haeun anywhere around, I was going to take the game that bastard meant to ruin, grab it by the collar, and drag it — ugly as it had to be — all the way to a win.
And what I needed in order to do that......
"Play it with everything I've got."
The words sounded grand. They meant only one thing. This game, I was the one who would carry it.