Credit Where It's Due
Credit where it's due. I had actually won.
"......"
I couldn't believe it.
The viewers were feeling about the same thing I was. And fair enough. If I started counting how many times that garbage stream sniper had done this to me — six times. Yeah. Six times I'd been hit. Every single time, my momentum snapped, the losing streaks piled on top of each other, and I had genuinely been one bad stretch from demotion to Diamond. And that wasn't even the end of it. The mood on stream had gone so completely to shit that things had gotten actually dangerous.
And then TSGoDie fixed it.
"......TSGoDie. Is he a god?"
The moment I praised him, the viewers moved to shut me down. But how was I supposed to hold this in? People in a crisis are bound to be drawn to whoever reached out a hand. Why else do the heroines in web novels fall for the protagonist who saved them? It was a cliché. Which made praising him the perfectly natural move.
"Wow, seriously, what does this person even do? No, I'm genuinely moved right now. I really almost fell for him."
"What, so the rest of you don't? I was about to get demoted to Diamond. Today's stream was about to die."
The result had been too good. On that point, the viewers didn't push back. Anyway, TSGoDie had saved me, so I had to do what needed doing. After the game ended, on the scoreboard screen, I opened a chat with him.
Objectively, it was the truth that he'd saved my stream, so I didn't think one gift card was too much to ask. Think about it. A mood that stream sniping had completely destroyed, flipped in a single game. I'm a woman who acknowledges what deserves acknowledging. Fortunately, the viewers didn't give me any grief about that either.
But then.
That was all TSGoDie had meant. He'd simply gotten serious because he couldn't stand the bullshit trolling from our mid laner, the Paper Knight.
Dead serious about the game, even on a trash-tier pick. The line hit home, because TSGoDie was a player who had already proven himself — Grandmaster on Light Knight. I caught myself nodding before I knew it.
"I acknowledge it."
The viewers, it seemed, were afraid of me praising TSGoDie. But still.
"Come on, this much praise is fine."
"I can't even do this for the person who kept me out of Diamond? I might as well quit streaming. Wouldn't you agree?"
Maybe it was because I was openly spraying mindless praise, but the viewers were starting to laugh, too. Good. This was enough. I'd managed to drag the stream's mood back to life. So it was about time to start landing the ending. Today's broadcast had nearly died thanks to that bastard of a sniper anyway. Even if I cut it here, there wasn't a person alive who would complain.
I closed the game and spent a few dozen minutes just talking with the viewers.
"All right, that's it for today's stream~."
The stream ended cleanly.
"......"
The second it was off, I grabbed my phone and called.
And then—
"What."
Choe Seohyeon picked up. I asked him with zero preamble.
"Hey. What are you to TSGoDie?"
What the hell was this about now.
Yoo Seoa. A female friend I'd been close with since high school. This same friend, the one who had steered me onto the path of streaming in the first place, had suddenly and without any lead-in asked me what my relationship was with TSGoDie.
"What are you talking about. What do you mean, relationship."
"Do you have any idea what just happened?"
Yoo Seoa started walking me through everything that had happened today, one piece at a time. I heard all of it out, then nodded.
"I'll give him this much. You can't knock the skill."
"Right? I saw it with my own eyes and I was shocked. How do you even play a trash champ like that so well?"
And then she launched into praise that refused to end. She'd been that struck by him — a full ten minutes of nothing but compliments.
"So how long am I supposed to stay on the phone with you talking about him."
"Answer one more thing and I'll hang up too."
"And what's that."
"I've heard a little about him, so I know the talk, but... he really doesn't show up on other people's streams?"
"He's the type who won't come even if I beg him to."
"Haa......"
Yoo Seoa, sighing like she couldn't help the disappointment.
"Shame. If I could, I at least wanted to try a collab."
"What collab. He's not a streamer."
"He doesn't have to be a streamer. He's a seriously famous name, isn't he? So it'd be fine, right? A collab was never something only streamers do with each other."
"That's......"
She was right. A collab wasn't something you only did with other streamers. Magicians, singers — even someone who happened to show up on the news and blew up on social media. That counted as a collab, too.
"If it can't happen, then it can't. I'll hang up."
Yoo Seoa ended the call.
I set the phone down and carefully made my way over to today's broadcast of hers — that is, to the community tab on Yoo Seoa's channel on Frolik.
Yoo Seoa's Frolik community was currently running exactly like that.
"Mm."
I scrubbed back through the stream she'd just finished, and among the games I watched the one TSGoDie had been in.
"Yeah. I can see why she'd react like that."
It was real. Not his usual loose, coasting play — full dead-serious tryhard mode. Serious mode, from a person I might have seen that way five times in seven years. Maybe.
"Good grief."
The sheer absurdity of it pulled a laugh out of me. What was I even supposed to call this. TSGoDie was... I wasn't sure I was allowed to put it like this. But since I had no choice but to say it, let me put it carefully, in a single line: when it came to star power, TSGoDie was a person who was outrageously, devastatingly good.
Just look at now. Right when not a single person is even thinking the word hope, he appears out of nowhere and solves the problem. To Yoo Seoa, whose stream had nearly died, that must have landed especially hard. So of course she'd short-circuited like that.
"Good grief."
Disbelief pulled another laugh out of me. Anyway. Now it wasn't just my stream. He was showing up on other people's, too......
That was when it happened.
"Hm?"
It only lasted an instant, but something in my chest... stung. A small, sharp prickle.
"......What was that."
Some feeling I couldn't put a name to. Sudden as it was, the thought of TSGoDie appearing on someone else's stream left my mood faintly, strangely off.
But.
"......Well. It was probably just a special case."
This really was the first time he'd appeared on anyone else's stream. That was why I'd been a little surprised.
"Oppa——!! Mom says come eat——!!"
"Yeah, got it. I'll be right there."
With that, I slipped the phone into my pants pocket and headed for the kitchen.
The days the Choe siblings failed to come back had stretched on quite a while. It couldn't be helped. They were off seeing their parents for the first time in a long while, or so they said. And of course, the longer they went without turning a stream on, the harder I dragged myself through each day.
"Urghhh......"
There was a limit to doing nothing but play games. How to put it — if I had to hang a metaphor on it, it was like chasing only the biggest dopamine hits until the whole pleasure system burns itself out. I'd been wringing an obscene crit-high out of Light Knight, and then the crash arrived, that hollow drop gamers call sage time. I closed the game and lay face-down on the mattress.
"Ahh......"
No stream. Sick of the game. Nothing left to do with the time that remained. And as that stretch of having nothing went on, I started looking back over my life with a sour kind of regret.
"I knew. I did, but......"
I'd always known perfectly well that I wasn't going to turn out to be anyone impressive. But feeling it like this, with all five senses, left a bad taste. The thought that I was a genuinely pathetic person, maybe. If it had been the old me, this is probably where the spiral would have hit, my head smashed to pieces, and I'd have spent the whole day killing time like a useless lump of a human being......
Yeah. The old me would have done exactly that.
Which meant......
"......Should I try?"
The thing I'd done nothing but put off, all this time. Carefully, I turned on the computer and looked up anything to do with video editing.
"Should I take a class or something?"
A total beginner with nothing to stand on, like me, naturally ends up looking in that direction. Fortunately, from what I found, it didn't seem like I needed to go so far as paying for a course.
"So self-study works too......"
Of course, even if self-study was possible, it seemed to take quite a while. Sixty days. About two months, from what I'd read......
"Hmm......"
Too slow, if what I wanted was to be of any help to Choe Seohyeon right away. But—
"I'll do it."
A purpose for my life. If it was for that, then I would do it no matter how long it took. And so, through the stretch where his stream was gone, I searched, and I studied, throwing myself into the question of what this thing called video editing even was.
And like that, a week without him went by.
A week without him was a fairly new kind of experience. How to put it. For one thing, it started with spending leftover time studying something, instead of watching a stream.
"Mm......"
I tried it the way the video-editing veterans on the internet had told me. And there was one thing here worth noting......
"......Am I actually better at this than I thought?"
YouTube, and along with it the Video Editing Gallery — it had already been a week since I'd started, picking up bits of advice as I went. Looking at what I'd made, they had an awful lot of genuinely good things to say. Really. Just look at this post.
The Video Editing Gallery — VidEditGal, for short — thought very highly of my talent. For real. The same people who'd cursed me out on the first day, asking what kind of garbage I'd dragged in, were acknowledging me now.
Whether they were recognizing my effort and my talent, or just the parts that felt lacking, they fired off advice on the spot without holding any of it back. ......Honestly, I got a little emotional right then. Because given what galleries are like, getting help this way isn't exactly normal. Usually, when it comes to something like this, most gallery regulars just show up to stir the pot. The ones only trying to mess with you are the polite version — some of them are even out to run a scam. And these were gallery regulars, teaching me this freely?
"I really thought it was a fantasy, at first."
The situation I was in now was the kind of plot you'd only get in a fantasy. Anyway, I took in every piece of knowledge they handed me.
I was buried in studying just like that when it came.
Ding———
"......No way."
I'd been so deep in studying that I'd forgotten completely. He'd said he was coming back today, hadn't he? I hurried to open a new browser tab and went straight into his stream.
And at last......
"Ah......"
My god had returned.