The KCEL Gallery's Rampage!
CloudySky is typing......
She really is a pro streamer.
I hadn’t given it much thought, but she had already mapped out the justification for inviting me on air, how she would handle the flow, and even prepared a full question list.
…Impressive. Truly. I found myself staring in quiet admiration.
I downloaded the file right away and read through the contents.
After skimming it all, nothing seemed particularly problematic.
Except…
An interview, huh.
CloudySky is typing......
CloudySky is typing......
FurWheelSlayer is typing......
CloudySky is typing......
CloudySky is typing......
CloudySky is typing......
CloudySky believed she had made every possible preparation.
She would brush off anything related to the gallery, framing the stream purely as an introduction to the Roly-Poly Artisan, the player known as FurWheelSlayer.
Any incoming trolls would probably be manageable.
After all, the person was only really known inside their own KelInGal community. KelInGal was a mid-to-large gallery, but most of its traffic came from anonymous users, so its actual influence wasn’t that high.
At most, a hundred to two hundred people.
She had turned off donations, so the only thing to focus on was the chat window itself.
The moderators would all be on duty too.
That level of chaos could be suppressed easily if they clamped down hard in the early stages.
And every time a post appeared on KelInGal saying FurWheelSlayer had shown up on her stream, cutting it immediately would reduce the flood of trolls coming in through that route.
If everything went according to plan, the broadcast should finish smoothly without any major issues.
That was what she had thought.
She had held onto that optimistic outlook.
At least until thirty minutes before the stream began.
Viewers: 11,845
Accounts banned in the last 10 minutes: 682
……Haha.
“……This is insane.”
CloudySky had made only one miscalculation.
Ha Yunseo.
FurWheelSlayer was far more famous than she had imagined.
…No, it wasn’t even at the level of simple fame.
She simply hadn’t known because the name was practically banned from discussion inside KelInGal.
The truth was that in the neighboring gallery, the single name FurWheelSlayer had been fueling flame wars for days on end.
That she was revered and worshipped under the collective title of “Gallery Master.”
And that the place she herself had scornfully called a trash bin—
A gallery whose scale couldn’t even be compared to a mid-to-large community like KelInGal—
The overwhelmingly largest gallery on the entire DC Inside platform in terms of user count—
The colossal super-giant gallery known as the Official Celt of Heroes Gallery.
In other words—
“Kelgal.”
Kelgal.
A den of lunatics split into countless factions around a massive fandom, constantly fighting civil wars over the Gald Cup.
It never dropped out of the top 1–15 most active real-time galleries.
On tournament days it was common for it to crash the server.
Whenever DC Inside suddenly became inaccessible, users across every gallery would reflexively mutter, “Ah, it must be another Celt of Heroes tournament day.”
And in that place, FurWheelSlayer was a considerably famous user.
The reason was simple.
When she had first achieved Grandmaster, she had mercilessly crushed a professional gamer.
The team with currently the largest fandom.
The team considered the strongest in the world right now.
NCX.
Six World Championship titles. Thirteen league titles. An absolute powerhouse that had collected trophies from countless other competitions as well.
A team that experts always marked as a strong championship contender no matter the tournament or season.
Reaching the finals was the baseline.
Even when they won the league, their fans thought they had only just reached the starting line.
If they were eliminated anytime before the semifinals, it would be a disaster both for the commercial success of the Celt of Heroes professional league and for the community managers.
A super-giant club that generated headlines everywhere it went.
NCX, which had begun as a simple amateur team that no one expected anything from at its founding, had at some point become the universally acknowledged strongest team in the world.
And the divine rookie that this so-called strongest team had called up as the replacement for TwoStep—Shin Sehyuk—the legendary Glen player who had retired at the end of this season.
NineStar—Heo Jaeyeon.
A young player whose handsome appearance and incredible skill had made his name and face known not only to NCX fans but to many other teams even during his trainee days.
Because NCX already had so many female fans, he had been under intense spotlight even before his debut.
The two-minute official YouTube greeting video announcing his pro debut shot up to second place on the real-time trending list.
Any video in which he appeared even briefly racked up enormous view counts.
Channels that analyzed his solo queue plays were even more popular.
It was only natural that big YouTubers who encountered him in solo queue would suck up to him and plaster his name across their thumbnails for maximum clickbait.
In that way, NineStar—Heo Jaeyeon—had built a massive fandom even before the season began.
But perhaps because of all that overwhelming attention,
Heo Jaeyeon had failed to live up to expectations.
Although he had won the league, it had come after a brutal, ugly struggle and a miraculous victory.
The Worlds that everyone had pinned their hopes on ended in a round-of-eight elimination.
In both matches, the gap in the Glen lane had been overwhelming.
Every commentator, analyst, and YouTuber unanimously pointed to issues with NineStar’s individual skill as the cause.
Of course, NineStar’s play hadn’t actually been that bad.
On any other team, those performances would have earned him praise.
After every match, the internet might have been flooded with YouTube videos calling him a highly promising rookie, the next-generation star who would lead KCL after TwoStep, or an unprecedented genius monster.
But his team was NCX.
On the world’s top team, simply being “promising” earned him no leniency whatsoever.