ON AIR
Appetite, sleep, and sex.
These three are commonly bundled together as humanity’s three great desires.
There is no actual scientific basis for the grouping, but the reason they get linked is simple enough. Most people, after living long enough, just find those three the hardest to suppress.
So what kind of person goes around interrupting one of them—sleep?
I forced my eyelids back open with effort and looked up.
Pretty.
Being reborn with a face like this had raised my own beauty standards quite a bit. Even by those new standards, the girl in front of me had a remarkably pretty face.
The phone she was holding out toward me was playing the stream I had done with Han Byuri a few days earlier.
"…Yeah, that’s me."
"Whoa! Our school doesn’t have any girls who play LoL or watch the LCK!"
At my answer the girl bounced right up out of her seat. Whatever she was, she was the kind of person who made everyone around her feel lighter just by existing. If I hadn’t been so sleepy, meeting her wouldn’t have been a bad thing at all.
"H-huh? Why are you going back to sleep? I’ve got so many questions!"
If someone had woken me this persistently on a sleepy day in my previous life, my old personality would have started a full-blown fight. But after the TS and going back to school, I had realized that teenagers were, in a lot of ways, still pretty immature.
"I’m sleepy. Come back later."
"Ah, right, I woke you up while you were sleeping… Sorry!"
At least she had a minimum of conscience. She apologized and left the classroom. Coming all the way here from a different class just for that? She was impressive in more ways than one.
…And now I’m wide awake.
I tried to go back to sleep, but once the spell was broken, sleep refused to return.
"Wanna go eat?"
The second fourth period ended and the teacher left, someone came barreling into the classroom.
That girl from earlier.
It was the same girl who had woken me up that morning. Whether from running or not, her hair was completely mussed. The fact that she still looked pretty like that was kind of amazing. I could finally understand, just a little, how other people felt when they looked at me.
"You’re going to eat, right? Let’s eat together!"
"Well, yeah, but…"
I glanced at the friends I usually ate with. They waved me off, saying they didn’t mind.
"Then let’s go!"
"Alright."
I wasn’t some teenage girl overflowing with schoolgirl feelings, and who I ate with didn’t really matter. I followed her, then felt something off.
"This isn’t the way to the cafeteria."
The cafeteria was on the first floor. The girl had dragged me up to the fourth.
"I eat here."
We had arrived at the science lab.
"There’s a lot of stuff I can’t eat, so I bring my own."
She opened the door, stepped inside, and swung the lunch bag she had been hiding behind her back.
"Are you even allowed to just use this place?"
"Our homeroom teacher is the science teacher, so I eat here every day."
She sat down naturally at a completely empty table and started pulling out lunch boxes one by one. I peeked at the contents. All vegetables. Couldn’t eat meat?
"I packed one for you today too. Let’s eat together."
I had come all this way; leaving now would have been weird. I sat down and opened the lunch box she pushed toward me.
"Huh?"
"What do you take me for? I know how to be considerate of the person eating with me."
Unlike hers, mine was a completely normal lunch. If anything, it was a little fancy.
"Thanks for the food."
"Thanks for the food."
After dragging me all the way here, the girl ate in complete silence. Was she the type who didn’t talk while eating, like me?
Only after we had both emptied our lunch boxes did she finally speak.
"Right, I never even said my name. Choi Eunseo, Class 5."
"Yoon Seoha."
In the awkward atmosphere, Choi Eunseo held out her hand and I took it. I had always thought my own body temperature ran pretty low, but her hand was ice-cold.
"Do you have a team you like?"
"A team?"
"You said on Han Byuri’s stream that you watch the LCK."
"A team I like… is…"
"Oh, not just LCK—LPL and LEC count too!"
A team I like, huh.
"ARK."
"ARK? Didn’t their whole roster just explode?"
Roster disintegration. In soccer or baseball that was the kind of issue that could make fans set the stadium on fire, but in esports it was common. Player careers only lasted about five years to begin with, so transferring every year was normal. And this kind of roster blow-up happened more often the poorer the team was.
ARK is the poorest of the poor.
ARK was famous in the LCK for having no money. In my previous life I had taken more than half a pay cut just to keep the roster together—that said everything. Even so, I could still say I liked them.
It’s the memories.
There might have been some rose-tinted nostalgia, but the time I spent at ARK in my previous life had been fun. My first finals, all the international tournaments. The ten consecutive runner-up finishes were a little bitter, though.
"Their logo’s cool."
"It is, yeah. And ARK always makes good uniforms."
Of course I gave Choi Eunseo a half-hearted excuse. Telling her the truth—that I had been TS’d and was a pro gamer for ARK in my previous life—would only get me treated like a lunatic.
"One more thing I’m curious about. Are you really going to go pro?"
"I am."
"Really? Which team? Are you going to ARK?"
Choi Eunseo kept me trapped in the science lab with questions until lunch period ended.
This reminds me of back then.
I remembered an interview I had done with some reporter in my previous life. She had given off the feeling that she genuinely liked the game itself, rare for a woman. Somehow she and Choi Eunseo kept overlapping.
Just my imagination, probably.
"Today I’m really taking first place."
The second I got home from academy I sat down in front of the computer. It was 9 p.m. If I went to bed at 1, I could get in about six games.
Rank 1’s LP is…
I opened the match history site and went to the rankings tab. Rank 1 was sitting at Challenger 1,020 LP. My current 940 LP put me 80 points behind. Because the season was about to end, more than twenty people were packed into that tiny 80-point gap.
They had to go and change the season in the dumbest way.
It was the patch Riot was getting roasted for this season. They had stretched the season that normally ended at the end of the year all the way into January of the next year. Something about giving pro players a chance to climb the ladder too. Anyway, a completely useless developer.
Ah.
Before starting games, there was something I needed to set up.
Streaming.
Han Byuri had suggested it after our collab, and starting a stream didn’t seem like it would hurt in any way.
Streamer fandoms can get pretty big.
I had no idea how many people would show up, but I needed to start building a fanbase now. In esports, where a player’s individual fandom mattered a lot, securing personal fans wasn’t optional—it was mandatory.
More fans means more sponsors too.
And no matter which team I ended up on in the future, I wanted an environment where I could focus more purely on the game than I had in my previous life. Preferably a nicer team house with solid facilities.
Was this the setting…?
I installed a free streaming program and started configuring it. In my previous life the manager had handled everything, so I hadn’t realized how much there was to do. I also needed a mic.
Guess I’ll just use the one on the headset for now.
I had completely forgotten I was supposed to buy one. I finished the settings with the headset mic and went live.
As expected, viewers didn’t explode from the very first second. Back when I played with a pro gamer title in my previous life I only pulled about five hundred, so even one person showing up today would count as a success.
Just queue.
The important thing was hitting rank 1. Once I took first and changed my nickname, the stream would get traffic anyway.
Maybe because I had climbed all the way into the absolute heavens, every game I got into had a pretty friendly atmosphere. Some people even recognized me.
I wasn’t even a pro yet and people were already recognizing me in-game. That felt strange. And just like the friendly atmosphere, I managed to string together two wins in a row.
Twenty-eight LP twice. Only twenty-five points left until rank 1. Looking at my MMR, one more win would put me on top.
Any viewers yet?
I had been queueing so continuously I hadn’t properly checked the stream. Hoping, just a little, that even one person had shown up, I brought the stream window to the front.
"What the hell is this…"