She Was a Girl?
She was a girl?
The time was 11:25 p.m.
Nine hours had passed since the duo queue began.
"Grandmaster cutoff is 540 LP right now, yeah?"
Hanbyeori's current score sat at 558 LP — enough to promote into Grandmaster.
Five minutes later, she restarted the client.
"NICE!!!"
When she'd first gotten the offer to compete in VLL. When rank one had declared it impossible. When she'd barely clawed her way to the Master promotion series only to drop nine losses in a row.
"I've really been through a lot..."
Everything that had happened until now flashed through Hanbyeori's mind.
"Whew... alright, shall we start the settlement?"
The moment she said it firmly into the camera, two kinds of reactions flooded the chat.
The betting system.
It was a feature that let viewers use points automatically accumulated by watching the stream to wager on whether a mission proposed by the streamer would succeed or fail.
And the subject of this particular bet on Hanbyeori's stream was:
Grandmaster Promotion Possible?
Yes vs. No
Exactly that — whether she'd promote to Grandmaster. The bet had opened the moment today's stream began.
Which meant the viewers had finished placing their bets before the duo with para even started.
"Wow... ninety-one percent on No? You guys are hopeless."
"Whoa, the biggest bettor is... ThePizzaIsMine, with 250,000 points."
Someone who'd put down 250,000 points was about to walk away with 2.75 million.
"Congrats to everyone who hit on a life-changing payout, and the favorite-bettors can go learn a little more~"
The moment she pressed the No button, the mountain of points wagered on the favorite side flowed over to the underdogs.
"Whew... alright, first things first — thank-yous."
After snapping a promotion-commemorative screenshot, she started typing on the keyboard.
What on earth was that supposed to mean?
They'd been playing together for nine hours and she hadn't so much as let on?
"Wow... so you knew this whole time and just played dumb?"
Still, she didn't feel bad about it or anything. The so-called snipers and actors of the world usually couldn't wait to tip their hand the second they landed in the same game — but this level of restraint was actually kind of endearing.
And she'd gotten a free bus ride out of it, too.
This is pure YouTube content.
Just uploading the bus ride alone might have drawn some bad press — but the mysterious bus driver who'd been farming Grandmasters turning out to be a concept-obsessed sniper? That was pure gold.
A little uneasy about this...
Still, she'd somehow gotten the interview accepted, so she hurriedly opened Discord and sent a friend request.
Don't people usually set their Discord ID to their real name...?
A few seconds of the connecting tone ticked by — da-dan-da, dan — and the other person accepted the call.
"Hello?"
Hanbyeori spoke first, but the other side said nothing.
"Um, hello...?"
Just as chat was about to start spamming its frustration, a message popped up in the call window.
"Ah, that could be it."
"Ahh, can you hear me?"
"Huh?"
The moment a somewhat delicate girl's voice came through, the brains of nearly everyone watching — Hanbyeori included — short-circuited.
There was one reason Hanbyeori had been able to brand herself as a skill streamer despite sitting at Diamond, a tier that wasn't particularly high among broadcasters: among female streamers, almost no one had reached the upper ranks on any role other than support.
The person who was toying with Grandmasters... was a girl?
Did that even make sense?
She could only stare blankly at the chat rolling up in bewilderment.
"Um... so, are you a woman?"
"That's right."
"But... you're incredibly good at the game? Ah — that's not a discriminatory thing or anything, I'm just genuinely shocked!"
"I'm pretty good."
"When did you start watching my stream, by the way?"
"When was it... I used to watch back when you were on your old platform, too."
The platform Hanbyeori currently streamed on was Switch. Back when Switch first landed in Korea, they'd recruited a number of streamers with aggressive offers, and Hanbyeori had been one of them.
She watched my old streams?
The truth was, Hanbyeori's broadcasts back then hadn't been nearly as smooth as they were now. Average viewership hovered around five hundred on a good day, and on slow ones it dipped under a hundred.
"When you say old, how far back are we talking?"
"From around when you were fighting with SorryDie?"
There was a girl watching my stream back then?
When she'd first started playing LoL, the vibe hadn't been anything like it was now — her stream had been the kind where if a team picked a fight, she picked it right back. That energy had carried her into platform tournaments where she'd gone toe-to-toe with high-tier players until she was half-dead.
She'd never imagined a woman had been watching those old broadcasts.
"You've been watching for a really long time!"
"Yeah, it was fun."
"So, are you a student by any chance?"
"I am."
"Ahh, so you're a college student."
"I'm not a college student?"
"Ah, then high school?"
"No, middle school."
"What?"
"Middle school. Fifteen."
I was lurking the LoL Gallery like usual when a weird post caught my eye, so I clicked it.
The LoL Gallery was one of those places that had LoL in the name but barely talked about the game itself — just the players. A strange little corner of the internet.
The post argued that a rank climbed through duo queue with me didn't count, and that Hanbyeori shouldn't be allowed into VLL.
She would've climbed without me anyway.
Even if I hadn't helped, she was destined to promote soon enough. Next week, Jui's new skin was dropping with a historic buff attached. The resulting win-streak wave would push the Grandmaster cutoff down, and she'd ride that window straight into promo success.
Whether she got there on my bus or on that meta shift, it was six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Might as well check the comments.
I scrolled down.
Hmm.
Feeling a little dizzy, I closed the browser window and logged into the game.
I was about to queue up for ranked like always when—
What was this about now...