The Delinquent Hater
The corners of my mouth curled up, just slightly, as if I were sneering at someone.
"Heh..."
"Come on. A guy's allowed to just laugh. How would you even know why I'm laughing?"
For reasons I couldn't name, my energy was spiking hard. My mood lifted on its own, and the chill from a moment ago—along with every scrap of unpleasantness I'd felt—vanished in an instant.
Was this how a predator felt when it spotted prey?
Hmm... no. That wasn't it. It couldn't be. I refused to admit it.
The reason I, who'd grown up an orphan, had always been able to face myself without shame was a reasonably moral heart. I never looked down on people who were struggling. I never did to others what I wouldn't want done to me. I'd always lived in a way I could hold my head up in front of anyone.
I hadn't started calling myself a Sweet Hannam for nothing.
And that guy, pulling NTR? Setting his sights on someone who already had a partner? Unthinkable. Out of the question.
The heat climbing through me in real time... was not coming from anything that filthy.
Probably.
After a round of thorough self-brainwashing, I fired up a mellow game to settle the mood and kept the stream going.
But at one in the morning, when I finally ended the broadcast, the atmosphere in chat was a rave and nothing less.
"Alright. I'll wrap the stream here for today."
I ended the broadcast to a chorus of adorable complaints.
The clock read midnight on the dot. A little late for ordinary people, maybe, but for a streamer like me this was prime working hours. I needed to review the stream—whether there were clips worth uploading to YouTube, whether I'd made any mistakes, how the viewers had responded—and I needed to talk with the managers and editors as well.
I opened the messenger program Dascord and found a stack of notifications waiting. The chat room my stream managers used.
The kids who worked so hard behind the scenes for my broadcasts. Consoling each other over that labor was a beautiful thing, no matter how many times I thought about it. Hours of streaming were the product of so many people's effort. How could I not love internet broadcasting?
Then a new message came in.
Geum Taeyang. Short for Blonde Tanned Delinquent. I'd picked up the phrase wandering community sites for stream research.
Even now, it wasn't vocabulary I particularly liked. A delinquent woman who went around stealing other people's men—what exactly was supposed to be appealing about that, that people talked it up so much?
People called me uptight when I said things like this, but wasn't this the right way to think?
Anyone who used a word like that as a streaming handle probably wasn't all that well-adjusted either. And tanning, of all things—did people actually walk around like that?
With those thoughts in my head I moved the mouse cursor to the search bar, and a face flickered through my mind. Come to think of it, there was one, wasn't there.
The streamer who'd done a Grand Bow reaction and let his loose clothes slide down in the process. Remembering the way he'd looked—as if he'd donated his sense of shame to a stray dog—I was fairly sure he'd done it on purpose.
Using your body to pull viewers was one thing, in moderation. Stripping your clothes off in front of people like that... even in hindsight, he was a man with no sense of propriety whatsoever.
"Geum... Taeyang..."
I blinked eyes gone dry from staring at a monitor too long and typed the three syllables. What the search engine returned was a single male streamer. Of course it was him.
Handsome, maybe, but not someone I particularly wanted to look at again. Why had the manager even brought this up? Geum Taeyang... a person with whom I had nothing but bad memories.
What on earth was this about? Even if it was a request from a kid I cared about, having to look at Geum Taeyang's face again made me want whatever this was to be over as quickly as possible.
The clip title, Crazy Bastard. The aggression suited his image perfectly, didn't it. A sneer on my face, I looked at the screen.
The clip wasn't even thirty seconds long, and it had 247 views. The view counts on his clips were low across the board; he still looked like a Minor Streamer. I found myself hoping he'd stay one.
I wondered if I was pouring too many curses on a complete stranger. Then again, these were my own thoughts—what did it matter? I was allowed to have a type of person I couldn't stand.
I hit play, and a stream with a stiff, frozen atmosphere spilled out. Seeing my own handle climbing the chat, I more or less grasped the situation.
The streamer, who'd been frowning, changed his expression in an instant and put on a smile that made my skin crawl.
"Shit. I've never seen a face like that in my life. That is a genuinely world-class face."
The fact that this delinquent I'd seen for the first time today was evaluating my face did not sit well with me.
I was reasonably proud of my looks—the product of rigorous self-management—but I hadn't cultivated them so a man like that could pass judgment. And why the unnecessary swearing? Did it not occur to him that a flood of profanity would be unpleasant for viewers to hear? How little did he think of the streaming industry?
The more I watched, the lower my opinion sank.
"...? She's got a... boyfriend?"
This bastard?
He'd gone from rating my face to bringing up my boyfriend, and then his expression turned bizarre.
This person. Was he not being incredibly rude?
Anger surged. I did not like some weirdo coming at me.
......
"Fuck..."
I didn't swear much even on ordinary days, but this was hard to swallow. This wasn't okay.
Why was my boyfriend coming up at all? We didn't even know each other.
Look at that vile expression. What was he trying to pull? Was he looking down on me?
This was exactly why you didn't associate with delinquents.
I should have ignored the video donation the moment it came into my stream and let it pass without a word. Opening my mouth had been the mistake.
I turned the monitor off for a moment and sank back in the chair.
My body was trembling. My teeth were clenched.
I felt filthy.
How was I supposed to respond? Put up a callout video? Against a Minor Streamer like that? That was just ridiculous.
...No. I needed to calm down first. You didn't get the right answer while you were worked up.
I closed my eyes for about five minutes, and my heart gradually settled. A little more time, and I was completely calm. Time to reach a conclusion.
......Right. I shouldn't react.
I didn't like it, but what that delinquent wanted was attention. He'd gone after me in front of a crowd on purpose, hoping to scrape together some toxic viewers.
I didn't need to play along with someone like that.
Hmm.
I opened the messenger again and left a message.
But if he came at me again, I wouldn't sit still.
My head hurt. I still had work to do on the computer, but I just shut it down and left the room.
"Ari, is the stream over?"
"...Yeah. Just finished. You been resting okay, Junhyuk?"
"Me? I'm always taking it easy... Why's your face like that? Did something happen?"
"I'm just a little tired. It's nothing."
Lee Junhyuk. The childhood friend I'd known for eighteen years, and my boyfriend.
After looking at that ugly-faced delinquent, seeing Junhyuk's face felt like healing. A smile rose on its own.
Lately we'd been giving each other tepid responses compared to the past, and I'd wondered if we were sliding into a rut—but the happiness that welled up just from looking at his face told me I really did love him.
I drew Junhyuk gently into my arms.
If only this moment could last forever.
The morning after my third stream.
In the haze of my mind, yesterday was all that circled.
Viewers who'd flooded in at a suspicious volume after the community sites. If it hadn't been for the improved dynamic visual acuity that came with this new body, I wouldn't have kept up with how fast chat was scrolling.
......Okay, it hadn't been quite that bad.
And then those lines had started spilling out, and my energy had spiked so hard that no matter how I tried to rein it in, it just wouldn't go back down.
I felt like I'd made a bit of a mistake with that streamer Lethe... but then again, hadn't she wrecked the mood of my stream too?
I wasn't just saying that—it really had been too much. A Minor Streamer like me could get crushed to death by a single word from a corporate giant.
Technically the real culprit had been my own viewers, but that wasn't the point. If she didn't want to look at someone like me, she shouldn't have accepted the video donation.
Viewer count at stream's end: 230. I'd probably have a hard time breaking that record for a while, but streaming was supposed to grow slowly unless something special happened, wasn't it?
All I had to do was put in a solid stream this evening.
The brief daydream shattered on a creaking sound.
"Could you actually put some power into it?"
The one snapping in a sharp voice was me.
...I was currently pushing a handcart.
I'd seen a gaunt old man—he didn't look like he'd been eating properly—loading scrap paper onto a cart, and something like pity had risen in me. For twenty minutes now I'd been walking the road with him, hauling the cart together.
Someone might call it simple self-satisfaction, but so what if it was, and so what if it wasn't? We lived in this world together. If you were going to exercise anyway, helping someone while you were at it wasn't a bad thing.
"If you slip on an uphill, you'll wreck your back. Please be careful."
"I've been doing this for ten years. I know better than you, son."
"Heh heh... even so. Better safe than sorry, right?"
"Haha! This kid, answering back so prim and proper. Fine—better safe than sorry."
In the little space around the handcart, the laughter didn't stop.
What did it matter that I'd become Geum Taeyang?
Helping people still felt good. That much hadn't changed.