Yoo Serin's Great Crisis!
She piled her mother's shrimp fried rice high on her spoon and shoved it into her mouth.
Fluffy grains of rice and plump, springy whole shrimp burst with every bite.
That pure bliss washing away every memory of triangle kimbap and cup ramen for dinner!
"Mmm, this is so good."
Even while her cheeks bulged as she chewed, her eyes stayed locked on the monitor.
What was going out live on stream right now was a YouTube highlight reel from a streamer called Dongburo.
A massive speedrun tournament was only a few days away. She'd signed up without hesitation, sure—but scoping out the competition was still basic due diligence.
Know yourself and know your enemy, and you need not fear a hundred battles, right?
She already knew herself better than anyone. All that was left was the other side.
On screen, Dongburo tried to squeeze through a narrow passage—and a buzz saw shot out. He dodged by a hair's breadth, but before he could even catch his breath the floor dropped out from under him.
"AAAAH! This piece of trash game!"
A juicy scream, a game-over window, and the chat cackling like they'd just gotten revenge. Every time dazzling movement crashed into a miserable death, the reactions poured in.
She was enjoying it right along with her viewers.
"…Yeah. He's really good."
That was an honest review—not some polite line tossed at a fellow streamer.
What he was playing was a game you cleared with nothing but jumps. Peak absurdist genre, basically.
He's got talent.
The "gaming genius" title wasn't wasted on him at all. Dodging randomly popping spike traps with absurd reaction time was table stakes. And every pattern that had killed him with a scream once before? Memorized. Brain and hands fully loaded.
I never really got it before.
Back when she'd been a fan of Hanryang—the godfather of the hardcore genre—she used to put this guy's stream on in the background whenever Hanryang was offline. At the time it was just "huh, this dude can play." Digging in with an analyst's eye, though, felt completely different.
The instinctive flow of his runs, the pixel-perfect control of character position—that was top-tier territory.
"So he's the favorite to win, right?"
She shoved the empty bowl and spoon aside as she asked, and the chat lit up all over again—like they'd been waiting for exactly that reaction.
Most of the chat was riding Dongburo's total domination. Even the fans who'd been hauling timber in chat nonstop were taking a step back this time, muttering that it wouldn't be easy.
Well. I get why they'd react like that.
By any objective metric, by every visible performance—he was top class. She considered herself pretty good at games, but to the viewers that kind of play looked possessed. Just the movement on that video alone was enough to make even her—a reaction-speed specialist—nod along.
Of course they were calling him the number-zero favorite.
But still!
Every time she ran the footage through simulations in her head, her confidence only grew.
Confidence that she would not lose!
That was totally reactable.
On screen, Dongburo's character got crushed flat under a boulder dropping from the ceiling. She clicked her tongue at it. There had been about half a second of telegraph, and he'd still caught it a beat late.
Come on, you should've hopped a little there.
Next he got impaled by spikes erupting from the floor. He'd botched the hitbox math and taken an unnecessary big jump—then snagged a toe on a single edge pixel.
"Hmm…."
In sections she figured she could clear clean, he kept offering up a life like clockwork. Sure, by viewer standards the physicals and instincts were jaw-dropping, but…
Yeah? They were. But!
"He is good, though."
She dabbed the corner of her mouth with a tissue and grinned.
Okay. Analysis complete.
Against her? Not happening.
"If I'm being generous, maybe 0.8 of a Yoo Serin?"
Her devoted Serin-cult followers, singing her praises, clashed head-on with the casual viewers calling it delusional. Praise and snark tangled together—it was delicious.
Yeah. The real fun of streaming came from this exact kind of back-and-forth.
"Huuuh―!"
She leaned into the chair back and stretched her laced fingers high overhead. She wanted to savor this tasty moment a little longer.
And while a thousand-odd viewers were staring at their keyboards with mouths running wide open—
Ding―
A notification chimed and a message popped up.
A donation timed to perfection. She answered the taunt without a shred of hesitation, eyes smiling into her facial cam phone.
"I'll win."
"Installed, mouse battery's…."
Before she knew it, it was tournament day—Paraksil, with barely ten minutes left on the clock. She'd run through every last check before the real curtain rose.
"Mm. Done."
Final prep finished, she turned to the chat window on her secondary monitor.
The chat firepower was absurd. Of course it was—Paraksil category viewership had already blown past a hundred thousand. Traffic on par with a mid-tier esports event.
The fact that this was the first public look at a game the studio had kept veiled after dropping a single PV definitely helped. Her own stream alone had reclaimed its old peak of three thousand viewers.
Why so many flocked to me is pretty obvious.
She didn't chalk it up to pure weight class. Most of them had come to watch gaming-genius Yoo Serin prove her skill.
"We've got first-timers here, so let's watch the PV first."
She queued up the YouTube video to kill the last scraps of waiting time. Sponsored tournament or not, you still had to do the job.
The game was titled Fade of Arcadia: The Cursed Line. The community seemed to just call it FoA for short.
The base was that hardcore Soulslike vibe blowing up on Steam, but honestly, you couldn't shake the feeling they'd thrown a little of everything into the pot. Extreme-agility combat, gear farming crammed in, cash-shop skins on top of that—and even a multiplayer competition system between players. It wasn't an exaggeration to say they'd just slammed every marketable feature they could find into one box.
"Looks fun, right?"
Still, she jacked her voice up a notch and served the polished line. It was an official sponsored tournament; dressing it up was just professional courtesy. Run your mouth carelessly and land on the wrong side of an advertiser, and that was its own kind of disaster.
The sharper viewers played along and piled on.
As they watched the video, chat kicked into a higher gear again. She was just thinking it was about time to hop over to the official broadcast when—
"W-wait a second."
A few lines snagged her eye harder than the rest.
A bolt from the blue!
A natural disaster!
She blanked out for a solid moment.
No—hold on. Time out. Suddenly she had no idea what anyone was talking about, which meant….
"A-an interviewww?!"
She had to talk on a stream with a hundred thousand people watching?!