Rising Star
A rising star.
YoloLive.
Yeokjisaji.
Expo.
The three corporate giants of Pazijik.
Among them, Yagun—president of YoloLive and a streamer himself—dragged a hand down his face.
What even is this kid?
On his monitor sat a VTuber’s live stream. He’d only dropped in while scouting for talent ahead of YoloLive’s fifth-generation auditions, hunting for anything that looked like a gem.
VTuber Yoo Serin.
Yagun knew her well enough. As the head of a corporate agency, he had the community memorized cold.
She’s Grandmaster-tier at minimum, right?
He’d been aware she’d blown up off her Raso play. Flash-in-the-pan VTubers rode gimmicks like that all the time, so he hadn’t paid her much mind—until now. The moment he actually opened the stream, something bigger had clearly detonated. Three thousand viewers sat locked on her channel.
“Haa…”
And the League of Legends footage she’d put up as proof was genuinely disgusting. There were female players who’d climbed into high tiers, sure, but most of them were bused supports. This VTuber could sit any role and not look out of place.
My head hurts.
The current VTuber market was still called the underground for a reason—it sold to a niche. Not microscopic, no, but nowhere near mainstream. That meant everyone was splitting the same fixed pie. The arrival of a superstar made every stakeholder flinch.
And there was one more reason Yagun felt sick.
No—she definitely wasn’t this good back then.
He remembered her clearly. The fourth-gen applicant who’d leaned hard on being thirteen years old in real life. Stage name: Yoo Serin. The sample footage she’d sent had shown zero streaming talent, and the age issues alone had looked like a minefield, so he’d rejected her…
“…Shit. Out of cigarettes.”
Yagun fumbled an empty pack, sighed, and tipped back against his chair.
He’d cut a monster with his own hands? Not just a gaming monster—someone who could pull aggro and then actually digest it?
Is her application email still in the inbox?
Maybe he should reach out personally. The thought formed—and he shook his head at once. Reject her in gen four, then come sniffing around the second she starts popping off? Could anything look more pathetic? Besides, once an indie had tasted real concurrent viewers, the odds of her telling him to get lost were excellent.
“Augh! You absolute useless bastard!!”
Wham! Wham!!
The more he thought about it, the angrier he got at himself; he slammed the armrests. From the materials she’d submitted back then, her real age really had been thirteen. He’d walked past a jewel with conditions the industry had never seen before.
Didn’t she run with a crew back then too?
As he recalled it, she’d done a fair amount of content with two other VTubers. If those three ever re-centered a faction around Yoo Serin…
“…I’m getting food first.”
The most dangerous outcome of all would be born: an indie hakko-oshi pipeline.
“Hmm…”
After ending stream, I was scrolling the V-Sniper Gallery like always when a new problem surfaced. Plan after plan had landed—and now I had more things to worry about.
First: I wasn’t actually that good with my mouth. I could ramble to myself well enough, but next to a professional streamer who lived as a freeloading entertainer, I was still a beginner. No matter how broken the “little girl” trait was, an internet broadcaster still needed to be fun.
Second: I needed something continuous that would keep lifting me. Skill was relative. What mattered was constantly exposing the gap. And if I had someone beside me gasping on cue? That would be the cherry on top.
It’d be nice to have people I could schedule collabs with regularly.
A saying that floated around among girls came to mind—pretty girls always kept an attendant nearby to make them shine. There wasn’t a cleaner metaphor for what I needed.
“Hmm… this is a dilemma, okay?”
For now I’d keep solo streams and lock in regulars, but laying groundwork early was smart. A VTuber who’d only just restarted activity going around poking people for collabs didn’t look great either.
I need to hold the advantage.
First rule: don’t get dragged around. Getting personally tangled with bigger-name VTubers wouldn’t do me any favors. If I tried to take the lead, people would start screaming that I was full of myself and didn’t know my place. Fishing someone up from the bottom of the ladder wasn’t an option either. Nothing in this world was result without cause—if someone was a hakko, there was a reason for it.
…Wait.
Thought stacked on thought—and something snagged in my mind.
The unnies she’d streamed with. Their size hadn’t been that big, as I remembered it…
Tap-tap-tap-tap—
I rushed onto the new streaming platform and pulled up the search bar. Then—wait. What were their nicknames again?
I grabbed the diary and flipped through it fast.
“Aji unnie… Yunha unnie?”
I searched both. One VTuber each came up.
Mongaji
Seol Yunha
They even had collab clips together, so that checked out. Then I looked at follower counts.
“Eugh.”
The sound slipped out before I could stop it. Better than past Yoo Serin, sure—but both of them were still sitting around a thousand. Average concurrent looked like a few dozen, at least.
“Perfect, okay?”
Where else was I going to find VTubers this well-matched? On top of that, we’d known each other before, so viewers wouldn’t feel weird seeing us regroup. The only real problem was that they were on another platform.
But even that looked like it was about to solve itself. One of the clips had them talking about returning to Pazijik. All I had to do was wait and they’d roll in on their own.
Will they ask for a collab?
The only question left was who moved first. If they came back to Pazijik, they’d want a collab. A friend of theirs—not corporate-tier, but still massively bigger than before—was sitting right there. Just staring blankly would be stupid.
No. I should be the one to speak first.
In situations like this, the side with higher average concurrent usually made the invitation. If a hakko spoke first, it looked like they were climbing. Meaning this generous soul of mine would have to go embrace the two of them.
“…This isn’t easy, okay?”
But I’ve never even met those two. The one they know is Yoo Arin—not Kim Jio.
Emergency! Emergennnncy!!
And to make it worse, the only girls I’d ever spoken to in my life were a kid I’d fought at the orphanage and my current mother. In other words, I was the living embodiment of the word socially hopeless.
“Fine! What’s the worst that happens—I die?!”
I’d somehow pulled off an aggro stream already. Talking to a couple of girls might turn out to be a piece of cake once I actually tried.
…I can do this, right?
Stream ON.
The condition for becoming a major corp was diligence, and diligence, and also diligence!! Streaming at the same time slot without fail was the only way to survive the bloodbath that was internet broadcasting.
The chat welcomed me like a riot. I’d only just gone live and five hundred people had already parked themselves.
Jackpot!
This was a mega-jackpot. Sure, it was a big drop from yesterday’s three thousand—but that had been a peak inflated by pure aggro. These people had come to watch my stream. There were still a few snipers scoped in, no doubt, but if I just held steady I could coast to a clean thousand.
“Hello, okay?”
I greeted them in the speech pattern that had already become Yoo Serin’s color.
They were eating it up.
“Thank you for the ten thousand!!”
I bowed to the donation the second it hit, then snuck a look at the message.
Ah, crap. What was I supposed to say?
This person had watched the old Yoo Serin too, so there was already a built-in sense of familiarity. Throwing out a half-hearted “I just got better, okay?” felt wrong.
“I locked in while I was on a break from streaming because of a slump, okay….”
But nothing better came to mind, so I just pushed through.
“I grasped the very essence of gaming!!”
The second I swung a meme at it, chat let the whole thing slide right past.
Even the person who’d asked seemed satisfied. Huge relief.
“I really did have a breakthrough. You just look, and then react.”
That was how I played games. Exploiting absurd reaction speed. I’d clocked 0.12 seconds on a test—on that one axis, I was the best there was. Other people said I had game sense too, but I wasn’t so sure about that part.
“You think I’m joking? It’s real, okay?!”
“Thank you for the sub! And the person spamming…”
It had been getting on my nerves for a while. The reason I’d left them alone was so the viewers would move first. If I banned them myself, the community would immediately start screaming about censorship.
Click.
“Bye-bye, okay?”
Since my dear chatters wanted it so badly, I had no choice. I gifted them a permanent ban, packed full of love.
While I was bantering and clearing out the toxic ones, something odd snagged in my vision.
Huh?
Half-dreading it, I clicked the nickname of whoever had typed that.
I’d only been back three days. No way, right?
But a bad feeling never missed.
Damn it! A brand-new hakko?!
I’d never seen the name before—but the profile picture was unmistakably a male VTuber.